by Roger Cohen
The situation had not yet hardened; mingling was possible in the absence of walls or barriers or fences. On weekends, the family might go on a trip to Jericho or Ramallah and eat hummus and lamb so tender you could cut it with a spoon. Rena loved these outings. She was an easy child, calm and friendly, good in school if not particularly scholarly, conscientious and warm, gentler and quieter than Yaakov, whose frustrations with language could lead to outbursts. Her quietness was not sadness, at most heaviness. Pauline thought of her as “my no-problem child.”
The family lived in a small circle of friends of mainly South African Jewish descent. All English-speaking, they would gather for Shabbat. Pauline would light the candles, Meyer would say Kiddush, and someone would remind the children, “More than Israel keeping the Sabbath, it is the Sabbath that keeps Israel.”
The family was traditional rather than religious. They did not keep kosher. They went to shul on High Holidays only. The children attended a conservative school where they said prayers every morning. That was the extent of religious observance. For Meyer, the important thing was to give them a strong sense of Jewish identity and of his family’s Zionist heritage. Identity, he liked to say, is not forged through parental passivity.
Among the family friends were people who had participated with him in the South African branch of Betar, the right-wing Revisionist Jewish youth movement founded in Latvia in 1923 by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who a decade later offered blunt advice to Jews: “It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot.” Meyer, as a medical student in Cape Town, had been the camp doctor at Betar gatherings. It was natural that he would become a supporter of Likud. The party’s leader, Menachem Begin, had himself been a Betar militant in Poland before becoming the leader of the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary group that terrorized the British and embodied Jabotinsky’s view that the key to attainment of a Jewish state lay in force and readiness to use it. Meyer’s father had been a personal friend of Begin, who visited the family in the early 1950s when they were living in Bulawayo. The antisocialist platform of Likud appealed to him.
At election time, family tensions rose. Meyer was delighted by Begin’s election as prime minister in 1977 at the head of a Likud-led government that ended the dominance by Mapai and the left since Israel’s foundation.
“This is the day Israel became a democracy,” he told Pauline. “No nation is a democracy until there is an alternation of power.”
She retorted, “No nation can remain a democracy when it rules over people under occupation who do not have a vote—and Likud will do nothing to change that.”
“Occupation is a loaded word.”
“It is an accurate word.”
“We fought for that land and won it.”
“But it’s not ours,” Pauline said. “Another people live there.”
“If we’d thought like that, there would never have been an Israel.” They argued a lot, and not just about politics. A third child, whom I will call Yonatan—curly-haired, doe-eyed Yonatan—was born in 1978. With three young children, pressure on Pauline mounted. Meyer was gone much of the time at the hospital or on overseas trips, and when he was home, it often seemed to her, he specialized in silence. They would go to a movie, and when they emerged, he said nothing, and she would ask: Well, did you think anything of it? Anything at all you might care to pass along? He was a black hole.
Meyer felt he was at his best when dealing with an exact, identifiable reality, but Pauline’s moods remained an enigma. Their intensity overwhelmed him. Then the furies were gone, tropical storms that had passed through. He flapped around after them, like a sail when the wind drops.
She knew he expected an apology after their fights. He had to be vindicated. Remoteness was his fortress. He even called himself the Rock of Gibraltar! Silence is a master from Gibraltar. Pauline sometimes laughed at her fate. It was not that she wanted him to gossip, but he might lighten up, crack a joke, or even discover his inner frivolity. Was the sum of life’s achievements really the ability never to raise one’s voice?
Her feelings for him had always involved a thought process, which in itself said something. Did she love him? she wondered. In my family “love” was not a word thrown around. It had to be earned even when it was most craved.
