Free Art of a Jewish Woman by Henry Massie Page B

money to me. If you don’t return to Palestine, send me the money whenever you can.”
    Felice was one of 62,000 Jewish arrivals to Palestine in 1935. In the early 1930s it had been a small fraction of that. By 1938 it was back down to 10,000 as the Arabs, fearful of being drowned in the wave of Jewish settlers, persuaded the British to curtail immigration. Hitler was rising to ascendancy, and it was the very moment that European Jews had the greatest need for a place to escape, but the British were closing the gates. Felice was an anomaly. She was one of the few arrivals who did not remain in Palestine.
    Felice said, “I could have stayed and been happy in Palestine if it were not for the violence. My Arab women patients and I were happy together. If only the Jewish and Arab leaders had been able to coexist and share with each other. The Middle East should be open to everybody without chauvinistic boundaries. Eliyahu and I would leave on vacations to escape the tension in the cities. I would inhale the clean, fresh cedar aroma in the mountains; then we would come back, and there would be the scent of tear gas in the air. It was impossible.”
    Although she was always proud to call herself a Jew and identify with the Jewish people, in Palestine she was more identified with the idea of being a young French woman. She wasn’t a believer in God and scarcely knew the religious holidays. The land didn’t move her spiritually.
    She recalled, “The settlers had no idea of co-existence, of becoming friendly and sharing the land. Right away they began with hatred and animosity. You become what your environment makes you, and you can respond to Palestine’s hard dry land with a harsh character. The settlers were a people who had been pushed around and demeaned all their lives. Now they had a little power and they began to push around the people who were already there. It is a natural psychological phenomenon. I wanted a land for all of us. There was no future there.”

PART THREE. POLAND
    Felice’s false marriage to Steinberg had allowed her entry into Palestine. A few days after arriving, she had obtained British Mandate Passport #60260, “Issued in Jerusalem to Mrs. Feiga Steinberg born Ozerowitz, a naturalized Palestinian citizen by marriage,” on October 16, 1935. Six months later she obtained a divorce from Steinberg, but the British Mandate passport was still valid and gave her access to a visa to America. On June 2, 1937, the United States consul in Jerusalem stamped immigration visa #690 into it. Eliyahu Katz’s gift of money gave her the means to make a last trip home to her family.
    In Tel Aviv, Hanka put her arms around her sister’s neck, and she put her arms around Hanka. They cried and kissed each other. “Remember me when it is good for you in America and you have success.”
    “I will,” Felice replied.
    In August 1937, she traveled by boat from Haifa to Istanbul and by train through Bulgaria, and then by way of Belgrade, Budapest and Prague to Warsaw. Purposeful and with only a transit visa, she made no stops along the way. From Warsaw another train took her northeast for two hours to Bialystock and finally a local line went to Grajewo. From there, the eight-miles stretch to Szczuczyn was in a horse-drawn buggy. It was flat and rolling farming country, dotted with small lakes and ponds and cut by streams, formed much like Minnesota in America by the retreat of glaciers in an ancient era. The journey ran along fields of wheat, oats, barley and rye beginning to be harvested; and plots of potatoes and tobacco. There were a few cattle and huts with three or four hogs outside. Every once in a while Felice saw pheasants, a swan, ducks, and geese. Willows grew near water, and birch and pine forests began where the planting ended. The buggy clattered onto cobblestones when it arrived in Szczuczyn and took her to the Market Square in the heart of the town. Her home was on the corner of Market Square and Church