Post by MvTFan on May 26, 2006 18:54:28 GMT -5
To sing through the night
By Kobi Ben-Simhon
Rosmarie von Trapp, 76, is searching for quiet. As evening falls, the eldest daughter of Baron Georg and Maria von Trapp enters a makeshift swimming pool that has been dug into the ground and has been lined with a sheet of blue plastic. She moves gently, with the nobility of a princess, her white hair tied back with a slender string. Each movement is graceful. The heat wave has broken and a cool breeze is coming from the nearby wadi, the light is fading and the twilight obscures the general shabbiness of the isolated community of Ir Ovot in the northern Arava. For a moment it seems as if the entire desert around her is humbly ready to serve von Trapp. She submerges herself in the warm water, her arms spread to the side, her eyes closed. This is a purifying ritual.
"This place brings me quiet," she says with a soft, childlike smile. "I came here for the first time in 2001, and ever since then I've divided my year in half: six months here and six months in America. But here I feel closest to God," she explains, gazing out at the orange desert. "As a matter of fact, I don't like Jerusalem. I don't enjoy it there."
Asked what there is in the desert that she doesn't find in Jerusalem, she says: "Here when you pray, God listens to you. The desert is the backdrop of the Bible and when I speak with God I think about the Bible, about Abraham and Jesus, and in this setting it all becomes more real to me. I love the desert. There are no fences here around the community. It's just here in the middle of the desert. I'm reading a book now that says that in our childhood, walls are built in our soul, and that we have to topple these walls in order to achieve freedom. I believe in that. Here I break down the walls. In the desert I'm free."
Rosmarie von Trapp, whose family history was adapted into one of the most successful musicals and movies of all time, "The Sound of Music," has led quite a tumultuous life. Both the play and the Hollywood movie are based on her mother's autobiography - "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers," by Maria Kutschera von Trapp - in which Maria told the story of the family choir that spent 30 years roaming the world after fleeing Austria when the Nazi regime rose to power.
Rosmarie spreads out some wonderful black-and-white photographs on the table in the dining hall and begins her story in Salzburg, in 1925, when a young governess by the name of Maria Augusta von Kutschera arrived at the home of Baron Georg von Trapp, a captain in the Austrian navy.
"Seven years before that, his first wife had died of an illness, and my father was seeking assistance in raising one of his seven children who was ill," she says, as her hands stroke his picture. "For a number of years, Father functioned as a single parent until he decided that he had to get married. He was supposed to marry a baroness whom he knew, but in the end he fell in love with the governess. That was my mother, Maria. They married and I was their first-born."
Though actually, you and your two younger siblings were really the little kids in the family.
Von Trapp: "Yes, my seven half-sisters and brothers are a lot older than me. I was basically born in 1929 into this world of the family chorus. I remember them singing a lot, and their endless practicing on their instruments, too. I was little, in a somewhat different category. I didn't immediately join the choir as a little girl. I joined it later, as a teenager. I didn't like singing as much because I was afraid of being on stage, it made me nervous. So I mostly played the flute."
You lived a life of wandering.
"Life was spent on the bus, in restaurants or in hotels that we moved every few nights. When we were in Italy we sang in Italian. In France we sang in French. We learned to sing in English in America. Later on in Mexico we sang in Spanish and in Australia we sang Australian songs. We saw magnificent landscapes, that's something I really loved. My mother, who was played by Julie Andrews in the movie, loved doing these shows. She really enjoyed it. After our shows she would keep talking with the audience. She gave lectures after the shows. She told about her life and gave advice to people who came to hear us."
Financial problems
The von Trapp family became a traveling choir for financial reasons. An economic crisis and mass unemployment in Austria in the late 1920s and early 1930s forced the family to come up with solutions.
"Our family was a wealthy family, but with the economic crisis, the money disappeared and everyone had to go to work. Mother could take care of herself and she taught the children and Father to make decisions. At first we had a chicken farm and we sold eggs, and afterward we opened up our house in Salzburg to guests. Finally we started performing and we kept on doing it for 30 years. The shows became the family's main and sole source of income. Since Father was shy, Mother was the one who promoted our concerts. We sang without microphones then. It was another time period."
