One Saturday Night in Jerusalem

...As for myself, I find considerable change...

...Well, all right, I thought...

...In the theater I'd been angry enough to take on King Kong...

...Perhaps the best translation for pushtak is spoiler, for they can spoil the general aesthetic, cultural and moral ambience in our cities...

...I had just received my call-up notice for reserve duty...

...Solution to what, indeed...

...Now the time was right and off we went, determined—probably too determined—to have a good time...

...He took no sides in the dispute, but I do recall him informing me, "You know, you shouldn't hit...

...I had a rare night off from work...

...He replied with an insult...

...But I had attacked his person, and for that he wanted redress...

...It appeared he'd been hauled out of a theater for smoking, and because the officer had allegedly touched his girl, he had slugged the cop...

...With his shirt now modestly buttoned, he was alternately massaging his jaw and blinking into the light to see if his eye could still possibly function...

...They didn't take their places so much as ambush them...

...I didn't want to hear about the lack of facilities for youth or the post-Yom Kippur War malaise...

...Okay...

...Then I hit him, hard...

...But I recall Abba Eban's most reasonable request in Haifa for "maximal consideration for the interests of others," and I refuse to sneer, as so many did...

...They shifted, fidgeted, and provided a running commentary on the opening scene of the film, even heckled the unheeding images on the screen...

...Is this the solution...

...God love these kids for their lavish if misguided sense of justice...

...The majority of the audience blissfully chose to suffer all this without so much as a murmur, accustomed to such behavior and accepting it rather like some natural phenomenon, like a dust storm that simply must be waited out...

...He had a remarkable way of both sprawling and scrunching in his seat all at once...

...I was also chagrined that someone from the far side of the theater had taken it upon himself to come over and admonish the noisemakers while I, right near them, had limited myself to a modest shush or two...

...Reasoning quickly dissolved to argument, warnings were exchanged, and the negotiator returned to his seat, disgruntled...

...Now movie house rowdyism is a tired old subject in Israel...

...Hitting is the solution...

...Deprived of their beloved bottles they launched candies, wrappers, and eventually flaming matches into the air...

...By this time I had lost the thread of the film, and with it, my temper...

...May I hope so...

...It's become so bad recently that Tel Aviv authorities had to call in the crack Border Police from "pacifying" the Gaza terrorist nests to combat hooliganism in public places...

...The cop for his part blithely listened to one and all, tapping his foot as he waited for the patrol wagon...

...Immobile, his eyes actually glazed over...

...Push-takim are hooligans, would-be hoodlums, young nudniks who "hang out"—in pool halls, movie houses, pizza parlors, the street...

...And, until that Saturday night, never violent...

...Indeed, my pushtak was looking quite chastened by this time and was probably doubting the wisdom of calling in the authorities...

...No one wants to get involved, got too many personal problems, there's a war on, haboob, and blah blah blah...

...Until my Saturday night fracas, I too was passive about the behavioral decay...

...A few of the less fatalistic, however, ventured shushings...

...I declined to accept that...

...Pushtakim invariably smoke Marlboros to signify both their virility.and their worth, and they Matthew Nesvisky is news editor and book critic for The Jerusalem Post...

...I now firmly asked them to be quiet...

...They have a long heritage of respecting mild forms of anarchy in everyday life...

...Without it, the larger battles for survival lose much of their point...

...No film buffs, they venture into the auditorium as rarely as possible, preferring to sit by the candy counters listening to their transistor radios...

...The boy was turned over to the juvenile authorities and, since the inspector believed I did not habitually slug people, he said he would recommend no action against me...

...Testimony was offered by a few people from the audience, including the man who had first admonished the kids, as well as the ticket taker, the theater manager, one of two of the pushtak's pals who had forsaken the screen in a magnanimous gesture of solidarity—and of course a few pas-sersby who can never let an opportunity pass to advise police and litigants on a sidewalk...

...I felt rather sorry for him, as he had to keep up this ostentatious physical therapy for a quarter of an hour before the police van arrived...

...Like the dozens of New Yorkers who witnessed an assault and murder and failed to call the police, a score of patrons in a Tel Aviv cafe last April sat stonily sipping their coffee while an extortionist methodically wrecked the place around their ears...

...When Knesset member Abba Eban made an impassioned—no, a reasoned—commencement address at a recent Haifa University commencement exercise calling for an overall improvement in "the national style," the typical response here ranged from titters to outright animosity...

...But I will continue to bellow for the usher and to reprimand the litterbug—precisely because this is the only Jewish State we have...

...He's gone off to nurse his pride and maybe now I can salvage something of the movie...

...Naturally I felt foolish and embarrassed, especially now that out of the cave of the theater and under the marquee lights, I could see how young my opponent was...

