In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949. Nitza Rosovsky
deep affection developed between the physician and the community.17 Dr Yaffe later became famous for his efforts to establish health services throughout the country.
Little Jewish Boy in the Scots Mission Hospital, 1934-1939
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
I do not know much about Haya, Mordechai’s wife. Esther, her daughter—and my great-grandmother—claimed she spoiled her children and later her many grandchildren. She was an excellent housekeeper and learned how to cook local dishes from her Sephardi and Arab neighbors. (Esther was always quoting proverbs in Arabic that her mother had taught her. Concerned with good manners, she often repeated: Duq al-bab qabil ma tudkel. “Knock on the door before entering.”) Many of Haya’s female descendants were named after her, including my mother’s beloved sister.
Mordechai was quite liberal when it came to the education of Esther, the oldest child in his family that eventually consisted of four sons and three daughters. While most boys began to study in heder—a religious elementary school—at age five, girls were taught at home, if at all. (According to one tradition, Jewish girls learned enough Hebrew to be able to follow the prayer book, and enough of the local vernacular to be able to address an envelope.) Esther had an inquisitive mind and fortunately, she told me, her father was sympathetic. Either because of the bad reputation of the local heders or, as I like to think, for Esther’s benefit, he hired a tutor, a melamed, to come and teach his sons at home. Esther was allowed to sit in the same room and listen, so, indirectly she studied the Bible, Mishna, and Talmud. Due perhaps to poverty, the state of learning in the Jewish community in Tiberias was grim, especially among the Hasidim. Dr. Ludwig August Frankl, secretary of the Jewish community in Vienna who set up the Laeml School for Girls in Jerusalem, wrote after he visited Tiberias in 1856: “The city where the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Council, met and the great sages lived and taught, is now the seat of ignorance.”18
Esther did not shave her hair when she got married, as was the custom among Orthodox families and I give her father some credit for that. But against the practical, progressive image of Mordechai stand the instructions he left his sons, written on the back pages of one of the Humashim: “My dear sons, be careful not to bathe in the sea or in a river on the Sabbath. My dear sons, be careful not to take walks on the Sabbath outside a city wall or in a city without walls. My dear sons, be careful to pray in public because it is a mitzva often overlooked these days. My dear sons, be careful not to teach your children and your children’s children foreign [studies?] and especially European languages, and do not let them study in [secular?] schools.” Did he grow more conservative with age?
My great-grandmother Esther married David Brandeis, an ilui, a prodigy, according to family lore. Joseph, their oldest child, was born in 1878. Five years later, shortly after their second child, Sarah, was born something happened to David. One source says he drowned in the Sea of Galilee; another version has it that he studied too much and became mixed up, unbalanced. Whatever happened, Esther was left to bring up two children on her own. There was little a young woman could do to support herself in Tiberias during the 1880s, so others in her position returned to their parental home or lived with their in-laws. Esther, however, a forerunner of the liberated woman, refused to be a dependent. She tried to make a living by knitting sweaters and other garments, but there was little demand for her wares in the balmy winters of Tiberias and she found it difficult to provide for her two children. Meanwhile, Leah, one of her sisters, had married Moshe Elstein, a wealthy merchant who was living in Beirut. They could not have children and offered to raise Sarah, my mother’s mother.
FROM BEIRUT TO JERUSALEM
SARAH BRANDEIS-ELSTEIN
When Sarah Brandeis-Elstein arrived in Jerusalem in 1906, she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat with black feathers, as was the fashion in Beirut. Numerous bracelets adorned her arms and a small gold watch dangled from a chain around her neck. Attractive and urbane, her reputation slightly tarnished by divorce, she married my grandfather, Eliyahu Halevi Berman, a twice-widowed merchant with two sons almost as old as his new bride.
When Sarah first went to market, children ran after her and shouted: “Look at her! Look at that hat!” She soon gave up the latest creations of Beirut’s milliners and settled for a plain kerchief, as was the local custom. Half a century later, after my grandfather died, she sold the house on Hayei Adam Street that he had built in the 1880s and moved to a nearby apartment. Helping to pack in anticipation of the move, I was sorting through piles of belongings when I came upon an old shoe box where, side-by-side, lay the baby locks of my uncle Moshe, Sarah’s firstborn, and long black feathers from one of her old hats.
General View of Beirut, 1898-1914
American Colony Collection, courtesy of the Library of Congress
One of my earliest memories is of my grandparents sitting together every evening after supper at the dining room table. He would be peeling an orange and offering it to her. (A diabetic, he was constantly urging the rest of us to eat what for him were forbidden fruit.) When she finished the orange he would take her hand and ask: “Did it taste good, my Sarahleh?” To me they seemed an idyllic, if ancient, couple. But back to the beginning ...
Sarah was four or five when she found herself in Beirut. Forlorn at first in the large metropolis, amidst the unaccustomed opulence of the Elsteins’ house, she sorely missed her mother and brother. But her adoptive parents doted on her; it was said in the family that “she lived wrapped in cotton wool,” sheltered and protected. Eventually the Elsteins won her over. She took their last name, and later, when her first son was born, she named him Moshe, for her uncle, and brought him to Beirut to visit. She named my mother, her second child, Leah. Since it is not customary among Ashkenazi Jews to name children after living relatives, an exception was made in this case, probably because the Elsteins were childless.
Moshe Elstein, Sarah’s uncle who brought her up, with Sarah’s son, Moshe, on a visit to Beirut, 1908
Moshe Elstein was an Orthodox Jew, but he was also a worldly man who traveled a lot, buying silk in Aleppo—on the ancient route of caravans from the East—and selling it in the West. He thought that Sarah should have an education beyond the prayer book and since there were no Jewish schools for girls in nineteenth-century Beirut, he sent her to a Catholic day school, run by French nuns. She did not eat there nor did she attend classes on Saturday, and she was exempt from religious instruction and church services. At home Sarah got to know many interesting people because her uncle was an early supporter of Zionism and meetings and discussions with like-minded individuals took place regularly in the Elsteins’ drawing room.
Sarah remained a pious woman, yet glimmers of her time among the Catholics lingered well into my own childhood. Take Christmas, for example, an ordinary work day for Jews in the Holy Land, although some marked it by playing cards or dominoes—frivolous activities normally frowned upon—to show their low opinion of the man whose name would not cross their lips except as “he who had lost his way.” Grandmother, on the other hand, would drag out one of her old school books and recite some version of the life of Jesus. By the time she reached the end she was always weeping, but since the book was in French, which I did not understand, it took me a long time to realize what the story was all about. It was especially confusing because sometimes she read aloud from another book dealing with the voyage of Christopher Columbus and the trials he faced just before reaching the New World. This she read in German and since I knew Yiddish I understood most of that saga. When the going got tough—for Christopher