Jaffa Oranges in Schönau Castle 

Nina Kossman

The Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, so we could not fly directly from Moscow to Israel. We flew first to Vienna, and from Vienna, we were to fly to Israel. When we had gotten off the plane in Vienna, we were immediately taken to Schönau Castle and told to stay inside and not go anywhere, and the adults uttered the word "terrorism" instead of explaining. I thought, what will this Schönau be like? If it was really a medieval castle, then it was good that we wouldn’t go to Vienna, I thought. But Schönau was much less romantic than I had imagined: its spacious halls were turned into hostels; women were sitting on beds, breastfeeding babies; children were everywhere, running around, making noise; men, having nothing to do, opened and closed suitcases with a sigh.  The castle looked like a large train station. I spent three days there, wandering the long corridors. On the third day, I saw boxes of oranges. Every orange had the word "Jaffa" on it. My future life in Israel appeared to me in the form of ripe, large oranges from Jaffa.

At the end of the war, many years before my birth, my mother returned to Moscow from Georgia, where she ate only corn. She was so weak that she went to a doctor about it. “It’s probably my heart,” she told the doctor. “Or the liver. Anyway, this is serious." The doctor examined her and asked:
"What do you do?"
“I study biology,” said my mother who was not anyone’s mother yet.  “Uh, science doesn't feed,” he said. “You don’t need medicine, you need only meat, and in large quantities, plus at least one orange a day.”
“But where can I find meat? And oranges – that’s even more impossible ... "
"This is not my business,” he said, "but I’m telling you: if you don't eat meat and oranges, then in two months you won't be able to walk." When my mother told this to her uncle, with whom she had been living after the arrest of her father, he said: “Why didn't you tell me earlier?” The uncle's wife's father worked in a meat processing plant, and there was always enough meat in his refrigerator. The uncle and his wife's parents dined together every day, and that year my mother-to-be ate more meat than in the past ten years. She was so hungry all the time that she could eat even in her sleep. She recovered, although there were no oranges in Moscow, and even the parents of her uncle's wife could not get them.

As soon as we had boarded the plane to Israel, I fell asleep. I woke up only when we were given food on small trays, and the second time I woke up when the stewardess announced that we were flying over Israel. I looked out the window and saw a silver mountain.
“Look,” I said to Mama, “silver mountain”.
“This is Haifa,” Mama said. "This is what it looks like at night, from streetlights and lights in windows."
Jaffa oranges in Schönau were gold. Haifa at night - silver. Gold and silver were a good start.

We landed in Tel Aviv at night and were told that we would be taken to an absorption center in Nahariya. A hot black night swept past the car taking us to northern Israel. I fell asleep again, and woke up when our driver said, "Nahariya, Malon Yarden." The night was over, one-half of the sky turned pale. We entered the lobby of Malon Yarden, a plastered, four-story modern building. Even in the lobby, we could hear the sea. We smelled the purple flowers that grew on bushes at the entrance. The new world was opening itself to us from its best side, in all its sounds and colors, and this bright beginning temporarily blocked memories of the cold homeland. 

Our driver said something in Hebrew to a yawning and stretching owner of the malon, who came out to meet us, and together they helped us carry our suitcases to the room on the second floor. We breathed a sigh of relief upon learning that we would have our own room and that the days of sharing our living space with some forty refugees in Schönau castle were gone for good. In the center of the room, there was a double bed, and against a wall, next to a window overlooking the sea, there was a single bed for me. The owner of the malon went to his office and left with a key in one hand and a small Hebrew-Russian dictionary in the other. He leafed through the dictionary, pointed to a Russian word. I bent over the page - he was pointing to the word "breakfast." He leafed through the dictionary again, pointed again, I bent over the open page again and read - "Seven." Then he gave a short laugh, put away the dictionary, and resorted to sign language to show us how to get to another malon, ​​where breakfast was served from seven to eight.

A five-minute walk from Malon Yarden to Malon Hameezdim was our first independent walk in the so-called free world. Nahariya was in bloom. Walking the streets of this city on the border with Lebanon was like walking in a botanical garden under a bright blue sky without a single cloud. The dining room in Malon Hameezdim was overflowing with Russian olim hadashim, which is probably why everything there seemed familiar to me. Russian women moved as if they were carrying the burden of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ lives, and, compared to them, women raised in the free world moved their wings quickly and dexterously, like shiny butterflies. Russian men looked like heavy, awkward bears - even thin and well-coordinated ones had this bearish posture.  This is why, during my first breakfast in Israel, everything seemed familiar to me: voices, gestures, faces. But I was not familiar with small clear plastic cups filled with yellow liquid. Such cups are used for urine analysis in America, but of course, I could not know about it then. "Jaffa oranges," said a man at our table, pointing at his glass. I had never had orange juice before, and I had never had anything from such a transparent glass. “It was worth leaving Russia for this,” I told my mother; and even now, when I think about Israel, I remember orange juice in a plastic cup as a kind of revelation.

I wanted to learn Hebrew as soon as possible, so I asked my parents to place me in Hadassim, a children's town, or rather “a children's village” near Netanya. In Hadassim, my father was asked if I was independent. “Oh yes,” he said. "Too much so." The lady at Hadassim's registration office nodded approvingly. She gave my father an application form to sign and other documents that contained information about me: age, height, weight, grade I’m supposed to be in, and so on.

If I were really as independent as my father told the lady who was registering me at Hadassim, then a year later, when my parents decided to leave Israel, I would have told them to go to America without me. Hadassim could have dressed me, fed me, and educated me. Of course, I would have missed my parents terribly, but I wouldn’t have been worse off in Hadassim than I was in the first few years in America, where I was so sad for the first time in my life that I had to resort to reading and writing Russian poetry.

Moscow born Nina Kossman is a bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Her paintings and sculptures have been exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Moscow. Among her published works are three books of poems in Russian and in English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two books of short stories, an anthology she put together and edited for Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, Persian, Russian, and Dutch. A recipient of UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA translation fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundación Valparaíso, she lives in New York. Her website is www.ninakossman.com.