JERUSALEM, OF GOLD
Gold, Herbert
JERUSALEM, OF GOLD Herbert Gold Davka: in spite of everything In Paris, it is sometimes esti-M mated, there are one and a half press cards (breach inhabitant. If Paris used to support its...
...I want better weather...
...She changed it, don't you read the papers...
...the universal requires a walk through the narrow streets, or an emergency conference on the green and stony hills with their outcroppings of browsing sheep and humps of rock...
...In winter of 1975 the Syrians were building new fortifications in the Golan...
...Travellers tend to meet both old —Con't...
...And in the third place, when is this snowstorm gonna stop...
...If not, no danger...
...But it was not strong enough and millions died and it did not survive...
...It was inadvertent, honest, I didn't mean anything by it...
...Each child carries a stick with a painting of (lowers and his name on it...
...was any flirtatious girl, only maybe a little better, since she was flirting with me...
...G. A. Hufschmid, Decorator, O.E.V...
...Then they eat many kinds of fruit, carob, dates, figs, oranges, apples, rare fruits, as many as fifteen varieties of fruit, symbolizing the riches of the land on the day of Tu B'Shvat, a year and a half after the October war, in which everyone here has losses...
...The children are buying their Purim masks and costumes, and a crowd of kids looks to an American like Halloween...
...Television equipment snaked and bumbled through the lobbies, and sometimes the bright lights went on, just testing...
...I floated for a month like one of the deepseafish of Eilat...
...Some of the students chewed gum and tended their knitting, and perhaps I wish they hadn't...
...They try to fit their prayers into the cracks...
...Rudi talks about the founding of Gan Shmuel and its defense and he describes the barren desert of those days...
...What to do, what to do...
...Many of the young were hoping the snow would last long enough for them to use their skis in the Golan...
...They are natural...
...It is Tu B'Shvat, the fifteenth day of Shvat, a festival of nature and the planting of trees...
...Formerly called the Wailing Wall, this holy place, remnant of the great Temple, is the central place for what could be called Jewish pilgrimage...
...Laughter...
...Is that Lady Kissinger, Morris...
...Suddenly, on a warm day, the white almond blossoms appear...
...A light drizzle was falling as we took coffee and cookies between classes...
...The other would be a journalist after he wrote for some newspapers...
...Now I visited the Haifa University extension in Afula with writer A. B. ("Bouli") Yehoshua, and heard him lecture on the concept of the absurd in Camus to an extension class of careworn mothers and workers, glowing rural flowers from the ambient kibbutzim, a few school teachers, and a couple of Arab women students...
...Every Jerusalemite seems to discover an organization (lowering like the poppies in his garden, and carries a briefcase laden with his personal international obligations — to rescue the Jews of Syria, toward the United Taxi Drivers & Registered Guides for Ecumenical Faith, for South African Orphans In Love With Holy Places...
...A tourist from Beverly Hills said to her husband in the coffee shop, over their potato pancakes with apple sauce, "I'm so excited...
...The one would be a linguist after he learned some languages...
...Morris, take the onion soup, you like onion soup, you know at home you like my onion soup, Morris...
...Instead of a bar of soap I was served with an Israeli chocolate bar...
...But the laughing lady at the Kiosk who sought to sell me tickets to a Bat-Dor dance recital, or to a performance of an Ionesco play, or to what else would I have...
...Institute Jeanne Gatinean Beauty Salon...
...they are pretty...
...We left California to visit the Holy Land and find a snowstorm, we can't even get through the lobby to buy souvenirs...
...gripping the chair with white knuckles, to keep awake through the news...
...We rode up together...
...I waited for the other to say, Because I am still Biafran, but he did not speak...
...Aviv waterfront...
...My chief distraction in this holiest of cities was trying to get in and out of the lobby...
...But it's a miracle anyway...
...And religious factions were struggling over the question of whether to cut, trim, or root out the grass growing in the Western Wall...
...At the entrance to Kibbutz Gan Shmuel,' 'the Garden of Samuel," on a sunny winter Sabbath day, I found two handsome Africans posing for snapshots with their kibbutz girl friends...
