Free Art of a Jewish Woman by Henry Massie

Jewish national homeland, the Zionist organization Keren Hayessod is profiting by the absence of property titles in Arab working class neighborhoods and Bedouin districts, and forming an alliance with wealthy, feudal Arab chiefs, to appropriate lands … It is a form of exploitation foreseen and put in motion by British imperialism. 7
    Peri analyzed how European socialists, once arrived in Palestine, took reactionary social positions, and how European Zionism became something very different in Palestine. The Zionists were no longer inclusive workers’ socialist action movements, but rather became like landlords appropriating property for individuals belonging to one group.
    Felice wondered why her father, who had sacrificed so much for her that it even set her mother against him, sent her to this land. There was trouble at home, but there was killing here. She didn’t understand at the time that her father was grasping at straws to keep her from returning to Poland and this was the one he had picked. She didn’t know what life was like at home and how many would die there.
    She didn’t know how fragile life had also become in France. Gabriel Peri was L’Humanité’s chief foreign correspondent. The Gestapo killed him on December 15, 1941, when they occupied Paris because he had denounced the 1939 Hitler–Stalin peace pact for what it was—a ploy to give Hitler more time to build up his forces so he could invade Russia.
    Her job in Jaffa gone, Felice was penniless, her last pay already gone toward her room and board. She didn’t have enough food again and returned to the beach to think about her very personal struggle--learning how to exist with hunger, with little or no money, trying to practice her profession, dealing with men courting her, and still keeping her pride.
    “Somehow I could laugh at it. I told myself I had to get acquainted with my reality, dominate it. Today I don’t have anything, I told myself, tomorrow I won’t have anymore, but one day I will have something. I mocked my anger and poverty.”
    Then another newspaper posting led to her next position in Haifa, the small city she had passed through on the train from Beirut. Haifa was like a jewel facing the sea; the sky was beautiful. The little houses were like pastels looking down on the water. By then it was Palestine’s main port, built on hills rising from a symmetrical bay. She carried her life with her—her diploma from Nancy, her Polish passport, her British Mandate passport, and her bag of instruments.
    A dentist named Eliyahu Katz needed Felice’s French dental surgeon’s diploma. He had a busy practice in Haifa, but like her employer in Jerusalem, he didn’t have a license. He had learned dentistry by apprenticing to his aunt, who had been professionally educated in Moscow. His aunt, however, had fallen in love with a visiting Russian and returned with him to their homeland. Before long, Eliyahu had fallen in love himself, with Felice. He proposed marriage and began his campaign to woo her. He introduced her to his family. His mother found the young doctor a room in the home of a neighbor.
    It was Sabbath evening, and she was putting on her high heels with the ankle strap. Then she had to do her makeup. Katz was coming soon to take her to dinner with his mother, as he did most Fridays. Looking at herself in the mirror, straightening her dress so it hung just right, she wondered: Is my beauty a curse or a blessing for a young woman? She shrugged. What could she do? She was not going to hide herself. She applied an extra stroke of mascara.
    Her wit and spirit made her physical attractiveness all the more powerful. Some weekends Katz took her skiing in the mountains outside Beirut. Although Katz didn’t spare money entertaining her, her salary remained a pitiful five pounds a month, standard in those days for her position. Perhaps , she thought, he is keeping my salary at base level so that I will see marriage as a way of advancement.