Trigger Warning: Suicide
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"There cannot have been many people in the streets of north Tel Aviv that wet and windy Saturday morning. That morning, January 5, 1952, the temperature in Tel Aviv was five or six degrees Celsius. [41or 43º F]
... Washing lines stretched across the street from balcony to balcony. Here and there rain-soaked white and colored underwear whirled helplessly on the lines in the high wind."
--Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002, translated from the Hebrew)
Oz is describing his mother's last day before she died by her own hand when he was twelve (and the state of Israel almost four) years old.
ABOVE: Amos Oz (né Klausner), with parents Fania (Mussman) and Yehuda Arye Klausner
Oz wrote the book some fifty years after his mother's death. The rain-soaked laundry is his literary invention, I'd guess--conjecture, as when he writes,
"My mother was very tired that morning, and her head must have been [italics mine] heavy from lack of sleep, hunger, and all the black coffee and sleeping pills, so that she walked slowly like a sleepwalker."
"Must have been"... Yes, probably, but unverifiably, the case.
The temperature, however, looks like straight reportage.
Did he look up the weather report from the day his mother
went out for her last walk? That day, Oz was with his father in Jerusalem, so he couldn't remember it himself. Or perhaps his
mother's sister in Tel Aviv, his Auntie Haya, told him?
At any
rate, it touches me is that it's part of his detailed reconstruction of
his mother's last hours. It's a very Penny Cooper thing to ascertain.
"What was the temperature?"
How easy is it to find the weather report for Tel Aviv in 1952?
Let's see...
I type "historic weather reports for Israel" into the search box.
Okay... there it is.
It took a little rummaging around to find data older than the 2000s, but here we go, a PDF of Monthly weather report (Israel. Sherut ha-meteorologi)
(1947-1975) under "Palestine Climate Data" from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association), which archives "climatological and geophysical observations for sites in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt".
The report says, "The first half of January 1952 was colder and rainier than usual...."
And here's Tel Aviv:
Oz ends his memoir of growing up in Jerusalem with the description of his mother's last day--including what she might have seen walking the cold and rainy streets of Tel Aviv on the advice of a specialist.
Fania, tormented with insomnia and sadness, was staying with her sister Haya in Tel Aviv, trying to get some rest.
"Auntie Haya told me that on Friday Uncle Tsvi, who was the administrative director of Tsahalon Hospital, had called in a specialist from the hospital, who had volunteered to come over after work. The specialist examined my mother thoroughly, unhurriedly, pausing to chat with her and continuing his examination, and when he had finished, he had said that she was tired, tense, and a little run down. Apart from the insomnia he could not find anything specifically wrong with her.
Often the psyche is the worst enemy of the body: it doesn't let the body live, it doesn't let it enjoy itself when it wants to or get the rest it is begging for. If only we could extract it the way we extract the tonsils or the appendix, we would all live healthy and contented lives till we were a thousand years old.
...He recommended complete rest and avoidance of any excitement. It was particularly important, he said, that the patient should get out of the house for at least an hour or even two hours every day, she could even dress up warmly and take an umbrella and simply walk around town, looking at shop windows or handsome young men, it didn't matter what, the crucial thing was to get some fresh air.
He also wrote her a prescription for some new, very strong sleeping pills that were apparently even newer and stronger than the new pills that the new doctor in Jerusalem had prescribed. Uncle Tsvi hurried out to the duty pharmacist's in Bugrashov Street to buy the pills, because it was Friday afternoon and all the other pharmacists had already closed for Sabbath.
...
"On Saturday morning she told [her sister] that she had decided to go for a walk and look at handsome young men, as per the doctor's instructions. She borrowed an umbrella and a pair of lined rubber boots from her sister and went for a walk in the rain. There cannot have been many people in the streets of north Tel Aviv that wet and windy Saturday morning. That morning, January 5, 1952, the temperature in Tel Aviv was five or six degrees Celsius."It began to rain heavily, but she forgot about the umbrella that was hanging on her arm and walked on bareheaded in the rain, with her pretty handbag hanging from her shoulder... and now she was really lost, without the faintest idea how to get back to her sister's or why she had to get back, and she did not know why she had come out except to follow the instructions of the specialist who had told her to walk the streets of Tel Aviv to look at handsome young men."
❧ ❧ ❧
I'll stop there.
The rest is crushing, but I do recommend A Tale of Love and Darkness. It's as much a political history as a personal one. I don't own many books anymore, but I own that one.
I'm interested in the weather in Tel Aviv because I'm interested in how to approach a difficult story. Paying attention to physical details is one way.
Because we are physical, we share similarities with other physical things. "Damp" is similar to "sad".
The difficult story I always think about at this time of year is my own mother's suicide on winter solstice, 2002--eighteen years ago, this year.
I try to write about it every so often, but I've always been pushed away by what feels like a magnetic force.
The weather is, perhaps, a way to sidle up to the subject?
One of the last times I tried, in 2013-14, I did approach by a circuitous route--I was watercoloring things related to my mother.
I called it the LVD (Lytton Virginia Davis) Project.
Among other things, I went to the library to find the copy of the New Yorker that was on her bedside table when she died, open to the article about photography and war.
And I painted her passport from when she was twenty-one.
That's been seven years ago. Then, two years ago, in 2018, I put together a photo essay some of my mother's things that I still have.
I don't think I've reapproached since then, but I've never exhausted the topic.
In some ways I've only skirted it, stopped at the weather, as it were.
Maybe that's good enough, all I'll ever do or need to do.
I don't know.
But I feel there's a ball of highly concentrated material in the center of that story I've never touched. Maybe I never will. Maybe it's not possible.
I don't know.
But I feel I'm not done.
Maybe I'll try looking up and writing about the weather conditions on the day she died.
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P.S. Looking for past Israeli weather reports online, I found this:
"Snow in Tel Aviv, 1950".
"On January 29, 1950, newspaper Al Hamishmar reported, “A
miracle of weather occurred yesterday for the entire country:... on Friday morning, with the drop in temperatures, [rain] turned to snow
covering the hills, the coastal plain and the valleys”.
For info on suicide prevention or help if you are struggling:
or
Call 1-800-273-8255
Outside of the United States, please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.
