Leah Rubinstein-Calico

 Today, February 15, 2022, is the twentieth year of the death of my mother - Leah Rubinstein-Calico, remembered with much love. Leah was born on December 29, 1912 and died on February 15, 2002. She was born in the city of Lida (Polish: Lida, ), which is a city in western Belarus, in the Novogrudok region but in her parents' house they called their homeland Lithuania. I miss her every day since she passed away in February 2002 in her ninetieth year. I will tell two stories about her.

She was born to her father, Mordechai Yaakov Rubinstein-Kaliko (1876- 1966), a Koydanov follower, who immigrated to Eretz Israel following his two Zionist daughters, Esther and Leah, in 1935, and to her mother, Nechama Dagocki, (1880-1925), daughter of Menachem Mendel Dagotsky and Rachel- Rucha, who passed away in 1925. I did not know my maternal grandmother, whose name was Nehama Dagutsky-Rubinstein-Calico, because I was born 24 years after she passed away, but I heard one story about her. My mother, peace be upon her, who gained longevity in sanity and physical health, except at the end of her final year, nineties, in which she contracted pneumonia and died of old age, said her mother did not speak to her for a whole year between age 12 and 13 because she was very angry.

And what was her mother so angry about? For the fact that the 12-year-old little girl, whose older sister, Esther, had beautiful, long, straight golden hair that hung down to her waist, which she braided like a crown around her head, did not like her black,  curly hair, which had to be braided into braids up to her shoulders. Modesty of a devout Koydanov follower.

My mother, the girl who loved beauty, thought that this braided hairstyle was not beautiful for her and did not suit her, begged her mother to allow her to get a haircut but she flatly refused. The girl secretly saved the Hanukkah gift, she went on her own to the hair stylist in Lida, and asked him to cut her braids. When he asked her, did Mom know what she wanted? She answered confidently, yes, for sure. When she returned home everyone was angry at the rebellious girl who dared to cut her braids, and she was punished. Her mother refused to talk to her.

The mother, Nehama, died unexpectedly in 1925, as a result of a pregnancy that became complicated and caused a hemorrhage, when my mother was 13, and since then her Hasidic father, R. Mordechai, who was a multi talented and skilled person; accountant who was excellent in mathematics and geometry, cooking and carving wood, and gold-hand in general, And was the Gabay of the Rebbe of Koidanov in his city,. He now became a widower caring for five children, raised by him alone, My 13 year old motherr, her younger sister Bila and their brothers Zvi and Moshe and cared for his pioneer eldest daughter who immigrated to Eretz Israel before her mother died.
Her older sister, Esther, who had the golden braids, immigrated to Eretz Israel in 1924, as a pioneer, from the founders of Kibbutz Ramat HaKovesh, When my mother grew up and graduated high school, her older sister begged her to come to beautiful hot Israel, and not stay in gloomy Lida, then in Poland. A daughter of my mother's generation, Leah Goldberg, described the area "and seven days of spring a year and rain and rain all the rest"], over which the dark clouds of dark anti-Semitism began to cloud. My mother immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, a decade after her pioneer sister, in 1934. She immigrated to Israel as a student of the Hebrew University, thanks to a university certificate, because there was no free immigration then, but the immigration was conditional on a certificate allowing entry into Mandatory Palestine. She studied at Mount Scopus in the humanities in the 1930s and worked in various works in Jerusalem for a living, until she met my father in an exhibition of prints of Van Gogh paintings at the Artists' House in Jerusalem in 1947. From here I will tell the family story which is a private story but it tells the story of an entire generation.

My mother, Leah, and my father, Shmuel Palaji, their memory of love, who immigrated from Poland, Galicia (Krakow was my father's hometown, born in May 1911) To Mandatory Palestine, in 1934, first met in Jerusalem in 1948.

Mother spoke beautiful Hebrew, fluent Polish, Russian of the occupation regime at her birth and German as a graduate of the Lida Cultural Gymnasium, and so called Lithuanian Yiddish. He spoke fluent Polish and fluent German, like all students in Galicia, and everyday Hebrew, and Galician Yiddish. They had a lot to argue about: the correct or incorrect pronunciation of every word in Lithuanian or Galicia Yiddish, and every teaspoon of sugar yes or no in every dish, because in Vahlin and Galicia [today Ukraine and Poland] relatively southern, many sweetened The food, and in Lida, relatively northern, was often salted and peppered. After arguing over so-called Lithuanian or Galician Yiddish, and deciding to speak Hebrew in the new world they voluntarily immigrated to when they chose to immigrate to Israel..  They married in May 1948 at the outbreak of the war, raising three children, born in late December 1949 (me), in May 1951 ( My sister, the late Nehama) and in November 1952 (my brother, Arik,).

