The Tale of an Olive Tree

December 8, 2009

Translated by Lisa Katz

When Mahmoud Tawil was orphaned, when Mahmoud was 60, or 65, or perhaps 70 years old, he inherited an additional grove of 140 hardy olive trees and one remarkable, seasoned and venerable tree nearly a thousand years old. The many twisting branches of its trunk left a space that a donkey with a heavy load could pass through. The tree was of such great height that olive picking was a difficult task, and when a man wanted to work the land near the tree, he worked not only around it, but also inside it, as if an entire garden lay before him.

Mahmoud was overjoyed to receive the 140 trees, but about the ancient tree he felt a special pride. There were only six or seven such trees in the whole village and they marked the ancient lineage of the families to which they belonged, and added to their reputations.

The oil of this tree had always been used to anoint the skin of newborns in the Tawil family; if a relative was injured in a heroic battle he would be succored by the oil, which was also known to enhance male potency, not to mention health in general. And it was especially good for dipping bread in, and sprinkling on salad, for cooking, to splash on jugs of sour white cheese, and to fry doughnuts and soften warts. Can anyone claim that the sight of this oil maturing in jugs and tins was anything but a sign of happiness and comfort?

It came to pass that Mahmoud’s youngest daughter had reached marriageable age and he sold her to a neighbor, Ali al-Kasir, who wanted a third wife to add to the two aging ones at his home.

But Mahmoud Tawil’s young daughter had tasted city life working for a merchant in Haifa, and she thought herself modern and educated. She rebelled against her father, shouted her own eulogy and tore at her hair, and fell down at the entrance to the house.

Mahmoud grabbed a strap and tormented her as only a father can torment a daughter. But the wild girl would not heed and continued to rebel. Mahmoud took a new rope, of the kind that was always at the ready in case the bucket fell into the well, dragging the old one behind it, and he tied his daughter up. The educated reader will have guessed immediately that he tied her to the ancient olive tree, and that he did not simply tie her up, but placed her in the gap inside it, so the dew would not disturb her at night, and he said:

“Accursed girl, wild-daughter-of-a-wild-woman, whore’s daughter. Here you will sit and sleep. No bread, no water, and no milk will pass your lips, not one olive or one fig. I will check on you morning and night until your mouth speaks what I want to hear.”

That very evening Mahmoud did as he had sworn and came to his daughter, saying, “My ears are open, girl.”

But she pressed her lips together and gave him the look of a hunted tiger.

The next morning he returned and heard nothing from her but a dry cough.

In the evening he found her drenched in tears. She said, “I have one condition, my father. If you promise to meet it, I will obey.”

“Open your mouth and speak,” her father said.

“If I marry Ali al-Kasir, you will build me my own room in the courtyard and grant me my own bowl and cooking pot on my own stove, and a jug and my own bed.”

“I will take this upon myself,” he replied, releasing her from the rope, shoving her out and scolding, “Yalla, go home and eat, and sleep in your own bed.”

The wedding was held at the beginning of winter, when the oil came back from the refinery. Mahmoud took one tin of oil from the olives of the old tree and brought it to Ali al-Kasir’s yard, and said to him: “This tin is for my daughter to spread on the floor of her room.” Such was the custom of well-off farmers, to soak the tamped earthen floor with olive oil, to harden it, to seal out winter dampness.

In spring his daughter felt a child inside her, but she did not give birth at home because war came to the land and the Jews overtook the village at night and her husband was killed. She escaped with a few farmers and their wives over the border, to Lebanon. What happened to her there is not known to us.

But the grove and its olive trees did not run away, nor did the ancient olive tree. For two seasons the grove stood in ruins, untended; olives fell to the ground and rotted. But in the third year, new people came–Jews who had immigrated to Israel after the war–and they settled in the village.

When Mendel Tischler saw the parcel of land that had fallen into his hands, he said to the agronomist, “I’ll dig up that rotten old tree tomorrow so that it won’t ruin the rest of them.”

The agronomist laughed. “This tree will bring you more olives than ten others. Its oil is better than milk and honey, and if you dare pull it up, then I’ll pull out your teeth.”

Mendel Tischler shrugged his shoulders and acquiesced.

In autumn, when it was time to pick the olives, he gathered them from under this tree, and because he wanted to see how sweet the oil was, he ordered it kept separately in special containers.

Mendel Tischler’s family sat down to eat and they brought out a small dish of the oil. Mendel dipped his bread into the dish and tasted it and immediately spat three times: “Ugh, damn! This is bitter. Take this garbage out of my house.”

His wife tasted it and grimaced. His daughter and his sons too. They all agreed that olive oil was food for beasts and Arabs, and marveled that there were fools in the country willing to pay good money for it.

