TTT Interviewee: Dalia Carmel Session #1 Interviewer: Judith Weinraub Manhattan, New York Date: September 24, 2009 Q: It’s September 24, and I’m with Dalia Carmel at her apartment on the East Side of midtown Manhattan, right here at the United Nations, where there are a lot of people right now. Good afternoon. Carmel: Good afternoon. Q: Why don’t we start with your telling me where and when you were born and a little bit about your parents and your early life. Carmel: I was born in Jerusalem, Palestine, on September 1, 1935. I was born to a Latvian mother and a Hungarian father who immigrated to Israel as physicians, as TB specialists, in the early thirties. They originally settled in Tztat, in the northern part of Israel, where there was a famous TB hospital where they both worked. Then they moved to Jerusalem, where my father practiced, being a lung physician and TB specialist. Q: Could you explain what it meant to be Palestine at that point? What did the designation of Palestine refer to? Carmel: In 1935, Israel was part of the British Empire and it was called Palestine at the time as, I think, a protectorate of the British rule. That changed in 1948, with the declaration of independence, creating the State of Israel. But my birth certificate says that I was born in Jerusalem, Palestine. So basically, I’m a Palestinian, sort of. My parents came from well-to-do-families. My father studied medicine in Hungary and in Germany, and my mother, in Latvia and in Germany. They met in Gerbersdorf, Germany, I guess as residents, and that was the beginning of their romance that brought them to Israel. My father ran a hospital in Jerusalem for TB patients during the morning and early afternoon, and then in the late afternoon, he had a private practice at home, where my mother was his assistant with the patients at home. Once I was born, she did not go to work. She returned to work when I turned sixteen. At that time, she did not go back to her specialty, but she returned to medicine and was working for the blood bank as a hematologist. She was a terrific cook and a terrific baker. In view of the fact my father was a Hungarian and a rather controlling Hungarian, like so many Hungarians are, so the cuisine was basically Hungarian, except on the days where he was ensconced in the hospital and on big laundry days, where the laundress used to come to the house. At that time, my mother would make Russian food. Q: Like what? Carmel: Like cabbage soup, like borscht. Those were the dishes that we had that would last a good two days and they were good. When the laundress would come and stand there in the kitchen and scrub the sheets and the towels and then run up to the sixth floor, to the roof, to hang them. It was a different life. Q: What about the Hungarian food? What was that like? Carmel: Hungarian food was terrific. My mother used to make a lot of goulash and pot roast and chicken paprikash and the most marvelous creamed leezo and Nockerl and palacsinta, and she used to make her own fruit jams. Q: Oh, my. Carmel: And she used to make homemade noodles that she would cook with mun, little poppy seeds. Q: Mun, yes, poppy seeds. Carmel: And she was a fabulous soup maker and a fabulous baker. She made apple schnitten and linzer torta and cookies and challah. Really, she was exceptionally good in the kitchen. When I was young, I was extremely thin, almost as if I was deprived of food. Q: But you were tall early? Carmel: I was tall early. I was thin. I was tall, stretched out, and concave. [laughter] And in order to fight that, my father used to bring once a week, I think a gallon jar of fresh sour cream from the farm that was located near the hospital where he worked, and this was to fatten me up. Then my father also took care of a famous Arab Bey, who lived in Jericho. He used to go once a week to Jericho to take care of him. He would travel on the Sabbath and we would sometimes go with him and go and visit Bey Dayani.d They would send with us back, I don’t know how you call it, a whole thing of bananas. Q: A stalk, I guess. Carmel: The whole thing. So that I should eat the whole thing by the next week, so that I should be fattened up. [laughter] Q: Not possible. Carmel: Well, I guess it wound up being helpful, you know, to my fat cells, because you can see where I’m at. [laughter] Q: What size were your parents? Carmel: They were normal. Q: Were they tall? Carmel: They were tall, but I think at some point my mother was slightly taller than my father, maybe because of small heels that she wore or maybe because he shrunk. But I was taller than the two of them. I have one photograph where I’m taller. But they were already a little older. Don’t forget that they were not young parents, by any means. Q: They were older parents? Carmel: Yeah, they were older parents, which is a situation I do not recommend. Q: How old were they? Carmel: You know something, I don’t know, but I think they were in their late thirties. My father had no patience for children, for noise. So we never went to the beach. We never played. Everything had to be quiet. And he was Hungarian, so. [laughter] Q: Right. Q: Were your parents kosher? Carmel: No, but my mother came from a very Orthodox family, none of whom I ever met, but I was told that they were Orthodox. My father didn’t come from an Orthodox family, and we did not keep kosher. But they sent me to a British school which was Orthodox, an Orthodox British school in Jerusalem. They served us lunch, which was kosher. We had to pray morning, noon. I didn’t appreciate that one bit. Especially as we kept kosher in school, and when I came home we had pork for lunch. We would have lunch and I would ask, “What is this?” “Oh, this is chicken.” Every day was chicken. One day I said, “You know, yesterday was chicken, today is chicken. Doesn’t look the same.” My father said to my mother in German, thinking that I don’t understand, saying, “You know, she’s getting older and she’s realizing the difference in what we’re eating.” So I told her, I said, “Tell me, so what is it?” “This was rabbit.” So the combination of Orthodox in school and free at home with goulash with sour cream and— Q: Why did they send you to this school? Carmel: First of all, when I started elementary school, I started very early because I was very tall. The kindergarten didn’t want me anymore; I was too tall. Also I had—I don’t think that she was a nanny; I think she was a cook or something. She taught me how to read Hebrew and English. So I was bored in kindergarten. So I went to school. I was just about five years old, and I wasn’t socially ready for mixed company of boys and girls, so I was always having problems with the boys because my mother made me—you know, everything was so prissy, with bows and ribbons and “Don’t get dirty.” So the British school was all girls, so it was safer, and in that school you learned manners, which you didn’t learn in the other schools, and manners were more important than information. [It] was so retarded, they kept