The three young children born in close proximity to each other their (3 in 3 years) parents in their late thirties (mother was 38 when I was born),The two parents who grew up in spacious urban homes in Lida and Krakow, lived together  with 3 young children in a one-room apartment, on the roof of an old stone building in Jerusalem, in the Tel Arza neighborhood, corner of Bukharin Street, A small one that had wicks and primus in it, whose golden light is blue in the dark I remember to this day, and a washing boiler that was used to boil the diapers on the large Primus, on the roof.
We were three happy little children on the roof among the big boilers of the water, then called 'tanks', which used to be kept in Jerusalem on the roof, and between the tar and lime, the pipes and the clotheslines, we sometimes heard the roar of lions from the Sanhedria Zoo down the street and mountain views A distant bluish pink, through which the moon would rise every evening on the roof, would delight us in its beauty every evening. But our parents, who lived with us in one small room on the roof, which they rented from Mr. Musayuf from the Bukharan neighborhood, at an oppressive monthly rent, was a very crowded place when I was an eight-year-old girl, my six-year-old sister and my five-year-old brother.

I did not know what a home library was. I studied in first and second grade at the Sokolov School on Strauss Street in Jerusalem. All the secular children from Sanhedria and Tel Arza, the Bukharan neighborhood and Makor Baruch, who studied there, were children of war refugees or rebellious immigrants from all over the world, whose families were lost in the Holocaust, or all their property in the various settlements of the 1930s and 1940s. Israeli communities in the East and West, whether in the Lvov pogrom or in Farhud in Baghdad, in the extermination camps in Poland and Germany, and in the death pits in Lithuania and its forests, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by Lithuanian neighbors, whether in the camps Extermination throughout Europe ruled by the Nazi Germans and their collaborators in Lithuania, Ukraine, Romania, Germany, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary or Poland, whether deported from Libya or the extermination of the Jews of Thessaloniki, leaving no family member, relative or friend who could help or To support the families of immigrants, refugees, displaced persons and survivors, who survived the inferno of the first half of the twentieth century when all their family members were lost, only all survivors and immigrants and refugees and displaced persons who worked for a living, of any kind, in building, in bass, remained Hand and paint, in formwork, carpentry and ironwork, in the city or in the Dead Sea factories, or worked as junior clerks in government offices.
There was no little home library in the apartment of any child or adult whom  I visited as a child. They all lived in one-and-a-half-room apartments, very crowded places. Yet, were happy as lucky to have survived and come to the Promised Land, poor as it may be, because they had a roof over their heads, even if poor and crowded, and usually had a small family, against all odds, And many painful memories of their family members who were murdered in the Holocaust in various places about which they were silent, crying or speaking in foreign languages. They spoke Hebrew with the children born to the new world.

I, as a little girl, in a room on the roof in the Tel Arza neighborhood, had two colorful 'Bambi' books painted, a little book about the white Yucatan dog and a book I loved called 'The Child World'.
My mother explained to me, when we moved to Tchernichovsky Street in the Rasko apartment in Jerusalem, that it looked like an ugly construction site, when we went to the library on Shimoni Street between ugly gray houses covered in spritz, that a library is a place where reading books are exchanged. I really loved reading from my childhood, and was happy for the opportunity to read books I had not yet read.

We happily entered a small apartment on Shimoni Street, where the public library of Shikun Rasko was in Jerusalem, in a two-and-a-half-room apartment. The library was in the half room that served as the hallway and library. Mrs. Zippora Eshbal, the first librarian I have met in my life, left a great impression on me.

"This is my eldest daughter, Rachel," my mother said with importance and "she really likes to read," and "this is Mrs. Zipporah Eshbal, the librarian," my mother told me, as she introduced the short, white-haired, energetic, bespectacled librarian, who had a heavy, hospitable Russian accent. strict.
"Please let her read any book she wants, she reads very well," my mother told the librarian.
"By no means," "We only let them read in order!" The librarian replied emphatically. "up to third grade for her".

The library was open two or three times a week and I would walk alone from the upper Tchernichovsky Street to the lower Shimoni Street, replace the book with a plastic wrap, with a new book, which is usually used, and read while walking on the sidewalk, the new book I had just replaced at the library. There were no cars then and there was no danger in walking on the road or sidewalk. The librarian who initially suspected me of not reading the whole book I borrowed, before I came to replace the book I borrowed, with a new book, a day or two the next day, would examine me on the contents of the book, and I who read each book at least twice because I loved reading so much, I would answer her In detail and with pleasure and confidence, because my mother also came forward and asked before her, affectionately and curiously and matter-of-factly, when she returned tired from work, two buses, and took care of her three children and all household chores, shopping, cooking, laundry and ironing, helping to clean the children and their clothes. The family:
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'What book are you reading now? And what is written in it, and what is it told about? And what new word did you learn today? Do you have any new questions because of the book? Who wrote the book? And who drew the paintings? Or who composed and who painted? In what city was it printed? In what year? "

I learned a lot from my mother's enlightening  questions, which were always asked with interest, affection and encouragement. She had no time to read, almost never, though she loved to read, always worked and was busy traveling to work early in the morning and back from work late in the afternoon, and all the housework and all the family matters, paperwork, letters, bills or medicine and shopping were always waiting for her. And three children who had to be fed and bathed and clothed and a weary spouse who returned from his hard work in lime and paint craftsmanship, and was hungry and weary.

