David Kafri Memoirs
(Photos from the Memoirs)
Here's a translation of part of the memoirs of David Kafri, nephew of William and Morris Samuels, who emigrated to Israel. He was the son of Leah (Shmykis/Samuels) Frumerman, who was killed in a pogrom in Russia around 1922. I suspect this isn't a very good translation: volunteers to improve upon it are welcome.
David
Kafri - Memoirs
1910-1992
During one of my many trips as an Aliya emissary in Poland,
an old heavily bearded Jew sat next to me on the train. As always, I was
reading the newspaper "Davar." "Excuse me, do you speak
Hebrew?" the man turned to me. "Yes," I answered, and in Hebrew
asked in what the man worked. "In all sorts of things," he answered
me in pure Hebrew. All of a sudden it seemed to me that I knew him from
somewhere. I had met him, and I couldn"t remember where.
And then I remembered. "Are you not Bialech?" I
asked in excitement."Bialech, Bialech, yes," he was stunned. Bialech
was the principal of the orphanage into which, among others, I stumbled during
my childhood in Poland. Our instructors there, the "Halutz" people,
spoke Hebrew, and that was the first time I heard that language.
Childhood
Kafri's exact birth date is unknown. While still a young
child, and while his name was still David Frumerman, he lost his family in a
pogrom, and was left alone in the world. From an orphanage in Kovno, he was
picked up by Israel Balkind, a Jew from Rishon Letzion, who was gathering
Jewish orphans from Europe and dreamed of establishing a children's village in
the land of Israel. After a long voyage he arrived with the group of children
in the swamps of Chedera, to malaria and to hard labor. The wanderings brought
him to Mount Kna'an, to life in nature and to the meeting with a peculiar loner
who saved his life. In 1925, the lad arrived at the children's village in the
Jezreal Valley, where he first met Galili, and where the first signs of
leadership surfaced: he headed a students' revolt.
Clinging to life
World War I was over. These were days of anarchy and
confusion - a perfect setting for robbers and troublemakers. The house in which
I was born was a secluded inn on a crossroad neighboring the village of Ostrog.
My mother died when I was an infant - I hardly remember her - and my father
married another wife, with whom he had another child. All in all we were nine
kids. In our inn there were a few horses and cows, a bar and a restaurant.
Travelers would stop to rest and feed the horses, but many times the rest would
turn into a drunken party. I was not raised on Jewish values. On the contrary,
the place was always filled with gentiles, mostly drunk.
One evening, a Friday, the hoodlums burst into our home,
gagged the whole family and started shooting around without mercy. Blood was
spilling, heads smashing, every second somebody died. I was tied to one of my
brothers, Shalom, on the edge of the cellar where my parents used to store
potatoes, flour, oil, wine - the pantry of the house. My brother pushed me and
together we rolled and fell into the cellar. There we hid. The hoodlums
searched room after room, and when they were done they calculated that they
were missing two. They probably thought that we had escaped and run for help,
and they left in a hurry. This is how we were saved, only three, from the
pogrom: myself, my brother Shalom who later joined the Red Army and was
deported to Russia, and my brother Arya who was not at home when it all
happened.
Our family was liked by the local farmers. When they heard
about the pogrom, the shock was overwhelming. They swore to catch the hoodlums
and take revenge for our family's blood. The Bolshevik army unit which happened
to be around there joined the search, and the next morning they were caught.
They were five. Hundreds of the local villagers surrounded the gallows which
the Bolsheviks put up next to our house and watched the hanging ceremony of the
murderers. The Bolsheviks hung them and then shot them. They simply eliminated
the five. They held me up high in their hands so that I could see what was
happening.
My brother immediately joined the Bolshevik unit there and
then, and went away with them, and I was put in the custody of my stepmother's
aunt, a terrible woman, mean and cruel, who lived with her two children in
Ostrog. From the first moment I felt unwanted there and it did not take more
than a few days before I ran away.
An orphan starts his journey alone
I was merely seven or eight, but orphan-deserted children my
age were not scarce in the streets. We hung out in groups of five-six
kids, stole our food in the market and slept in ruins or construction sites.
I hung like that for months until I was caught and sent to an orphanage
in the county town of Kovno, and there I actually came back to life.
Why? Because it was an orphanage run by the "Halutz" people.
The group leaders knew Hebrew and taught us the language; everything was
optimistic.
At that time delegations of the "Joint" from
America would come to pick up and save deserted and lost Jewish children.
They were sent to the United States, Canada and South Africa, anywhere -
just to be saved from the pogroms. A bearded Jew came to us, holding a
blue and while flag. He did not talk much, only sang in Hebrew.
And he won us. "Come with me to Israel," he said, and we were
immediately convinced. His name was Israel Balkind, a son of a Jewish
family from Rishon Letzion. This was his second trip to Russia.
