The State Of Our Dreams
Klein, Yossi
THE STATE OF OUR DREAMS Of Labor and Likud, of terror then and now, of nightmares . . . and of promises YOSSI KLEIN I. Israel in the summer of '81 was in the midst of a startling electoral...
...But I wonder if it matters how many concessions we offer...
...In 1948, we accepted the UN partition...
...But for the men on the dais, disciples of Revisionist-Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the 1930s were no time for social experimentation...
...They found Anat and Dani in the living room...
...As if you were a kibbutznik clearing the land...
...Instead, Labor continued to nurture its model network of kibbutzim and unions and clinics, fending off the momentary demands that threatened to overwhelm its fragile dream...
...And quivers back and forth, an uncertain scale weighing the fate of Israel...
...So where does that leave us this afternoon...
...And please, ignore those who...
...It was an old Jewish sickness...
...But when they gathered together in the hall, time collapsed beneath the weight of their numbers and it was suddenly 1945 again, just after liberation, and they were back in a displaced persons' camp, lost in that interim with no familiar landmarks to define it, caught between confinement and drift, no longer inmates and not yet survivors: refugees...
...The Revisionists formed a political party that evolved into the Likud bloc and settled into permanent opposition, unable to adjust to the state that had come too late for those it was meant to save...
...The Labor government attempted to integrate the Sephardim and promote intermarriage among the Jewish communities, but it did so by scattering the extended Sephardic families that had lived together for centuries...
...Outside Likud headquarters—known as Metzudat Ze'ev, the Fortress of Ze'ev Jabotinsky—hundreds of celebrants press against the front door, overwhelming its guards and surging into the lobby...
...If now they joined with the Sephardim as the mainstay of the Begin coalition, it was not because settlements or a tough foreign policy suddenly concerned them, but because Israel was no longer Zionist, having failed to effect on a national scale the assimilation attempted by individual Jews in the West...
...Two...
...It was a time for records...
...Their wounds contracted, disappeared...
...Sadaam Hussein calls on the world to help Iraq build atom bombs...
...Do you even know what it means to be a Jew...
...And when on Memorial Day we stood in military cemeteries by stones uniform like small white fingernails, we waited for sundown to become dreamers again and welcome Independence Day by dancing madly around bonfires and bopping one another with plastic squeaking hammers, reveling in the endurance of our miracle child, Israel, no sadness without its happy end...
...And, turning to Adi, Smadar says, "So much talk...
...But I ask those who have been friends of Israel not to turn their backs on us now...
...Be-g/n...
...He conceded that, until the Six-Day War, Israel's strength had been a bluff, like the tiny cannon, the "davidka," bronzed in a Tiberias square, whose thunderous explosions had frightened off invading Syrian troops in the 1948 war...
...I ask...
...She lost her entire family...
...Do you want PLO guns aimed at our bedroom...
...Left, right, morality, greed: it's not hard to figure out...
...But it was Begin's policies that caused Israel's isolation . . . —Exactly the opposite...
...But they were confusing desperation for arrogance...
...For years their major focus was on the German-Israeli rapprochement, symbol of Jewish refusal to acknowledge the past...
...Every morning he wraps himself in his new tallis, blue and white, the Zionist flag...
...and now I demand of You, empower this tallis as a canopy wedding the Jews to their home, an umbrella over the land of Israel...
...So what if the PLO promises to use a West Bank state as the first stage toward liberating you completely...
...Is it really so hard to understand why Israel went as far as it did in Lebanon...
...Be-g/n...
...It was fitting, he said, that Ferenc had been caught in the Ukrainian crossfire, straddling as he did reality and a dream world...
...More bicycles than cars, and even an occasional horse and buggy, travel its streets...
...Every month a check arrives from Germany, which pays for this room: a cot, a folding chair, an armchair, silverware stacked neatly in a cardboard box...
...It is election night at Likud headquarters, a gray building with pinched corridors and low ceilings, housing a party accustomed to the margins of power...
...And, straining upward, he sees the gold dome hovering over the Wall, the glory of Islam blinding, crushing, and beyond it church spires in their arrogant stance...
...and, recalling his fear of small places, feels the air beneath his tallis begin to thicken, gags, eyes wide as though trying to breathe through his pupils, clutches for an opening, a memory of breath, and suddenly he is back in a Jerusalem store, rifling through stacks of black and white prayer shawls, thick and lifeless, then notices one, blue and white, its stripes like lines of festive newsprint, and knows he has found his way back to prayer...
...But more often the process was gradual, an incomplete westernization that fractured families and turned Sephardi children into urban waste...
...When I was interviewed on television right after the incident, people were angry at me for not crying...
...Shimon Peres, leader of the Labor Party, appears on the screens, a politician whose smile seems incongruous on a melancholy face...
...And when the tight spaces within him would constrict, and he would wonder whether Jews could still live in this world, he would think of that place where chalutzim sang swift songs punctured with rhythmic clapping and the accordions like jolly fat men expanding and contracting on the bare touch of the keys, simple songs about campfires and midnight horas and eucalyptus trees whose leaves tasted like mint candies...
...Smadar does not seem disturbed by my staring...
...It's important for me to show we can live normally, even in the midst of all this...
...Its leaders were once synonymous with Zionism...
...and I say to the Vatican, the Protestant churches, the House of Saud: If my presence here sticks in your throat, then history is now your theological problem, not mine...
...despite the rush of words that seems to take him by surprise, his voice never wavers...
...A mitzvah...
...We were both visiting wounded friends...
...in an exposed jaw simulating strength...
...H,ow does the face conceal pain: in a mouth which smiles easily but within secure borders, not wide or giddy, retrievable should the muscles begin to quiver...
...Flower stalls and book stands and outdoor cafes line its main boulevard, through which runs a stone canal as though the earth had ruptured, eucalyptus trees shading its banks...
...In government schools, Jewish history began with the Bible, then vanished and materialized again only with the founding of the kibbutzim...
...He loved them for who they were, not as abstract components of a social experiment...
...We went from gas chambers to battlefields without pause, and now finally we are admitting the consequences...
...And Israel was beloved by the West for its youthful exuberance, made possible by its self-willed amnesia...
...We are still hovering over the Land of Israel, the silver eagles have not yet descended, they have been circling in the fog, they are just about to land...
...Though they sit erect, their shoulders sag or shrug, unsure about why they have been dropped onto center stage just at that point in their lives when obscurity would have been welcome...
...Smells shit and burned flesh...
...Never Forget...
...He tunnels around the thick walls of the Old City, looking for an opening...
...The survivors step slowly, almost drowsily, peeling away layers from one another's aging faces, checking each other's forearms like numerologists, and line up before a computer terminal to watch the screen for pale blue letters to form the name of a sister, a friend, a misplaced loved one who didn't die because he crawled from the mass grave with only a bullet in his foot, because just that once the showerheads jammed and in the ensuing chaos everyone was spared...
...am fertile, I am hollow, I am a sabra, I am a Polish Jew returned to my emptied shtetl...
...Always be proud, he told his wife and three daughters in the cattle car, their heads shaved but for a stripe down the middle to mark them in case of escape...
...And the chorus began: Fascists...
...He stares for a while into the camera...
...My father's grave is on the side of a mountain overlooking the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, the limestone casket smooth and airy, as though it has floated up from beneath the earth...
