2
In 2014 Orna and I moved from the Hollywood Hills to the “Valley,” a suburb of the suburb that is Los Angeles. Two generous awards, the Dan David Prize of Tel Aviv University and the Edgar de Picciotto Prize of the Geneva institute allowed us to buy a house somewhat more expensive than the previous one but also more spacious, with easy access by car to the entrance (just in case) and with enticing grounds. As nothing required us to drive regularly to UCLA anymore, living in the Valley had advantages that the city could not offer for the same price. Moreover, both of us prefer to be on our own, without many social obligations, in moderate isolation. Like Voltaire’s Candide, I take care of my garden. Voltaire may have meant gardening as a metaphor for writing, although he apparently was also a constant gardener. Orna loves gardening and I love watching her and writing about it.
We are not shut off from “civilization,” though. Everything on Ventura Boulevard, the endless main artery of the Valley, is on hand in the Tarzana segment of it or in nearby Woodland Hills to the left of Vanalden Avenue, our street, or in Encino to the right. Everything, from medical centers to Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Persian, Armenian, Indian, and Israeli restaurants, to gas stations, banks, movie theaters, parking lots, car dealers, liquor stores, real estate offices, army recruiting centers, food supermarkets, shopping malls, cobblers, dentists, bakeries, optometrists, beauty salons, kung fu centers, hair salons, massage salons, nail salons, mattress stores, futon stores, insurance companies, New York bagel stores, delicatessens, and again gas stations, banks, parking lots, and car dealers.
You’ve got the idea, and I am sure that you would easily recognize the difference between Ventura Boulevard and avenue de l’Opéra, for example. I forgot to mention that on Ventura you also have churches, synagogues, yeshivas of various Orthodox groups, at least four Israeli restaurants in Tarzana alone, an Israeli shuper-sal (supermarket), and, of course, a lot of Israelis. How many? It’s hard to tell: probably fewer than Mexicans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans …, but if I have to venture a number on the basis of the all-day-long crowd at Humus Bar and Grill, Tel Aviv, Big Itsik, or Aroma, all places where we eat at times, Israel must have exported at least half of its population (including us) to the Valley.
3
Israelis, those who came here as adults, mostly keep a divided identity: “They live in the West but their heart is in the East,” to quote the much overwrought sentence of Yehuda Halevi, the greatest Jewish medieval poet (who himself lived in Spain). Indeed, although most Israelis do well economically, send their children to American schools, strive to acquire U.S. citizenship, and willingly adopt and celebrate the quintessential American holidays, the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, they continue to speak Hebrew at home, congregate with other Israelis, shop at Israeli supermarkets, and patronize Israeli restaurants; they read Israeli newspapers or follow the daily news from Israel on the Internet and celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. Sometimes their children keep the same divided identity, but mostly they become simply Americans. You will say that this is the way of the American melting pot; it is.
The question that remains hard to answer is that of the “residue”: How many of those Americans belonging to the second generation of ex-Israelis will continue to regularly visit the “old country”? How many would rush back in time of crisis? Logic and common sense say: fewer and fewer with each passing generation.
In the sixties, a French Jewish sociologist, Georges Friedmann, published a widely discussed essay: La fin du peuple juif? (The End of the Jewish People?). The gist of Friedmann’s argument was that in Israel, a new kind of Jewish existence was emerging, growing increasingly different from that of the Diaspora. As years go by, these two Jewish worlds will have ever less in common, and thus, of necessity, the Jews will disappear as one overall entity. At the time, Friedmann’s thesis was contradicted by the outburst of solidarity that the Six-Day War engendered among Diaspora Jews. I am much less certain, with the passage of time, whether Friedmann’s prognostication is not proving true, also as far as successive generations of ex-Israelis are concerned.
The picture I am drawing is too schematic: any number of American Jews, without Israeli heritage, feel very close to Israel for political or religious reasons, and a small minority spends time there in various frameworks, also as volunteers in the army. Some American Jews, a few hundred per year, even end up living in Israel. They are usually on the right side in politics and on the Orthodox side (not ultra-Orthodox) in religion. In fact, U.S. Jewry has provided Israel with some of the most dangerous fanatics among the settlers in the occupied territories. Some were notorious racists and anti-Arab agitators (Meir Kahana), even mass murderers, such as the infamous Baruch Goldstein; now a new Jewish terrorist group, with Kahana’s grandson as a leading member, has surfaced.
Make no mistake, however: the immense majority of American Jews, a near totality in fact, be they liberals or conservatives, are Americans first and foremost. They may criticize Israel or support it, they may contribute money and try to mobilize U.S. politicians to their camp, but from afar.
What I just mentioned should help define where we, Orna and I, stand. We are no different from the majority of Israelis who have lived in the States for decades (in Orna’s case over thirty years). And we too are divided between our integration in America and our constant attention to what is happening in Israel, even far beyond the daily news.