As the Nazis' power grew, the von Trapps, a nonreligious Christian family, reached a decisive crossroads. The father, Georg, was brave - a person of conscience who was not willing to accept the trampling of moral values in which he believed.
"When I was 9 years old, Hitler invaded Austria. I don't remember the day of the invasion, but I do remember that Father decided that we had to leave," says von Trapp, pouring herself a glass of water.
"If you said 'no' to Hitler, it was the end for you, regardless of whether you were a Jew or a Christian - and my father said 'no' to Hitler three times: He refused to fly the Nazi flag outside his home, he refused to join the Nazi army and he refused to sing to him. Therefore we had no choice but to leave Austria. We fled by train to Italy in March 1938. I vividly remember the trip to Italy. I was very sick there. We stayed in Italy the whole summer and then we took a boat to France. After some wanderings in Italy, Switzerland, France and England, we came to the United States, but after six months our visa expired and we had to return to Europe."
They arranged new visas and returned to the United States, where they eventually settled in Vermont. "We kept on touring during the winter months. It was a time when people came to concerts because they couldn't really travel outside. In the summer we returned to our house in Vermont, and after a few years, we bought a beautiful farm there."
Georg von Trapp died in 1947 at age 67. Maria von Trapp's book was published two years later. German producers were the first to acquire the rights to it and released two movies based on the book. The first depicted the family's history in Austria and the second picked up their story in America. In 1959, an American company bought the rights to the German screenplay and decided to make a musical - which eventually led to the story's legendary status. The musical, the last that Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II created together, was called "The Sound of Music." It was a box-office smash on Broadway, running for about 1,500 performances and garnering eight Tony Awards.
Hollywood cult
Hollywood didn't take long to respond and in 1960, 20th Century Fox Studios acquired the rights to a film version of "The Sound of Music." In March 1965, exactly 27 years after the von Trapp family fled Austria, the Hollywood version of their life story came out. (Both the movie and the musical, incidentally, were based on the book "The Sound of Music," written by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, on the basis of Maria von Trapp's book.) Julie Andrews, already a rising star thanks to her role as Mary Poppins, was cast as Maria. "The Sound of Music," directed by Robert Wise, broke the box-office record held by "Gone With the Wind," won five Oscars - including Best Picture - and developed iconic status around the world.
"The movie about the family was an extraordinary thing," says Rosmarie von Trapp. "When we saw the movie we definitely enjoyed it. The movie became a personal thing for very many people and it moved us. Even after 41 years, people remember the songs and the names of the actors, and girls still dream of becoming Maria. It's incredible. But when we saw the movie we saw a story that was a bit different from our life story. 'The Sound of Music' is not the real story of my family."
What's the main difference?
"First of all, we never went out running to the field and singing songs like that. We never sang those songs. The movie tells about the period that we were in Salzburg. Our life in America isn't depicted at all. You could say that our life wasn't so glamorous like in the movie. We had a very hard life for the most part. It was a struggle. We lived in a struggle and coped with the hardships of survival. Money was shared ... No one had private money of his own. This way of living, of so many people as a single unit, was not easy. We sewed our own clothes, we dressed in the Austrian style, we didn't go shopping.
"Also, my father was not mean and tough like he seems in the film. He was a very shy man. In the movie he is portrayed as a man who enforces discipline and controls his children the way a captain controls his troops. Father worked on old submarines that were very noisy, so he communicated with his sailors by whistling. After his service in the war he wanted to buy a boat and sail the world with his family, so he taught my brothers the whistling language. He used whistling to train them, so they'd be good sailors, but he called us by our names. In the movie, each child has a whistle instead of a name. By the way, after I was born, the economic crisis began and there was no more money and no more dreams about ships. It was all over."
Were you involved in the making of the film?
"My mother asked the directors if she could help them make the film and tell them about our life, but they didn't want her help. They said that had their own idea. They didn't want to listen to her."
Did you meet with the cast?