...Sometimes Dr...
...Not sexy, but something better...
...The children can see the difference in the land...
...The hotel was surrounded by sharpshooters from the Israeli army...
...Palm trees and eucalyptus, poppies and almond blossoms, winter sun and winter sleet, hooded priests and rabbis and kafiah-wearing Arabs were undiluted by the stubborn tourists and pilgrims of late winter 1975...
...Evidence was accumulating...
...In the ornate mideastern-cum-Swiss lobby of the King David Hotel, there still remains an astonishing framed message from the decorator who designed this interior during the days of the British mandate: The object was to evoke the glorious period of King David...
...If Religious Affairs asked Antiquities to look into the plants, he and a staff of botanists would be happy to oblige...
...Herod's tomb is a meeting place for lovers...
...The date was February 10, 1975, and it has entered history very quietly, like a melting snowfall, despite the walkie-talkies, the bugs in ears, the special canteen with liquid Prell and M & M's and Kent cigarettes, staffed by a blue-haired American lady official and set up for the (two-day) visit by the State Department so that its personnel would not go into American Product Withdrawal...
...The Garden of _Samuel The parking lot at Can Shmuel is crowded with tractors pulling carts decorated with flowers and filled with children, parents, grandparents...
...Later, in the dining hall, I sat with the Africans...
...Geneva, Switzerland It looks quaint and laborious now...
...To make affable in this holy city with unholy elevator, I declared, "I suppose you're here with the Kissinger group...
...Old men and tourists, soldiers and school girls, Jews from all over come to the awesome structure with its history of miracles...
...They invented room service for people like her...
...They were the province of the Religious Affairs Ministry...
...The Wall can support these tiny roots...
...The skinny blond one...
...Rabbi Perla said: "We must get more opinions...
...Because we were Biafran...
...The camera of eternity turns and we are suddenly in our places...
...One of the young men said he was a linguist, the other a journalist...
...And their presence here is a lesson for Israelis, too...
...Israel knows it can win the next one — and asks for no more victories...
...This is not a religious holiday...
...Now again he stands on a pickup truck to mobilize his energy for an occasion...
...If Paris used to support its indigents by journalism, Jerusalem has invented the Institute, the Committee, the CongregaHerbert Gold has published articles and fiction in numerous magazines...
...Jerusalem is a golden sea city withformer frontier village has modern university buildings...
...Institute for Science and Halachah...
...they were not formally Antiquities...
...Syria knows it will lose the next one—and seems to hurry toward it...
...They can work and they can enjoy the laughing kibbutz women...
...There was a rare winter snowfall over the city...
...He is in his eighties...
...Other rabbis joined the fray...
...In the synagogues and at the Western Wall everyone argues alone with God...
...I once led a Soviet immigrant to the Wall for the first time, without letting him know where we were going...
...Gardening is an affair of love," the Tel Aviv city gardener remarks...
...Scientists criticized...
...The children love to dig and they love to listen to him...
...Morris wanted to go out...
...Faith is ever beset by doubt, I believe everywhere else I roam, but here I expect an Institute for the Resolution of All Doubts to dissolve them...
...His most recent books are SWIFTIE THE MAGICIAN and MY LAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS...
...On the seventh visit to Israel I rediscovered the magic of exploration in the present as if it were the past, the past as if it is the present, which is one of the enduring fascinations of this land and idea...
...Visitors who had kissed the Wall with closed eyes now touched the wall, the plants, the crevices with botanical intention...
...They had tribal markings on their cheeks and foreheads...
...I explained that it was only because she glamorously read Camus in Hebrew, from right to left...
...We will do everything to provoke it...
...its suffering would be redeemed...
...What can a fellow do, lonely for news of the links between Sweden and France in the winter drizzle of Afula...
...Somehow I found myself talking with her about D'astier de la Vigerie, a French journalist and resistance hero...
...A certain despair in the staff was indicated by a luxurious error in my bathtub when I attended to the lonely traveller's ritual soak...
...Is that why...
