bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, p. 45
No Balm in Gilead: A Personal Retro-
spective of Mandate Days in Palestine by
Sylva M. Gelber, Carleton University Press,
1989, 284 pages, $21.50.
In early 1948, Sylva M. Gelber left the Palestine she had come to as a young woman sixteen years before. Her dream of participating in the building of the Jewish National Home had been shattered by the gunfire and bomb explosions of Palestine’s agony throes. In the early years of the Great Depression, Gelber had aspired to a career in the theatre and had written a column for the weekly Toronto Jewish Standard. In 1932, for reasons which are not explained in this book, she left Toronto to spend a year in Palestine. That year stretched into more than a decade and a half, much of it spent as a social worker for both private and government agencies — a career in which she had received no prior training in Canada.
Why did Gelber decide to settle in Palestine? No real answer is given. The impression conveyed in this book, time and time again, is that Gelber went there as an adventurer and stayed because of inertia, because of an unwillingness to reinsert herself into Canadian (and Toronto Jewish) society, and because she found a unique niche for herself in Palestine. There is no hint that Gelber went because of any commitment to Zionism, although she clearly found attractive what she thought of as the moderately socialist Zionism of David Ben Gurion’s Mapai Party.
Gelber is very good at establishing a sense of place and in putting across the underlying mood of a certain part of Palestinian Jewish society in the 1930s and 1940s. The most effective part of her story is her description of the impact that Jewish terrorism had on Palestine and on the Palestinian Jewish community. She clearly recoiled from the wanton murder and destruction carried out by the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Those parts of the book which describe some of the innocent British victims of that terror are poignant.
Gelber’s recollections of some of the people she worked with are very effective in evoking character; they provide sometimes truly fascinating miniature portraits of Yishuv notables such as Henrietta Szold. Some of the most interesting chapters are those that describe both the living conditions and the psychological strains of the people Gelber worked with during the war years. The uncertainties of the military situation in the Middle East and the rumours (and later confirmation) of mass slaughter of the Jews of Europe, combined with food shortages and the virtual total mobilization of the Yishuv, produced a Palestine that was tense, expectant, and often worried about its fate and the fate of world Jewry.
All this is told against the backdrop of Gelber’s personal development and her apparently increasing integration into Yishuv society. Her hopes of launching an English language theatre career dashed, she moved into other areas, eventually earning credentials as a social worker, working first for Hadassah and then for the Palestine Department of Labour. While pursuing her professional career, she maintained her interest in music and the arts and even enjoyed a brief stint as a broadcaster for Palestine Radio. Her circle of friends widened as her professionalism deepened and her apparent commitment to her new home was strengthened.
Why then did she leave Palestine when she did? The roots of her anguish went back to the late 1930s and the period which saw the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, the growth of the Irgun, the intensification of its counter-terror terror, and the White Paper of 1939. Gelber clearly found the violence deeply disturbing, whether directed by Arab at Jew, vice versa, or as so often happened, at moderates by extremists inside both communities. At first, she made her peace with the situation by reassuring herself that the leadership of the Yishuv did not countenance terror, that it believed in the concept of havlagah or “purity of arms” — violence for self-defence only and even then in restrained measures. After the war, however, when the haganah itself began to engage in military action against the British mandate, sometimes in cooperation with the Irgun, she no longer believed that the leadership of the Yishuv were as pure in thought and in deed as she had once imagined. It was after the bombing of the King David Hotel that she began to consider leaving Palestine. She was deeply disturbed, not only at the violence, but at the Yishuv’s apparent acquiescence in it. So she returned to Canada.
It is all too easy to accuse Gelber of naiveté. It is equally easy to pass gratuitous judgment on her — “if you didn’t like things as they were, why didn’t you try to change them?” This book makes clear, however, that Gelber herself was unsure of her own motives from beginning to end of her Palestine sojourn. At times, she appears to have been by her own choice, “in” but not “of” Yishuv society. How else to explain the almost total lack of resolution at the end of this memoir?
Gelber’s failure, at least in this book, either to resolve the meaning of her experience in Palestine or the manner of her leaving it, is a very personal one. It makes this book much less satisfying than it might otherwise have been. But then, life is rarely that cut and dried!
David J. Bercuson is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Graduate
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, p. 45. Read the rest of this issue →