the entire school an extra year. They froze the school. But being that I had left, I managed to go to the next grade, provided I took some tests, because, let me tell you, we did not learn anything besides to say “please” and “thank you.” One of the things that I always laughed about was, when I went to the high school I was one semester late. The War of Independence broke in the middle, so I missed the whole first semester, so I was now not only retarded information-wise, I missed a whole semester. So the headmaster of the high school was willing to test me. So we were in his office and he makes me look at a world map, and he says to me, “Show me where Germany is.” “I don’t know.” In school we had the maps of England in every class, and England was from the floor to the ceiling. It didn’t even show that it was a real island. So where the hell is Germany? I knew England. I knew how many knives were made in Sheffield. [laughter] But what’s the relationship of this map to the world? So I looked at the map and I remembered that my father, during the Second World War, was playing with pins and he was moving pins. There was one area that I figured this must be Germany. [laughter] Q: One area where there were lots of pins? Carmel: Yeah. So this is how the school— Q: But were you right? Carmel: I was right, yeah. [laughter] But the extent of lack of knowledge of information was so tremendous. For instance, he asked me, “If somebody is very poor and has to take a loan, what does he pay back the bank?” So I said, “This is such a stupid question. If he doesn’t have any money, how can he pay back?” [laughter] And he says to me, “Haven’t you heard of interest?” There’s a word in Hebrew, ribit de ribit. “Never heard that.” So he took me on. He accepted me to go to school on condition that by the end of the year I will have to take the exams that other kids take at the end of the previous year. But I finished the year with first prizes in mathematics, in French, in geography, in God knows what. I came with all the prizes. I knocked on the door. I said, “So give me the date for the next test.” [laughter] So that’s how I moved from the British system to the Israeli system. Q: Where was this school? Carmel: In Ramat Gan. We moved from Jerusalem to Ramat Gan in—what month was it? At the end of the first armistice of the War of Independence, whenever that was. We moved first to Jaffa, to a hospital by the beach, which was exactly what TB patients needed. [laughs] Then we found an apartment someplace in Ramat Gan. I went to school in Ramat Gan and finished high school in Ramat Gan. Then I was too young to go to the army, and my parents wouldn’t sign me off to go to the army with my class mates because I was too young. Q: How old did you have to be, eighteen? Carmel: Eighteen. I was sixteen and a half. So my father decided it will be a good idea if I go work in the Foreign Office. Q: Hey, that’s a leap. [laughs] Carmel: He had a friend that ran the archives in the Foreign Office. He spoke to him and they agreed to bring me in for an interview to the head of the personnel department. [laughs] The Personnel Manager says to me, “But Dalia, I can’t hire you. You’re too young to be an employee and you’re too old to be a trainee.” So I said, “What’s the age have to do with anything?” He says to me, “How am I going to pay you?” I said, “Pay me? One only pays the cleaning ladies.” Q: Why did you think that? Carmel: I don’t know. I didn’t think that anybody else was getting any money. So he said, “You want to work for nothing?” I said, “I don’t know how to work. Why would you pay me? I don’t know to do anything.” So he took me on and I worked there for about ten months, having a wonderful time. I did whatever I wanted. [laughter] Whatever I wanted. They assigned me to work with somebody. I didn’t like him because he used to scratch his balls, then I’m not working for him. No way. So they assigned me to somebody else. I said, “I don’t work for him because he always peeps under my skirt when I’m up on the ladder. No way.” [laughter] It was good to be young. Then it was time to go to the army. I joined the army on May 3, 1953. I served in the army two years in compulsory service and a year and some in regular service. In the army I was the secretary of the Chief of Intelligence. Q: How did that happen? Was that in part because you had had some work experience before? Carmel: Number one, the fact that I had a little work experience. Number two, because I spoke, read, and wrote both Hebrew and English, and I also spoke German and I read German, but I didn’t know German. To this day I don’t know German. I know how to read because I can read the Latin letters, but no other reason. In high school I learned French and I was pretty good at it, so I could also dabble in French. So that was something that they wanted. I also knew how to type both Hebrew and English. We were three girls in training camp that wanted to go to the intelligence and they let us go. One was a British girl, who was one of my best friends from the time that we boarded the truck that took us to training camp. She was slightly older and looked totally foreign to the group of girls on this cow truck. This was a truck without any seats or anything. You carry cows to market with that. We became very friendly. She spoke some Hebrew and very good English and French and German and Italian and Spanish. So she was grabbed to work in the army censorship. She hated it. She hated it. Q: What was army censorship? What were they censoring? Carmel: To read all the soldiers’ letters. Q: Before they received them? Carmel: No, before they sent them. She hated it. She was so bored. Because she spoke all these languages and read all these languages, she could go through the mails. She hated it. Because of my English and my ability to type English, I was being torn apart between various departments that wanted my services. So I was working for the Commander of Intelligence, from eight to five, and then everybody else wanted me to come and type and translate and do. So one of the people that was doing that was the head of the Armistice Commission, Ariel Shalev. He used to come and pick me up and take me to his office, and I would sit and type and translate or what have you, and then he would bring me back either home or to the camp. We did it night after night. It was, you know, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock at night, and I was exhausted. I guess the U.N. was in session at that time. They were busy with stuff on the borders. There was lots of infiltrators on the borders in those days. As we were driving along Shalev asked me, “Dalia, do you know anybody else that I could possibly get to do the job? I said, “Yes! Turn left here.” [laughs] Eleven o’clock at night. My friend Maureen was staying at an apartment down the road with a friend that was guarding her pregnancy. I run upstairs. I get her wearing a robe her hair in rollers. I say, “Come down. I’ve got a new boss for you.” And