When family and friends read Ayala Dekel's debut novel Home, There and Back, they found themselves calling the author worriedly to make sure that everything was alright between her and her husband. Ayala assured them there was nothing to worry about and that their relationship was firm and stable.
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Stability, it must be said, is a bit of an ironic way to describe a tumultuous relationship like the love story between Ayala and Yonatan. After all, they are very far from being a run-of-the-mill couple. When they married 14 years ago, she was a religious settler with no prior romantic experience, and he was dyed in the wool secular with a trail of ex-girlfriends.
Over the years, Ayala became less and less religiously observant, while Yonatan became closer to religion until the two of them had swapped places. Today he is a believer and keeps mitzvot, and she is an atheist who wears tank tops and drives on the Sabbath.
"A year after our marriage, I had already removed my head covering and slowly, slowly I grew distant from religion," she recalls. "Yonatan, who was secular at the time, always had an affinity to the religious world, to Shabbat, and to mitzvot. I on the other hand, was drawn to his secular world, a world in which there are no restrictions and laws."
Yonatan and Ayala's intriguing relationship trickled into the plot of the beautiful novel that she wrote and which was published last month by Showtime. I read it in one go. The protagonists of her novel are Lior and Itamar, both tour guides, who like Ayala and Yonatan slip into each other's worlds and swap beliefs.
The plot sails into the 1950s in Alexandria, Egypt, and tells the tale of a tumultuous and painful love story between Jacqueline, a Jewish girl, and Abdul, a young Muslim man, after their forbidden relationship is discovered by her family. Jacqueline is expelled by her father and marries Abdul in a Muslim ceremony, but continues to keep kosher and Jewish holidays, and even has her baby boy circumcised in secret.
Into this invented plot, Ayala injected shots of truth from her family life. A secret kept for generations that was only revealed 18 months ago. "My grandmother, Susie Salem died and at her funeral, I found out what had been hidden by the family for 70 years. My grandfather, Henry had a sister called Rachelle, who married a Muslim man in Egypt.
"Her father, who was my great-grandfather, threw her out of the house and forbid any of his family to be in contact with her. Two of her brothers, Jojo and Izak remained in touch with their sister all the same. The family left Egypt in the 1950s and only Rachelle remained behind. Izak, who immigrated to Switzerland, remained in touch with her. But the connection with Jojo who made Aliyah to Israel was cut off.
"The discovery of this secret shook my world; I couldn't stop thinking how one move changes fates and divides families. On one side of the border, devout Muslims living in Egypt, and here a religious family living on a West Bank settlement.
"During the coronavirus pandemic, when the whole country was in lockdown, I found myself sitting between four walls and trying to imagine what happened back then, and what is happening now with Rachelle's grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live in Egypt. Could it be that I the girl from the settlement, who took part in all the demonstrations against the Oslo Accords and is fearful of Arabs, has Muslim family. This was this dramatic discovery that gave birth to my novel."
Ayala, who will soon be 39 grew up in Beit Horon in Binyamin, the eldest daughter of Henri and Aviva Shalo. Her father works in the defense industries, and her mother is an educator. You paragraph. She grew up in the 1980s when Beit Horon was considered an isolated settlement. "We grew up in a very difficult period with the trauma of terrorist attacks and stone-throwing. I remember an incident in which we didn't manage to get to a family event because we were attacked with huge rocks. In the mornings, our parents would accompany us but, in the afternoons, when they were at work, stone-throwing fights would break out between the kids on both sides of the fence."
Q: Did you throw stones? You look very fragile and gentle.
"I'm ashamed to say so, but I also threw stones, even though in general I was a good girl. Once we threw sticks at a Palestinian car and the driver came back to catch us, we ran away and hid in a cave. I remember the palpitations I had to this very day."
Ayala imbued put her childhood experiences into the world and feelings of Liora, the heroine of her book. "You never knew when you could get stuck on the road. It was as if WAZE, which hadn't been invented yet, suddenly announced 'you have not reached your destination; you may never get there.' Over time, new roads were paved, and a tall wall divided the Palestinian and Israeli populations, but fear still knocks on the door of my heart to this day."
