The Counterlife (15 page)

The teacher came over to shake my hand. “I'm Ronit.” Like the woman called Daphna up at the shed, she wore a dark beret and spoke American English—a slender, rangy, good-looking woman in her early thirties, with a prominent, finely chiseled nose, a heavily freckled face, and intelligent dark eyes still confidently sparkling with the light of childhood precocity. I didn't this time make the mistake of saying to her that her accent was obviously that of a native-born American raised in New York City. I simply said hello.

“Hanoch told us last night that you were coming. You must stay and celebrate Shabbat. We have a room for you to sleep,” Ronit said. “It won't be the King David Hotel, but I think you'll be comfortable. Take a chair, join us—it would be wonderful if you would talk to the class.”

“I just want Henry to know I'm here. Don't let me interrupt. I'll wander around until the class is over.”

From where he was seated in the semicircle of students, Henry thrust a hand up in the air. Smiling broadly, though still with a touch of that embarrassed shyness he could never quite outgrow, he said, “Hi,” and that too reminded me of our childhood, of the times when as an upper-grade monitor in the hallways of the grammar school, I'd see him passing along with the other little kids to gym class or shop or the music room. “Hey,” they'd whisper, “it's your brother,” and Henry would sort of bark to me beneath his breath, “Hi,” and then submerge instantaneously into the body of his class like a little animal dropping down a hole. He'd succeeded brilliantly, at his studies, at sports, eventually at his profession, and yet there was always this hobbling aversion to being nakedly conspicuous that thwarted an unquenchable dream, dating back to the bedtime reveries of earliest boyhood, not merely to excel but to be uniquely heroic. The admiration that had once made him so worshipful of my every utterance, and the resentment that came to discolor, even before I published
Carnovsky,
the natural and intimate affection springing from our childhood bond, seemed to have been nourished by a belief he continued to hold long after he was old enough to know better, that I was among the narcissistic elite blessed by an unambiguous capacity to preen in public and guiltlessly adore it.

“Please,” Ronit said, laughing, “how often do we ensnare someone like you on a hilltop in Judea?” She motioned for one of the boys to pick up a wooden folding chair from the ground and set it up for me. “Anybody crazy enough to come to Agor,” she told the students, “we put him right to work.”

Taking my cue from her bantering tone, I looked at Henry and feigned a helpless shrug; he got the idea, and kiddingly called back, “We can take it if you can.” For “we” I substituted “I,” and so with the permission of the brother whose refuge this was—as much perhaps from his history with me as from everything else purged from his life—I took a seat facing the class.

The first question came from a boy whose accent was also American. Maybe they were all American-born Jews. “Do you know Hebrew?” he asked.

“All the Hebrew I know are the two words we began with in the Talmud Torah in 1943.”

“What were the words?” Ronit asked.

“‘Yeled' was one.”

“‘Boy.' Very good,” she said. “And the other?”

“‘Yaldaw,'” I said.

The class laughed.

“‘Yaldaw,'” said Ronit, amused by me as well. “You say it like my Lithuanian grandfather. ‘Yal
da,
'” she said, ‘Girl.' ‘Yalda.'”

“‘Yalda,'” I said.

“Now,” she told the class, “that he says ‘yalda' correctly, maybe he can begin to have a good time here.”

They laughed again.

“Excuse me,” said a boy upon whose chin were the first faint beginnings of a little beard, “but who are you? Who is this guy?” he asked Ronit. He was not in any way amused by the proceedings—a big boy, probably no more than seventeen, with a very young and unformed face but a body already as large and imposing as a construction worker's. From the evidence of his accent, he too was a New Yorker. He wore a yarmulke pinned to a head of heavy, dark, unruly hair.

“Tell him, please,” Ronit said to me, “who you are.”

I pointed to the one they called Hanoch. “His brother.”

“So?” the boy said, implacable and getting angry. “Why should we be taking a break to hear him?”

