The Counterlife (8 page)

2. Judea

WHEN I located him at his newspaper, Shuki couldn't at first understand who I said was calling—when he did, he pretended to be stupefied. “What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”

“I come regularly every twenty years to be sure everything's okay.”

“Well, things are great,” Shuki replied. “We're going down the drain six different ways. It's too awful even to joke about.”

We'd met eighteen years earlier, in 1960, during my only previous visit to Israel. Because
Higher Education,
my first book, had been deemed “controversial”—garnering both a Jewish prize and the ire of a lot of rabbis—I'd been invited to Tel Aviv to participate in a public dialogue: Jewish-American and Israeli writers on the subject “The Jew in Literature.”

Though only a few years older than I, Shuki back in 1960 had already completed a ten-year stint as an army colonel and just been appointed Ben-Gurion's press attaché. One day he'd taken me up to the Prime Minister's office to shake the hand of “the Old Man,” an event that, however special, turned out to be nowhere near so instructive as our lunch beforehand with Shuki's father in the Knesset dining room. “You might learn something meeting an ordinary Israeli working man,” Shuki said; “and as for him, he loves coming down here to eat with the big shots.” Of course why he especially liked coming to eat at the Knesset was because his son was now working there for his political idol.

Mr. Elchanan was in his mid-sixties then and still employed as a welder in Haifa. He'd emigrated to mandate Palestine from Odessa in 1920, when the Soviet revolution was proving to be more hostile to Jews than its Russian-Jewish supporters had foreseen. “I came,” he told me, in the good if heavily accented English that he'd learned as a Palestinian Jew under the British, “and I was already an old man for the Zionist movement—I was twenty-five.” He was not strong, but his hands were strong—his hands were the center of him, the truly exceptional thing in his whole appearance. He had kind, very mild, soft brown eyes, but otherwise plain, ungraspable features set in a perfectly round and gentle face. He was not tall like Shuki but short, his chin was not protruding heroically but slightly receding, and he was a little stooped from a lifetime of physical work forming joints and connections. His hair was grayish. More than likely you wouldn't even see him if he sat down across from you on a bus. How intelligent was he, this unprepossessing welder? Intelligent enough, I thought, to raise a very good family, intelligent enough to bring up Shuki and his younger brother, an architect in Tel Aviv, and of course intelligent enough to understand in 1920 that he had better leave Russia if he was intent upon remaining a socialist and a Jew. In conversation, he displayed his share of forceful wit, and even a playful, poetic imagination of sorts when it came time to put me through my paces. I myself couldn't see him as a worker who was nothing more than “ordinary,” but then I wasn't his offspring. In fact, it wasn't at all difficult to think of him as an Israeli counterpart to my own father, who was then still practicing chiropody in New Jersey. Despite the difference in professional status, they would have got on well, I thought. That may even be why Shuki and I got on so well.

We were just beginning our soup when Mr. Elchanan said to me, “So you're going to stay.”

“Am I? Who said so?”

“Well, you're not going back there, are you?”

Shuki kept spooning the soup—this was obviously a question he wasn't startled to hear.

I figured at first that Mr. Elchanan was joking with me. “To America?” I said, smiling. “Going next week.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You'll stay.” Here he put down his spoon and came over to my side of the table. With one of those extraordinary hands of his he lifted me by the arm and steered me over to a window of the dining room that looked out across modern Jerusalem to the old walled city. “See that tree?” he said. “That's a Jewish tree. See that bird? That's a Jewish bird. See, up there? A Jewish cloud. There is no country for a Jew but here.” Then he set me back down where I could resume eating.

Shuki said to his father, once he was over his plate again. “I think that Nathan's experience makes him see things differently.”

“What experience?” The voice was brusque as it hadn't been with me. “He needs us,” Mr. Elchanan pointed out to his son, “—and even more than we need him.”

“Is that so,” Shuki said softly, and continued eating.

However earnest I may have been at twenty-seven, however dutifully, obstinately sincere, I really didn't want to tell my friend's well-meaning, stoop-shouldered old father just how wrong he was, and in response to their exchange I merely shrugged.