she said, “Not yet. You know I’m with rollers.” I said, “Come on. It’s dark. Nobody will see.” Ariel Shalev had rotten teeth, black rotten teeth. I guess he was afraid of the dentist. So I introduced them at night and the next day she was transferred to his office, so I had some freedom. But the army days, some of them were a lot of fun. Some of them I paid dearly afterwards. But that’s what life is all about. Q: You paid dearly afterwards because of the results of the Lavon Affair? Carmel: Because of the Lavon Affair, yeah. Q: Could you explain that? Because that is complicated. Carmel: It is so complicated. One must have the patience. Q: Why don’t you explain what the Lavon Affair was, first of all. Carmel: Well, that’s the complication. Q: You mean that people are not sure? Carmel: In 1954, orders were given to the commander of a unit of young [Jewish] kids who were Egyptians who lived in Cairo and Alexandria. He was given an order to activate the unit in Egypt. The idea was to plant bombs in American and British facilities which they would think the American and British facilities would be the target, to prove that that the Egyptians are really not capable of running the Suez Canal, which was going to be nationalized at that time. Israel was afraid that with the Suez Canal being in Egyptian hands, we wouldn’t be able to use that maritime passage for our shipping. Now, the group had a local commander that used to travel back and forth from Israel and there used to be somebody else that was located in Egypt. When they placed incendiaries in an Alexandria movie house, the incendiary exploded in the pocket of one of the guys and he was caught and then the rest of the group was caught. When the information came to Israel, no commander would take responsibility. “I didn’t give the order. I didn’t give the order.” Lavon was at the time the Minister of Defense. He’s the one that allegedly okayed the action in Egypt. But he denied it. He said he never heard of it. So in view of the fact that this was such an important event, there was one investigative committee chaired by the ex-chief of staff, Yaakov Dori, and the head of the Supreme Court of Israel, Jacov Olshan. So the Olshan-Dori Committee sat and investigated the matter and they couldn’t find exactly who was responsible for this fiasco. But for that committee, the officer that was in charge of the unit in Egypt came to me and said, “You will do anything for your boss and you don’t do anything for me.” That was at the time when Ariel Shelev would grab me to type for him over there. So I said, “I do whatever time I have in the day. I’m in the army. I do anything.” So he took me to his office and gave me stuff to alter. Q: What kind of stuff? Carmel: There were telexes, you know, the stuff that was from his files, being that this was not material that I worked with, I don’t remember what was what. But there was one document that came from my files. It was a copy of a letter from the head of the intelligence to the then chief of staff, Moshe Dayan, who was abroad, who was in the United States at that time. The letter was two pages, and in the second page, this officer told me to add a paragraph at the beginning that read “according to instructions of Lavon, the unit was activated.” What was written there before I changed that, I don’t remember. The reason why I remember that so well after so many years is that he placed the paragraph where it just didn’t fit. But that officer was so dumb. Later on as an adult, I saw that the 20/20 eyesight should have been better at that point. Q: Go ahead. Carmel: Where was I? Q: You were talking about the alteration of the document. Carmel: Oh yes. I remembered because it was added in the wrong context. It would stick out to anybody reading it. This document with the other documents were presented to the Olshan-Dori Committee, and the results were that they couldn’t establish who gave the order, if it was Lavon or somebody else. This was in 1954, the end of ’54, beginning of ’55. In ’55, the army decided to send me away to England, so I was sent to England to work in the Israeli embassy for two years. I came back, I worked for a little while in the foreign office, and then I went to work for Levi Eshkol, who was Minister of Finance, for whom I worked until September 4, 1960. On September 16, 1960, the Lavon Affair exploded, where Lavon decided that he wants to clear his name, that he had proof that witnesses were perjured. Perjured? Q: Committed perjury. Carmel: Perjury, and that there were forgeries and perjuries, and so he started the whole Pandora box. So that’s the Lavon Affair. That’s why it’s called the Lavon Affair. The situation in ’54 was the mishap, security mishap, in 1960 started the Lavon Affair that went for years investigated by the attorney general, Gideon Hausner. Later a Ministerial Committee of 7, appointed by David Ben Gurion. Q: When you say you paid dearly, what do you mean? Carmel: I basically left the country because there was no point in being there. There was just no point in being there. Q: You mean that you agreed to go to England? Carmel: No. From England I came back to Israel and I worked for Eshkol for three years. Q: So what did you do then, when there was no point in being there? Carmel: First I sent to work for the State of Israel Bonds, which was a total bore. Then I went to work for the Israel Students Organization. In the morning I worked for the New York section. In the afternoon I worked for the international section. That lasted for four, five months, and then I went to work for El Al. See, part of my problem was that, first of all, I was, I guess, fairly pretty, tall, intelligent, and when I walked into a room, you noticed me just because I was six foot tall. The people around were sure that I had an affair with the Chief of Intelligence, which I did not. When I came to give evidence regarding the altered document, I said I was convinced by the other officer Motke Benzur to alter the documents. So the idea was that because I was in love with [Benjamin] Gilvi, the Chief of Intelligence, I’m covering up on him and blaming this other officer. Q: But that was not true. Carmel: So that’s chapter one. Chapter two, it’s like literally regurgitating. I was interrogated by [Gideon] Hausner, the guy that interrogated Eichmann in Paris in December of 1960, and I asked for permission to—I wanted to go back to Israel to tell my parents that I’m the one that is being written about, though nobody’s name was published in the papers. So the nicknames--I was “the secretary” and somebody else was the chief officer and the other one was the officer in reserves and so on, so I wanted my parents to know that it was me. So I organized a trip to Israel. I requested to continue from Paris and Israel, but in the press, it came out that Hausner made me return to Israel. In Israel, Hausner organized a police investigation. Q: About? Carmel: About the alterations of the documents. They didn’t believe what I was saying. They