In the wake of Oct. 7, 2023,, many Israelis felt abandoned by their government. Facing an absence of leadership, volunteer operations popped up to help victims recover. People from around the country stepped in to help with agricultural work and gathered donations for 130,000 internally displaced people.
At first, I felt immobilized by the stress and agony of the unfolding war.
Then I saw a Facebook post calling for volunteers to clean people’s homes in the kibbutzim that had been invaded by Hamas on Oct. 7. I signed up immediately. This, I thought, was something I could do. Something concrete, useful.
Somehow, in a world that made increasingly less sense, the straightforwardness of cleaning felt like a balm. The basic fact of it — you clean and it’s changed, you clean and it’s restored — felt like a miracle.
All through my childhood, my mother cleaned. Early morning, I’d wake up to the sounds of her moving furniture, wheeling appliances, hoisting up chairs, the scent of bleach stinging my nostrils. Our house in a small suburb east of Tel Aviv was pristine. Laundry was folded promptly. Shelves and surfaces were free of dust, the sink clear of dishes.
As a teen, I didn’t understand my mother’s need to clean or why she took such pride in it. I thought of myself as sophisticated for not caring about something so mundane.
When I mentioned my mother’s penchant for cleaning to new friends, they nodded. Everyone in Israel knew Yemeni women cleaned. It was one of the less offensive stereotypes about us. But also, it was grounded in fact: As early as the late 19th century, when the first wave of Yemeni migrants arrived in Palestine, women were encouraged to fill the role of cleaners by the European-led Zionist movement. The Yemenite Jews were “born laborers,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once said.
I was determined to brush this inheritance off me like dust. Knowing that Yemeni immigrants had been seen as unhygienic, smelly — fenugreek, an essential herb in Yemeni cuisine, releases a strong odor in one’s sweat — I wondered: Was their insistence on cleanliness a way to prove their humanity?
Despite my firm resistance, at 25 I became the fourth-generation woman in my family to work as a housecleaner.
Cleaning filled a financial need at a time when I had no options. Then I found myself enjoying it. It gave me a sense of accomplishment when I lacked direction. It linked me to my mother and my community.
Many years later, cleaning the homes in the plundered kibbutzim brought me solace and a sense of agency. It was as if, by cleaning, I could expunge some of the horrors that had occurred there — bleach as a way to eradicate bad memories, wipe things clean, start fresh.
My great-grandmother arrived in Ottoman Palestine with one child and her third husband at the turn of the 20th century, leaving my grandmother, a toddler, and her twin sister behind in Yemen. There she began working as a maid for a wealthy family. Later, when she died in childbirth, her adolescent daughter replaced her.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1934, my grandparents left Yemen for Palestine, where my grandmother began cleaning. When she was pregnant with her third child, my eldest aunt, Rivka — only 7 years old at the time — stepped in.
By the 1950s one could hire a cleaner, most of them Yemeni, by driving through an illegal housemaids’ fair in Tel Aviv. At the time, the word “Yemeni” in its Hebrew female form was synonymous with maid.
Much later, my mother briefly worked as a cleaner, including at the home of one of my friends’ grandparents, a fact that once mortified me. By the time I came along, my father, raised in poverty, had built his own successful law practice. My mother no longer needed to work outside the house.
She returned to cleaning at home, grief-stricken and despondent, after my father, the love of her life, died at 44, leaving her with six children between the ages of 2 and 21. I wonder if cleaning saved her. Perhaps her fixation on it was a reaction to trauma. My mother’s entire world collapsed, but cleaning was something she could control, something she could accomplish and maintain.
When I immigrated to Canada at 25, cleaning was the only job I was able to find. I had moved to Vancouver to follow a man, and for the first year I was lonely, depressed and unemployed. Spending long days on my own as my boyfriend worked, I began meticulously cleaning our one-bedroom apartment. There was something calming and surprisingly meditative about the act. I was good at it. When my friends complimented me on the state of our home, I felt oddly proud. I got a job working for a cleaning company, scouring lobbies and stairways in large apartment buildings in Vancouver’s West End. Then I found regular clients, mostly bachelors and seniors.
It was around that time that I realized cleaning had the power to do more than dust and mop and shine. It could address trauma. Once a close friend in Vancouver had her drink spiked at a local bar and called me, crying. Later, I came over and cleaned what she could not touch. I washed and changed the sheets, discarded a condom wrapper by the bed. I bleached everything the perpetrator may have touched.
When I clean the houses at the edge of Israel’s border with Gaza, houses that have been looted, children’s rooms with bullet holes and shattered glass, Lego structures toppled over, safe rooms with “Peace Now” stickers on their doors, I do my very best. I summon the cleaner in me, and I perform deep work: I clean with intention, with something akin to religious devotion. I scour nooks and crannies, scrub floors, polish windows, pick up cigarette butts left by the Hamas terrorists. I bleach kitchens and bathrooms: Here, again, bleach is a magic eraser of trauma, a renewer of things.
The residents of these homes say that the work we’ve done in a few hours is equivalent to months of therapy. That before we cleaned, they could barely touch a glass, because everything felt violated, tainted.
By the time we leave the kibbutzim, those homes that had been frozen by trauma are transformed; the air has shifted, eased. We clean, and it allows for new stories to take root.
The post I Come From a Long Line of Housecleaners. After Oct. 7, I Knew What to Do. appeared first on New York Times.