(The previous time he saved children after the Kishinev pogroms) and his dream
was to bring orphans to Israel and build "Kiryat Sefer" (Village of
the Book), as he described it, a village similar to Ben Shemen. He told
us: "I have no money and no clothes, but you will go with me and we shall
make it." The group leaders of the orphanage also wanted to
emigrate to Israel, and thus we started out, about 100 children and leaders, on
our way.
We took the train to Warsaw, where Balkind approached several
Jewish institutions - synagogues, schools and other community organizations -
and asked for help. There started a run-around of Jews to collect clothes,
food, toys and some money, and meanwhile Balkind was organizing certificates
and travel documents. This repeated itself in every stop on the way. We were
traveling on trains to Vienna, Italy, Marseilles, and again kind-hearted Jews
ran around and took care of our needs, and so on. The stay at each stop lasted
sometimes for two or three months. After six months we went by ship from Marseilles
to Alexandria, Egypt, and from there on a train to Israel. It was 1922.
The adventures of Balkind and the lost children
Balkind's sister was married to the famous Yehoshua Hankin,
the land salvager of the Jewish National Fund, who then lived in the settlement
of Hefsiba in a deserted Arab inn, a place somewhat afar from Hadera. They had
there some orange orchards and grew some carobs, but the promising crop of
those days was tobacco. Hankin had us live in the inn and as exchange for the
lodging we had to work on the tobacco plantation. Hadera and its surroundings
were infected with malaria, and the children started suffering from various
illnesses, some died of malaria. The lodging was terrible, we received a little
bit of food, slept on the floor, a doctor came once every two weeks and at
times he did not have enough Chinin pills (for malaria). We moved to Hadera
where we also suffered from malaria.
When those facts were published in the newspapers, there was
a big commotion all over the Yishuv: how does a man like Balkind dare, alone,
without help, bring children to Palestine and let them die of malaria? The
Joint people implored him to give the children to an organized orphanage;
Jewish celebrities pressured him. Eventually he agreed, but he let go only of
children under the age of ten, and demanded that some of them, at their choice,
be allowed to return to him when they were fifteen. He wanted to fulfill his
dream of founding Kiryat Sefer - a youth village for agriculture and education.
I refused to leave him. I wanted to be with the grown-ups.
Most of the kids were sent to an orphanage in Tzfat, and this is the reason
that Balkind decided to build his village on the way to Tzfat. He bought a few
shacks from the British, put them on the rocky hillside of Mount Kna'an,
without a floor, without water, without foundations, and proudly located the
blue and white flag so that the people who went to Meron would see our
settlement. We thought we would live there forever.
We were only sixty children left. Life was hard. In the
winter it was dreadfully cold and the shacks were falling apart from the winds
at night. There was no water, but there were plenty of wolves, snakes and
frogs. We had one mule with which we would go to Tzfat to bring food supplies,
and a barrel on wheels for bringing water from Rosh Pinna. We worked for
pennies for the farmers of Rosh Pinna, planting tobacco, and in the cigarette
factory. We grew like weeds: no study, no reading, nobody bothered to teach us
morals or culture. After eighteen months it was all over. The older among us
understood that it could not go on and there was no sense to it. Each of us
went his own way. I and a friend my age went back to Hadera, an area with which
we were familiar. We would sit on the banks of the Hadera river, fish, naked
all day long, roaming around, pick oranges and sleep in a little shack we built
among the trees. Until we felt that the Arabs were spying on us and we ran to
Hadera.
In the shack of Kafri, the weird savior
In Hadera, I earned my poor living in odd jobs. I was thin,
run down - a neglected child. One day, while I was picking oranges, I fainted
from weakness. When I opened my eyes there was above me this wild hairy person.
At first I shivered, but he calmed me down and said that I fainted so he
splashed me with water. "Do not be afraid," he said, "I want to
help you."
Later on I found out that his name was Kafri (like my name
today, my family name was Frumerman) and he was a strange loner living in a
shack in the woods near Hadera. Kafri took me to his shack where I stayed for
almost a year. He was vegetarian and ate only what he found in the woods, his
clothes were rags. He knew many languages, was an educated man and in his shack
he collected many things, mainly books. Kafri took care of me as if I were his
son and during the days tried to teach me some reading and writing. Although he
was very good to me I started feeling some loneliness. My dream was to reach
the agricultural youth village of Mikveh Israel. I left him and returned to
Hadera to seek my way.
Years after I departed from Kafri, when I attended a seminar
of the Working Youth, Berl Katsenelson asked me why I didn't change my name to
a Hebrew one. "What would you suggest?" I asked. He thought and
thought and at the end said: "Kafri." I immediately loved it.
This was the name of my savior. (The meaning of the name Kafri is a villager, a
farmer).
Later I learned that Kafri got out of his solitude, married
and had a daughter. He bought a couple of acres at the center of Hadera and
raised bees, a line that made him rich. After his death, the family decided to
publish a book in his memory, not for distribution. I found out that the book
included a chapter on his relationship with two of the Balkind kids. I went to
Hadera and found his wife.She told me he had some crisis and he did not want to
make it known.