"An organized meeting between the cast, the filmmakers and the family only took place after the movie was released, and the lead actress, Julie Andrews, didn't come. Even then, she was a very private person and didn't often go out to parties. She was a smart woman. But my mother and I met her together with another niece, in Austria. We were in Salzburg for a visit and we came to the movie set. We arrived when they were doing the scene where she sings the song 'I Have Confidence.' My mother asked if we could take part in the scene and she was told: 'Okay, you can pass by across the street, behind Julie Andrews.' And that's what we did ... When Julie Andrews passed, we immediately started walking on the other end of the street. It was all very nice, but we had to do it at least 20 times and it was pretty tiring. Being in that one small scene was enough for us."
To sing through the night (cont.)
Blossoming Rose
The connection of Rosmarie von Trapp with Israel began the day she joined a tour that her Michigan church was arranging to the Arava. Her priest, Dr. DeWayne Coxon, headed a Christian-American foundation called Blossoming Rose, whose goal was to support Israel. The organization's flagship project is Matzad Hatzeva, an archaeological site located at Ir Ovot. Artifacts from the time of King Solomon have been discovered there. Based on the evidence, it appears that the site is the biblical Tamar mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel, which describes the southern border of Judea. During the year, the site is home to up to 10 volunteers who maintain the place, and von Trapp is one of them.
"I want to make the wilderness bloom, for the desert to be like a blooming rose," she declares. "I really love Israel. I don't know where the feeling comes from, but that's just how it is. We live here and maintain the antiquities site. In the winter we have a lot of visitors from Israel and America, and in the summer it's a lot quieter. This place has become my home. I grew up in hotels, and the atmosphere here reminds me of a hotel. I volunteer here with some other people who came from Switzerland, America and other places in the world. We live together, like on a kibbutz. I'm in charge of the animals, for example. I feed the rabbits and the chickens, and also clean the bathrooms and cook. In my free time I am also translating a novel from German to English."
The connection of Ir Ovot with the Christian world began at the time of its founding, in 1967. The community was established by the late Simcha Perlmutter, a religious Jew from Miami who came to the Arava because of his faith in the anticipated coming of "the Messiah, from the mountains of Edom, Yeshua," says his son Dari, adding that his father wanted to be part of the prophecy and to await salvation in the desert. Perlmutter looked at a number of places along the Arava highway until he was invited by then-Southern Command Brigadier General Shaike Gavish, to move with his family into a number of military structures that had been left on a hillside.
Perlmutter, who lived with two wives, called the abandoned hilltop Ir Ovot. The place later came to be known as a religious kibbutz with Perlmutter, the only man, serving as its rabbi. His Jewish wife, Yehudit, subsequently decided to leave Ir Ovot along with their children; his Christian wife Rachel (who eventually converted to Judaism) remained there along with their two children, Ari and Dari. Ari was killed in the bombing at the Hadera central bus station in 1994, and Perlmutter died six and a half years ago. Rachel still lives at Ir Ovot today (Dari lives in the nearby community of Sapir) along with a German family that came to Ir Ovot at her husband's invitation. Simcha and his son are buried at Ir Ovot.
Godsenther
Like Perlmutter, von Trapp also feels that God sent her to Ir Ovot. She discovered her faith when she was 40, after a turbulent life. She prefers not to talk too much about the hard times, but reveals a little.
"When Father died I was 18, and after his death I had a nervous breakdown. I ran away from home in Vermont and when I came back, the doctors treated me with electroshock therapy. It was awful. After that I ran away to New Guinea near Australia. I was a little afraid and worried about everything, about life. I ran away a lot in my life. From age 20 to age 40, I had a tough growing-up period," she explains, with a touch of sarcasm and suppressed pain. "Most of the time I lived in Vermont, where the family has a large hotel that my younger brother runs. In my adult life, I didn't work outside the farm. There was one year that I studied to be a nurse and after that I had another nervous breakdown and spent a year in the hospital. I made mistakes all the time.
"I began relationships with men at a somewhat older age and when I had a boyfriend he started using drugs and the relationship eventually ended. I made some wrong choices in life, and afterward I never married. I had two serious car accidents that required a real effort to recover from. I think that it's okay to make mistakes, but I was always very disturbed by the mistakes I made, and that was the problem. But I don't want to talk about those things, about that time. Those things are too private and personal."
