Farewell, Israel!, by Ephraim Sevela

...What is surprising is that a man whose self-proclaimed virtue is honesty should fail to recognize and admit that these factors are the chief source of his dissatisfaction...

...Leys disclaims any attempt to write a complete and well-balanced account of the People's Republic...

...The future course of the Reverend Mr...

...Moreover, Mr...

...Only those Soviet Jewish emigrants who have a meaningful interest in the renaissance of Jewish national life are likely to make such efforts...

...In 1972 he revisited China for six months and went back briefly once more in 1973, before having his true identity disclosed to the Peking authorities by people he calls "the Maoist faithful" in Europe...

...Sevela's self-proclaimed capacity to face the truth seems a bit dubious...

...BOOK REVIEW Farewell, Israel...

...Hence, the "negative" and "disjointed" traits of this book, to which the author himself readily admits...

...The foreword to the English-language edition adds a few notes as of 1976...

...Sevela spends the other major portion of his- book describing and evaluating these defects...

...The sad thing is, however, that Israel turned out to be not only not as good as our dream but scandalously below acceptable standards...

...On the contrary, he modestly asserts that Chinese Shadows is intended simply to complement the work of scholars he admires, like Han Suyin, Edgar Snow, and John King Fairbank, and to add "some shadows without which even the most luminous portrait lacks depth...

...Despite this, Mr...

...He lays claim to a privileged perspective in another respect,as well...

...Now, six years later, Mr...

...After all, a country as small as Israel offers relatively little opportunity for filmmaking and still less for a filmmaker who does not speak the language...

...Indeed, when one discounts the respective biases of the two authors, what each reports tends to reinforce the observations of the other...

...Duty has called him to an even snugger harbor, the cure of souls at the Riverside Memorial Church...

...Shortly thereafter Heinrich, an atheist, had his children baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and left with them for America...

...Nevertheless he did find himself in precisely these circumstances, making a film for the Russian Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem...

...Sevela's story leads one to suspect that he has not been entirely honest either with himself or with his readers about the motives behind his own rejection of Israel...

...Sevela should occasion little surprise or consternation...

...Like most of us, he was fully assimilated...

...One is tempted to excuse Mr...

...He too is a filmmaker who has found no employment in his profession since arriving in Israel...

...And to counter the reproach that he treats "grave matters lightly," Leys maintains that under the circumstances prevailing in the PRC today, no visitor is in a position "to write anything but frivolities...

...After all, the Bible indicates that it was a great deal easier for the Children of Israel to leave Egypt than it was for them to shed the habits of servitude and enter the Promised Land...

...Yet to recognize these problems is hardly an exceptional achievement...

...He is totally disenchanted with Israel and speaks with the utmost despair about his own fate and that of the Jewish people...

...Sevela finished writing his book...

...Sevela on the grounds that he was unlikely to anticipate what came as a surprise to so many other Israelis...

...Happily for Israel the number of such Soviet Jews is by no means small...

...Mr...

...Israel has been afflicted, especially in recent years, by the problems of bureaucratic and economic inefficiency, political graft, social and economic divisiveness, and the hostility of Arab neighbors...

...Heinrich initially had no inclination to emigrate to Israel, but he eventually followed Sevela's example...

...This view has been given the lie in the The American Spectator March 1978 31 most dramatic fashion possible by the results of Israel's 1977 elections, which cast the Labour Party from power and put in its place the Likud coalition...

...I think it not impossible that he may yet see the great truths of Episcopacy and wind up in such congenial company as that of the Right Reverend Paul Moore, with mitre, crozier, pectoral cross, and the rest of the gaudy regimentals of an- Episcopalian bishop...

...Cut off from the everyday life of the Chinese people, the foreigner must either dish up a warmed-over version 32 The American Spectator March 1978...

...After less than a year in Israel, while still in the process of learning Hebrew, Heinrich became very morose, despairing of "having a movie camera inhis hands...

...I can see no reason for Coffin's readiness to believe, and even participate in the staging of, North Vietnamese propaganda, when he would never have done as much for Stalin or even Khrushchev or Brezhnev, except his extraordinary ability to believe what he wants to believe...

