DAI
Both sides these days are saying Dai — enough fighting, enough killing — enough sadness, enough starvation, and enough destruction. The Israelis and the Palestinians. Worn down, eager to return to a peaceful life.
Dai is a word with many meanings. A word that can be used to suggest –plentiful, or, with an exclamation point, too much. Stop! Dai, I have enough to eat. Dai, Enough of this carnage and bloodshed.
Dai was a word that I heard often in 1961 when I lived in Israel. Holocaust survivors in the shuk saying Dai when the man poured too much on the scale, food they could not afford. Dai in the laments of struggling immigrants who would cry out when they no longer had the strength to dig deep holes in the rocky sand. Dai in the testimonies of the survivors at the Adolf Eichmann trial..
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Excerpt from The Girl Who Counted Numbers
“The woman was the hundredth survivor Susan had seen. “There was a three-inch tear in the back of her short sleeve blue cotton blouse and deep scratches in the black leather pocketbook that hung from her shoulder. Her hair was twisted into a bun. She gestured to the man to stop after he’d placed six or seven olives in the brown paper that rested on the scale. Dai, she said, Enough.
“Dai. That was the word Susan heard everywhere in 1961, Dai heat. Dai talk. Dai remembering. Dai suffering. It was a word with an edge, meaning enough or too much. She was surrounded by people who had suffered too much. People who had broken stones in work gangs. People who had lost the right to vote. People who were rounded up and squeezed into ghettos, six people in a narrow, dirty room. People who hid out in cesspools, living with the stench, even in their dreams. People who were forbidden to immigrate to Israel. Husbands without wives, children without parents and grandparents.”
