by Philip Roth
“Living the life of Riley in New Jersey.”
“Come on, Henry—there’s no such thing as the life of Riley, in New Jersey or anywhere else. America is also a place where people die, where people fail, where life is interesting and tense, and hardly without conflict.”
“But Riley’s life was still whose mine was. In America the massacre of your brother’s Judaism couldn’t have been more complete.”
“‘Massacre’? Where’d you pick up that word? You lived like everybody you knew. You accepted the social arrangement that existed.”
“Only the arrangement that existed was completely abnormal.”
Normal and abnormal—twenty-four hours in Israel and there was that distinction again.
“How did I even get that disease?” he asked me. “Five occluded coronary arteries in a man not even forty years old. What sort of stress do you think caused it? The stresses of a ‘normal’ life?”
“Carol for a wife, dentistry for a livelihood, South Orange for a home, well-behaved kids in good private schools—even the girlfriend on the side. If that’s not normalcy, what is?”
“Only all for the goyim. Camouflaging behind goyish respectability every last Jewish marking. All of it from them, for them.”
“Henry, I walk in Hebron and I see them—them with a vengeance. All I remember seeing around your place were other prosperous Jews like you, and none of them packing a gun.”
“You bet: prosperous, comfortable, Hellenized Jews—galut Jews, bereft of any sort of context in which actually to be Jewish.”
“And you think this is what made you sick? ‘Hellenization’? It didn’t seem to ruin Aristotle’s life. What the hell does it even mean?”
“Hellenized—hedonized—egomaniazed. My whole existence was the sickness. I got off easy with just my heart. Diseased with self-distortion, self-contortion, diseased with self-disguise—up to my eyeballs in meaninglessness.”
First it was the life of Riley, now it was nothing but a disease. “You felt all that?”
“Me? I was so conventionalized I never felt anything. Wendy. Perfect. Shtupping the dental assistant. My office blow job, the great overwhelming passion of a completely superficial life. Before that, even better—Basel. Classic. The Jewish male’s idolatry—worship of the shiksa; dreaming of Switzerland with the beloved shiksa. The original Jewish dream of escape.”
And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into. Back in Jersey, he ascribes the stress that he was convinced had culminated in the coronary artery disease to the humiliating failure of nerve that had prevented him from leaving South Orange for Basel; in Judea his diagnosis is just the opposite—here he attributes the disease to the insidious strain of Diaspora abnormality manifested most blatantly by “the original Jewish dream of escape … Switzerland with the beloved shiksa.”
As we headed back to Agor to be there in time to prepare for Shabbat, I tried to figure out if Henry, who had hardly grown up in some New World Vienna, could actually have swallowed a self-analysis that to me seemed mostly platitudes gleaned from a turn-of-the-century handbook of Zionist ideology and having nothing whatsoever to do with him. When had Henry Zuckerman, raised securely among Newark’s ambitious Jewish middle class, educated with hundreds of other smart Jewish kids at Cornell, married to a loyal and understanding woman just as secular a Jew as himself, ensconced in the sort of affluent, attractive Jewish suburb that he’d aspired to all his life, a Jew whose history of intimidation by anti-Semitism was simply nonexistent, when had he given a moment’s serious consideration to the expectations of those he now derisively referred to as the “goyim”? If every project of importance in his former life had been undertaken to prove himself to someone dismayingly strong or subtly menacing, it certainly didn’t look to me to have been to the omnipotent goy. Wasn’t what he described as a revolt against the grotesque contortions of the spirit suffered by the galut, or exiled Jew, more likely an extremely belated rebellion against the idea of manhood imposed upon a dutiful and acquiescent child by a dogmatic, superconventional father? If so, then to overthrow all those long-standing paternal expectations, he had enslaved himself to a powerful Jewish authority far more rigidly subjugating than even the omnipresent Victor Zuckerman could ever have had the heart to be.
Though maybe the key to understanding his pistol was simpler than that. Of all he’d said over lunch, the only word that sounded to me with any real conviction was “Wendy.” It was the second time in the few hours we’d been together that he’d alluded to his dental assistant, and in the same tone of disbelief, outraged that it was she for whom he’d risked his life. Maybe, I thought, he’s doing penance. To be sure, learning Hebrew at an ulpan in the desert hills of Judea constituted a rather novel form of absolution from the sin of adultery, but then hadn’t he also chosen to undergo the most hazardous surgery in order to keep Wendy in his life half an hour a day? Maybe this was no more than the appropriately preposterous denouement to their bizarrely overburdened drama. He seemed now to look upon his little dental assistant as some girl he’d known in Nineveh.
Or was the whole thing a cover-up for the act of abandonment? There’s hardly a husband around anymore who is unable to say to his wife, when the end has come, “I’m afraid this is over, I’ve found true love.” Only for my brother—and our father’s best son—is there no possible way to walk out on a marriage in 1978 other than in the name of Judaism. I thought, “What’s Jewish isn’t coming here and becoming a Jew, Henry. What’s Jewish is thinking that, in order to leave Carol, your only justification can be coming here.” But I didn’t say it, not with him packing that gun.
