by Philip Roth
“Yes. Kamil said to me, ‘One Woody Allen is enough.’”
“Did he? In the courtroom? Why Woody Allen?”
“Woody Allen wrote something in The New York Times,” George said. “An op-ed article. Ask Anna. Ask Michael. They read it and couldn’t believe their eyes. It was reprinted here. It ranks as Woody Allen’s best joke yet. Philip, the guy isn’t a shlimazl just in the movies. Woody Allen believes that Jews aren’t capable of violence. Woody Allen doesn’t believe that he is reading the papers correctly—he just can’t believe that Jews break bones. Tell us another one, Woody. The first bone they break in defense—to put it charitably; the second in winning; the third gives them pleasure; and the fourth is already a reflex. Kamil hasn’t patience for this idiot, and he figured you for another. But it doesn’t matter in Tunis what Kamil thinks in Ramallah about Philip Roth. It hardly matters any longer in Ramallah what Kamil thinks about anything.”
“Tunis?”
“I assure you that Arafat can differentiate between Woody Allen and Philip Roth.”
This was surely the strangest sentence I had ever heard spoken in my life. I decided to top it. If this is the way George wants to play it, then this is the way we shall go. I am not writing this thing. They are. I don’t even exist.
“Any meeting with Arafat,” I heard myself telling him, “must be completely secret. For obvious reasons. But I will meet with him, any place and any time, Tunis or anywhere, and tomorrow is none too soon. It might be communicated to Arafat that through the good offices of Lech Walesa it’s likely that I’ll be meeting secretly at the Vatican with the Pope, probably next month. Walesa is already committed to my cause, as you know. He maintains that the Pope will find in Diasporism not only a means of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict but an instrument for the moral rehabilitation and spiritual reawakening of all of Europe. I am myself not as sanguine as he is about the boldness of this pope. It’s all well and good for His Holiness to be pro-Palestinian and to berate the Jews for appropriating property to which they have no legal right. It’s something else again to espouse the corollary of this position and to invite a million-plus Jews to consider themselves at home in the heart of Western Christendom. Yes, it would be something if the Pope were to call upon Europe publicly and openly to invite its Jews to return from their exile in Israel, and for him to mean it; if he were to call on Europe to confess to its complicity in their uprooting and destruction; if he were to call on Europe to purge itself of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and to make room in its midst for a vital Jewish presence to multiply and flourish there and, in anticipation of the third millennium of Christianity, to declare by proclamation in all its parliaments the right of the Jewish uprooted to resettle in their European homeland and to live as Jews there, free, secure, and welcome. That would be simply wonderful. But I have my doubts. Walesa’s Polish pope may even prefer Europe as Hitler passed it on to his European heirs—His Holiness may not really care to undo Hitler’s little miracle. But Arafat is another matter. Arafat—” On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine, heedless of truth, liberated from all doubt, assured of the indisputable rightness of my cause—seer, savior, very likely the Jews’ Messiah.
So this is how it’s done, I thought. This is how they do it. You just say everything.
No, I didn’t stop for a very long time. On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash, ostentatiously free of uncertainty and without a trace of conscience to rein in my raving. I was telling them about the meeting of the World Diasporist Congress to take place in December, fittingly enough in Basel, the site of the first World Zionist Congress just ninety years ago. At that first Zionist Congress there had been only a couple of hundred delegates—my goal was to have twice that many, Jewish delegations from every European country where the Israeli Ashkenazis would soon resume the European Jewish life that Hitler had all but extinguished. Walesa, I told them, had already agreed to appear as keynote speaker or to send his wife in his behalf if he concluded that he could not safely leave Poland. I was talking about the Armenians, suddenly, about whom I knew nothing. “Did the Armenians suffer because they were in a Diaspora? No, because they were at home and the Turks moved in and massacred them there.” I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. “People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It’s like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bullshit. Jews don’t want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So—Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?” I took more pride, I told them, in “Easter Parade” than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in “White Christmas” than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on dropping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. “Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility—how can you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it’s not a revolution that I’m proposing, it’s a retroversion, a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back the other way. Zionism went back too far, that’s what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion—Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of Zionism.”
My sympathies were entirely with George’s wife. I didn’t know which was more insufferable to her, the fervor with which I presented my Diasporist blah-blah or the thoughtfulness with which George sat there taking it in. Her husband had finally stopped talking—only to listen to this! Either to warm herself or to contain herself she’d enwrapped herself in her own arms and, like a woman on the brink of keening, she began almost imperceptibly rocking and swaying to and fro. And the message in those eyes of hers couldn’t have been plainer: I was more than even she could bear
, she who had by now borne everything. He suffers enough without you Shut up. Go away. Disappear.