didn’t believe what I was saying. So leave me alone. Q: They didn’t believe that you were told to alter the documents? Carmel: They didn’t believe that it was done. In a confrontation between the Reserve Officer and me, the officer who had asked me to alter the documents said “I don’t know what she’s talking about.” So he’s a man and he’s a lieutenant colonel, and I was only a sergeant major, so the word stands by the man who has the higher rank. So they didn’t believe me. “You don’t believe me, let me go home. I’m not going to fight.” I wanted to hit him, but I was not going to do that. So I had taken a valium in me so that I don’t carry on. So the gossip was that I had an—the whole country was talking that I had an affair with the head of the intelligence. Now I said, “I want to tell the lawyer of the Chief of Intelligence, I want to tell him exactly what I said so that he will know how to deal with the picture.” The chief of intelligence agreed to drive me to his lawyer. So off we go. At that time I had a boyfriend. The boyfriend was married. I sent him a Telex from Paris saying that “I’m coming to Israel on such-and-such a flight and my parents don’t know that I’m coming. Would you come and meet me at the airport?” I get to the airport at three o’clock in the morning. I’m the only person going through the airport, not one other passenger, nobody, and I’ve got a bottle of Valpolicella for my boyfriend, and he’s nowhere to be seen. There’s an AP reporter that hangs out at the airport, you know. He’s following me all over the place. As I was the sole passenger arriving, I had to hitch a ride. There was nobody. First of all, I had no money, and there was no transportation. There was no bus. There was nothing at three o’clock in the morning with no passengers at the airport. So I managed to get to Tel Aviv. As Eshkol was in Tel Aviv on that night, and so I go to him at his hotel . I told him that, “I want to tell the lawyer.” He said, “Let me ask the Minister of Justice if it’s appropriate.” I said, “I don’t care if it’s appropriate or not. I feel that it’s my duty to do that. Because of all the gossip, I want the lawyer to know exactly what I said.” So off I go to Haifa to the lawyer. Now, remember, the boyfriend never showed up at the airport. Q: I remember. [laughs] Carmel: And I never heard from him, nothing. I get to the lawyer’s office, and he’s in a meeting, and I’m waiting and waiting. It’s Friday and I’m waiting, I’m waiting. I want to go home. I’m tired. I’m tired of life. I’m tired of everything. The meeting ends and out comes my boyfriend, who was in a meeting with the lawyer. “Hello. What are you doing here?” I sat with the lawyer and filled him in on what I told Hausner. He’s a married guy. I can’t say, “How come you didn’t come to get me?” So he leaves, and all I want to do is sit and cry, and I can’t. So I sit with the lawyer and tell him what had gone by. When I sat with Eshkol, Eshkol waited until it was Shabbat, so he figured that I will not be able to get to Haifa, because there’s no train and no bus. With the Shabbat coming in, I left to go to Haifa. On the way back, we’re driving like a bat out of hell, and on the road I see the chief accountant of the Ministry of Defense. I said, “[unclear]. I mean, [unclear]. He saw me. He called Eshkol. I come home. My father says, “Eshkol called already ten times. You did go to Haifa?” I said, “I told you I’m going to Haifa, and when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.” Now, to add complication to this life, Eshkol was in love with me. Q: That does add complications. How old was he? Carmel: 1960. Wait a minute. I don’t remember all these dates. I don’t remember. I think he was in his sixties. Q: Did he act on it? Carmel: Oh, he tried hard. He ultimately proposed to me. He ultimately proposed to me, but when my boyfriend came to Jerusalem to meetings and so on, Eshkol was carrying on like a lunatic. I mean, it was impossible to work. One day I came to work and Eshkol wasn’t talking to me. So at one day, second day he didn’t talk to me. Third day he didn’t talk to me. On the fifth day, I came in early. He was sitting and reading the paper. I crumbled the paper and said, “Either talk to me or I’m quitting right now.” “I have nothing to say.” I crumpled the paper. I said, “What did Dr. Arnon,” who was the Director General of the Ministry, “tell you about me that is bothering you, which is none of your business? None of your business. What is bothering you?” “Is it true that you have an affair with so-and-so?” So I said, “Yes.” So he said, “What do you do together?” I said, “Read the Bible.” [laughter] “If anything happens, will you let me know?” I said, “I promise. Can we start working?” I mean, the office of the Minister of Finance is closed because he’s jealous of a secretary. You know, this is a kindergarten. But it made my life extremely crowded. [laughter] Extremely crowded. [unclear] was sure that I had an affair with Givli. My boyfriend wasn’t sure if I did or didn’t, so he always sort of needled me on that. He was sure that everybody go to hell, and I’d go away. [Passages about her personal life as well as rumors about it deleted by Carmel.] Q: Were you living alone or with your family? Carmel: No, at that point I was living alone. I was living in Jerusalem in a hole. But it was interesting. Q: So how did you resolve all of this? Carmel: Oh, god, how did I resolve all this? So, number one, the police did not believe me, what I was saying. Number two, I had to get away from all these men, married men too. No, Eshkol was widowed at that time. But I had to get away from all of them. In 1967 was the Six-Day War. Eshkol was Prime Minister, and Jerusalem was taken, and I decided to go visit Israel. No, I have to backtrack again. In ’65, I tried to get this resolved by meeting with a very famous Haganah person, Shaoul Avigur, was a close friend of Ben Gurion, and to go to him with all the proof that I had so that he would convince Ben Gurion and they will stop haranguing. I mean, the thing is that Ben Gurion did not believe that the army would do forgeries and perjuries. You know, it was his holy child. So I went to Vienna to meet Shaoul Avigur, and I brought him copies of handwritten letters from the Chief of Intelligence, writing me sort of like love letters saying that if there’d be a renewed investigation, if I change my— Q: Testimony? Carmel: —testimony and deny what I said before, he will come to visit me in America. Hello? All I needed was one more man in my life. So at the end of the letter, he wrote, “Please destroy the letter after reading.” And I decided, “Buddy, I’ve grown up.” So he wrote a second letter, that he didn’t hear from me, he’s worried, and the third letter he’s even more worried. Then I sent him a letter back that quoted Kipling’s poem, If. “If you were a man, my son,” and after that, I never heard from him again. But I had the copies of the letters, both his and mine, and I went with that to Shaoul Avigur. Shaoul