Page 9 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - October 19
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to receive the magazine that AJEX (Association of on Aliya to Israel and get a job there. The
Jewish Ex-servicemen) put out. I had already interesting thing is he writes from an address in
finished work a few years ago and I noticed there Kfar Vitkin.” Edith asks: “Is that where you live?”
was a request for people to send whatever they So, I started looking for him. Only the people
could as mementoes for souvenirs for their Jewish from the synagogue knew how to get in touch
Museum. I remembered that I had some things with him. Someone here had taken “rachmanus”
and looking through my stuff, I found something and had pity for him and had given him a room,
that the Jewish Museum could put up. It was a where he stayed in Kfar Vitkin. So, there was the
news sheet that the British forces in Austria grandson of the first love of my life. I managed to
printed because there was no mail and no get his telephone number. He picked up the
newspapers yet for the citizens. They used to print telephone after I rang and all I said was that if it
the news on the news sheet and the one that I kept wasn’t for WWII, I’d have been your grandfather.
featured the headlines: END OF WWII, THE I was going to finish with that story.
JAPANESE HAVE SURRENDERED. I kept Epilogue
thinking that this was a good souvenir so I sent How much more remembering can one take? Each
that to the Jewish Museum and I sent a letter day is consumed by this compulsive
saying who I was, where I’d been, my army career preoccupation with the past, a fight against
and so on. They went and printed the whole thing forgetting that gets in the way of living. Is it a
in the AJEX “iton.” I didn’t know they were going quest or an escape? A mission or an invasion?
to do this. A few weeks later a letter arrives from Have we all become slaves to memory?
Edith after a gap of seventy years and she tells me
that she joined the British army and she became a May 21 2019, Coral, Harold and Ilan (Israel)
captain in charge of weaponry and so on, and she met with Asher Tarmon at his home in Kfar
had married and had a couple of children and she Vitkin, to hear first-hand his account of a life of
began reinventing and redoing the correspondence service. This is an edited version of that
between us. I was enjoying this very much but in account. The unedited transcript of the meeting
her first letter she added a PS “My grandson is available on request from the Archives at Yad
decided after finishing school and college that Tabenkin.
since he was an expert in high-tech, he would go
*
Asher Tarmon at home
9