Still, Pauline believed they should preserve their marriage. The children were beautiful. Divorce was always a disaster. Her parents had stuck it out through years of misunderstanding and resentment. Her mother, who was not physically affectionate, found the intimacy absent in her marriage with her bridge partner, a dashing polyglot. A few people muttered at the Houghton Golf Club; otherwise nobody seemed to notice. Time did not cure things but it did even them out. Meyer, who had loved Pauline with a passion but was not good at expressing feelings, burrowed deeper into his frustration, convinced that love was an abstraction to her, something she could not communicate with warmth or consistency, at least to him.
Meyer had been trained as a gastroenterologist but opted to stay in general medicine, before gradually migrating toward behavioral medicine. He specialized in stress and suffering. It was the large gray area between psychiatry and medicine that intrigued him. He called himself a “lumper,” a doctor who enjoyed bringing disparate threads together. As a physician, he saw a lot of psychosomatic problems he felt psychiatrists were not giving him the tools to deal with. He knew, for example, that there was no such thing as recurrent or chronic pain without a psychological element. He began to work on theories of stress. Were the issues that threw somebody into stress as varied as each individual personality, or were there commonalities? He concluded that it is, above all, loss of control that defines stress. As he liked to put it, “There is a one-to-one relationship between feelings of control and the feelings of self-confidence an individual has.”
When Rena was seven, a French psychiatrist friend came to visit Meyer in his office at Hadassah hospital. He had pinned up a couple of Rena’s pictures. One was of a sparkling blue sky, sun, and butterflies. The other caught the psychiatrist’s eye.
“Is your daughter depressed?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“Look at that picture! All that black paint. In my experience this usually means depression.”
“My daughter could not be sweeter or sunnier.”
“Are you sure?”
Meyer shrugged off the conversation. But he would return to it many times and wonder—as any parent who survives a child must—what else he might have done.
That was about the time Pauline fell ill, in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the massacre by a rightist Christian militia of at least eight hundred civilians in two Palestinian camps. The slaughter at Sabra and Shatila, carried out with Israeli forces surrounding the camps and illuminating their narrow alleys with flares, would lead to the resignation of Ariel Sharon, then the defense minister.
Pauline was the sickest person Meyer ever saw recover. He had been convinced that it was the end, that the children were about to lose their mother. The illness began with a severe pain in her neck. By the time she was admitted to hospital, she was critically ill with an unbearable pain deep in her skull, an aggressive streptococcal infection. She went straight into intensive care. Meyer sat at her bedside. She was unconscious most of the time. Toxins had overcome her. In desperation, he suggested a total blood exchange. This was still an unusual treatment in infectious diseases. Meyer appealed to the head hematologist, who agreed it was worth the risk.
New plasma saved Pauline’s life. She was in the hospital for months, enduring several major operations to treat the damage resulting from deep abscesses. Friends rallied to help Meyer with the children. Israel is good at support in a crisis. The children’s visits to Pauline were traumatic. Her hospital room was down the corridor from a burn unit, where soldiers from the war in Lebanon were being treated. Terrible screams would issue from the ward as wounds were cleaned and dressed.
“It would probably have been better if we had never heard those screams,” Yaakov tells me. “Mom being sick was bad enough.”
The screams were intruders. Lives in Israel, however placid on the surface, cannot be cocooned from the “conflict.” The Jewish national home is ever more comfortable, to the point where it is easy to forget that the foundations are uncertain. A window slams on a bus. A sleeping IDF soldier awakens with a start clutching his rifle, terror etched on his face, a vivid portrait of the hair-trigger, lock-and-load Israeli condition. A seven-year-old girl visiting her mother in hospital is traumatized by the sound of screaming.
On Rena’s eighth birthday, her parents were at the hospital. A close family friend took her to the Israel Museum to see the movie The Red Balloon. She watched transfixed as the little boy hero, having lost his beloved red balloon to thugs, is lifted over the rooftops of Paris by a host of multicolored balloons that come to console him and carry him away over the zinc rooftops into a magical pure blue sky.
Rena always dreamed of a simpler, more harmonious life, an end to the “situation.” Like my mother, she wanted things to be just right. In her journal she wrote:
It is all so hard, it’s so hard. It’s all so hard, it’s so hard. I dream my dream. I’m sane, I’m insane. What is sacred? What embodies the soul? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? Love.