[Much of the book, describing Kafri's involvement in Kibbutz Na'an, in the
Israeli army Palmach, as an Aliya emissary to Poland, and in Israeli politics,
has not yet been translated.]
Memorial
Memorial by Ami Ronis (p. 71)
It was Kafri who became close to me - "Nu, young man,
can I offer you a cup of tea?" and I would come down, sit across from him
on the little terrace, watching his shaking hand trying to grab the little pill
of artificial sweetener and listen to his hoarse voice, cracked from years of
smoking, travel through time to his far past . . . .
A strange connection. Kafri - always only Kafri, not Uncle
nor Uncle Kafri - was in my childhood years the omnipotent Secretary of Kibbutz
Na'an. When we moved to an apartment above him he was close to eighty and we
were a young family.
It was a special hour on Friday afternoon, when the
"Friday" would gather: Srulik Makoshevski would come back from the
dining hall, slowly walking the turning slope of Arye Pak, the newspapers under
his arm and he would inform everyone of the headlines of the day. Kafri and
Haim Librant would be waiting outside already, brooms in their hands, cleaning
the pavement for Shabbat. And the conversation would flow - Srulik, always
excited, emotional, protesting, Haim smiling and Kafri - the authority - would
avidly repeat that something must be done. When he would finish he would snap
towards the stairs: "Nu, young man, what do you say?"
A year went by and we moved away to the new neighborhood. By
now we did not meet every day, only occasionally at lunch, in front of the
billboard. I would caress his stomach, straighten a button on his shirt.
"What's up, Kafri?"
"Thank God, Hamdulillah (thank God in Arabic), we're
going to work every morning," and his back would straighten and something
in his eyes would awaken.
In the evening, we would come, Ido and I, sit in the little
dining area and listen, and Kafri would tell and repeat what he had already
told. When we would get up to leave, he would beg us to stay because he had not
yet finished everything he had to tell.
One day he met me at the dining hall exit - "Nu, young
man, may be you have ten years for me? I am willing to pay," and there was
a deep sorrow in his voice.
When father died Kafri climbed the stairs to the second
floor, arrived huffing and puffing and said, "Your father gave me a big
scare," and we hugged, trying to find comfort.
From one lost to another
On December 12, 1981, Zina passed away. In his book Kafri
wrote, "In my childhood I lost my parents and many days went lonely in the
passages of life. In my tie with you, you gave me strength and stood by me. At
the end of my days it is hard to bear the loneliness and renewed loss."
On April 25, 1992, at the age of 82, Kafri died in his sleep.
He devoted all his life to society. He lived humbly and modestly. He had
endless charm and warmth. He never wanted to be a burden on anybody and never
asked for thanks. On the contrary. In a note found by his bed after his death,
he had written: "I owe a debt of honor, that cannot be measured, to the
friends, the activists and the movement, who offered me their good hand to
bring me back from the valley of shadows, from the disgust and humiliation
where I was trapped for many days. It is thanks to them that I made a covenant
with the pioneering movement and all my life I felt as a soldier ready and
willing to perform any duty requested of me."
This debt of honor Kafri tried to return by describing his
life in the valley of shadows and later on as a soldier in the service of his
saviors. In the last years of his life he decided to record his memories. He
did not tell everything. Death cut his story short. The things he recorded are
brought to you in this book.
Father
In the things that friends tell about father and in his many
tapes that he left behind, the family is hardly mentioned. Father always spoke
and lived with a feeling of obligation to do something for the public, for the
movement, the kibbutz, the state. There is no doubt that we were born and
raised in a period that this was the reality and atmosphere in the country, but
with father it was such a dominant feature and very important part of his life.
As a child who grew up without a family and a home, in loneliness and want that
we cannot grasp, he felt and often expressed that he survived thanks to the
movement and had a debt to it.
I remember that he once told me that he never wanted to get
married and have a family, because he was afraid he would not be able to stand
up to this commitment together with the huge general demands of that period,
and would not be able to bear missing his family when on a mission.
Psychologists today can explain the hardship of people who grew up without a
home to create a home for themselves and their children. Father, in his natural
intelligence, was aware of it, but looked for historical reasons.
Mother also lived without a family, and together they tried
to create a home. Today, years later, I understand how difficult it was to
start everything from the beginning, without roots, and without traditional
frames of reference. Father told me more than once that we, the girls, were a
wonder for him. For years it was difficult for him to get used to the idea that
he had a family of his own, daughters of his own. And he loved us so much! He
was so proud of us! Could not get mad, demand, teach. He left those to mother
and relied on her. He relied on us also. He always had this anxiety, not
necessarily logical, but he never stopped us from doing things. He wanted us to
carry on in his footsteps but understood that we had to live our own lives.
When we were little he was often away from home and we missed
him a lot. He never managed to tell all he did and experienced in his life, but
more than anything, I remember how much he loved us and how much he wanted to
give, even if not always knowing how.
We loved you, father.
-Anat