Zakh handed her the application form and told her, “You need to fill this out, get a transcript from your university, three letters of recommendation, one of which will be from me, and submit an essay about your project.”
She took the application and told him, “If I stayed here, I could check in with my subjects if I needed to—it might be easier to write.”
“Apply. Give yourself the option of staying another year,” Zakh told her smiling.
Wendy walked out of Zakh’s building onto Kikar Magnes in a daze. How would it be to stay in Israel? She had been worrying about how being far from her research subjects could pose problems. What would she do if she needed more information from her subjects as she was writing everything up? What if she couldn’t locate the person? Would she have to throw data and interviews out, hours of work gone because she was thousands of miles away from her fieldwork site?
The more pressing anxiety was harder to face. Though she had been denying and denying, Wendy hadn’t gotten far enough in her writing. Okay, she thought, to be honest with myself. I haven’t started the writing. I’m finishing the literature review. It would be good for me to stay here to write, especially if I have fewer teaching responsibilities than I would in Princeton.
Standing outside Zakh’s building, she looked across the street at the patch of green in the center of a square, the protected enclave of Kikar Magnes, a park in a populous city. The difference between the elitism of New York’s Gramercy Park, and the still socialist and populist inclined Jerusalem’s Magnes Square was that there was no locked gate here to keep the green sward exclusively for eligible residents. The verdant expanse was available to anyone who knew it was there.
In Zakh’s Rehavia neighborhood, elegant streets were named for grammarians of the Hebrew language. The language these grammarians articulated and defined with precision was entirely attuned with the exactitude of Rehavia’s pristine buildings and well kept walkways. The scholars whose names were on these streets had figured out the mysteries of the entire spectrum of expression in three simple letters, the shoresh, the root, at the heart of the Hebrew word. They knew of the possibility of a continuum of meaning in a permutation of letters, a reconfiguration of vowels. Wendy loved the mysteriousness of the language, the complexity of meaning a mere vowel change could make. A different kind of elegance in the alphabet, she thought as she meandered up vov-shaped Alfasi Street. When Alfasi met Radak, becoming Ibn Ezra, she saw a pay phone next to the makolet, the allpurpose grocery store.
The makolet, neighborhood grocery, exemplified a uniquely Israeli business model. The proprietors knew the name and birthplace of every customer who came in; all comers had accounts. A six-year-old could go in, get what her mother or father needed, and leave without money changing hands. The bill would be settled later, accounts kept in a handwritten notebook. A makolet had pretty much anything one might need: newspapers, fresh pita, breads, milk in the Israeli sackiot (plastic bag containers), candy, yogurt, canned goods, coffee and tea, spices, frozen items. In the earlier times when few Israelis had cars, it was possible to shop exclusively at a makolet, supplemented by trips to an open air market or a fruit and vegetable store. There was a closeness in neighborhoods here, different from America where people needed to drive everywhere, which created a physical and emotional distance. A makolet was more fun to be in than an impersonal supermarket. Wendy liked that the proprietor could reach anything with a stick with a gripper handle that reached to the top shelf. It was such a contrast with the immense and impersonal American supermarket where no employee was ever able to determine the location of a specific item or if it might even be stocked.
A pay phone was stationed next to a jumble of mops, buckets, smartutim—Wendy had learned the word for rags—and cleaning supplies piled outside the makolet to help customers prepare for upcoming Passover cleaning. It was only a few steps from the bus stop. She could make a call and hang up to catch her bus when she spotted it arriving.
Who to call? She didn’t want to call others in her Fulbright group, because she didn’t know who Zakh had approached and who he had not. It could be awkward if she talked to someone who wanted to stay but hadn’t been approached. Orly would just say something crude, like you’ve gotten laid more here than in Princeton. Stay, and may your good fortune continue.
Uri, she thought. I’ll call him; he’ll have a level-headed attitude about this.” She opened her bag and took out an asimon, a phone token, and looked up his number in her planner since she hadn’t memorized it yet.
She dialed. She wasn’t sure he’d be in, but figured it was worth a chance. Maybe he was on a night shift today and hadn’t yet left his apartment? After a number of rings, when Wendy was just asking herself whether she could get her phone token back or not if she hung up since there had been so many rings, she heard, “Hullo?”
“Uri?”
“Speaking.”
“Hi . . . ah . . . Wendy,” she said rather tentatively.
“Wendy! I’m on my way out in a jiffy; I’m on call tonight,” he added with his adorable accent.
“I want some advice.”
“Brilliant. Go.”
“I’ve just been talking with Avner Zakh, my faculty advisor here. He wants me to apply for a Lady Touro Society fellowship for next year but I don’t know what to do.”
He responded in his best doctor voice, “What do you want to do?”
“Apply. I’d be able to finish my dissertation, with access to my subjects and less teaching than in Princeton. But being away another year . . . I don’t know. My parents and grandmother wouldn’t be too happy.”
“Sounds like something else bothering you.”
“Even over the phone you’re good, Uri. Zakh wants me to apply because the people who were awarded the fellowship turned it down.”
