Kokomo (a story)

Ben-Ner, Yitzchak

NOKOMO YTIZCHAK BEN-NER I'm a Jew and my heart's in Israel. Every day at 4:30 A.M. I jump out of bed as if touched by the hand of God. New life pours over me, and I'm full of joy, like a child at...

...Nothing can spoil my Israel...
...Seven of my predecessors fell off the end of the trailer and shattered their backs...
...On it were some words nervously written in pencil on the torn paper: "I'm a worn-out two-bit whore...
...Mister Boaz, you don't know what troubles you enter...
...This is damn shit...
...We'll walk arm in arm, dressed in shorts and sandals, cartanned people with sparkling eyes, dressed in full robes, greeting each other with bowed heads beside the date palms...
...Her take-home pay then was sixty dollars a week, and for a while we had to live on this, though Ruth's grandmother each month would send us something to help us out Then we moved to Kokomo, where housing was cheaper...
...Ill Mfather stopped having anything to do with me or my family since we became Jewish...
...There are some people who—whatever they do— you know what I mean?—it goes against them...
...I supposed that everyone there also knew about my Ruth's activities...
...There, the cold, estranged stares push me closer to holiness...
...She said nothing when she awoke...
...He had left his country, he explained, because he could not bear the injustice around him...
...When the rent-collector, Mr...
...You've been saying this for five years," laughs Meyer Roth...
...All this will put you right at the Pearly Gates the day we're called to judgment," I tell him, halfway in jest, halfway serious...
...The heater in this car was out before I bought it...
...She's eighty-three years old, with a very grim face...
...He shrugged and pulled a pack of crushed cigarettes out of his pocket, lit one, and then held the pack out to me...
...As for me, I look down on those who have left the Land, for the battle is continuing all the time, and Gog and Magog are fighting too, and the days of peace have not yet come...
...The children used to give him a hard time about this too, until Ruth almost stopped sending him out of the house...
...For two months we went around without work, and then, when my son was born, one of Ruth's uncles got me a job in a garage...
...We don't want to be an imposition," I explain...
...At this point, as always, she loses her temper...
...What am I doing to you...
...the books are worn from age...
...This is not reality...
...That black fellow, Jefferson Cuny, sits at the switch box, presses a button—and a heavy wind gushes through the load on my shoulders...
...I press her against me and hold her up, and our little son grips my leg...
...This you chose for yourself...
...They don't know that her studies have been cut short, that she's finished them conditionally and for no degree, because of the difficult times that have come upon her troubled soul...
...The second night an annoyed neighbor tapped on the door and called me to the phone at his house...
...Less than a year passed, and old Hackler, who owned the garage, passed on...
...I don't know what they mean, but I find great significance in them...
...My own language I do not know except for a few words I learned at the Jewish Community Center...
...I simply can't understand it...
...On the wall in a gold frame hangs a picture of the prophet Ben Gurion...
...On Thursday we k would meet L at the Corn-IB munity Cen-¦ ter for folk-iV dancing, W and Yona-r tan Perach was always there...
...The first two years she was meticulously punctual and prepared...
...You're an idiot, Boaz," he would tell me to my face...
...I haven't put on my snow tires, and my car swerves from one side of the road to the other as if this were the Adantic storm that pounded the Arthur Grey back in '59 when Mary and I stood by the railing and watched the waves rage on high like Mount Moriah...
...They too laugh on you...
...He laughed furiously, joylessly at my reproof, and Meyer Roth said: "You see Boaz—it's not all Jerusa-lem-of-Gold there...
...Since then we haven't seen him, and he hasn't written at all...
...I can serve as a gunner in the Israeli navy, and if they don't accept me because of my age, I can even work in the granaries like here...
...How's Ruthie and the boy...
...But Atias couldn't get rid of him, and there was no other place for that pitiful youth to go to soothe his painful longing...
...I am a lost son, thirsty and longing, who trudges along his journey across the earth...
...My little son Nili prances alongside me on his good leg and plays with the plastic trains his great-grandma gave him...
...My wife Ruth was not at home, and my son had already been taken to the hospital...
...At the end of summer they stand waiting in a long caravan along the edge of Keystone Avenue, filled to the brim with grains of corn, sorghum, millet and wheat...
...and one king shall be king to them all...
...So shall they be my people, and I will be their God I repeat these words and slap my arms and thighs to warm my body in the awful cold as the car swerves from one side of the road to the other and plows through the dense fog...
...I withstood it...
...The Israelis who have left their homeland open tattered songbooks and sing sad, extremely beautiful tunes...
...I take pleasure to remind myself that in Israel, a '61 car still has some value, and drivers don't have to warm themselves as they drive...
...What was wrong with Allan...
...It not for me," he said...
...David Atias stays at the magnificent Community Center, but only a few people come to him...