...Gavriel Ben-Ephraim defends Lawrence by stating that he is "incomparably penetrating, digging deeply into previously unexplored areas...
...Institutum Biblicum Pro-curacion General de Terra Sante...
...Czech," 1 said, just to amuse myself, trying to think Bratislava, Masaryk, Benes, Munich...
...The immigrants from everywhere say life is impossible here, and they want to be no place else...
...Let us reason together...
...He is still a part of that lost community...
...He took his notes in Hebrew, but also wrote painstakingly in German, spelling correctly, the words Dachau...
...George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), told a Beirut interviewer his group would do everything possible to provoke a new war...
...There were unlikely tourists in low-rise jeans in this luxury hotel, just hanging around, keeping an eye out for things...
...It was sleeting that winter day in Jerusalem...
...You are Nigerian...
...This stern and lovely setting for an ancient nation looks, in a village like Ein Karem on the edge of town, or anyplace in Jerusalem except perhaps just under the Hilton Towers, like the place the Messiah would surely choose for his next vacation on earth...
...In-stituto Central de Relaciones Cul-turales Israel-Iberoamerica Espana y Portugal...
...If eyes could frisk, his were frisky...
...Kissinger's Mobile Diplomacy Travelling Inducement Shows, the hotel was suddenly awash in electronics, weaponry, and gossip...
...Feignant," said Yehoshua, which is French for: Man you tell a lot of lies...
...The walkie-talkie man cast a narrow glance over my jacket...
...And what questions were agitating the people of Jerusalem...
...tion...
...The writer, Jorge Semprun, is a Spaniard who escaped his civil war into the France of the Nazi death trains...
...Letters to editors offered various views...
...The healthy kibbutzniks listened to this agitated, clever, passionate lecture, delivered with Sephardic eloquence and mobility, by a man whose ancestors never left Israel for Europe...
...That gentleman busily talking to himself on Bezalel Street may only be convening a quorum...
...Well, "the cactus in the town is a flower in the desert "—one of those epigrams which works and doesn't work equally well, no matter how you juggle nouns and verbs...
...I bought the poster called Shalom— a boy in sandals chasing the dove of peace with a butterfly net...
...A Hebrew greeting doesn't say, "Good day," but: "It will be good...
...At last the architect Tochanan, Minister of the Department of Antiquities, who was responsible for restoring and repairing the Wall after the Six Day War, said that the plants could only damage the structure if they were of the sort whose roots thicken as they grow...
...The argument between God and man, with time and history, about diaspora and the ingathering is concentrated in this holy city of many faiths...
...Bouli was amused by the velocity of my academic curiosity about a blond kib-butznik with long pigtails who looked like an untormented Swede...
...But nations have interests, not sentiments, as Palmer-ston said...
...They were Ibos, and they were volunteer workers, along with the Scandinavians, the Swiss, the Germans, the American adventurers — even an occasional French kid — who find their way to the peculiar enduring experience of kibbutz communal living...
...The tufts of green and the stone are, in the meantime, in spite of everything, most pleasing...
...To show appreciation," the other Normal Controversies: Grass, Literature D. H. Lawrence is in the news again as a critic asks: This is a great novelist...
...There were dark-eyed and pretty but very solemn Israeli army girls to check packages and passes...
...I asked...
...The Arabs listened...
...The fat boy raised his finger in the classic gesture...
...cried one of the young men...
...Yes, some men with permanent injuries to arm, leg, eye...
...I leave out the Committees, the Organizations, the Action Groups, the Authorities, the Faculties, the mere Clubs...
...Historical note: An Uzi is not some exotic form of Rachel or Esther, but a simple automatic weapon manufactured in Israel...
...Henry Kissinger filled Jerusalem with his ambiguous presence, suggesting that Israel give up land in the Sinai and the Abu Rodeis oil fields in return for Sadat's willingness to let them give it up...
...Rabbi Perla took the ominous news to the chief rabbis of Israel...
...Normal life, davka, in spite of everything...
...In the meantime, there is a shortage of men after so many wars...
...Was this a warning, was it a blessing, what did it mean...
