26/1/98

Ein Hod, blackly

It is autumn in Ein Hod. It is a New England kind of autumn, crisp and rustic and crackling with color.
    It would be majestically beautiful, if it were New England, and autumn. But the browns and rusts and yellows and reds of the foliage are not a canvas of summer's gentle denouement; these are the wounds of summer savagery.
    This most enchanting of Israeli villages will never recover in our lifetime, following the fire that seared through it three months ago. If you have been to Ein Hod, you may not be able to bear going back; if you have never been here, it's too late.
    In some areas, Ein Hod has been stripped naked.
    "See that big yellow house down there? We'd heard that someone was building, but this is the first time we're seeing it. The house was completely enveloped in trees." Roy Brody pointed ahead of us, to a hill beyond the main road. "That Arab village. No one ever saw it from here, until the fire."
    The yellow house stands out, starkly, almost gaudily, a rude interruption of the vista. It was denuded. It remains there to be gawked at, though it was built with modesty in mind. Not for generations will those trees grow back.
    The great pines that surrounded it were reduced to cinder. And in that way, the yellow house is another symbol for what happened that awful day.
    Residents consistently speak in awe of the arbitrariness of the fire. The haphazard winds brought flames to one place, leaping over another. The house itself was spared; the trees around it were leveled.
    Throughout Ein Hod, this cruel randomness is visible. Here, half a tree singed; there, a stone house picked off indiscriminately next to a wooden home that was completely untouched.  
    The word "decimated" is rarely used precisely -- it means one-tenth destroyed.
    Ein Hod was decimated. Of the 120 families here, 12 homes were severely damaged or destroyed. Everyone lost, for the rest of their lives, the cozy charm of their village.

AS AN artist colony, it is now doing what comes naturally, to therapeutically vent its grief: it is holding an exhibition they call Save the Shade.
    Ora Lahav-Chaaltiel came up with the idea for the exhibit, which will include works of the village's children and their perceptions of the fire.
    Of the works she has seen, "they are strong, so strong. Some of them have integrated remnants of the fire itself: burned items, ash. You can almost feel the fire." She is especially lyrical of a panorama of photographs shot by one of the residents during the maelstrom. "It was enlarged and colorized, and it looks like a painting."
    She spoke woefully about the grief, the loss. "We're traumatized. Many people lost everything. For them, it means not just economic loss, or possessions, but their life's work. They have nothing left of their past, their careers. Nothing."
    She has lived in Ein Hod since 1956, one of the most veteran of residents. She recalls a sweeping fire in Ein Hod, "like in the movie Bambi," in 1959. While hell raged around her, she held a baby in her arms and feared for their lives.
    In her 42 years here, there have been five fires, she says, three of them major conflagrations. Her home, and her work, survived each time.

EIN HOD has departed from its genteel period. The undulations of pine green are now rendered in threatening colors, in blacks and reds. There is fear and trauma and grief in the expression. It is personal, for the artists themselves have been assaulted. It is self-portraiture, touching upon their own mortal environment.
    There is a bitter irony that is not literary, but literal. The fire came on a day marked for Jewish joy, for renewal and continuity: the eve of Simhat Torah.
    Most strikingly, the people of Ein Hod chose that day to celebrate the completion of a new home in their community. The forces of fate chose that day as well, to deem what shall live, what shall perish by fire.