...Well and good...

...But they should not be condemned for their appearance, especially since this description fits many of Zahal's finest...

...That is to say, mine was far from the only case of movie house rowdyism—nor the most dramatic...

...Some may feel that with Israel constantly poised on the brink of political, economic or military catastrophe, my concern with the national behavioral style is petty...

...But just as the vigilante was about to spring, the wounded ringleader settled matters by bolting out of his seat and leaving the theater...

...I pushed my way into the noisy row, stood in front of the worst offender, and loomed...

...We tend to identify them by their appearance: on top they sport crazy coxcomb hair-dos and on the bottom they have tight trousers falling off the ass and in between they wear shirts opened to the navel to reveal on their chickeny chests multiple gold chains, charms and ju-jus, the current favorites being the gold-plated razor blade and the semi-abstract, distorted Star of, David, two items of depressing symbolic suggestion...

...But to behave himself would be admitting defeat...

...In return I was jeered...

...I demanded that he and his friends be quiet...

...Saturday night at Jerusalem's police headquarters in the Russian Compound, I discovered, is largely movie night...

...Only actions should be condemned...

...At this point I of course should have left the hall and looked for an usher, and if unsuccessful, then a Higher Authority...

...Hitting out was a foolish error of judgment, but doing nothing, I am convinced, is just as bad if not worse...

...All of this may make me sound like an overly moralistic crank...

...I couldn't help replying, "Solution to what...

...Not that my subsequent actions were indicative of an especially advanced stage of civilization...

...Magiya li—I deserved it...

...Such apparently was the case during my Saturday night massacre...

...Smoking on buses, playing put-and-take at the tax office, queue jumping—from the Knesset to the army to the schools to the banks to the neighborhood grocery, rule-bending is an accepted way of life here...

...But I was underestimating one of the boundless qualities of our Israeli youth—their chutzpah...

...The film was a loss by this time anyway, and a cop is what I should have called in the first place...

...I then repeated the call for an usher, so loudly that this actually drew hurrahs of encouragement from the back rows...

...All he had done was to ruin a movie for a few hundred patrons...

...His lip quivered and I read that as a challenge, so on the downswing I cracked his jaw with my fist...

...Newcomers to Israel may not know the slang term pushtak, but they need but one Motzei Shabbat in any of its towns and cities to learn more than they want to know about them...

...But then, just as we'd got through the advertisements and the trailers, perverse providence loaded that empty row with a half dozen or so of the worst movie house rowdies I'd ever come across...

...Which is precisely what is needed in our cinemas— bouncers...

...Israel has also had something distressingly reminiscent of the infamous Kitty Genovese case...

...And the disturbance promptly resumed, stronger than ever...

...But in the dark anonymity of a movie theatre, Israeli anarchy takes one of its worst forms...

...But one of his buddies showed up just then to act as his lawyer and was full of appropriate umbrage...

...Latecomers...

...Yet these are measures imposed from above...

...An usher, by the way, in Hebrew is a sadran, and literally means one who keeps order...

...Recently on a bus, when two university students—they were not pushtakim but they were still learning—got into a very lofty argument over rights and privileges because one wanted the other to douse his cigarette, I stepped in and lambasted the smoker so heatedly that his mouth hung open in mortification (whereupon the other student cheerfully removed the cigarette from the offender's lip...

...But the pushtakim simply told me that if I didn't like the situation here, I should "go back to America...

...Still, the amateur attorney shared with the patrolman an utter revulsion toward violence...

...I was just getting over a nasty bout of flu...

...And beyond that, my wife and friends will attest to my mellow nature...

...To renew his pranks would only bring on more trouble...

...But they didn't...

...When I see someone discard a cigarette pack on the sidewalk, I scoop it up and return it, saying something like, "Excuse me, you dropped this, I think it's yours...

...With the back of my hand—with what my father used to call afrusk—I shattered his smirk and left him in shock...

...Hitting...

...The single stroke was sufficient, but I wanted revenge as much as reform...

...We agreed I'd been provoked and again the axiom was endorsed that it's not nice to hit...

...Natives traditionally have been far too tolerant of such behavior...

...Now faced with a kid not yet out of high school, I felt akin to a child beater...

...Don't go to the cinema Saturday night" is an admonition both common and sensible in Jerusalem—but that night I was unwilling to abandon the town to the pushtakim...

...I was allowed to go...

...And in the past two weeks I have stopped two fights, one between teenagers and one between kindergarteners, all of whom I more or less shamed into a cessation of hostilities...

...I was stung by this—not only by the acknowledgement of how bad my Hebrew accent was, but by the deeper implication that these youths and their particular mores had some higher legitimacy in Jerusalem than I and mine...

