Fields of Exile

by Nora Gold

  Praise for Nora Gold’s “Marrow”:

  “Bravo!”

  — Alice Munro, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature

  Advance Praise for Fields of Exile:

  “An engrossing read.… A revealing and searing portrayal of moral courage and commitment amidst hypocrisy and betrayal … seen through a cross-cultural looking-glass.”

  — Irwin Cotler, Emeritus Professor of Law, McGill University

  “Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile is a gripping tale. It is also a novel of ideas in the tradition of George Eliot, Doris Lessing, and Marge Piercy, but one that is filled with real characters, a literary sensibility, and a powerful example of the near-fatal consequences of anti-Israel aggression. The heroine Judith’s vulnerability, dreaminess, erotic imagination, and knowledge of Jewish traditions in both kitchen and yeshiva drew me close and kept me there, and I could not put this book down. I wanted to scream to her, though: ‘Danger Ahead! Proceed with Caution,’ but she could not hear me. I hope and pray that this novel’s readers do.”

  — Phyllis Chesler, author of

  The New Antisemitism and An American Bride in Kabul

  “Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile is a fine novel: poignant, passionate, compelling, and funny, an adventure of the heart and mind. I don’t think anybody has nailed the way anti-Israel feeling gives the license for antisemitism as well as Gold has here, and you won’t find a more unflinching examination of the terrible ironies inherent in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or a more compelling portrait of the personal toll exacted from those who face these ironies with courage. This is an emotionally fraught, distinguished novel, often as humorous as it is harrowing.”

  — Steve Stern, author of

  The Frozen Rabbi and The Book of Mischief

  “In Fields of Exile, Nora Gold succeeds fully in making her characters debate social and political themes as an expression of their personal complex contradictions. They are luminously alive. This novel is about men and women who are trying to understand and define their relations to each other, as well as their place in society. Wonderful reading.”

  — Naïm Kattan, author of

  Farewell Babylon and Reality and Theatre

  “Nora Gold’s Fields of Exile restores one’s faith in the possibilities of the novel. It is truly a novel of ideas, a brave book that ventures into territory from which non-fiction has shied away and even obscured the truth. With a lyrical flair Nora Gold has delivered a novel that casts a light onto the ivory tower in ways that should unsettle the faculty lounge.”

  — Thane Rosenbaum, author of

  The Golems of Gotham and Second Hand Smoke

  “‘My heart is in the East and I am in the far, far West.’ Seldom has anyone expressed so well as Nora Gold the yearning for Zion that remains within every fibre of one who has been torn away from a life of fulfillment in Israel and condemned unwillingly to return to the anti-Zionism/antisemitism of exile. A brave book that courageously takes on the ambivalences of Jewish life in the Diaspora — ambivalences that mirror those of the protagonist, torn between two very different lovers.

  — Alice Shalvi, Israel Prize laureate

  “The yearning for true peace and human compassion blooms in these fields of exile. Judith, the protagonist, much like Nora Gold, the author, searches relentlessly for ways to fix the flaws of our world. This is a novel written with an open heart and a loving hand, and with the hope that literature can somehow make amends. After crossing many fields of exile we, like Judith, shall finally find our way home.”

  — Nava Semel, author of

  And the Rat Laughed and Paper Bride

  “A novel about a difficult subject — antisemitism in the university — written with passion and fervor.”

  — Ann Birstein, author of

  Summer Situations and The Rabbi on Forty-Seventh Street

  FIELDS OF EXILE

  a novel

  Nora Gold

  For David, my best friend and true love

  Exile

  How difficult the word how many memories

  of hatred and slavery

  and because of it we have shed so many tears

  exile

  and yet, I’ll rejoice in the fields of exile …

  — Leah Goldberg

  CONTENTS

  1 In Exile, but Just for a While

  2 Friends and Enemies

  3 Winter Chills

  4 Taking a Stand

  5 Love and Hate

  6 Next Year

  Glossary

  IN EXILE,

  BUT JUST FOR A WHILE

  — 1 —

  She is sitting on the edge of her father’s bed, holding his hand. She thinks he’s dead, but she isn’t sure. He seems strangely still and lifeless; he can’t be dead, though, because he’s her father.

  His hand is still warm and dry, as it always was. Like when he took her hand at the age of three, to lead her for the first time safely across the street. And when he touched her on the cheek, in a kind of wordless blessing, the day she left home for Israel.

  Her father was not happy about her going to live there. Neither he nor her mother could understand why she would give up a safe and comfortable home to go “halfway across the world, and to a war zone, yet.” But they didn’t stand in her way. Now, though, ten years later, her father brought this up again. Just yesterday he said, “I know you want to return to Israel, Judith. And that’s fine, if that’s where you’ve chosen to make your life. But first you have to go back to school. You need a Master’s degree so you can stand on your own two feet.”

  “Never mind, Daddy,” she said. “I’m fine.” Which is what she always said whenever he raised this topic.