When did things start getting better for you?
"At age 40 I told myself that I don't know how to live my life and decided to give my life to God. That was the turning point. Before that I didn't have my own faith in God. I always lived like my family, I was their shadow, I followed them, I did what they did. Since I didn't have my own personal faith in God, I also didn't have faith in myself. One day when I was feeling very desperate I listened to the radio and the man who was talking said, 'If you're in despair, go talk with God, talk with Jesus about your problem. Tell him that you want to start over, that you need help.' This was when I was 40."
And what happened?
"I went to bed and when I got up in the morning my depression was gone. Everything changed in one night. I decided to join a religious community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I lived in this community for eight years. Many of us had come there from the street and didn't know how to cooperate or to respect authority. I was on my way to the street and this place saved me. There we learned how to live for God, how to pray. Today I thank God for everything that happens. When you thank God you don't search for anything. When I was miserable and upset, I always searched for something. When you give thanks for what there is, life is easier. I recently started a new thing - I'm keeping a journal. Every day I write down five things that give me happiness. You ought to try it."
Goodforbusiness
The von Trapp family gave its final performance in Australia in 1957. Having finished its musical touring, the family returned to the farm in Vermont, which it bought in 1942. The family turned the place into a lodge and focused on expanding the business. In 1968, the lodge became a cross-country ski resort. Maria von Trapp, who was awarded many prizes and medals by the Austrian government over the years, passed away in 1987. Of the family's 10 children, six are still alive (Werner, Agathe, Maria, Rosmarie, Elenore and Johannes). The eldest son, Rupert (1911-1992) was a family physician. Hedwig (1917-1975) died as a result of severe asthma, an illness she suffered from her whole life.
"She was always late to everywhere," recalls Rosmarie von Trapp. "We used to tease her: 'Don't be late to your funeral.' In the end she died in Austria and her body was mistakenly sent somewhere else in the United States and not to Vermont, and so we waited for her and she really was late to her funeral."
Johanna von Trapp (1921-1951) died in childbirth. Werner, born in 1915, is a retired dairy farmer living in Waitsfield, Vermont, and has six children. Agathe, now 93, is a retired teacher living in Baltimore, Maryland. Maria, born in 1914, was a lay missionary in Papua, New Guinea and now lives in Stowe, Vermont. Elenore "Lorli" von Trapp Campbell lives in Waitsfield, Vermont. "She's two years younger than me and had seven daughters, and now she's a grandmother with lots of grandchildren," says her sister.
The youngest brother, Johannes, born in 1939, runs the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. "Johannes built a big hotel with 90 rooms and wide hallways and large rooms. Now we have a staff of 250 and a ski school. Johannes really likes the fame surrounding our story. It's good for his business."
And for you?
"It doesn't matter much to me. What matters to me is the work I'm doing here, in Israel. Here everything that I've done in my life comes together: I'm still on the stage, I'm connected to people here, to the volunteers, to the tourists who come, to the community. Granted, it's a small stage, but I don't feel like I'm on it for my own sake, but rather for Israel's sake. It's a better stage. It has more importance to me."
What was life like for your mother in her later years?
"Mother died in 1987. After we stopped performing she lived in Vermont and continued to give talks about the family and to share her story with everyone. She wrote another three books about the family. After the movie, lots of people came to the farm wanting to hear her speak and she became quite famous. A lot of men wanted to marry her, but she didn't agree. In her fifties, Mother was a very sick woman. She suffered from epilepsy attacks and had a problem with pressure in her brain caused by an accumulation of water and blood. She had surgery, but this problem also made her have hallucinations. She saw ghosts. Sometimes we didn't understand her and she didn't understand us, but she was always just as loving."
How was your relationship with her?
"We had a special connection. I was her eldest daughter and I looked a lot like her. It was hard for her to raise me within the unique sort of life we were living, so she let my big sisters raise me. For many years I blamed her for my problems and didn't know how to repair our relationship. Thankfully, we were able to reconcile before she died."
