22/6/97

The Cleaning Lady’s Story

    You can't find a woman more feminist than Sarah Tzuberi -- though she'd look at you crazy if you called her that.
    Sarah never waved placards, or joined demonstrations. As a younger woman, she was another sort of feminist: primitive, illiterate, socially retarded by the backward ways of her menfolk; abandoned on a mountaintop with eight young children to raise ... yet elevated by some force of nature to overcome the limitations foisted upon her.
    Her stricken family survived on one thing alone: Sarah's ferocious fortitude.
    She was born in 1917 to poor Yemenite parents who buried more children than they raised. Her father didn't work; didn't do anything much, in fact, but engage in religious study. Her mother sold coffee beans.
    "I was a girl. Girls counted for nothing. We weren't allowed to learn at all. I grew up confined, like in a box."
    Life in San'a was wretched, but there was consolation in the fact there was life at all: the king, Sarah recalls, was benevolent to the Jews. But when the king died, the pogroms began, and her parents knew it was time to get out.
    In 1944, they did: on foot to Aden. The port city was aswarm with fleeing Jewish refugees, all with one magical word on their lips: Jerusalem.
    Her family was lucky -- sort of. "With so many people and so few boats, there was a waiting list of a year. But they held a lottery to choose who would gain passage, and my family was allowed to go -- everyone but me."
    She was shanghaied there for a month. "I was very afraid. I had no education, I didn't know anything, I'd never been left alone. I cried bitterly. But there was no choice."
    That was to be her later fate.
    The year after she arrived in Jerusalem, a dashing young Yemenite named Shalom informed her that he planned to marry her. Sarah's eyes light up at the memory. "Don't be foolish, I told him. I can't marry you without permission from my parents. So a neighbor tried to get my father's permission. He said I was old enough to decide."
    They were a stunning couple: he, with big, soft eyes and matinee-idol looks; she, a delicate beauty with a hint of oriental exotica.
    "He was the first traffic policeman in Jerusalem, you know, in 1948. He stood on a platform in the intersection and wore white gloves."
    Shalom had been here since 1936, the same year Sarah's brother immigrated. "Back then, the boys ran from Yemen to Israel the way boys now run from Israel to America."
    Unknown to Sarah when they married, Shalom was already dying, slowly. While serving in the Hagana, he was severely wounded when a British soldier cracked his skull during a protest against the nefarious 1939 White Paper. As a result, for the rest of his life, Shalom was tormented by ever-worsening epilepsy.
    They struggled desperately: the stifling poverty, Shalom's disability; the city attrited by war, seige, guerrilla attacks, austerity; the shared home they were given was cramped and unsuitable; and their family was increasing every year.
    Shalom decided this was no way to raise children, and in 1951 they moved to Moshav Beit Zayit, five kilometers from Jerusalem. "This was paradise for the children; for me, it was hell."
      It was so remote, so desolate, so undesirable, the Jewish Agency set them up for free. "In the '40s there was nothing here, just olive trees. No houses, no road, it was filthy and fly-infested. Now? You say 'Beit Zayit,' and people say oh, how wonderful!
    "The Jewish Agency gave us a small house -- two rooms, really -- and two chickens. I bought two more chickens so we could start earning money from the eggs."
    They were stranded on a forest hilltop without electricity or running water, incommunicado -- no telephone, no car, and a distant bus stop that was her only link with the outside; the bus came only at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.
    "Every little thing