Questioning Return

by Beth Kissileff

  He stood up and allowed her to pass.

  “Thanks,” Wendy said, stepping past the first few people in the row to sit one empty seat from the woman her age.

  Once seated, purple messenger bag on floor, Wendy asked the woman reading the English magazine, “Are you here on a Fulbright?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A Fulbright? Are you in my group?”

  “I’m a journalist. Orly Markovsky. “

  Wendy looked at her. “Orly Markovsky? Camp Kodimoh?” she said, stunned.

  Orly looked at Wendy and replied, “Wendy?” with an upward quizzical lilt in her voice. She added “Wendy Goldberg?”

  “When did we last see each other? At thirteen, so . . . 1983?”

  “You were the only person I liked in that bunk,” Orly said. She paused and added, “This is so weird. What are you doing in Israel now?”

  “I’m writing my dissertation. My fellowship group of graduate students was invited to come tonight so I guessed you might be one of them. The only person in the group I’ve met is my advisor. He’s up front.”

  “I’m a freelance journalist, working on a book. I’m hoping to get a piece about this debate in a hip publication.”

  The participants were assembling on the dais, not seated, but still standing and chatting, even though it was ten minutes after the lecture’s scheduled start time. Finally, a preliminary rustling and settling in emanated through the room, as Emma Fletcher, the chair of the Hebrew University English department, tapped the microphone to get the audience’s attention.

  “We’ll talk after. I’m glad to see you again,” Orly whispered to Wendy across the still empty seat between them.

  On the podium, Fletcher began: “Welcome to the fall 1996 Van Leer Lecture of the Hebrew University English Department. We are pleased to have Phillipe Berger with us from Palo Alto”—she paused for the polite applause—“and Yedidya Hartheimer with us from Jerusalem.” The stronger applause from the hometown crowd necessitated a longer halt. “The format we’ve devised is that each panelist will speak for fifteen minutes. Then, I will pose a few queries addressed to both speakers, and finally I’ll accept questions from the audience. Yes?” She looked around to be sure her audience concurred with her ground rules before continuing.

  “Our honored guest will be first. Phillipe Berger was born in Zurich in 1930. His family sent him on a Kindertransport to England during the war. He stayed on to matriculate at Oxford, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He has taught European literature at the Sorbonne, Oxford, the University of Turin, and Harvard, and is currently Percy Stanford University Professor in Palo Alto. Professor Berger has received every major award for his writing, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Prix Médicis. This is his first visit to Jerusalem and we are honored and pleased to welcome him. Professor Berger.”

  To the sounds of mild applause, Berger rose from his seat and stepped to the lectern. He began: “Our eternal homeland,” and was silent a long moment.

  “The fixity of the text is the only place the Jewish people can truly be at home. The longing for perpetuity can never be found in a fixed physical abode, only on the page, the permanence of the black ink burnished by the whiteness of the space around it, the blank space a flame in which burn for all time the passions that created the writing. The word is where the Jews, the lecteurs de durer, enduring readers, belong. Only in the margins, in the disputations with what is around us, can we truly fulfill our destiny as individuals and as a people. We must remain there, on the margin, never in the center, never allowing ourselves to be trapped in what is, only what is in formation, in becoming. The margin is flexible; it yields,” he continued. Somewhere in this message, Wendy’s mind had begun to drift off for a brief snooze.

  Wendy was roused by the polite applause marking the end of Berger’s presentation. She opened her eyes to hear Fletcher introduce Yedidya Hartheimer. “The writer Yedidya Hartheimer needs no introduction to this audience. We are all aware of his two novels and his penetrating book of journalism, Victims in Power: Children of Survivors Serving in the Territories, which has won many prizes, including the PEN Writers of Conscience Award, the Prix de Rome, and the National Jewish Book Award. We are fortunate to have you with us. Yedidya.”