Link to entire article: www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/719911.html
By Kobi Ben-Simhon
Rosmarie von Trapp, 76, is searching for quiet. As evening falls, the eldest daughter of Baron Georg and Maria von Trapp enters a makeshift swimming pool that has been dug into the ground and has been lined with a sheet of blue plastic. She moves gently, with the nobility of a princess, her white hair tied back with a slender string. Each movement is graceful. The heat wave has broken and a cool breeze is coming from the nearby wadi, the light is fading and the twilight obscures the general shabbiness of the isolated community of Ir Ovot in the northern Arava. For a moment it seems as if the entire desert around her is humbly ready to serve von Trapp. She submerges herself in the warm water, her arms spread to the side, her eyes closed. This is a purifying ritual.
"This place brings me quiet," she says with a soft, childlike smile. "I came here for the first time in 2001, and ever since then I've divided my year in half: six months here and six months in America. But here I feel closest to God," she explains, gazing out at the orange desert. "As a matter of fact, I don't like Jerusalem. I don't enjoy it there."
Asked what there is in the desert that she doesn't find in Jerusalem, she says: "Here when you pray, God listens to you. The desert is the backdrop of the Bible and when I speak with God I think about the Bible, about Abraham and Jesus, and in this setting it all becomes more real to me. I love the desert. There are no fences here around the community. It's just here in the middle of the desert. I'm reading a book now that says that in our childhood, walls are built in our soul, and that we have to topple these walls in order to achieve freedom. I believe in that. Here I break down the walls. In the desert I'm free."
Rosmarie von Trapp, whose family history was adapted into one of the most successful musicals and movies of all time, "The Sound of Music," has led quite a tumultuous life. Both the play and the Hollywood movie are based on her mother's autobiography - "The Story of the Trapp Family Singers," by Maria Kutschera von Trapp - in which Maria told the story of the family choir that spent 30 years roaming the world after fleeing Austria when the Nazi regime rose to power.
Rosmarie spreads out some wonderful black-and-white photographs on the table in the dining hall and begins her story in Salzburg, in 1925, when a young governess by the name of Maria Augusta von Kutschera arrived at the home of Baron Georg von Trapp, a captain in the Austrian navy.
"Seven years before that, his first wife had died of an illness, and my father was seeking assistance in raising one of his seven children who was ill," she says, as her hands stroke his picture. "For a number of years, Father functioned as a single parent until he decided that he had to get married. He was supposed to marry a baroness whom he knew, but in the end he fell in love with the governess. That was my mother, Maria. They married and I was their first-born."
Though actually, you and your two younger siblings were really the little kids in the family.
Von Trapp: "Yes, my seven half-sisters and brothers are a lot older than me. I was basically born in 1929 into this world of the family chorus. I remember them singing a lot, and their endless practicing on their instruments, too. I was little, in a somewhat different category. I didn't immediately join the choir as a little girl. I joined it later, as a teenager. I didn't like singing as much because I was afraid of being on stage, it made me nervous. So I mostly played the flute."
You lived a life of wandering.
"Life was spent on the bus, in restaurants or in hotels that we moved every few nights. When we were in Italy we sang in Italian. In France we sang in French. We learned to sing in English in America. Later on in Mexico we sang in Spanish and in Australia we sang Australian songs. We saw magnificent landscapes, that's something I really loved. My mother, who was played by Julie Andrews in the movie, loved doing these shows. She really enjoyed it. After our shows she would keep talking with the audience. She gave lectures after the shows. She told about her life and gave advice to people who came to hear us."
Financial problems
The von Trapp family became a traveling choir for financial reasons. An economic crisis and mass unemployment in Austria in the late 1920s and early 1930s forced the family to come up with solutions.
"Our family was a wealthy family, but with the economic crisis, the money disappeared and everyone had to go to work. Mother could take care of herself and she taught the children and Father to make decisions. At first we had a chicken farm and we sold eggs, and afterward we opened up our house in Salzburg to guests. Finally we started performing and we kept on doing it for 30 years. The shows became the family's main and sole source of income. Since Father was shy, Mother was the one who promoted our concerts. We sang without microphones then. It was another time period."
