The Sound of Her Voice

By Sara Gelbard

A poetic and unusually constructed memoir, THE SOUND OF HER VOICE, is Sara Gelbard’s story of her experience growing up on one of the first kibbutzim in Israel and how she was forced to repress her individuality, and the self-expression of a normal childhood. This book sensitively follows her personal journey through life from Israel to New York and Uruguay, and gives voice to how she finally created a home for herself and in her heart, and healed what she lost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adelaide Books Publishers
• Release date: Nov 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953510549

Sara Gelbard

Sara Gelbard is a woman of three homes – Israel, New York, and Punta del Este in Uruguay. This may be because she never had a home. She was born in one of the first Israeli kibbutzim in Western Galil near the Lebanon border, of Polish parents who escaped the tremendous horror of Europe. They escaped, but their families did not, and consequently, their commitment to the kibbutz was ideological, necessary, and fueled by a broken heart.The first kibbutzim were the most stringent in their rules – mothers only allowed in at feeding times – and 24 children in each Children’s House, with only one circulating guardian at night. The children were taught to be little soldiers, and performed their duties, and needs and emotions were discouraged. For a sensitive individualistic person, like Sara, this became a burden that would later haunt her. She excelled in the kibbutz, in the Israeli army (in her case, becoming a Navy officer), at a Tel Aviv Movement and Dance School, and teaching at the College of Sde Boker (where Ben Gurion lived.) She excelled but carried a tremendous loneliness and sadness of having lived without real connection or having been given the gift of self-expression. The army offered more self-expression than the kibbutz. Even with her excelling at the kibbutz, she was denied by them her second year of college, because they deemed her too independent. With that, she left.After the Six Day War, when all Israel was celebrating, Sara decided to enroll in the Martha Graham Dance School and moved to New York. There she went through the struggles of an immigrant with language, finding work, although she was helped by a dear friend also from Israel, and by a philosophical psychoanalyst who ran seminars on the interior life. This saved her and opened the inner life to her. She got her BA in Economics from Fordham, became a successful real estate broker, selling homes to others, which was a form of reparation. She married her Uruguayan husband (then in New York) who became her first “home.”At seventy, she was walking in the beautiful Punta del Este, with its ocean on two sides, and that little girl’s voice, who never could be heard, or speak of what she felt, bubbled up. THE SOUND OF HER VOICE is Sara’s exploration of what it was like to live in this unfeeling world as a child, the healing in writing, what her three homes are to her, how marriage healed her, and, ultimately, how she came to understand and forgive how her mother could, in her way, give her away. Sara sprinkles her book with haikus that go to the heart of such a journey. The entire book speaks to all of us who have a voice inside us that must be listened to if we want to open our hearts.

Book preview

THE SOUND OF HER VOICE

THE SOUND OF HER VOICE

A memoir

by

SARA GELBARD

Adelaide Books

New York / Lisbon

2020

THE SOUND OF HER VOICE

A memoir

By Sara Gelbard

Copyright © by Sara Gelbard

Cover design © 2020 Adelaide Books

Published by Adelaide Books, New York / Lisbon

adelaidebooks.org

Editor-in-Chief

Stevan V. Nikolic

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner

whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case

of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For any information, please address Adelaide Books

at [e-mail]

or write to:

Adelaide Books

244 Fifth Ave. Suite D27

New York, NY, 10001

ISBN: 978-1-953510-54-9

CONTENTS

The Sound of Her Voice

Night

When You Feel Lonely, Ask for More

Gas Explosion

Friday Nights

Home

Israel

New York

Punta Del Este

A Grief Revealed

About the Author

Let’s look for secret places

Somewhere in the world

On the blue shores of silence.

Or where the storm has passed…

— Pablo Neruda

The Sound of Her Voice

When I reached the age of 70, I got to the point where she could finally tell her story. She couldn’t tell it before. I had just begun spending more time with my husband in Punta del Este in Uruguay, an elegant town by the sea, with a pure and stunning quiet, and the most luminous sunsets and sunrises. The beauty of Punta with its beaches, and the embracing and healing sea surrounding both sides of the town, somehow made her bubble up. She saw the water and she came out. It couldn’t be on the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue in New York, where I also live and work. It is too crowded there, too noisy. I never had time for her there.

One day in Punta, she just started talking. Was she talking before and no one would listen or did she never have a voice? I believe her voice was always there. But I was too busy managing my real estate business, being with my husband, Carlos, and traveling back and forth to Israel to see my family. I was too busy seeing friends, and learning, and pushing myself, as people in New York do. She had to be safe to tell her story since her soul, her little self, had only known danger. If she revealed herself before, if she came out and was herself and spoke her mind, she had to pay a price. Annihilation. Being ostracized. Being thrown out on her own with no one to support her. She had to be sure I could hear her before she would speak.

Each morning in Punta, I began going to Boca Chica, a café near my house to hear her. I went after I had walked the dog in the very early morning, our ritual, which I feel is a sacramental activity together, as does the dog by the way since he so attentively wakes me to begin. I bring him back home and have a coffee there, I take my notebooks and pencils and unfortunately my phone. I am still in business in New York, even living in Punta, and the waitress knows me, and her, and brings me a cortado, and I try to begin.

It is hard to be a beginner and exciting at the same time. Strange how hard it is to hear one’s own still small voice within. There are so many voices talking to us, demanding of us, so many sounds and noises.

I hear music in the background as I start to write. The place does not have a view which I think will help me. Gila, my writing coach, said to write 3 to 5 pages a day, and she thought I should write in English. I think so, too. My family is on my mind because, if it is in English, I am not sure they will be able to read this. But I also think writing in English provides me the necessary distance to tell this story.

