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Can't Stop the Music
David B. Green
 ESTEBAN ALTERMAN |
The 1994 Subaru compact scurries up the narrow, curving road that leads to the Beduin town of Kamana el-Sharkiyya. "Town" may not be quite the most apt term to describe the random collection of houses, many of them unfinished, that pepper the side of this hill, Mt. Kaman, a few miles to the east of the Western Galilee city of Karmiel. On the other hand, if the term "Beduin" brings to mind semi-permanent tent settlements, around which dirty-faced children herd flocks of goats, then East Kamana defies the stereotype.
The car comes to a halt in front of a chain-link fence that encircles a pre-fab kindergarten. No children spending their morning hours as goatherds here: They're all in school, the younger ones here, their older siblings at another nearby Beduin town. The Subaru's driver hops out and removes a large case from the trunk. His hair is shortly cropped, and he wears blue jeans, a red-plaid flannel shirt, and Reebok walking shoes, all of which sit comfortably on his spry 86-year-old body as he bounds into the kindergarten. Dov Yirmiya has arrived.
Every two weeks Dov Yirmiya makes an unpaid appearance at four different Beduin towns, and at each one he takes out his accordion and spends an hour leading the children, 3 to 5 years old, in songs and dances. He is a Jew, a veteran of all of Israel's wars, who during the 1948 War of Independence was even reported in one of the papers as deceased after being shot in the neck. He grew up with Moshe Dayan on the first moshav, Nahalal; helped establish Kibbutz Eilon, along the northern border; set up and ran for some years the northern district of Israel's Nature Reserves Authority: and has probably participated in more left-wing demonstrations than anyone in the country. In 1974, when Palestinian terrorists came ashore on the beach near his home, in the Northern coastal town of Nahariyah, he helped to quickly organize the defense of the neighborhood. (Tragically, before the army killed the invaders some hours later, they murdered a woman and her two daughters.) But anyone who entertains the notion that there's something pitiable about a man with such a past devoting his twilight years to playing the accordion for groups of young Arab children - as if it were the equivalent of basket-weaving or bead-stringing for the feeble-minded - obviously hasn't seem him at work. Nor do they know what makes Yirmiya run.
One might think that Israel's Arabs needed a Jew to come teach them their folk music the way the residents of Newcastle need to import coal, but Yirmiya's longevity at the job is a sign that he's providing a valuable service. So is the reception he receives when he arrives at this morning's first kindergarten, from both the children and the teachers. He encourages the kids to call him "Ziti Dov" - Grandfather Dov - and they seem to enjoy his presence almost as much as he does. He has prepared, and is constantly updating, a booklet with 40 songs, which he gives to the teachers, and a series of tapes, "for when I'm not here," which he sells to them at cost.
Over the course of an hour, he has the 30 or so kids guess from the first notes what song he is about to play, leads them in an Arabic version of "Heveinu Shalom Aleikhem" (Heveinu Salaam Aleikum), has them act out a story in song. At one point he plays a traditional melody, and the kids divide to dance: the little boys forming a circle, arms on each other's shoulder, and then making a train, the girls holding hands in a circle. Yirmiya stands up and starts stomping his foot.
One little girl, wearing a brown corduroy skirt suit, dances with unusual panache. One can almost imagine her appearing in a kiddie talent show - but without any self-consciously forced sexuality. Here, among her classmates, her sensual movements seem perfectly natural. A few minutes later, Dov asks her how old she is and we learn that she is all of 3.
Finally, at the hour's end, is the moment the kids have all been waiting for: Yirmiya lets them come up one by one and tinkle the ivories of his accordion. Suddenly, the little girl in the corduroy suit acts her age. Insulted when she finds she is at the end of the line, she refuses to play the accordion when her turn arrives. Yirmiya takes this as a challenge, using all of his charm to try and placate her - to no avail.
YIRMIYA HAS BEEN VISITING Beduin villages in the Western Galilee for 17 years. His involvement began when he joined a group from the left-wing Mapam party that had come to express support for two families whose homes were scheduled for demolition by the government because they were built without proper permits.