...A new dance began in the middle of the hall, and he stared at the dancers and at his fellow countryman who stood there pumping the accordion, staring but not seeing anything...
...I need somebody to pay to get me out of here, out of this damn shit...
...He spoke well, although his language was very bad—but his words could not affect me, for I saw through them...
...I think that after I eat, I go look for something else...
...I shook my head...
...Turn your body...
...I used to go there twice a week for Hebrew , lessons and folkdancing...
...Burstein is thirty and goes by her maiden name, even though she is married...
...I look serenely at the scoffers...
...Think of it...
...wipe away my tears...
...He was always dressed in the same clothes—narrow brown slacks, a green wool shirt and a light black coat...
...You know...
...He reads and chants the liturgy in pleasant, melodious Hebrew, and everyone responds with a verse from the prayer book, first in Hebrew and then in English...
...He lay there seven weeks, and I stayed by his side throughout my non-working hours, since my Ruth could not stand to look at his silent suffering...
...From the moment we both decided to become Jewish, we felt the need to change our names...
...Webb's son-in-law, has given me a raise three times, and I haven't even asked for one...
...The Kingdom of Heaven is there, and each person's portion in it will be certain, my good Ruth...
...Four years have passed since then...
...Maybe he's written to Ruth...
...The black guy, Jeff Cuny, did okay with him, feeding him and amusing him throughout the day...
...They were sitting around together, all pale and listening to the radio and watching the television broadcasts of the coming dangers...
...Maybe I'll go back to sea or try to get over there, to Israel," he said...
...I didn't find my Ruth there, but I noticed that some of her clothes had been gathered together in a flurry...
...My wife's name had been with her from birth—"as if you were predestined to be a part of the Chosen People without knowing it," I used to tell her...
...God of the Hebrews, give me strength to perceive my loved ones' sorrows and to withstand them until the day of redemption...
...I answer: "Next summer...
...So I take stock of myself, reinforce my difficult decision, agonize over the way I affect the lives of my loved ones, and mortify myself in the harsh sadness of the ancient prayer...
...When I get home at six in the evening, and my wife Ruth has, as usual, disappeared, or has withdrawn into her depression, I sustain myself with a cup of coffee and a slice of bread dipped in maple syrup...
...And then she starts banging angrily on the calculator keys...
...I am on my way to you, brethren...
...Until a short time ago he was a kind of pariah...
...In the afternoon he meets with the kids in Zionist youth groups called "B'nei Golan" and "The Blues and Whites...
...Then he would lean against the wall and watch the dancers...
...He eased his foot off the brake, and the car rolled forward again and stopped...
...We are going to a land that knows affliction, and it would never occur to me to demand luxuries I've grown used to here...
...I grip the thick vacuum hose and stand like a rock on top of the trailer, and the din of the millions of grains rolling into the silo fills my ears...
...You know what I'm talking about...
...I never carried cash with me, except a few dollars for daily expenses, and Ruth had taken what was left in the wooden box in the kitchen cabinet...
...Yitzhak Ben-Ner is an Israeli writer whose books include Rustic Sunset from which this story is excerpted Robert Whitehill is an American poet and translator...
...They think I've gone deaf, but the truth is that I'm removed in thought when they call...
...They say that the old lady has four husbands buried in her cellar...
...He said something in Hebrew to Meyer Roth, who gave a quick, nervous laugh...
...He cuts out pictures with them and helps them stick up posters of our president (I've forgotten his name for the moment, to my shame) and David Ben Gurion and General Dayan and the Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem of Gold...
...My lips, moved by some unfamiliar force, utter those harsh, ancient words...
...She arranged to work for them in exchange for instruction for three additional years, plus a salary...
...Six or eight of us go there once a week and go over words with intoxicating sounds...
...True, I love the Orthodox Jewish temple more...
...As we danced, the Israeli, long-haired and swarthy, leaned against the wall...
...Shivering from the cold, he would enter the heated hall and station himself by the coffee table, filling up on little sandwiches and refreshments...
...His secretary, Ms...
...They demanded $65 bail in addition to $126 he owed the hotel for three weeks' stay...
...The leader was an energetic youth named David Atias...
...Not one come...
...Seven and a half years on deck...
...I see her long lashes quiver, and her cry for help penetrates me...
...We'll eat loaves and fishes to our fill there, like all the early saints...
...My Nili hopped over to him in his pajamas, and I gave Marv a leisurely hello, and Ruth hid her face...
...In three weeks a high-rise office building stood in its place...
...The highways that gird the city open before me, south, west, and east, long and empty...
...We pored over the Bibles that Marv brought us for a long time before we decided in our hearts...
...Like here, with the Negroes...
...He couldn't satisfy his ravenous hunger...
...He spoke about the Jews rescued from Arab lands and how in Israel they were second-class citizens, and about living in a garrison state that has fought for survival but has failed to seek alternatives to injustice or war...
