Every Home Needs A Balcony
This international bestseller tells the bittersweet story of one family, one home, and the surprising arc of one woman's life, from the poverty of her youth, to the intense love and painful losses of her adult years.Braiding together the past and present, Every Home Needs a Balcony relays the life story of a young Jewish girl, the child of Romanian immigrants, who lives with her family in the poverty-stricken heart of 1950s Haifa, Israel.Eight-year-old Rina, her older sister, and her parents inhabit a cramped apartment with a narrow balcony that becomes an intimate, shared stage on which the joys and dramas of the building's daily life are played out. It also a window through which Rina witnesses the emergence of a strange new country, born from the ashes of World War II. While her mother cleans houses and her father drifts from job to job, as the years pass Rina becomes desperate to escape her crowded, dirty surroundings. Eventually she falls in love with a wealthy Spaniard and moves to a luxury apartment in Barcelona.Yet although she enjoys money and status in her new land, it is not Israel. Longing for the past, Rina, now pregnant, returns to the simple life she has missed - a move that soothes her soul, but destroys her marriage. Alone, raising a new baby, comes the painful realization that no matter how much she yearns for the past, the old Haifa of her boisterous youth has gone.Told with the light touch of a humorous, incredibly dexterous writer, Every Home Needs a Balcony reveals how our choices shape us - and how we learn to survive life's most surprising turns.
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EVERY HOME NEEDS A BALCONY
RINA FRANK
TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY
ORA CUMMINGS
Contents
I was born on the second day of the Jewish New Year. When I discovered that Yaffa, the third daughter of our Syrian neighbors, was born during Hanukkah, I assumed that children were born on holy days—as a special gift from God. When I realized that my sister, who is older than me by one year and eight months, was born in January and I could find no holy day in her vicinity, I became very worried and afraid that she was damaged. I shared my deep concern with her. My sister laughed and, with all the wisdom of a seven-and-a-half-year-old, explained to me that children are indeed born only on holy days; she, on the other hand, while still an embryo in our mother’s belly, had decided that she wanted to be special and different from everyone else, and so she persuaded God to arrange for her to be born on a regular weekday. And God agreed.
Because my sister Yosefa knew God.
Two families and Tante Marie lived in our three-room apartment and kitchenette. The apartment belonged to my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Lutzi, and her husband Lazer.
They were lucky. They had emigrated from Romania in 1948, right after the War of Independence, and were already regarded as “veterans” because they had managed to take over apartments abandoned by Arabs who had previously occupied Stanton Street, which made them instant property owners. Actually, their son the policeman, Phuyo, who had immigrated to the Land of Israel at the age of fourteen, had set aside an apartment at 40 Stanton Street for his parents. When members of the local police force were allocated the best apartment block on Stanton Street, Phuyo immediately commandeered the first floor, and three of his colleagues took over the remaining floors; for several months thereafter they took turns guarding the empty apartments, to prevent any undesirable Jewish invaders from entering and occupying them before their parents and the rest of their families arrived in Israel.
Vida, Father’s second sister, and her husband, Herry, also made a beeline to Wadi Salib in search of an apartment in which to set up home. At 47 Stanton, they found a two-story building abandoned by its Arab inhabitants. They didn’t fancy the furniture on the first floor; in the second-floor apartment, however, not only was the furniture relatively new but there was an indoor toilet, rather than one in the yard, as was normal in Arab houses. They settled unanimously for the apartment on the second floor. Herry, who was multitalented and very resourceful, installed a tin water tank on the roof, and a solar collector. The result was a supply of free hot water almost all year.
My parents, who lingered for a further two years in Romania in order to do it for the first time in their lives and produce Yosefa, my only sister, did not have this good fortune. And thus the Franco family, comprising Moscu, Bianca, and their eight-month-old baby girl, arrived in Israel and were given the kitchenette. It was an inner room with no window, and no access to the high-status balcony that overlooked Stanton Street.
Moscu and Bianca did it for the second time in their lives in Tante Lutzi’s small kitchen, because they were depressed at having to live in a tiny, windowless room and because Father really wanted a son. When I was born, one year after they immigrated to Israel from Romania, Father was so disappointed with “that one who doesn’t know how to produce a son” that his sister Lutzi, who loved her attractive younger brother with all her heart, gave us the third room that faced the stylish balcony and connected between all the other rooms. The room had been reserved for Phuyo the policeman, who was responsible for our having the house in the first place. But Phuyo had married a Frenchwoman, Dora, who flatly refused to share a house with her mother-in-law, Lutzi, and that is how our occupation of the room with the elegant balcony became a fait accompli.
From the balcony, you could overlook the entire Haifa port with its fleet of ships, as far as the yogurt-bottle-shaped oil refineries, and when you closed one eye you could even see Acre on your outstretched hand. There was no need even for binoculars; no boat or ship could infiltrate our little country via the port of Haifa without us noticing it from our balcony. Except, perhaps, a submarine.
The houses on Stanton Street were built of good-quality local stone, not the usual crumbling gray plaster, but stone blocks that gave the buildings a special elegance and made them stand out in the surrounding landscape. And all the buildings had balconies, one balcony facing the other, with no difference between the outside and the inside. The stone walls had been designed as a buffer only against the cold or the heat, not between the people and the neighborhood and the families who lived there. There were no curtains in the windows, and everyone was able to see everyone else, as if on a conveyor belt. Your entire life was laid out there on the balcony, illustrated in the piles of bedclothes hung out daily on the banister for airing. All the neighbors knew how often, if at all, every family changed its sheets. And if it wasn’t enough that everything was visible to all eyes, there was also the laundry, pegged out to dry on ropes stretched along the length of the balcony, revealing the patched clothes and the underwear and nightgowns worn and faded from too much washing. It was as if all your belongings were displayed there each day for public auction.