As the Nazis' power grew, the von Trapps, a nonreligious Christian family, reached a decisive crossroads. The father, Georg, was brave - a person of conscience who was not willing to accept the trampling of moral values in which he believed.
"When I was 9 years old, Hitler invaded Austria. I don't remember the day of the invasion, but I do remember that Father decided that we had to leave," says von Trapp, pouring herself a glass of water.
"If you said 'no' to Hitler, it was the end for you, regardless of whether you were a Jew or a Christian - and my father said 'no' to Hitler three times: He refused to fly the Nazi flag outside his home, he refused to join the Nazi army and he refused to sing to him. Therefore we had no choice but to leave Austria. We fled by train to Italy in March 1938. I vividly remember the trip to Italy. I was very sick there. We stayed in Italy the whole summer and then we took a boat to France. After some wanderings in Italy, Switzerland, France and England, we came to the United States, but after six months our visa expired and we had to return to Europe."
They arranged new visas and returned to the United States, where they eventually settled in Vermont. "We kept on touring during the winter months. It was a time when people came to concerts because they couldn't really travel outside. In the summer we returned to our house in Vermont, and after a few years, we bought a beautiful farm there."
Georg von Trapp died in 1947 at age 67. Maria von Trapp's book was published two years later. German producers were the first to acquire the rights to it and released two movies based on the book. The first depicted the family's history in Austria and the second picked up their story in America. In 1959, an American company bought the rights to the German screenplay and decided to make a musical - which eventually led to the story's legendary status. The musical, the last that Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II created together, was called "The Sound of Music." It was a box-office smash on Broadway, running for about 1,500 performances and garnering eight Tony Awards.
Hollywood cult
Hollywood didn't take long to respond and in 1960, 20th Century Fox Studios acquired the rights to a film version of "The Sound of Music." In March 1965, exactly 27 years after the von Trapp family fled Austria, the Hollywood version of their life story came out. (Both the movie and the musical, incidentally, were based on the book "The Sound of Music," written by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, on the basis of Maria von Trapp's book.) Julie Andrews, already a rising star thanks to her role as Mary Poppins, was cast as Maria. "The Sound of Music," directed by Robert Wise, broke the box-office record held by "Gone With the Wind," won five Oscars - including Best Picture - and developed iconic status around the world.
"The movie about the family was an extraordinary thing," says Rosmarie von Trapp. "When we saw the movie we definitely enjoyed it. The movie became a personal thing for very many people and it moved us. Even after 41 years, people remember the songs and the names of the actors, and girls still dream of becoming Maria. It's incredible. But when we saw the movie we saw a story that was a bit different from our life story. 'The Sound of Music' is not the real story of my family."
What's the main difference?
"First of all, we never went out running to the field and singing songs like that. We never sang those songs. The movie tells about the period that we were in Salzburg. Our life in America isn't depicted at all. You could say that our life wasn't so glamorous like in the movie. We had a very hard life for the most part. It was a struggle. We lived in a struggle and coped with the hardships of survival. Money was shared ... No one had private money of his own. This way of living, of so many people as a single unit, was not easy. We sewed our own clothes, we dressed in the Austrian style, we didn't go shopping.
"Also, my father was not mean and tough like he seems in the film. He was a very shy man. In the movie he is portrayed as a man who enforces discipline and controls his children the way a captain controls his troops. Father worked on old submarines that were very noisy, so he communicated with his sailors by whistling. After his service in the war he wanted to buy a boat and sail the world with his family, so he taught my brothers the whistling language. He used whistling to train them, so they'd be good sailors, but he called us by our names. In the movie, each child has a whistle instead of a name. By the way, after I was born, the economic crisis began and there was no more money and no more dreams about ships. It was all over."
Were you involved in the making of the film?
"My mother asked the directors if she could help them make the film and tell them about our life, but they didn't want her help. They said that had their own idea. They didn't want to listen to her."
Did you meet with the cast?