  But this time he didn’t accept her answer with his usual resigned silence. She was older now, he said: thirty-two, not twenty-two like when she first went to Israel, and here she was, still alone — gantz aleyn, he added in his native Yiddish. By which he meant she was unmarried, and with no prospect of marrying any time soon. She did have a boyfriend, and even one her father liked, but this wasn’t somebody she could imagine ever having as a husband. Firstly, because she planned to return to Israel, and as soon as possible, and he would never follow her there. And secondly, because he was conservative and right-wing, a tax lawyer who had little in common with her socialist ideals or her passionate temperament. But they had known each other since high school — they went out in grade eleven, and then again during her final year in university, for those last few months before she left for Israel. When nine months ago she came back to Toronto, Bobby seemed to always be around. They started going to movies together, and dinners, and in no time at all they fell back in step with each other and became a couple again. She was lost, disoriented, and depressed being back here, and he was comforting and dependable with his weekly Saturday night dates and daily phone calls and invitations. He also felt familiar, and maybe even familial, because he saw her much as her father did. As a wonderful, talented person who had wasted herself and her Bachelor of Social Work by moving to Israel for ten years, living hand-to-mouth in Jerusalem for the last nine of these, and before that working on a kibbutz where she did various odd jobs. Some of them very odd, like simultaneously sucking turkey sperm up one side of a two-pronged straw and turkey ovum up the other, to try and artificially unite them for fertilization. An unpleasant job because sometimes she sucked too hard and the foamy foul mixture came up into her mouth. They were right, Bobby and her father, that since her two social work jobs in Jerusalem were both only short-term contract positions, she hadn’t developed her career very far while in Israel. But still she doesn’t consider those years to be wasted time. She’d really lived while she was there. She’d had friends, lovers, and a community, and she f
elt truly alive. On kibbutz she rose every day before dawn and worked in the dark, cold fields picking artichokes while the sun rose slowly before her. In Jerusalem she cooked meals with her friends and ate with them and celebrated and demonstrated and laughed and mourned and belonged.

  But now she’s here in Toronto, supposedly back “home” — though home for her is still there — because her father, aged seventy-two, got sick. Her mother had been dead for nine years and there was no one else to take care of him. So, loving him, Judith has been doing this as well as she can for the past nine months. (Nine months — long enough to have a baby.) Nine months of watching her father gradually weaken, and get thinner, yellower, and bonier, the life leaking out of him till there was nothing left. Fortunately, he has had relatively little pain, and this is easily brought under control by morphine. His could be called A Very Easy Death, she thinks now, recalling the bitterly titled book by Simone de Beauvoir about the months leading up to the death of her mother. At least Judith’s father has remained lucid all the way through, and this has been a great blessing. Even as recently as yesterday he spoke to her and made perfect sense. Half-sitting up in bed, propped against pillows, he took her hand in his, and said, “Judith, dear, you must go back to school. You said last month that in Israel it takes forever to do a Master’s, but that here it’s just a one-year program. So stay here, Judith, for a year, and do it. I’m not a rich man — I can’t leave you provided for the way I would have liked to. You’re going to have to stand on your own two feet.” He didn’t say “when I’m gone,” but it hung in the air between them. And now he looked at her expectantly. She realized he was asking her a direct question — he wasn’t, as she’d thought, just making a suggestion. She looked back into his eyes. Dying eyes, she thought. But no, those eyes couldn’t be dying. His body maybe, but those eyes of his, so full of intelligence and warmth, would never die.

  “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I’ll do my Master’s.”

  There was an obstruction halfway down her throat when she said that. She’d held out a long time against this. She didn’t want to leave Israel, even for twelve months, and she didn’t want to do the same thing as everyone else, following the usual well-worn path. She wanted to be different. But yesterday, though that lump in her throat was still there when she spoke — a physical hurdle in her voice box that she had to leap over, like a horse over a fence in an obstacle course — it wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be. Maybe because of the relief, joy, and hopefulness that immediately suffused her father’s face. It filled her with astonishment — it had been so easy to make him happy. Then he turned his face away and instantly fell asleep. This conversation had cost him a great effort.

  Now, just one day later, she is again sitting on this bed and holding his hand. This hand is warm. Though she knows it won’t be for long. In a couple of hours — or maybe even less than that — her father’s hand will turn cold and rigid. But this is not important. All that matters, all that’s real to her, is that for now it’s warm. It is still Daddy’s hand, the same as always. Tears stream down her face, but she doesn’t feel sad. Why should she? Daddy’s not dead. He can’t be dead; he’s her father. It is late afternoon, and she sits for a long time staring out the window at the slowly falling night, holding — as if this moment will last forever — her father’s unmoving, gradually stiffening hand.

  Four days later she tells one of the women at the shiva, an old friend of her father’s, that she’s planning, at her father’s request, to go back to school here in Toronto. She asks this woman what she should study now — should she stay with social work, or try something new?

  Flora laughs her big horsey laugh.

  “You should study, of course, what you already know, my dear. It makes things so much easier.”

  Two days later, on a hot June day, Flora returns to the shiva house, carrying a tub of pistachio ice cream and an application package for the only Master of Social Work program within driving distance that has not yet closed its admissions.

  Judith frowns at the name on the envelope. “Wasn’t Dunhill in the papers a few months ago because of a student riot?”