"There have been Beduin on Mt. Kaman for some 200 years," explains Yirmiya. "They belong to the Sawayyad tribe, who originated in Saudi Arabia, and came to Palestine via Lebanon or Jordan. In the late 1970s, Ariel Sharon [then agriculture minister] started his program to Judaize the Galilee. He built two 'settlements'" - Yirmiya intentionally uses the Hebrew term usually reserved for Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza - "on the mountain, Kamon and Makhmanim." He explains that until that time, the Beduin indeed lived in tents, although they had already started building houses and becoming involved in organized agriculture.
Kamon and Makhmanim are two of a series of mitzpim (hilltop outposts) established in the area in the late 1970s and early 80s to increase the population of Jews in the Galilee and to leave the high ground in their hands. Even today, though, Arabs still slightly outnumber Jews in the region, and when there is tension, as there was last October (when police fired on Israeli Arab demonstrators, killing 13 of them), a deep-seated Jewish fear of losing control of the area rises to the surface.
The increase in Jewish development was accompanied by a plan to concentrate the Beduin in a small number of towns. "The government started to put pressure on them. They limited their water supply. And they began to destroy the houses they had built." The school that was operating at East Kamuna was closed down, so that school-age children had to walk miles cross-country each day (there was then no road leading to the town) to get to the closest school. That's where Yirmiya and his friends entered the picture. But their involvement went beyond mere protest. A German foundation had provided funds for the creation of a nursery school, and he assisted in setting it up.
When Israel invaded Lebanon, in June, 1982, Yirmiya was, at age 67, part of the occupying force, as an officer in the military regime that administered the Israeli zone, providing assistance to Lebanese civilians whose lives were disrupted by the war. (Though he had been formally released from reserve duty 13 years earlier, he volunteered to stay on in the army in a variety of humanitarian tasks.) The diary that he kept for the first month of the war recorded his reaction to, as he put it, his "shock from the terrible damage and the treatment of the civilian population." Publication of parts of it in the Mapam newspaper, Al Hamishmar, and later in book form caused a national stir, and led to his commanding officer banning him from re-entering Lebanon, or even getting the huge amounts of relief materials he'd help collect across the border.
Not long after that, he began his new career, as a traveling music teacher, but not before taking an intensive course in literary Arabic. Between that and the spoken Arabic he began learning in his youth, Yirmiya's command of the language is fluent.
Today, Yirmiya rotates his visits between four Beduin towns, spending a total of two days every two weeks in the kindergartens. When asked if he has a hard time filling the rest of his days, he seems almost offended. First, there's the memoir he's been working on since 1995. Then there is the preparation for the music classes. Yirmiya has invested vast amounts of energy in collecting, transcribing and recording the songs he plays. Today he has some 200 songs under his belt. Forty of them he's transcribed, music and words, into the book he distributes among the teachers, and there is also the tape, which combines songs he sings and others.
The morning that began with a session in the kindergarten in Kamana el-Sharkiyya ends a kilometer or two to the west in Kamana el-Gharbiyya. He plays the same songs, tells the same stories - and is received with the same warmth and enthusiasm by the children. After the children each put on their tiny backpacks and head out the door, Yirmiya stays to schmooze with the teacher and her two assistants.
Following that, Yirmiya stows his accordion back in the trunk of his car, and leads me on a short tour. Tooling around the village, he slows down every time he passes someone, giving every resident - and receiving in return - a warm wave of his large hand. Everybody seems to know him, and when we stop to talk with some, they all want to tell me about his acts of generosity and support over the years - the construction work he did on the classrooms, the books and play equipment he brought, the steady political support. Children who have moved on to higher grades remember him and greet him.
IT'S ONE OF THE GREAT IRONIES of Dov Yirmiya's life that he has spent half of it fighting the Arabs and the other half defending them. Often he's done both at the same time. He describes an incident after the War of Independence. He was a deputy commander in the Upper Galilee when a battalion conquered a town called Huleh. "It's right on the Lebanese border, near Manarah. It was conquered at night, with no battle, and when I came in the morning to see what had happened, I was told they had prisoners - 70 civilians had remained in the town, half of them men. The rest had escaped to Lebanon."
"When I came back the next day to tell them that the brigade commander said to expel the prisoners, one of the corporals said it was okay, that he had killed all the men during the night. He said, 'I avenged my friends that the Arabs killed at the refineries in Haifa.'"
Yirmiya had the man arrested, and insisted that he be put on trial. "They told me, these things happen in war. He killed some Arabs, so what?" Eventually, the trigger-happy soldier was tried and convicted. But his seven-year sentence was reduced to one year and shortly after that, on Independence Day, it was commuted altogether.