...Yossi hated its old men, recreating the imagined innocence of their Hungarian shtetls and mouthing prayers for deliverance as if they were not already living in the Jewish state...
...At night he would stare at the photographs of his parents mounted on the bedroom walls until they blurred into dots through which he could slip like the pores of a sieve and return to his father the winepresser, one of the most respected Jews in Transylvania, riding with him in a carriage through a tangle of vineyards to the cheers of all the workers...
...Be-g/n...
...The Revisionists sat in continuous shivah for all the un-mourned Jews, rebukers at the wedding who wouldn't join the dancing that followed the smashing of the glass...
...I ask Simi...
...Inside, the rooms are cool and dark, afternoon light squinting through the slits of drawn shutters and muffled by curtains...
...On its marble roof are etched these words: "Asher ben Yosef the Levite, a survivor of the Holocaust who believed in the eternity of Israel...
...Tell me, sweet bird, is there pain and suffering in the warm land...
...Again with the West Bank...
...The men on the dais, translucent in the burning lights, watch the crowds around them thicken with rejoicing...
...Yossi planned to travel as an explorer...
...And he realizes he has taken a wrong turn and must tunnel back, extends his long black fingernails and claws through the air, hands thickening with calluses, tries to spit out the dirt filling his mouth but cannot gather saliva, presses the weight of his torso into the digging, propelled by rhythmic thrusting until he collapses before a large domed building, crawls up its wide steps and into the main sanctuary of the synagogue...
...And the child doesn't cry...
...He begins his story, in a broken but elegant English that is like a poorly remembered poem, in a Hungarian yeshivah before the First World War, where he secretly read the secular Zionist works that promised to free the Jew caught between ostracism and chosenness, humiliated by the nation and clutching the air for an invisible ally...
...Then he began to list his options...
...Yossi Klein is a free-lance writer and a moment contributing editor...
...And, confident he has won, he accepts the new covenant, wraps himself tightly in its blue and white rainbow...
...This is where I am a Jew," the Sephardi says, pressing his hand against his heart...
...In Moscow, Riyadh, Bonn, they all agreed about one issue...
...says Yossi...
...Will you tell Adi about the incident...
...No community: before the war he had been a member of a Zionist youth movement, blue scarf and khaki shorts and sandals, had trained on a farm, a sabra in absentia...
...Before every Shabbat meal, Ferenc would toast in a quivering voice the downfall of Israels enemies, a mapolefar alleh Yiddishe soinim, but thinking even as he spoke that Israel was doomed...
...That's it...
...As though he has just seen a ghost...
...How did Anat die...
...In a report of the incident...
...She would have nightmares about it...
...Israel had first glimpsed its own mortality on Yom Kippur, 1973, as Arab armies advanced on its population centers and one country after another severed ties with the Jewish state...
...Lips slightly parting...
...Menachem Begin is coming here tonight...
...They did survive, and then died together of typhus three days after liberation...
...But what they found in Israel was an Ashkenazi society that was trying to forget its own past and could not accommodate theirs...
...Most survivors I know couldn't tell their children about their experiences...
...And they rejoiced in their sudden reprieve: They were not the outcasts of humanity but its pride...
...Let's talk about now...
...The rebirth had come full circle...
...I bring regards from Yossi's parents, who have moved to Brooklyn...
...she would have gone to the gas with the old people if she were holding a child...
...And then he is back there again, taking his only grandchild, Yitzchok, out of his daughter's arms...
...And all those years he never spoke of the past or mourned his family...
...What's the news from the land of Israel...
...asks Simi...
...Then Uncle Baruch strips naked in the middle of the crowded store, and dresses Yitzchok in the three-piece, pinstriped suit he himself has been wearing...
...Dear brothers and sisters," Begin says, and the crowd erupts...
...Hitler's strategy: isolate the Jews, and soften up the world with evidence of their crimes...
...Yossi was going to be a frogman...
...Imperialists...
...Time magazine said it was easy for you to contain your bitterness since Israelis were the victors in the Middle East...
...You think if we give them a state, that's the end of it...
...When a Jew is buried in Jerusalem, a small stone home no longer than the length of the body is built upon the ground, to ease the trauma of those privileged to have already reached the final destination, so that when the Messiah comes they need only raise the lids of their caskets and stumble into the air of Israel, which adheres to their bones like skin and loosens their memories to a past beyond darkness...
...We bought falafels and went to an Indian movie...
...I asked...
...That, more than any other reason, is why Jews loved Israel...
...No rationalization can shake that feeling...
...the dreams and the nightmares belonged to history...
...When a Jew is buried outside the Land of Israel, the body is caught between stillness and turning, pressed against the earth which may at any time rupture like a trap door leading to a tunnel, through which the corpse will be propelled by its own spinning, as though drawn through the earth in a straw...
...Begin was drawn to the very Jewishness of the Sephardim that had so threatened Labor...
...The Zionists had been mad to try to normalize Jewish fate in the midst of a hundred million Moslems and the world's oil supply...
...I went also to explore possibilities of moving to Israel, something I had considered since my first visit to the country in the summer after the Six-Day War...
...Is my soul poisoned...
...The biggest crisis isn't starvation or nuclear war, it's Israel...
...And that's what they got...
...And he kisses the stones gently, almost shyly, as one would a lover unjustly accused of betrayal...
...The last few weeks since the massacre have certainly proved that...
...Its limp velvet curtain stripped of gold stitches leaving only a fossil imprint of gummy-mouthed lions upholding the Tablets of the Law...
...Grateful to America which after the war kept survivors in camps because its immigration quota could still not be waived...
...From the outside, Israel appeared invulnerable, the undisputed military power of the Middle East...
...Everything is ready, all the ghosts await his gentle falling, when suddenly he is jolted by hysterical people seeking the anonymity of a crowd...
...And waits...
...and in the distance the stone monument to Absalom, which rounds and peaks like the medieval cone hats Jews were forced to wear for ridicule—Absalom, betrayer of his father David, usurper of the crown of Jerusalem...
...He has just saved his daughter...
...Is your blood holier than mine...
...If Israel is temporarily the military power of this region, that is only part of the equation...
...I voted against Begin...
...Always laughing...
...I don't believe the Jews have come this far to end in a bitter old age...
...Am I still capable of dreaming...
...Begin pauses...
...We converted the human dust which gathered here from all the corners of the earth into a sovereign state which occupies an honorable place in the family of nations...
...Who crowns Israel with glory...
...The Sephardim had left the ghettos of Islam for a reunion with all those who had managed to survive as Jews...
...And if they come back . . . —And if I should be awakened by a bulletin on the transistor radio that plays beneath my pillow: a hole in the security fence along the border, a terror/st band on its wa y to nahariya . . . And if the past becomes real again . . . If all the terrors I keep stored away, explosives in a cool dark place . . . And should I see neighbors rushing to shelters: Why aren't all your doors fastened with gates, your school buried underground, an electric fence around the entire town, a moat...
...Everyone...
...The Likud ministers wear white shirts whose open collars spread over jacket lapels, a style popularized by their Labor Party predecessors...
...Silly baby," says Smadar, lifting Adi to her breast...
...And he tells the child everything will be fine, just go now to this woman...
...Our enemies created an atmosphere which unmistakably evoked old fears, and then jeered at us for "paranoia...
...We tried to be like everyone else...
...You can ask the same question of Holocaust survivors...
...Do you want to know Israel's crime...