  “The aron hesafirim hayehudim, the bookshelf of Jewish texts, is ours. We who live here in Eretz Yisrael, speak its language, the language of the Torah, the prophets, daily, as we wander on these eternal hills. Without the land the Bible is . . .” he made a cutting off gesture with his hands, “zeeffft, nothing. This place is for me, eretz hakodesh, the holy land. Not because I am a religious person—I cannot take the privilege to claim that for myself—but because it is ours, the place we have yearned for, these centuries. Now, we are like dreamers and have returned. It is ours, to bring our Jewish ethos into every stone in this country.

  “Moshe Rabbeinu stood benikrat hatzur, in the cusp, the cleft of the stone, to behold God, ahorei, literally, from behind. But those who are intimate with the language know ahorei can also mean belatedly. Moshe sees God belatedly. And that, I am afraid, my friends,” Hartheimer said with an air of prophecy and sadness,” is what will happen to us if we do not realize the miracle. I am purposely using this word ‘miracle’ with religious overtones. In this wonder that is the modern state of Israel, with Jewish sovereignty, we have Jewish culture in all its glory and grossness, from Hebrew hip-hop and Jewish whores and drug dealers, to high art, Hebrew opera, and epic poetry. If we do not understand the treasure of our miraculousness, of our permission to be at the center once again, if we continue to only see ourselves as outsiders, as victims, we are in grave danger. I want us to stand in the stones of this place, not belatedly cognizant of our power like Moshe, but grasping it fully. I want us to take it with each and every stone, to use it to create a place with a fully Jewish ethos, to be the moral creatures we can be, created with the possibility of being divine, b’tzelem Elohim. We can overcome our mortal flaws, even to make peace with our enemies. That is the possibility we have been permitted here in Eretz Yisrael, to fully be at the center.”

  The applause died down and the questions from the audience began. Wendy had not thought that any audience could be more certain of the uncontested significance of each of its utterances than the ones at Princeton. In a moment, she saw this assemblage as able competition. Each question was not a question, but a disquisition on the work of the questioner, and the grave mistake the speaker was making in not paying more attention to its significance, imperiling his ability to draw proper conclusions. After a number of these, Emma Fletcher cut off further discourse and thanked the audience for their attendance.

  Wendy rose and gathered her belongings, and so did Orly. As they waited behind the others in their row to file out, Orly asked Wendy, “Shall we go for coffee? I know a good place near here.”

  They left Mishkenot Sha’ananim and walked up the hill, through Yemin Moshe, out to David HaMelech Street. Orly told her, “I’m taking you to Café Florence. They have amazing Italian food.”

  They walked through the pleasant air of the late summer evening and sat on the patio on the street outside the restaurant, stepping over the ropes separating the restaurant’s seating from the street. They didn’t need to enter the restaurant since they were going to sit outdoors, on the patio. The décor was minimal: an awning overhead, black iron tables and chairs with lattice work, white linen table cloths. A waitress brought them menus. The summer night, with a bit of a breeze, was perfect for sitting at an outdoor café.

  Orly spoke confidently, “The crepes here are amazing, and they make their own gelato. Want to share one?”

  “Sure.”

  “You won’t be sorry,” Orly said as she turned to the waitress who reappeared to take their order. Orly spoke to her in fluent Hebrew.

  When the waitress had departed, Wendy asked, envious, “How do you know Hebrew so well?”

  “My mother is Israeli. She spo
ke Hebrew at home, and I spent some summers here growing up. It’s helped my career—I only write for English language periodicals, but I interview people in Hebrew. They trust me because I speak the language.”

  “I have a question. If you get Israelis, can you explain that Hartheimer? I’m confused. He’s not religious, but I’ve never heard someone speak of the land of Israel with such . . . I don’t know . . . intensity? It seemed religious to me. Am I missing something? And, he looked, so . . . how can I say it? Did you notice something almost translucent about his skin? If he were an insect he’d be missing his carapace, whatever it is that protects him from outsiders. He just seemed . . . those bug eyes, so large and like they can’t create a barrier between him and anything that might hurt him in the outside world. He looks shorn of ordinary protection, you know?”