“He lives in a museum!” Mr. Elchanan said angrily. Shuki half-nodded—this too he seemed to have heard before—and so Mr. Elchanan turned to say it again directly to me. “You are. We are living in a Jewish theater and you are living in a Jewish museum!”

“Tell him, Nathan,” said Shuki, “about your museum. Don't worry, he's been debating with me since I was five—he can take it.”

So I did as Shuki said and, for the remainder of the lunch, I told him—as was my style in my twenties (with fathers particularly), told him overpassionately and at enormous length. I wasn't improvising, either: these were conclusions I'd been reaching on my own in the last few days, the result of traveling for three weeks through a Jewish homeland that couldn't have seemed to me more remote.

To be the Jew that I was, I told Shuki's father, which was neither more nor less than the Jew I wished to be, I didn't need to live in a Jewish nation any more than he, from what I understood, felt obliged to pray in a synagogue three times a day. My landscape wasn't the Negev wilderness, or the Galilean hills, or the coastal plain of ancient Philistia; it was industrial, immigrant America—Newark where I'd been raised, Chicago where I'd been educated, and New York where I was living in a basement apartment on a Lower East Side street among poor Ukrainians and Puerto Ricans. My sacred text wasn't the Bible but novels translated from Russian, German, and French into the language in which I was beginning to write and publish my own fiction—not the semantic range of classical Hebrew but the jumpy beat of American English was what excited me. I was not a Jewish survivor of a Nazi death camp in search of a safe and welcoming refuge, or a Jewish socialist for whom the primary source of injustice was the evil of capital, or a nationalist for whom cohesiveness was a Jewish political necessity, nor was I a believing Jew, a scholarly Jew, or a Jewish xenophobe who couldn't bear the proximity of goyim. I was the American-born grandson of simple Galician tradesmen who, at the end of the last century, had on their own reached the same prophetic conclusion as Theodor Herzl—that there was no future for them in Christian Europe, that they couldn't go on being themselves there without inciting to violence ominous forces against which they hadn't the slightest means of defense. But instead of struggling to save the Jewish people from destruction by founding a homeland in the remote corner of the Ottoman Empire that had once been biblical Palestine, they simply set out to save their own Jewish skins. Insomuch as Zionism meant taking upon oneself, rather than leaving to others, responsibility for one's survival as a Jew, this was their brand of Zionism. And it worked. Unlike them, I had not grown up hedged in by an unnerving Catholic peasantry that could be whipped into a Jew-hating fervor by the village priest or the local landowner; even more to the point, my grandparents' claim to legitimate political entitlement had not been staked in the midst of an alien, indigenous population that had no commitment to Jewish biblical rights and no sympathy for what a Jewish God said in a Jewish book about what constitutes Jewish territory in perpetuity. In the long run I might even be far more secure as a Jew in my homeland than Mr. Elchanan, Shuki, and their descendants could ever be in theirs.

I insisted that America simply did not boil down to Jew and Gentile, nor were anti-Semites the American Jew's biggest problem. To say, Let's face it, for the Jews the problem is always the goyim, may have a ring of truth about it for a moment—“How can anyone dismiss that statement out of hand in this century? And if America should prove to be a place of intolerance, shallowness, indecency, and brutality, where all American values are flushed into the gutter, it could have more than just the ring of truth—it could turn out to be so.” But, I went on, the fact of it was that I could not think of any historical society that had achieved the level of tolerance institutionalized in America or that had placed pluralism smack at the center of its publicly advertised dream of itself. I could only hope that Yacov Elchanan's solution to the problem of Jewish survival and independence turned out to be no less successful than the unpolitical, unideological “family Zionism” enacted by my immigrant grandparents in coming, at the turn of the century, to America, a country that did not have at its center the idea of exclusion.

“Though I don't admit this back in New York,” I said, “I'm a little idealistic about America—maybe the way that Shuki's a little idealistic about Israel.”