...Like the name of this lousy town...
...At times like these, she and I squeeze in together in our big, warm bed, and heat passes from flesh to flesh...
...I haven't been able to take part in the Israeli dancing anymore...
...Since our fellow Jews here don't want them, the Israeli expatriates get together at each others' homes, and more than once Ruth and I have been invited to their little gatherings...
...A step-and-a-half back...
...All characters in this story are fictitious...
...I nodded...
...I wish I could sit down and think...
...They are ill-at-ease and persecuted...
...Every morning at 4:30,1 get in my old MG and leave for work...
...They were so dumbfounded to see me and so starded at my request, that they didn't ask why but only counted out the bills and handed them to me: $200.1 didn't know how I would manage to repay them...
...What do I tell you...
...He refused to join the debka...
...I turned on the light and found a page ripped out of the Bible, and fastened with a magnet to the refrigerator door...
...The Jews there are rich, and they pay off their true yearning for the Holy Land with large contributions...
...As my car pushes through the heavy fog, I recall my friend Mary and Yonatan Perach, the Israeli, and I see my father in his trailer, and my son laughing silently, and I imagine the face of that black bank robber in his stolen car...
...And I move, my eyes shut and my lips murmuring, gripping the hand of Phyllis Horowitz to my right, and to my left, the warm hand of Melinda Roth...
...Their words may attempt to cover up the distance, but they cannot hide their true intent...
...After finishing the course, we went to work for Sears...
...the Jews don't like him, even though his wife Melinda is a local girl...
...the winds are pleasant and do not whistle...
...Meyer is from the land of Israel, and he came here in 1948, at the height of the war...
...I laughed and saw joy in my Nili's eyes, as he sat with the black worker on the concrete floor...
...God will give you the strength to make this hard journey and come out of darkness into great light...
...When I got home it was already three in the morning...
...then the motor turns over, and the coughing turns to measured purrs as I leave for work in Indianapolis...
...It's good for you only if bad for others...
...I'll write you as soon as I know what's going on...
...A short step forward...
...Her grandmother paid the hospital bills...
...We are still strangers among them, and this coldness is one of the mortifications we must endure...
...There amid the palms and sands of Mount Gilboa, in the plowed fields, quiet is waiting for us...
...In the morning I took the boy with me, still wrapped in his blanket, and he slept till we reached Indianapolis...
...A Jewess...
...I subdued my pride as I entered my Ruth's parents' clothing store...
...I will save them out of all their dwelling places...
...We don't see my good buddy Marvin anymore...
...We went there two or three times, Ruth and I. But we stopped going, because my wife felt uncomfortable...
...We want to be useful...
...I don't know...
...Amen...
...The building has marble columns and a golf course and auditoriums with upholstered seats and a stereo system and color televisions and listening rooms and game rooms and room for dancing...
...I had packed my bag, and if my son's illness hadn't become more serious then, I would have gone to the Land whatever way I could, to give my brethren a helping hand...
...he hunted for words...
...Once or twice I found her striking the child hard, her face contorted, as if she were laying all her troubles on him...
...Copyright © 1979 by Am Oved Publishers, Ltd, Tel A viv and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Ltd, Tel Aviv...
...My father stays there alone, though some people say that for the past couple of years a Chicano lady, a widow, has been living with him...
...Burstein, is Jewish—but I don't consider her a real Jew as I long to be, even though at face value she is more Jewish than any other Jew I've ever met...
...Her husband laughs, and his face quivers, swollen from drinking...
...We made my name Boaz, and for our son we chose the name Nili...
...I nodded...
...Marvin Cohen, my buddy from the Arthur Grey, helped us choose new ones...
...great oppression lies upon them...
...You could read his secret homesickness for that faraway place...
...We traveled in three cars to Bloomington to perform our dances at the YMCA...
...I love moments like these, and my Ruth cuddles up to me, and we feel so good...
...We don't want to go there and ask what Israel can do for us...
...I struggle to start my car, a '61 MG, all beaten and battered, its frame rotting...
...Hey," Yonatan Perach said to me in the waiting room of the jail...
...In the dark, in his closed room, Nili too wanders in his dreams...
...But there, in the Holy Land, on the kibbutz, I'll carry that heavy hose with pride, damn it...
...And there were days when she secluded herself for many hours, as if hiding in a thick, hard shell, wary of any touch, not answering and not speaking and not crying, in a stubborn and evil silence...
...Harrison, Jr., nods in esteem...
...Suddenly I am strong...
...He's Jewish too, but he keeps some of the commandments from time to time—the pleasant ones—like most of the Jews around here...
...In the evenings he gives us Hebrew lessons or turns on the record-player, rolls up the carpets, and leaps with his accordion into the middle of the sparse circle...
...He is the author o/Orvim Chumim, a book of Hebrew poems...