  Orly picked up her knife and stabbed menacingly at the air, “Yedidya Hartheimer is not protected,” she intoned.

  Wendy laughed, “I’m not explaining myself. I guess . . . I was surprised by what he said.”

  “How so?”

  “I haven’t really heard anyone articulate this notion of Israel and its potential to be miraculous and at the center. I mean . . . on the plane here I bumped into this professor from my department who’s a survivor and religious, and he told me how miraculous it was to be in Israel, but . . . I was surprised to hear an avowedly non-religious person speak of the place in such unabashedly sacred overtones.”

  Orly placed the knife down and turned serious. “Wendy, how many of the people in this country would not be on this earth, just wouldn’t exist, if this place were not a haven? I wasn’t shocked by Hartheimer, but by Berger. A guy who spent his childhood away from his family, who didn’t have a family by the time he was an adult, to say that we shouldn’t have a homeland because Jews don’t belong at the center, but on the margins? To me, and I hope I’m not offending you, that position is completely not intellectually or morally defensible. What did this guy learn from history?”

  Wendy said, “It isn’t about him, personally, it is about where the religion belongs in the world, what kind of space it occupies in the public sphere. Is Judaism a religion for the world, to be on the periphery, or for ourselves to be at the center?” Wendy mused. “I’ve taken classes on the role of religion in public debate, First Amendment issues and how they play out in America versus Europe versus Moslem countries. Each country has its own code of what works for that place. Israelis are, by and large, willing to put up with Sabbath restrictions to create some kind of common shared culture. Americans are freaked out when the Ten Commandments are posted in courtrooms. The French don’t like seeing little Muslim girls wear headscarves in a public school.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I just got here, Orly. I’m not ready to formulate an opinion—very un-Israeli of me, I know. Having said that, if I’d gone through the Holocaust I’d be more Hartheimer than Berger. And Berger . . . his appearance. No one in Israel wears sports jackets, and his whole getup—the Hermes handkerchief in his jacket pocket, the tortoiseshell glasses that he kept taking on and off as he spoke—something about him was too . . . polished? I’m not sure what I’m getting at.”

  “Wendy, the man is legendary as a womanizer, who beguiles and mesmerizes, enthralling the ladies them until they succumb to his charms. He just separated from wife . . . number four? Three? I agree, there is just something . . . unctuous about him.”

  Wendy smiled. “There was this guy at Princeton who was a grad student in literature. He kept propositioning my friend Leora. He would tell her things he wanted to do with her, like “cunnilingus” in eight languages. He confessed to another friend that he got all the words from an article by Phillipe Berger, which bragged about how he seduced women in different languages. That’s how I know his name.” Wendy guffawed, loudly and unabashedly, proud of herself for recalling the source of her knowledge of Berger’s name.

  “Glad to know tuition dollars are being put to such good use, multilingual seduction. I knew a PhD had some practical value.”

  “Yep.” Wendy looked at Orly, more thoughtful. “Can we reduce this Diaspora/Israel thing to Berger’s need to prove himself desirable to as many women in as many places as possible, and Hartheimer’s apparent monogamy?”

  Orly looked up as the waitress approached with their chocolate crepe with dollops of both cinnamon and espresso gelato on top and an extra plate. She thanked the server in Hebrew and said to Wendy, “B’tayavon.” Wendy gave her a look of incomprehension and Orly translated, “With gusto, good appetite. Ta’avah is, literally, passion, so when you say ‘eat with good appetite’ you are saying ‘eat with passion.’ To passion.”

  Wendy raised her fork to dig in. “To passion,” she said and bit into the delicious combination of hot sweet chocolate and cold bitter espresso gelato. “Ohhhh,” she moaned, “you were so right. This is . . . superb.” She dove her fork back for more, smiling at her friend.

  Orly smiled back, chocolate sauce dribbling lazily from her chin. “From the Holocaust to the sex life of Phillipe Berger. This is good. I need friends who can have meaningful conversation and also talk about sex, you know?”

  Wendy laughed. “We’re going to be good friends this year.”

