Inside, Outside, page 25
Now at his Camp Carmel-Herzl, I hasten to say, the Zionism was not of the Friday night ham-and-cigars variety. On the contrary, we had daily prayers, kosher food, grace at meals, and long Sabbath services. Mr. Kapilsky’s Zionism was a matter of hearty songs in modern Hebrew, galumphing sweaty round-dances, playlets about “building the land,” the Star of David flying beside the Stars and Stripes, and yawn-generating lectures. Kids are sharp observers, and something told me that it was all unreal; that Mr. Kapilsky, the lecturers, and the Young Herzlian counsellors did not in the least intend to emigrate to Palestine and settle in kibbutzim, and build the land, and plant oranges, and cavort in circles, but just to make a living talking about it. I couldn’t have put it into words then, but that’s how I felt.
***
Unlike Camp Eagle Wing, this camp did use me at Friday night services as the cantor. One day I received an unsigned fan letter on stationery of the girls’ camp, a twittery gush. This got me all in a glow of vainglory. Next Friday night, I kept a sharp eye on the girls’ section. One cute girl was throwing me, I thought, blushing little grins. After the services we exchanged a few snatched shy words. She confessed to writing the letter, and we agreed that we were in love. That was Bernice Lavine, about thirteen and a half, with a sweetly budding bosom. As cantor I was a sort of holy man, so I tried not to notice that.
Next morning at services, this girl’s father, introduced as a great Zionist by Mr. Kapilsky, lectured about kibbutzim. He had just spent a week at a kibbutz in Palestine. Mr. Lavine was round and soft and white and bespectacled, like Eagle Wing’s nature counsellor. He rhapsodized on and on about the brawny kibbutzniks, the beauty of the kibbutz, the charming children in the kibbutz nursery, the exquisite kibbutz fruits, the crystal kibbutz air, the fragrant kibbutz flowers, the delicious food in the kibbutz dining room, and the thrill of watching the kibbutzniks at night, singing and dancing in circles under the kibbutz moon. Mr. Lavine’s voice cracked with ecstasy, describing the kibbutz moon. “You could read a newspaper by the light,” he gurgled, tears standing in his eyes. That speech touched heights, never since reached in my hearing, of uncommunicated enthusiasm. We campers sat in dulled slumped rows, waiting for him to finish all that crap about the kibbutz moon so that we could go to lunch.
But I did not hold Bernice’s father against her. After he left I happened on her, hammering at some flats backstage on a very hot day, in a sleeveless shirt. As we chatted and flirted, there was visible through the armhole this one exquisite pink rose-tipped breast, scarcely formed. Bernice seemed utterly unaware that it was on view. Well, if I wasn’t in love with her before, that did it. Bernice Lavine’s little breast haunted me. I covered pages of camp stationery with drawings of it, then tore them up. I went around in an amorous fog. Whenever I saw her again she was always well covered; but through her blouse, like Superman, I saw what I had seen and could never forget.
Across this aureate romance there fell the shadow of one Clarence Rubin, a super-senior of sixteen, who came to services in plus fours, enormously baggy knickerbockers popularized by the golf champions. There was a big dance one night in August, to celebrate the change of camp names; and—one of the great shocks of my life—I overheard Clarence Rubin say he was taking Bernice Lavine to the dance. She and I had talked about the dance, and I was sure we were going together. But she went with Clarence Rubin, all cock-of-the-walk in his plus fours.
Next weekend Bernice’s father came back to lecture again. My resistance to his fruity talk about kibbutz, kibbutz, kibbutz, and therefore to Zionism altogether, got all kneaded up in my gut with my agonies over Clarence Rubin and Bernice Lavine. Alas, that breast! Bernice did not seem to grasp what she had done to me. After the lecture she approached me with the old intimate smile, and was hurt and baffled when I snarled something about plus fours, and held aloof. We never had it out. At the camp reunion in the dead of winter six months later, she came up to me and shyly said, “David, I didn’t really care for Clarence Rubin.” By then the summer seemed a million years ago. It didn’t matter any more.
Bernice may have been the only Young Herzlian who ever did go to Palestine. She married there, and had a big family. And if you’re wondering why Bernice is on my mind, okay, I’ll tell you. When I’m in Jerusalem I spend hours walking the streets, and there are always neighborhoods I haven’t walked in before. Today after my meeting with Golda I took such a walk, and came on something called the American Library, in an old stone building. I can’t pass a library any more than a drunk can pass a bar. In I went, and there, by God, was Bernice Lavine.
