A Separate Peace
By Colman Andrews
photograph by Christopher Hirsheimer
Source:
Saveur
Haj Ali Hamoud, whose honorific title indicates that he has made the pilgrimage to Mecca that is required of every good Muslim at least once in his life, pilots a dusty red Massey-Ferguson tractor along a rutted dirt pathway past rows of tangerine trees, pulling a small cart heaped with citrus fruit. Hamoud is the manager of the 50-acre Yonay farm at Kfar Hasidim, in the Zebulun Valley in northern Israel, and the bounty he has gathered today will be part of the wedding feast honoring my old friend Ehud Yonay, an Israeli farmer turned California journalist turned Israeli farmer again, and his Moroccan-born bride, Shoshi. I met Ehud in 1976 in Beverly Hills, in the offices of New West—a now defunct magazine spun off in the early ’70s from New York—where I was an editor and he was a star reporter covering everything from California water politics to international terrorism. One of his pieces, about U.S. Navy fighter pilots near San Diego, inspired the Tom Cruise movie Top Gun. At the time, Ehud seemed the quintessential Israeli émigré: handsome in a ruddy, wiry way, self-confident, bold, intelligent, a bit mysterious; the Hills of Beverly and beyond are full of people like him, hardened in the sun, who have ended up in Southern California doing interesting and profitable things. He might have stayed forever. But his roots were deep in rural Israel, and in a way he never really left the family farm. That farm, still run by his 85-year-old mother, Erela, with Ehud’s help, is no bucolic paradise: the village encroaches on every side, and the surrounding slopes are chockablock with apartment buildings. But the soil is fertile, and the groves produce not just tangerines (four or five varieties) but oranges, grapefruit, and pomelo-like pomelits. And then there are the olive trees, here and on another patch of land Ehud leases not far away, which supply the fruit that is the core of his business: producing top-quality olives for sale in Israel and America. Ehud was married a month earlier in a religious ceremony in Kfar Hasidim itself, in a room hung with pictures of his ancestors in a little building that used to be a grocery store until, 20 years ago or so, his mother turned it into the village archive. The new Mrs. Yonay is a teacher and administrator at Misgav High School, about 20 miles away. “It’s a Hollywood cliché,” says Ehud of his marriage. “Shoshi’s family came here from Morocco in 1963. She was the girl next door—but I never knew her. I knew all her family. Her brother used to store hay in our barn. But I was living in California, and she was always away at school when I came home. Then, about a year ago, I was over interviewing her parents for my book [a work in progress about Israel’s multiethnic cuisines], and she happened to call. She wanted to know who I was, asking all these questions, so I got on the phone with her, and when she learned what I was doing, she told me that her daughter had just collected lots of local history for a ‘roots’ project at school. She offered to drop it by for me to see the following week. She did, we met, and that was that.”
It is safe to say that this is not going to be a typical Israeli wedding feast. For one thing, it is deliberately secular: it begins at noon on a Saturday, the Sabbath—which means that Shoshi’s parents, who are religious, will not be able to attend (her mother does stop by before the party starts, in her Saturday best, to offer their best wishes). For another, about a quarter of the two hundred or so guests are Arabs—mostly Bedouins, who have made a sometimes uneasy but also often amiable peace with their neighbors. Rural Israel is not an integrated society. There are Jewish villages and Arab villages (a few of the latter are Christian rather than Muslim), and many of the Jewish ones are still protected by guards and by gates that are locked at night. But today, as Ehud and Shoshi celebrate their wedding, Arabs and Jews are certainly having no problem. They do form separate groups (and the Bedouin men and women separate subgroups), sitting either in green plastic chairs at blue-napped tables or on oriental rugs and against big embroidered pillows on the ground in the farm’s olive-sorting shed—which has been draped with olive nets for the occasion, with strings of plump lightbulbs overhead (in anticipation of the early twilight) and a trough arranged with Ali’s citrus fruits on one side. But as they wander around the property or crowd the buffet tables, they meet and joke and reminisce and argue lightly about who has known Ehud the longest. I meet Ehud’s sister-in-law, Zofia Yonay-Alhassid, an early