The first cracks in Ayala's religious faith appeared when she was a young girl and grew stronger in her teenage years. Against a backdrop of the kidnap and murder of the soldier Nahshon Waxman by Hamas terrorists in 1994. "Nahshon was held in the village Beit Jabala, very nearby to us. I remember my father, Yehuda, may he rest in peace, explaining that God was not listening to our prayers because a father can also say no. It drove me crazy. I was not convinced. If God was here to manage the world, then he should make a bit of an effort."
Despite her doubts, Ayala remained within a religious framework completed her high school studies and went to a religious seminar in the army she was a commander on a program for special needs soldiers. That was the time when I was mostly religious. I had officer ranks and walked around in a skirt right down to the floor." After completing her military service, she continued her studies on a religious kibbutz, Migdal Oz.
"The more I learned the more I understood that at the end of the day, as a woman in Judaism, I was worth nothing," she recalls. I wasn't counted as part of a quorum, and I kept hitting a glass ceiling. In the secular world, which I first encountered in the army, and then later on during my academic studies, I was worth something."
She took a degree in Bible studies and criminology and continued to a master's in education. During her practical work in criminology, she was sent to teach in Ayalon Prison where many of the prisoners are serving life sentences. "I taught Bible studies there. I was 23 and to hear from people who had difficult life experiences about their understandings of the biblical texts was quite an earth-shattering experience for me. I understood that I prefer to teach Bible studies and Talmud in a way where the texts and life would come together."
Today she is a lecturer and at the secular yeshiva, Bina, in Tel Aviv, and is studying at the Beit Midrash for Israeli rabbis at the Hartman Institute, I'm nurturing a new Judaism, a Judaism of culture, not religion," she stresses, as she glances at the huge library that fills the living room of her house - prose alongside Jewish books. During the conversation, she skips easily between worlds, quoting from Bible stories alongside Hebrew poetry and Hebrew and foreign literature.
The love story between her and Yonatan Dekelbaum (we shortened to Dekel after our wedding) began during the selection process for a counseling spot on Masa Israel Journal, an educational program to develop Jewish and Zionist identity among young people through hikes and getting to know Israeli society.
I was 23-and-a-half and Yonatan was 25. And even though there was a click between us, we weren't together at first. Yonatan turned up for the counselor training course late after coming straight from reserve service in the Second Lebanon War, where he lay in ambush near Mount Hermon. He joined my group and was very nice to everyone, including two other women, and not just to me. It looked a little dangerous, so I kept my distance from him. At the time she recalls, she really wanted to get married. "I felt that I was an old spinster. All my friends were married, and I felt that I was destined to remain alone and tell stories to the cats."
Even though she did her best to maintain her distance from Yonatan a friendly relationship developed between them during the course. After the course, they remained in touch and helped each other prepare trips until Ayala felt that she was falling in love with this secular boy.
"I realized that it was problematic and then Yonatan went on reserve duty again, this time on the Gaza border. I called him to say I was falling in love and so I had to cut off the relationship with him."
"I was stunned by the phone call, says Yonatan, "because I felt that everything was going really smoothly between us. The more I got to know Ayala, the more I understood just how deep she is and what broad horizons she has."
Q: Yonatan, at that time, could you even have imagined yourself being religious?
"The first time I encountered religion was in the army when I was in the Givati reconnaissance unit, where half of my squad were religious," he continues. "I had an affinity to these people who don't just live their own personal lives but are part of something much bigger, part of a tradition. I started to take part in prayers, which until then had been completely foreign to me. I felt that there was a whole world that I was missing. The relationship with Ayala also connected me to something that has been dormant inside."
Ayala says that Yonatan asked to let things develop at their own pace because he too was falling in love with her. "I was in shock because until then, I hadn't imagined for a moment that the feelings between us were mutual.
When he returned from reserve duty, they went hiking in the desert, and there, as the sunset in the vast silence, they officially became a couple.
