Inside, Outside, page 26
“What are you shaking your head about?” Abe abruptly asked him.
“Never mind.”
“Let’s hear, Moyshe,” said General Lev, whose joke it was to call Mark by the inside name which was also his own.
“This is all such futile talk in a void,” Mark said.
“How, futile?” grated Abe.
Now came the crunch of the night.
***
Mark stared at his son for heavy seconds, and poured himself a hooker of cognac. “Okay. You asked me. Now listen, all of you, to some sense.”
He spoke almost sepulchrally as he sipped. “Let us say that the Japanese in World War II managed to gain a beachhead in California, okay? Never mind how. Let’s say they took—oh, San Diego, with a sizable patch of territory around it, and started to settle and develop it. And let’s say the war ended just the way it really did, Hiroshima and all, except that the Japs in the beachhead managed to fight off the Americans. Caused enough casualties, let’s say, to get themselves a cease-fire and a truce. All right. How long do you suppose the Americans would tolerate that excrescence on the west coast? How long could that beachhead last? Five years? Ten? Fifty? What future would those Japanese have, but sooner or later to be thrown into the sea?”
“It’s a ridiculous analogy,” said Abe.
“Not at all,” shot back his father. “Israel is exactly that, an isolated beachhead in an enemy region, an armed perimeter with its back to the sea. Zionism has failed. No reinforcements are coming. The Jews never did come here, except to escape some unendurable place. Even then they’ve come in handfuls, never en masse. And how many stay who can go on to America or Canada or Australia? The Israelis themselves leave in droves for Los Angeles and New York, if only they can afford to move.”
“You’re just dead wrong, on numbers alone,” Abe bristled. “Israel has kept growing and growing.”
“I’m not wrong. Hitler made the beachhead swell briefly—Hitler, and the Arab countries that expelled their Jews. Now it’s shrinking again. The British created the beachhead. They brought in the Jews in World War I, with some notion of protecting the Suez Canal. In 1948 the Brits pulled out, leaving the beachhead Jews behind to have their throats cut by the seventy million Arabs. Which is the only way it can all end.”
In a moment of quiet, the Israelis looked at each other. Abe slumped on a chair, regarding his father with a drawn face.
“All wrong, Moyshe.” General Lev calmly broke the pause. “The Arabs aren’t Americans, and Israel isn’t a beachhead. The Arab countries are unstable fragmented provinces of the Ottoman Empire. They have no cohesion. Their tribal enmities go back hundreds of years. Their culture doesn’t have an industrializing tendency. That’s what Israel brings to the region. As a people, as a culture, the Arabs can be noble, and generous, and proud, and hospitable. Our future among them will be secure once we make peace. We are a small country, but solidly structured, very strong and stable, and they need us to help them bury their ancient differences.”
“Pipe dream,” said Nahum Landau quietly.
“As to the weak sisters who go to Los Angeles,” Moshe Lev went on, ignoring him, “we can spare them. We don’t want or need them. We don’t even blame them. Life here is a hard challenge, only for the best. The ones who stay and the handfuls that come—like your son, here—are the ones who count. Nothing can attract them away from this land. It’s home. Abe is right, the Suez line is a strategic mistake that spells trouble. But we’ll survive.”
“You had better survive,” I couldn’t help saying, “because talking of self-respect, the self-respect of every Jew that the Holocaust left alive now rides on Israel.”
“My self-respect rides on my work!” Mark Herz acidly turned on me. “What your self-respect rides on, Dave, I admit I’ve never understood. You so all-fired Jewish, and religious, and Zionist, you defending Peter Quat—”
“Oh, God,” exclaimed Abe. “Not that again!”
“Why not, if self-respect is the issue?” Mark snapped. “Peter Quat, a one-man anti-Semitic movement, more effective than all the propaganda put out by all the Arab countries combined!”
“Moyshe,” said General Lev, “the man just writes funny books. Don’t get off the subject, and don’t exaggerate.”
“Funny books,” said Mark, “restoring throughout the world, despite Israel and her victories, the comfortable image of the Jews as foul grotesque degenerate people. No wonder the gentiles hail him. But you, David Goodkind! You and your self-respect! You of all people, to defend this self-abusing kike comedian!”
