Chapter 4/Page 136

Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 136 CHAPTER FOUR HOW I BECAME WHO I AM: LIFE STORIES PRELUDE PERSONAL BIOGRAPHIES AND SOCIAL INSIGHTS This chapter, which deals with biographies in various ways, has three parts. The first presents the life stories of some of the women I came to know in Pardes Katz. The second part tells another life story, of the birth and development of a school for Mizrahi girls, where many of these same women were educated into a Haredi way of life. The third part turns its gaze to me, the researcher, and examines the ethnic aspect of my own biography. This chapter seeks answers to the question of how each of us became what she is: a cashier, a Haredi women, an Ashkenazi woman, a single mother, a person with respect for religion, an office cleaner, a social activist. Unfurling a biography is like pulling on a thread that unravels the social fabric into which we have each been woven at what seems to be a preordained location. *** If we each had a parallel self, we could learn some important things about our placement in the social fabric. A friend of mine suggested to me the idea of a person with parameters more or less identical to one’s own, who chooses, at life’s major intersections, the road you did not take. The simple model of this “sister self” assumes that each intersection presents a choice between only two roads. At any given moment of time, this double can show us “what might have happened if.” What would have happened had I decided to keep dancing seriously, what would have happened if I hadn’t married at such Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 137 a young age, and what would have happened had I gone to law school, as I originally intended. The idea of the double is more than a curiosity. It can be a tool for sociological analysis. The sister self marks out, in broad lines, the degrees of freedom available to a girl/teenager/woman with a given set of parameters. Beyond her individual traits, her place of residence, family, ethnicity, class, and her other cultural affiliations create a social map. This map, which has both visible and blind areas, is first-class intelligence material. It can help us trace the process by which such maps are made and their roads marked. These maps display bumps and barriers, and they identify the people who control the traffic lights and those who level and pave the roads. They also show us the navigation instruments used by those who move through the territory it depicts. I don’t actually have such a parallel self, but I can examine the lives of my friends from my own neighborhood, where I grew up and still live. What happened to Dalia, Havva, Hanale, Yael, Michal, and Rivka? What is Raya doing, and where do Leah and Dvori live? What kind of job does Irit have, and what has become of Shlomit? These are girls who grew up with me in my neighborhood on the edge of Tel Aviv. They attended my non-religious public elementary school, and we went to the same youth movement. We attended different high schools in the city, because there was no high school in our neighborhood. When I inquired after their current lives, I did not find anything astonishing. All in all, the social differences between us are not great. We are all married, although some of us divorced and remarried. We all have children, we all have post- secondary educations, and almost all of us work. We all live in Israel, and only one lives over the Green Line, in the Golan Heights. One is a judge, one a lawyer who founded a Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 138 school, one a doctor. Many are high school teachers, and others have jobs in the commercial and business sector. It’s a normal distribution of talents and ambitions. The keys of socialization worked as they were supposed to, opening some doors and failing to open others. Here and there we fiddled with the locks and banged on locked doors, but we did not go anywhere we were not supposed to go. A collection of life stories is based on a principle similar to that of the “sister self.” Such a collection might offer biographies of Jews who have shed their religious beliefs, of Holocaust survivors, of North African immigrants, or of businesswomen. The definition of the group under study determines whether the lives included share a common origin or a common present station. For example, if one wants to study women in senior positions in the business community, one begins with their current position and reads back into their biographies. In contrast, one can choose a biographical datum, for example having lived in Europe during World War II, and then read forward to see where such people have gone. The assumption at the basis of this methodology is that gathering together a number of different life progresses on the basis of a common axis will enable the researcher to plot a social map that shows the forces that operated on the subjects, and the counter-forces that they applied. The methodology of collecting and analyzing life stories1 takes as given that the personal story of a specific person has double value: it precisely portrays a unique life, but also can, when taken alongside other stories, be placed within its public, social, and historical context. This enhances the importance of the private biography as a source of social insight, and at the same time unravels social insights into a myriad of individual stories. *** Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 139 The collection of life stories of the women I studied with in the senior secretaries’ course at the Pardes Katz community center is, then, like any other effort to weave together the private and the public. But it is also different, and unique. I should open by stating that the stories of many women who grew up in the neighborhood and then left it, or of women with whom I did not speak, might well offer a rich and varied tapestry that is unknown to me. Most of the women I met were born and raised in the neighborhood, and remained there during the third decade of their lives. Their field of maneuver was colored by the environmental conditions in this area, their family origins, and the educational systems they were exposed to. The educational options were a function of the neighborhood’s Mizrahi-ethnic character and its homogeneous class structure, and ranged from public schools (with their religious-public school variation) to Haredi schools. One option was meant to offer a royal road to Israeli identity and culture, while the other sought to direct them to an alternate route. Placing these stories one beside the other offers something much like a “sister self.” Their proximity offers a glimpse of what might have happened if, for example, Eveline’s father had won his argument with her mother and sent her to the public school that he favored instead of the Haredi boarding school that her mother chose. Or what might have happened to Bracha if her mother had insisted on keeping her close to home in the neighborhood state-religious school, rather than allowing her to transfer to the Or Hayyim boarding school in Bnei Brak. What might have happened to Eti-Aya if she had remained in the neighborhood, at her public school, instead of transferring to a kibbutz boarding school in eighth grade? What would have happened to Sarit if she had continued Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 140 her professional studies in the Haredi post-secondary program rather than getting married at a young age? These women walked down different paths, but paths that could have intersected and exchanged one for the other. That, and the fact that they found themselves in the same classroom in the community center in the 1998-1999 school year, indicates that the social map available to them and their families was similar, even if they are located at different points. Their ethnic origin, place of residence, and economic class interlock into a single social parameter of lower middle class peripheral Mizrahiyut. This parameter paints in new colors the categories of religious and non-religious, and thus also the definition of Israeli identity. I. THE SOCIAL MAP OF LIFE PATHS The reconstruction of the road map available to my protagonists and their families will be accomplished in two stages. In the first stage, I will offer the profiles of eight interview subjects, grouped in four pairs. Each pair places a woman alongside her “sister.” This act of coupling is itself an act of interpretation. The first three pairs are women who attended the secretarial course with me. They place the biography of a woman who identifies herself as Haredi alongside that of a woman who views herself as not religious. The fourth pair, the life stories of women who led the neighborhood’s Haredi women’s club, invites an examination of the variation within this single social category. The second stage of reconstructing the social map will offer a theory-based interpretation of the life stories. This is an interpretation that grows out of each individual biography, and also out of the juxtaposition of each biography with its sister biography. Elor/Reserved Seats/Chapter 4/page 141 The interviews took place after the course ended. I first tried to set up appointments to talk to the women, but only three agreed; the others were evasive or refused.

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