...Yossi prided himself on being the exact opposite of his father...
...As his story reaches the 1940s, Uncle Baruch stiffens, as if the slightest movement might shatter his invisible brace...
...He says that Likud had brought Israel the world's highest inflation and a bungled peace that promised only strategic weakness and instability, its leaders in a state of perpetual emergency and unable to administer basic day-to-day affairs...
...They're banging on our doors, begging for peace...
...I dream of an Israel whose increasingly Afro-Asian Jewish population will lead the country—and Judaism itself—back to its non-Western roots...
...Its 1977 rise to power had been assumed a temporary aberration, the result of a protest vote against an entrenched Labor Party bureaucracy...
...His jaw is hard, his eyes clear...
...Sometimes I think it wouldn't make a difference where we would have created a Jewish state...
...It felt, in fact, more like a ghetto than a sovereign state...
...In the summer of '81, its borders shrinking, its economy stagnant, and worst of all, its isolation nearly complete, Israel watched the stages of its unraveling fall into place...
...he asks...
...And scatters the pieces so that they fall upon him, catch in the knots of his hair, his beard, fill his gaping mouth, confetti for the returning Jew...
...Ben Hecht My dreams are Israeli...
...But now, said Yossi, we don't have to bluff anymore...
...Beneath the names of his family members, the sign says these words: "Remember the Holocaust...
...Then the first enemy tanks touched shore and the order came to retreat, and he ran with the other Israeli soldiers, some of them in the sneakers Orthodox Jews wear on fast days instead of leather, ran until he could no longer hear treads milling the sand...
...he is tired, he cannot fight...
...the sun exhuming from its cotton strands his morning smell, like earth after rain, and it is only within this tallis into which he would crawl after a night of dreams descending on his sleep like a lid upon a manhole that I can pray without choking, his aura neutralizing the air of poisoned gasses: Blessed are You, Lord of the universe, Who watches my leaving and my returning...
...he has just saved his daughter's life...
...envisions armies of wasted bodies lined up before Israeli embas sies with flowers, banners of hearts in tertwined with Stars of David...
...she is Nahariya's wound and triumph...
...But what kind of peace can we get in this atmosphere...
...And as rumors reach him of unexpected Israeli victories against invading Arab armies, he begins to wonder if a reprieve has been granted, a way to remain a Jew by becoming like everyone else, a nation among nations, beginning history all over again and blessing the Jews with amnesia...
...Forehead furrowed, Adi watches me, an intruder, violating the calm of her home...
...Israel made it possible to forget the past and Jerusalem to retrieve it, renewing all the defiled rituals that pleaded for and promised the city's restoration...
...Though he could not bring himself to visit Germany, he accepted reparations from its government and said the Jews must be forward-looking and not bear a grudge...
...And I dream of an Israel whose unmatched ethnic diversity will be the incubator of a new universalism...
...The Holocaust does not give Jews a moral blank check, but it does give us the right to refuse to be turned into a demon, an all-purpose symbol of evil...
...He became as wealthy as he had been before the war...
...Blessed are You, Lord of the universe...
...He kisses the child's head and he feels giddy, he feels—happy...
...But any resemblance between the two groups of leaders ends there...
...Foreign journalists wrote of a new mood, a cocky, militarist Israel...
...For Ferenc, a refugee, the world was an enemy...
...Singed Torah scrolls laid out like rugs...
...And besides, Israel is an illusion, it will be wiped out soon enough, the escape hatch has been shut, the Jewish people is dead, its heart excised, his only regret the shabbiness of the funeral...
...The dignity of Zionism had once helped him keep the madness out, and now helped to keep it in...
...Y'varechecha Adonai v'yishmerecha, God watch you and shine His face upon you...
...The Arabs are completely innocent...
...We're going to need a miracle to get us out of what we're in now," says Simi...
...But Likud was reelected, and it was now clear that Israel had been permanently transformed by a coalition of Orthodox Jews and Sephardim presided over by a Holocaust survivor...
...However they twisted about to evade the truth, they were members of a tribe that had been burned alive in a great public bonfire with no friend in the world to cry "shame" or "stop...
...My father came from Germany, before the war...
...The PLO, with embassies in more countries than recognize Israel, is not the Jew of the Middle East...
...They have come to rejoice in the power of their numbers, for they are numerous as the stars...
...It was abnormal...
...the structure of the state could be determined later...
...And they quickly lose their initial tact, attempt to dissect me with cold blunt questions: Do I hate...
...Like most people here, I feel shamed, sullied, by the massacre in Beirut...
...David Ben-Gurion Renew our days as of old...
...Be-g/n...
...And as the months drag on through 1948, he seeks out survivor shuls in basements and atop grocery stores, taking a seat on the bench closest to the door, not bothering to pick up a prayerbook, and asks those equally aimless worshipers beside him, "Vus iz nayesfun Eretz Yisroel...
...I hope it did some good," she says...
...The plea to remember is directed at our conscious will...
...Hands wave and bodies leap into the air, but most of all there is laughter, sheer pleasure not at the political message so much as at the intimacy, the understated irony of the Diaspora, with which it is delivered...
...He offers him a sailor suit, an anchor tattooed on its sleeve, but the boy throws it to the floor...
...Be-G//V...
...But though he is so hungry he sometimes thinks he will decompose, he spends his money on newspapers written in languages he cannot read, scanning the blocked lines of print for the word "Israel...
...I'm going to Bombay," Yossi said...
...Never before has this country been so despised, and so unsure of itself...
...But they wanted all or nothing...
...It is possible they can come back any time...
...He was 16 then, two years older than I. We would crawl into steel pillboxes that had been abandoned by the Syrian Army, and from a slit Yossi would watch the sea, imagining the exact spot where he swam every afternoon, deep where the fishing boats waited, net taut in his hands, submerged beneath the water as he traced the path of his prey, until his body quivered in rhythm with its movements...
...He coaxed his bronzed body until it held no secrets, and turned even his slight stature to advantage, adding swiftness to strength...
...Instead of devising a practical program for governing Israel, the Revisionists became guardians of memory...
...Such a silly baby...
...You were very effective...
...It was crazy, but it happened...
...Independence would not be won by an accumulation of small acts of love, the gradual transformation of wasteland to garden, but by power...
...The Jews had invited attack by flaunting their fantasies of chosenness...
...the admonition never to forget a warning that regardless of what we choose to do, no trauma can remain suppressed...
...He hands me each picture, one at a time, though they all seem to be copies of a single image...
...For the last decade, we have watched Yasir Arafat declare us thieves to standing ovations around the world...
...otherwise, I promise You, I will die and my children will leave You, and the Jewish corpse, conditionally resurrected, will never again rise, because Israel was our final card, a last mad dream of history as more than a vast and empty space in which one survived in cracks, the ingathering into Auschwitz followed by the ingathering into Israel, the ultimate prayer stunned into being, the only fantasy potent enough to challenge the imposition of the German imagination on history...
...Do you learn Torah...
...Back to his town from the forest hole...
...The European Orthodox were once Zionism's bitterest opponent...
...It seemed inevitable that Israelis would return to the party of Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, the party of the founders...
...Chaloimes, said Yossi, using the Yiddish word for dreams, illusions...
...Labor was finally vindicated in its struggle against desperation...
...And he recalls a Christian taunt from his childhood: Where is your God, chosen people...
...Pores where the worms burrowed through...
