The Counterlife (18 page)

All this merely as appetizer to my Sabbath meal, and while proudly exhibiting to me, one by one, the treasured leather-bound masterpieces collected in Berlin by his grandfather, a celebrated philologist gassed at Auschwitz.

At the dinner table, in a resonant cantorial baritone, a rich pleasing voice that sounded trained and whose excellence wasn't entirely a surprise, Lippman began the little song to welcome the Sabbath queen, and then everyone joined in, except me. Vaguely I remembered the melody but found that thirty-five years on, the words had simply vanished. Henry seemed to have a special fondness for the Lippman boy, Yehuda; they grinned at each other while they sang, as though between them there were some joke about the song, the occasion, or even about my presence at the table. Many years back I had exchanged just such grins with Henry myself. As for the Lippmans' eight-year-old girl, she was so fascinated by the fact that I wasn't singing that her father had to wave a finger to get her to stop mumbling and make herself heard with everyone else.

My silence must, of course, have been inexplicable to her; but if she was wondering how Hanoch could have a brother like me, you can be sure that I was now even more confused by having a brother like Hanoch. I could not grasp this overnight change so against the grain of what I and everyone took to be the very essence of Henry's Henryness. Is there really something irreducibly Jewish that he's discovered in his own bedrock, or has he only developed, postoperatively, a taste for the ersatz in life? He undergoes a terrible operation to restore his potency and becomes as a result a full-fledged Jew; this guy has his chest ripped apart, and in a seven-hour operation, hooked up to a machine that does his breathing for him and pumps his blood, he has the vital lines to his heart replaced by veins drawn out of his leg, and subsequently he winds up in Israel. I don't get it. This all seems to give new meaning to the old Tin Pan Alley idea of recklessly toying with somebody's heart. What purpose is hidden in what he now calls “Jew”—or is “Jew” just something he now hides behind? He tells me that here he is essential, he belongs, he fits in—but isn't it more likely that what he has finally found is the unchallengeable means to escape his hedged-in life? Who hasn't been driven crazy by that temptation—yet how many pull it off like this? Not even Henry could, so long as he called his flight plan “Basel”—it's designating it “Judea” that's done the trick. If so, what inspirational nomenclature! Moses against the Egyptians, Judah Maccabee against the Greeks, Bar Kochba against the Romans, and now, in our era, Hanoch of Judea against Henry of Jersey!

And still not a word of remorse—not any word
at all
—about Carol or the kids. Amazing. Though he phones the children every Sunday, and expects them to fly over to visit him at Passover, he's given not a single sign to me that he's still in any way fettered by the sentiments of a husband and father. And about my new life in London,
my
renovation, of more than passing interest even to Shuki Elchanan, Henry has nothing to ask. He appears to have totally repudiated his life, all of us, and all he's been through, and anybody who does that, I thought,
must
be taken seriously. Not only do such people qualify as true converts but, for a while at least, they become criminals of a kind—to those they've abandoned, even to themselves, even perhaps to those with whom they've formed their new pact—and this true conversion can't be dismissed any more easily than it can be comprehended. Listening to his mentor's professional voice rising in song above the rest, I thought, “Whatever the tangle of motive in him, he certainly hasn't been drawn to nothing.”

There was a second song, a melody more lyrical and poignant than the first, and the voice that dominated now was Ronit's, leading with her folksingerish, fervent soprano. Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation—a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.

Lippman blessed the wine with Hebrew words familiar even to me, and as I sipped from my glass along with everyone else, I thought, “Can it be a
conscious
ploy? What if it isn't still more of that passionate, driving naïveté for which he has always shown such talent but a calculated and devilishly cynical act? What if Henry has signed on with the Jewish cause without believing a word? Could he have become that interesting?”

“And,” Lippman said, lowering his glass and speaking in the smallest, soothing, most delicate voice, “that's it—the whole thing.” He was addressing me. “There it is. The meaning of this country in a nutshell. This is a place where nobody has to apologize for wearing a little hat on his head and singing a couple of songs with his family and friends before he eats his Friday night meal. It's as simple as that.”

Smiling at his smile, I said, “Is it?”

He pointed proudly to his handsome young wife. “Ask her. Ask Ronit. Her parents weren't even religious Jews. They were ethnic Jews and no more—probably, from what Hanoch tells me, like your family in New Jersey. Hers was in Pelham, but the same thing, I'm sure. Ronit didn't even know what religion was. But still nowhere she lived in America did she feel right. Pelham, Ann Arbor, Boston—it made no difference, she never felt right. Then, in '67, she heard on the radio there was a war, she got on a plane and she came to help. She worked in a hospital. She saw everything. The worst of it. When it was over she stayed. She came here and she felt right and she stayed. That's the whole story. They come and they see that there is no need to apologize anymore and they stay. Only the goody-goods need to be approved of by the goy, only the niceys who want people to say nice things about them in Paris and London and New York. To me it is incredible that there are still Jews, even here, even in the country where they are masters, who live for the goy to smile at them and tell them that they are right. Sadat came here a little while back, you remember, and he was smiling, and they screamed with joy in the streets, those Jews. My enemy is smiling at me! Our enemy loves us after all! Oh, the Jew, the Jew, how he rushes to forgive! How he wants the goy to throw him just a little smile! How desperately he wants that smile! Only the Arab is very good at smiling and lying at the same time. He is also good at throwing stones—so long as nobody stops him. But I will tell you something, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman: if nobody else will stop him, I will. And if the army doesn't like me to do it, let the army come and fire on me. I have read Mr. Mahatma Gandhi and Mr. Henry David Thoreau, and if the Jewish army wants to fire upon a Jewish settler in biblical Judea while the Arab is looking on, let him—let the Arab witness such Jewish craziness. If the government wants to act like the British, then we will act like the Jews! We will practice civil disobedience and proceed by illegal settlement, and let their Jewish army come and stop us! I dare this Jewish government, I dare
any
Jewish government, to try to evict us by force! As for the Arabs, I will go back to Bethlehem every day—and I told this to their leader, I told them
all,
and in their own tongue so they would not fail to understand, so there will not be any doubt what my intentions are: I will come here with my people, and I will stand here with my people,
until the Arab stops throwing stones at the Jew.
Because do not comfort yourself, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman from London, Newark, New York, and points west—they are not throwing stones at Israelis. They are not throwing stones at ‘West Bank' lunatics. They are throwing stones at
Jews. Every stone is an anti-Semitic stone.
That is why it must stop!”