childhood education specialist, whose family comes from Cochin, in India, and who is the widow of Ehud’s younger brother, Yossi—killed in 1973, in the Arab–Israeli war on Yom Kippur. I listen to his cousin Ziv Spector—who runs Desert Shade Eco-Tourism in Mitzpe Ramon, in the Negev—enthusing about the craft and ingenuity with which the desert’s early inhabitants, Jews and Arabs both, found nourishment in the sand. I talk goat cheese with Lou Lenart, a former U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot who volunteered to fly in Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and whose sister, Lillian Cahn, makes some of America’s best chèvre at the Coach Dairy Goat Farms in upstate New York. And I’m introduced to what seems like a whole tribe’s worth of Bedouins, some of whom work on the farm and others who have been friends of the family for generations. The women are mostly in print dresses, and some are laden with silver jewelry; some of the men wear long robes; others have on suits in sober hues, with collarless white shirts; most have covered their heads with kaffiyehs, the traditional Arab headgear. More than one has a cell phone. And a couple are busily cooking. One of these is Hassan Fandi, whose older brother, Fayiz, is the best-known Bedouin chef in the region. Clearly, Hassan shares his brother’s love of cooking. With his friend Mustafa Hassan Amariyah, Hassan is boiling lamb bones in a cauldron to make stock for the rice and browning pine nuts and slivered almonds in oil to make his brother’s great specialty, ruzz bi-snobar wa-kharuf (rice with pine nuts and lamb). (I can’t help noticing that the big sacks containing the ancient Middle Eastern grain that is to go into the dish are labeled “Thai Jasmine Rice”.) Into another cauldron, meanwhile, filled with beef simmering in broth, he dumps powdered allspice, cardamom, cinnamon, and nutmeg, to make a kind of Levantine goulash called kader. “Mustafa’s father,” Ehud tells me, “was our herdsman back in the ’60s and ’70s when we had a lot of cattle, and his sister is married to Ali, our farm manager.” He points to an older Bedouin. “And that man there, Musa Yassin, brought the meat here last night. My neighbor has a produce business and a walk-in cooler, so I said we should just put the meat in plastic pails and leave it in the cooler overnight. Musa said, ‘Are you crazy? This is meat! It’s a living thing that needs to breathe!’ He took it back and put it in his own cooler and brought it again today.” Near the cauldrons, on a big grill, spiced ground meat kebabs, lamb kebabs, and Persian chicken kebabs—one of Ehud’s own specialties, taught to him by an Iranian friend in Los Angeles—are sizzling. The rest of the food is prepared by caterer Eti Egozi, with the help of florist Daniella Arbel, who moonlights making Moroccan Jewish dishes. Out from the granary, which has been turned into a makeshift kitchen for the occasion, comes one huge bowl or platter of salad after another—fennel with dill, zucchini and diced red pepper with dill, cherry tomatoes with green olives and parsley, sliced tomatoes and spicy chiles, roasted sweet red and green peppers with garlic, stewed olives, couscous with pine nuts and raisins, an exuberant mixed salad including tomatoes, beets, celery, parsley, and croutons… There are oversized loaves of dark European-style rye bread and whole wheat pita, and a platter of boiled potato-filled kreplach. (A panoply of creamy, central European–style cakes will appear for dessert.) In honor of Shoshi’s heritage, there is a Moroccan table whose centerpiece is an immense couscous with big hunks of chicken, assorted vegetables, and dried fruit and nuts; this is surrounded with platters of kebabs, an assortment of triangular and tubular deep-fried meat-filled pastries, and a wonderfully aromatic dish of lamb meatballs with onions and cinnamon. “Moroccans are carnivores!” exclaims Ehud with a smile as he passes. “Cannibals!” A vodka-spiked punch is served, but most of the tables are crowded with big bottles of Coke and Fanta orange soda, and on a big tray there are etched brass coffeepots. Nearby is a carved wood contraption that looks like a cross between a mortar and pestle and a butter churn. It is in fact a jurun, the traditional Bedouin coffee grinder. Later in the afternoon, one of the older Arabs will roast green coffee beans in an iron pan, then pound them into powder in the jurun before brewing pots of the impossibly strong, thick, acidic, cardamom-scented coffee that is the Bedouin’s ritual tea and welcoming cocktail in one. “The young Bedouins use an electric grinder,” sniffs Ehud. “Old men, who know how to use the jurun, make a kind of music with it.”