took the copies and brought them to Ben Gurion, and he said, “These are love letters. Why are you bringing me love letters?” So he didn’t trust it. So now in 1967, after the Six-Day War, I came to Israel to visit. At that point Eshkol was married to a mousey lady. Q: Where were you living? Carmel: Here in America. I’ve been here since September 1960. Q: And now it’s ’67. Carmel: And now it’s ’67. Somehow during the time that I was there, the wife of President Ben Zvi wrote a letter to David Ben Gurion in response to greetings for her birthday or something. A whole page in the newspaper. [laughs] And mentioning me, you know, that I was involved and the letters. So Shaoul calls me and he says, “Did you read today’s newspaper?” I said, “No, I don’t bother with newspapers. I stopped reading newspapers a long time ago.” So he said, “I want you to read the newspaper.” So I went to get the newspapers, and, oh, god almighty. I mean, a full page went on and on and on and on. So Shaol says to me, “I have a question to you. Are you willing to meet with Ben Gurion?” So I said to him, “You know, emotionally speaking, it’s a wonderful idea. Logically speaking, it’s a waste of time. But I always go on the emotions. Let’s go.” So we went that evening. He organized it. We went to meet Ben Gurion..”You know, and he says to me, “I know of your relationship with that man. There was a that man and there was a this man.” And I had no idea what the delineation was. Who was that man, and who was this man? And I said to him, “Mr. Ben Gurion, I had relationships with all kinds of men. It’s none of your business. Do you want to hear what I have to say? Fine. If you don’t, let’s part ways.” In that one minute, I had no respect for the guy, none whatsoever. And I told him how I forged. I said to him, “I want you to know that when you work in the intelligence, whatever you do, you have to do as perfectly as possible.” So the fact that the police couldn’t ascertain that it was forged is because I did a good job. And I was not a professional forger; I just thought out what I was doing so the technical side will not pop up right away to indicate that it’s an alteration. The content side, as I told you, that paragraph popped in anybody’s eyes. So I was shooting my arrows at Ben Gurion, and off I went home, and, for me, the affair was finished. But I also didn’t want to live in Israel. Q: In Israel? Carmel: In Israel. Everything was everybody’s business. There is one incident that I remember that really made my—two incidents—made my blood boil. The one incident was when I first came to Israel right after the interrogations in Paris, and the atmosphere in our home was—you could cut the air. My father yelled, “Why did you do it? Why did you do it?” “So I did it, you know. Why did I do it?”
 “Why didn’t you come to discuss it with me?” So we went to visit an old patient of his, a woman that I love dearly, and we’re sitting and talking and talking and having coffee and cake and what have you, and all of a sudden the subject of the Lavon Affair came up, and she says, “You know, I heard from our neighbor that the secretary of the Lavon Affair came to Israel yesterday, and he says she’s such a prostitute. He knows she slept with so many people,” and she went on and on and on, and I was relishing the story, because I didn’t know who the people that she was talking about. Then I looked at my father, and he was going to get a heart attack. So I said, “[unclear], calm down. Calm down. I’m the secretary. Calm down.” But that was one incident that, you know, when do you stop it? Another one was during the Six-Day War when I went to Israel, I was asked by American Express, who were coming out with a brochure about Israel, and knowing that I did photography, they asked me if I could possibly photograph their Mercedes bus, a tourist bus that went from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and vice versa. So I said, “Well, it’s a little difficult to go chase a bus. With whom do I talk to make an appointment with a bus?” So they told me where to go, which travel agency to go in Tel Aviv, and I go there. I have a carte de visite that says “Dalia Carmel, photographer,” and the head of the travel agency says to me, “I know you.” I’ve never met him before. He says to me, “You don’t remember, but I interrogated you at the D_____ Hotel.” I wasn’t there. I never saw the man. Q: Strange. Carmel: So I said to him, “I wonder, was I drugged? Was I brought to the D____ Hotel in a coffin drugged?” Then I said, “You know, I really came to find out where can I meet the bus. I’m not interested in any of your comments.” So for everything that you had to do, you had to go through shenanigans of the Lavon Affair. You know, let me be. Q: Let me ask you something. Did you envision any kind of professional future for yourself at that point, I mean any specific one? No? What was your expectation about life, that you would stay working here and maybe get married? Carmel: I was literally floating. I would go to the opera. I would go to concerts. I would enjoy life, and who knows what will happen later. No, that whole event in my life, although interesting, it sure has muddled my life. So once I was working for El Al, it provided me with travel, it provided me with some security of the— Q: This was El Al in New York? Carmel: Yes. Q: Doing what? Carmel: Running the claims department. But even there, I remember sitting at the general manager’s office and discussing some claim, and I saw the newspaper on his window. I said, “Can I see the newspaper?” It was the Hebrew [unclear] paper where on the second part of the bottom part of the first page, there was Shaoul Avigur meeting the secretary in Vienna, and our meeting was supposed to be totally secret. So I stormed out of the office. I was a wild woman. I was a wild woman. You know, this was a man that supposedly I could trust, and you couldn’t trust a sausage around, it was so bad. However, it went on and on and on, and if you look at all the press to this day. Q: When did you come back to New York? Carmel: In ’67. I was there only for two or three weeks. The only time I stayed there longer --a year was from ’68 to ’69--was because my parents were sick and passed away. Q: So there you were, you were working at El Al and meeting people, having a life that you enjoyed in New York? Carmel: Yes. Q: Were you cooking at all? Carmel: Yes, I learned to cook. I had to. When I moved to New York, I got an apartment, a studio, on East 35th Street, and I went to Woolworth and I bought a set of one-ply aluminum pots, and I started to cook. My first dishes ever were chicken curry, rice, and stone soup. [laughs] Q: Oh, my. Carmel: And soup that nothing ever came of it. That’s when I started to buy cookbooks, so that I could learn how to cook. Living alone, I used to cook every weekend. I would make a meatloaf. I think by the time I met Herb, I could have built the Washington Bridge. [laughter] Q: With meatloaf? Carmel: With meatloaf. Both levels. Q: Did you enjoy the cooking at all? Carmel: I loved cooking. What I used to do on Saturday afternoon, Saturday morning I would go to the supermarket. I would buy whatever I fancied there, and I would come home, turn the Met opera broadcast on in the radio, every radio in the apartment, and start cooking. By the time the opera ended, all of a sudden I had food for twenty. So I used to call the neighbors to join in in the feast, because there was no way I could eat all that I cooked, with the tiny, tiny kitchen with my one-ply pots. Q: Do you remember which cookbooks you used at that point? Carmel: I used one—I think it was an international U.N. fundraiser. In that book there was a recipe for pot roast, a Sri Lankan pot roast, and the reason why I used that was that one of my colleagues gave me a recipe for a Jewish pot roast, and when I went to do the cooking, I couldn’t find where I wrote the recipe. So I didn’t want to call her again. I was embarrassed. She was having company. So I decided I would look and whatever I had in—I had this cookbook that I was given by my orthopedist’s wife. Q: What was it? Carmel: The International U.N.— Q: Oh, I see, that was the cookbook. Carmel: And the cookbook, the Sri Lankan recipe, I didn’t have to go out and buy anything for it. It was definitely non-kosher. I think it was cooked in milk. When I finished the cooking, I mean, I had to sear it and cook it and take it out and then braise it, and then take it out and then do something with a sauce and then take it out and it went back and forth. But when I finished cooking, it was too late to eat it. So I put it in the refrigerator, and I went to call my colleague from work who gave me the original pot roast, and I said, “Rosalee, tomorrow you’re coming to dinner. But bring Tums for dessert, because whatever I did was very spicy.” She said to me, “You wanted some information? I asked the guests that I had,” and I opened the notebook next to the telephone to write down the information, there was the recipe. [laughter] Q: Oh, my. Carmel: So I said, “Oh, well, too late.” So that was delicious. But I used to cook a lot and do a lot of meals with a couple of neighbors. Q: Did you buy more cookbooks as time went on? Carmel: All of a sudden, I got a mailing from the cookbook club, to the occupant of apartment 2A. So the occupant started buying books from the cookbook club, you know, The Art of Hungarian and The Art of Lebanese and The Art of Middle East and The Art of— Q: So they would send like one a month or something, and you would send it back if you didn’t want it? Carmel: Yes. Actually, you had to send in a card saying that you do not want the mailing, otherwise it was automatic. Being that I went a lot to Carnegie Hall, there were remaindered bookstores on the way. There was one on Third Avenue and 55th Street. There was one on 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh. I left work at five, and the concert started at eight. I mean, those days I didn’t go to have dinner and have a drink, I used to go browse in books. So that’s where I started collecting, collecting, and little by little, they added up. Q: Now, at that point, you were living by yourself in a what kind of apartment? Carmel: Yes, in a studio. Q: In a studio apartment. Did you continue to live there until you got married? Carmel: Until I got married. Q: Tell me about how you met your husband. Carmel: I originally met Herb Goldstein in Israel when he came to meetings with Eshkol. He was the head of the Sunol Company. Q: Of the Sunol Company. Herb was? Carmel: Yes. He had business dealings with the Ministry of Finance, so that’s where I met him. He was tall, very tall, very formal, crew cut, bowtie, rimless glasses, very formal, and, “Hello, hello.” Before I left for the United States I asked him, I said, “Mr. Goldstein, I’m going to New York. Where do I meet tall men?” [laughter] And he answered, “Go work in the Tall Men’s Shop.” He didn’t say, “Wait eighteen years. I’ll be around.” And eighteen years later, I met him in the street on Third Avenue and 48th Street, and, “Hello, hello.” He remembered me. I— Q: You were still working for El Al? Carmel: I was working for El Al. As a matter of fact, I was running to a conference of the airlines, and I was running late, so I was running in order to get home, and I bumped into him running. I thought his name was Al, and told him I worked for El Al. I have no time to talk. So he called me at El Al, and we had lunch, and he was so formal. Boring. Q: His wife was what? Carmel: She was sick at the time. She had lymphoma. This was in April of ’77 when I met him, March, April ’77, and I think she passed away the end of that year. Then I met him again after I sent—his secretary asked me to send a Telex to the general manager of El Al in London who was a close friend of his, which I did, to tell him that the wife had passed away, and he called to thank me and to invite me for dinner. I said, “No, no, no.” That lunch was so boring. [laughter] Q: You didn’t say that to him, did you? Carmel: No, no. So I said, “One day when you stay in the city, we’ll go and have a drink.” Q: He lived in the suburbs. Carmel: He lived in New Jersey, in Elizabeth. He came into town. We had dinner. [laughs] He came to the house. I had to pick something up in my apartment, and it became rather late, and I wanted to go to a restaurant called Raga, which was a very fancy Indian restaurant. By the time we got to the restaurant, it was a bit after nine. It was pretty late on a working day, and the maître d’ wanted us to sit there. I said, “No, I want to sit there.” “That, too big a table.” “I don’t care. I don’t want to sit there. I want to sit there.” So Herb thought, well, she’s a crazy woman. At the next table to where I wanted to sit, Zubin Mehta was sitting with the director of the Israel Philharmonic. So I wanted to hear what they were talking about. [laughs] So Herb said at the time that this was almost the last time that he saw me, until he realized what was going on, because he was always an eavesdropper, listening to other conversations, so he realized that this is what I wanted to do. Q: Which, however, brings up a point. Did you cook for him at all during this semi-courting period? Carmel: Yes. Did I cook for him? I don’t remember. I remember going to his apartment in New Jersey where he invited some guests, and I was cooking dinner. I cooked and I was totally surprised that he was going to do the dishes. I never saw a man do dishes. And he said to me, “You worked. Now it’s my turn.” Fine. I got used to it pretty fast. [laughter] We were a good team, because I would cook one course and go to sit down to have a cigarette, and he would come to do the cleanup in between, and I would start the next course. We were a very good team. He loved my cooking and he loved leftovers. Q: Oh, how unusual. How wonderful. Carmel: Especially with stews and roasts, he loved soups. He loved soup. I have a nice story on soups. My mother was terrific on cooking