Within his battalion, the hostility toward Yirmiya was so pronounced that the army promoted him up and out, moving him to a command in Jerusalem. A quick glance at the seven-page r�sum� Yirmiya prepared a few years ago reveals he's been moving around all of his adult life. He's been married three times, lived on two kibbutzim, one moshav, and the city of Nahariyah. When he lived on Eilon, the kibbutz he helped found, the British still ran the show in Palestine, and Yirmiya served as the community's mukhtar, an official title recognized by His Majesty's Government ("I received four pounds sterling a month for coffee and sugar, for guests"). In addition to his years in and out of the Israeli army, during World War II, he served in an Israeli unit of the British Transport Corps ("I started in Damascus and ended on the border of Austria").
Yirmiya traces his interest in music back to his teacher at Nahalal, Meshulam Levy. "There were still teachers like that then," he recalls admiringly, more than seven decades later, "who taught everything, including music. Because of him, I learned to play the accordion and the violin, and to sing. He also taught us to be mensches." Later, Yirmiya took a course for choir conductors, and studied music in Tel Aviv.
In 1986, he took a nice beating from the police during a demonstration he participated in in Jerusalem, outside a hall where the late Meir Kahane was holding a political rally. (Yirmiya was confined to bed for a month afterwards.) Three years later, he traveled with other Israelis to meet with a PLO delegation in Germany, at a time when it was still illegal for them to do so. On their return to Israel, the group's leaders were arrested and brought to trial. "We asked to be tried as well," Yirmiya recalled, somewhat ruefully, "but the prosecutor's office said, We'll decide who goes on trial and not."
At a certain point, standard political activity became difficult for the aging leftist. "I needed to find something that I could do without getting hit by the police, and without having to travel far," he explains. That's where the musical sessions came from, an outgrowth of his contacts with the Beduin towns he was already in touch with, and a continuation of his efforts to bring them closer to equality.
The accordion-playing, then, is as much a political statement as a gesture of human generosity. Yirmiya is still mightily fired up about the hefty inequities that distinguish the living conditions of Israeli Jews and Arabs. And when he describes the significant advances that have occurred in recent years, one senses that as much as he feels pride for the role he's played in promoting those improvements, he also begrudges being denied some of his reason for outrage.
For some years, there was official pressure on the residents of the Kamanas to move south to the community of Wadi Salameh. Nobody did. Finally, three years ago, both villages received recognition from the Interior Ministry, and a master plan was approved that sees the two neighborhoods being merged into a single municipality. Despite all this progress, which brought with it paved roads and running water, most parts of both towns still lack regular infrastructure, such as electricity and sewers. (Many residents wires from the homes of Jewish families in neighboring Makhmanim.) "There's no money," explains Yirmiya, bitterly. "But until the infrastructure is in place, no one can get building plans approved." Theoretically, new buildings are subject to demolition. In 1986, authorities actually destroyed the mosque that residents had put up, though today, generally a stiff fine is the worst punishment someone will receive for illegal construction.
Dov Yirmiya does what he can, and he does it with an energy and sharpness that one rarely encounters in people half his age. But he has no illusions about the overall impact of his work on Israel-Arab relations. He believes that "Israel made all the mistakes it could have vis-a-vis the Palestinians," and now he foresees a "catastrophe" coming. He recalls that it was his namesake, the Prophet Jeremiah (Yirmiyahu) who predicted the destruction of the Temple. Ironically, when Dov Hebraicized his last name from Yermanovitz, he chose "Yirmiya" rather than the more obvious "Yirmiyahu" because he knew it would offend religious sensitivities for his name to end with the sound "ya," a name for God in Hebrew. "I'm terribly anti-religious," he volunteers. "All religions. They have brought the world to the state that it's in."
Clear as it is that Yirmiya's visits to the children stimulate them and provide them with a positive image of the Jew, one can't help but wonder if the accordionist doesn't keep at it because, as age encroaches and politics depresses, he simply takes pleasure in his visits. Is he doing it for himself as much as for them? He's heard the question before, and readily acknowledges that the meetings with the children provide "instant gratification." Then he adds, somewhat ruefully, "And if I stop, what else will I do?"
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