Kfar Hasidim was founded in 1925 as a religious farm settlement by Ehud’s maternal great-uncle, a Hasidic rabbi from Poland named Yechezkel Taub. (The name of the place literally means “village of the Hasidim”, Hasidism being a mystical Jewish sect founded in Poland around 1750.) His niece, Erela, was 9 when she arrived in the village with her family and 20 when she married the dashing young Mordechai Yonay—who had come to Palestine at the age of 16 from Belarus and promptly fallen in love with Arab culture. “He learned to speak Arabic, compiled books of Arab anecdotes and fables, and had a lot of Arab friends,” remembers Ehud. But he also became a shomer, a watchman, charged with helping to protect the Jewish settlers from their Arab neighbors. Ehud points to a handsome Bedouin sporting a thin mustache and wearing a gray suit and a kaffiyeh. “That’s my friend Dardach Tayyar,” he says. “His father, Salah, was a rogue, a brigand, and a hired killer. He and my father used to look across the fields at each other through gun sights. One day, Salah stole my father’s white Arabian mare, and in retaliation my father burned the little valley where Salah lived. Neither could prove what the other had done, but they were even, and after that they became the best of friends.” The past doesn’t seem very long ago here. The gun post in the tower of the farm granary is still visible—and Ehud points out a line of cypress stumps just beyond the olive shed. “That was the perimeter of the village,” he says, “and the trees were planted as a wall. At one point we installed barbed wire and searchlights among them.” He sighs. “Our lives, the Jews and the Arabs,” he says, “have been so intertwined over the years, but those things are there only if you see them. My father was one of only a few rangers here, and you don’t keep all those Arabs in line for so long without working with them and getting to know them.” Ehud’s mother, who has been listening as he talks, scowls and shakes her head. Ehud looks at her lovingly but then raises his eyes heavenward. “It’s the mystery of the East,” he says, “and she has never understood it.”
Born on the Yonay farm in 1940, Ehud graduated from the nearby Kadoorie Agricultural School as a farm adviser and served in the Israel Defense Forces both as a combat soldier and as a senior instructor for the army’s agricultural program, which taught soldiers how to farm. In 1962 he moved to Los Angeles, where he earned a B.A. in political science from UCLA and then an M.A. in journalism from USC, eventually ending up at New West. In 1989, at least partly in an attempt to reinforce his connection with Kfar Hasidim, Ehud branched out from journalism and founded the Greater Galilee Olive Oil Company, using the produce of his family farm and capitalizing on the new American enthusiasm for olive oil and other Mediterranean products. In Israeli terms, he turned out to be something of a pioneer. “For the Jewish settlements in the Galilee,” he tells me at his wedding feast, “olive farming basically meant growing table olives for canning. Oil was Arab business. Now Jews are getting into oil too; it’s like wine in Napa was years ago: the idea of it attracts people who are tired of the rat race.” Ehud’s oil was very good—but it wasn’t Tuscan, and potential customers often ingenuously declared that they didn’t know there was olive oil in Israel. Ehud would respond, “No olive oil in Israel? Read your Bible, man!” (Now that he’s living in Israel, Ehud is restructuring his company, renamed Olive Gardens Ltd., and, after a brief hiatus, has resumed shipping olives to the U.S.) Long after New West and its successor, California, had disappeared, I’d run into Ehud at food shows and other industry events, and he’d always invite me to come to Israel for the olive harvest. When I chanced to talk with him in early 1999, he repeated the invitation, but with a twist. “This year you’ve got to come,” Ehud said, “because the celebration will be not only for the olive harvest but for my marriage.” I happily agreed. When he moved back to Israel last fall, though, it wasn’t just to get married. “My mother isn’t getting any younger,” he explains, “and she can’t run the farm herself. I’d give up anything before I’d give up the farm.”
This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #47
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