Ronnie Green

2026 | 247pp pb | ISBN: 978-1-914002-67-0

It was a beautiful spring morning in May 2001. I had arrived in Tel Aviv the night before to take a week’s holiday and visit the family. I was almost 51 years old, sitting on the north-facing terrace of our room in the Sheraton hotel, built along the sea front with a row of other luxury hotels punctuating the gap between Hayarkon Street and the beach.

The smell of the salt in the air, the sea breeze and the humid heat all served to remind me of times gone by. I could hear and see the traffic below where decades before the occasional car was a luxury that belonged to other people. I looked down towards the row of other hotels and my mind began drifting back.

The gap between Hayarkon Street and the sea was a different sight then. The area was called the Machlul neighbourhood, a slum consisting of low, ramshackle sheds covered in bitumen. These housed mainly North African Jewish immigrants arriving from Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq and other Arab countries that were persecuting Jews. On the east side of this road stood a row of three-storey tenement blocks occupied mainly by European refugees, many of whom were survivors from the Holocaust. I grew up in one of those. My mother was one of the survivors.

It was a tiny ground-floor, west-facing flat on the corner of Gordon Street and Hayarkon Street. As I sat that May morning contemplating the past, I looked at our old tenement block. I recalled the tiny stone entrance hall, its green, brown and yellow pattern floor tiles still vivid in my mind. Then came the three steps leading up to our front door on the right. On the left was Mrs Halperin’s door. Two further storeys consisted of four flats, two on each floor. There was a door leading to a flat roof where my friends and I used to play and look down to what seemed like an abyss to the street below.

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