The Counterlife (11 page)

“I rather like it, actually,” she'd said. “Life is sort of fizzy here, isn't it? A seemingly higher proportion of interesting people around. I like the way they talk. Gentiles have their little pale moments of exuberance, but nothing like this. It's the way one talks when one's been drinking. It's like Virgil. Whenever he tries any of that epic stuff, you knew you were in for twenty-five lines of seriously difficult Latin, all beside the point. ‘And then the good Antaeus begged his son to put him down, saying, “My son, think first of our family, as when…”' This manic asidedness—well, that's New York and the Jews. Heady stuff. The only thing I don't like is that they all seem a bit too quick to find fault with Gentiles in their attitudes toward Jews. You have a touch of it too—finding things horrendously anti-Semitic, or even mildly so, when they really aren't. I know it's not entirely unjustified for Jews to be thin-skinned on that score—nonetheless, it's irritating. Uh-oh,” she said, “I shouldn't be telling you these things.” “No,” I said, “go on—telling me what you know you shouldn't be telling is one of your endearing strategies.” “Then I'll tell you something else that irritates me. About Jewish men.” “Do.” “All the shiksa-fancying. I don't like that. I don't like it at all. I don't feel it with you. Probably I'm deluding myself and you're the man who invented it. I mean, I know there's an element of strangeness here, but I like to think all that doesn't operate
too
much.” “So other Jewish men fancy you too—is that what you're saying?” “Are attracted to me because I'm not? In New York? Absolutely. Yes. That happens frequently when my husband and I go out.” “But why should it irritate you?” “Because there are enough politics in sex without racial politics coming into it.” I corrected her: “We're not a race.” “It
is
a racial matter,” she insisted. “No, we're the same race. You're thinking of Eskimos.” “We are
not
the same race. Not according to anthropologists, or whoever measures these things. There's Caucasian, Semitic—there are about five different racial groups. Don't look at me like that.” “I can't help it. Some nasty superstitions always tend to crop up when people talk about a Jewish ‘race.'” “See, you're about to get angry at a Gentile for saying the wrong thing about Jews—proving my thesis. But all I can tell you is that you
are
a different race. We're supposed to be closer to Indians than to Jews, actually. I'm talking about Caucasians.” “But I am Caucasian, kiddo. In the U.S. census I am, for good or bad, counted as Caucasian.” “
Are
you?
Am
I wrong? Oh, you're not going to speak to me after this. It's always a mistake to be frank.” “I'm nuts about you for being frank.” “That won't last.” “Nothing lasts, but right now it's true.” “Well then, all I
am
saying—and I am not talking now about you
or
race—is that I don't feel with a lot of men in New York who do seem to want to chat me up that this is a personal thing, that they find me an interesting person who just happens not to be Jewish. On the contrary, this is a type that they had met before and that they quite liked having lunch with, or perhaps doing other things with, only because she
was
that type.”

As it turned out, if anyone at that dinner party had been overly quick to find fault with Gentiles in their attitude toward Jews, it had been Maria herself. And in the car driving home, when she wouldn't let up about their hypocritical line on the Middle East, I began to wonder once again whether all this indignation might not have something to do with her anxiety about our English future. I might even be seeing signs of that tendency toward self-annihilating accommodation that had been exploited so cruelly by her former husband once he'd begun losing interest in her.

The car door had barely shut behind her when she said to me, “I assure you, people in this country who have any sense at all, who are people of any kind of discrimination and judgment, are
not
anti-Israel. I mean, these people bat on about Israel in terms of great disgust, but the man who runs Libya thinks he can
fly.
It's just unreal, isn't it, their selective disapproval? These people disapprove selectively and most strongly of the least reprehensible parties.” “You're really stirred up by all this.” “Well, there comes a time when even nicely brought-up females lose their self-control. It's true I have trouble shouting at people, and I don't necessarily always say what I think, but even I don't have trouble being angry when people are being insulting and stupid.”

*   *   *

After I'd repeated to Shuki the gist of the London dinner-table argument of the night before, he asked, “And she's beautiful too, your foolhardy Christian defender of our incorrigible state?”

“She considers herself Gentile, not Christian.” In my billfold I found the Polaroid snapshot taken at Phoebe's second birthday party only a few weeks before. It showed Maria bending over the party table, helping the child cut the cake, both of them with the same dark curls, oval face, and feline eyes.

