Stealing Home:
Weales, Gerald
"HEIM" IS WHERE THE HEART IS STEALING HOME Israel Bound and Rebound Haim Chertok Fordham Unversity, $19.95, 295 pp. Gerald Weales Haim Chertok was still Harvey when he turned up in my graduate...
...That was 1976, and he is still there...
...The essay was a revelation...
...It is a series of essays, each occasioned by a particular event (a visit to his old neighborhood in the Bronx, a reading by Max-ine Kumin in Yeroham, a school trip with his son to Jerusalem, military duty in Beirut), illuminating one or more of the points I have touched on in the paragraph above...
...It is his acceptance of this condition-that we all carry our exile with us-which makes it possible for him to reconsider Coalinga in the last chapter, to contemplate a temporary, unthreatening return there...
...in American Civilization, a-bout which he is mildly ironic in Stealing Home, he went off to Brown and further graduate work...
...Gerald Weales Haim Chertok was still Harvey when he turned up in my graduate American drama course almost thirty years ago...
...Stealing Home is not a chronological account of the Haim-ing of Harvey...
...One more variation on Stealing Home, and fadeout on a baseball metaphor...
...He is plainly more at home in Yeroham, the town where he settled, than he has been anywhere else, but he is only one of a handful of Anglos among a largely Moroccan and Indian Jewish population...
...There are recognitions as well as revelations in Stealing Home...
...The essayist's voice has some of the impatience of Harvey Chertok, the activist as scold, but this Haim has enough self-mockery to suggest that he knows he is an imperfect man in an imperfect world...
...When the essay that has become the opening chapter of Stealing Home first appeared in Commentary (an odd place these days for a left-leaning activist), I discovered that his letters to me had left out his growing . spiritual distress...
...I did not know it at the time-nor did Chertok-but his transfer was an early step in a journey that he hoped would take him out of galut (exile...
...On army duty in Japan, he lived dff base, hoping to become part of the working-class neighborhood he chose...
...as an Orthodox Jew, he is an oddity on the left, where his political allegiances lie...
...he wrote sadly that his Japanese, functional in the vegetable market, would never be good enough for philosophical discussion...
...Perhaps on the assumption that I was a goyisher secularist, a practical Midwesterner for whom a galoot was only an awkward oaf, he gave me the details of everyday life-family, work, social setting-without dwelling on the needs that infected or informed them...
...to live apart...
...He distrusts the materialism that marks so much of Israeli life, is wary of the attractions of the cosmopolitan cities, deplores the aggressiveness that has turned Israel's need for security into an annexation of other people's land...
...His lively glossary in Stealing Home defines galut as "a concept and state of Jewish soul," which explains why his aliya (immigration to Israel) is an ascent, as the ambiguity of his title suggests, which carries exile with it...
...From California, he was settling into conventional college teaching where, in the best American liberal tradition, he could do good and well at the same time...
...Believing that to be a Jew meant to take "next year in Jerusalem" literally, he made his aliya, but his return to the promised land was not all milk and honey...
...He has a good ear and eye for the details of the life around him, but they are presented not for themselves but as the material from which the theme and shape of each piece come...
...Although Chertok was politically and professionally at home in California, his return to religious orthodoxy set him apart not only from his non-Jewish but from his Jewish friends and colleagues...
...In the . 1980s, Chertok became a writer in earnest, contributing to both Israeli and American Jewish publications...
...His departure from America was the result of a long, nagging process that is central to Stealing Home...
...Then, suddenly, he moved his family and his hopes to Israel...
...Anomaly in America, anomaly in Israel," he says at one point, and elsewhere comments on his "idiosyncratic-choice always...
...For the reader who never knew Chertok in any of his guises, it should still be fascinating...
...He came to fear what was most enticing about Coalinga, California, that it was a comfortable place into which he could sink, that it would devour his Jewishness and-still the 1960's rebel-accustom him to what he primly calls "an unseemly standard of consumption...
...The suddenly above is my adverb, not Chertok's...
...As a peacenik, he is one of a small and isolated group among religious Jews...
...Chertok surfaced now and then in my life-usually in my mailbox-with reports from the various way stations of his quest...
...Bright and restless students often change colleges in search of the nonexistent nest that is just right for their talents and temperaments...
...It was not an unusual defection...
...From New York, he was high and then not so high on the possibilities of Bensalem, a communal experimental college he was running at Fordham, where he had gone as an undergraduate...
...He wrote a reasonably respectable essay on a playwright who did not much interest him (his mind was on the fiction he was trying to write) and, after pocketing his M.A...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