"We got engaged after three months, a reasonable period of time in the religious world," says Ayala, but a little less common in the secular world."
Q: How did you deal with your differing views on physical contact?
"During the first month of our relationships, we refrained from touch, and after that a little less, but no more than a hug," says Ayala.
Yonatan is shocked. "Really Ayala. Don't put things like that in the paper. Now everything that happened between us is something that your parents and all of the People of Israel are involved."
Q: In the book as well, Ayala introduces scenes that seem to have been taken from the intimacy of your relationship?
"That's not the same," says Yonatan. "Itamar in the book is a very different character to me."
At the end of the day," Ayala replies, "an author writes from his soul, but we do so through figures that are a figment of the imagination. Yonatan isn't Itamar and I'm not Liora. She is a lot more courageous than me. I often remain silent, but she always says what she thinks."
They married in August 2007 at the caves of Beit Guvrin Dancing was separate for men and women, and after the dancing, the guests sat in a circle for and sang together. After their wedding, Yonatan and Ayala lived in a caravan in Nofei Prat with a view over the Judean desert expanse. "I was really suffering, so we moved to Modiin," says Ayala. "
Cross-cultural and religious love affairs are nothing new to Yonatan's family. His parents met on a Kibbutz Beeri: His father was a Jewish immigrant from Canada and his mother a volunteer from an English Christian family. When he was four, they divorced and both remarried and set up new families.
Today, Yonatan, 40, works in town planning at the Ministry of the Interior in Jerusalem. He continues to serve on reserve duty, and every time he does, drama seems to occur at the Dekel family home in Modiin.
The biggest drama of all occurred four years ago when Yonatan turn was serving as a reserve company commander on the Gaza border. He was away from home for a whole month leaving Ayala alone with their three boys, Evyatar (12) Beeri (10), and Tavor (8).
Ayala relates how on Fridays, when Yonatan was on reserve duty, she would take the boys to the trampoline park in Rishon and then for ice cream "When we got home to Modiin, it was already after Shabbat had come. After kiddush, I would sit down with the boys to watch a movie on TV. Those were the first times I really violated the Sabbath."
Q: It sounds like the end of a very long personal process for you?
"My process of secularization began gradually more than 10 years ago when I took off my head covering the year after we got married. It was a step by which I declared to others, but primarily to myself that I was no longer bound by the framework of Jewish religious law. Just as I removed my head covering, Yonatan began wearing tzitzit under his clothes and then a kippa.
Q: When did you tell him about violating Shabbat with the kids?
"Only after he returned from reserve duty"
Yonatan says he was duty, very surprised and pained when he heard. "But I couldn't be angry with Ayala, or start to make demands of her. I could only tell her how fantastic she was and thank her for staying alone for a whole month with the boys so I could do my reserve service. So, there were dramas on the surface, but I asked myself whether this had been a violation of the unwritten pact between us and whether we should split up."
Q: You must have known earlier about the process she was going through?
"I knew that Ayala was a free spirit and that this time she was basically saying to me: 'This is me and the changes I am going through our are important to me. Deal with it!' So I dealt with it… After digesting the initial shock, we understood that we needed to rearrange our family framework."
As part of this rearrangement, their kids today learn at a mixed secular-religious school in Modiin. When the kids are asked about it, they reply that they are both secular and religious. The family keeps kosher and does not violate Shabbat within the communal spaces in their home. When they go out on Shabbat to visit relatives in Modiin, Ayala drives home, while Yonatan and the boys return on foot.
One thing they are strict about is no screens on Shabbat. During the days of intense work on the novel, Ayala would hole herself up on Shabbat evenings in their room and switch on the computer to write. It wasn't easy for Yonatan, "but I understood that I can't force Ayala, I could only ask her not to do so in communal spaces and not at the expense of family time, which is the essence of Shabbat."
Another issue between them is that of ritual purity. "I always hated going to the mikveh. From my point of view, it's are embarrassing and invasive. At first, I made an effort, but then after a religious girlfriend told me that she had stopped going to the mikveh that gave me a tailwind and I made it clear that I wasn't going anymore.
