Making Aliyah: A new home in an old home

For Part I of Darrell's arrival in Israel, click here.

After sifting through the joyous celebration on the tarmac, I made my way into the terminal to begin the bureaucratic balagan [chaos]. The time spent running between immigration offices at the airport gave me my first lesson in traditional Israeli folk-dancing. Participants move swiftly, impatiently and irately between government offices looking for a non-existent person, form or stamp. The dance is performed to differing simple melodies but the customary refrain always includes 'we don't handle this type of work... we are closing in 10 minutes....come back tomorrow...(sung in Hebrew, Yiddish or Russian).'
 
With free tuna sandwiches stuffed in my pockets I took my complimentary taxi credit to Haifa. My cab driver was a lovely man, bursting with Zionist pride. During that 2-hour ride, he told me stories of conquest and bravery for every rock we drove by, every landmark we passed and for every notch on his belt. Soaking wet due to the 45 C August heat mixed with the overflowing amount of 'Oleh Juice' seeping from my pores we finally arrived at my destination in Haifa: The Mercaz Klita [absorption center].
 
My driver, an amateur historian explained to me the history of this infamous building. Built during Ottoman rule by a wealthy Turkish noble for his Swedish boyfriend, the structure was originally built to rival the great bathhouses of Istanbul's more affluent neighborhoods. Construction was never finished as World War I broke out and bathhouses were deemed unnecessary and a waste of brushes. When the British took over Palestine they refurbished the West Wing of the building and the Eastern Wing was used as the Treasury for the Church of England. The Church wanted a strong presence in Haifa to compete with the Lutherans from Germany who dominated Haifa's religious Christian community. 

When the British ran out of sausages and decided it was cheaper to end the Palestinian Mandate than to ship over more meat, the building was abandoned. Looters stole everything of value and the building remained untouched during the War of Independence as both the Arabs and Jews believed the grimy building was already destroyed.

The building remained empty until the great financial crisis of 1968 when the Israeli Government Oversight Committee was first formed and subsequently realized the previous finance minister had been reading his ledgers from right-to-left thus not realizing the countries coffers were filled with nothing more than old newspaper copies. The imminent Inxodus of refugees from North Africa implored the financially-fizzled government to open up more housing for immigrants. It was believed the best way to ease their absorption into Israel would be by recreating the living conditions of their great-grandparents. Thus 7 rooms were given a fresh coat of paint, the mattresses in the East-Wing were flipped over and the Aba Hushi Absorption Center was opened.
 
The staff at Aba Hushi had no record of me arriving that day since messages were sent from Jerusalem's Ministry of Oleh Housing to various satellite offices by donkey and the National Union of Jackasses and Donkeys had declared a strike in a dispute over an unfulfilled hay-raise. However, the staff was quiet pleasant and within an hour I was being carried up four flights of stairs to my room with the house mom on my left arm and the cab driver on my right. I was literally floating with excitement.
 
We knocked on the door of my new room. After some rumblings, a muscular twenty-something Ukrainian immigrant opened the door in a towel, glistening with sweat. In the small room, his 19-year-old girlfriend lay giggling in bed. The house-mom told him in Hebrew that I was his new roommate and with a wink to my cab driver made her way back down to her air-conditioned office. The cab driver, transfixed on the young girl in the bed, slowly backed away from the door mumbling something about a girl he met once in Bulgaria. 

Although obviously not expecting my arrival, my new roommate welcomed me with open arms and the open gap in his towel informed me he was Jewish. He introduced himself and yelled something in Ukrainian to the teenager in the bed. She irritably arose and began putting on her clothes. She had the demeanor of Drago's busty Russian wife in Rocky 4 with the body of the 1976 Romanian Olympic Gymnastics Champion Nadia Comaneci. 

He began putting on his clothes and I noticed that he was covered in what looked like whip-marks on his back. It didn't take me long to know that the wounds were fresh and inflicted by the communist gymnast now making coffee in her underwear. He separated the two beds he had placed together, flipped over the mattress, and said in heavily accented Hebrew 'you sleep...we go.' I fell like a lump into bed and tried to avoid thinking of the stories these mattresses could tell.
 
Three hours later I awoke covered in a blend of sweat and the travelers' paste one only has smeared on their bodies after Trans-Atlantic flights. I arose and began to fumble my way to the bathroom, stumbled, and fell in a complex mess onto the large duffle bag that occupied the kitchen of my new room. On the floor looking up at the ceiling I noticed a small cockroach speeding back to his parents home after a late afternoon visit to my fridge.

I lay there for a moment before the realization of it hit me like a punch from Mike Tyson during his non-medicated youth.

I was finally here.

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