A Lover of Unreason Read online

  In 1932, there were 476 Jewish doctors in Palestine. By 1934, the year that Dr Gutmann arrived, the number increased to 1,282, all recent immigrants like himself. Five years later, there were nearly two thousand doctors. There were not enough patients for so many doctors, especially as most of the population were twenty-something, young, healthy and penniless. In a situation of unemployment and low pay, few could afford a massage or treatment with an ultraviolet lamp to ease their muscle pains. Electrotherapy, Dr Gutmann’s specialty, was not included in the essential services that were provided by the General Sick Fund, the medical insurance co-operative that most citizens were members of. He was now paying the price of his reluctance to make a greater effort to acquire a more prestigious and indispensable specialisation. Competition among private doctors was so tough that sixty per cent of them earned less than the minimum income needed to support a family. Many changed careers and became farmers, builders or taxi drivers. There is a story about a pregnant woman, who went into labour while commuting on a Tel Aviv bus. A passenger cried out, ‘Is there a doctor on board?’ Six men, all immigrants from Germany, jumped to their feet and rushed to help the woman. The driver pulled the vehicle to the side, stood up and said, ‘Clear the way, on my bus I’m delivering the babies’: he was an obstetrician.

  Having shied away from hard work throughout his life, Dr Gutmann would not consider manual labour. In his frustration he reverted to his Russian self, immersing himself in Chekhov and Pushkin. ‘Vati liked the easy life, and wasted his time by playing chess with and in between patients. He loved entertaining guests and, on the summer nights, they played gin rummy on the balcony,’ says his daughter Celia. ‘He was a weak, selfish man, and he preferred being supported by a woman to working.’ As financially hard up as they were, Lisa insisted on eurhythmic classes to improve her daughters’ posture. ‘Mutti made us walk straight, one foot behind the other, like young ladies, and kept us on a strict diet, so that we should be thin and attractive,’ recalls Celia. ‘However, she frowned when people said how pretty we were, afraid that it would go to our heads.’ The Gutmann girls stood out in their appearance and, with the little money they had, their mother took extra care to adorn them with dresses meticulously sewn out of identical patterned cloth and decorated with lace collars. ‘Mutti made a point of maintaining the façade and, in our appearance and behaviour, we had to pretend that we were actually an affluent doctor’s family.’

  All shared alienation and hardship, but being a Lutheran in a totally Jewish environment, Lisa Gutmann was doubly affected. She tried to disregard the whispers of goya (Gentile) behind her back. A gloomy side to her nature, which had always been there, surfaced. ‘She was a fine person but didn’t know how to be a mother. She tried to make us better people, but at times she lost control completely, venting all her frustration on us. She would tie Assia and me to the window for minor wrongdoings, like not washing the dishes,’ Celia recalls. In later years, when Celia accused her mother of cruelty, Lisa Gutmann would answer that it was nothing compared to what she herself had been through as a child. Lisa’s manic-depressive traits and fits of rage got worse because she could not bear the family’s insecurity and lack of means. ‘Once, after a bitter confrontation with father, Mutti ran out of the house,’ Celia remembers. ‘That week, a curfew was imposed on Tel Aviv following clashes between the Jewish underground and British soldiers and Mother was hoping that the soldiers would shoot her for breaking the curfew.’ Little Celia chased her mother, pulling at her and begging her to return home. Assia, too, had similar fits of rage, and would fling herself on the floor when she could not get her own way. With the lack of adequate psychiatric services, the only way Dr Gutmann could calm his daughter down was by giving her shots of tranquillisers.

  The persecution of Jews in the Third Reich was intensifying and yet there were normal relations between Palestine and Nazi Germany: ships carried imports and exports, and there was traffic in tourists from both sides. In the summer of 1935, Lisa Gutmann and her daughters wished to cheer themselves up by travelling to Germany at the invitation of her parents, her passport, issued by the British authorities in Palestine, serving as a political shield. The girls’ most vivid memory of that visit was Granny’s frightening bedtime stories, and a trip to the heart of the forest, when she ordered them to sit down: ‘Don’t dare to move, or else the Evil Witch will come and grab you!’ Decades later, Assia was still troubled by those memories, and in 1963, while living with Ted Hughes and his children in Sylvia Plath’s death flat, she wrote in her diary:

  Last night, in the half dark, as he laid naked – and his thick hair on his chest and stomach formed a diffused, moving monster’s face – like a tattooed snake – I came into a panic fear, like the kind I had when I was 4. Was that the black, manic negress-eater – the killer, who was quite formally showing himself like a harmless photograph, for the first time.