"It's my body and Yonatan knows that it's difficult for me so he doesn't ask that I go to the mikveh. I really appreciate that side of him. Usually, it's the secular side mixed relationship that has to give up more and here Yonatan is the one who is giving up more and has left me with what is mine."
Q: How did your parents accept the changes in your lives?
"When Yonatan began to wear a kippa my parents were very happy," says Ayala, "and by the way, for the past few years, Yonatan only wears a kippah on Shabbat and not during the week because he felt that he was being treated differently at work because of an external marker.
"With the changes that I have been through, on the other hand, it was very, very difficult for my parents . When I go to visit them, I try to dress appropriately. But when my mother comes to us, which she does quite often, she sees me wearing a tank top. They still aren't willing for me to drive to visit them on Shabbat. It isn't easy for them and of course, the book I wrote wasn't easy for them either."
Ayala didn't let any of her relatives, not even from her nuclear family, look at the draft of the book before it was published. She says that after it was published, they liked her writing and the plot, "but they were also hurt by a few things."
Q: For example?
"It was mostly with my father that things were very complicated because the book reveals that the father of its heroine, Liora, is half Muslim. But in the in our true family story, it was my grandfather's sister who married a Muslim and there is no direct connection to my father. Incidentally, my father is also interested in our family story and together with me is looking for our relatives in Egypt."
Ayala's parents are both children of families that came from Egypt. Her mother's parents, Tony and Yitzhak Hefer were members of the Zionist underground in Alexandria. Tony lost both her father and her brother, who was killed in a Nazi bombing of the city during World War II.
After the declaration of independence of the State of Israel when Jews started to come under attack in Egypt and Zionist activists were hunted down, Tony had a typewriter in her house where she typed up pamphlets for the underground. Yitzhak was arrested after being caught with pamphlets. In 1952, he was deported to Italy and from there, he made aliyah to Israel. Tony and her relatives had to watch from a distance as he boarded the ship in handcuffs as they weren't allowed to bid him farewell.
A year later, Tony left Egypt with one suitcase and $20 in her pocket. In Israel, she was reunited with her love, and the two married and lived on Moshav Bnei Darom near Ashdod. "Every Passover until he died, grandfather Yitzhak would tell us the story of his own private exodus from Egypt. I put his stories about the heroism of the underground into the book.
"Incidentally, the heroine, Liora, doesn't like her grandmother, but I am very close to my grandmother Tony who is no 88 years old and still going strong. I would spend hours with her traveling in her memories in the alleyways of Alexandria of the 1950s. It was very special to hear from her about daily life. How much did a suit cost back then? How sent down a basket with money down on a rope from the second floor and pulled it back up with their shopping. How they would walk to school and how her mother forced her to give back money to a Muslim trader in the market after he mistakenly gave her too much change – because he is also a person and that money is his children's food."
Her father's parents, Henri and Susie Salem made aliyah to Israel from Alexandria and Cairo and met at the beginning of the 1950s in a transit camp in France. In Israel, they were sent to Rosh Pina, and later they built their home in Jerusalem. Grandfather Henri was also an activist in the Zionist underground in Cairo, while his sister, Rachelle married Salah, a Muslim.
"According to what I heard from my grandmother's sisters Rachelle and Salah were madly in love, obsessively so. He threatened that if she were to leave him, he would burn down their home," says Ayala
Ties between the family in Israel and Rachelle who remained behind were renewed in 1979 after the peace agreement with Egypt. "Thanks to Izak, Tante (Auntie in French) Zoza Auntie in French Zuza managed to reconnect with her sister in Egypt."
"My cousins who were witness to the first conversation between the two sisters after 25 years described a half-hour call during which Zoza sat and cried while she hugged the telephone. I imagine that was how Rachelle reacted on the other side of the line, in Egypt. Thanks to the peace agreement, the sisters finally managed to meet face to face after years apart. Tante Zoza traveled several times, sometimes with her children, to visit Rachelle and stay at her house in Egypt. When Zoza entered the house and Rachelle started crying, Salah said to his sister-in-law 'You have brought the sun to your sister.' It was a very emotional family reunion."