“He’s always been jealous of Quat, hasn’t he?” Abe Herz said to me.
The father and son seemed to be picking up their fight where it had broken off five years ago. I wanted to cool it. As mildly as possible, I said, “Peter writes his truth, Mark, and if it’s a sick truth, well, so was Proust’s.”
“Quat is the American Jew,” said Abe. “That’s why he’s a success. He’s nailed down the American Jewish experience. And that’s exactly why I’m here, and not there.”
“Really? And what about Peter’s lecture that you went to?” barked his father. “You Israelis turned out for him as though he was Elizabeth Taylor, and all he did was shit in your faces. Told you that he didn’t believe in Zionism, didn’t feel at home here, didn’t consider himself a Jew but an artist, and had no intention of ever coming back. What did that matter? You flocked, because he’s an American celebrity. If you’re here to get away from Quat’s America, you’re at the wrong address. Israel worships Quat’s America.”
“We went to see and hear Quat,” retorted his son, “the way we’d go to look at a two-headed horse, or any other freak. For diversion. At least his Jewishness troubles him. It’s a live nerve, not dead and gangrenous like yours. We’ve been through all this before, you know. Where do you stand, once for all? You despise Peter Quat, who tells exactly what it’s like to be a rootless American Jew. You think Dave Goodkind’s religion is an obsolete cop-out. You call Zionism a doomed regression to tribalist nationalism. What do you want the Jews to do with themselves, anyway? Build gas chambers and walk into them?”
“Maybe forget the whole thing at last,” said Mark, “and join the human race.”
“Assimilate, you mean,” said Nahum Landau. “Excellent idea. Very successful in Germany.” He yawned. “Do we drive back to Haifa tonight, Moyshe?”
“Are you crazy?” said Dudu. “We have a cottage waiting for you, beds made, everything.”
Abe looked from me to Sandra. “Do we drive back tonight?”
“I have to,” I said. “I have an appointment at noon tomorrow.”
As we broke up, Abe went out without another word to his father. Sandra and I walked to the cottage where she bunked with some girl volunteers from Canada. At the door she sprang her surprise on me, in her customary offhand way. I returned to Abe’s car without her.
“So? Where’s your daughter?” he inquired.
“She’s staying.”
***
On the long drive back to Tel Aviv I told Abe something about April House—the second person who knows, beside Jan—and he mentioned that he was keeping notes on his own experiences. I told him, too, that his remark about my Wall Street coprophagy, rankling for years, had perhaps been the starting point of these scrawls.
“Well, I’d like to read your book.” Abe grinned. “Maybe I stimulated a masterpiece.”
“I’m trying to show the American Jews I know,” I said. “They’re not much like School of Quat characters, as your father calls them.”
“Oh, look, I was baiting him about Peter Quat. Quat is much the best of those university bellyachers. He gets boring with his repetitious sex-ridden schlemiehls, who can’t stop picking their noses about being Jewish. Still, he can be damned funny.”
“Peter always was damned funny. I once said to him that maybe it was too soon after the Holocaust to be making such raw fun of the Jews. ‘We’re barely up on one knee and bleeding,’ I said. ‘Give us a chance.’”
Abe’s face brightened. “What did he say to that?”
“That once an artist started thinking that way, he was a goner. So I dropped it. We’ve never discussed it since.”
To stay awake on the long moonlight drive, I probed a bit about Abe’s reasons for making aliya. Meeting his uncle General Lev in New York for the first time, right after the Six-Day War, had been a revelation. Also his grandfather, Mark’s father, had been an influence, although Abe got to know him only when he was in college. There, too, between the grandfather and Mark, an almost total father-son break had occurred. It appeared to run in the family.
When Abe stopped at the taxi depot in Tel Aviv, in the dead of night, he said, “I wonder whether Sandra just didn’t want to ride with me. Better check with her tomorrow.”
“Don’t be a fool. She’s going to Haifa to hear Nahum Landau lecture on the hawk position. Wants to get the other side, so she said. Also, the volunteer girls are finishing up a big orange-sorting operation at Sde Shalom. She doesn’t want to fink out. She’s staying just two more weeks.”