...Sevela, who constantly bewails the fact that many atheistic Soviet immigrants are faced with a choice between the hypocrisy of conversion to Judaism or future legal difficulties in Israel, says about this man: I neither judge nor accuse him...

...Sevela did not see fit to alter his opinion of the vicissitudes and future of Israeli political life...

...Yet they do not represent opposite poles, for Orville Schell rather frequently criticizes what he observes, while Simon Leys punctuates his acerbic vignettes with professions of love for the Chinese "people" and for the "Revolution" that is being subverted by bureaucratic stupidity...

...As these problems have intensified—during a period roughly equivalent to the time Mr...

...But in fact many Israelis, both religious and nonreligious, would want to argue...

...The most dramatic example of the intemperate and false character of Mr...

...Coffin has precisely nothing to say about events in any part of Indochina since 1975...

...It is not that his enumeration of the difficulties of Israeli life is fanciful...

...In fact, they formed the major themes of the most recent Israeli election campaign, which was well underway before Mr...

...Ephraim Sevela / Gateway Editions, Ltd...

...He dimly perceives the dilemma and attempts to resolve it, first, by portraying the rulers of North Vietnam as patriotic, courteous, reasonable, patient, and humane (he has a good deal to say about the criminality of American actions in Vietnam, but nothing about the numerousmassacres and other violations of international law committed by the North Vietnamese), and, second, by arguing that the United States refused to negotiate a reasonable compromise settlement of the war...

...He says, for example, that he does not think "that anyone will want to argue with me when I suggest that the celebrated discussion about who is a Jew, which has been torturing the country for so many years, smells of primitive racism a mile off...

...He would be leaving behind the cruel and suffocating atmosphere of official Soviet anti-Semitism for surroundings where he and his fellow Soviet Jews could freely pursue a healthy Jewish life...

...The idea that a negotiated compromise was possible is simply a delusion, though it was probably shared by Kennedy and Johnson, if not by Nixon...

...At the time of his departure, Mr...

...One particularly striking example is his story of an old friend, Heinrich...

...he too is a man who had little real connection with adistinctly Jewish life prior to his departure for Israel, and who from all appearances has established no substantial connection since his arrival there...

...His motives may in fact be very much like those of his friend...

...Sevela's career as an early Jewish activist testifies to the sincerity of his purpose and lends weight to his judgment...

...Sevela does consider the possibility that he is to blame for his great disappointment, that his fantasies about Israel so impaired his judgment that he was incapable of recognizing Israel's virtues...

...Leys spent a large part of the years 1972 and 1973 writing this book, which first appeared in French in 1974 as Ombres Chinoises...

...He left Yale, fearing that it was too much of a "safe haven," but again the slum parish eluded him...

...Sevela looked forward with high hopes to his new life in Israel...

...They were willing to palaver in Paris, so long as that seemed likely to persuade the United States to withdraw, but that was all...

...In Israel he would be able to escape from such hypocrisy and achieve his highest personal ambition, to be an honest man...

...12.95 Hillel Fradkin In February 1971, twenty-four Soviet 1 Jews staged a sit-in and hunger strike in the reception hall of the Supreme Soviet...

...It was obvious then, and is still more so today, that North Vietnam would never accept anything less than the total subjugation of the South...

...The Cambodian Communist state seems actually to be more murderous...

...Sevela's judgment is his discussion of Israeli political life...

...Nor is there any reason to blame Israel if it found itself incapable of accepting Heinrich's gifts...

...founded, the result of extreme credulity in a mythical Israel created by the imagination of Soviet Jews...

...He sacrificed everything to join the nation from which he had always been so remote and, even at this late stage, to offer it his gifts...

...Sevela has spent in Israel—they have become the standard fare of public and private discussion...

...The purpose of this unprecedented public display of dissent was to demand the right of free emigration to Israel...

...That there are a few Soviet Jews like Mr...

...Afterwards, the Soviet Union did permit the first large groups of Jews to leave for Israel, and among the emigres was Ephraim Sevela, one of the heroes of the February sit-in...

