My cousin Yochanan who lost an eye in the Six Day War left Israel in 1968, soon after, and went to America to make money. He stayed on Wall Street 22 years, working, as they say, like a donkey, and so never had time to get married. Or maybe he didn’t want to; because though he had lots of offers, including a beauty queen (New Jersey, 1987), and two El-Al stewardesses, he was afraid they were all after his money, which maybe was true, because in the meantime he had become a partner at Loewenstein Brothers, and was worth maybe four or five million dollars, plus his partnership interest. Finally in 1990 on a visit to Israel, to see his mother (that’s my father’s sister Rivka), he also dropped in on my father in his tailor shop on Nachalat Binyamin Street, to talk, and to make a new suit (it’s cheaper than Brooks Brothers), and there he met Pnina Chelnov, the daughter of Sarah Chelnov, the “1956 Nightingale” who had sung the famous “Nights of Blood,” and who now gave her skirts to my father to be taken out or in, depending on her diet.
Now, Sarah’s daughter Pnina was only 24 years old, sixteen years younger than Yochanan, and she had already been married once (for a year), to a Yemenite from Kerem HaTeymanim named Yig’al Z’ruya, who had divorced her because she couldn’t have children. Pnina herself was half Yemenite—her mother, Sarah, was born in San’a, but had married Gavriel Chelnov, the comic actor, and had one child—Pnina, who, like most children of mixed marriages, was a beauty, with fair skin and tight curly hair, and with the rollicking walk of a Yemenite, but the legs of an Ashkenazi—everyone looked at her as she walked down the street, or came into the grocery store to buy bread, or eggs. So from here to there, Yochanan, who liked pretty girls—though not to get married with—forgot about the suit and took Pnina to lunch at Kerem HaTeymanim, of all places, and there, Pnina’s ex-husband, who was a small-time criminal (diamond burglaries), saw them eating hummus together from one plate and got jealous—though what did he have to get jealous about? He and Pnina were divorced four years already!—so he slapped her on the face right at the table, before everybody.
From what I learned later, two policemen were also in the restaurant (having Turkish coffee), one from the anti-terrorist squad, the other from police intelligence, but none of them did anything, because why get tangled up in something not your business, and with a Yemenite, too? But Yochanan, who in the army had been with the paratroopers (as an officer, though only at the Supply warehouse, in Sarafend), got up, and immediately punched the ex-husband two times, once in the stomach, the other in the face, and broke his (the Yemenite’s) nose.
Now, although the restaurant (Tziyon’s, on the corner of Malkiel Street and Even-Chen) was full of Yemenites, from complete astonishment nobody did anything to Yochanan—later it came out that Pnina had said to someone that he (Yochanan) was a friend of Sammy Aboutboul, a Moroccan from the HaTiqva neighbourhood, who the year before had emigrated to America to start a small mafia in Brooklyn; or maybe it’s a tall-tale, who knows. But the result was that Yochanan and Pnina finished their hummus (with Pnina holding a cold Tempo bottle to her cheek), and right after, she went with him to his suite at Dan Hotel, and the following week Yochanan told my father (who, ever since Yochanan’s own father had died in ’56 in the Kadesh campaign, was like a father to him), that he, Yochanan, was getting married.
“To whom?” asked my father, who already guessed, but hoped it wasn’t true.
“To her,” Yochanan said, “Pnina Chelnov, that I met through you, here.”
My father later said he felt a cold hand on his heart, because, to make a Shiduch, a match, is a Mitzvah. But this? What’s the point for Jews to get married? Only, begging your pardon, to go to bed? For this you don’t need a ring. For this, begging your pardon again, even Shiksas are good, of which there are plenty in America. Jews get married to procreate, that’s what for, like it says in the book of Genesis. But with Pnina a barren woman, and after a Yemenite, too (who most of them can make children even when they are 80), why put a healthy head into a sick bed, as they say?
But Yochanan did not want to hear anything. “In my age,” he said, “when I finally found love, I will marry her, no matter what anybody says.”
“Yochanan,” my father told him, “listen to me. With your money, you can marry a Rabbi’s daughter, even, to be a good Jewish wife to you, and make you five children, ten, even. What do you need this one for?”
But, as they say, when a mule has made up his mind, nothing helps. So nothing helped here either, and after maybe two weeks, in which Yochanan also met Pnina’s family (her mother Sarah, and two uncles in Hadera), he left for America, and after another week he sent her an El-Al ticket (first class), and the next month they got married in the biggest synagogue on the upper West Side, right under his co-op apartment.
So that’s how it began. For the next two years they lived there, in New York, and also in Florida, where Yochanan had a little sailboat, and a condo, and also every year they came to Israel to visit, and to see the family: from Pnina’s side, her mother, and from Yochanan’s side, us. (His mother died right after the marriage.)
Pnina in the meantime had begun working in El-Al’s New York offiece, where Yochanan’s chauffeur’s used to bring her every morning, after he drove Yochanan to work, until she told him to stop, because no-one at work talked to her. She just wanted to be like everyone else.
Now if you ask me, I think Pnina was a good girl, and everything that happened was not her fault, both then, and later. Sometimes, like they say, God plays jokes, and people suffer. And who does He like to play jokes on, most? Exactly. The Jews.
So, like I said before, the only problem of Pnina was, she couldn’t have children. Everything else, a husband, money, work, vacations, she had. Only no children. Not that she and Yochanan didn’t try. They travelled everywhere, to the Caribbean, Paris, Gstaad, who knows where else, for the atmosphere, the air and the water, maybe something would help them relax. But nothing helped. Also, every year when they came to Israel, on Passover (usually they came to us, to the Seder), they also went to doctors, first in Ichilov and Hadassah hospitals, then private, but the doctors could do nothing. There was nothing wrong with either Yochanan or Pnina, they said. Just no children.
So after a while Pnina began to keep Kosher kitchen in her New York apartment, just in case, and go to synagogue, and visit holy Rabbis to get a blessing, or an amulet—I heard once that she had made Yochanan give maybe $10,000 (some say $100,000) to the Boyberisher Rebbe’s charity, for a special amulet (a piece of paper with letters from the Kabbalah, and a clove of garlic and a coin inside). But again nothing helped. So then they