  Lisa Gutmann was horrified to see the brown Hitlerjugend uniforms of her nephews, Fritz and Hans; from then on she severed her relationship with her sister. She and her daughters set out for Tel Aviv just as the Nuremberg Race Laws were enforced and Lisa was spared the humiliation of being pressured to leave her Jewish husband: sexual relations between Aryans and Jews was forbidden. Those same laws also forbade Jews from keeping a dog and the girls counted themselves lucky that in Palestine they could enjoy the company of Befy, their beloved brown cocker spaniel. It was the last time Assia and Celia ever saw their German grandparents. In subsequent years, it would be too dangerous, and later, impossible, to venture into Germany.

  That autumn their paternal grandparents came from Riga to check out the possibility of settling down in Tel Aviv and they all crowded together in the three-room flat. The girls were impressed by their grandmother’s fur coat and crocodile handbag, which stood out in its extravagance. In February 1936, just five months after his arrival, Grandfather Ephraim Gutmann suffered a heart attack and died in the Hadassah Hospital. For some reason or other, whether through financial hardship or blatant atheism, Dr Lonya Gutmann failed to erect a tombstone on his father’s grave and it was left to the Hevrah Kaddisha, the burial society, to erect a standard cement slab, reserved for the city’s paupers. Not wishing to linger on, Grandmother Gutmann packed her suitcases and sailed for Latvia.

  In May 1936 Palestine was catapulted into three years of bloodshed. The Great Arab Revolt brought chaos to the country and victims fell on all sides: Jews, Arabs, British policemen and soldiers. Dr Gutmann was in despair; the shelter he had been seeking was not only economically precarious and culturally inferior, but now had also become life threatening. The girls were seemingly unaware of all this: a serene studio photograph from that time shows Assia and Celia in identical checked pastel-coloured dresses and frilly white collars, lovingly coiled in the arms of their smiling mother. Assia seems the tallest of the three, against her mother’s shadow on the wall behind her.

  A classmate from Balfour Elementary School remembers Assia as weird and beautiful, a bright girl who excelled in painting and wrote poems and bitter-sweet love stories. She appeared to daydream and even her walk seemed to hover above the ground and float on a cloud. All in all, she gave the impression of a fluttering, lost butterfly, afraid to touch the earth. There was something bewildered and uneasy about her; her personality traits and the shadow of her Gentile mother pushing her to the margins of school social life. Her well-mannered behaviour was under attack from the ruggedness of the Sabras, the native-born Israelis.

  The school was overcrowded, with more than fifty pupils in each class; there was a permanent shortage of books and equipment and only one map for geography for the entire school. The result was substandard education and filth that the caretaker could not cope with. There was a never-ending influx of new pupils, some of them in torn and dirty clothes, their hair sticky and unkempt. A separate class had to be set up for them, so that they would not contaminate the rest of the school with lice and contagious diseases. ‘We ceased being an edu
cational institution, and became an asylum to hundreds of forlorn children,’ complained the principal, Judith Harari, in a letter to the Tel Aviv municipality, appealing for emergency assistance.

  Dr Gutmann did not relinquish his dreams of grandeur and infused his elder daughter with them. Assia was to embody everything that he wanted to be but couldn’t manage, and she willingly sat on the throne he set up for her. ‘Throughout my childhood, I believed that I was not my parents’ daughter; Assia told me that the gypsies left me on their doorstep,’ recalls Celia. ‘She would say that she was a princess born in a palace, and was kidnapped from her real mother, while I was a gypsy child. It had a lasting effect on both of us.’ One day Assia took their mother’s precious bottle of perfume, poured it over a cloth and wiped the floor with it. She escaped her mother’s wrath through her father’s indulgence, which also helped her evade the tough household duties. Celia was the one sent to the market to buy a block of ice for the icebox, dragging the heavy bulk along the ground. Though meticulously dressed when going outdoors, Assia’s clothes were always scattered around the room, and she left it to others to tidy up after her. ‘Assia thought that she deserved everything, and that everyone around her would serve her and do what she wanted,’ her sister remembers. ‘But Father was the only one that she placed under her spell.’