...Nevertheless, this book was evidently finished after the Israeli elections, as one may conclude from a few muted references to the Labour Party's fall from power...

...By devoting a .large part of the book to a description of his life in Russia, he takes care to impress upon the reader that he speaks from a privileged podium...

...He was fully educated in Russian culture, made films in Russian, and Russian was his native and only language...

...It is therefore not only his judgment that may be questioned but also the honesty in which he seems to take such pride...

...It is a happy circumstance that Mr...

...The former excuse is largely based on a guided tour of Hanoi, in the course of which he seems to have believed whatever he was told (including the Prime Minister's statements that there would be "no reprisals" in South Vietnam and that there would be an "interim government of national concord"), never asked any embarrassing questions, and never asked to see what his hosts did not choose to show him...

...Another lesson he might have drawn from this traumatic experience is that good conscience does not command active and enthusiastic efforts to bring about the abandonment of millions of unwilling people to a regime which we knew then, and know even better today, to be quite as brutal as Stalin's...

...He also hoped to see realized there his political and social ideals, ideals he had learned as a member in the Komsomol (Communist Youth Organization) but which in the Soviet Union proved to be only a shameless and hypocritical facade...

...Despite Israel's democratic appearance, he writes, "there is a complete blanket of purely totalitarian power exercised by one or, at the very best, a group of related socialist parties...

...But he rejects this notion...

...What he did must have been a statement—his protest against the snare for immigrants that the Jewish state had become...

...One may agree that there is no reason to censure Heinrich, but it is hard to believe that considerations of personal advantage had nothing to do with his decision to leave Israel...

...Simon Leys is the nom de plume of Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian art historian who has written several books in the Chinese field...

...The vision of a just and global future," apparently to be organized by such as Ramsey Clark and Cora Weiss and, of course, himself, "beckons insistently...

...As a saying quoted by Sevela states, it takes great efforts to get out of Russia but still greater ones to remain in Israel...

...It is after all a fundamental question, if not the most fundamental question, that the Jewish inhabitants of a Jewish state must try to answer...

...Sevela's book does in...

...For if it were limited to his critique of Israel, it would be at best an uninteresting book and at worst a dangerous and pernicious distortion of the character and problems of Israeli society...

...fact have two themes...

...He could not have taken this step for personal advantage in order, through the good offices of the Orthodox Mission, to obtain a free ticket to America...

...Sevela finds these hopes to have been cruelly unHillel Fradkin spent last year in Israel as a research fellow at Hebrew University in Jerusalem...

...Indeed, he claims that his belief that conscience may justify disobedience of constitutional laws or lawful orders had its genesis in 1946, when he participated in the forcible return to Soviet control—which meant torture, death, or, at best, years in concentration camps—of several thousand Russian defectors who had been captured fighting for the Germans...

...As a relative newcomer to Israel, he (along with other Soviet Jews) can see its defects more clearly than most Israelis, who he believes have become so inured to life in Israel as to be indifferent to or unconscious of its faults...

...It is not surprising, then, that a man like Sevela, lacking any interest in this question and finding no immediate private fulfillment in Israel, should find the difficulties of life in a young, small, and threatened country insupportable...

...He first visited China in 1955 at the age of 19, became sufficiently acculturated to marry a Chinese woman, and later resided in Hong Kong for five years...

...agent...

...Wendell N. Calkins is chairman of the history department at Wabash College...

...Sevela labors under an additional handicap: He has only a brief acquaintance with actual democracies and their slow, somewhat chaotic, but often effective resolution of political problems...

...This is by no means the only case in which Mr...

...BOOK REVIEW Chinese Shadows Simon Leys / Viking / $10.00 In the People's Republic Orville Schell / Random House / $8.95 Wendell N. Calkins These two books represent very dif- ferent attitudes towards China in the 1970s, the one (as its title suggests) dark and sardonic and bitter, the other bright, jovial, and occasionally a bit naive...

...Coffin's evangelism is not entirely clear...

...There he can be counted on to make life more rewarding for the religious editors of the Times and other papers, to say nothing of the TV camera crews...