As I begin, I have just come back from Israel where I was born, on a kibbutz. I am shocked how estranged I feel from my country, I am no longer part of that culture. However, I don’t feel estranged when I am with my brother, David. On that visit, we traveled a day in the Galil and drove through the magical green hills of our childhood. When we were children, there were never places to stop for coffee, but now we stopped in a place on the Adir mountain overlooking the other mountains at the border of Lebanon, a typical Galil vista, where so many homes and towns are hidden. Then to Kadem and a Druze village, Chorphish, on the hillside.

We stopped to eat food that I had never eaten before, as usual dirt cheap, but so good. I love the food in Israel, its freshness, simplicity. I have never liked French cooking, it’s too fancy and complicated. One area where Arabs and Jews are integrated in Israel is food. We took so much from the Arab culture and it is truly a part of our Israeli cuisine.

We kept on driving in our majestic Galil. It was a day to remember. My brother and I did not live as a family when we were children in the kibbutz. We hardly saw each other or our parents. Now I make a point to strengthen my family ties with my siblings. On this trip to Israel, I also saw my sister, Elana, whom I find I always want to care for and protect. I know she did not have protection in the kibbutz’ Children’s House that each of us grew up in. Not that I had much protection myself as a child. But this is why I know what she feels, even perhaps if she does not.

I am the oldest and, when I was born, my mother was thrilled to have a child. My father travelled a lot, leaving the kibbutz, helping the dispersed Jews in Europe come to Israel. Ecstatic as my mother was with her firstborn, she was only allowed twenty-minute feeding visits to the Children’s House. Then she had to leave no matter how I screamed for her. And she would hear me scream in my loneliness and fear as she walked by the Children’s House, but the rules were stringent: Leave the child alone. Do not go to her no matter how much she cries to be held. It was painful for my mother. Never mind for me. For me it was terrifying and excruciating. It was a form of torture. What they do to prisoners, they put them in solitary confinement with limited contact with their loved ones. And yet, my mother loved me. She just had to sneak that love in, in the intervals where she was allowed to, a visitor to an inmate. And then leave me alone as a baby and infant, sobbing my heart out not to be left in the dark there.

My parents felt, in their hearts, it was against human nature to have such arbitrary separation between parents and children. They knew, but it was the rules and they were good kibbutzniks.

My father tried to humanize the experience. For instance, he brought live animals into the kibbutz to help create a little zoo for the children and he brought clothing and many gifts back from his travels.

My mother also had her misgivings about the stringencies of life in the Children’s House, but she insisted that the family stay, no matter what. She had made a moral commitment to be part of it.

Each of us children in my family experienced the Children’s House differently. My sister Elana, five years younger than me, was born to a different mother than me, one who was more beaten down by life at the kibbutz, so she was more than willing to give the caring and responsibility of a child to the metapelet in the Children’s House. With me, she may have had more conflict complying with the rules.

For me, the Children’s House was a great form of sadness and isolation but, for Elana, it actually was a home. I admit that Elana’s classmates were unusually kind and she still gets together every month with some of her classmates, now that they are retired. David, my brother, the youngest, also had a class of loving children. In both their classes, there were cases of polio and the whole class was quarantined and the other children nurtured the children with polio. Elana’s class is still supporting the girl who had polio. And, in David’s class, a child with a severe case of polio, ended up marrying and having a family.

In my case, we were not such a homogenous group. I was among 7 girls and 14 boys, and there was much cruelty in the early, first kibbutz system. The philosophy was at its strictest and all that mattered was the kibbutz. We were not to have personal feelings and we were not to be coddled. I remember, in later years, when we were joining the army, telling my teacher that one of my classmates was unprepared and he was going to fall apart in the army. But no one at that time in the kibbutz system made room for special needs. The system did not pay attention to anything that was out of the norm. We were all to be strong Jews, no matter the reality of our nature. (The boy I warned about did fall apart in the army and ended up committing suicide later.) Even after many years had passed, when our kibbutz began to pay more attention to children’s needs, and now considered that children sleeping in their parent’s home is important, one of my classmates fought against it. She was hanging onto the rigidity of the past. The move to change was passed, however. My brother’s children, who lived with he and his wife on the kibbutz, slept at home.

A deep sadness is rising to the surface as I write. When I first came to New York as a young woman, when I essentially ran away, Preston, a spiritual psychoanalyst who affected my life deeply and of whom I will speak often, when he first met me, said, I see a million tears in your eyes that you need to cry from your childhood. Who would dare to cry in the Children’s Houses where we were all supposed to be little soldiers, where we were all supposed to love this communal living of rules and duties and no love or nurturing? To show unhappiness or sadness meant there was something wrong with you. You were not a good kibbutznik, you were not strong enough. We in the kibbutz were part of something big: building Israel, a most righteous society. We didn’t have much, but it belonged to everybody. We lived on ideology. And to express vulnerability was considered weakness.

But Preston was right: I was born to cry, I have that type of nature, and I had to suppress it. But those feelings are close to the surface now, I see, as I pick up my pen and the water of the sea surrounds me on both sides and wells up inside me.

This coffeeshop is not perfect in that it can be noisy, sometimes the music is loud, but it’s a place I can hear my voice, her voice, the child no one knew. There was beautiful music at home this morning that Carlos had on, that helped me to feel my grief, but I do not want to write at home. Carlos has his desk; I don’t have my corner. Maybe we should look for it.

It is the next morning and I am walking my dog, the most special part of my day, seeing his beautiful black silhouette, galloping against the silver sea. It is just us and it is heaven. Even when it rains and the wind is blowing, it is us, the sea and the sky. That shared solitary moment. In the afternoon, when the sun came out, I took a photo of our terrace overlooking the sea and the sky. A simple snap on my iPhone and it made me happy and I shared it with a lot of people. The sea strengthens and softens me, its power and beauty, and the sun