CHAPTER 11
Death in the Holy Land
My cousin Yaakov Levin, a tall man with the soulful Michel eyes, lives in a small apartment on Zweifel Street in Tel Aviv. Zweifel means “doubt” in German. It is a quiet area of small houses and lush gardens far from the hum of the city center. A few years ago he and his wife, Maya, broke up. Yaakov lives alone, with weekly visits from his two children. He likes his wine—a taste developed during a year spent in France earning a business degree—and enjoys jazz.
One evening, his son and daughter asleep in their bunk bed, we sip an acceptable new Israeli cru, nibble more-than-acceptable cheese, and tell family stories. A scented breeze carries the wistful sounds of Yusef Lateef, an American jazz musician who, when he converted to Islam, changed his name. The great-grandchildren of the South African patriarch Isaac Michel, who was rich as Bavaria and sent money to Israel soon after its birth in 1948, we have met at last in the restless, wired city founded by Jews in Palestine just over a century ago.
Yaakov hands me something he wrote about his sister, Rena, who changed her name to Renata:
It has been a dark year without you, a year of un-living you. Birthdays, holidays and just plain old days, time slowly tearing the fabric of your life away. Memories of us all laughing our heads off around a Friday night table, with your sweet gentle giggle lingering in the air like a fading dream. I dreamt Maya and I gave birth to a baby girl. I am alone walking empty street drinking myself numb. I stop by a wall a man was painting portraits on. Every day he had made a different portrait. Returning home I find myself locking the front door in fear. The baby, the portraits, are you, my memories of you or me un-living you, Rena. If only I could hug the baby girl in my arms. If only I could stop the memories, the portraits from changing, from fading.
Yaakov calls the times when he is overwhelmed by memory “Rena moments.” I am reminded of lines of W. G. Sebald: “Writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me.… Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life.”
“When did you first notice Rena’s depression?” I ask.
“Well, it’s hard to say. I was her outspoken older brother, and I did not give her a lot of space, and at times I thought maybe she was a little sad. But around the time of the divorce, I guess something shifted.”
“What shifted?”
“Divorce is insoluble to a child. There are more variables than you have equations.”
Yaakov was eighteen at the time of Meyer and Pauline’s divorce and away in the army. Rena was sixteen and took the brunt of it. She was very close to her father. She would listen to Pauline sobbing behind closed doors. Curly-haired Yonatan was thirteen.
“What happened?” I ask.
“It was pretty simple in the end. Dad didn’t come home. Explanations and heart-to-hearts were not really his thing at the time.”
It was a decision Meyer had been mulling for several years. In 1987 he had gone with Pauline and the children to Los Angeles for a one-year sabbatical at UCLA. He had begun to grasp the downside of his stability. Perhaps it prevented him from seeing and feeling things of which he should have been aware. He sought psychiatric help. At a group therapy session he talked for three minutes about his life. That was enough. A woman said, “Boy, you sound depressed.” Meyer understood for the first time that his steady demeanor was a survival mechanism.
The patterns established by couples can be as destructive and immovable as the stereotypes of two nations at war. He and Pauline had struggled with incomprehension for so long, they no longer even tried to identify what it was they were missing about each other. After Los Angeles, he put off the moment only for the sake of the children. Finally, in 1991, while at a conference in the Washington area, he called Pauline to say he would not be returning. (The family had moved by now to a larger home in the Ramot area of Jerusalem.)
Pauline had been unhappy with Meyer for a long time, but that, she had always felt, was part of the marital condition. Marriage was a contract, an arrangement that bridled human instinct for the sake of societal stability. Love was all of life, yet it could not be more than a fleeting escape from self. In bridge, her mother’s consolation in marital misery, you played even a bad hand to the very end.