All right, I’ll address this woman’s fears directly. Wouldn’t Moishe Pipik? “Anna, I’d be skeptical too if I were you. I’d be thinking, just as you are, This writer is one of those writers with no grasp on reality. This is all the nonsensical fantasy of a man who understands nothing. This is not even literature, let alone politics, this is a fable and a fairy tale. You are thinking of the thousand reasons why Diasporism can only fail, and I am telling you that I know the thousand reasons, I know the million reasons. But I am also here to tell you, to tell George, to tell Kamil, to tell whoever here will listen that it cannot fail because it must not fail, because the absurdity is not Diasporism but its alternative: Destruction. What people once thought about Zionism you are now thinking about Diasporism: an impossible pipe dream. You are thinking that I am just one more victim of the madness here that is on both sides—that this mad, crazy, tragic predicament has engulfed my sanity too. I see how miserable I am making you by exciting expectations in George that you know to be utopian and beyond implementation—that George, in his heart of hearts, knows to be utopian. But let me show you both something I received just a few hours ago that may cause you to think otherwise. It was given to me by an elderly survivor of Auschwitz.”
I removed from my jacket the envelope containing Smilesburger’s check and handed it to Anna. “Given to me by someone as desperate as you are to bring this maddening conflict to a just and honorable and workable conclusion. His contribution to the Diasporist movement.”
When Anna saw the check, she began to laugh very softly, as though this were a private joke intended especially for her amusement.
“Let me see,” said George, but for the moment she would not relinquish it. Wearily he asked her, “Why do you laugh? I prefer that, mind you, to the tears, but why do you laugh like this?”
“From happiness. From joy. I’m laughing because it’s all over. Tomorrow the Jews are going to line up at the airline office to get their one-way tickets for Berlin. Michael, look.” And she drew the boy close to her to show him the check. “Now you will be able to live in wonderful Palestine for the rest of your life. The Jews are leaving. Mr. Roth is the anti-Moses leading them out of Israel. Here is the money for their airfare.” But the pale, elongated, beautiful boy, without so much as glancing at the check in his mother’s hand, clenched his teeth and pulled away violently. This did not stop Anna, however—the check was merely the pretext she needed to deliver her diatribe. “Now there can be a Palestinian flag flying from every building and everybody can stand up and salute it twenty times a day. Now we can have our own money, with Father Arafat’s portrait on our very own bills. In our pockets we can jingle coins bearing the profile of Abu Nidal. I’m laughing,” she said, “because Palestinian Paradise is at hand.”
“Please,” George said, “this is the royal road to the migraine.” He motioned impatiently for her to hand him my check. Pipik’s check.
“Another victim who can’t forget,” said Anna, meanwhile studying the face of the check with those globular eyes as though there at last she might find the clue to why fate had delivered her into this misery. “All these victims and their horrible scars. But, tell me,” she asked, and as simply as a child asks why the grass is green, “how many victims can possibly stand on this tiny bit of soil?”
“But he agrees with you,” her husband said. “That is why he is here.”
“In America,” she told me, “I thought I had married a man who had left all this victimization behind, a man of cultivation who knew what made life rich and full. I didn’t think I had married another Kamil, who can’t start being a human being until the occupation is over. These perpetual little brothers, claiming they can’t live, they can’t breathe, because somebody is casting a shadow over them! The moral childishness of these people! A man with George’s brain, strangling on spurious issues of loyalty! Why aren’t you loyal,” she cried, wildly turning on George, “to your intellect? Why aren’t you loyal to literature? People like you”—meaning me as well—“run for their lives from backwater provinces like this one. You ran, you were right to run, both of you, as far as you could from the provincialism and the egocentricity and the xenophobia and the lamentations, you were not poisoned by the sentimentality of these childish, stupid ethnic mythologies, you plunged into a big, new, free world with all your intellect and all your energy, truly free young men, devoted to art, books, reason, scholarship, to seriousness—”
“Yes, to everything noble and elevated. Look,” said George, “you are merely describing two snobbish graduate students—and we were not so pure even then. You paint a ridiculously naive portrait that would have struck us as laughable even then.”
“Well, all I mean,” she answered contemptuously, “is that you couldn’t possibly have been as idiotic as you are now.”
“You just prefer the high-minded idiocy of universities to the low-minded idiocy of political struggle. No one says it isn’t idiotic and stupid and perhaps even futile. But that is what it’s like, you see, for a human being to live on this earth.”
“No amount of money,” she said, ignoring the condescension to address me again about my check, “will change a single thing. Stay here, you’ll see. There is nothing in the future for these Jews and these Arabs but more tragedy, suffering, and blood. The hatred on both sides is too enormous, it envelops everything. There is no trust and there will not be for another thousand years. ‘To live on this earth.’ Living in Boston was living on this earth—” she angrily reminded George. “Or isn’t it ‘life’ any longer when people have a big, bright apartment and quiet, intelligent neighbors and the simple civilized pleasure of a good job and raising children? Isn’t it ‘life’ when you read books and listen to music and choose your friends because of their qualities and not because they share your roots? Roots! A concept for cavemen to live by! Is the survival of Palestinian culture, Palestinian people, Palestinian heritage, is that really a ‘must’ in the evolution of humanity? Is all that mythology a greater must than the survival of my son?”
“He’s going back,” George quietly replied.