I was totally obsessed by that gun.
At the crest of the hill outside Agor, Henry pulled the car to the side of the road and we got out to take in the view. In the falling shadows, the little Arab village at the foot of the Jewish settlement looked nothing like so grim and barren as it had a few minutes before when we’d driven down its deserted main street. A desert sunset lent a little picturesqueness even to that cluster of faceless hovels. As for the larger landscape, you could see, particularly in this light, how someone might get the impression that it had been created in only seven days, unlike England, say, whose countryside appeared to be the creation of a God who’d had four or five chances to come back to perfect it and smooth it out, to tame and retame it until it was utterly habitable by every last man and beast. Judea was something that had been left just as it had been made; this could have passed for a piece of the moon to which the Jews had been sadistically exiled by their worst enemies rather than the place they passionately maintained was theirs and no one else’s from time immemorial. What he finds in this landscape, I thought, is a correlative for the sense of himself he would now prefer to effect, the harsh and rugged pioneer with that pistol in his pocket.
Of course he could have been thinking much the same of me, living now where everything is in its place, where the landscape has been cultivated so long and the density of people is so great that nature will never reclaim either again, the ideal setting for a man in search of domestic order and of renewing his life at the midpoint on a satisfying scale. But in this unfinished, other-terrestrial landscape, attesting theatrically at sunset to Timeless Significance, one might well imagine self-renewal on the grandest scale of all, the legendary scale, the scale of mythic heroism.
I was about to say something conciliatory to him, something about the spectacular austerity of this swelling sea of low rocky hills and the transforming influence it must exert on the soul of a newcomer, when Henry announced, “They laugh, the Arabs, because we build up here. In winter we’re exposed to the wind and the cold, in summer to the heat and the sun, while down there they’re protected from the worst of the weather. But,” he said, gesturing toward the south, “whoever controls this hill controls the Negev.” Then he was directing me to look west, to where the hills were now seventeen shades of blue and the
sun was slipping away. “You can shell Jerusalem from here,” Henry told me, while I thought, Wendy, Carol, our father, the kids.
* * *
Lippman’s very looks seemed to be making a point about colliding forces. His wide-set, almond-shaped, slightly protuberant eyes, though a gentle milky blue, proclaimed, unmistakably, STOP; his nose had been smashed at the bridge by something that—more likely, someone who—had tried and failed to stop him. Then there was the leg, mangled during the ’67 war when, as a paratroop commander, he’d lost two-thirds of his company in the big battle to break into Jordanian Jerusalem. (Henry had described to me, in impressive military detail, the logistics of the “Ammunition Hill” assault as we’d driven together back from Hebron.) Because of his injury Lippman walked as though intending with each step to take wing and fly at your head—then the torso slowly sank into the imperfect leg and he looked like a man who was melting. I thought of a circus tent about to cave in after the center pole has been withdrawn. I waited for the thud, but there he was again, advancing. He was a couple of inches under six feet, shorter than both Henry and me, yet his face had the sardonic mobility that comes of peering nobly down upon self-deceiving mankind from the high elevation of Hard Truth. When he’d returned in dusty combat boots and a filthy old field jacket from where the Jewish settlers organized by him had been distributing leaflets in the Bethlehem market, he looked as though he’d been under fire. A deliberate front-line appearance, I thought, except that he wore no battered helmet—or rather, the helmet protecting him was a skullcap, a little knitted kipa riding his hair like a tiny lifeboat. The hair was yet another drama, the kind of hair that your enemy uses to hold up your head after severing it from your carcass—a bunchy cabbage of disarranged plumage that was already a waxy, patriarchal white, though Lippman couldn’t have been much over fifty. To me he looked, from the first moment I saw him, like some majestic Harpo Marx—Harpo as Hannibal, and as I was to discover, hardly mute.
The Sabbath table was prettily set with a lace-trimmed white cloth. It was at the kitchen end of a tiny living room lined to the ceiling with book-crammed shelves. There would be eight of us for dinner—Lippman’s wife (and Henry’s Hebrew teacher), Ronit, and the two Lippman children, a daughter eight and a son fifteen. The boy, already an ace marksman, was doing hundreds of push-ups twice a day in order to qualify for commando training when he entered the army in three years. Visiting from next door was the couple I’d already met up by the shed on my arrival, the metalworker, called Buki, and his wife, Daphna, the woman who’d informed me she was a Jew “by birth.” Lastly, there were the two Zuckermans.
Lippman, having showered, was dressed for the occasion exactly like Henry and the metalworker, in a light, freshly laundered shirt whose lapels were ironed flat and a pair of dark cotton trousers. Ronit and Daphna, who’d been wearing berets earlier in the day, now had their hair bound up in white kerchiefs, and they too had gotten into fresh clothes for the Sabbath evening celebration. The men wore velvet skullcaps, mine presented to me ceremoniously by Lippman as I was stepping into the house.