...Dave Harrison, Jr., agreed to take him on as a sweeper—and he was soon all white teeth with dust, sinking into mountains of corn...
...One day, two months after the incident I have just described (I had already sent a letter to the Israeli consul in Chicago and told him the whole story of our lives and requested permission to immigrate), a black burst into the Merchants National Bank & Trust on Empire Boulevard, Kokomo, and in front of everybody, in broad daylight, robbed the bank...
...My wife Ruth's parents live nearby, in Indianapolis, and what we did caused them a lot of grief...
...In a year my Ruth will have covered her debt to the hospital, and then, if she can withstand the job and the hours, we'll be earning a lot of money...
...Before he was arrested he had been beaten by the porters, and his whole body was bruised when I met him the next morning...
...I can perform these dances well, as if flowing in my veins is the warm, special blood, full of pain and persecution, of my new people...
...Four-and-a-half years, and Sundays too...
...He teaches Hebrew in Sunday school in Indianapolis and Lafayette...
...Just think of it...
...As soon as we make up the back payments on our rent, I'll pay Grandma back everything, to the last penny...
...To live on someone else's expenses...
...So what's Meyer Roth...
...and I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel...
...All that I wanted Israelis to be and all I had heard about them...
...Marv sat at the wheel of his car and didn't look me in the eye...
...They nabbed the bank robber in Lafayette that evening, with all the money on him, and I was called home from Rowe & Webb...
...I'm a woman with free choice and free thought, cut off" entirely from all that pagan mythology...
...Some say that he is in Israel...
...Million and quarter Arab people, refugees, in dirty camp— and they dance his dances...
...His pants and shirt were stained, and his coat torn, and his whole body was a mass of bruises and stubble...
...Marv enrolled at Indiana University...
...I say: "In a year and a half Ruth will have completed her obligation to the hospital...
...They don't like people who've left the Holy Land to come here...
...The furnace has been broken for three months, and I can't afford repairs...
...The radio broadcasts the news, and Reverend Marshall reads from the Old Testament...
...I was glad about the partnership too...
...Our family name became Ben-Brith— Son of the Covenant...
...Why do you grow his hair so long...
...I was the only one who noticed this, and therefore I couldn't reprimand him but only scolded him gently...
...I'm almost forty already...
...Listen, you think they want you there...
...Her house is an old crumbling fortress surrounded by maple trees...
...And Ruth—" my wife lifts her warm eyes toward me, and they are filled with quiet, "my Ruth can be a nurse at the kibbutz...
...I put on my skull cap and repeat after him as I pass through a misty, temporary world on the wide and empty highways amidst sleeping towns named Cairo and Lebanon, Zionsville, Capernaum, Car-mel, Hebron and Terre Haute, Tyre, Corinth, Jericho, Bethlehem, New Palestine and Jerusalem...
...They won't help to you...
...And she, for the first time weeping in distrust, asked: "You really believe this, dear...
...And he answered: "Leave that shit alone...
...Like me, he came off deck without a career...
...I haven't asked her...
...I never ask her why she is crying, where she has been or what has happened to her...
...Maybe than I can go home"—for the first time he said "home" meaning Israel, and I was glad—"maybe I and you can come there all together...
...I feel, in the words I exchange with people at the reception after the Reform service, a kind of artificiality...
...What you build for yourself, you know, a picture like this—" his hands moved, as they desperately aided him to form and explain his words, "like this of Israel: blue skies, sea, sand, kibbutzim, boys, girls...
...in all $191, more than my take-home pay for a week...
...I need a lot of money...
...Sometimes, when I come into the office and help myself to a cup of coffee, she shakes her head and repeats her usual line: "I can't understand it...
...Four days later my Ruth came home, stubborn and silent as usual, until the bitter crying broke out...
...We have come home, and our road has been long and bitter...
...I touch his light hair before I leave the house...
...Since he had no way out of his embarrassment, he has ignored us...
...He grew silent, and I nodded yes...
...I resolved to send these good people their money from Israel...
...That's damn shit...
...Their laughter does not hurt me but only them...
...The next day at 4:30 A.M., he got up, still sleepy, put on my clothes and helped me carry my crippled son to the i car...
...At times like this I feel a pinching throb inside of me...
...That's fortitude...
...Like this from start...
...Just a little...
...From there we can send the hospital the rest of the money we owe them for your courses...
...In the morning Atias drives over to the university...
...His left cheek was shaking, and he couldn't stop it from shaking...
...My feet seem to move at their own command...
...I smile at them both with all my love, in the darkness, and whisper: "A little while more, just a little while more...
...They steal from the Arabs also the dance...
...You can come, maybe...
...The great and happy quiet, by the Sea of Galilee...
...Marvin Cohen, petty officer second class on the Arthur Grey...
...Sometimes Harrison, Jr., comes out of the office to take a look at the continuous line, and his eyeglasses glisten...
...The trucks come one after the other...
