A Small Door Set in Concrete: One Woman's Story of Challenging Borders in Israel/Palestine

by Ilana Hammerman

Overview

“I was taught from the start not to be silent.”

For years, renowned activist and scholar Ilana Hammerman has given the world remarkable translations of Kafka. With A Small Door Set in Concrete, she turns to the actual surreal existence that is life in the West Bank after decades of occupation.

After losing her husband and her sister, Hammerman set out to travel to the end of the world. She began her trip with the hope that it would reveal the right path to take in life. But she soon realized that finding answers was less important than experiencing the freedom to move from place to place without restriction. Hammerman returned to the West Bank with a renewed joie de vivre and a resolution: she would become a regular visitor to the men, women, and children who were on the other side of the wall, unable to move or act freely. She would listen to their dreams and fight to bring some justice into their lives.

A Small Door Set in Concrete is a moving picture of lives filled with destruction and frustration but also infusions of joy. Whether joining Palestinian laborers lining up behind checkpoints hours before the crack of dawn in the hope of crossing into Israel for a day’s work, accompanying a family to military court for their loved one’s hearing, or smuggling Palestinian children across borders for a day at the beach, Hammerman fearlessly ventures into territories where few Israelis dare set foot and challenges her readers not to avert their eyes in the face of injustice.

Hammerman neither preaches nor politicks. Instead, she engages in a much more personal, everyday kind of activism. Hammerman is adept at revealing the absurdities of a land where people are stripped of their humanity. And she is equally skilled at illuminating the humanity of those caught in this political web. To those who have become simply statistics or targets to those in Israel and around the world, she gives names, faces, dreams, desires.
This is not a book that allows us to sit passively. It is a slap in the face, a necessary splash of cold water that will reawaken the humanity inside all of us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226666457
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	325
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Ilana Hammerman is an editor at Achuzat Bayit Publishing House in Israel and was editor-in-chief at Am Oved Publishing House. She writes a column for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Hammerman is the author of five books: Nazism as Reflected in Contemporary German Literature; Soldiers in the Land of Ishma'el: Stories and Documents; Cancer Zone of No Return; From Beirut to Jenin 1982/2002; and In Foreign Parts: Trafficking Women in Israel. She is also a prominent translator from French and German into Hebrew.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

WORKERS

Someone at the Door

The doorbell rang. Not the loud clang of the intercom but the lighter ring of the apartment doorbell. Well then, perhaps it's a neighbor and she should open. But that morning she didn't feel like getting up from her easy chair in the garden — a woman on her own in an apartment with a garden, sitting and reading a book.

It's God's little acre she's got there. In springtime a vine spreads its young tendrils overhead, and the rosebushes bordering of the lawn are bowed down under the weight of their white and red flowers, and the earthen flowerpots assembled in the corners disappear under the colorful crowns overflowing their rims. The trees have grown high enough to give her, seated in her garden, an enclosed intimacy in the heart of this urban neighborhood, within the stone wall whose top is lined with geraniums sporting their purple and pink and white flowers.

The doorbell rang again, and she got up slowly and went to the door. Through the peephole she saw a striped T-shirt on a man's chest, and she felt the need to hurry: it was uncomfortable, he might sense her presence, the man standing on the other side.

She opened and Tareq faced her, smiling his familiar smile, part friendly and part cunning, part asking and part demanding. He was dressed neatly, not in the work clothes he wore back when she would see him every day as he supervised the workers who built her apartment building and completed the finishing touches after she had moved in — all the workers from his village. But those days were gone, it had been some time ago, perhaps a year; now the building was finished and entirely inhabited, and its invisible pipes leaked occasionally, and in the underground car park puddles formed, and some of the flagstone facing had broken off the walls. Someone had warily suggested that the hands that built the place had done some sabotage here and there.

"Did I wake you?" Tareq asked, as he always used to ask, for she had never hurried to open the door for him in the morning.

