Book Review: Channeling her experience

Having endured her fair share of discrimination, racism and prejudice, former Reshet Alef director Tsega Melaku dispels some of the myths surrounding Ethiopian aliya.

By BARRY DAVIS
Tsega Melaku (photo credit: Courtesy)
Tsega Melaku
(photo credit: Courtesy)
If you’re looking for a spot of escapism, a comfy read to slip into and possibly forget about the looming elections, Not in Our School by Tsega Melaku is one to avoid. The book, which came out in Hebrew late last year, tells the trying tale of Ethiopian aliya and absorption into this country.
One may have noticed that there are not many members of the Ethiopian community in high-ranking positions – in the government sector, industry, or, in fact, any walk of life here. Melaku bucks that trend: The 46-year-old has served as director of the Reshet Alef IBA radio station – the first female incumbent – as well as in a string of other important roles at the IBA, including head of the Amharic Language Channel.
Most of us tend to encounter members of the Ethiopian community as we pass the security check on our way into public buildings, or maybe our local supermarkets.
There have been a number of Ethiopian MKs, including two MKs in the Yesh Atid Party. But overall – as Melaku makes painfully clear in her book – it seems we still have some way to go toward changing the way we perceive Ethiopian Israelis.
In the prologue to Not in Our School, the author recalls a vexing and apparently none-too-rare incident in which two men in a car next to hers, stuck in traffic in Tel Aviv, remarked unsubtly, “Look at her.
Just yesterday she was riding a mule, and today she’s driving a car.”
“What do you know about me?” muses Melaku later in the same chapter. “What do you know about my life in Ethiopia and in Israel? What do you know, at all, about us, the members of the community?” Anyone who reads the 200-plus-page book will certainly be a lot wiser about the community, its pre-aliya life and what its members have had to deal with in their new homeland.
“The vast majority of Israelis don’t know about the community,” says Melaku in an interview. “The questions we get asked and the way people treat us show they are ignorant of who we are, our culture, and our history in Ethiopia.”
It would not be accurate to say that Not in Our School is a litany of gripes and unsavory incidents that have come Melaku’s way since she made aliya around 30 years ago, but there are some shocking tales in there. In one, the author relates that she was walking through Jerusalem’s Malha mall with her then-small son, Emmanuel, when a man stopped and asked the youngster if his mother might be available to clean the gentleman’s home. The clearly savvy Emmanuel – who is now a medical student – came right back at the ignorant stranger and said, “Maybe you can ask your wife if she could come to our house to clean for us.”
“That was wonderful,” says Melaku, “but it just shows how Israelis in general relate to us.”
While there may not have been any malicious intent behind the man’s offer of domestic work, it was clearly the product of uneducated assumption – something the author says abounds here regarding Ethiopian immigrants.
“People think we came on aliya because we were starving in Ethiopia,” she says.
“Many people think we are illegal immigrants who ran away from Africa to find work here. And a lot of people have this stereotypical image of us – that if we come from Africa, we don’t know anything.
They think we are illiterate and primitive.
The way people are educated here is to put others in pigeonholes. That makes life easier for them.”
That, of course, can spawn prejudices.
“If you are white, you are higher up the social scale,” she continues. “If you are African and black, you are inferior. If you are black, you are probably some kind of servant.”
It must rankle all the more considering the trials and tribulations that Melaku, her parents, her siblings and thousands of other Ethiopian Jews had to endure to reach the Promised Land.
Melaku feels that the ignorance about the Ethiopian community is often by choice.
“People don’t know about us, and they don’t want to know,” she declares, adding that she hopes Not in Our School will help to redress that sorry state of affairs. “That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book. I want people to know about our history. When we lived in Ethiopia, there was rampant anti-Semitism there. How many Israelis know about that? But in Ethiopia, people hated and feared us not because of the color of our skin, but because we were Jewish. We really suffered.
Ethiopians believed that Jews brought the evil eye with them. We were persecuted.
People don’t know that.”
Most may also not know that thousands of Ethiopians perished in their quest to make aliya, either en route to Sudan or in Ethiopia. There were highway robbers to deal with, charlatans and all kinds of mendacious characters to navigate.
In her book, she also talks about her father’s highly risky efforts to help members of the community get to Israel.
“We always dreamed of coming to Jerusalem.
We prayed for that,” she says.
However, she and other members of the community were in for a rude awakening.
“We thought Israelis were waiting for us with open arms. But what was really waiting for us? No one wanted us here.”
What made it doubly difficult for Melaku was that she came here on her own at the age of 16. Her parents and three siblings followed several years later.
“I couldn’t tell my parents about what was really happening here,” she recalls.
“I didn’t want to disillusion them.”
She soon buckled down to make a life for herself here. She gained a BA and an MA, landed a job at the IBA presenting a regular show in Amharic, and eventually scaled the heights of the Reshet Alef leadership. There, too, she had to contend with snide remarks about her origin and the color of her skin.
Over the years, she has served as a Jewish Agency emissary to the United States and elsewhere, and met former president Shimon Peres, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the prime minister of Ethiopia.
What is abundantly clear is that she does not shrink from a fight. In her book, she talks about her role in organizing demonstrations against travesties of justice committed by the establishment, including the 1996 protest following the revelation that the national blood bank routinely destroyed Ethiopian-donated blood on the grounds that the donors might have AIDS. She also mentions the startling episode in which Ethiopian women were persuaded to take contraceptive injections both before and after making aliya. Melaku claims the women were told that the economic situation in Israel was not conducive to supporting large families and that if the women did not agree to have the injections, they would not be eligible for health services when they arrived in Israel.
“Through the Ministry of Health, or the... JDC [Joint Distribution Committee], who together were responsible for the well-being and health of the population in the transit camp on their way to Israel, the [Jewish] population was intentionally kept in check through [administering contraception to] the Ethiopian women, and only Ethiopian women,” she says. “This has to be discussed in terms of public responsibility, and certainly to expose those responsible.”
Melaku is a highly driven character and is involved in a variety of initiatives to better the lot of the Ethiopian community. She is active in helping to ensure that members of the community get financial assistance so they can pursue higher education, and she was due to run for the Knesset in the upcoming elections as No. 3 in Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu list. However, it seems she had to resign her position from the IBA a certain number of days before announcing her candidacy for the Knesset, and she missed the boat.
Having spent a couple of hours with Melaku, and after reading her forthright book, I would not bet against the letters “MK” appearing before her name the next time the country goes to the polls.