...The wars overarch all...
...Tufts of grass, rooted in crevices, give splashes of green to the umber of stone...
...Are the girls of Netivot not quite so pretty as the fashionable jean-clad ones of Di-mona...
...Yet in the warm winter sunlight they also loafed with their books, their felafel in folds of pita—the traditional equivalent of the Big Mac — their guitars on the lawns or at the fountains...
...However, the shower did not hurt...
...The crewcut American security people carried antennae, special buttons, walkie-talkies, bugs in ears, organic fret equipment, double creases between the eyes...
...A lively debate about the bushes and trees best suited to resist the salt winds on the Tel said...
...Auschwitz...
...Young men with stubby automatic weapons, wearing their khaki woolen knit caps indoors, strolled the public rooms...
...S.W.B...
...Yes, some skullcaps...
...Rabbi Goren stated that the Wall had stood for 2,000 years...
...A letter writer to the Jerusalem Post complains about the critic Alex Berlyne's "annual anti-sodomy campaign...
...I remember Rudi from the October war, when he watched the fighting on Israeli television and stood up...
...No one agrees about the Director, but we are all on stage...
...So Israel knows it must be strong enough to survive and not depend on the warm-hearted friends of Biafra or Zion...
...In the first place, her hair is dark now...
...The Arab students wore slightly more exotic blue jeans — otherwise they looked like typical young Israelis, sulky, sexy, dark, and pretty girls who argued interpretations of Camus with their teacher...
...To learn Hebrew," one of them said after a pause...
...A man reported that tiny bits of crumbling stone landed on him once as he prayed...
...Institute for the Complete Israel Talmud...
...History is being made here today, Morris, and I think you should live to appreciate...
...This new war, we are looking for it, we are waiting for it, we greet it with all our wishes...
...memoir of the German occupation of France and the deportation trains, the camps, the ovens, those memories which haunt Israel...
...it is a celebration of the land which merely feels like a ritual, a traditional homage to the passion which drained the swamps and irrigated the desert—an old story, told the children once again by an elder of the kibbutz, Rudi, a Haganah commander in the old days, now bent and white-bearded, as they dig holes with little shovels, carry water, sing, dance, and eat the goodies their parents have brought...
...I know something about your civil war," I said...
...Temporal reform will be convened immediately in the synagogue...
...In spite of everything...
...Israel too hopes for help from its friends, from those who believe its three million people have the right to make their own destiny on this narrow strip of land...
...In the second place, I doubt very much she comes to the coffee shop...
...and look to planting and green and faith for new miracles...
...The graves in the cemetery at Gan Shmuel are still fresh...
...Istituto Immacolata Con-eezione Suore d'lbrea...
...We here are a collection of one-man institutes, dealing on earth with the demands of eternity, Christian, Arab, Jew, and politician...
...In his next class Yehoshua lectured on "The Long Voyage," a brilliant out a sea, burnt by history, burnt by holiness, its hills covered with rocky outcroppings of the same stone with which the city is built...
...The young man next to me had shrapnel scars in his forehead...
...As faithful reconstruction was impossible, so the artist tried to adopt to modern taste different old jew styles...
...Jerusalem the Golden is also a city of institutes and congregations — of the remnants of Kamenetz, of the scholars of Melville and Mark Twain in the holy land, of Herod and of the Golani Brigade and the pious and mad anti-Zionists of the N'turei Karta movement, who want to take part in an eventual PLO regime over Israel (Jews were not supposed to return to the Temple until the Messiah returns), of the jacket-wearing Germans and the fezzed Turks...
...The classic medieval commentator Rashi had pointed out that plants should not be removed from synagogues...
...In the meantime, city gardeners remind the public that Theodor Herzl, the great Zionist philosopher, suggested no lighting and plenty of trees in public parks in order to give protection to lovers from prying eyes...
...Henry or Mrs...
...He knows that history has irrevocably trampled on the memory of Biafra, and he is realistic, an Ibo, making out okay, travelling the best he can...
...When it suddenly appeared, he stopped, folded his hands, and said haltingly, "I don't believe...