soups, and I never got any recipe from her. We didn’t get along five minutes in the same room. So how do I cook? How do I cook what she cooked? Because she was fabulous. So I remembered when I was in elementary school, I was six, seven years old, on my way to school, she would ask me to stop at the butcher and to ask the butcher to prepare me a shpitzen brust. Q: Which is? Carmel: A shpitzen brust? I don’t know. On my way back home, I had to come and pick up the shpitzen brust and bring it home. Then a day or two later, there was this wonderful aroma in the house, and there was this wonderful soup. So now the question is what is shpitzen brust? Q: Were they bones or— Carmel: No, it was meat. So I asked in the office all the mothers and the older women, “What do you do? It’s a meat soup. What is it?” Q: So they told me buy [unclear], buy short ribs, buy long ribs. I bought everything. I made soups. They were good. It was not that soup. So I decided, I’ll do some research. So I call a butcher on 86th Street, and I started the conversation, “Do you speak German?” [laughs] I said, “If I come to you and I ask you for shpitzen brust, what are you going to sell me?” So one butcher came back and said, “The second cut of the brisket.” I called another butcher and he said, “The first cut of the brisket.” So I went to my Italian butcher and I bought the whole brisket. I never saw a brisket in my life. Q: That’s a big piece of meat for soup. Carmel: I cut the triangle, what I guess they call the first cut, and put it in the pot with all the vegetables that I read in the cookbook, because I didn’t know what my mother put in there. And I’ll never forget it. I went to take a shower, and I came out. Bingo. That’s the aroma. That’s the soup. And it is a divine, divine, divine, divine soup. As a matter of fact, I gave the recipe to Arthur Schwartz who included it in his Soup Suppers book, and Andy—I don’t remember his second name. He was the chef of the Sign of the Dove. He used that soup as a base for his onion soup. But that’s a soup. So for Herb I would do all kinds of soups, and he used to say, “Remember, you made the stew and I want that stew.” Very often I couldn’t because if there was any leftover, I would leave in the freezer, and I would add it in later, and how could you repeat, you know? Who knows what was in the previous leftover. But he was a wonderful customer. Q: When did you start to live together or get married? Carmel: We started living together in July of ’78, I think July 1st, and we got married on August 27th. Q: By that time, had your cookbook buying habit become even greater? Carmel: When I moved, I had two small racks, metal racks, of books, about this height, and in each one there were records, the wider shelf the records, and the rest was cookbooks. So there must have been a hundred cookbooks, which were the cookbooks I actually used. I didn’t read them for the joy of reading a cookbook. I would use them. If I wanted to do an osso bucco, I’d pick one of the books up to see how to do it, because whenever we had company, I would always make things that I never made before. I mean, I had the audacity of using my guests as, how do you call it, guinea pigs. Q: Good for you. Did you continue to work for El Al? Carmel: Yes. I worked all the way, yes. Yes. What happened also at work, it was funny. I used to cook a lot on Saturday and Sunday, and if something was really came out terrific, having a recipe from a cookbook which I embellished it on my own, I would write it down, and type it in the office, and make ten copies and keep it in an envelope, because colleagues always came along and said, “Dalia, I have to make dinner, give me an idea or a recipe.” So I would say, “Go to the drawer, take the envelope that says vegetable soup, entree, whatever, and pick whatever you fancy.” On holidays, very often more than one of my colleagues at work used to make the brisket. Not the brisket soup, but the brisket which I got. I got the recipe from Annie, from Annie the— Q: Annie Stern. Carmel: Annie Stern, yes. Q: Why don’t you tell me who Annie Stern was and how you met her. Carmel: Annie Stern. Annie and George Stern were actually friends of Herb’s, and he knew them from Haifa, because he had lived in Haifa. Q: He had lived in Haifa, for work? Carmel: Yes. When he was stationed in Israel, he was working, he lived in Haifa. Herb was not good in keeping relations going, and he didn’t like to talk on the phone, and he didn’t write notes. One day we went to a Czech restaurant on 72nd Street. All of a sudden, somebody started yelling, “Hey, Herb, Herb, Herb.” There was Annie, and Annie was a very effervescent, outgoing, wonderful, gorgeous, gorgeous lady. Herb introduced me, and we sort of hit it off, and being that we lived at 300 East 40th Street and she lived at 300 East 34th Street, it was really very close by. So from time to time I would pop in and visit her, and she was always gracious and always, “Come for coffee. Come for cake. Come for soup. Come.” She always had goodies, always. Q: They were both Israelis? Carmel: They were basically Czech. Q: They were Czech who had— Carmel: Who had moved to Israel, then to New York City. Then one day I was visiting Herb, being that I promised her to bring her some dried fruits and nuts from the Lower East Side, so I went to deliver it with Herb. Unbeknownst to me, she was playing bridge. So I didn’t want to stop their game, and it was sort of embarrassing, she stopped the game. I think there was somebody else that sort of covered her duo, and she said to me, “You know, I know that you collect recipes. Let me show you something.” And she went rummaging in the back of her library, sort of behind the books. I said, “I don’t collect recipes. I collect cookbooks.” “Yeah,” she said, “the same, collect recipes.” She pulled out the notebook of the recipes that she received somehow from her mother, Mina Pachter, after twenty-five years. Her mother had perished in Theresienstadt and had given the book to someone for keeps and to at some point send it to Annie, who at the time was living in Israel. Q: I could be wrong. My memory was that the book was hidden there. No? Or is that just a story? Carmel: I have a difficulty in this area. Annie had told me one story, the details of which which I don’t recall anymore. From what I understood at the time, it was hidden somewhere in Theresienstadt, and the person, who settled in Cleveland, came back and then after years, he managed to find it. He had gone to visit Israel and was trying to deliver it, and he was told that Annie had moved to New York City Q: He knew her name? Carmel: Yes. Yes, because the mother had given him the name. Because Annie, by then, I think, was married. When he was in Israel, he found out she was in New York, and I think through B’nai B’rith they found her in New York, and she managed to get the cookbook. When she showed it to me, I was stunned, absolutely stunned, that people starving, starving of hunger, would think of chocolate