...I'll just say that we have survived a great tragedy...
...I don't know, Wally," he said...
...This is enough for me, and I sit down and imagine this distant vision: tall, Some day we will reach the Holy Land...
...I made some coffee and poured syrup over slices of bread, and my boy Nili sat with us like a man...
...His face was somber and his eyes were blank...
...He sure don't look like a Jew," she used to say about her great-grandson, Nili, with the slight impression of relief...
...Harrison, Jr., Mr...
...In any case, when we go to our Land, we will have a need for this trait...
...Just a little more willpower, faith, hope...
...Everyone there has come to the ultimate, eternal freedom, without injustice or evil...
...But they didn't get up or move...
...He never took part in the dances, and his relationship with our leader Atias was not especially good...
...Maybe heaven will look with favor on your wife too, who has committed the gravest sin of all: for in cutting herself off from her origins, she has become cut off" from herself...
...And so I restrain my yearning and make time stand still...
...He laughed, as if he had not for a moment doubted I would come...
...You got to throw out that pretty picture...
...I would take my loved ones, pull them close and hard between my arms...
...He passed his hand through my son's hair and pressed his foot on the gas pedal...
...My whole body shaking as if the Last Day has come to earth, I grip the hose with all my might...
...A prancing hop to the center of the circle and stick your chest out...
...The man left her there and disappeared...
...You really chose on this people...
...Other times I found her where I had left her before daybreak, and the pillow on the rumpled bed was soaked in her tears...
...with the dirty conscience of all this nation, that she should move from this bad thing they do to her two thousand of years, and she herself does a bad thing, a wrong, terrible wrong like this, to others...
...His name was Yonatan Perach, and he stood there and badmouthed Israel—but when he spoke, there was distant longing in his eyes, and pain...
...They don't care if you stay Jewish or not It is same thing...
...I to return you it all, to the last penny," said the Israeli Yonatan Perach as we sat in the evening at my house in Kokomo...
...Yonatan Perach from Israel had been arrested for not paying for his hotel room downtown...
...There are three gray-haired ladies—Ruth Levitt, Phyllis Horowitz and Irene Mel-chior, whose grandson is on a kibbutz in the Holy Land...
...Not even that shit Atias...
...What in the world do you need this for...
...No one else at the hose has been able to last as long as I have...
...And the priest shall take the basket out of thine hand, and set it down before the altar of the Lord thy God And thou shall speak and say before the Lord thy God A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty and populous...
...Baloney...
...His distress and his friendship had brought me to this hostile city and to this distant and ancient faith...
...Always the same songs...
...Tenderly I took hold of her and the compulsive evil slowly fell away...
...Just six more months, my love, and then all your troubles will come to an end...
...I have a share in their pride, and she depends on me, drawing upon my renewed strength...
...That night she curled up in my arms like a child who misbehaved and cried a long time...
...He broke through and emerged from the shower of kernels, sending clouds flying, and yelled back: "Like on lousy kibbutz, Boaz...
...At 5:30 A.M...
...At night, when she finally fell asleep, I saw bruise marks at the base of her neck...
...He invested in a garage on the outskirts of San Antonio, and since my mother died he's been living in a mobile home park not far from the garage...
...The boy from Israel switched back to English...
...On dry land I taught my body to make do with less...
...Who wants us...
...I won't be able to tell the story in every detail...
...He was so Israeli—mad, young, ill-at-ease, and also strong, sure, brash, proud...
...The rolling thunder separates me from my surroundings and gives me time to ponder...
...Nobody asked me what had happened...
...rying weapons to protect our little kibbutz from all manner of evil...
...What d> you think...
...You see...
...Not pretty people from Exodus...
...And on that day, as You sit upon Mount Moriah among the silv'ry olive trees, You shall be beseeched by thieves and whoremongers, sinners and those who take Your name in vain, cripples and women who commit adultery, and You shall forgive them all, and they shall come in purity, in white robes to take refuge under Your wings in mercy and in loving-kindness...
...We don't want to go there empty-handed...
...I myself didn't know how it would end...
...It to spoil everything you want about Israel," he said and twisted his face...
...We're not so young and we're foreigners...
...Why do they always say that we Jews are a merchant people...
...Since then I've managed to work at a laundromat, and as a rent-collector's assistant at the El Dorado Apartments...
...Well," I say, "you especially, Ms...
...When I found myself again without a job, my wife Ruth signed up for nurse's training at the church hospital...
...I slap my hands on my thighs to warm them...
...By 6:15 every morning I'm standing on top of a semitrailer at Rowe & Webb Grain Elevator, Keystone Avenue South, Indianapolis...
...He was dressed in my striped shirt and wool slacks, all washed and clean...
...I laughed into her hair as she wept "Time is standing still, Ruthie...
...This is like children's stories," he said suddenly...
...These people are considered traitors...
...You see...