  “Yes,” says Flora. “A rally there got out of hand. But never mind about that. You don’t have to have anything to do with the Students’ Union. You just go to your classes and do your homework, and everything will be fine. Anyway, at this point you don’t have any choice. This is the only school still accepting applications — it’s the only game in town.”

  The only game in town. Her father always said that. She thanks Flora and puts the big brown envelope on the kitchen shelf. A few days after the end of shiva, Flora phones and comes by again. From the shelf where she saw Judith place it, she takes down the unopened application package, and with Judith sitting dully next to her, dazed and paralyzed with grief, she painstakingly fills it out. Three weeks afterwards, Judith receives a letter saying she has been accepted into the M.S.W. program at Dunhill University.

  — 2 —

  A glorious sunny day in September, and after a one-hour drive, Judith arrives at the gates to the university in Dunhill, Ontario. She doesn’t want to be here, in exile; she wants to be home in Israel where she belongs. She resents being stuck here for the year because of the stupid promise she made to her father. She stomps around the campus for a half-hour looking for the School of Social Work. She’s here for Orientation, but she feels totally disoriented. The social work school is housed in a silo-like building, the Franklin Ardmore Rutherford Tower, which, for obvious reasons, the campus map does not refer to by its acronym, FART, but simply as FRANK. She climbs the front steps. Once inside, she waits for the elevator with two chatting women. One is a very plain redhead, the other pretty, dark-haired, and flamboyant. The three of them ride up to the eleventh floor. Room 1104 is a big square corner room with large picture windows on two sides, and through these windows Judith sees a big grey-stoned quadrangle eleven floors below her with students crossing it back and forth. The room itself is bright and cheerful, thanks to the large windows flooding it with sunlight, some of this refracted through orange woven curtains, giving everything a warm, fiery glow. It is full of talking, laughing people, mostly women, and Judith, not knowing anyone, mills around, nodding and smiling at whoever she passes, trying to look unobtrusive, un-lonely, and un-lost. She keeps walking as if she’s preoccupied with looking for a friend or has a destination — perhaps someone she knows on the other side of the room. After ten minutes of walking in circles and picking at the handouts and cookies on the long table at the back, she hears a loud thumping. A burly grey-haired man in a green cardigan is pounding on a table at the front of the room.

  “Okay, everybody,” he calls out. “Take your seats so we can start.”

  Almost all the gold or orange easy chairs are already taken. Within seconds nearly everyone is seated except Judith. She alone will be left standing, with everybody staring at her, like the loser in a game of musical chairs. Desperately she glances around.

  “Here,” says a cheerful voice. A young blonde woman in a lime-green blazer is smiling at her and patting the chair on her left.

  “Thanks,” Judith says, gratefully sitting.

  “No problem,” says the woman, extending her hand. “I’m Cindy.”

  The hand is dry and cool to the touch. “Judith,” says Judith, and is about to say more, but the burly man is rapping the table again and starting to speak.

  “Good morning,” he says. “I’m Lawrence Weick, Director of the Dunhill School of Social Work, and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here today. You’ve made an excellent choice in selecting this school for your graduate studies. As you’ll soon see for yourselves, we have an outstanding faculty, as well as a very select group of students. It may interest you to know that this year, for your one-year M.S.W. program, there were eighty-four applicants and only twenty-eight spots. In other words, for every one of you sitting here now, we turned away two others.”

  A buzz, surprised and pl
eased, runs through the room. Judith and Cindy grin at each other. Cindy shrugs.

  “So you should all feel very proud of yourselves,” Weick continues, “and we’re delighted to welcome you to the 2002–2003 academic year. As most of you already know, we at Dunhill take a Structural approach to social work. Our mission, as you can see on the orange handout, is the advancement of knowledge in the service of social change. This means, firstly, educating ourselves about the oppressions, injustices, and structural inequalities in Canadian society today, as well as around the globe. Secondly, it means preparing our students to engage in the struggle against inequity and oppression, whether you’re working with individuals, groups, or communities.”

  Judith is starting to feel at home here. This mission statement sounds almost verbatim like the one at the university where she completed her B.S.W. ten years ago. The same language, the same concepts. Apparently nothing has changed.

  Now Weick introduces Phoebe Browne, the school’s Administrative Coordinator and student advisor. Phoebe is a dumpy-looking woman of about forty, wearing an apricot-coloured polyester pantsuit, and she speaks for about ten minutes, describing in mind-deadening detail all the course requirements for Dunhill’s one-year M.S.W. Judith, being in the Practice, rather than the Policy, stream, will need to take eight half-courses — six required and two electives — over the course of the year; alternatively, she can take only six courses and write a one-hundred-page thesis. Thesis, she writes. She’s forgotten to bring paper with her today, so she is writing in the margins of a fuchsia handout that invites all the first-year students to the Lion’s Den, the student pub on campus, for the first meeting of the school’s GLBT committee. GLBT looks strange to her — she’s used to seeing the term LGBT instead. So for a moment GLBT strikes her as some variation on a BLT — maybe a Greek Lettuce-Bacon-and-Tomato, something for the Greek students? Then she understands. Phoebe, finished now, sits, and Weick pops up again like a jack-in-the-box.