"No," she answered, "I'm working," as she had always answered him back then. Still she opened the door a bit wider and held out a hesitating hand. He entered as he always did, his eyes darting around to detect any changes in her flat, and he took some steps to and fro and was no longer looking at her but at the cell phone he was holding, as if he had some urgent calls to take. She apologized for not inviting him to have a seat because she has no time, she is working right now, and he said he knew and had no intention of disturbing her.

He was disturbing her, though, standing next to the low plaster partition between the dining area and the sitting corner, smiling his smile and telling her what she already knew: he was no longer working for that contractor who had been in charge of this building. She had already heard and known that, she heard that the arrogant and tight-fisted contractor had recently fired them all after fifteen years of working for him, as he decided to employ a subcontractor from the Occupied Territories who would supply the workers himself more easily and cheaply. Still she said: "Oh, really? I didn't know that," in a sympathizing tone which she adopted regularly for such unpleasant, strained circumstances.

"Perhaps you have some work for me?" he asked, or rather murmured.

No, she didn't! She sounded a bit more aggressive: no, how could she have work for him?

"Maybe your friends or something?"

"No, but I'll call you if I hear of anything," she said, and gave no sign of hope that she'd actually do it. "After all, I do have your number."

"No," he said, "it's changed. I have another number now."

She took a piece of paper and wrote down his new number.

And waited for him to leave.

But he went on playing around with his cell phone.

Now she realized that his smile was actually embarrassed, perhaps even ashamed, for suddenly he was dependent on her, asking favors, when in the past she was the one to depend on him.

Back then, lord and master in his own domain, he would go up and down the spacious marble-coated stairwell of the large new building — in his work clothes, obviously, but always cleaner and neater than the workers who were his subordinates, for he was a foreman, not a simple worker. He would strut around holding a large bunch of keys and answer ringtones that issued ceaselessly from his cell phone, and answered or didn't answer calls from neighbors upstairs, downstairs, front, and back who needed him, asking him to come and take a look at all kinds of malfunctions and mishaps in their new apartments and make sure to repair them. He really was an important and vital personage at the time, and his name rang out constantly from all corners of the building that gradually became inhabited, echoing Israeli and Anglo-Saxon and Russian accents, and his smile then was in fact a bit arrogant and cunning. Now, as he stood in front of her again after all this time, nothing was left of that smile but a hint at the corner of his mouth, like a cigarette butt one doesn't feel like throwing away.

No, go now, I have no work for you, she said decidedly but voicelessly, to herself.

For she wanted Tareq to get lost, whether because in all those months he had worked here she never really grew to like him, unlike some of the other workers, whom she befriended and thanks to whom she enjoyed her wonderful relationship with Amal and her daughters, or because she felt extremely uncomfortable in this kind of situation in which she had found herself occasionally — and still finds herself time and again — in her meetings and conversations with Palestinian people of West Bank villages.

Yes, especially because she felt uncomfortable, for she wished to get back to her morning calm, to the shady garden and the padded wicker chair and matching small wicker table and her book and her cup of coffee. She did not offer to make him a cup of coffee, she did not even offer him a glass of cool water on this hot day.

He's going, he said, he really doesn't want to disturb her, but just a minute: maybe she could write a letter to the army for two friends of his who have applied and are not being issued magnetic cards or an entry permit or a work permit, write the army or the Civil Administration or the Shabak (General Security Services) — as she had often done in the past, as other Israelis, especially Israeli women, still often do, in fact — to look into what the authorities have on them. He knows they're clean, they've never done a thing.

Another moment and she would have told him that it's too bad they never did anything, she wished they finally would — smartass that she was.

"No, I can't," she said. "Look, the rules have changed." Suddenly she found herself in the role of a patient clerk at the Civil Administration offices or the army or god knows what the hell, and she gave him a lecture about the new rules that are now in force, rules she had received in writing just lately, with explanations, from a group of volunteer women who handle this issue with immeasurable dedication and diligence, trying, sometimes even successfully, to help the Palestinian workers who apply and are not issued permits to work in Israel.

Well, according to these rules one should first of all distinguish between the various types of permit:

permit to work in Israel permit to work in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories permit to enter Israel on business permit to enter the seam-line zone for farming purposes permit to travel during closure permit to enter Israel to reach a hospital ...