...Not in this filthy world...
...He said 'illegal' and I said ' legal.' And so we conducted four years of diplomacy...
...And voices respond in neutral wonder, "He survived...
...For the first time, during border clashes with the PLO, entire Israeli towns were emptied, their residents evacuated to the interior...
...The word dissolves in his mouth...
...Last night, the dream returned: Uncle Baruch takes his only grandchild Yitzchok to a clothing store, the fanciest in Budapest...
...Grateful to the UN, as though not the Irgun but a troubled conscience had led to the vote for a Jewish state...
...Before we part, he recites for me the Zionist poem by Bialik he first learned secretly in the middle of the night in yeshivah, his voice lilting, tremulous as youth's: Welcome sweet bird on my window, how I miss you my soul went out in the winter when you left me...
...Yossi told me that he had been among the few soldiers stationed at the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur, staring as the torpid waters suddenly erupted into a mountain of mud...
...And should I hear footsteps on the stairs...
...And anxiously, "Will there be more...
...Was your mother any different...
...Labor's dream then had been the "normalization" of the ghetto Jew through contact with the land, a process from which would emerge the world's first voluntary col-lectivist society: Utopia...
...Israel in the summer of '81 did not feel like a superpower...
...But Peres had no explanation for Labor's failure to unseat the most incompetent government in Israel's history...
...For peace...
...Occasionally, his first wife's niece from Rumania comes to visit, and Uncle Baruch's body will stiffen as though attempting but unable to suppress the stories of his past which have emerged only in the isolation of this room...
...And for that they won't forgive us...
...They're moderates...
...But this I believe, as surely as my father did: Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, will not betray us...
...Even in Israel they remained aloof in isolated enclaves, refusing to serve in the army or otherwise participate in the life of the modern state that had occupied Zion...
...Brothers and sisters...
...Israel has been subjected to relentless psychological warfare and diplomatic isolation, and no nation was as vulnerable to those tactics...
...And they loved this little Ashkenazi with the Yiddish accent and the pinstriped suit...
...And he thinks: We continued to believe that one day our history would prove it had not lied, and as a sign we proposed that most implausible of all events, the weakest people wresting control from the empires who ruled Jerusalem...
...Then the nightmares would intrude, and Ferenc was back in his leaking tent in a refugee camp near Tel Aviv, the infant Yossi covered with a loosely woven shawl against the rain...
...We would take the ferry to the opposite bank, littered with tank treads like shed skins, and climb the steep cliffs of the Golan Heights, which only a few weeks earlier had been like the demarcation line of a medieval geographer, the earth flat and ending, not in a borderless fall...
...I'll show her pictures of her siblings...
...For the first time, I notice how well Yossi has aged, but for a small paunch his body still that of an athlete's, the same youth who 14 years ago crouched in a pillbox imagining the power that the Syrian soldier felt watching him in the sea below, tracing the thread of his underwater movements, tiny bubbles knotting the surface, the soldier sighting Yossi and aiming his machine gun toward the sea, casting a net of steel across its expanse...
...Better for her to hear about it from me than from strangers...
...He doesn't stoop...
...If after 1945 Jews still felt at home in this world it was thanks only to the creation of the Jewish state...
...His most recent article in these pages, "Facing West Toward Jerusalem," appeared in December, 1982...
...They picked her up by her feet...
...Don't scream you will alert the Diaspora ghosts with their drowning boats waiting by the shore like kidnappers to drag us across the unsteady surface, a bottomless madness back into Exile . . . And when the ghosts illumined our nights we forced ourselves awake into the reality of Israel...
...In his room in Hamavri hangs a picture of a young man, Vandyke and three-piece suit, gold chain across his vest, and beside him his wife, the two of them bareheaded, clear, unfettered minds, and before them three girls in white ruffles, a Jewish family of kultur, circa 1925...
...He had included my name in a speech during the last election, and I asked him to respect my privacy and not mention me in that way...
...We'll let Sadaam Hussein build atom bombs...
...Uncle Baruch calls himself...
...This article originally appeared in The Village Voice, October 19 and October 26, 1982...
...Even if all the Arab lies were true, we still wouldn't be worse than anybody else in this wonderful world...
...A bulletin: Likud 48, Labor 47...
...That role still belongs to us...
...And they were grateful to the world for all it had done...
...Israel's territory a beachhead crowded with tent cities, at one point only eight miles separating Arab armies and the sea...
...And when he spots the Wall, he squints as though just heaved from a dark place, his torso plunges before his legs as he tumbles headfirst through the crowd and thrusts himself wide against the stones, leans his head aching as if bruised from a fall into a crack soft with scrolls of tightly rolled notes, shielding his eyes from the sun which distills all he sees into spotted colors, breathes deeply to slow the spinning, a particle of dust caught in light...
...In 1967, under Labor, when we were willing to return the West Bank we had just won in a war we didn't want...
...Unlike Labor's aristocracy of idealists, who had voluntarily left Europe before the Holocaust to build a Utopian society, this "new Israel" was composed mostly of the refugees who had come here because they had nowhere left to run...
...And he blesses the child...
...Then tell me why Israel is the most hated country on earth...
...The PLO is hated here not simply for killing children, but because it has led the post-Holocaust effort to delegitimize the Jews...
...Israel's Auschwitz borders, hunched and skeletal, had been replaced by an athlete's body, hard and beautiful...
...The teenagers crowding the stage sing "Hatikvah," the national anthem, beating the air with their fists and waving their hands as if drawing rescue planes: As long as deep in the heart the soul of a Jew yearns . . . Restore us to ourselves, we are not junkies and prostitutes, we are fellow Jews, your trauma is ours, the Diaspora knows no borders, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, we are all survivors . . . and toward the East an eye to Zion . . . return us to that Land of Israel whose cycle we inhabited from every distance, celebrating the harvest of its barren fields, imposing on its timelessness a seasonal rhythm . . . our hope is not lost, to be a free people in our land...
...Do you know what you're defending...
...Now Jewish in its nightmares, Israel will, given half a chance, become Jewish in its dreams...
...I dream of an Israel whose people will make the transition from traumatized refugees to spiritual survivors...
...But now, suddenly, the past was back...
...It is a strange time to be starting a new life here...
...Paranoia...
...He studied atlases and knew the name of every African country...
...The most pervasive image of summer '81, appearing on walls and billboards and road signs, was the poster of those opposing withdrawal from Yamil: a black map of Israel, Sinai divided by white strips into segments marking the stages of its return to Egypt, the black and white diagonals protruding into the Negev Desert, the West Bank, the central plain, Galilee, until the entire country is overwhelmed by a pattern of severed roads...
...he says with a triumphant grin...
...And the Jews fell into a dream state...
...Grateful to the Allies who had barred Jewish refugee boats and sent them back to Hitler...
...Es brent a foyer, Jabotinsky shouted at rallies across Eastern Europe, a fire is burning...
...So then who cares about killing arch-criminals...
...Ignore those who have seized on the Beirut massacre with the joy of believing they have finally unmasked the Chosen People...
...Moreover, the Labor vote had been split by a centrist party which had since dissolved...
...They can hate us because they sympathize with the Palestinians, and they can hate us because they want to flatter the Saudis...
...Yossi could scarcely keep from laughing when Ferenc told his stories about being sent by the Nazis to the Ukrainian front where Jews dug ditches in the crossfire, only to be captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia as an enemy soldier...