The veteran librarian kept asking me if there were no other book lenders in the library, until she was convinced that I was indeed an avid and loyal reader, finishing every book from cover to cover, and allowed to read books not for my age, and to this day I remember the happy hours of this tiny library, about two and a half Corridor walls with a window and door covered with bookshelves, converted me, when she introduced me to the best of children's and youth literature printed in the late 1950s and 1960s.

There I read excitedly the books of Lucy Maude Montgomery, The Collective, Anne Mabonley, and Anne Shirley, and the books of Yemima Chernovitz and Leah Goldberg, the beautiful books of the Art Publishing House edited by Shoshana Persitz who taught the children aesthetics, the 'The Puppet Journey to the Land of Israel' by Avraham Regelson, 'Mahnayim What a Hero' on Franz Molnar's Little Nemchak, 'Michael Strogov' and 'Journey to the Belly of the Earth', all the books by Jules Verne and Karl May, the ' Daniel Dironda 'and' Cedar Valley ', and' Silver Sliders 'and the stories of Hans Christian Henderson, and' The Magic Yotam 'is not' Kaitush ', and I knew' Daughter of Montezuma 'and the books of Ryder the Elder,' King Solomon's Mines ', and I read' In Sinkwitz's In the Wilderness and the Arava, 'Greek Mythology for Children', 'Eight in One' by Yemima Chernovitz, Astrid Lindgren's Wonderful 'Gilgi' and 'The Double Light' by Erich Kasztner and his '35 May ',' Five Weeks' In Balloon ', the books about Captain Nemo and' Eighty Thousand Miles Underwater 'and' Ivanhoe ', and' Gonov-Stealing 'and' Treasure Island 'and the Explosive Hand, and' Bug Jargel ',' Little Women ',' Polyana ' 'And' Quo Woodis 'and Benny Baskerville's Dog' and all of Conan Doyle's books on Sherlock Holmes And 'The Bacteria Hunters' about Louis Pasteur' and books authored and edited by the great Yitzhak Lebanon and many other books that were certainly far beyond my reach and age, but were fascinating and charming, eye-opening, enriching and broad-minded, and even if I understood only a third or half of what was said, I learned a lot Great Hebrew words, I learned mysterious concepts like 'money slides' or 'amethyst pool' or 'balloon' or 'belly of the earth' or lighthouse, and I learned at an early age that the infinite world revealed to readers in books is infinitely more interesting than the completely random world into which man was born. , For its many limitations and challenges.
I soon finished reading the first and second grade bookshelf and was allowed to go up to the third-fourth shelf because the veteran librarian who saw that I was indeed a persistent, curious and enthusiastic reader, who could answer her exam questions fluently, removed the barriers and allowed me to ask which book I wanted and sometimes even two .

It was one of the wonderful gifts I received in my life and I am grateful for it both to my mother peace be upon her, who knew in her wisdom that there is no greater gift for a child than to enroll him in the library on days struggling with subsistence, in houses without books, and to Mrs. Zipporah Eshbel To a public library, which brought great happiness to book lovers, and educated the young readers to love books and respect what was written in them and opened the way for them to unknown worlds. From then until today I have always loved libraries of all kinds, I have always wanted to be with books and readers, and I have felt affection and deep gratitude to all librarians and librarians.

Mother in memory of the blessing opened to me this wonderful world found in the dilapidated library books wrapped in nylon, where the avenue and the kind of amethyst of Anne Mabonley or the tropical witness forests of Bog Yargel, or the snowmen in silver skates, or 'Five Weeks in a Balloon' or ' A Journey Around the World in Eighty Days 'by Jules Verne, or' The Dolls 'Journey to the Land of Israel' or the stories of 'The Heart' by Damitzis, or the knowledge-rich pages of 'Full of Tene' and 'The World of the Child', or of Greek children's mythology, have changed in their diversity , In the infinite beauty and charm of their language, the poor and ugly environment of the gray Rasco housing between the rocks, in the poor Jerusalem of the late fifties and first half of the sixties, in a world that had no aesthetics and no visual beauty and no grace of garden or shade or art for anyone one. My deep gratitude to writers, poets, male and female translators, male and female editors and male and female librarians, has accompanied me from my childhood to the present day. Because of her I always like to learn and teach in any medium.

One day someone will write and find out who were the narrow-minded and heartless planners of the poor and ugly plaster-covered housing, built according to the guidelines of the Ministry of Housing, what were the guidelines given to them in relation to its so inhuman new constraint of living space, and its lack of aesthetics. These guidelines and what was on their minds when they put families of five or six or seven people, in apartments of fifty-five square meters or sixty-five square meters? Libraries as cities of refuge?
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When I think of my beloved mother, I think of Amalia Kahana-Carmon's sentence: "There are people, without meaning to, and they are a torch to show the way."
My mother, Leah Rubinstein-Calico Palagei
Your dirt rugs will sweeten for you.  Rachel Elior