A theatrical moan rose from the back of the class, while close by me a girl who was stretched on the ground with her pretty round face propped up between her hands said in a voice comically calculated to suggest that they'd all been together long enough for certain people to begin to drive others nuts, “He's a writer, Jerry, that's why.”

“What are your impressions of Israel?” I was asked this by a girl with an English accent. If not all American, they were obviously all English-speaking.

Though I had been in the country less than twenty-four hours, strong first impressions had of course been formed, beginning with Shuki, impressions fostered by what little I'd heard from him about his massacred brother, his disheartened wife, and that patriotic young pianist of his serving in the army. And of course I hadn't forgotten the argument on the street with the Sephardi to whom Shuki Elchanan was nothing more than an Ashkenazi donkey; nor could I forget the Yemenite father who'd driven me to Agor, who, without any common language to express to me the depths of his grief, nonetheless, with Sacco-Vanzettian eloquence, had cryptically described the extinction of his soldier-son; nor had I forgotten the center fielder for the Jerusalem Giants hauling in a home-run blast up against the Wailing Wall—is Jimmy Ben-Joseph of West Orange, New Jersey, just a freakish anomaly or
was
this place becoming, as Shuki claimed, something of an American-Jewish Australia? In short, dozens of conflicting, truncated impressions were already teasing to be understood, but the wisest course seemed to me to keep them to myself so long as I didn't begin to know what they added up to. I certainly saw no reason to affront anybody at Agor by telling of my unspiritual adventures at the Wailing Wall. That the Wailing Wall is what it is was of course clear even to me. I wouldn't think to deny the reality of that enigma of silent stoniness—but my encounters of the night before had left me feeling as though I'd had a walk-on role—as Diaspora straight man—in some local production of Jewish street theater, and I wasn't sure that such a description would be understood here in the spirit with which it was meant. “Impressions?” I said. “Just arrived really—don't have any yet.”

“Were you a Zionist when you were young?”

“I never had enough Hebrew, Yiddish, or anti-Semitism to make me a Zionist when I was young.”

“Is this your first trip?”

“No. I was here twenty years ago.”

“And you never came back?”

The way that a couple of the students laughed at that question made me wonder if they might not themselves be considering packing up and going home.

“Things didn't lead me back.”

“‘Things.'” It was the large boy who'd indignantly asked why the class was listening to me. “You didn't want to come back”

“Israel wasn't at the center of my thoughts, no.”

“But you must have gone to other countries that weren't at the center quote unquote.”

I saw how this could become, if it hadn't already, an exchange even less satisfactory than my colloquy with the young Chasid at the Wailing Wall.

“How can a Jew,” he asked, “make a single visit to the homeland of his people, and then never, not in twenty
years
—”

I cut him off before he really got going. “It's easy. I'm not the only one.”

“I just wonder what's wrong with such a person, Zionist or not.”

“Nothing,” I said flatly.

“And it's of no concern to you that the whole world would as soon see this country obliterated?”

Though a few of the girls began to shift about, ill at ease with his aggressive questioning, Ronit leaned forward in her chair, eager to hear my answer. I wondered if there might not be a conspiracy operating here—between the boy and Ronit, and even perhaps including Hanoch.

“Is that what the world would like?” I asked, meanwhile thinking that even if there was no preconceived plot, should I agree to stay the night this could well turn out to be one of the least restful Sabbaths of my life.

“Who would shed a tear?” the boy replied. “Certainly not a Jew who in twenty years, despite the persistent danger to the Jewish people—”

“Look,” I said, “admittedly I've never had the right caste spirit—I take your point about people like me. I'm not unfamiliar with such fanaticism.”

This brought him to his feet, furiously pointing a finger. “Excuse
me!
What is
fanatical?
To put egoism before Zionism is what is fanatical! To put personal gain and personal pleasure before the survival of the Jewish people!
Who
is fanatical? The Diaspora Jew! All the evidence that the goyim give him and give him that the survival of the Jews couldn't matter to them less, and the Diaspora Jew believes they are friends! Believes that in their country he is safe and secure—an equal! What is fanatical is the Jew who never learns! The Jew oblivious to the Jewish state and the Jewish land and the survival of the Jewish people!
That
is the fanatic—fanatically ignorant, fanatically self-deluded, fanatically full of shame!”

