"Abyss calls to abyss

to the sound of your pipes

all your billows and your waves

passed over me" Psalm 42,8

When one is sad,
one goes to the sea,
that's why the sea is salty.
We crash on the peer of life.
(excerpt from an Israeli song,
which became most popular,
when sung by Aviv Gefen
after the murder of Yitzkhaq Rabbin,
the Israeli Primeminister, in 1995.")

My first memory - Stuttgart, age four and a half:

I came back from a walk with a snowball.
My mother fortunately wasn't home.
I put a pot on the gas of the kitchen oven.
I can't see the nanny helping me with that.
But I clearly remember the delight I felt,
when the snow transformed into water.

90% of our human body are Water.
Each of us grew in a womb of Water.
The birth of my son started too early,
because "the Water had gone off".
A "dry birth" is much more painful.

In the biblical myth of creation
the second specified "differentiation",
after the one between darkness and light,
is the differentiation between Water and dry-land.
"And God called the dry land: Earth!
and the gathering of the waters he called Seas!" [Gn 1,10]

I still have difficulty feeling gratitude towards my mother.
But I have always been immensely grateful to her
for having taught me how to swim at the age of 6.

There was a pond about half an hour away from the village,
to which we were evacuated from March 1944 to Dec. 1946.
I see myself holding on to the hips of my swimming mother.
This was also the only body contact with her I remembered.

Forced to go back to Stuttgart by the occupation authorities,
forced to share a flat with the owner whose house was intact,
we were allowed to use only the sink, but not the bathtub.
So for seven years Body could not immerse in the Water.
Except in the swimming pool in summer.

Continuation of memories, written on 2003_03_06

When I, the oldest, was about twelve - and it was summer,
I went with sister and brother to the pool one hour away.
We had no money to use the tram and walked both ways.

This wasn't bad except for the recurring disgusting show:
Part of the walk was along the river and under bridges.
where waylaying sexual offenders exposed their cocks.

I relived the disgust 3 times when I visited India in 1998,
once at the ocean of the southern tip of the continent...

When I was 15, we finally moved into a flat of our own.
There was no bath-room at all, only a sink in the kitchen.
But on our tram way to school there was an indoor pool.
And there I was priviledged to spend some water holidays.
Twice a classmate invited me to her grandmother's house.
We ran out of the house directly into the Lake of Constance.

Finally I encountered the delight of the Sea for the first time.
It was around my 18th birthday - in England.

I got 1000 DM as compensation for my electricity accident
at the church organ, where I practiced when I was 15.
My mother suggested, that I should use it for 3 things:
a bicycle, a type-writer+lessons in typing, and going to England.
My (Jewish) English teacher, fond of me for unknown reasons,
sent me to her friend Joan, a social worker with many contacts.
After a week in London with a retired teacher,
I spent six weeks in 3 places, all on the shore of the ocean.
What a celebration of swimming and playing in the water!
The laborer family in Dover I stayed with, took me for a picnic.
While everybody was sitting on the beach and chatting,
I ventured to swim along the peer, one hour out into the ocean.
On my long way back, I was afraid, they would be angry at me.
But they weren't. Maybe, they trusted me.

Later, when I stayed for 3 weeks with a teacher's family in Deal,
I met the first boy, who truly fell in love with me and I with him.
He was a trumpeter in the Navy, spotted me at a public dance,
where I felt out of place, too tall, not dressed like the others,
and grabbed/dragged me to dark, sounding waves of the Sea.
A shooting star fell, when our hearts felt the fulness of love.
But his navy band left 2 days later to the Edinborough Festival.
Our love grew through letters, until my mother cut the thread.

It is only in this minute, that I see the connection -
between the SEA and this awakening of my loving.

I crossed the Waters between Europe and England by a ferry.
3 years later, in 1958, it was again by boat that I crossed them,
this time to Sweden, where I worked for seven waterless weeks.

My life changed in January 1959.
My teacher at the University of Tuebingen, Reinhold Mayer,
had opened my eyes to the Holocaust, to Judaism, to Israel.
A German-Israeli-Study-Group was founded exactly then.
I was one of its leaders and had to teach before I had learnt.
In the summer term I heard about a student, Martin Fincke,
who had been to Israel with the very first group of Germans.
I searched for him, invited him and it was with his help,
that I learnt my first Hebrew song and danced my first Israeli Horra:

"you shall draw water with joy from the springs of freedom"

"Schoepfen sollt ihr Wasser mit Wonne aus den Quellen der Freiheit" (Isaiah 12,3)

Later Martin became my fiance and I cherish him up to this day.


The real encounter with the Sea occurred on September 7, 1960:
5 days on the Mediterranean from Italy, Rhodos, Cyprus, Israel.
2 months in the Ulpan [school for learning Hebrew] close to the Sea.
Dry & cold months in Jerusalem - University & Eichmann Trial.
One single visit to the Sea with my forbidden love and his kids.
While resting in the sand, fingers dug a tunnel to each other:
"You are not at all weaned from your love," Rafael whispered.
"I never claimed that. But you know that we can't live this love."

But unlike the English love, this Sea love was meant to be lived.

On July 3, 1961, he saw me off in his jeep - across the Carmel.
On the boat we were four, two of us tried to hide our identity,
I, the Christian from Germany, and Nicola, the Arab from Israel.
When the two Israel born Jews found out, they screamed at us.
Uri, a 13 year young boy, on his way to a German peace camp:
"My father taught me, that if I hold my head up, no one will spit on me."
When we climbed on land, we parted, but his words had sunk in.
They inspired my behavior, when I was pregnant with Rafael's son,
thus breaking all the taboos of the Protestant "Scientific" Society.

I felt I owed my mother another compensation for my long absence.
This time I paid for spending a week at the Orta lake in Alpine Italy.
We lived in a house on a little island, with cooking facilities.
Once I swam across the lake from the island to the main shore.
It took me 2 hours! Then a ferry returned me to my furious mother.

When a long painful process worked itself out towards the decision
- to divorce, to become Jewish, to marry, to live together in Israel, -
my poor mother asked me to travel with her to Holland for a week.
It was the land of her longing, but for me it was van Gogh & the Sea.
How I savored it - the grey sky over the high breakers of dark Water!

The Mediterranean would be so different!
And I had no idea then, that the haven and home of my sea routes
would be along the Syrian-African Rift: the Red and the Dead Sea.

On April 1964, a legitimate Jewish mother and her legitimate son
stepped off a plane at the only Israel airport.
There was no contact or communication with the Sea then,
not even in Haifa with its harbor where we lived the first 3 months.
I was a wife now, I was with my child now and soon with two more.

It was good so, for there was no place for WATER in my soul then.
I wanted to be happy and to realize this, I needed to deny the WILL.

Of course, in summer, we sometimes went to the Sea, 40 min. drive.
I see baby Micha screaming with fright at the contact with the Water.
[Now he does his army service as the captain of a coast guard boat.]
In a pool I taught the kids to swim and at six everyone had learnt it.
The greatest delight were Shabbat trips to the Sakhneh in the north.
This is an almost natural lake, nurtured by the spring of Gideon.
But once I discovered a 5 year young child at its bottom - drowned.

Which reminds me of my memory of an earlier life:
Then too I was with child - unmarried -
and entered the Water to kill ourselves...

In fact, despite many daring long swims into unknown waters,
I'm stiff with fear,
when my imagination depicts me a scene of drowning.
[see Bible, Jonah 2...]