Alla

When I worked in Israel, there was a cleaning lady who would come in at about 4:00 every afternoon. She was responsible for our floor of offices. She was incredibly friendly and would speak to me in Russian-accented Hebrew, to which I responded in English-accented Hebrew. Sometime our vocabularies were too inept for proper communication and we would resort to hand signals. When my hand gestures failed, we would go off to find a colleague with a bigger vocabulary who could explain something to one or the other of us. It wasn't just workday vocabulary that stumped us. My office mate at the time was dying from a brain tumor and Alla would come in and look at my colleague's empty trash day after day and ask, "She didn't come again today, eh?" and I would shake my head and she would shake hers, neither of us knew what to say, even if we had known the words in Hebrew.

Alla was homesick, like me. She would talk about how she wasn't sure if she and her husband had made the right decision to move to Israel, after all they were already in their 50s when they moved. Maybe it was too late in life to try to relocate. One time she was so homesick we looked up pictures of Tashkent online, she took me on a virtual tour of the city. I'd help her look up other sites on line. She had a hard time with the internet and with reading in Hebrew. We'd stumble together over how to access bank information over the internet. For her, I was willing to try harder than usual to navigate the frustrating foreign websites. In exchange, she would bring me deep fried dumplings, cabbage salad, apple cakes. I'd save her birthday cake whenever someone had a birthday in the office.

One time she offered me salad of potatoes and beets. "This stuff my father won't eat," she said. "He lived off of nothing else for so many years with the war and then after the war. He swore to himself he'd never eat another beet again and he hasn't."

One time I came in to the kitchen and watched her dig a little yellow piece of lemon out of a jar. "This is what we used to do," she said, holding the jar up for me to see. "A lemon was such a rare thing where I come from that we would take one, chop it into tiny pieces and mix it with sugar to make it keep longer. And we would use the pieces one at a time for our tea. We were so careful with each piece. Now there are lemons all around me, and I still, for some reason like it best like this."

One afternoon I noticed several women clustered around the secretary. I went to investigate. They were fluttering and jabbering and clearly upset. One of them explained that the management of the building wanted to fire Alla. The women hypothesized that since Alla was getting older, they didn't want to pay her a pension. I was irate. "What do we do about it?" I asked.

"We are all writing letters," they said.

"I want to write a letter too, but I won't know the words. No one will understand what I mean."

"Write it in English," someone said. "English is even better. It's intimidating." So, in English I wrote my letter of recommendation for Alla. I told the management that no one worked as hard as Alla. I promised that they would never find another employee that could replace her.

Alla kept her job. I don't know if our letters helped, especially the one in a language that the management may not have read. When I told Alla I was moving back to the US, part of me felt guilty. My homesick friend was staying and I was leaving back to my soft life in the US, while she was staying to work and wonder if she had made the right decision to come to Israel. I still miss her and think of her at odd times, and hope that she was able to keep her job, that she was able to find some peace of mind about her decision to immigrate, and that she knows that thanks to her, I will never take a lemon for granted.