A Street Divided by Dion Nissenbaum

Jerusalem.
    â€œWe waited each year for Santa Claus, and Santa Claus was none other than my grandfather,” Saliba said.
    The visiting permits were always short—usually a few days. Then Saliba’s grandfather would cross back through Mandelbaum Gate and disappear again for another year.
    Beatnik Abu Tor
    There was something about living on the edge of a new country that attracted eclectic characters to Jerusalem. On the Israeli side, as the country dug in, artists established a small bohemian outpost in Abu Tor. Abandoned Palestinian houses in Abu Tor filled with young, adventurous Israeli poets, writers, television directors and sculptors who wanted to live—spiritually, psychologically and physically—on the edge. Director Tom Shoval, who produced a short documentary about the artistic life of Abu Tor, described the neighborhood in the 1950s and 1960s as “an international center of Beatnik life.” 9
    â€œPeople, artists made pilgrimage to the area,” he said. “There was a unique spirit here.” 10
    The London-born poet Dennis Silk, known for filling his place with hand puppets and wind-up toys, moved into a house next to the Goeli family. He practiced his marionette plays at his house. Yehuda Amichai, one of Israel’s most celebrated poets, came to Abu Tor to live, as he put it in one poem, “inside the silence.” So did poet Arieh Sachs and Micah Shagrir, a pioneer of Israeli film and television.
    The neighborhood represented the frontier of the young country, the place where artists felt like they could stew in Israeli angst. Living in Abu Tor meant simmering in the idea of what it meant to be Israeli. The artists gathered at each other’s homes for parties and poetry readings. American writers and British poets came to drink wine along the border and scribble down anguished ideas about life on a precipice.
    The artists who lived in Abu Tor ruminated on what it meant to live in homes abandoned by Palestinians and what they would say to the old owners if they ever came back. On one visit to see Arieh, British poet Elaine Feinstein marveled at the Israeli poet’s elegant, curved Arab ceilings, a compliment that appeared to sober him up during a long night of drinking. Arieh smiled bitterly and told Elaine that he had recently seen Palestinians burning tires in the road nearby. “I got the message,” he said.
    â€œCakes, Not War”
    One of those attracted to life on the edge in the 1960s was Hedva Harekhavi, a 25-year-old, dark, curly haired design student who was questioning her place in the divided city. When a real estate agent asked her what she wanted in a house, Hedva told the realtor that she wanted two things: “silence and sun.”
    â€œI have something for you,” the agent replied: “Abu Tor.”
    The house Hedva’s realtor had in mind looked down on one of two Jordanian guard posts in the neighborhood. The back wall of the home was pockmarked with shell fragments. One blast had blown a car-wheel-sized hole in the back wall of an unfinished section of the house. A wide garden with fruit trees and grapevines bumped into the fence marking No Man’s Land, right above a dirt path that would one day mark the beginning of Assael Street. You couldn’t get any closer to the end of the country.
    Hedva was sold.
    â€œIt was a place nobody wanted to live,” she said. “Nobody except me.”
    â€œI bought it,” she said, “for the cost of a blender.”
    Hedva was intrigued by life on the border. She would climb onto the roof of her new home and wave to the Jordanian soldiers no more than 50 yards away. The Israeli soldiers always told her not to get too friendly with the enemy.
    â€œGirl, girl, don’t say hi to them,” the soldiers told Hedva. “Not so much peace.”
    From Hedva’s vantage point near the Israeli and Jordanian guard posts, No Man’s Land and the valley below