Rachelle told her sisters and nieces that she had remained faithful to her Jewish faith the whole time, and all those years had fasted on Yom Kippur, and would no eat hametz on Passover. Even though she wore a hijab, in the evenings she would wait patiently for the Voice of Israel broadcast to end for the day and play Hatikvah, the national anthem. She would whisper the Hebrew words and only then would she go to sleep.
Rachelle lived a long life and died in Egypt in 2005 at the age of 95. She and Salah had four children: Sammy, the eldest remained connected to Judaism and as a boy would go to the Eliyahu the Prophet synagogue in Alexandria; the two girls, Mona and Nadia, married Muslims but remained open to their family's Jewish. Both of them have died meanwhile of cancer. The youngest son became a radical Muslim and refused to maintain any connection with the Jewish branch of the family. For year's Zoza's girls kept in touch with Sammy, but over the past year, he has not answered their calls, and they fear he may have died.
"Since we began investigating our family history, I have been trying to obtain the phone numbers of Mona and Nadia's husbands and perhaps through them to renew the ties that have been cut off and perhaps meet their children, Rachelle's grandchildren who according to Jewish law, are Jewish.
Q: Do you have any thoughts about going to Egypt and looking for them?
"As soon as I have a lead, I will go there, and I believe that my father will come with me. Unlike Tante Zoza who spoke Arabic with her girls, and took them to visit Rachelle, I never heard grandfather Henri speak Arabic. And he certainly never told us stories about his sister Rachelle. Perhaps because he was a staunch Zionist and wanted to be part of the Israeli mainstream. All in all, he succeeded: Today, we are all totally part of the mainstream and perhaps because of that, we can no longer talk about secrets."
Ayala says she has heard similar stories of families whose daughters remained in Egypt, living with Muslim partners. "These are women whose story was never told because it remained hidden within the family.
"I heard for example, about a Jewish family who boarded a boat to leave Egypt, and at the last moment one of the daughters she was going to bring something, and then fled with her Muslim love. Another woman made aliyah to Israel with a man who was the son of a Muslim father who had hidden his identity from the son. And there was another case where a Muslim husband made aliyah to Israel, adopted his Jewish wife's surname and himself as a Jew. The common theme of all these stories is that of the secret."
Q: Are you no longer afraid to publish these secrets in public?
"I don't like secrets, and I try to bring up my children so they can ask any question and receive an honest answer. A secret is something that veils fear. I feel secure enough to conduct an open and healing dialogue. The book as well in a way heals my world and I hope that it will do so in the world at large. It gives a voice to the figures who were silenced in the past."
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The first drafts of "Home: There and Back" were created in a writing workshop held by the author Meira Barnea Goldberg, and later, in workshops held by authors Eshkol Nevo and Orit Gidali. "Thanks to those workshops and thanks to the book's editor, Orna Landau, I was not on my own during the writing process, I had someone to lean on and to help me move forward."
Q: Was Yonatan with you in the writing process, or was he also not allowed to peek at the drafts?
"Yonatan didn't want to be involved, so as to give me complete freedom of expression. He only read the book after it came out. I was really anxious about what his reaction would be but he really, really liked it."
Q: How will you react if one of your boys chooses a Muslim partner?
"That's a great question. I guess it will be very difficult for me. But if she were to be a secular Muslim and they lived a secular life in a mix of cultures, I think it wouldn't be as hard. In any event, I would hug my son. The most important thing from my perspective would be not to split up the family."
"From my perspective," says Yonatan. "The debate isn't about Muslims and Jews, but about how much we can accept the other. We live in a complex world and there is a possible a reasonable possibility that our children will meet many different people. I believe that I would be happy for them knowing that they have made their choice. Until then, the smart thing to do as a parent is to teach them about healthy love, acceptance of the other and respecting people, no matter who they are, together with a connection to the tradition of Israel and our belonging to it. All the rest is up to them."