...But in my experience, Israeli cinema ushers are invariably gentle old men...

...The inspector was by now more interested in the handcuffed movie-lover who was rattling his chains in the hallway...

...Now, some weeks after this misadventure, I find it won't leave me alone...

...Half-hearted requests for order were rendered, someone called for an usher, and at last one member of the audience delegated himself to approach the troublemakers and ask for quiet...

...At any rate, I resumed my seat and tried to convince myself that I could now somehow get back into the movie...

...Not much was solved in the police station that night...

...the average citizen is still too tolerant of the nudniks...

...I haven't been the same person since...

...What surer sign of heaven's favor can there be than an empty row in front of yours...

...As when any point of law is being discussed on an Israeli street, a small crowd immediately formed...

...Indeed, my action at the theater shocked me as much as it did those around me...

...Although I suggested earlier that I am of an even-tempered, even sedentary nature, I did not mention that I am built like a line-backer, and if nothing else, I can loom well...

...When the bus driver blasts his radio, I insist that he turn it down, reinforcing my demand by quoting the relevant law (Regulation 422 of the Road Traffic Ordinance...

...I'm generally cheerful, rarely aggressive...

...They joked, smoked, laughed, screeched, burped...

...Well, that certainly made my little case small potatoes...

...Nowhere is this more sharply seen than in our much cherished if rather tacky cinema halls...

...The extent of his moral outrage at their infractions is—as it was to the illegalities of Asher Yadlin and Leah Rabin—more often than not a mere shrug...

...The kid was doing a good job of acting the injured party, too...

...I shall strive not to let the difficulties of our situation ever let me hit a fellow Jew again...

...I was getting annoyed all over again and, having committed myself to activism, was wearily reconciling myself to hauling the head hoodlum outside by the hair...

...I wanted my evening out...

...For a minute or so he and his buddies commiserated and muttered curses—tiresome and trite Arabic musings on genealogy and the like...

...He pointed up a nasty brush burn on his client's elbow—no doubt earned on the soccer field—but I let him know in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going to pin that on me, and that idea was dropped...

...Give them a chance to settle down...

...The confrontation was quick...

...I regret having lost my temper, but I must admit to some degree of satisfaction in striking the kid...

...They stumbled into their seats with a clatter of curses and flying limbs...

...But there was no answer...

...As an American immigrant, I'm reluctant about imposing my cultural values on my adopted land, and like the native, I find myself terribly caught up just in the day-to-day business of managing affairs in this dizzying country...

...Further, as a professional writer, I've always been more of an observer than a participant—even in college I went to the demonstrations with my pad and pencil...

...That's what I did...

...Old-timers take a certain pride in it, and newcomers, if somewhat puzzled, generally rationalize it as a vestige of Israel's recent pioneer past...

...I wonder what effect the experience had on the pushtak—is he more circumspect in the cinema these days...

...Because the little bastard actually came back— with a cop...

...Even the extraordinary policy of banning soft drink bottles in theaters was finally adopted (if you have never heard the racket of a bottle rolling on a concrete movie house floor, you cannot understand what a blow this ban was to the pushtakim...

...Part of the audience actually cheered, and there was a scattering of applause—although I believe the approval was for the sheer violence more than for the motive behind it...

...he asked one and all...

...always carry the pack in their hands to avoid unsightly bulges in their sleek profiles...

...So I gathered my coat and my anxious wife and went outside...

...I find I cannot and will not tolerate "spoiler" behavior any longer...

...It was unstated but no doubt agreed all around that I'd had punishment enough already by causing anxiety to the wife, missing out on the movie, and watching the thirty lirot for tickets slide down the chute...

...The disturbances continued...

...But these were met with mockery...

...I can't excuse it, but I've been trying to explain it to myself...

...the concept is too important, too Jewish to ignore...

...My tormentor-victim was now in a difficult spot...

...And so lately I've taken to action...

...The hamsin was hanging on forever and there hadn't been a decent film around for weeks...

...Although the theater manager would later claim he had three ushers on duty, none made an appearance during the entire altercation...

...The reason: I punched a pushtak in the mouth...

...The weary young police inspector favored my side over the kid's, and after all, what chance did a little hood have against a tweedy, pipe-puffing immigrant Ashkenazi...

...Even as the kid and I filled out our countercharging statements, a fellow was brought in wearing manacles...

...I think it is just because Israel has always been a delicate entity that my moral outrage is justified...

...I then heard myself ask if he would step outside with me...

...And when a group of Anglophones held a conference last year on upgrading the quality of life in Israel, the press clucked at the "foreign" tone of their ideas...

...I have similarly lectured adults on their mob behavior in the waiting room of my neighborhood clinic...

...At the least, they can spoil your evening out on the town...

...He retorted with another insult...