"An organized meeting between the cast, the filmmakers and the family only took place after the movie was released, and the lead actress, Julie Andrews, didn't come. Even then, she was a very private person and didn't often go out to parties. She was a smart woman. But my mother and I met her together with another niece, in Austria. We were in Salzburg for a visit and we came to the movie set. We arrived when they were doing the scene where she sings the song 'I Have Confidence.' My mother asked if we could take part in the scene and she was told: 'Okay, you can pass by across the street, behind Julie Andrews.' And that's what we did ... When Julie Andrews passed, we immediately started walking on the other end of the street. It was all very nice, but we had to do it at least 20 times and it was pretty tiring. Being in that one small scene was enough for us."
To sing through the night (cont.)
Blossoming Rose
The connection of Rosmarie von Trapp with Israel began the day she joined a tour that her Michigan church was arranging to the Arava. Her priest, Dr. DeWayne Coxon, headed a Christian-American foundation called Blossoming Rose, whose goal was to support Israel. The organization's flagship project is Matzad Hatzeva, an archaeological site located at Ir Ovot. Artifacts from the time of King Solomon have been discovered there. Based on the evidence, it appears that the site is the biblical Tamar mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel, which describes the southern border of Judea. During the year, the site is home to up to 10 volunteers who maintain the place, and von Trapp is one of them.
"I want to make the wilderness bloom, for the desert to be like a blooming rose," she declares. "I really love Israel. I don't know where the feeling comes from, but that's just how it is. We live here and maintain the antiquities site. In the winter we have a lot of visitors from Israel and America, and in the summer it's a lot quieter. This place has become my home. I grew up in hotels, and the atmosphere here reminds me of a hotel. I volunteer here with some other people who came from Switzerland, America and other places in the world. We live together, like on a kibbutz. I'm in charge of the animals, for example. I feed the rabbits and the chickens, and also clean the bathrooms and cook. In my free time I am also translating a novel from German to English."
The connection of Ir Ovot with the Christian world began at the time of its founding, in 1967. The community was established by the late Simcha Perlmutter, a religious Jew from Miami who came to the Arava because of his faith in the anticipated coming of "the Messiah, from the mountains of Edom, Yeshua," says his son Dari, adding that his father wanted to be part of the prophecy and to await salvation in the desert. Perlmutter looked at a number of places along the Arava highway until he was invited by then-Southern Command Brigadier General Shaike Gavish, to move with his family into a number of military structures that had been left on a hillside.
Perlmutter, who lived with two wives, called the abandoned hilltop Ir Ovot. The place later came to be known as a religious kibbutz with Perlmutter, the only man, serving as its rabbi. His Jewish wife, Yehudit, subsequently decided to leave Ir Ovot along with their children; his Christian wife Rachel (who eventually converted to Judaism) remained there along with their two children, Ari and Dari. Ari was killed in the bombing at the Hadera central bus station in 1994, and Perlmutter died six and a half years ago. Rachel still lives at Ir Ovot today (Dari lives in the nearby community of Sapir) along with a German family that came to Ir Ovot at her husband's invitation. Simcha and his son are buried at Ir Ovot.
Godsenther
Like Perlmutter, von Trapp also feels that God sent her to Ir Ovot. She discovered her faith when she was 40, after a turbulent life. She prefers not to talk too much about the hard times, but reveals a little.
"When Father died I was 18, and after his death I had a nervous breakdown. I ran away from home in Vermont and when I came back, the doctors treated me with electroshock therapy. It was awful. After that I ran away to New Guinea near Australia. I was a little afraid and worried about everything, about life. I ran away a lot in my life. From age 20 to age 40, I had a tough growing-up period," she explains, with a touch of sarcasm and suppressed pain. "Most of the time I lived in Vermont, where the family has a large hotel that my younger brother runs. In my adult life, I didn't work outside the farm. There was one year that I studied to be a nurse and after that I had another nervous breakdown and spent a year in the hospital. I made mistakes all the time.
"I began relationships with men at a somewhat older age and when I had a boyfriend he started using drugs and the relationship eventually ended. I made some wrong choices in life, and afterward I never married. I had two serious car accidents that required a real effort to recover from. I think that it's okay to make mistakes, but I was always very disturbed by the mistakes I made, and that was the problem. But I don't want to talk about those things, about that time. Those things are too private and personal."
