Lee Yaron: Larni, a caregiver from the Philippines, worked for six years caring for an 84-year-old woman from Tel Aviv. Every month the human resources company employing her paid her about 2,000 shekels [$515], which is what the woman’s National Insurance Institute benefits covered. The rest, about 2,500 shekels, was covered by her patient.
But when the Kav Laoved Workers Hotline looked at Larni’s salary slip, it found that the agency employing her was not paying all the benefits she was entitled to, which amounted to the withholding of hundreds of shekels each month. It made no difference to Larni because her patient made up the difference. But the patient was apparently paying over the years more than she should have been because she believed the agency was paying Larni as required.
Jo-Ann Mort: A recurring theme throughout these stories is the difficulty that immigrants have in settling in a new place — not just the Mizrahi Jews, who often feel like second-class citizens and about whom Tsabari mostly writes. There’s an especially touching scene in the story “Invisible,” whose protagonist is a Filipina caregiver named Rosalynn. Her immigrant status is described along with that of the elderly Israeli in her charge, a woman she calls “Savta“ (Hebrew for grandmother), a Yemeni immigrant who tells Rosalynn how she “walked for weeks through the desert, from San’a to Aden, with a group of Jews on their way to Israel. How she too had worked in people’s homes when she arrived, cleaning and doing laundry for the rich Ashkenazi.”
This story takes a turn that is perhaps typical in American immigrant fiction, where a relationship develops between Rosalynn and Yaniv, a friend of Savta’s grandson, who is just out of the army and comes to live in the shed behind Savta’s home. He asks Rosalynn about the beaches and surfing in the Philippines, based on what he’s heard from his friends who traveled there, but she thinks, “In the neighborhood where she had grown up nobody cared about beaches or surfing. Rosalynn tried to imagine Yaniv in her hometown, pictured him walking with her on the dirt roads, saw through his eyes the patched-up shacks, the piles of trash, the streams of dark water, her extended family all living under one roof.”
In Israel, Rosalynn is part of a largely invisible universe of migrant workers, who fill jobs that were in some cases once filled by Palestinians, and in others, Israelis simply don't seem to want. They are often treated with contempt at best, though they and their Israeli-born children are more Israeli today than some segments of Diaspora Jewry.
Rosalynn, who goes to meet her friends at a Filipino club in South Tel Aviv, takes the reader into their world “near the old bus station, an aging, decrepit part of Tel Aviv that was now claimed by migrant workers as their own": "The streets, bustling with discount shops, international phone booths, restaurants and street vendors, were suffused with a rich blend of aromas that didn’t typically go together: coconut, cinnamon and cloves, smoked fish, fresh ginger, toasted green coffee beans, grilled skewers of meat, sweet narghile smoke. In sidewalk cafes men drank in front of TV screens blasting action movies, and in the side streets johns slipped into red-curtained massage parlors… whenever the immigration police raided the area, the party would come to a halt, everyone lining up to produce passports and visas. Rosalynn had seen friends who worked illegally, like her, escorted into vans, from which there was no coming back….”