...For me, Israel had begun to feel like home...
...For 29 years, and for several decades preceding statehood, Labor had spoken for the'country's Jews, its vision of a radical break with the Jewish past synonymous with Zionism...
...So what if the Saudis can't say the word 'Israel' without sounding like their teeth are falling out...
...Sometimes the Sephardim were converted into Israelis by direct persuasion, as when children were greeted at the airport by barbers who snipped their sidecurls...
...When did you start wearing that...
...Where are your parents from...
...Behind the TVs crowd hundreds of journalists and photographers and cameramen, stabbing lights into the eyes of the men at the dais and then recording each pained wince...
...So that when the 1973 oil embargo turned Israel into a pariah, something in the Holocaust generation snapped...
...Smadar, what happened when they smashed through the door...
...Yael and I pressed in the closet . . .Yael don't they'11 hear us please no you mustn't there is nothing to fear we can stay in here forever learn to sleep standing we are not hiding we are not quarantined we are not locked in here like lunatics no one waits outside the door for us to weaken and surrender Yael no they will hear us please no you must not cry...
...to be a people again, families into extended families, restored to that time before this century of oblivion...
...Of course...
...They took them hostage to the shore...
...And when he begins, suddenly, without warning, to tell me his life, his body straightens as though seized by old strength...
...It is time for the afternoon minyan at Hamavri...
...The refugees had taken over the boat...
...During one Shabbat lunch, he announced to his terrified parents that he intended to forge a passport and become the first Israeli tourist to Saudi Arabia...
...If today we are a little unhinged, it is because we are sick of reading between the lines of every Arab communique to see whether we have been granted permission to live, sick of being the only country in the world whose right to exist is reconsidered after each moral lapse...
...Leaves clinging to his clothes, stiff and shiny and black like leather...
...it happens to her all the time, on the street, in the supermarket...
...The living room walls are spare—a mounted basket of dried ferns, a miniature harp with taut strings—except for one corner crammed with Smadar's paintings that suffocate the spaces between them: a severed torso dangling on springs, a swollen face containing a hundred smaller faces, a woman pressing a child to her utterly flat bosom...
...It was November, 1973, at Tel Hashomer Hospital near Tel Aviv...
...Israel, returned to the ghetto, was now hospitable to a restoration of ghetto culture...
...The Revisionists remained pariahs...
...In the town of Nahariya, not far from the Lebanese border, it is possible to forget that one is in Israel and to imagine oneself back in northern Europe...
...and now I demand of You, do not allow harm to come to the nation that made my peace with You possible...
...And when the light exposed the harshness of this land we learned to dream alert...
...40/Moment...
...From alleys and projects and slums, from every exile the Sephardim have known, thousands of families have gathered on the hills around the valley, in a thick night beneath an empty sky...
...but at an incline peaked with barbed wire...
...A Sephardi teenager, hair close-cropped, a cigarette box tucked into his rolled shirt sleeve like an extended muscle, approaches a Chasid...
...Hands steady, she lights a cigarette, and looks at me, unwavering, waiting to answer any question...
...And he gives the child to the woman...
...A talent for living, my family said of Uncle Baruch...
...And picks up a prayerbook intact on the floor...
...To consummate Israel's triumph over history, Labor offered the world a deal: Don't treat us like a Jewish ghetto and we won't dredge up Jewish grudges...
...The Palestinians could have had a state much bigger than the West Bank...
...He did not sit shivah...
...and now I accept control of this city on behalf of all those Jews violated in the name of Christianity and Islam, usurpers of our crown, both of which in my own lifetime attempted against us a final solution, the Christians succeeding, the Moslems thwarted in their inherited crusade...
...June 1967...
...Peres turns to his supporters...
...Pale light burning the skin that hangs to his bones, rattling as though grinding one another into dust, head exploding with sun and wind, stripped of the filter which like a gas mask dilutes the primordial splendor...
...1945...
...If in their eyes we have moved away from the original ideals of Zionism, is that really so hard to understand...
...Yes...
...In large measure, Arik Sharon is the UN's gift to Israel...
...For the last ten years we have been pushed onto the ledge and taunted to jump...
...looked at the Jews around me still trying to believe themselves intact...
...What do you think...
...1948...
...The victims were now tourists in Jerusalem, accompanied by their children, even grandchildren, rejoicing in the personal and collective recovery none of them dreamed possible 40 years ago...
...And if you keep together, he said, you will survive...
...the world would still not let us live...
...Uncle Baruch's life remained the same as it had been before the war, except that now there were no children...
...The whole world is screaming at us: What are you so afraid of...
...And suddenly he knows this to be the elusive burial ground of his town, recalls long-forgotten names as though these stones were markers, feels hands caressing, upholding him, opens his eyes and for the first time realizes he is surrounded by crowds, those too far removed to press mouth against stone touching his back with kissed fingers, and he feels his breath return, the spinning still, the haze dissolve, and most of all it is that clarity which stuns him...
...I thought Adi was a boy's name," I say, hoping to avoid mention of the tragedy, though that of course is why I have come...
...In Menachem Begin—old, crippled, humorless—the generation of the Holocaust has finally found its face...
...A survivor...
...The stereo plays a soprano singing Israeli folks songs, no accordions or Arabic drums, only a guitar, for the pauses between dancing, and I think that the voice could be Smadar's, ascending steadily despite mounting agitation...
...I find Uncle Baruch erect in an armchair in his cubicle room in the Hamavri Home for Retired Adults, a low stucco building like that of a kibbutz, fronted by lawns and flower beds watered by slowly revolving sprinklers that spurt without warning and then just as abruptly revert to their barely perceptible rotations...
...I began most of them as a teenager...
...No ornaments mask the enormity of this space or the abruptness of its boundaries...
...It's simple, really: You don't think, you do...
...Take a chance...
...And then he would awaken in Tiberias, pressed upon his back as though paralyzed, and above him the Golan suspended in air...
...I suppose I am a symbol for people here...
...then sways backward as though shoved, startled at the intrusion into this dream of the latest UN vote against Israel, hears the voices of murderers demand the quarantining of the Jewish state, too criminal to sit among them...
...And for the first time since 1956, the Americans imposed sanctions on Israel, invoking the prospect of its total isolation...
...like Christian crusaders speaking in the name of love, today invoke revolutionary justice and single out the Jew as the enemy of the Millenium...
...Likud and Labor are now even at 48 seats...
...He lived in Tiberias, famous for its graves of miracle rabbis, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee...
...I'm defending the Jewish state," the teenager says...
...the teenager asks...
...Many of their friends are dead now or in the hospital...
...When his wife died a few years ago, Uncle Baruch, for the first time since 1945, found himself alone...
...The Zionist return would remain joyous, no violence, and most of all, no desperation...
...On Tisha b'Av, the fast day marking the destruction of the Temple, Yossi told me that the Six-Day War had put an end to Jewish mourning...
...Do they really expect us to be the same fools we always were...
...In the cool darkness his senses sharpen...
...Under Likud, Israel began the painful process of confronting its past...
...And the love affair between the Jews and the world abruptly ended, as though, victorious, we had recovered too well...
...It's a lynch mob, the '30s all over again...
...If any of us is alive today it's only because of a miracle...
...Shabbat prayer I met my cousin Yossi in the summer after the Six-Day War...
...she is invulnerable, immutable: a rock...