Most paradoxically, for example, it is here, thanks to Orna, that I discovered the vast expanses of recent Hebrew literature. I had read the modern classics: A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David Grossman, but only in translation. Once I even lectured on one of Yehoshua’s books (The Lover, if memory serves me right) in Zurich and in German (I had read it in German). Among the “classics,” I particularly admired Grossman’s To the End of the Land and Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness, but, again, in their English translations.
Regarding the more recent writers that Orna reads in the original, I had never heard of them before; now that I have heard so much about the quality of some, I wait impatiently for the English and, in the meantime, keep their names in mind: thus I remember Yochi Brandes, thanks to another Brandes, Nietzsche’s early interpreter.
I have no compunction in reading Hebrew prose in translation: it goes so much faster and, after all, prose is prose and a good translation catches many of the nuances. My problem is poetry: I would feel ashamed of reading Yehuda Amichai, for example, in English when with minor effort I could read him in Hebrew. I won’t have a chance to tell you how it went, but now is the time to try.
On several occasions we toyed with the idea of returning to Israel. We are well aware of Israel’s immensely attaching aspects: the energy and the astounding creativity, among much else. And we miss families and friends. Wouldn’t living there make more sense for the two of us than playing Candide in faraway California? In practical terms, returning to Israel would be but slightly more difficult than staying put, but the drift toward an increasingly nationalist-religious society and the political initiatives it shamelessly displays are repelling. Under such conditions, one must express oneself or, to me at least, the political environment would quickly become unbearable, even within the bubble of sanity that Tel Aviv appears to be. Unfortunately, I feel too old and too much of an outsider (even if I devoutly follow most of what goes on) to contribute anything of significance to the public debate. Notwithstanding my literary discoveries, I have lost touch, also with the slang (for “very good,” when do you say haval al hazman, or Sababa, or Achla?).
As for family, soon only Eli and his wife Michal will be staying in Tel Aviv. Omer and Elam, their twin boys, will be studying in Europe and in the States for several years to come. Otherwise, as I already wrote, David, Isabelle, and Thom live in Paris; Michal, Karl, Yoni, and Ben, in Berlin. Orna’s two boys, Gil and Amir, and her granddaughter Una, live in L.A. Hence, moving to Tel Aviv would solve only part of that problem. Going for longer stays in Europe
and in Israel may be the only viable solution at this stage.
There are also the friends. It is sad to say, but, among my friends, the closest I had in Israel have died: Uri Tal, Amos Funkenstein, Shabtai Teveth, and Meir Rosenne. Meir passed away a few months ago, suddenly, possibly from a hospital-generated infection. We had reconnected only during the last few years; I had kept my distance, as from the seventies on, Meir explicitly leaned to the Likud kind of right. But, of course, all this became irrelevant once we met again, also with his wife Vera.
I was told only very recently of Shabtai Teveth’s death. In 2002 Sabi suffered a stroke, and since then he could not communicate anymore. I visited him once. He seemed happy to see me but there was no way of knowing whether he recognized me or not, whether he recognized anybody. Here was somebody who had been an outstanding journalist, a prolific writer, a most thorough biographer of Ben-Gurion, suddenly incapable of saying anything except a single, incomprehensible word. I hope that he didn’t understand what was going on with him or around him, otherwise every minute of his life, for thirteen years, would have been a horrible torture. Sabi was possibly the closest friend I have had for so long. It is painful to write about his last years: for him, death was truly deliverance.
4
Here, the local ideological scene is not without its problems either, mainly regarding Israel and particularly in academe. Thus, the University of California campuses have got the reputation, justified or not, of being a fount of anti-Israel activity. Some faculty members of my Department of History certainly do their best to enhance that notoriety. Criticizing Israel’s policies is not only justified, it is necessary. However, questioning Israel’s right to exist is a very different matter. Sometimes one gets the feeling that, in the American academic environment, the first attitude easily leads to the second one. As for the second attitude, it often smells of more than a whiff of anti-Semitism. The dilemma is obvious and has to be dealt with case by case.
A few years ago, Orna became a target of this kind of politics. She had been teaching the history of Israel at UCLA for six years when the issue of tenure came up. Her students wrote glowing reports, but tenure was refused on the grounds, among other highly problematic arguments, that her courses showed too much of a pro-Israel bias, which meant, in the context, not doubting the state’s very legitimacy.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in and of itself exacerbates the anti-Israel activism. This activism will spread without a solution. Is there, nowadays, any chance of reaching such a solution? Let me try, at the end of this memoir, to venture a few brief remarks on the present situation, as I see it from afar.
On both sides, radicalization has made deeper and possibly irreversible inroads. The conflict openly remains one between two nationalisms, but on both sides, the nationalist frenzy is increasingly laced with religious fanaticism. In other words, extremist rabbis and imams become more than ever the inciting voices in a highly volatile situation, in which young hotheads play a decidedly aggressive role on both sides. While half a million or more Jewish settlers, backed by extreme right-wing parties, turn violent, several endogeneous Islamic movements, possibly inspired by the so-called Islamic State, are deeply influencing a new generation of Palestinians, born after the end of the second Intifada, including some Arab-Israeli citizens.
Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States (including Saudi Arabia) keep open or covert relations with Israel, but rejection of any compromise with the “Zionist entity” is the official stance in Iran and among its allies: Assad’s Syria, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as among the more diffuse Islamist movements, both Shiite and Sunni, all over the region.
This situation provides the main argument against revival of the peace process for many Israelis on the right and even among some on the left. If, the reasoning goes, under current conditions the West Bank becomes a Palestinian state, it will fall into the hands of Hamas or some other extremist group, as happened in Gaza, given the notorious weakness of the president of the Palestinian Authority; Israel will then be surrounded on all sides by militants determined to destroy it. That Israel is in part responsible for the radicalization of the Palestinians is irrelevant to those who so argue; the present situation is what has to be faced.
Preaching from afar or reading tea leaves from half a world away is anything but admirable. Yet, as I have been quite outspoken about my political opinions over the years, it would be less than candid not to say here whether these opinions have remained the same or whether they have evolved and, in both cases, for what reasons.
On the central issue of our relations with the Palestinians, I remain resolutely in favor of the two-state solution, which means putting an immediate end to the expansion of settlements and, beyond that, of being ready, on principle, to accept difficult concessions regarding the withdrawal of some settlements, an exchange of territory, and even a political (not social) division of Jerusalem.
A very recent resurgence of a Jewish terrorist movement that has existed for decades but lain low for most of the time adds a dangerous twist to a situation already complicated enough. After the burning down of a church in Galilee and the setting on fire of a Palestinian house in which an eighteen-month-old toddler was burned alive (the father succumbed a few days later and the mother shortly thereafter), the existence of this terror group was confirmed and denounced by the Israeli government. Seemingly adequate orders were given to the security service. Whether this sudden decisiveness will be sustained and lead to results, given the country’s political and religious landscape, remains to be seen. Jewish terrorism is not only a threat to the Palestinians; as these ultra-fanatics are ready to use violence to scuttle any agreement, they may become one more disastrous obstacle to any move toward peace. This “hilltop youth” (so they call themselves at times) is, in the words of Israeli president Reuven Rivlin, a cancer that threatens to devour Israeli society itself.
Another recent growth that feeds Jewish violence in the occupied territories is developing within Israel: right-wing groups have started denouncing left-oriented initiatives as treasonous, as externally financed, at times accusing individuals, among them the best-known writers and artists in the country, of being “planted” agents of anti-Israeli elements. Simultaneously, ministers belonging to the far right have begun excluding from the school curriculum books they consider subversive (such as a novel telling of a love story between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man); this is nothing else but outright Israeli McCarthyism, if not worse. And while this is going on, the left-wing parliamentary opposition watches passively the onset of its own doom.
If the present trend is not reversed, if the settlements policy is not stopped, if a government guided by a vision of peace is not elected, then, metaphorically speaking, regarding the values Israel once held dear, regarding the survival of an Israeli democracy, there is nothing more to say than “God help us.”
5
The impact of the Shoah has determined the course of my life, but, for a long time now, it does not impinge on the everyday. My everyday is as gray or as sunny as that of many of my contemporaries. Well, almost. There is, for example, a recurrent dream theme that probably has nothing to do with the past. But who knows?
Usually, I don’t remember my dreams, perhaps as a result of medication, but one theme has become so pervasive, under slightly different guises, that it has engraved itself deeply enough to resurface at any recall. I am in a city that I do not know, a mix of Prague, Geneva, and some touches of Tel Aviv. I must go somewhere and meet somebody, but each time I either get lost as I try one street after another, or miss the bus that would have taken me to the right place, or am misled by people I ask for directions (I am not sure that they want to mislead me, but I never find the way they indicate). In some variations, I know that at the end of a road once taken (no Robert Frost involved), there is a sudden opening onto a magnificent mountain landscape. I promised some people that I would show them the landscape, but, of course, I never find the r
oad again …
A dream of childhood bliss never recovered? Of something essential missing in my life? I will never know, as, each time, I suddenly wake up without finding my goal. So let’s leave the land of unpenetrable dreams and return to the everyday. In that everyday, I try to live in the present, in the minute happenings of the present. It’s a process that, as I discover, is far from easy and certainly does not come naturally, at least not to me.
An embargo on the past is impossible: the past can never be banished, for “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (William Faulkner). Moreover, who would want to miss all the wonderful time that the past carries entwined with all the sadness? Time spent with the woman you love, with your children, with your grandchildren, with all those who are close to you or whose memory you cherish. The past has to be let in, as it is. It should be accepted as a whole.
The future? You create it, willingly or not, as you go on living. About one of its aspects you may feel safe at my stage: the distant future is closed; there is no doubt about that. It is the near future that cannot be shaken off. There’s the rub. You have matters to take care of, but as you tend to forget, you have to write it all down, and part of the present is spent listing the chores of the near future and, mainly, being consumed by the gnawing feeling that you forgot a few things, as, some time ago, you forgot the Hebrew name for “aubergines” and as you go on forgetting so many other words, occurrences, faces, and names.
When Memory Comes Page 24