When did things start getting better for you?
"At age 40 I told myself that I don't know how to live my life and decided to give my life to God. That was the turning point. Before that I didn't have my own faith in God. I always lived like my family, I was their shadow, I followed them, I did what they did. Since I didn't have my own personal faith in God, I also didn't have faith in myself. One day when I was feeling very desperate I listened to the radio and the man who was talking said, 'If you're in despair, go talk with God, talk with Jesus about your problem. Tell him that you want to start over, that you need help.' This was when I was 40."
And what happened?
"I went to bed and when I got up in the morning my depression was gone. Everything changed in one night. I decided to join a religious community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I lived in this community for eight years. Many of us had come there from the street and didn't know how to cooperate or to respect authority. I was on my way to the street and this place saved me. There we learned how to live for God, how to pray. Today I thank God for everything that happens. When you thank God you don't search for anything. When I was miserable and upset, I always searched for something. When you give thanks for what there is, life is easier. I recently started a new thing - I'm keeping a journal. Every day I write down five things that give me happiness. You ought to try it."
Goodforbusiness
The von Trapp family gave its final performance in Australia in 1957. Having finished its musical touring, the family returned to the farm in Vermont, which it bought in 1942. The family turned the place into a lodge and focused on expanding the business. In 1968, the lodge became a cross-country ski resort. Maria von Trapp, who was awarded many prizes and medals by the Austrian government over the years, passed away in 1987. Of the family's 10 children, six are still alive (Werner, Agathe, Maria, Rosmarie, Elenore and Johannes). The eldest son, Rupert (1911-1992) was a family physician. Hedwig (1917-1975) died as a result of severe asthma, an illness she suffered from her whole life.
"She was always late to everywhere," recalls Rosmarie von Trapp. "We used to tease her: 'Don't be late to your funeral.' In the end she died in Austria and her body was mistakenly sent somewhere else in the United States and not to Vermont, and so we waited for her and she really was late to her funeral."
Johanna von Trapp (1921-1951) died in childbirth. Werner, born in 1915, is a retired dairy farmer living in Waitsfield, Vermont, and has six children. Agathe, now 93, is a retired teacher living in Baltimore, Maryland. Maria, born in 1914, was a lay missionary in Papua, New Guinea and now lives in Stowe, Vermont. Elenore "Lorli" von Trapp Campbell lives in Waitsfield, Vermont. "She's two years younger than me and had seven daughters, and now she's a grandmother with lots of grandchildren," says her sister.
The youngest brother, Johannes, born in 1939, runs the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont. "Johannes built a big hotel with 90 rooms and wide hallways and large rooms. Now we have a staff of 250 and a ski school. Johannes really likes the fame surrounding our story. It's good for his business."
And for you?
"It doesn't matter much to me. What matters to me is the work I'm doing here, in Israel. Here everything that I've done in my life comes together: I'm still on the stage, I'm connected to people here, to the volunteers, to the tourists who come, to the community. Granted, it's a small stage, but I don't feel like I'm on it for my own sake, but rather for Israel's sake. It's a better stage. It has more importance to me."
What was life like for your mother in her later years?
"Mother died in 1987. After we stopped performing she lived in Vermont and continued to give talks about the family and to share her story with everyone. She wrote another three books about the family. After the movie, lots of people came to the farm wanting to hear her speak and she became quite famous. A lot of men wanted to marry her, but she didn't agree. In her fifties, Mother was a very sick woman. She suffered from epilepsy attacks and had a problem with pressure in her brain caused by an accumulation of water and blood. She had surgery, but this problem also made her have hallucinations. She saw ghosts. Sometimes we didn't understand her and she didn't understand us, but she was always just as loving."
How was your relationship with her?
"We had a special connection. I was her eldest daughter and I looked a lot like her. It was hard for her to raise me within the unique sort of life we were living, so she let my big sisters raise me. For many years I blamed her for my problems and didn't know how to repair our relationship. Thankfully, we were able to reconcile before she died."
Link to entire article: www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/719911.html