From Jerusalem to Beverly Hills

“Eitan!”

I heard my mother calling from the balcony of our apartment on the fourth walkup floor.

“Don’t forget to get off at Chancellor Street.”

I waved from the bus stop in front of our apartment building on Prophet Samuel Street; she could not hear me from down there. Our place was on the outskirts of the new city of Jerusalem, a building with no street address number, just a name - the landlord’s name - “Cadoori House.”

As the bus pulled up, I noticed a flyer someone had pasted on its side: “Fight Hitler, Join the Jewish Brigade!” I read in big block letters. I tried to read the smaller letters to see how exactly I could join. It seemed exciting; I could go to Europe.

“Hey boy, are you coming in?” the bus driver shouted, not willing to wait.

“Yes,” I said and climbed the three steep steps. Inside I handed the driver three mills minted with the words “PALESTINE (EI)”. The EI stood for Eretz Israel – Land of Israel. He looked at the coins, then at my face.

“How old are you boy?” he asked.

“I’ll be five on Passover.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I knew the regular bus fare was 5 mills, but children under five and invalids paid just 3 mills – equivalent to one American cent. Passover was still weeks away, and so was my fifth birthday, but I could see the bus driver was skeptical.

“What year were you born?”

Surprised he couldn’t calculate that, I answered “1938.”

The driver, a member of a cooperative “Hamekasher” (The Connector), wanted to be sure I wasn’t conning my way onto his bus. I had been riding the No. 2 bus for about a year and a half. At first I traveled with my sister, Shifra, four years older than me, but one morning when I turned four, my mother said, “Here’s your bus money. Don’t forget to get off at the Chancellor Street bus stop.” That’s where my daycare/kindergarten was, and since then I’d been on my own.

“Hey driver,” a man called from the back of the bus, “let’s move on or the boy will be six before we get to work.”

Still suspicious, he handed me the ticket and stuffed the coins I gave him into the multi cylinder coin holder. I walked to the back to find a seat as the bus chugged forward.

We drove along Prophet Samuel Street. On the right were ancient stone houses, on the left mostly open fields leading to Mount Scopus. On its ridge I could see Hadassah Hospital and the Augusta Victoria Monastery. Just before reaching the Old City, the route turned into Beit Israel, the older neighborhoods of the “new” city where the houses built at the end of the 19^th century were small and crowded together. All of Jerusalem outside the Old City walls was considered the New City, even those parts like Beit Israel that were centuries old.

The bus drove on through Meah Shearim, 100 Gates, where the orthodox Jews lived. At one of the many stops, a man climbed onto the bus and sat next to me. He took out a pack of Universal cigarettes and lit one. The sign above the bus windows said clearly, “No Smoking and No Spitting in the Bus,” in three languages -- Hebrew, English and Arabic, though I could read only the Hebrew. As the man smoked, I was sure a policeman, or at least the driver, would arrest him, but nothing happened.

The bus was crowded. A woman, her fat belly touching me, stood next to my seat. Her head was covered with the religious shawl, and she had what seemed to me the largest breasts in the world. For a moment I contemplated giving her my seat, but if I stood, my head would bump into her breasts, so I stayed where I was.

The woman sitting to my other side wore a black dress and sandals. She was skinny and talked to herself, her lips moving with no sound, the way people did during the quiet prayers at the synagogue. She held small paper notes arranged in a brick, like a pack of cards. Hand-written lines covered the note, and I bent closer to try to read the words.

“Do you want to have one, my child?” she asked in Hebrew, with an English accent.

At that time I read everything I passed - store signs, food packaging, advertisements and street signs. “Okay,” I said.

She peeled off one of the notes and handed it to me.

“Keep your connection to the One,” she said, “our Savior.”

The bus turned onto Geula Street, and as we neared my destination, I grew more alert. When we turned onto Chancellor Street, the driver pushed the gas pedal, and the engine roared with a frightening growl as it climbed one of the steepest slopes in Jerusalem.

The lady with the large breasts bent down and peered at my note. “What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, turning to the skinny woman.

“Kesher La’ Echad,” she said, “Connection to the One.”

The fat lady straightened her eyes wide. “Oy, gevald!” she cried in Yiddish, “a woman missionary!”

In spite of the crowd, passengers moved, creating a space around me. They stared at me and pointed at the skinny lady in black.

“She gave the little boy a traif Christian paper!” the fat lady shouted.

Through the window I saw the traffic policeman standing in the intersection of King George and Jaffa Streets, the center of Jerusalem, beyond my stop. The driver looked at the wide mirror above his seat, trying to make sense of the commotion. “What is it?” he asked.

Everyone began to speak, offering conflicting reports, and at last the driver stopped the bus, pulled up the hand break and stood.

“Get her off the bus,” the fat lady shouted. Others shouted too, and I began to worry they would take the skinny woman to jail because of me. Perhaps they would take me too, if only for questioning. But I had to go to kindergarten.

“She did nothing wrong,” I said, but over the noise, the driver could not hear me. People next to me began to smile. Behind me a man shouted, “The boy says she’s done nothing wrong!”

The driver opened the door and two policemen climbed onto the bus and made their way through the crowd to my seat. “What did she give you boy?” the red-faced cop asked in English; the other translated into Hebrew.

I showed him the little note.

He looked at it, then at the skinny woman and rolled his eyes.

“It’s nothing, I know her; she’s the Kesher La’Echad lady. She hands out these notes all the time. It’s something about her God.”

Jerusalem attracted believers in the messiah from the world over. Some even believed they were the messiah. The skinny woman’s lips kept moving in prayer, oblivious to all that was happening around us. The cops and some other people hurried off the bus, and so did I. I started my walk all the way back up steep Chancellor Street to my Strauss Kindergarten.