Bernice Lavine, all plump and gray, but we recognized each other! Her father, she said, has been dead for thirty years. We talked about our children, and how our lives had gone; and at one point, with a wry wrinkling smile, she said, “You know, David, I didn’t really care for Clarence Rubin.” Bernice never worked on a kibbutz. I asked her. She’s been a librarian all along.
***
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? I’d better take a heavy slug of my dwindling Jack Daniel’s if I want to get any sleep before I go to that kibbutz.
35
Sde Shalom
King David Hotel, Jerusalem
August 28, 1973
Well, it was quite an experience, Sde Shalom.
I found Abe Herz behind a small piled-up desk in a hot little office, much smaller than any clerk’s cubicle in my firm; the walls lined with law books in Hebrew and English and file boxes hand-labelled in Hebrew. A fan whooshed overhead, a window cooler rattled and groaned, and Abe in a sport shirt was nevertheless shiny with sweat. Telephone in hand, he said, “Sit down, this won’t take long.”
My Hebrew improves once I’m in Israel for a while, so I could catch the drift of the call. A client in Switzerland wanted to form a Liberian corporation to buy real estate in Beersheba, in order to lease the land to South African contractors, who would build housing for Russian immigrants, with Argentinian capital held in a bank in Australia. Abe was urging that the whole thing be done instead through corporations in Hong Kong and South Korea, via an investment firm in Dallas that had an Australian branch. According to Abe’s boss, who had just resigned as Israeli Treasury Minister to return to private practice, that would be sounder taxwise, for some tangled reason.
“These Swiss Jews,” said Abe, hanging up, taking off horn-rimmed glasses, and shaking his head. “Kind of slow on the uptake. Let’s go. Why are you wearing a coat and tie? You’ll die in the Negev.”
The telephone rang. “Zozti kvar (I’ve already left),” Abe snapped, picking up the receiver. “Oh! All right, put him on…. My boss,” he said to me. “Calling from London.”
He talked in English about import duties on bulldozers. I garnered that a deal involving millions of British pounds might get tax exemption if the bulldozers could be ruled a matter of national urgency. But the new Treasury Minister’s view, Abe told his boss, was that Israel was about to slide into the sea from the sheer weight of bulldozers on hand. So where was the urgency? A senior partner was contacting the Minister of Defense, and there might be something more positive to report in a day or two. The army seldom had enough bulldozers.
“You could be doing this on Wall Street,” I said, as we walked down narrow rusty iron stairs, “making a lot of money, and staying cool.”
“Are you telling me I was crazy to come here?” said Abe a shade irritably, mopping his brow. “This country was created and is maintained by crazy people, and the tax system is crazier than anything that foreign lunatics could invent.”
We emerged from a dark vestibule into blazing white glare. Abe put on sun glasses and led me to a decrepit Citroen. I peeled off coat and tie before I got in, saying, “It helps to look like a foreigner here, sometimes.”
“Oh, we’re wonderful to foreigners, just hard on each other. Close quarters.” He threaded expertly through the twisting streets of old Jaffa, where the traffic noise made talk difficult, and headed south on a black-top road traversing farmland. “When I made aliya, this firm offered me a job,” he spoke up. “I wasn’t interested then. I told them that I hadn’t left America to help fat cats dodge Israeli taxes.”
“What changed your mind?”
“After I did my army years, I had to eat. I was having a rough time. Woman trouble, money trouble. They say if an American sticks it out here for five years, he stays. I nearly went back in year four. That’s why I took the job. Actually, it’s a service to Israel to do tax law. The people who beat the system are the ones who keep the country going. How’s Sandra doing at Sde Shalom?”
“You’ll have to ask her.”
In Beersheba we stopped to eat. Dehydrated by the hot dry drive, we drank three or four beers apiece. Back on the road, I said, “Look, it’s none of my business, but your father and I are very old friends. What’s the trouble between you, and can I help?”