  Three

  A Tabeetha Girl

  Tel Aviv, 1939–42

  When the Second World War broke out, anything German in Palestine became automatically suspect – to both the Jewish community and the British authorities. Expatriates like Lonya and Lisa did everything possible to downplay their ‘German’ backgrounds, both out of shame at the atrocities committed in their former homeland, and to protect themselves from accusations of guilt by association. Even trivial public arguments over service in a shop or office could result in a Palestinian Jew or British soldier saying, ‘If you don’t like it here, go back to Hitler.’ But the Gutmanns knew that the way back was blocked for ever. In the dead of night, Assia and Celia listened to the troubled whispers that came from their parents’ bedroom. The irony of the family’s situation was painfully obvious to all of them. Six years earlier, in Berlin, Dr Gutmann had been in peril of being separated from his Aryan wife and deported to a concentration camp. And the Nazi racial laws would not have spared his daughters from sharing his fate. Now, in Palestine, the Gutmanns feared the opposite scenario: that Lisa, though she hated Hitler and was married to a Jew, might be detained in Tel Aviv as a possible enemy sympathiser. Assia and Celia were too horrified to discuss the matter and their parents either would not or could not speak openly to them about it. But Lisa Gutmann had packed a small suitcase containing some essentials and waited for the knock on the door. She worried that her daughters might not be spared deportation along with her.

  In May 1941, the pendulum was swinging again when the Afrika Korps, under the command of Field Marshal Rommel, reached the borders of Egypt. A year later, they were so far advanced that their Panzer tanks were just a week’s drive away from Tel Aviv. The small Jewish community in Palestine feared that in case of an invasion, the Germans would retaliate on those who managed to escape Europe. The threat was so imminent that the Jewish Agency, the representative body of the Jews in Palestine, made plans to fortify Mount Carmel, and to cram the entire Jewish population up there. They were following their forefathers who, in AD 73 were entrenched in the fortress of Massada by the Dead Sea. Massada remained the only pocket of resistance against the Romans, who crushed the Jewish kingdom. Facing a final defeat after a blockade that lasted two years, the 960 Jewish men, women and children besieged on Massada committed mass suicide, preferring death to deportation, slavery and abuse. A possible Nazi occupation of Palestine was less of a threat for Lisa, being a German national, but it would mean death to her Jewish husband and daughters.

  When news of Nazi atrocities in Europe reached the Jewish community in Palestine, the German Templars who were living in their own colonies throughout the country, feared for their life and property and the revenge of their Jewish neighbours. As the war proceeded, the British administration deported the Templars to Australia and Lisa Gutmann dreaded that she would be associated with them and exiled too. Her daughters would whatever happened, since they were regarded as the enemy by both sides. They were on two sides of the barricade: perpetrators on their mother’s side, victims on their father’s. The memory of being trapped in the middle lingered on with Assia; in 1968, she would visit Germany with Ted Hughes and their three-year-old daughter Shura, as guests of the West German Federal Republic. Her postcard to their friend, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, concluded with a sentence in Hebrew: ‘Me, half-German? No, no, no. Suddenly Germany disgusts me.’

  As far as her daughters’ education was concerned, the Balfour Elementary School in Tel Aviv was not up to Lisa Gutmann’s standards, and she was not going to send Assia to a high school that was part of the Hebrew education system. The curriculum seemed to her too Zionist, alien and constricting, detached from the richness of European culture. She inquired at Emmanuel Church and was advised to enrol her daughter at Tabeetha High in Jaffa. It seemed an odd choice for a Jewish girl from Tel Aviv. None of Assia’s friends, and no child of her parents’ acquaintances, had ever studied there. Located in an Arab neighbourhood, it charged a high tuition fee and required a long journey by bus. The main drawback for Tel Aviv students was that it was run by a Christian organisation. But this was no obstacle to the atheist Dr Gutmann. Appreciative of good education, he was willing to face the heavy burden of tuition and extra expenses.