Shuki asked, examining the picture, “She has a job?”

“She used to work for a magazine; now she's writing fiction.”

“So, gifted as well. Very attractive. Only an English girl can have that expression on her face. Observing everything and giving away nothing. She is surrounded by a large serenity, Maria Zuckerman. Effortless tranquillity—not a trait we're renowned for. Our great contribution is effortless anxiety.” He turned the photograph over and read aloud the words written there by me. “‘Maria, five months pregnant.'”

“A father finally at forty-five,” I said.

“I see. By marrying this woman and having a child you will be mixing at last in the everyday world.”

“That may be part of it.”

“The only problem is that in the everyday world girls don't look like this. And if it's a boy,” Shuki asked, “your English rose will consent to circumcision?”

“Who says circumcision's required?”

“Genesis, chapter 17.”

“Shuki, I've never been completely sold on biblical injunctions.”

“Who is? Still, it's been a unifying custom among Jews for rather a long time now. I think it would be difficult for you to have a son who wasn't circumcised. I think you would resent a woman who insisted otherwise.”

“We'll see.”

Laughing, he handed back the picture. “Why do you pretend to be so detached from your Jewish feelings? In the books all you seem to be worrying about is what on earth a Jew is, while in life you pretend that you're content to be the last link in the Jewish chain of being.”

“Chalk it up to Diaspora abnormality.”

“Yes? You think in the
Diaspora
it's abnormal? Come live here. This is the
homeland
of Jewish abnormality. Worse: now
we
are the dependent Jews, on your money, your lobby, on our big allowance from Uncle Sam, while
you
are the Jews living interesting lives, comfortable lives, without apology, without shame, and perfectly
independent.
As for the condemnation of Israel in London W11, it may upset your lovely wife, but, really, it shouldn't bother you out there. Left-wing virtue-hounds are nothing new. Feeling morally superior to Iraqis and Syrians isn't really much fun, so let them feel superior to the Jews, if that's all it takes to make life beautiful. Frankly I think the English distaste for Jews is nine-tenths snobbery anyway. The fact remains that in the Diaspora a Jew like you lives securely, without real fear of persecution or violence, while we are living just the kind of imperiled Jewish existence that we came here to replace. Whenever I meet you American-Jewish intellectuals with your non-Jewish wives and your good Jewish brains, well-bred, smooth, soft-spoken men, educated men who know how to order in a good restaurant, and to appreciate good wine, and to listen courteously to another point of view, I think exactly that: we are the excitable, ghettoized, jittery little Jews of the Diaspora, and you are the Jews with all the confidence and cultivation that comes of feeling at home where you are.”

“Only to an Israeli,” I said, “could an American-Jewish intellectual look like a charming Frenchman.”

“What the hell
are
you doing in a place like this?” Shuki asked.

“I'm here to see my brother. He's made aliyah.”

“You've got a brother who's emigrated to Israel? What is he, a religious nut?”

“No, a successful dentist. Or he was. He's living in a little frontier settlement on the West Bank. He's learning Hebrew there.”

“You're making this up. Carnovsky's brother on the West Bank? This is another of your hilarious ideas.”

“My sister-in-law wishes it were. No, Henry's made it up. Henry appears to have left his wife, his kids, and his mistress to come to Israel to become an authentic Jew.”

“Why would he want to be something like that?”

“That's what I'm here to find out.”

“Which settlement is it?”

“Not far from Hebron, in the Judean hills. It's called Agor. His wife says he's found a hero there—a man named Mordecai Lippman.”

“Oh, has he?”

“You know Lippman?”

“Nathan, I can't talk about these things. It's too painful for me. I mean this. Your brother is a follower of Lippman's?”

“Carol says that when Henry calls to speak to the kids, Lippman's all he talks about.”

“Yes? He's so impressed? Well, when you see Henry, tell him all he has to do is go to the jail and he can meet plenty of little gangsters just as impressive.”

“He intends to stay on, to live at Agor after he's finished his Hebrew course,
because
of Lippman.”