This she read him aloud from the pages she had brought from another room and spread out on the wooden shelf at the top of the plaster partition. Her eyes scanned the precise instructions for issuing a "permit to enter Israel on business" that differentiated in large subheadings between "merchants 30 years old or older who are fathers to children" and "merchants under 30, or over 30 but without children." "In most areas," the document stipulated, "applicants may be issued permits only through the Trade Bureaus. In areas where the merchant may apply for a permit on his own, he must go to the DCO [District Coordinating Office] with all the necessary documents and apply. If the permit is to be issued, the merchant will be instructed to have a magnetic card made. If a permit is not issuable because the applicant is security-blacklisted, the Trade Bureaus may fill out his form and hand it in at the place where permit applications are turned in. Since the Trade Bureau personnel are not fluent in Hebrew, the merchant may be equipped with a form that has already been filled out, and he must then turn it in with all the necessary documents and the Trade Bureaus will do it for him. In the 'notes' section of the form the applicant's family status should be mentioned, as well as the type of business and whether he has a police or security record. If the applicant is married to an Israeli citizen or resident of Israel and their children are registered in her ID, proof must be given that he has children ..."

But Tareq was interested in a work permit, naturally, both in Israel and in the settlements, and not a permit for trade purposes: he had nothing to trade.

All right, she said, listen, about work permits it says here: "Workers 30 years old or older and fathers of children ... For workers under 30 or over 30 but without children the procedure is the same, but only employers in the settlements or in the seam-line zone are acceptable ..."

She reached the point where the writers of the document noted that workers were no longer to file application letters, and this she read to Tareq with a sense of mean relief. Yes, she was definitely aware of the meanness in her relief — relief for getting rid of the need to meet the requests she is constantly faced with to write application letters to the Civil Administration or army authorities or Shabak or DCO or staff officer or god knows what despicable authorities end up receiving those letters and handling or not handling them.

"No, it says here they no longer send letters," she explained without hesitation. "The worker needs to find an Israeli employer, and the employer must try to get him a permit. If the employer doesn't manage to get a permit for him because he is security-denied — in other words, the worker is blacklisted by the Shabak or police," she recited, "the employer must fill out a form and send it to the Employment Staff Officer at the Civil Administration offices in Beit El, a certain Yitzhak Levi. And if the employer finds it difficult to fill out the form, we are willing to do it with him." She quoted for Tareq what the volunteers had written in this document, and hoped she would never be asked to sit with some employer and fill out forms.

"If all these procedures fail," she continued reading — and all that time they stood by the plaster partition, she and Tareq — "one might appeal to the Supreme Court. There is a woman lawyer who does this for a fee of only a few hundred shekels, and she comes to meet the applicants on certain days of the week.

"Would you like to know when and where? Would you like me to give you a form? You could photocopy it and pass it on to your friends. Does that work for you?" she asked Tareq, now with great willingness.

But that day Tareq didn't want to know where, nor did he want to take a form from her. He thanked her politely and took off, and never returned.

The Passengers in Car Trunks

Back in the days when the Palestinian workers who built her apartment building in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Ha-Kerem were still giving the building its finishing touches — the third millennium was then five years old, and she had moved there from her flat in the Katamon neighborhood in order to have a private garden — she went down one day to the spacious car park and storage basement to fetch something from her storage space. And there she saw one of her neighbors with an unfamiliar worker, and for some reason she asked who that worker was and from where, just out of curiosity and her tendency to be friendly with everyone at her new dwelling.

The neighbor hesitated for a moment and then told her, lowering his voice, that he wished to make some renovations in his storage space, work that was beyond what the regular workers did, so he had asked them whether any of them knew a renovator who could do the job. One of the workers said his brother was unemployed and looking for work. When the neighbor suggested the worker bring his unemployed brother along, the worker told him that his brother did not have a permit to enter Israel.

"So I went there with my car and he got into the trunk and that's how I brought him here ..." said the neighbor.