“When? When?” She shook the check in George’s face. “When Philip Roth collects a thousand more checks from crazy Jews and the airlift to Poland begins? When Philip Roth and the Pope sit down together in the Vatican and solve our problems for us? I will not sacrifice my son to any more fanatics and their megalomaniacal fantasies!”
“He will go back,” George repeated sternly.
“Palestine is a lie! Zionism is a lie! Diasporism is a lie! The biggest lie yet! I will not sacrifice Michael to more lies!”
___
George phoned to downtown Ramallah for a taxi to come to his house to drive me to Jerusalem. The driver was a weathered-looking old man who seemed awfully sleepy given that it was only seven in the evening. I wondered aloud if this was the best George could do.
First George told him in Arabic where to take me, then, in English, he said, “He’s used to the checkpoints, and the soldiers there are familiar with him. You’ll get back all right.”
“To me he looks a little the worse for wear.”
“Don’t worry,” George said. He had wanted, in fact, to take me back himself, but in their bedroom, where Anna had gone to lie down in the dark, she had warned George that if he dared to go off in the evening to drive to Jerusalem and back, neither she nor Michael would be there when he returned, if he returned and didn’t wind up beaten to death by the army or shot by vigilante Jews. “It’s the migraine talking,” George explained. “I don’t want to make it worse.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, “I already have.”
“Philip, we’ll speak tomorrow. There are many things to discuss. I’ll come in the morning. I want to take you somewhere. I want you to meet someone. You will be free in the morning?”
I had arranged a meeting with Aharon, I had somehow to get to see Apter, but I said
, “For you, yes, of course. Say goodbye to Michael for me. And to Anna. …”
“He’s in there holding her hand.”
“Maybe this is all too much for him.”
“It does begin to look that way.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “My stupidity,” he moaned. “My fucking stupidity!”
At the door he embraced me. “Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what it’s going to mean for you when the Mossad finds out you’ve met with Arafat?”
“Arrange the meeting, Zee.”
“Oh, you’re the best of them!” he said emotionally. “The very best!”
Bullshit artist, I thought, actor, liar, fake, but all I did was return the embrace with no less fervent duplicitousness than was being proffered.
To circumvent the Ramallah roadblocks, which still barred the entrance to the city center and access to the telltale bloodstained wall, the taxi driver took the circuitous route through the hills that George had used earlier to get home. There were no lights to be seen anywhere once we were headed away from the complex of stone houses at the edge of the ravine, no cars appeared on the hillside roads, and for a long time I kept my eyes fixed on the path cut by our headlamps and was too apprehensive to think of anything other than making it safely back to Jerusalem. Shouldn’t he be driving with his brights on? Or were those feeble beams the brights? Going back with this old Arab, I thought, had to be a mistake but so was coming out with George, so, surely, was everything I had just said and done. This little leave I had taken not merely of my senses but of my life was inexplicable to me—it was as though reality had stopped and I had gotten off to do what I did and now I was being driven along these dark roads to where reality would be waiting for me to climb back on board and resume doing what I used to do. Had I even been present? Yes, yes, I most certainly had been, hidden no more than an inch or two behind that mild exercise in malicious cynicism. And yet I could swear that my carrying-on was completely innocent. The lengths I had gone to to mislead George hadn’t seemed to me any more underhanded than if we’d been two children at play in a sand-pile, no more insidious and about as mindless—for one of the few times in my life I couldn’t really satirize myself for thinking too much. What had I yielded to? How did I get here? The rattling car, the sleepy driver, the sinister road … it was all the unforeseen outcome of the convergence of my falseness with his, dissimulation to match dissimulation … unless George hadn’t been dissimulating, unless the only act was mine! But could he possibly have taken that blather seriously about Irving Berlin? No, no—here’s what they’re up to: They’re thinking of the infantile idealism and immeasurable egoism of all those writers who step momentarily onto the vast stage of history by shaking the hand of the revolutionary leader in charge of the local egalitarian dictatorship; they’re thinking of how, aside from flattering a writer’s vanity, it lends his life a sense of significance that he just can’t seem to get finding the mot juste (if he even comes anywhere close to finding it one out of five hundred times); they’re thinking that nothing does that egoism quite so much good as the illusion of submerging it for three or four days in a great and selfless, highly visible cause; they’re thinking along the lines that Shmuel the lawyer had been thinking when he observed that it might just be that I’d come round to the courtroom in the clutches of “the world’s pet victims” to beef up my credentials for the big prize. They’re thinking of Jesse Jackson, of Vanessa Redgrave, smiling in those news photographs arm in arm with their leader, and of how, in the public-relations battle with the Jews, which well might decide more in the end than all of the terrorism would, a photograph in Time with a celebrity Jew might just be worth ten seconds of the leader’s precious time. Of course! They’re setting me up for a photo opportunity, and the looniness of my Diasporism is inconsequential—Jesse Jackson isn’t exactly Gramsci either. Mitterrand has Styron, Castro has Márquez, Ortega has Pinter, and Arafat is about to have me.