Flowers of the Desert: Inspired by a Different Culture

When I first met my husband, I thought he was from India.  The meeting took place on the Princeton Commons, where there was folk dancing every Tuesday evening during the summer months.

Having just moved to Princeton and—yes, this was eons ago in the dark ages for women—I asked my housemates where one could go to meet men.  Folk dancing was one of the activities they suggested.

At the Commons I stood on the side, near the wall and was talking to a few of the men there when I spied this ill-dressed, short man looking at me. He was wearing a white dress shirt and awful blue Bermudas, with one of the tails of the shirt hanging out.  I just hoped to god he wasn’t going to ask me to dance.

Unfortunately, he did.

But it was a change partners dance, so, as soon as he released me to go onto the next victim, I scurried back to the wall, leaving someone without a partner.

Afterwards, he came up to me and asked why I had left the dance.  I don’t even remember my answer, but I do remember we began talking, whereupon I discovered he was from Israel, not India.  I was excited, being Jewish myself, and having taken a wonderful course on the Middle East from Richard Mitchell, an excellent professor and sorely missed.

This unkempt Israeli and I talked, never danced again, and then the rain came. It soon became apparent that the rain wasn’t going to let up, so he invited me to his dorm room to see his stamps.

You’ve got to be kidding, I thought to myself.  Was that the same as seeing someone’s etchings?  I derisively said no.  Later I found out he actually did want me to see his damn stamp collection. In fact, he came to the States with two suitcases, one filled with clothes and the other with stamps, now wasting away in the basement.

Finally, it was time to leave, the rain wasn’t stopping, we had no umbrellas, so we raced to the parking lot, even though I told him it was silly for both of us to get wet.  I got into my car and pulled away.  In my rearview mirror, I saw him standing there, getting soaked, waving me goodbye.  I said to myself, I’m going to marry that man.  Two months later I did.

Flash forward to May and June of 1967.  We were at the University of Illinois, where my husband started his professional career, and things were heating up in the Middle East, thank you, Egypt.

How tense we all were, at least in the Israeli community at the university.  Some of the young men had already left to join their units, others were debating whether and when to go.  Then came the Six Day War and our/their glorious victory.  (If only Jordan had made peace and taken back the whole of the West Bank how different so many lives would be now.  And how much better for both countries.)

Where is all this leading, you ask, and what does it have to do with FLOWERS OF THE DESERT?  Well, I didn’t meet those flowers until July 1967.  (By the way, FLOWERS OF THE DESERT was not my title for the book.  In fact like most authors, I’m guessing, I went into a bookshop and asked if they carried FLOWERS OF THE DESERT.  They sent me to the horticultural shelf.  The whole experience of getting that book published was a nightmare with the worst editor any author could ever have. She lacked complete understanding of the culture I was trying to represent.)

What was that culture?  The Iraqi/Israeli culture?

Before our visit to Israel in the summer of 1967, the first since our marriage but definitely not the last, the only member of my husband’s family I met was his older brother, the one we came to call Uncle Monster.  So I was trepidatious about meeting the rest of his family, although my husband was anxious to introduce me.

Cultural note here:  There are two streams of Judaism that mix and sometimes clash, the Ashkenazi, mine, and the Mizrahi, my husband’s.  When my husband and his family arrived from Iraq via Iran to Israel, his was considered the polluted stream, undereducated and unwanted, except to increase the numbers of the State of Israel.  All the power, the wealth and the cultural institutions rested with those mainly from Eastern Europe, who ran Israel with a system of protekzia.  If you knew someone who could grease the wheels for you, you got ahead.  If you didn’t, tough.

So those rescued from or fleeing from Middle Eastern countries got the dregs of what Israel had to offer, and at that time the country had very little to offer anyone.  Now it’s a country of the very rich and those struggling to get by.  It’s a powerhouse in the tech field, the skyscrapers, resting on sand, grow higher and higher.  But when I first visited lo those many years ago, it was a more equalitarian society.  Everyone wore khaki and everyone was hungry.  For something better.

And thus I met my husband’s family, the immediate and the tangential.  It was an experience.  My family, quiet and deadly.  My husband’s loud, volcanic, gossipy mavens of the first order, but loving and embracing.

I will admit there were some cultural differences that surprised me.  Like maybe a more casual attitude?  One example:  On Saturday, Shabbat, in the greater Tel Aviv area, my brother-in-law suggested we go to the beach.  There were no buses operating officially, but he thought he knew of one that would take us to the Mediterranean.  So we all dressed in our bathing suits and threw coveralls over them and went down the street to wait for the bus.  The phantom bus that never came.  His response?  A shrug.

I thought to myself, you either know something or you don’t know, but inshallah.

Another time I was sitting next to the sister of a brother-in-law, trying to be pleasant. She spoke a brand of English where most of the relatives of my generation didn’t.  She said to me, “I like you very much, but I don’t like you as much as Doris (Uncle Monster’s wife) because she’s blonder.”

Needless to say, I never sat next to this woman ever again, despite her efforts.

It was a cornucopia of incidents from inside and outside the family that led me to write FLOWERS OF THE DESERT. I saw firsthand how my father-in-law, a prosperous contractor in Iraq was left diminished in Israel, living on a pittance, working construction but told not to work so fast as it made the other workers look bad.  I saw women who were afraid to leave the house alone because they didn’t know the language.  And I saw discrimination that wasn’t even recognized as such by the people perpetrating it.

Of course the book isn’t a political tract or a rage against a machine.  It’s the story of a family, forced to flee their homeland lest they be killed, as some of their relatives were.  It features their efforts to make it in a country that was new and raw and really not ready to receive them.

Now my generation in Israel is dying off.  My nieces and nephews, great nieces and nephews live in a different country entirely.  While there’s still calumny against the Mizrachi, definitely by foreign reporters, who drop into the scene and leave a few weeks later, learning little, but claiming knowledge they don’t have, the Mizrachi are making advances.  Perhaps not fast enough, but they have made the country their own.

If this doesn’t convince you to read/buy FLOWERS OF THE DESERT, let it be known that Uncle Monster tried to sue me over this book.  Gee, I wonder why?  Read it and find out!