They turned then and there to a man who smuggled oil, out of the government’s sight, and sold him the entire barrel and a few more that they had managed to keep hidden the day the inspectors came to take the oil at official prices.

The family was glad to have rid themselves of a bother and turned back to the table to eat noodles cooked in milk, and cheese pie, and drink tea, and they went to sleep.

When they woke up the next morning, they found someone from the city waiting in the front yard. He said to them: “If you have olive trees that you are willing to sell, I’m buying…”

They quickly brought him over to the ancient tree and told him: “Take only part of the one you see, so we won’t get into trouble.”

The man from the city brought a worker with a saw and they cut three or four large branches from the tree, paying Mendel what they paid, and left in haste.

Olive wood camels with inked manes were fashioned in Tel Aviv out of these branches, as well as writing pens, and plates printed

“The State of Israel,” and candlesticks on which were written “Shabbat,” and bowls inscribed “The Bread of Affliction.”

After all these were finished and lacquered, an advertisement appeared in the papers which said: “Your relatives in America send you food packages. Don’t be ungrateful. Send them a souvenir from Israel, send them gifts fashioned from olive wood, an original creation!.”

People came to the shops to look at these original creations and saw the camels. They said: “But this is kitsch! It isn’t art. This is what you want us to send to America?”

The storeowner replied, “To you it’s kitsch, but to the Americans…a great joy.”

There were those who were tempted, who bought them and sent them off. When the camels arrived in America and were unwrapped, some American relatives thought, “This is art from the State of Israel? In any case, they sent them so, we cannot throw them out.”

And they placed the camels in the maid’s room.

But the ancient olive tree in Mendel’s yard in the village did not know or even sense what was happening. Each year it brought out new silvery-green leaves and extended its branches to embrace the distance. Some of them were so high they could have seen beyond the border into Lebanon, and if I didn’t know that trees have no eyes and no soul, I would say they were longing for Mahmoud’s daughter who had been trapped inside the tree for a day, a night, and another day..

When only a year or two had passed, Mendel Tischler and his friends informed the government, the Jewish Agency, and the Jewish National Fund that they refused to stay in the remote village, and instead vehemently demanded apartments in housing projects near Rishon LeZion. They kept their word. They stopped working the land, they slaughtered the chickens in their coops and sold the meat to small hotels in Safed, they stopped paying water bills, and earned money only by reselling eggs, which they bought from the Arabs of nearby Gush Halav, and from smuggling calves from here to there and there to here.

The Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency and the government gave in, and acted as Mendel Tischler and his friends wished. Once again the village emptied of its inhabitants.

Until one day a car arrived from the company of a building contractor who developed abandoned land, and inside were an agronomist and his seven consultants. They carefully examined the olive grove’s “rentability,” they said what they said, and a week later, workers came to prepare the land. The first thing they did was to uproot seven ancient olive trees, first, because they had not been planted in rows and so disturbed plowing, and second, because they were too tall and during picking they required ladders so high that they could not be found in the warehouse of the building-contractor-for-developing-abandoned-land, and third, because this is what the agronomist demanded, having found them unrentable.

AUTHOR NOTE:

Benjamin Tammuz was born in Ukraine in 1919, made aliyah with his family in 1924, and later volunteered for the Palmah. He studied art history at the Sorbonne and was a noted painter and sculptor active in the Canaanite Movement in Israel. The Canaanites advocated the creation of a “Hebrew” culture that was motivated in part by a desire for Jewish-Arab coexistence. Tammuz spent many years as an editor for Haaretz where he wrote a popular satiric column. The recipient of numerous literary prizes in Israel, Tammuz has also been published widely in translation. His works in English include Requiem for Na’aman (New American Library, 1982), The Orchard (Copper Beech Press, 1984), and Minotaur (Europa Editions, 2005). Tammuz died in 1989.

TRANSLATOR NOTE:

Native New Yorker Lisa Katz is a poet and translator who has lived in Jerusalem since 1983. In 2008, Shikhzur (Reconstruction), a book of her poetry translated into Hebrew, was published in Israel by Am Oved; also in 2008, she was awarded the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and a Ledig House International Writers Residency. She is the translator of Look There: Poems of Agi Mishol (Graywolf Press, 2006) and of the forthcoming Approaching You in English, a bilingual edition of poetry by Admiel Kosman (Zephyr Press). She has taught literature, translation and creative writing at Hebrew University, and leads a poetry workshop at the Poetry Place in Jerusalem.

Zeek’s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

“The Tale of an Olive Tree” (“Maaseh B’etz Zayit”) is copyright © Benjamin Tammuz. English translation by Lisa Katz. Published by arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.

The Tale of an Olive Tree

Benjamin Tammuz

Arts and Culture