...And finds himself propelled among soldiers, tourists, spinning as a single body through the narrow space between exile and replacement...
...Strands of beard spiked with mud...
...I ask...
...The Holocaust changed nothing...
...When a Revisionist rescue committee headed by Ben Hecht began to influence American public opinion, Labor attempted to discredit its motives, as if by suppressing the Revisionists they could somehow suppress the Holocaust itself...
...the same daring with which he had escaped the stone quarry at Mauthausen by declaring himself an electrician because once he had fixed an electrical something...
...So that when they make you run up a mountain heaving boulders for sport, you count the steps in your mind slowly, as if you yourself were dictating the pace...
...Every prophecy has been kept, more or less, even the promise of their ingathering from the Atlas Mountains and the caves of Libya and the mud blocks of Yemen...
...Hair thick and tangled like roots...
...The crowds press into Independence Hall...
...And slowly folds and rips each page into tiny pieces, severs the ineffable Name of God that is protected by euphemisms which in turn become ineffable, concentric rings around the Throne of Glory...
...How did I manage...
...We were less than men, sheep...
...And I press Yael deep within me—hard until I can't breathe—until I burst, split wide, heave her in, her cries muffled like gentle kicks...
...my nightmares are Jewish...
...but now he doesn't sign up for the ships taking immigrants to the new state of Israel...
...No friends: names and faces from before the war have fallen into a memory hole, and he does not recall even whom to moum, has heard his own name screamed on street corners of strange cities as someone rushes up to him, grabs his face, weeping, kissing his eyes, and he forces a smile, inquires about the years since their separation, but cannot retrieve a link with the man...
...In the '30s they made the Jews scapegoats for the Depression...
...Not even the fulfillment of Jabotinsky's prophecy could move Labor toward more than a token rescue effort for Europe's Jews...
...Young Israelis mocked them as senile men who thought they were still in Poland...
...We have been returned, but not in mercy...
...One tank against a hundred...
...I ask...
...Hollow...
...And only God, said Ferenc, could save us now...
...And stumbles to his feet, spinning as he pries open his eyes and discerns for the first time the outline of the familiar streets, strains for a Jewish face but sees only strange laughing children, dogs dancing around him as if they had just unearthed a bone, and in the distance a procession of townspeople, one of whom warily approaches him, peers into his face, and shouts back to the others, "It's one of our Jews, Klein, the winepresser's son...
...Yet you accept reporters into your home...
...And reporters come, disappointed not to find me raving in tongues or quarantined in silence, and they wonder if the incident was really so traumatic, or if perhaps I am not deadened...
...And drifts into the Dung Gate, used by Moslems as a garbage dump because of its proximity to the Wailing Wall...
...And when in 1944 Menachem Begin and his fellow Revisionists declared war against Britain, they were hunted by kibbutzniks and turned over to the occupation authorities...
...The world can't stomach us...
...And he covers the child's head...
...I went to Jerusalem in the summer of 1981 to represent my father, a survivor, at the World Gathering...
...we were fools to give this world a second chance, we should have run to you in 1945, stayed in refugee camps, surrounded ourselves with charge wire, worn our misery like yellow stars on our sleeves...
...I cover my head with his tallis, its blue and white stripes rearranging into patterns the empty colors of the mountain, white stone, cloudless blue...
...Though nearly 90, Uncle Baruch has suppressed the most obvious indignities of old age...
...When I was a prisoner in Siberia," says Begin, and he is again interrupted by chants of his name...
...The pressure goes only one way, on Israel...
...How normalized we were: how respected...
...Whenever I met with President Jimmy Carter, we would argue about the settlements...
...But Israel inhabited this world...
...And, lips unmoving, he begins to sing a wordless tune, knotting the air in a cantor's trembling falsetto, one notch higher, the veins of his neck like taut strings, hoisting himself up higher still until the air dissolves, and demands an audience with the God of his fathers, face to face, without intermediaries: I, Asher ben Yosef the Levite, survivor of the end of the Jewish people, come on my own merit: I have praised You to eternity, with my knowledge I could have poisoned Jewish history, retroactively invalidated all prayers, forbade the emergence of new generations...
...Yes...
...Shalom," laughs the child...
...The World Gathering assembled more survivors than had been together at any time since the camps...
...Five...
...For sadness was the infiltrator against whom we secured our borders, an entire nation vigilant against ghosts, confining our nightmares to private places, far from the public rejoicing, even our lunatics from the wars and the camps adhering to the national consensus by losing their minds quietly or else becoming court jesters, harmless, never the deranged killers that should have filled our streets, as though Jews were incapable of true madness, a genetic disease . . . Ours the heroism of the pause between battles, the screams smothered in our throats, for there are some shivahs from which one does not rise . . . —Smadar, what went wrong . . . —No nation ever tried harder to defeat its nightmares...
...It was supposed to be a celebration: the first World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors...
...Young men, some without shirts, arms linked on hips, sway and chant, "Be-gin, Be-gw," then roar when Begin appears at the foot of the stage, braced by aides as he slowly mounts the three small steps...
...Even now he can recite the works of the Hebrew poet Bialik, and of Goethe and Schiller...
...dreamed Anat and I were on a boat, people clinging to its sides, sailing from shore toward the open sea . . . "I read in the papers that you sent a letter to Begin," I say...
...Israel Television's prediction flashes on the screens: 49 seats for Labor, 48 for Likud...
...We were so peaceful that after the Holocaust they said we deserved what we got: Who ever heard of millions of people walking naked into gas chambers...
...The ark flung open and empty...
...sways forward clutching onto a rumor of an Israeli cancer cure that will cause the world to embrace the Jews...
...The baby lives . . . "How old was Yael...
...Gambling," he said...
...I chose it as an acronym for the names of my first husband, Dani, and my previous two children, Yael and Anat...
...Her voice: apparently conversational, but rising and falling in controlled cadence...
...Begin pauses...
...It became a big debate in the country about the proper way to mourn...
...All that has happened in the Middle East since my visit crystallized in those few weeks last summer when survivors converged on Jerusalem just as Menachem Begin, the country's first survivor prime minister, was being returned to office in an atmosphere of near hysteria...
...Victims of the PLO...
...In Memory of My Unforgettable Family...
...Now with Arab oil it's not so crazy to blame the Jews...
...But the intactness was gone...
...Fewer immigrants arrived than at any other period in the country's history...
...THE STATE OF OUR DREAMS Of Labor and Likud, of terror then and now, of nightmares . . . and of promises YOSSI KLEIN I. Israel in the summer of '81 was in the midst of a startling electoral comeback by the Likud, assured defeat in every poll taken in the previous two years...
...And I suddenly realize there is no need for tact, I can pry for an opening, tease the wound, sever pieces from her and she will not convulse...
...Unlike the heroes of pioneering Israel, dashing even in old age, these men are squat, as if stunted from confinement to small places...
...They shot Dani on the beach...
...And if I leave the yeshivah, who will take my place...
...Yossi marked his time until the army would free him from his father, Ferenc, who every Shabbat forced Yossi to accompany him to the kindergarten next door which doubled as a synagogue...
...he holds up two fingers...
...Uncle Baruch became an active Zionist, the family's first freethinker...
...Nahariya was built in the 1930s by German Jews who, intending to minimize the trauma of dislocation, surrounded themselves with constant reminders of their loss...
...Of course there were problems...