“Well, that's wonderful. Lippman drives into Hebron with his pistol and tells the Arabs in the market how the Jews and Arabs can live happily side by side as long as the Jews are on top. He's dying for somebody to throw a Molotov cocktail. Then his thugs can really go to town.”

“Carol mentioned Lippman's pistol. Henry told the kids all about it.”

“Of course. Henry must find it very romantic,” Shuki said. “The American Jews get a big thrill from the guns. They see Jews walking around with guns and they think they're in paradise. Reasonable people with a civilized repugnance for violence and blood, they come on tour from America, and they see the guns and they see the beards, and they take leave of their senses. The beards to remind them of saintly Yiddish weakness and the guns to reassure them of heroic Hebrew force. Jews ignorant of history, Hebrew, Bible, ignorant of Islam and the Middle East, they see the guns and they see the beards, and out of them flows every sentimental emotion that wish fulfillment can produce. A regular pudding of emotions. The fantasies about this place make me sick. And what
about
the beards? Is your brother as thrilled by the religion as by the explosives? These settlers, you know, are our great believing messianic Jews. The Bible is their
bible
—these idiots take it seriously. I tell you, all the madness of the human race is in the sanctification of that book. Everything going wrong with this country is in the first five books of the Old Testament. Smite the enemy, sacrifice your son, the desert is yours and nobody else's all the way to the Euphrates. A body count of dead Philistines on every other page—that's the wisdom of their wonderful Torah. If you're going out there, go tomorrow for the Friday night service and watch them sitting around kissing God's ass, telling him how big and wonderful he is—telling the rest of us how wonderful
they
are, bravely doing his work as courageous pioneers in biblical Judea. Pioneers! They work all day in government jobs in Jerusalem and drive home to biblical Judea for dinner at night. Only eating chopped chicken liver at the biblical source, only going to bed on the biblical sites, can a Jew find true Judaism. Well, if they want so much to sleep at the biblical source because that is where Abraham tied his shoelaces, then they can sleep there under Arab rule! Please, don't talk to me about what these people are up to. It makes me too crazy. I'll need a
year
at Oxford.”

“Tell me more about my brother's hero.”

“Lippman? I smell fascism on people like Lippman.”

“What's that smell like here?”

“It smells the same here as it does everywhere. The situation gets so complicated that it seems to require a simple solution, and that's where Lippman comes in. His racket is to play upon Jewish insecurity—he says to the Jews, ‘I have the solution to our problem of fear.' Of course there's a long history of these people. Mordecai Lippman doesn't come from nowhere. In every Jewish community there was always such a person. What could the rabbi do for their fears? The rabbi looks like you, Nathan—the rabbi is tall, he is thin, he is introverted and ascetic, always over his books, and usually he's also ill. He is not a person who can deal with the goyim. So in every community there is a butcher, a teamster, a porter, he is big, he is healthy—you sleep with one, two, maybe three women, he sleeps with twenty-seven, and all at the same time.
He
deals with the fear. He marches off at night with the other butcher and when he comes back there are a hundred goyim you don't ever have to worry about again. There was even a name for him: the
shlayger.
The whipper. The only difference between the Old Country
shlayger
and Mordecai Lippman is that on a superficial level Mr. Lippman is very deep. He hasn't only a Jewish gun, he has a Jewish mouth—remnants even of a Jewish brain. There is now so much antagonism between Arab and Jew that even a child would understand that the best thing is to keep them apart—so Mr. Lippman drives into Arab Hebron wearing his pistol. Hebron! This state was not established for Jews to police Nablus and Hebron! This was not the Zionist idea! Look, I have no illusions about Arabs and I have no illusions about Jews. I just don't want to live in a country that's
completely
crazy. It excites you to hear me going on like this—I can see it. You envy me—you think, ‘Craziness and dangerousness—that sounds like fun!' But believe me, when you have so much of it over so many years that even craziness and dangerousness become tedious and boring, then it's
really
dangerous. People are frightened here for thirty-five years—when will there be another war? The Arabs can lose and lose and lose, and we can lose only once. All that is true. But what is the result? Onto the stage comes Menachem Begin—and the logical step after Begin, a gangster like Mordecai Lippman, who tells them, ‘I have the solution to our Jewish problem of fear.' And the worse Lippman is, the better. He's right, they say, that's the kind of world we live in. If the humane approach fails, try brutality.”