She did not respond.

"What, aren't they human beings?" asked the neighbor. She did not respond.

That woman sometimes has too many things to say, and at other times, dammit, she stays silent even if she knows it's necessary, even urgent, to say something.

"What are these people supposed to live on? Tell me!" The neighbor was agitated, having become a smuggler-employer.

She responded: she promised him not to tell anyone that he'd smuggled a worker in the trunk of his car.

Later she came to understand that secrets are secrets but not for those who wish to know. Many workers are smuggled this way, and there are even set fees: a thin boy pays his smuggler seventy or eighty shekels, a heavy man ninety.

She believes, or would like to believe at least, that the worker she saw was transported in the trunk free of charge.

The Walkers

One Saturday night, late, she drove her red Ford Fiesta down the alleys of a Palestinian village in Area B — or perhaps A or C. The third millennium was already ten years old, she was not on her own this time, a local man was with her. With that man, in his midlife and father of a large family, she had already had such dramatic experiences — she wouldn't want to recount them all — that they had become close friends. Not necessarily a spiritual or emotional closeness. Rather, circumstances had taught them to know each other very well in all kinds of situations and cooperate like a well-knit team: this too is a way for friendship to be forged.

Despite the hour, the village was bustling with life. Private cars and taxis and transit vans inched down the streets, while others were parked anywhere possible; dozens of people sat on chairs at house doorways and shops and improvised cafés, or on the pavement or the ground, and smoked cigarettes and drank black coffee from small paper cups, poured for them by boys and children from thermos bottles for one shekel. This bustle was there for anyone to see, as were the armed soldiers who stood next to their military vehicles or sat inside them at the entrances to the village and at various spots along its streets.

The woman too stood out a bit in that man's world, different from everyone and foreign to them, but not to her companion, who even insisted on introducing her to some of the people: an Israeli, a Jew, who wishes to "see the situation here." The two of them made their way in her car through the village and onto a side road winding through a darkness pierced only imperfectly by the car's headlights, descending in sharp bends into one of the ravines at the foot of the village.

The road was very narrow. Soon along its sides, from within the darkness of low clumps of trees and bushes, cigarette tips and small squares of light from cell phones began to appear like fireflies. Then figures suddenly emerged by the roadside, three or four, and when the woman and her friend stopped and got out of the car they were already surrounded by about fifteen men, not exactly young — in the car headlights she saw some gray hair and lined faces. Their clothes were neat and clean, they were on their way to work: in Tel Aviv, in Bnei Brak, in Ashkelon, and even in the northern city of Haifa. They came out of Hebron and its surroundings, Bethlehem and its surroundings, and many of them had left their homes very early that morning in faraway Nablus and Jenin in order to reach this part of the Jerusalem hills where the Separation Barrier had not yet been erected.

When the woman and her companion met this group, its members were about to move away from the road and vanish among the bushes and trees. Indeed they had neither the time nor the patience for conversation; they hurried to take their leave. The woman was also in a hurry: she took a pair of walking shoes out of her car, more suitable for a long walk than the sandals she was wearing. She meant to join them.

But suddenly the plan changed, another group arrived from below, and one of its members said the army was waiting up on the other side of the ravine. He said the soldiers had arrested some of the workers who had crossed the ravine and almost made it to the road where Israeli cars belonging to their employers or their messengers waited to collect them on the other side of the checkpoint and drive them an hour or two or three to Tel Aviv or Bnei Brak or Ashkelon or Haifa. They had very nearly made it &mdasg; but were caught. The bearers of this bad news witnessed this in time to escape and turn back.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Small Door Set in Concrete"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Ilana Hammerman.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by David Shulman

Prologue

In the Land of the Maoris
In the Land of the Palestinians

The West Bank

Workers
Someone at the Door
The Passengers in Car Trunks
The Walkers
Captured
Her Own Passenger in the Car Trunk

Prisoners
The Story of Adnan Abdallah
The Story of Jamil
The Story of the Invisible Ones