“Sudden decision, though.”
“That’s my little girl.” I got out of his car. “Thanks for the lift.”
“She’s the most attractive girl I’ve ever met,” Abe said in a troubled tone. “She’s stunning. She’s paralyzing. She’s so beautiful, and so sweet when she wants to be. But God Almighty, her head is screwed on backward! Where were you when she was growing up?”
“I’ll tell you, Abe,” I said, leaning on the open car window, “being a Jewish father is not all that easy in this day and age. Bear that in mind.”
He stared at me. “Oh? And I’m a School of Quat son, eh?”
“Not you. You’re here. I told you long ago that I envy you. It still goes.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he replied, “it’s easy to sit on Wall Street, and envy me here on Ibn Gvirol Street. You bear that in mind.”
“You’re suggesting,” I said, “that I’m the American Jew. I don’t deny it.”
He offered me his hand for a firm handshake. “Shalom, shalom,” he said, and drove off. I slept in the taxi all the way to Jerusalem.
***
And that is the story of my famous night at Sde Shalom. I will shortly be plunging back into that madhouse at the airport, homeward bound alone. No Sandra. I’ve said my farewells to Mama, who is in remarkable shape, considering. She is now having her nap.
“Tell the President to be good to Israel,” she said sleepily when I left her, “and God will be good to him.”
My plane leaves in four hours. My taxi is ordered. You have to get there early for the baggage inspection and body search. The Israelis are deft and polite about it, but there’s not much chance of getting a penknife, let alone a gun or grenade, aboard an El Al plane. It’s your one reminder that this is a nation at war with every country along its borders. Abe Herz is right; you’d never know it in the grill of the Tel Aviv Hilton, where sleek Americans quaff Israel’s good red wine and eat fine kosher rare roast beef from Kansas; or in fact as you climb Mount Sinai or visit Jericho, Hebron, and Shechem, places where Jews couldn’t set foot a few years ago. Junketing among the quiescent Arabs still seems a lark for the tourists, though lately it’s made me uneasy.
At the moment I’m sitting in a seersucker suit and tie, on my terrace facing the Old City, waiting for the cab. When the sun rose I was down there praying at the Western Wall, after about an hour’s sleep. Even that early, the walk back through the Arab market was a hot uphill pull. Peaceable as those Arab shopkeepers are, I never feel calm among them; and I hurried, and I perspired from more than the heat. Then I took my last random walk in modern Jerusalem, in the religious neighborhood called Geulah, that is, “Redemption.” In a revelatory flash I realized, as I walked by the small shops and food stands, why I love to take such walks. To me, Jerusalem is Aldus Street. I can’t put it any other way. I’m not sure that ten thousand words would say it better. To me, Jerusalem is Aldus Street. In a way perhaps it is to much of the world, and that may be the Jerusalem problem. Or one of them.
I’ve had a shower and I’ve packed up. Quat’s galleys (Kee-rist!) are tucked away in a suitcase. My dispatch case is jammed with a heap of pages I’ve scrawled in these past two weeks about my Columbia years. The cork really blew out of the bottle here. I sat for hours on end in the hot sun on this terrace, getting a blistery sunburn and pouring it all out. I would write and write until the sinking sun lit up the Old City walls with the golden glow one sees nowhere else on earth. When that faded I’d go inside, have a few beers and a sandwich, or maybe eat dinner with Mama. Then I’d scribble more pages, sometimes far into the night. There wasn’t anything else I wanted to do, once I took care of Mama and saw Golda Meir, and Sandra went her way. I know so many people here that I’d have killed the whole time just touching base with them. I asked the Prime Minister’s office not to let on that I was in Jerusalem, and they were very decent about it.
Golda was in an ebullient mood when I saw her at noon today. She gave me an upbeat message for the President, and chatted about how secure Israel is at last, from the Suez Canal to the Jordan River, from the Golan Heights to Sharm-el-Sheikh; invincible and at peace, despite the formal war status. It’s all true. If this happy state of affairs continues, Mrs. Meir looks to go down as one of the great mothers in Israel. But I was somewhat shaken last night by what I heard at Sde Shalom, and I now have a daughter here. Moreover, I still remember the false-alarm mobilization in May.