cakes and onion cakes and— Q: Now, we should explain. These were recipes written down by people who were being held captive in Theresienstadt. Carmel: In Theresienstadt, I mean, there were held in a concentration camp, surviving on stale bread, barley and water.. Q: They got together to have memories of the civilizations in which they lived. Carmel: It seems, when you look at the notebook, it seems that most of the recipes were written by Mina. It’s her handwriting. Did they get together and she took the dictation, I don’t know. Because there was another handwriting. There was a Czech. Some recipes written in a different handwriting in Czech. Did they get together and discuss recipes, according to Bianca, they were talking recipes. Q: Bianca was a teenager also at Theresienstadt. Carmel: Yes. Q: She remembered people talking about recipes. Carmel: Talking food. Talking food, yes. Q: Talking food from the civilized lives that they had had before they were held captive. Carmel: Yes. So, now, when I saw the notebook, I said to Annie, “Annie, you’re not putting it back. I’m borrowing it for twenty-four hours.” Herb said, “Dalia, nobody’s going to be interested. Don’t butt in.” I said, “The world has to see this. I don’t know how. That I don’t know, but the world has to see it.” And I borrowed it for twenty-four hours, and with Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt, whom I literally commanded to come to my office the next day, and we sat together and photocopied and killed the notebook, and made two photocopies, one for Barbara and one for me. Q: You knew her? Carmel: Who? Q: Barbara. Carmel: Oh yes. I mean, I’m the one who, because I was friends with her, I called her and said, “I don’t care what you’re doing tomorrow, you’re coming to my office.” And then I started going out with the idea of publishing it to Beth Crossman. She was an editor of—which company? She was a cookbook editor in one of the publishing houses, Beth Crossman, and I talked to Rozanne Gold and Michael Whiteman about it, and I spoke to Judith Jones about it. The editors said, “That’s too ghoulish. Nobody would buy such a book.” And every time I came home, Herb told me, “I told you.” At that time, approximately, I became a member of the Culinary Historians, and after a few months, I sort of befriended Cara De Silva and got to read some of her articles in New York Newsday, loved her writing and loved the way she wrote. So I addressed myself to her, would she write a story about it? And she refused. She said it was too ghoulish. Interesting enough in those days, Nina Simonds kept calling me. She wanted to see the notebook. Q: How did she know about it? Carmel: Because Barbara spoke about it somewhere. She mentioned it. But Nina was a Chinese food specialist. Q: She was an Asian cookbook writer. Carmel: What does she have to do with Jewish concentration stuff? I mean, it didn’t sound right to me. So I wouldn’t give it to her. Cara was reluctant to do anything about it, so at some point I went to Israel and visited Yad Vashem, and found out that Yad Vashem—that interestingly enough, they had computerized all their holdings, but they did not computerize anything about food. So my friend there who was the secretary to the chairman, asked the archivist to look through the files to find the food-related items, and she found a few collections of recipes from a few camps. One was written in like a budget book, a person would write breads, two dollars, this seven dollars. The book, this column was the articles and this was the price, in between there were recipes written. Then in another collection, which stunned me was small three-by-three or four-by-four leaflets that on one side was the picture of Hitler and then on the other side were written recipes. At the time, they used to throw leaflets from the air, so camp inmates collected them. They didn’t have paper, so they collected the leaflets and on these leaflets on the reverse side they wrote, I don’t know what language. When I was lucky to be at the Yad Vashem, I was sick as a dog, and I couldn’t postpone my visit because I was leaving for New York back on the following day. So I was holding everything a bit far, just in case I have to throw up, I don’t do it on the paperwork. But while I held it, trying to read the recipes, it would flip and there facing me was a picture of Hitler, oh, god. They were probably Hungarian but I couldn’t vouch for it. But the fact they found for me four collections, so I had in my hand four collections from four different camps. Q: Four collections? Carmel: Of recipes. Q: That belonged together by language or— Carmel: By camp. So when I came back and I told Cara that it’s unique and yet there were other situations like this, she should really do something about it, and she went to Renie Sax. Renie Sax thought it was a good idea to have— Q: Renie Sax, who was the editor, Cara’s editor, at that time, yes. Carmel: Yes. But not to put it in the food section. So it was placed somewhere else, and she got an award for that, for her story. Now, one of the things before I gave it to Cara, I thought because it was in German and in Czech, it should be translated into English so somebody could read what’s written there. I had gone to a food and wine event, and there by the coffee urn I saw Bianca Brown, whom I didn’t know, but I knew of her, I knew that she was a recipe tester or writer, whatever. So I went over to her and I asked her if she would be interested in translating the collection into English, and I wasn’t sure should it be done in working terms, to be able to use it today or not. I wasn’t sure. I mean, I never dealt in this stuff. In her meek, squeaky voice, she said, yes, she’d be interested. So I said, “I’ll introduce you to Annie,” and I gave her my copy of the book that we had made. Q: Now, at that point did you know that Bianca had been at Theresienstadt? Carmel: No. I mean, here I’m asking her if she would be interested. She didn’t say. There wasn’t even body language to indicate that she—nothing. But Cara, Cara took it into her hands, and she spoke to Bianca, I guess, to know what the recipes were. She found out that Bianca was a survivor of Theresienstadt. I was totally taken aback. Had I known, I doubt that I would have gone to her to ask her if she would be willing to do the translation, because I would imagine that would be very traumatic. Q: Too painful. Carmel: Yes. But I introduced Bianca to Annie, and they became very close friends and gave her my copy, and the rest is history. The story came out, and then after a while and a lot of prodding, Cara agreed to make it into a book. She had then this literary agent that was willing to do it pro bono, and the book came out in ’96 to tremendous acclaim all over, I mean every newspaper in this country and television station covered it. Q: And the book is called In Memory’s Kitchen. Carmel: In Memory’s Kitchen, yes. [End of interview] Carmel - 1 - PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 1