“Okay, you have a chance at this because someone else doesn’t want it. So what?”
“They’re turning it down because of the matzav. Basically, Sam Handelman and Benjamin Margolis’s deaths.”
“You didn’t plant the bomb that killed them. Why do you feel guilty?”
“It feels . . . false. Kind of . . . I’m . . . feeding on someone else’s corpse. It’s not fair that I benefit from the situation and from their deaths.”
There was silence for a few moments. “You don’t know yet whether you’ll benefit. It doesn’t hurt to apply.”
“Yeah.” Wendy didn’t know how to bring up the next topic. But she needed to. “What are you doing next year? Do you stay here or go back to England?”
“I’m here till December. Then, I take my boards in England, finish up there. After that, unclear. I might try to stay here—depends . . .”
She blurted out, “That’s motivation for making me want to stay.”
“No.” He paused. “I’m gla-ad”—his accent lengthened the vowel—“you want to stay, but we haven’t known each other long.”
Shit, I messed up. I’m pressuring him; guys hate that, she realized. Wendy backtracked, “No, no, I just meant . . . it will be nice to be in the same country you are. But . . . I’ll apply because of my career, not my relationship. We don’t know what will happen.” She didn’t want to say “us”; it would be too intimate at this point. She couldn’t even put a label on what existed between them. This was it, the dreaded relationship talk. Each party thinking this amorphous thing, a relationship, should be configured differently. The endlessly labyrinthine conversation of, if we take one direction it is “this,” another, it is “that”; one can never pin the thing down to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. This was not the time to morph the relationship into a recognizable mission statement like, “We’re seeing each other,” or “We’re dating,” or “We are lovers.”
Wendy looked at the buckets and mops of the makolet. She tried to visualize what the scene in front of Uri was—they’d never been to each other’s apartments.
“It would be great if you and I were in the same country a few months lo
nger,” he reassured her. “I just don’t want to think you’d be doing this for me. Apply because it’s right for your project.”
“Right. Thanks for the advice.”
“Hey, I’m almost a shrink. Good luck with the application. See you, motzei Shabbes, okay?” Her murmur of assent was followed with the clink of the phone announcing the finality of the discussion.
I guess I didn’t screw it up too badly because he still wants to see me Saturday. Remember, no hint of pressure. I’m not even sure how much I like him.
I like him, she imagined herself telling Orly. He’s reassuring. From when I first met him, nervous about being at the Hideckels’, he was a calming presence. He knows what questions to ask, to elicit the response the person needs. I love the soothing sound of his voice, knowing I’m communicating with him.
That night, in her apartment on Rehov Mishael, Wendy decided to take a preliminary look at the Lady Touro application Zakh had given her. She had less than three weeks to complete it, so her usual procrastination mode needed to be temporarily placed on hold. She sat at the desk she’d purchased on Meah Shearim the first week she’d arrived, because someone in her ulpan had said that was the easiest place to buy cheap used furniture. The cab she had to take home with the desk strapped to the top cost her more than the desk itself. She laughed at the memory. She started her “beginning to write” ritual, putting a gorgeously patterned scarf around her neck so she’d feel dashing and sophisticated, an interesting person capable of writing work that people would want to read. She’d started with the scarves, ever changing in their colors and patterns, in college, after the professor of her anthropology seminar confessed to the class that she wore red cowboy boots while writing the book that got her tenure because they made her feel tough and empowered. Wendy decided then that she would similarly find a costume to help her get a jump on her writing, put her in the right frame of mind. She lay the application face up on the desk with a blank yellow legal pad next to it, and took out a bar of chocolate to nibble as she worked, rewarding herself for acting so contrary to her usual inclination to procrastinate. She wasn’t a pathological procrastinator, waiting to do something until it was impossible to accomplish, but she didn’t like to work on projects where there was a great deal at stake—like her whole career—until she was sure how to do them. If she stayed here or went back, it would make her life totally different. This application counted. But somehow, she wasn’t anxious—maybe because the present task seemed so much less fraught than writing her dissertation.
This application was something she could do easily without making herself crazy about how much hinged on how good it was. She would figure out what had to be done, make a list, and do it. Make outlines, write the essays, show them to one or two friends for critique. Finish it. I can do this, she told herself, breathing out. It isn’t so complicated. I just hate being judged—what if the committee finds my project is stupid and a waste of time? Her rational self knew her concern was irrelevant; she had the Fulbright, and a teaching fellowship to go back to at Princeton.
She didn’t need this Lady Touro. That knowledge of its essential superfluousness to her life made the application easier to work on—maybe she needed to do that with her dissertation too. She could just tell herself, This is a draft. My professors will read and critique it, and help me get it to where it should be. That is their job, to tell me what is missing, to help me find the right sources and precedents, and to make sure it passes muster on all levels. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the start. I need to give myself permission to make mistakes, and accept that and just write the thing.
She unwrapped the Swiss chocolate bar, put a small piece on her tongue, and made a note on the legal pad to e-mail Connie, the religion department secretary, for a transcript, and her advisers, Cliff Conrad and Mark Sokoloff, for recommendations. All the usual information was required: name, date and place of birth, educational history, curriculum vitae, two-page research proposal. She would revise the templates from her Fulbright application for this. No sweat. After these simple questions was a three-part essay, each response to be no more than 1500 words.