  Orly responded, “I’d like that. I don’t have many friends who are serious about their careers. My boyfriend, Nir, he’s fun to be with, he’s in a band, he works in computers during the day, but he doesn’t really understand when I have a deadline and can’t go out. Or my passion for my work; he just says I work too hard, wants me to party more.”

  Wendy sighed. “I have the opposite problem. This guy in graduate school, Matt, we’re compatible intellectually, he’s good-looking, we get along. I like to talk to him, but there’s just something . . . not quite there. He doesn’t excite me. We keep saying if we’re both single at thirty we’ll get together.”

  “How unromantic,” Orly sympathized.

  “Exactly.” Wendy carefully swooped up a piece of crepe draped with chocolate and swathed with the bitter espresso ice cream, now puddling as it melted. “Maybe I need to improve my Hebrew, try seduction in different languages. My chances to land a guy will go up statistically if there are more guys to cast my potential net for.”

  “Phillipe would be proud—why don’t you write him a fan letter and tell him what you learned from his article.”

  Wendy smirked.

  “No, seriously, I had a professor in journalism school who made it the capstone of our class to write fan letters to writers we admired. People appreciate them, and mostly write back.”

  Wendy wiped her mouth with her napkin and intoned, “I’ll pass on that assignment, thanks, Professor Markovsky. Currently, I’m limited to English. That’s why my dissertation is exclusively on Americans.”

  “What’s it about? You haven’t told me.”

  “American baalei teshuvah in Jerusalem. How they tell their stories.”

  “They’re nuts. What else can you say?”

  “For starters, why? Why of all the possible nutty paths there are do they choose to do this, not radical veganism? Or Buddhist asceticism?”

  “Big deal. There are a variety of ways to be a nut! As we say in journalism school, where’s the story here?”

  Wendy put her fork down and said, “American kids, from American families, most of them in the US for a few generations. Now, they are taking on this different identity, Jewish in a way no one in their family has been in over a century. Why? What does it say about the role of religion in America? Dormant for a few generations and then, voila, coming to the fore. Does the behavior of baalei teshuvah compare to other American religious groups or is it sui generis?”

  Orly chewed thoughtfully, and said calmly, “Wendy, I’m not your professor. You don’t have to use jargon or situate your work within the field as a whole. Just tell me why you’re doing it, as a friend.”

  Wendy put down her utensils and laid her palms flat on the table, splaying her
fingers. “My best friend growing up, Nina, had an older sister, Deb, now Devorah, who became religious when we were in high school. It was weirdly fascinating, how this person who’d been a lifeguard and competitive swimmer started wearing these long skirts and shirts, and looking indistinguishable from other women dressed that way. I wanted to know, had she really changed? Was she different, or was it all in the externals, just an overlay?”

  “Alright, what was it?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t just ask her. Now I’m asking a whole population of people like her. It started with my interest in whether someone truly changes or whether certain core parts of the personality are the same. I also wanted to do a Jewish dissertation in American religion. I wrote my undergrad senior thesis on Buddhists in America, and how the process of immigration changes religious practices. That semester, my grandfather died, and I felt this urge to . . . connect? I guess that’s it: grow closer to my own family, my own past. Make sense?”

  “Totally. I was just curious.”

  “No problem. What got you into journalism?”

  “I’ve always liked to write, and I’m naturally nosy. I love to ask brash questions and get in a person’s face, and figure out how to unsettle them if I sense they won’t tell the truth otherwise. I wrote for the newspapers in high school and college, and decided J-school was a natural fit.”

  “Trying to unsettle people is one of the things I like about my project. I’m trying to get them to tell their stories to see where they are uncertain, what kinds of hesitations creep in even while they are embracing this religious path.”

  “The thing is you shouldn’t unsettle them too much, just enough to get what you need. One of the most important things is bonding with your subjects, and knowing how to write with both objectivity and compassion. It’s a hard balance to strike, but good writing demands both, in different measures at different times. If you want advice on journalistic interviewing techniques, I’ll be happy to tutor you.”