Things I already knew came pouring out as we drove: Mark’s divorce from Abe’s mother, his two marriages to gentiles, his philandering with college girls, and so on. Mark had not come to his first wife’s funeral after her death from cancer. That, I didn’t know. Abe was very bitter about it. The lecture by Peter Quat in Tel Aviv, I learned, had really occasioned the break. Mark refused to go, and afterward in a hot argument Abe finally told his father off. His exact words—which he quoted, staring ahead at a bumpy dirt road and clutching the wheel—were these: “Listen, just do me a favor and leave me alone, now and forever, will you? You’re envious, you’re opinionated, you’re a bad Jew, and you’re a whoremaster.” At this Mark had walked out of Abe’s flat. They had not communicated since. I didn’t press my offer to help.
When we arrived at Fields of Peace, dinner was over. Sandra was in the kitchen with other girls, also some young men favoring beards and long hair, washing and drying vast stacks of plastic dishes in a steamy racket. She looked all sunburned and healthy. When she saw me through the vapor, she dashed up to me and gave me a wet hug and a real kiss. Sandra has to do something like that only once or twice a year to keep me in line, and don’t tell me what a fool I am. If you’re a man and you have an only daughter, you understand, otherwise forget it.
Abe came tromping into the big empty dining hall, his footfalls echoing. Sandra’s eyes went wide, and gleamed at him like a cat’s in the dark.
“Well, well! Shalom!” The tone put ironic quotes around the Hebrew.
“Hi,” he said.
She brought heaping plates of fried chicken and minced-up salad vegetables with a basket of coarse bread, and sat us down at a long freshly washed table. “Got to get back to my chores. When you’re through, Dudu is expecting you,” she said to me. “He has some other visitors.” With a sly glance at Abe she darted back into the clattering kitchen.
“Who’s Dudu?” I asked Abe.
“Dudu Barkai. Chairman of the kibbutz.”
He wolfed all the food, but I passed up the chicken. Kosher slaughtering by these radical peaceniks was unlikely.
“Okay,” Sandra said, picking up our plates and grinning at my uneaten chicken, “I’ll take you to Dudu’s cottage.”
“I know the way,” Abe said, but Sandra came along.
There was a brilliant full moon outside. Maybe I could really have read a newspaper by the light, as Bernice Lavine’s father had burbled half a century ago. The Negev air is remarkably clear, for a fact. At Fields of Peace it was sweet with the scent of flower borders along the walkways and the heavy fragrance of orange blossoms. One could see that this was a small young kibbutz. Some of the old established collectives are almost as imposing as American country clubs: beautiful gardens, fine villas, swimming pools, and tennis courts. This one was, as I expected, in the stark style of the pioneer days.
As we walked toward Dudu Barkai’s cottage down a long row, Sandra told me that the chairman was now running the laundry, the dirtiest job on the kibbutz. Everybody took turns doing everything at Sde Shalom, it was a very idealistic place. Mrs. Barkai, for instance, managed the turkey-breeding pens, and also was in charge of repairing tractors. Music wafted from the cottage windows we passed, the same Beethoven symphony on the highbrow Israeli station, but from the chairman’s cottage as we drew near, we heard a beautiful solo violin: Menuhin, at a guess, or possibly Isaac Stern. “So, friend chairman has got himself a shortwave radio,” I thought, “and is listening to Paris or London. Rank hath its privileges even at Sde Shalom.”
Sandra opened the door and slipped in, beckoning to us. In the middle of a small bleak sitting room, a curly-haired man in shorts and a T-shirt was fiddling magnificently. Seated on a sofa were Mark Herz and a man I knew from my UJA days, Professor Nahum Landau the physicist, the rumored father of Israel’s rumored atom bomb. Sandra whispered to me that the white-haired man in shorts sitting cross-legged on the floor was General Moshe Lev, and the fiddler was Dudu Barkai. Mark Herz, usually impassive as Dr. Fu Manchu, started when he saw his son, and a strange look, half-pained and half-glad, crossed his face. I peeked at Abe to see how he took his father’s presence. His irked glance at Sandra blamed her for not warning him. She returned a tart little smile.