I asked Golda about that. A shadow passed across the broad rugged old female face. Fleetingly she looked like Mama, reminded of something she’d rather not talk about. “Well, the Egyptians naturally want to keep things stirred up. It’s a problem. We’ve been handling it, and we’ll continue to handle it.”
36
Zaideh
In show business they speak of an actor “taking stage.” The curtain goes up, the minor players get things going with small talk, then on comes the star. There is no mistaking the moment. Well, when Zaideh arrived, he took stage.
I first saw him, as I did Bobbeh, ascending a Bronx staircase. But what a difference! Bobbeh was a bewildered little old lady, hobbling upward one step at a time. He climbed those Longfellow Avenue stairs quick-march, a vigorous gray-bearded giant in a heavy fur-lined black coat with a rich brown fur collar. When he reached our landing he towered above the lot of us: Mom, Pop, Lee, and of course me, just past my bar mitzva. Behind him came Aunt Faiga, a fresh-faced girl about Lee’s age and size, wearing a Lenin cap and the red scarf of the Young Pioneers. So it was that Hassidism and Leninism entered the Goodkind household as a package. The consequences would be interesting.
“So this is Yisroelke,” he said, right there on the landing (in Yiddish, of course), caressing my face with a firm yet soft hand. “Other children skip over benches, Yisroelke skips over classes.”
No sooner had Zaideh settled in Bobbeh’s former room and unpacked his library than he sat me down at a gargantuan brown volume, smelling somewhat mildewy from the ocean voyage, and opened it to a passage in Talmudic property law. The page is famed for difficulty, I later found out. I had had only a little Talmud in Hebrew school, and it had seemed an antique nuisance, mere puzzling rote drone. I was not bad at Bible study, by American standards, but Talmud was what Zaideh was after. Bible he took for granted. He told me what every Aramaic word of the passage meant, but not the idea, the point of it; and he said that if I figured it out he would give me five dollars. Thereupon he left me alone with the book.
Five dollars! Five dollars!
It was two months’ allowance. It was a bloody fortune. When it came to motivation, Zaideh knew a thing or two. I pored over that volume, and after a while I figured I had it. I called him and began to expound the point in halting Yiddish. He listened eagerly, but then the light died out of his eyes. He shook his head and went away. No fiver. I crouched over the page again, and arduously thought, and thought, and thought.
Maybe I should stop and explain here how the Talmud works. The President himself once asked me to do that. I tried to tell him, citing quite a simple passage, as it seemed to me. His eyes soon went glassy, so I trailed off and quit. He said yes, thanks, now he understood, it was very interesting; and he changed the subject. So it’s risky to get into this, but it’s the key to what happens next. If I take a brief whack at it, please don’t go all glassy-eyed on me. It’s not that mysterious or difficult, I swear. The President just had a lot on his mind.
The Talmud is a rambling encyclopedia of religious and civil law of Second Temple times. When Jesus, as the gospels narrate, disputed brilliantly with the elders, he was arguing Talmud law. Throughout its thousands of pages, the rabbis debate every sort of legal principle, some practical, some abstruse, in elegantly rigorous give-and-take. The language is tight and gnarled. Half the job is fathoming what a few apparently plain words imply. Among other things, in fact, the Talmud is a perpetual intelligence test. Helpful commentators line each page, but at that time they were over my head, and couldn’t nudge me any closer to the fiver. I was on my own, butting and butting that stone wall of text.
And yet I got it! I broke through the wall! I grasped the point of logic, I saw the light, and for the first time in my life I felt the rush of joy which is the soul of Talmud study. When you have got the answer, the idea of a passage, you know. Jews have pored over this literary inheritance for twenty centuries and more because—over and above the lore, the parables, the folk history, the Bible comment, the word pictures of Babylon and Rome, and the religious and legal substance—besides all that serious stuff, the Talmud is such incomparable mental fun. I am describing my love, or my hobby, so discount my enthusiasm as you please; I do believe I see some glassy eyes here and there among you, gentle readers. But now you’ll understand what followed between Zaideh and me.