...And when neighbors come upon my corpse they will hear a knocking from within: A miracle...
...The concrete walls are unpainted, the floor and ceiling uneven, as though abandoned in midconstruction...
...I ask Yossi, pointing to his yarmulka...
...Walking along the rim and looking back at his city which had been caught below, Yossi felt like an explorer violating all boundaries...
...I saw you interviewed by Geraldo Rivera on American TV," I say...
...When my father was drafted by the Hungarians, they gave him a broom and told him it was a rifle...
...He left America, bought a cemetery plot in Jerusalem and moved to Hamavri, which means "that which heals...
...What was the speech about...
...We're not novices at this game...
...A schnorrer...
...And suddenly our every move was dissected, probed for moral flaw, measured by standards no one else was expected to uphold...
...Trust...
...Be-g/n...
...Perhaps even more devastating for Jews than the Holocaust itself was the realization that for six years the killing went on unimpeded in the heart of the West as though a near-universal consensus existed to let the Nazis get on with their work...
...Yossi did not want to hear about Transylvania or Russia or his gassed grandfather after whom he and I were named...
...And meanwhile we went and built 144 settlements...
...You're not happy...
...And we could have gone on that way forever, had our enemies not done the one thing that should never again have been done to us: the Jewish people ghettoized, untouchable, abandoned to one last, restive friend, Israel a boat to whom all ports were closing . . . "What do you think of Menachem Begin...
...They applaud...
...Labor responded just as it had to the Holocaust itself: by quarantining the Land of Israel from Diaspora suffering...
...Nahariya is only a few kilometers from the border...
...Instead of negating the Diaspora experience, Israel was now its heir...
...II...
...Blessed are You, Lord of the universe, Who gives the weary strength...
...A Jew should shoot...
...How will you get the money...
...He donated his fortune to the Jewish National Fund, which plants trees in the country's sparse forests, at last a chalutz offering seed to Israel...
...Grateful to the Catholic Church, which forgave the Jews for crucifying Christ...
...Since the incident I haven't painted...
...Postscript A few weeks ago, I returned to Israel as an immigrant...
...Israel was not meant to be the repository of our bitterness, the instrument of our isolation, but rather our way back into the world...
...I ask...
...So forget history...
...American-Jewish organizations boycotted Begin's speaking tours...
...His sentences become short and rhythmic, everything measured by a harsh and exacting moderation...
...Smadar sits on the couch, her eight-month-old daughter, Adi, bouncing on her lap...
...The Diaspora Jew was a schnorrer, embodied best by those old men who moved to Jerusalem to be interred in its sacred soil and living in the interim on charity collected by overseas Jews...
...Passes the ruins of the old Jewish Quarter destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948, archways leading to rubble, urinals scooped from yeshivah floors, mules squatting in the hollow of synagogues...
...we trusted too much...
...My mother from Poland...
...Uncle Baruch almost awakens from his own scream at the joy of seeing Yitzchok again...
...The men at the dais sip tea from glasses...
...In a small room called Independence Hall, Likud cabinet members, their aging faces hot and white in klieg lights, sit at a dais before three television sets...
...It has been a long war against the Labor Party, beginning in the 1930s...
...I'm against the settlements...
...And Anat...
...The real problem is the same as always...
...From his desk drawer, he removes several creased black and white photographs of a forest clearing, scattered pine trees, and wood tables and a sign: "Jewish National Fund, Fbgel Picnic Area...
...Roaming...
...Collapses and claws the earth for an opening but the surface does not soften, tries but cannot recall why or how his body was heaved from its hole just high enough for squatting, above him an airtight canopy of leaves and twigs and earth laid across the aperture like an animal trap, small hole to its side against which he pressed his mouth like a respirator, body clinging to the moist slopes, shuddering steadily like rain...
...Why don't you people serve in the army...
...And he thinks now that he would smother beneath this canopy of tallis and yarmulka, pressed by its weight into the ground, were it not for Jerusalem...
...Blessed are You, Lord of the universe, Who chooses His people Israel with love...
...In the war I saw things I'll never understand...
...1 ask...
...Don't you worry about staying...
...We didn't come here to be conquerors," she says...
...Presses his palms against the early spring sun, no more dazzling than tinted glass but cutting like shards in his eyes, swelling its lids until he can only squint, distilling all he sees into shadow and space through which he moves arms flailing like antennae...
...Zionism meant refuge, the immediate establishment of a Jewish state and the evacuation to it of Europe's Jews...
...Anat was terrified that Germans were coming to kill her...
...Yossi now lives with his wife, Simi, in one of the coastal towns crowding Tel Aviv, to which most Israelis have fled the otherwise underpopulated country, as if to be as close as possible to the only border not contiguous with Arab land...
...They took Anat to the rocks...
...How old was the child...
...Even Chasidim, who are scattered among the Sephardim and have been quietly watching the stage, now join the chanting...
...Listen to what goes on at the UN...
...Or a parachutist...
...Not even against Germany, from whom Israel accepted monetary reparations that were soon followed by goodwill missions and diplomatic representatives, until the streets of Tel Aviv choked with Volkswagens...
...I'm willing to do anything...
...Labor rewrote the past, displacing those memories which required mourning...
...It's history," says Simi...
...No rage, no grief: the post-Holocaust Jew, progressive, jovial, a kibbutznik in Israel and a Borscht Belt comic in America...
...Never before has the very basis of Zionism—an end to Jewish ghettoiza-tion—seemed so tenuous...
...I ask...
...The agonizing repetition among Israelis of every known detail about Sabra and Shatila, self-doubts that have affected even Gush Emunim leaders, the eruption in the officers' corps which more than anything else forced Begin to form a commission of inquiry, have proved that this people has not betrayed itself...
...But they don't look happy...
...will be a symbol, but only of renewal: Come see my new family, my miracle child, generations crammed into a single life...
...It was the last war, says Yossi, which finally broke Ferenc, sprawled on the graves of kabbalists, pleading for news of his son...
...For centuries, Jews prayed three times a day, "And to Jerusalem, Your city, in mercy return...
...Begin himself is home, resting...
...From Destruction to Rebirth," read the posters of barbed wire sprouting into a tangle of vines...
...It's necessary...
...As though a memory long forgotten has suddenly focused, all along in his mind, but nameless...
...A grim Shimon Peres appears on the screens...
...Sees in a corner a formless squatting hulk...
...Of course...
...He fired his machine gun until it emptied...
...Israel reached the highest inflation level in the world, and the highest proportional number of road deaths...
...Tell me, Smadar, about that night four years ago when PLO men crossed from Lebanon, entered your home and wiped out your family...
...Sometimes I wake up in the morning," says Yossi, "and I think, better to get rid of the territories immediately, today...
...Then at night, when I'm going to sleep, I tell myself, hold on no matter what...
...liquidate the Diaspora before the Diaspora liquidates you...
...Are these depictions of what happened...
...In 1940, Jabotinsky died of a heart attack, denounced as an alarmist and a militarist by Labor leaders who feared his dreamless Zionism, his politics of refugees...
...When he heard the news, he held his head until it emptied...
...And Begin, for all his posturing about power politics, was still a ghetto Jew outsmarting the prince...
...It was one thing to attempt a Utopian society with young pioneers from prewar Europe, another with the survivors of death camps who filled the new state...