I wasn't sure if the smile I saw wasn't perhaps a sign of how impressed he was. He ought to be, I thought—he certainly doesn't hear stuff like this from the other welders. I was even, afterwards, a little chagrined that I had said quite so much, fearing that I might have demolished
too
thoroughly the aging Zionist and his simplifications.

But he merely continued smiling away, even as he rose to his feet, came around the table, and once again lifted me by my arm and led me back to where I could look out on his Jewish trees and streets and birds and clouds. “So many words,” he finally said to me, and with just a trace of that mockery that was more recognizably Jewish to me than the clouds—“such brilliant explanations. Such deep thoughts, Nathan. I never in my life saw a better argument than you for our never leaving Jerusalem again.”

His words were our last words, for before we could even eat dessert Shuki rushed me upstairs for my scheduled minute with another stocky little gentleman in a short-sleeve shirt who, in person, also looked to me deceptively inconsequential, as though the model of a tank that I spotted among the papers and family photos on his desk could have been nothing more than a toy constructed for a grandchild in his little workshop.

Shuki told the Prime Minister that we'd just come up from lunch with his father.

This amused Ben-Gurion. “So you're staying,” he said to me. “Good. We'll make room.”

A photographer was already there, poised to take a picture of Israel's Founding Father shaking hands with Nathan Zuckerman. I am laughing in the photograph because just as it was to be snapped, Ben-Gurion whispered, “Remember, this isn't yours—it's for your parents, to give them a reason to be proud of you.”

He wasn't wrong—my father couldn't have been happier if it had been a picture of me in my Scout uniform helping Moses down from Mount Sinai. This picture wasn't merely beautiful, it was also ammunition, to be used primarily, however, in his struggle to prove to
himself
that what leading rabbis were telling their congregations from the pulpit about my Jewish self-hatred couldn't possibly be true.

Framed, the photograph was exhibited for the remaining years of my parents' lives atop the TV console in the living room, alongside the picture of my brother receiving his dental diploma. These to my father were our greatest achievements. And his.

*   *   *

After a shower and something to eat, I walked out back of my hotel to a bench on the wide promenade overlooking the sea where Shuki and I had arranged to meet. Christmas trees were already stacked on the pavement outside of our London greengrocer's, and a few evenings back, Maria and I had taken her little daughter, Phoebe, to see the Oxford Street lights, but in Tel Aviv it was a blue, bright, windless day, and on the beach below, female flesh was toasting in the sun and a handful of bathers were bobbing about in the waves. I remembered how, driving to the West End with Phoebe, Maria and I had talked about my first English Christmas and all the holiday celebrations to come. “I'm not one of those Jews for whom Christmas is an awful trial,” I said, “but I have to tell you that I don't actually participate so much as look on anthropologically from a distance.” “That's fine with me,” she said; “you do the next-best thing. Which is to write large checks. That's really all the participating that's necessary.”

As I sat there with my jacket in my lap and my sleeves rolled up, watching the elderly men and women on the nearby benches reading their papers, and eating ice cream, and some, with their eyes shut, just pleasantly warming their bones, I was reminded of the journeys I used to make to Florida after my father's retirement, when he had given up the Newark practice and was devoting his attention entirely to the daily
Times
and Walter Cronkite. There couldn't have been any more ardent Israeli patriots welding away in the Haifa shipyards than were gathered in those lounge chairs around the condominium pool after the triumph of the Six-Day War. “Now,” said my father, “they'll think twice before they pull our beards!” Militant, triumphant Israel was to his aging circle of Jewish friends their avenger for the centuries and centuries of humiliating oppression; the state created by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust had become for them the belated answer
to
the Holocaust, not only the embodiment of intrepid Jewish strength but the instrument of justifiable wrath and swift reprisal. Had it been Dr. Victor Zuckerman rather than General Moshe Dayan who'd been the Israeli Minister of Defense in May 1967—had it been any one of my father's Miami Beach cohorts rather than Moshe Dayan—tanks emblazoned with the white Mogen David would have rolled right on through the cease-fire lines to Cairo, Amman, and Damascus, where the Arabs would then have proceeded to surrender like the Germans in 1945, unconditionally, as though they
were
the Germans of 1945.