So the reader now gets his first glimpse of the Man in the Iron Mask, as Mark Herz was known at Columbia College. Mark Herz remains today as lean as when, some forty years ago, he wrote Varsity Shows with Peter Quat. His close-trimmed hair is gray, his face is seamed, craggy, and very melancholy. That sad cast of countenance seldom leaves Mark Herz’s face, unless he is momentarily amused. His ascetic weighed-down air makes me think of J. Robert Oppenheimer, though his career, while including work on the bomb at Los Alamos, has not been that brilliant or controversial. Professor Landau by contrast has the smiling sardonic look of a Voltaire bust. Landau worked with General Lev on the Kfir fighter plane, but unlike Lev he is a flaming hawk.
The turkey farmer and tractor repairer, Mrs. Barkai, was pottering noiselessly in the kitchen; a small brown muscular woman, in a sleeveless housedress. When her husband finished and we applauded, she brought out tea, cakes, and cognac. Barkai said to Professor Landau, laying aside bow and violin and wiping his brow, “Nahum, this is the girl who is writing her master’s thesis about our proto-fascist state.” He shook hands with me. “Welcome to Sde Shalom.”
“Proto-fascist, eh?” Landau said genially to Sandra. Laugh lines wrinkled his whole face, but his blue eyes were calm and penetrating. “Well, that’s still better than some people give us.”
“I have a lot to learn, I guess,” said Sandra. “That’s why I’m here.”
Abe Herz, slouching on a wooden chair with a glass of cognac, asked her, “Well, have you learned anything yet?”
“Why, sure. For instance, that one can get the wrong impression from Americans who make aliya. Israelis aren’t all gung-ho militarists, by a long shot.”
“My dear,” put in Mark Herz, “the Israelis are erasing a two-thousand-year-old image of the cringing Jew as victim. This calls for a certain high mettle, which can be mistaken for brassiness or arrogance. Especially in Americans who make aliya. They feel they have to out-Israeli the Israelis.”
“Well, that could be it,” Sandra said.
General Moshe Lev sat up very straight and began to lecture Mark. He clearly disliked that buzzword arrogance. Living in a sea of enemies, he said, having to prove in war after war their right to exist, Israelis had earned their self-respect the hard way. It was the backbone of the country, the secret of its survival. Self-respect was not arrogance. His crisp sentences caused Mark to raise both hands and say sorry, sorry, sorry, he withdrew the word, since it gave offense. He had simply made a joke, which hadn’t quite come off.
“Now who’s being a cringing Jew?” said his son. “That’s what you really think, so why back down?”
“How do you know what I think?” Mark exclaimed. “When did you last talk to me?”
“The last time I wanted to.”
A snappish exchange, very awkward for the rest of us.
Nahum Landau struck in with a smile. Very vivid and realistic, he said to Lev, that phrase, “sea of enemies.” The dikes that held back this sea were the territories, of course. Sinai, the West Bank, Golan. Could Moshe please explain again his so-called phased peace plan, which would level the dikes and let the sea surge in to the walls of Jerusalem and the outskirts of Tel Aviv?
General Lev retorted that his plan would transform the enemies into peaceful neighbors, so there would be no sea and no need for dikes. An acid exchange ensued between these two old antagonists. They had a fresh audience—Mark, me, and Sandra—and they warmed up to it with sharp cut-and-thrust. Dudu Barkai broke in to declare that they both missed the real point, the decay of Israel’s ideals.
“We have had a chance to create a just society here,” he said, “the first true socialist country on earth. If we become just another capitalist consumer society, how can the Arabs ever befriend or trust us? Capitalism is aggressive and expansionist in its very nature.”
“Proto-fascist,” said Abe Herz, “in fact.”
“Damn right,” said Sandra.
With a dismissive wave at her, Abe said that the real danger in his view was Israel’s loony electoral system. He had served on the Suez Canal off and on for many months. To come back to Tel Aviv from duty amid the sandstorms and the flies—with the enemy in plain sight across the Canal, killing Israeli soldiers in the outposts every day—was a shock; hotels full of fat tourists eating fat meals, streets streaming with cars, Israelis pouring in and out of cinemas and shops, eating ice cream and drinking coffee in the sidewalk cafés, with not a worry in the world! Either the politicians didn’t have the guts to tell the people in what danger they still stood, or they too were living in a dream world, like the people. Either possibility was frightening. Abe became vehement about the evils of proportional representation. Mrs. Barkai, whose English was weak, asked him to translate. The discussion veered to rapid Hebrew. Mark Herz sat contemplating them all, drinking shot after shot of cognac, slowly shaking his head, with the face of a man of sorrows.