  The school had been established by 29-year-old Jane Walker-Arnott, who had left Glasgow in 1863 for the Holy Land to escape the tyranny of her mother. It was named after Tabeetha, the good woman of Jaffa, who died tragically and was resurrected by Peter the Apostle. Originally, it had catered for deprived Arab girls of poor families, who were trained by Miss Walker-Arnott to be good, efficient maids and governesses. In 1914, some years after her death, the Church of Scotland took the school over and changed its approach, turning it into the best in Jaffa. In September 1941, when Assia Gutmann started her education at Tabeetha, only distinguished, wealthy Arab families could afford to send their daughters there. A column of smart chauffeured cars would stop each morning at the school’s gates on the main street of Jaffa, dropping off the Arab girls in their school uniforms of pink dresses with blue sweaters. At lunchtime, maids would hurry with cooked lunches on a dinner tray. Assia commuted by bus all the way from Tel Aviv and at the lunch break had to make do with her mother’s cold sandwiches.

  Contrary to the prevailing attitude of both Jews and Arabs in Palestine, who wanted to see the British ousted, Tabeetha was loyal to the Empire and everything British; a recurrent conversation piece and role model among Tabeetha girls was the Royal Family, and more so because they were of the same age as Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. A haven of Little Britain in the Middle East, the school had a British syllabus and the language of tuition was English. History lessons, as well as geography, literature and natural sciences, were all British oriented. ‘We learned nothing about our own surroundings,’ remembers former student Wedad Andreas, an Arab Christian. ‘Even in maths, the exercises were given in pounds and shillings, and not in the monetary system we were using in the shops of Jaffa; likewise, we weighed ourselves in stones and not in kilos, which was the standard measure of Palestine. After all, we were being geared towards matriculation exams which were sent from London.’

  Most girls attended Tabeetha from nursery school, getting accustomed to the English language and manners from a young age. Assia, who only joined at the ninth grade, was doubly deficient; not only did she have a background of just three years of English – three hours per week at Balfour Elementary – but her community frowned upon the tongue and customs of the foreign ruler. Still, she mastered the language in no time and in later years impressed all with her rich vocabulary and impeccable accent, which gave no hint of her m
ixed background. Richard Lipsey, her second husband, remembers that Assia gave the credit to her English teacher at Tabeetha, a graduate of Cheltenham Ladies College. ‘Assia emulated her adored teacher’s manners and accent, and always quoted the teacher as expecting her to be one of the “crème de la crème”.’

  It was a Protestant school, so there were no nuns among the staff, but each morning began with a prayer, a hymn, and a reading from the New or Old Testament. In addition to the usual British syllabus and daily Scriptures lessons, the girls played tennis and netball, and danced to Scottish Highland music played on the school gramophone. They were taught some French, polished their English in decorous conversation, and were given piano lessons so that they would be able to entertain guests in their future salons. In drawing classes, much attention was paid to decorating Easter eggs and, in domestic science, they did embroidery and tapestry. There were no cookery classes, because the girls were certain to have a cook in their husbands’ homes, and they only learned to bake cakes and delicate biscuits. The pupils sold their pastry and needlework at the annual bazaar and, at the end of each year, would stage a British classic, to an audience of parents, diplomats and dignitaries: in 1944, it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is no record of what role, if any, Assia Gutmann had in the play.

  The graduates were not expected to continue to university but, rather, to be accomplished in graceful living, in everything that would serve them in their future social lives and their roles of perfect hostesses. ‘Our goal was to find a good husband and raise a family, and already in the last year of school, many of us got engaged,’ recalls former pupil Leila Andreas, Wedad’s sister. ‘The matriculation certificate was meant to enable us help our children in their homework.’ Only a handful graduated and became career women, and those who did became nurses, teachers or secretaries; the Andreas sisters went on to university and became teachers at Tabeetha.