A Wall of Light - Edeet Ravel [67]
14. Written in 1967 by Varda Satie (née Klein); b. 1927, Montreal, Canada. “The main character in the play is single. I was already married on the kibbutz. I met Naftali at the local [Montreal] branch of Shomer [Young Guard Youth Movement] when I was fourteen. He was four years older than me and had just volunteered for the army. I had a huge crush on him—he was famous for having Paul Newman eyes, ‘bedroom eyes’ we used to call it. All the girls had a crush on him. I gathered my courage and asked if I could write to him in the army. He said he’d be flattered to receive letters from such a pretty girl, but we only got to know each other later, on his leaves and through letters. He wrote me over a thousand letters from his base. I know because I numbered them. I don’t know where the letters are now; they were lost. He wrote to me just about every day—long, beautiful letters.* It was always a thrill, getting those envelopes in the mail. Naftali was lonely in the army, and bored. He asked to go overseas, but they needed him at Gander [in Newfoundland]. All his friends from Shomer were overseas, but the army wouldn’t send him. He used to tell me what books to read and what to look for in the books—he was educating me. At first he signed his letters ‘with impending love’—he was always a stickler about language. Then he began leaving out the ‘impending’ and one day he signed ‘your impending husband.’ He applied for leave to get married, but soldiers couldn’t get leave from Newfoundland very easily, it was too far. He had to wait until the war was over.
“Even then he wasn’t released right away, but he was finally given leave in June and we got married. I was seventeen, almost eighteen. I moved in with his parents—I was in teacher’s college by then. He returned to the base for a few more months, and when he came back we began preparing to emigrate to Palestine. We didn’t sail until 1948—I had to finish my studies and then we had to go to the Shomer farm in Highstown, New Jersey, to get hakhshara [training]. On the ship to Palestine, or Israel as it was by then, we suddenly heard Arabic on the radio, and all the women began to cry. It hit us how far we were from home. On our first night in Haifa we were given a room with straw mattresses on the floor. Martin found a bottle of whiskey in the port and I got quite high. I stood on the table and sang ‘Bei Mir Bist du Schoen.’ No one ever forgot that.”
—Interview with Varda Satie
* From Nafatli Satie’s unpublished memoir fragments:
In the army I found an enormous amount of free time and to my happy astonishment, well-stocked libraries almost everywhere I was stationed. I first arrived on the mid-Atlantic RCAF station in Newfoundland in late summer 1942. I resumed my prolific correspondence with about a dozen individuals, including my family, Movement friends and, of course, Varda. When I enlisted, my knowledge as journeyman electrician may have saved my life. Try as I might to transfer out to a frontline unit to gain experience that might be useful in Palestine, I was consistently rejected; experienced electricians were in short supply.
One day I received orders to report to the station’s legal officer. I entered Captain Solomon’s office and, as required, saluted. The fair, balding officer looked up from his desk, smiled sweetly and motioned for me to sit down. His motion as much as said, let’s dispense with all these absurd formalities.
“You may be wondering why I asked you here. It’s your letters. You probably realize that the officers here come from diverse backgrounds and some of them react very graphically, I mean orally and very publicly, to some of the contents of your letters. In other words, Leading Aircraftsman Stavitsky, you’ve become quite a celebrity in the officers’ mess.”
I felt the blood rush to my head. But it was a good feeling. I got them to think, I made them uncomfortable.
“So