Yaakov delivered a stark verdict: “You fucked up, Dad.” Rena did not show her anger. She was quieter than usual. When she met with a cousin visiting from Denver, she cried inconsolably before gathering her strength to tell him: “I just want them both to be happy. It is time each of them found their happiness.” That was Rena, the peacemaker.
In 1991 Yaakov was spending most of his time in the West Bank. He had wanted to do his military service as a pilot and had gone through a battery of tests for admission to the air force. He passed every exam, but just before his service was to begin, he suffered a tiny puncture of a lung. Instead of joining an elite unit, he was drafted into the civil administration in Hebron, overseeing the lives of Palestinians under occupation. It was a painful experience.
“You are put in an impossible situation,” he says. “You realize the way things are run—you see the occupation up close. You are treating families in a way you would not want your own family to be treated. It is as simple as that. There’s this sense of injustice. You have control of their lives—births, deaths, taxes, property, movement, everything. I remember going into Palestinian homes in the middle of the night to arrest people, the screams and the chaos. I found it hard to take.”
He would travel by bus every morning from the base to his office, through the central market, a sea of hostile Palestinian faces. He could never get used to it. The First Intifada was dying down, but not its impact on Israeli and Palestinian alike. Once he saw a Jewish boy, no more than ten years old, running through the maze of Arab market stalls and wondered if the child felt his fear. In sweaty palms he clutched his rifle to his thumping heart.
The army had placed Yaakov at the epicenter of the conflict. Hebron, revered by Jews and Muslims alike, is a sacred battleground where, as in Jerusalem, interwoven religious passions and a long trail of violence banish reason. If history enlightens, it is equally true that too much history can blind.
Abraham is buried in Hebron alongside his wife, Sarah. He is the first Patriarch to the Jews; a prophet called Ibrahim and a model for mankind to Muslims; and a forefather who battled idolatry for all three ancient monotheistic religions. To the eight thousand Jewish settlers in the town itself and in the adjacent settlement of Kiryat Arba, this is the first Jewish c
ity in the heart of the biblical hills of Judea and Samaria. How, they ask, in such a place, can they be “occupiers”? To the Palestinian majority, who number some 175,000, this is their centuries-old home under an Israeli military occupation dedicated to the protection of a small number of Jewish fanatics.
The town, a commercial center, snakes over hills. The situation has not improved since my cousin ended his service in 1994. In some parts, the homes of Palestinians and Israeli settlers are perhaps sixty feet apart. Yet there is no contact between them. Bullet holes in the walls of their respective homes are shown off to prove the irremediable violence of the other. The past is pored over, an immense repository of spilled blood that justifies more bloodletting. The features of feared neighbors are blotted out.
Slaughter is the hook on which each side hitches its identity: the killing of twelve Israelis by Palestinian snipers in 2002 as settlers returned from Friday-night prayers; the 1994 murder of twenty-nine Muslims at prayer by Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-raised doctor from Kiryat Arba; the killing, also on the Sabbath, of six Jews in 1980; the massacre of dozens of Hebron Jews by Arab residents in 1929, their bodies mutilated, limbs hacked off, faces smudged by blows. Ever backward the cycle goes, all the way to Abraham’s decision, several thousand years ago, to acquire a cave here for his family’s burial.
Violence turns most intense when inflicted on one’s likeness. The mirror image must be bludgeoned out. Today in Hebron, the descendants of Abraham and the descendants of Ibrahim—the same man—are locked in hatred. Some roads are known as tzir sterili, or “sterile roads,” by the Israel Defense Forces, because no Palestinian is allowed to travel on them whether in a car or on foot. Jews and Arabs enter Abraham’s tomb through separate entrances. Religion becomes a claim to real estate. The conflict’s creeping diktat is separation. The mingling in the wadi of Yaakov’s childhood has drained away. In the end, the question before the two peoples is whether winning an argument is worth more than a child’s life. Competitive victimhood produces nothing. When the dead hold sway over the living, the future is blotted out. Words like destiny and divine right brook no contradiction. The Holy Land needs prosaic words.