I. How do the particulars of this place shape your research?
II. Why must you do it here?
III. How do you feel about spending a year in the land of Israel?
Wendy wished she knew more about the role of these essays. Is this an academic fellowship or a way of convincing people to live in Israel? Or of getting people who like being here to go back to the States and say how great it is? What if I want to say something critical? Like, I enjoy living here but don’t understand why there is an entire people that feels itself so oppressed that individuals are willing to blow themselves up on buses? Or why, if this is a modern country and there is supposed to be universal service in the army, the ultra-Orthodox don’t serve when they benefit from state services?
She began her list by brainstorming:
I. Closer connection to lives of my subjects. Being in Israel, one lives a Jewish life, religious or not. I can continue to learn how holidays are celebrated, the rhythm of a week organized about the Sabbath rather than the weekend. Israel is more of a communal society than an individual one.
Able to keep in touch with subjects.
II. Sense of history. By virtue of being in Israel, each person here has come to reclaim something, make something that has not been in their life or their family’s life once again part of what they are.
Importance of place—subjects feel a profound connection here—I seem to understand it more, the longer I am here. Yet I can still give critique of it as an outsider. (I do worry what will happen as it all becomes more familiar to me. And Uri? What is his role?)
III. Feeling of vitality in Jewish life—Judaism isn’t confined to a synagogue for a few hours a week. It permeates all of life—there are Hebrew cows. The food, language, and rhythms of time are Jewish. It is such an expansive mode of being, not just using Yiddish words, or eating bagels, or laughing at Borsht Belt humor. Being here connects one to something larger in a way that can’t happen in America. Jews from all over the world can all be on the same public bus, speaking Amharic, Yiddish, French, Spanish, German, English, infusing an ordinary activity with a biblical sense of ingathering of exiles.
Then she wrote out cons.
Con: If I stayed another year, I’d still miss my cat. What if my advisors can’t write good recommendations because I haven’t been around enough? Will staying make me lose out on a career? If I delay going on the job market till the year I get back, what if all the good jobs are open next year and there aren’t any the year after? What if no departments are interested in me because they think I’ve “gone native” by being here so long? What if I’m still not done after two years here????
She began to write in her journal: It would be great to be here longer. The place gives me something. I love to eat felafel, to smell the freshly baked challah scent coming from bakeries on Fridays and see people walking around with bouquets of flowers to bring to one another to greet the Sabbath. The quiet that pervades the neighborhood when I wake up Saturday morning to silence, no buses or cars. I love the simplicity of it, the peace I feel hearing birds singing, not car alarms blaring. Being a Jew is so ordinary here. I like the sounds of children racing as they wander freely in the streets and take public buses everywhere. I like the smell of pita. I like seeing names of biblical and historical figures marking the streets.
But really I need to discuss why this is important to my project. Do I need to have these feelings and experiences in order to accomplish my goals? I need to gather some ideas about how being here will help me understand American Jews who become more religious.
I am studying people who have sought dramatic change in their lives. Having had to undergo and adjust to change this year, being an American Jew who is living in Israel, helps me understand why and how they undergo their changes. What are they gaining—closeness, community, ease of being normal as a religious
Jew not some kind of oddity, sense of surety that they are doing God’s will? What they may be giving up—careers, talents in the arts, graduate school, the ability to make a secure living?
Wendy put her pen down and looked up at the poster on the wall beside her desk. It was the poster announcing the lecture her advisor, Cliff Conrad, gave when he was promoted to Elias Brill Professor of Religion. There were two photos of him. One was with Oprah when she had him on TV to discuss his work with modern religion and its Puritan roots, the other of him at the head of a seminar table in 1879 Hall, teaching graduate students. Wendy admired Conrad, with his large audience, bringing scholarly ideas to a vast number of people in an interesting and relevant way. That was Wendy’s goal in her scholarly work too.
Below Conrad was a picture of the late anthropologist and thinker Elias Brill. Brill had been a friend of Freud’s in Vienna and fled to Princeton in the thirties, having already done the groundbreaking fieldwork in Eastern Mauritania that created his reputation. He’d had fierce disagreements with Franz Boas and Claude Levi-Strauss, but always asserted the primacy of the individual believer even within a tribal society. Brill had found that, though the tribal elders held to a certain system of belief, others in the society were less rigid in their ideology, even professing unbelief in private conversations with him, though continuing to publicly uphold tribal values. The dissonance between the formal picture of Brill in his study writing in longhand, surrounded by totemic artifacts and books, and Conrad on the set of the talk show couldn’t be greater.
Now, she looked at the poster and saw transformation, the movement from Austrian Jew and rabbi’s son to scholar of an African land, and then again to American éminence grise. Conrad, his heir, had undergone shifts too: son of Midwestern greengrocers, to scholar of New England Puritans, to public intellectual and individual who could communicate intelligent ideas broadly on television.
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