...There, in the elevator yard, he sat and watched me as I stood on the end of the semitrailer...
...The workers have to call me from the yard for a long time before I respond...
...The Jewish Agency had brought him over, and he's paid by the Zionist Federation of Indianapolis...
...A year and a half later, Marv got laid off—and a month later I too lost my job...
...With sadness and regret she nestles in my arms and sobs on my tired shoulder...
...At noon I shake the heavy dust from my clothes and walk over to McDonald's to buy a Quarter-pounder, some fries and a beer, and this will last me the rest of the day...
...He took his glasses off and wiped them carefully with a kleenex...
...Her whole body shudders between my hands, and her crying is bitter...
...You know...
...We saw a picture of it at the Jewish Community Center...
...And there's Abraham Katz, who came here two years ago from Poland, Mark Stein the lawyer, who was a volunteer pilot in the first war in the Land, and Meyer and Melinda Roth...
...Day has begun in Kokomo, Indiana, but in the early morning, the electric lights still leave their yellow reflection upon the road...
...It's standing still and not moving, and everyone is waiting for us there...
...Snow never falls there, in that land of palms and golden sands...
...And the building is empty...
...We always say one more year, six more months—and time goes by...
...A verse full of faith and hope: "The Eternal One of Israel will not speak falsely...
...Like me...
...The wind whistles through the Translated by Robert Whiteh.ll rattling windows as I drive along...
...On Friday evenings at temple, Rabbi Arnie Frankel stands by the organ in his black robe, with the girls' choir behind him...
...Stein," they say, "was wounded in the war over France and still volunteered in Israel...
...What will you do on the kibbutz, Boaz...
...Is this Boaz...
...They can't find their niche anywhere in the world...
...Our entire group, when I was with them, numbered eight or nine, sometimes less...
...You to feel there more bad, more alone than here...
...his day of greatness was in the war, on Mindanao...
...His translation of "London," a story by A haron Megged appeared in moment, April 1978...
...The child, who had not cried since he had begun to stand on his tender legs, would hug my thighs and look up with eyes that pleaded and thanked...
...Five damn minutes...
...My buddy Marv used to come up to see us in the evenings, and we drank coffee together and talked about the sea and our voyages and laughed about all the different jobs we had had and devotedly read the Old Testament...
...I don't give these days much thought, for time stands still for me...
...The insatiable lips spread out and suck in the abundant grains...
...It's like all America's standing up there with you, Wally...
...We are building ourselves, preparing ourselves, in body and soul, for a new life...
...And all the troubles of these hard times seem to have sunk into her pale face...
...Our Nili," I say, "will be a big boy then and won't be a bother to the kibbutz...
...A few weeks ago, the boy began to cough in his sleep from the cold, and my wife Ruth piled her wool dresses over his blanket to warm him...
...we must restore ourselves, purify ourselves, decree upon ourselves all the religious duties of the Jews, even the most stringent ones...
...They must be jealous that my path is clear and sure and that I know my place, my end purpose, my future...
...Like on a kibbutz, Yonatan Perach...
...But the days continued as usual, and we've been forced to postpone our journey to the Holy Land...
...Why you have no television, Boaz Ben-Brith...
...All of us, the child and I and the Israeli Yonatan Perach, had a good laugh...
...Everyone there knows suffering...
...For this reason, Ruth and I have resolved that when we go to the land of Israel we will join a kibbutz in the mountains of Gilboa...
...I hugged her, and her body was warm and aching in mine, and I whispered in her ear, into her soft, full hair: "I'm not asking a thing from you, dear, except to wait another six months, six months and no more...
...Gather in your beloved, the abandoned and banished and me...
...Every morning it is like this, and this is the seventh year of his life...
...That's nonsense...
...My father, like me, was baptized in the Presbyterian Church, but was not a practicing Christian and never attended church very much...
...He was about twenty-four, maybe even younger...
...Her husband is a sergeant in the dental clinic at Fort Benjamin Harrison...
...I smiled at him from my side of the table...
...I looked at him and wiped the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve...
...Man," he tells me now and then, "to see you standing up there...
...Why did you change his name...
...Often, when I came home from work I found the house empty or my son Nili wandering around alone in silence...
...Hours later, when the child was already asleep, Ruth would return and I never asked her where she had been...
...How is it...
...Once I was so startled by the shouting, I dropped the hose, which began twisting and shaking and leaping like a snake...
...The nights are cold in this heathen town...
...Why worry them...
...We both sent off for information on a bookkeeping correspondence course in Popular Mechanics...
...When I returned in the evening with my son, his sheets lay on the mattress in the big room...
...Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they have gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land...
...The kibbutz leaders would gather to discuss my request—and all of their money, with interest, would be sent to them right away by air mail...
...But I've gotten used to it, and now I bless it...
...And I, even though he calls me by my old name—he's a friend of my wife's family—answer him: "That's what the sea does for you, Dave...