He paused dramatically for a response. I said only, “Good luck,” but those two syllables were enough to inspire an even more impassioned aria.

“We don't
need
luck!
God
protects us! All we need is never to give ground and God will see to the rest! We are God's instrument! We are building the Land of Israel! See this man?” he said, pointing to the metalworker. “Buki lived in Haifa like a king. Look at the car he drives—it's a Lancia! And yet he comes with his wife to live with us. To build Israel! For the love of the Land of Israel! We are not Jewish losers in love with loss. We are people of hope! Tell me, when have Jews been so well off, even
with
all our problems? All we need is not to give ground, and if the army wants to fire on us, let them! We are not delicate roses—we are here to stay! Sure, in Tel Aviv, in the café, in the university, in the newspaper office, the nice, humane Jew can't
stand
it. Shall I tell you why? I think he is actually jealous of the losers. Look at how sad he looks, the loser, look at him sitting there losing, how helpless he looks, how
moving. I
should be the one who is moving because
I
am sad and hopeless and lost, not him—I am the one who loses, not him—how
dare
he steal my touching melancholy, my Jewish softness! But if this is a game that only one can win—and those are rules the Arabs have set, those are the rules established not by us but by
them—then somebody must lose.
And when he loses, it is not pretty—he loses
bitterly.
It is not
loss
if it is not bitter! Just ask us, we are the experts on the subject. The loser hates and is the virtuous one, and the winner wins and is wicked. Okay,” he said lightly, a thoroughly reasonable man, “I accept it. Let us be wicked winners for the next two thousand years, and when the two thousand years are over, when it is 3978, we will take a vote on which we prefer. The Jew will democratically decide whether he wants to bear the injustice of winning or whether he prefers living again with the honor of losing. And whatever the majority wants, I too will agree, in 3978. But in the meantime,
we do not give ground!
”

“I am in Norway,” the metalworker, Buki, said to me. “I go there on business. I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read, ‘Down with Israel,' I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?' I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible. There are so many terrible countries—why is this country the most terrible? Why don't you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,' ‘Down with Chile,' ‘Down with Libya'? Because Hitler didn't murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.' Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya,' and leave Israel alone.” His dark brown eyes, fixed upon mine, appeared to be set in his head crookedly because of a long jagged scar on his forehead. His English came haltingly, but with forceful fluency all the same, as though he had mastered the language in one large gulp just the day before. “Sir, why all over the world do they hate Menachem Begin?” he asked me. “Because of politics? In Bolivia, in China, in Scandinavia, what do they care about Begin's politics? They hate him because of his nose!”

Lippman cut in. “The demonization,” he told me, “will never end. It started in the Middle Ages as the demonization of the Jew and now in our age it is the demonization of the Jewish state. But it is always the same, the Jew is always committing the crime. We don't accept Christ, we reject Mohammed, we commit ritual murder, we control white slavery, we wish through sexual intercourse to poison the Aryan bloodstream, and now we have really ruined everything, now we have perpetrated truly monstrous evil, the worst the world press has ever known, upon the innocent, peaceful, blameless Arab. The Jew is a problem. How wonderful for everybody it would be without us.”

“And in America that will happen,” Buki said to me. “Don't think it won't.”

“What will happen?” I asked.

“In America there will be a great invasion—of Latinos, of Puerto Ricans, people fleeing poverty and the revolutions. And the white Christians will not like it. The white Christians will turn against the dirty foreigner. And when the white Christian turns against the dirty foreigner, the dirty foreigner he turns against first will be the Jew.”

“We have no desire for such a catastrophe,” Lippman explained. “We have seen enough catastrophe. But unless something momentous is done to stop it, this catastrophe too will occur: between the hammer of the pious white American Christian and the anvil of the dirty foreigner, the Jew in America will be crushed—if he is not slaughtered first by the blacks, the blacks in the ghettos who are already sharpening their knives.”

I interrupted him. “And how do the blacks accomplish this slaughter?” I asked. “With or without the help of the federal government?”

“Don't worry,” Lippman said, “the American goy will let them loose when the time is ripe. There is nothing the American goy would like better than a
Judenrein
United States. First,” Lippman informed me, “they permit the resentful blacks to take all their hatred out on the Jews, and afterward they take care of the blacks. And without the nosy Jews around to complain that they are violating black civil rights. Thus will come the Great American Pogrom out of which American white purity will be restored. You think this is ludicrous, the ridiculous nightmare of a paranoid Jew? But I am not
only
a paranoid Jew. Remember:
Ich bin ein Berliner
as well. And not out of run-of-the-mill opportunism—not like your handsome, heroic, young President when he announced that he was one with them to all the jubilant ex-Nazis, before, unfortunately, he succumbed to
his
paranoid nightmare. I was born there, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman, born and educated among all the sane, precise, reasonable, logical, un-paranoid German Jews who are now a mountain of ashes.”