Children
Seeing Them See the Sea
The Wonders of Ice Cream and What She Got Out of Them
A Beauty Spot, a Pearl

The Seasons in Hebron
Autumn: Through the Hole That Once Was a Lock
Winter: Blessed Be He Who Does Wondrous Deeds
Spring: Childhood

The Gaza Strip

Lamenting Her Unseeing Eyes, Winter 2011

Gaza Strip in the First Person
Prologue, 2016
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here, January 1988
R.
Visiting R. in Prison in Gaza, June 1988
How We Didn’t Manage to Visit R. a Second Time, August 1988
Facing the Sea, with H., Summer 1988
Three Spasms, Jerusalem, 1991
Being Guests in the Gaza Strip, January 1991
Open Letter to Abu Ashraf and Those Who Send Him to Do Their Bidding, June 1991
This Is Not My War! Summer 1991
Nor Is This War Mine, Summer 2014

Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

"Although Hammerman does not deal with the origin of the question of Palestine, nor does she bring up the 1948 historical moment, the narrative is a must read for all readers who wish to learn about the plight of Palestinians under Israeli occupation, a plight that has been taking place since 1967, under the very eyes of the international community and human rights agencies."

Arab Studies Quarterly

I am torn while I read it. I weep. . . . The writing is so honest and so lovely. It is as if there is no other way to seduce the horror. But please, do read it.

Praise for the Hebrew edition - Lea Aini

If you want a book whose words are clear and simple and which says things that come out of a wise heart, this is a book for you. . . . Hammerman is not boring for one moment: her book is vibrant, personal, and relevant, and its intensity is tangible under the surface. Sometimes the descriptions become fine literature by virtue of the narrative ease, with the anger neutralized. It is not the storyteller who is shouting, it is the story that cries out without raising its voice.

Praise for the Hebrew edition - Talma Admon

At the heart of the book is a woman on her own, free, inquisitive, friendly, who drives children to the sea so that they can see it for the first time, and who meets families and friends and officials and speaks with them and observes them. A woman who is capable of ‘ridiculing fears and prejudices, of crossing barriers of walls and fences with her body, her spirit, and her mind, and of defying limitations that reside in the soul—limitations of submission and obedience, and especially of fear—and vanquishing them.’

Praise for the Hebrew edition - Omri Herzog

"If [Hammerman] is working toward a long-term change, it is through the reader. Buried in Hammerman’s words is a quiet but insistent alarm clock. She proposes an awakening to the coffee shops and living rooms beyond the point where cars of casual passers-by turn back. She urges an opening of the consciousness that can only occur outside the physical and metaphysical contours of a state."

Al Jadid

"Above all, Hammerman shows how the Occupation works to cast Palestinians as 'creatures of a different species,' rather than 'normal human beings.' Her remarkable book is a fierce corrective to this."

Times Literary Supplement

Israeli journalist, translator, and editor Hammerman’s memoir of life along the Israel-Palestine border is a fascinating view into the region’s ongoing tensions in the early 2000s. She finds both the absurd and tragic in the bureaucratic structures that keep Palestinians and Israelis divided. [...] As this is written primarily in the third person, readers may at times forget that they're not reading farcical fiction, though the ways in which Hammerman conveys the humanity of each person ground her memoir in reality. A final section includes Hammerman’s first-person articles reported from the Gaza Strip. Readers will appreciate Hammerman’s literary depiction of life on the ground in the borderland."

Booklist

This is a forceful and weighty book . . . written in a quiet, personal voice, and with humor. It is a documentary book, but it is written like literature in the full sense of the word. It produces in the reader—at least it did in this reader—empathy and emotion, and it reads like a powerful, consciousness-changing novel.

Praise for the Hebrew edition - David Grossman

Intense, heartbreaking, and filled with memories of shared laughter and tears, A Small Door Set in Concrete is the work of a sensitive, courageous soul. Its stories of injustice and oppression might be overwhelming were it not for Hammerman’s example of facing it all with compassion and courage. Her text demands to know why nothing is being done and calls upon the world to effect change through the power of mass civil disobedience.

Foreword Reviews