...Well, Boaz," says Meyer Roth, "when are you leaving for Israel...
...All of a sudden I noticed that he hadn't slept the whole night either...
...At times like this everyone laughs, but I don't pay attention to their laughter...
...Listen, please, Boaz...
...At the door of the room I see his leg brace, leather and metal and my heart aches...
...Shit...
...Tomorrow I am looking for work, damn it...
...And he, Yonatan Perach, laughed at what I said...
...The women sit in their place in the balcony, and the men clutch their prayer fringes...
...At first the noise destroyed all silence, disturbed all peace and quiet and every thought...
...In a year and a half for sure...
...I must now put on my Navy pea jacket, the last remnant of my service possessions, don my wool hat and leave...
...With...
...He could not build a decent life for himself while ignoring the injustice around him...
...They've never let us try our strength at other things...
...I know what it is to slip...
...I got hit in the ribs, and the metal nozzle tore up my cheek...
...They smile at me, ask how I am, how my job is, and sometimes they invite my wife Ruth and me to their homes...
...Time is not leaving any marks on me, and the touch of my hand still quiets my beloved wife's misery...
...After what happened with him and my Ruth, he sold the rest of his own and his late parents' belongings and left Indianapolis...
...Suddenly my eyes are full of hot tears, and I am purified in great and tender love through the pain and suffering and the vision of Jerusalem...
...In the past, when I was out at sea, my appetite was that way with women too...
...I don't see them except on Thanksgiving, which we all celebrate together, and on other legal holidays...
...There's not five minutes in the whole world, and that's the trouble...
...I dance...
...But what I did six years ago made him quite embarrassed...
...I need five minutes...
...This is damn shit...
...Maybe I shouldn't be telling this, since it's between them and me, but only by telling it can I explain how intense is our feeling that only there can be found a place for our lives...
...That's what I am dammit...
...Israel is something else...
...The sun will rise in the east, in Edom, across the high peaks of Gilboa, I and we shall kiss the dust and sand...
...We are Jews by choice and not by circumstance, Jews who have no salvation but there, no respite but there...
...And the money...
...I never had asked them for money, and they never had spare money to give me...
...The reverend speaks and I repeat the English words after him...
...Her lingerie was piled on the bed, and the only suitcase in the house was gone...
...Maybe he and Marv, my two friends, are plowing the desert lands of Israel, the one country that wants them...
...A coward fleeing from battle...
...bout six months ago, I met an Israeli at the Jewish Community Center...
...Outside is total darkness, and the snow flickers bright upon the grass...
...And with...
...But two weeks later I was back at the trailer as before...
...This, these dancings, this is fraud," he said in his fractured English...
...I take off my wool hat and put on the skull cap I keep in my glove compartment and repeat after him: "When thou art come in unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shall take of the first of all the fruits of the earth, and shall put it in a basket, and shall go unto the place which the Lord thy God shall choose to place his name there...
...Prominent jaws, eyes sunk somewhat, and a bristly stance...
...On Sundays, against his wife's wishes, he takes his kids to Sunday school, and he puts on a skull cap and sits down with his friends in the snack bar...
...Then Reverend Marshall reads some verses from the Old Testament...
...This work is very hard here...
...My Ruth nods her head in confirmation, and one Israeli asks in bitter fun: "How come in a year and a half and not tomorrow...
...I didn't believe what he was saying, since there was such yearning in his face...
...I had only ninety minutes left to sleep, but I didn't shut my eyes...
...Kokomo...
...My heart was torn at their pain, but I kept silent...
...When they sing, a distant sparkle shines in their eyes, unfamiliar, charming, a sparkle that has been buried only to re-emerge for a brief moment...
...Burstein, as a Jewess, should understand this better than anyone else...
...Meyer wandered from job to job until they felt sorry for him and made him a teacher—but to this very day the pupils' parents have not pardoned him for having left our Land at the peak of the first war...
...Somehow or another, the bandit escaped in a stolen car waiting for him outside, and as he raced down the street in front of our house at a hundred miles an hour, he hit our Nili, who was crossing the street on his feeble legs...
...Thus we sit, until darkness surrounds our small, temporary home on Empire Boulevard, Kokomo, Indiana...
...My wife Ruth was smart enough to answer back and explain that Nili was not Neal but rather the Hebrew abbreviation of a verse from the Old Testament that a friend had revealed to us...
...But we've been forced again to postpone our trip to the country we long for...
...How can there be a name like that...
...I said...
...I'll get an extra job and we'll gather some money together and I'll sell the car and we'll leave for Israel...
...They are poor folks who own a small clothing store downtown where only black people live...
...Since I became Jewish, I haven't smoked or drunk anything but beer," I told him...
...Yes sir...
...My Ruth returns home...
...I glance at my wife sitting by my side, her eyes shut in silent prayer...