While we were waiting for the guests from next door, and while Henry played like a kindly uncle with the Lippman kids, Lippman found for me, among his books, the German translations of Dante, Shakespeare, and Cervantes that they’d carried out of Berlin in the mid-thirties when his parents had fled with him to Palestine. Even for an audience of one he held nothing back, as shameless as some legendary courtroom litigator cunning in the use of booming crescendo and insinuating diminuendo to sway the emotions of the jury.
“When I was in a Nazi high school in Germany, could I dream that I would sit one day with my family in my own house in Judea and celebrate with them the Shabbat? Who could have believed such a thing under the Nazis? Jews in Judea? Jews once again in Hebron? They say the same in Tel Aviv today. If Jews dare to go and settle in Judea, the earth will stop rotating on its axis. But has the world stopped rotating on its axis? Has it stopped revolving around the sun because Jews have returned to live in their biblical homeland? Nothing is impossible. All the Jew must decide is what he wants—then he can act and achieve it. He cannot be weary, he cannot be tired, he cannot go around crying, ‘Give the Arab anything, everything, as long as there is no trouble.’ Because the Arab will take what is given and then continue the war, and instead of less trouble there will be more. Hanoch tells me that you were in Tel Aviv. Did you get a chance to talk to all the niceys and the goodies there who want to be humane? Humane! They are embarrassed by the necessities of survival in a jungle. This is a jungle with wolves all around! We have weak people here, soft people here, who like to call their cowardice Jewish morality. Well, only let them practice their Jewish morality and it will lead to their destruction. And afterwards, I can assure you, the world will decide that the Jews brought it on themselves again, are guilty again—responsible for a second Holocaust the way they were for the first. But there will be no more Holocausts. We didn’t come here to make graveyards. We have had enough graveyards. We came here to live, not to die. Who did you talk to in Tel Aviv?”
“A friend. Shuki Elchanan.”
“Our great intellectual journalist. Of course. All for Western consumption, every word this hack utters. Every word he writes is poison. Whatever he writes, it’s with one eye on Paris and the other on New York. You know what my hope is, my dream of dreams? That in this settlement, when we will have the resources, we will create, like Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, a Museum of Jewish Self-Hatred. I’m only afraid we wouldn’t have room for the statues of all the Shuki Elchanans who know only how to condemn the Israelis and to bleed for the Arab. They feel every pain, these people, they feel every pain and then they give in—not only do they want not to win, not only do they prefer to lose, above all they want to lose the right way, like Jews! A Jew who argues the Arab cause! Do you know what the Arab thinks of such people? They think, ‘Is he crazy or is he a traitor? What’s wrong with that man?’ They think it is a sign of treachery, of betrayal—they think, ‘Why should he argue our case, we don’t argue his.’ In Damascus not even a lunatic would dream of entertaining the Jewish position. Islam is not a civilization of doubt like the civilization of the Hellenized Jew. The Jew is always blaming himself for what happens in Cairo. He is blaming himself for what happens in Baghdad. But in Baghdad, believe me, they do not blame themselves for what is happening in Jerusalem. Theirs is not a civilization of doubt—theirs is a civilization of certainty. Islam is not plagued by niceys and goodies who want to be sure they don’t do the wrong thing. Islam wants one thing only: to win, to triumph, to obliterate the cancer of Israel from the body of the Islamic world. Mr. Shuki Elchanan is a man who lives in a Middle East that, most unfortunately, does not exist. Mr. Shuki Elchanan wants us to sign a piece of paper with the Arabs and give it back? No! History and reality will make the future and not pieces of paper! This is the Middle East, these are Arabs—paper is worthless. There is no paper deal to be made with the Arabs. Today in Bethlehem an Arab tells me that he dreams of Jaffa and how one day he will return. The Syrians have convinced him, just hang on, keep throwing stones at the Jewish school buses, and it’ll all be yours someday—you’ll go back to your village near Jaffa, and have everything else besides. That’s what this man was telling me—he will go back, even if it takes him the two thousand years that it took the Jews. And you know what I tell him? I tell him, ‘I respect the Arab who wants Jaffa.’ I tell him, ‘Don’t give up your dream, dream of Jaffa, go ahead; and someday, if you have the power, even if there are a hundred pieces of paper, you will take it from me by force.’ Because he is not so humane, this Arab who throws stones in Bethlehem, as your Mr. Shuki Elchanan who writes his columns in Tel Aviv for Western consumption. The Arab waits until he thinks you’re weak, and then he tears up his paper and attacks. I’m sorry if I disappoint you, but I do not have such nice thoughts as Mr. Shuki Elchanan and all the Hellenized Jews in Tel Aviv with their European ideas. Mr. Shuki Elchanan is afraid to rule
and to be a master. Why? Because he wants the approval of the goy. But I’m not interested in the goy’s approval—I am interested in Jewish survival. And if the price I pay is a bad name, fine. We pay that anyway, and it’s better than the price we usually pay in addition.”
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!