...And it is also now in the fretful end of the twentieth century, with its campuses, coffee houses, restaurants, and music, a sensual city...
...Check," he said...
...Why did you come to Israel...
...These are a genuine selection from the Institutes...
...Israel is busy mourning her last military victory while the Arab states are celebrating their defeat...
...That powerful bearded chap with his briefcase open on a bench in front of Herod's Tomb is compiling the minutes of the last meeting...
...As I left Israel, Israelis were still discussing the matter...
...Hebrew University At the entrance to Hebrew University the guards check all packages and purses, and there are barbed wire barriers, and the arcades are thronged with young men and women in uniform, some of them carrying their weapons...
...A burly Alabamian held the elevator in the King David Hotel while a burly Mississippian with a walkie-talkie walked and talked...
...At the stadium a crowd of slim ones was hooting a fat boy who finished his laps around the track — some kind of bet...
...I wonder what the Kissinger period of magic diplomacy will look like when a generation has passed in this city which has absorbed so many miracles already, stubborn sacrifice and vigilance by three great religions, births and deaths, priests and supplicants, crusades and schisms, destructions and rebirths, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Turks, British, armies fluttering their last inside its walls, spears, emblems, banners, and chocolate in the soap-dish...
...It looks very much like an American campus, only with the preponderant note of prettiness long Afula: A.B.\fehoshua When I first passed through Afula, in the mid-fifties, it was a frontier town, a crossroads with a gas station and a fly-specked eaterie, and we drove with Uzis in our laps...
...But as the steady winter rain fell and the electric heater hissed and steam came from our breath as we huddled in our coats, the time of horrors came alive again in Afula, in the Jezreel Valley, for this people which seeks to overcome but not to forget...
...square — when I inadvertently tried to walk into the barber shop where Nancy Kissinger was having something done to her hair...
...Again the radio plays "Blowing in the Wind," with its heart-breaking Russian-Jewish lyric line absolutely appropriate in Hebrew translation...
...Rabbi Perla consulted other engineers...
...But he still remembers how the Ibos call themselves the Jews of Africa, and Biafra was like Israel, a refuge and a dream, and it would survive because its cause was just, its people loved and sacrificed for it...
...He will plant this reminder along with his sapling...
...The poppies are out— Kissinger's guards were worried about opium...
...Maidenek...
...However, he had not yet examined them...
...No," declared stubborn Morris, "I'm not here to eat...
...Nevertheless, in spite of everything, the people of the Garden of Samuel celebrate the bounty of nature and the riches of the land...
...A concerned Tel Aviv engineer wrote to Rabbi Dov Perla of the Religious Affairs Ministry that the roots could crack the stones of Herod...
...It provides the sensuality of stone and green and nostalgia, hope and desire, birds, donkeys, and parks, and that of fear too...
...They confirmed the warning...
...on page 4i friends and odd other travellers...
...The flow of the present into the future still animates a people who are too much in mourning for the fallen of the past while they push bulldozers through development towns, lead touring students through ruins, balance impossible accounts with the world (how to rank the injustices of the past with the continuing injustice to Jew and Arab...
...I'm not sure how I had this good luck...
...And leaves room for the sexiness of those who know, here more than anyplace else, of sacred yearning and community...
...They plant the tender shoots...
...His wife pouted...
...He's like the kings of old...
...For one of Dr...
...Biafra hoped for help from its friends, the religious, the sentimental, the gallant, but it could not mobilize enough strength in itself, though it tried very hard, and it was crushed despite all the outcry about starving babies and an isolated, oppressed, lonely people...
...The stories of both Samson and Massada may turn out to be mere history, mere myth...
...The straight black hair or a curly haze instead of that California blond look which American college girls get by heredity or by Clairol, whichever comes first...
...They smiled and shrugged...
...they stand for the eternal growth of the spirit...
...I was bumped by two security people with distinct symbol pins in their lapels—one was a Star of David, it seemed to me, the other some sort of high-fashion U.S...
...Nancy Kissinger was expected...
Vol. 1 • September 1975 • No. 3