...Well, so," I said, "will we be seeing you...
...We take each other's hands and move our feet in quick, hurried steps and sing out along with the record, scratchy from so much use...
...I dance, free and easy, dance away my yearning for redemption, to be there, dance away the end of my sorrows...
...My son Nili, still in his clothes, was asleep in his bed, covered by his blanket...
...We will go there and say: Take us—we will go to work for Israel...
...Adriano, got arrested for slipping money into his own pocket, I went to work at Rowe & Webb...
...I haven't seen him since...
...The voice on the other line was at first not familiar: "It's me," said a man in a foreign accent...
...In his office at the base, he told me once, they decorated the walls with pictures of General Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin and a cartoon of the old lady clutching a jet...
...I sorry to bother you like this—but I don't have much choice...
...Where did he go...
...Suddenly she let some words burst out: "What am I doing to you both, dear...
...They do not fear the stranger there or try to greet him, as at the Reform...
...They to kiss you and your wife in Israel, when you come...
...Sustenance for all America and America's livestock, Wally my boy...
...Why is Neal better...
...R." I couldn't sleep that night...
...But we must be more prepared...
...But I unwittingly find myself feeling pity toward them, for they are, at the core of their being, Jews, and as Jews their-home is nowhere...
...I hold the large plastic hose between my neck and shoulder and grasp the metal nozzle, pressing my lips hard together against the corn powder and dust...
...I tune in a small Bloomington station to find out whether the President has consented to give us the equipment we need...
...Man, we live in the twentieth century, in the last half of the century...
...We want to go there and serve and give her all she deserves from her loving children...
...They are Methodists who go faithfully to church each week...
...Not pretty story from Bible...
...I yelled to him from the edge where I stood, with the thick hose pulsating on my shoulder...
...He used his hands to punctuate his bad English...
...The little Israeli asked him two or three times not tc come back to the Center, since he had heard the things repeatedly being said against his country...
...Maybe I too will study nursing during the year, and in three years we'll both have real professions as well as some money to use for our departure to our Land...
...What difference does that make...
...How our great love for that faraway land and her people has steadily grown...
...About six months ago 1 met a young Israeli at the Jewish Community Center...
...I telephoned to everyone of those shit people from the dancing...
...And the Lord said unto me: Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee, and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and I will make thy name great among the nations...
...My father is a retired Marine sergeant...
...But afterwards, at home, as the good dreams slowly evaporate, my wife Ruth asleep by my side, her terrors gone now, I meditate in the darkness, for maybe they are right and we are not yet ready...
...You must know this—or it be very bad for you there...
...Tiny snowflakes hover silently in the chill air...
...His wife sold the sooty old building to a contracting firm...
...their conversation is cold, hypocritical and contrived...
...In the evening I picked him up downtown and we went back to Kokomo without exchanging many words...
...At 6:15, like every other morning, we were at Rowe & Webb...
...The next day, Saturday morning, Marv honked his horn outside our door...
...In the morning when I got up for work, he was still sleeping...
...For a long time we have been dreaming of our life there...
...Tell me about Israel," I suggested, after my son had gone to bed, as we sat at the kitchen table...
...Four and a half years ago, more than a year after we became Jewish, I got into a big argument with them...
...Shivering in the darkness, I put on my clothes...
...Ruth's mother asked...
...You to need of all this troubles...
...Several weeks later I heard what some evil people were saying about her, that she had run away with a drunken black waiter to some town in Illinois on the Ohio, Missouri and Kentucky borders...
...Why are you doing...
...Four and a half years...
...Grandma, my wife's mother's mother, is the axis around which everything revolves...
...I didn't say a word when the two of them told me, in broken sentences, with innuendos, about what had happened on those lonely evenings and desolate days...
...she implored...
...At noon over lunch at McDonald's, the Israeli told me that he didn't intend to return to the elevator...
...I really prefer things to be direct and open, as at the Orthodox temple...
...All fraud...
...Then we can pack up our things and leave...
...That's where I am now, Boaz Ben-Brith, ex-expert gunner on the Arthur Grey, now a grain elevator worker, age 37, living in a heathen land...
...And if I happened to have been born to parents who decided they were Jewish, as did their parents—do you think this obligates me...
...What is it...
...Not an ounce of love do I feel towards it...
...Allan Giles Hackett was her third or fourth husband and the only one who blessed her with progeny...
...About six months have passed since then...
...There at least all the prayers are said in ancient Hebrew without translation...
...the supplications have a piercing and painful melody...
...I haven't seen my friend Marv for four years now...
...New life pours over me, and I'm full of joy, like a child at the new dawn, even if the day will be like all the other days that have gone by...
...When I get dressed, my wife Ruth is still asleep...
...Everything happens in this land of the shadow of death...
...Maybe we can see some television, huh...

Vol. 4 • March 1979 • No. 4


 
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