I stood too, putting my back to Jerry and the class. “Henry and I are going for a walk,” I said to Ronit. “I came out really to talk to him.”

Her eyes remained just as bright as before with passionate curiosity. “But Jerry has had his say—you're entitled now to yours.”

Was it overly suspicious to believe that the naïveté was feigned and she was having me on? “I'll relinquish my rights,” I said.

“He's young,” she explained.

“Yes, but I'm not.”

“But to the class your thoughts would be fascinating. Many are children of deeply assimilationist families. The egregious failure of American Jews, of most Jews of the world, to seize the opportunity to return to Zion is something that all of them are grappling with. If you—”

“I'd rather not.”

“But just a few words about assimilation—”

I shook my head.

“But assimilation and intermarriage,” she said, turning quite grave, “in America they are bringing about a second Holocaust—truly, a spiritual Holocaust is taking place there, and it is as deadly as any threat posed by the Arabs to the State of Israel. What Hitler couldn't achieve with Auschwitz, American Jews are doing to themselves in the bedroom. Sixty-five percent of American Jewish college students marry non-Jews—
sixty-five percent
lost forever to the Jewish people! First there was the hard extermination, now there is the soft extermination. And this is why young people are learning Hebrew at Agor—to escape the Jewish oblivion, the extinction of Jews that is coming in America, to escape those communities in your country where Jews are committing spiritual suicide.”

“I see,” was all I replied.

“You won't talk to them about this, for just a few minutes, just till it's time for their lunch?”

“I don't think my credentials qualify me to talk about this. I happen to be married to a non-Jew myself.”

“All the better,” she said, smiling warmly. “They can talk to
you.
”

“No, no thanks. It's Henry who I'm here to talk to. I haven't seen him for months.”

Ronit took hold of my arm as I started away, rather like a friend who hates to see you go. She seemed to like me, despite my faulty credentials; probably my brother acted as my advocate. “But you will stay for Shabbat,” Ronit said. “My husband had to be in Bethlehem today, but he's looking forward to meeting you tonight. You and Hanoch are coming for dinner.”

“We'll see how things go.”

“No, no, you're coming. Henry must have told you—they have become great friends, your brother and my husband. They're very alike, two strong and dedicated men.”

Her husband was Mordecai Lippman.

*   *   *

From the moment that we started along the path that sloped down the hill toward the two long unpaved streets that constituted Agor's residential quarter, Henry began making it clear that we weren't going to sit in the shade somewhere having a deep discussion about whether or not
he'd
done the right thing by seizing the opportunity to return to Zion. He was now nothing like as friendly as he'd seemed when I'd showed up in front of his class. Instead, as soon as we two were alone, he immediately turned querulous. He had no intention, he told me, of being reproved by me and wouldn't tolerate any attempt to investigate or challenge his motives. He'd talk about Agor, if I wanted to know what this place stood for, he'd talk about the settlement movement, its roots and ideology and what the settlers were determined to achieve, he'd talk about the changes in the country since Begin's coalition had taken charge, but as for the American-style psychiatric soul-searching in which my own heroes could wallow for pages on end, that was a form of exhibitionistic indulgence and childish self-dramatization that blessedly belonged to the “narcissistic past.” The old life of non-historical personal problems seemed to him now embarrassingly, disgustingly, unspeakably puny.

Telling me all this, he had worked up more emotion than anything I'd said could possibly have inspired, especially as I had as yet said nothing. It was one of those speeches that people spend hours preparing and delivering while lying in bed unable to sleep. The smiles up at the ulpan had been for the crowd. This was the distrustful fellow I'd talked to on the phone the night before.

“Fine,” I said. “No psychiatry.”