...entire communities trekking across deserts to makeshift clearings where wings of eagles transported them to that land accessible only by flight, men in white robes and women with silver braids strung along the sides of their faces like parted veils, eyes wide but mouths pressed tight for fear of disrupting themselves awake...
...but instead created of myself a sealed chamber, quietly took my place in the back of the synagogue, raised children and allowed the Jewish people to go on...
...She used to speak with my daughter Anat...
...I'm not saying we should hand it over to Arafat," Simi says after a while...
...Sh'mor She' erit Yisrael, they sing, protect the remnant of Israel, a mournful song they attempt to enliven with rapid, offbeat clapping...
...He donated generously to the Tel Aviv Philharmonic and was honored by the United Jewish Appeal...
...It stinks...
...Uncle Baruch imagined himself a chalutz, a pioneer, draining swamps and turning deserts into forests of fruit trees and discoursing in a curt, modern Hebrew that purged the liturgical language of its tendency to turn every vowel into an "oy," an old Jew's krechts...
...But that process of growth must yield more than rage...
...To this day he can't hold a gun without someone having to peel his fingers from the barrel...
...It is the demise of the Labor Party which the crowd has gathered tonight to celebrate, the old women in housecoats and slippers, their children in T-shirts with slogans from Hollywood movies like "We Are Not Alone," workmen in undershirts, the children hoisted on their shoulders peering from the near total darkness into the valley below, where the only visible light is focused on a stage draped with a banner proclaiming: "Peace, Security—Likud...
...When the Holocaust was invoked at all, it was to honor those would-be pioneers trapped in Europe who had died fighting in the underground...
...And that's exactly what's happened to Israel...
...I cannot help staring at Smadar and thinking she must not have changed from her kibbutz childhood, curly brown hair as though windblown in this stillness, skin bronzed in the shaded light...
...Listen in my ear and you can hear the sea, the rocks foaming like mad dogs . . . And I cling to Adi, my miracle child, my border with the past, only she can restrain memory from annexing my life . . . "How do you manage to continue living in Nahariya...
...The rise of Likud and now the invasion of Lebanon have ended the fantastic notion that it was possible for the Jewish people to emerge unbroken from this century, to make a Utopian leap over its own trauma and become an instant light unto the nations...
...Please, children," Begin says to the teenagers, who immediately fall silent and strain to hear Begin tell his stories of a life in exile, crouched in cupboards to elude the British and emerging into political invisibility, the Land of Israel just beyond reach...
...But there were memories he could not suppress...
...And not this generation of Jews...
...He covers the child's head...
...I ask, pointing to the paintings...
...Adi laughs, and Smadar echoes her laughter...
...When Israel was established, Labor became its government, since it alone had prepared the infrastructure of the state, the Revisionists having been too preoccupied with creating the state itself...
...And lies soon passed for irony: The Palestinians were the Jews and we the Nazis, all the more hateful for masking ourselves with the rhetoric of dreams . . . And then came the Yom Kippur War, and the oil embargo . . . And the UN rose for Yasir Arafat and Zionism became racism, the Jews again well poisoners, child murderers, demons . . . And slowly we felt the ground shift, the present rupture, the dream forced into a narrow space, smothered . . . If it's irony you want: Zionism, our medium of reconciliation with the world, was chosen as the pretext for our ostracism . . . And Israel fled the Labor Party and its failed normalization, and turned to the man we had kept quarantined: You and not the kibbutzniks were right all along, the Holocaust was no aberration, Israel no dream, only refuge...
...All of Israel mourned the deaths of your children, mourned the way they had died, the papers filled with stories of Holocaust survivors identical to yours: a mother in hiding inadvertently smothering her baby to keep it from crying, German soldiers picking up Jewish children by their feet and smashing their heads against stone...
...If this, however, were to be the last word on Israel, I doubt I would have moved here...
...A clump shaken loose from the earth...
...Amos Oz In a vast and empty hall in Jerusalem, 6,000 Holocaust survivors are gathered for a seance...
...Uncle Baruch stares directly before him, eyes not glazed but focused on the wall...
...And though Labor was soon forced by events to fight Britain and then invading Arab armies, it never forgave the Revisionists for desecrating with realism the Zionist return...
...Where did Labor go wrong...
...He gives the child to an old woman beside him on the line...
...A tampering at my gate . . . I go with Adi onto the ledge . . . A megaphone: we the uberators of palestine have come back to finish the job, we sentence smadar to sterilization . . . I clutch Adi to my breast and leap from the ledge . . . —One reporter called you a metaphor for Israel smothering its dream...
...He and his wife traveled often to Europe, tourists to the place of their humiliation...
...they laugh and applaud his every Jewish shrug...
...Uncle Baruch places a peddler's cap over his black nylon yarmulka...
...Racists...
...Zionism was going to transform the Land of Israel from burial ground to fountain of youth, creating a new Jew, a man among men, Jewish but not excessively so...
...He never complains of pain...
...Labor promoted affirmative action, but in the process stripped the Sephardim of their traditions, saying they no longer needed the mystical faith that brought them to Israel in the first place...
...Until the Likud victory in 1977, these men, colleagues of Menachem Begin from the underground, had never held power in Israel, their names and exploits excised from the official Zionist histories and preserved only in little-known books, often self-published, their faces familiar to the public as if through the blurred photographs of a wanted poster...
...Ferenc would tell of running through the Siberian winter and suddenly collapsing in a heap of snow, where he was left for dead by the prison guards and where he would surely have been buried had his eyes not begun to discern in the white haze the outline of a snowy beard, clumps blown from it by the wind, and behind it two eyes moist like icicles, and it is the rebbe of his town, holding out a glass thimble and laughing, "L'chaiml" as Ferenc reaches out and drinks the vodka, stumbles to his feet and leaps to join the other prisoners...
...you who once tried to save the Diaspora, rescue us, its remnants, teach us how to live in a world of enemies and bystanders, teach us how to turn the ghetto into a fortress . . . "How did you manage the transition back to normal life...
...Uncle Baruch quickly remarried and moved to America, and established an important Swiss watch company consisting of nothing but the watch on his wrist...
...No...
...How does a Jew learn again to pray...
...How far we had come from those days in 1945 when survivors were called "live soap...
...And I answer each question like a shrug, my mouth rounding and tensing like a potter's wheel spinning words until they harden: Do you really think you can judge my soul, know what it is like to struggle every moment for the equilibrium you take for granted, agonize over how many gaps to permit in my gate, how close to hug Adi...
...It happened before Begin, before Sharon...
...Wave to Menachem Begin," a deep brown Yemenite with black sidecurls tells his son, and the young boy waves, "Say 'shalom' to Menachem Begin...
...Copyright © The Village Voice, 1982...
...I find Smadar's apartment without difficulty, the only one in the building whose door is guarded by a steel gate, its bars curled festively into petals...
...Like the refugee boat on which he had tried but failed to book passage for his family when the war began, and which was later turned back by the British from Palestine and denied entry into every port until it sank in the Bosphorous...
...The last time I saw Yossi was by coincidence...
...Ferenc was safe only in the past...
...Yossi points toward the window and says, "Twelve kilometers away is the old border...
...Now you've said something," agrees the Chasid, and they wish each other good health...
...And in this atmosphere we're supposed to do what...
...Every night as he goes to bed, he stares at the walls adorned with photographs of his prewar life, as though the last 35 years had never happened...
...Pale...
Vol. 8 • January 1983 • No. 2
