by W. E. Gutman
*
Françoise and I tried to finagle other rendezvous but conflicting school schedules and other unforeseen hindrances conspired against us. The winds of change were blowing once again and one day the suitcases came down from the top of the armoire where they’d been stowed and onto the bed where neatly folded clothes were now piling up.
I learned that my uncle had lost his job at the paper in Bucharest, that he’d been disbarred for possessing a few dollar bills -- or so his denouncers alleged. A reign of communist terror was now raging in Romania. French authorities held fast in denying my father citizenship. Last resort or rash improvisation, we were now headed half a world away across the Mediterranean. I wept as I bid Marcel and Françoise farewell. Barely appeased, wanderlust and the lure of the unknown quickly dried the tears. I would not see my friends for the next five years.
I’d just turned twelve.
EXODUS
They came because they were afraid or unafraid,
because they were happy or unhappy, because
they felt like pilgrims or did not feel like pilgrims.
There was a reason for each man….
They were coming with small dreams
or large dreams or none at all.
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
Spurned by the country he’d served and loved, it was my father’s failure to find his “place,” a restless discontent that would stalk him for the rest of his life -- and which I would inherit -- that prompted him to uproot anew and embark on yet another Quixotic odyssey. We were setting sail, this time, to the “Old-New” land, the recently created State of Israel. The catalyst for what would prove to be an ill-conceived decision lay in a thoughtless pretense (reckless incitement might be more accurate): I came home one day and claimed that someone had called me a dirty Jew.
“Where?” my father asked, his brow furrowed with concern.
“Oh, in the street,” I replied.
“Who?”
“I don’t know, somebody….”
I clearly remember alleging the incident but have no recollection of it actually taking place. Nor did the slur -- assuming it was ever uttered -- seem to cause me the outrage it warranted, perhaps because I’d lied, blurted out the kind of untruth children tell that is as impulsive as it is preposterous. This fabrication, unchallenged and uncorroborated, would have immediate and long-term consequences on our lives. To my father this meant war, war against anti-Semitism, which he knew lurks in the shadows and stalks every Jew. This was his way of intellectualizing the frustrations of the moment. He was already struggling against a host of inner demons -- pain, still raw, at the loss of his parents and siblings, horror at the murder of his youngest sister, dashed hopes, self-doubt -- all of which he faced with a gallantry and stoicism that left him emotionally exhausted.
The awful untruth I had uttered may also have provided him with a ready-made pretext to validate a nascent but utterly atypical gush of Zionism. As years went by, with hindsight as evidence, I would conclude that my father, who never ceased to be a Jew, had little feeling for the Zionist cause. The hardships and setbacks we would face in the “Land of Milk and Honey” would leave him bitter and resentful. Israel would be yet another milestone on a very bumpy and circuitous journey to nowhere.
Near the end of his life, my father reflected that old age had affixed “a coda, forcibly and cruelly, onto an unfinished symphony.” Like him, I discovered a metaphorical connection between music and vagabondage. I would indulge in both when dissonance and boredom begged for unusual harmonies and unexplored horizons.
*
Nor did I believe that some obscure scruple, some scrap of reawakened piety had driven a confirmed agnostic to exclaim “next year in Jerusalem,” not even in symbolic jest. Israel’s rebirth had heralded the apotheosis of Jewish survival but to my father, who now viewed religion as an absurdity -- “faith by force and psychological extortion” -- and nationalism, in any form, as “a heady tonic for the dim-witted and the bellicose,” Israel was little more than a historical eccentricity and it aroused only mild interest as a revived or artificial ethno-geopolitical entity. In the circumstances of the moment, however, it also afforded an opportunity to escape, yet again, a no-exit status quo.
Whereas I could not imagine, let alone fully grasp, what years of religious indoctrination had done to shape my father’s psyche, I understood even less how deeply entrenched beliefs can be so effortlessly jettisoned. Heretofore introspective and atavistic, devoid of dogmatism or militancy, my father’s Judaism had withered to a vestigial self-view: He was aware of the existence of a primal nexus that linked him to the very deepest part of him, but the bond was now stripped of all metaphysical accouterments.
The soul cannot remember its former lives but carries within it the regret of having forgotten them.
*
Predictably, I was never given a religious education. Nor did I ever ask for one. Instead, my father and I spent hours dissecting the major doctrines -- focusing mostly on the aberrations, paradoxes, inconsistencies and the atrocities committed in their name. We conceded that all are anchored in some sublime if unattainable ideal but found none that does not claim preeminence, none that condemns, tacitly or explicitly, the use of force -- apostolic or separatist -- to defend it. We reviewed the fury unleashed among the multiplying cults, the cleaving into “denominations,” each fond of vilifying the other. We noted that ministers, instead of teaching and enlightening, are often ignorant, parochial and bigoted. Ascetics, instead of facing life’s turmoil, are idle, misanthropic parasites and shameless sensualists who take masochistic delight in self-denial and pain. Rabbis, instead of being rapt in Talmudic studies, dabble in commerce and other profane pursuits. Blinded by mutual contempt, polarized by exegetic discord, Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodox Christianity make a mockery of the Christian ethic. Hindus and Muslims are at each other’s throats -- as are Jews and Arabs -- all mired in a turf war fueled by hatred and envenomed by the inflexible credos that divide them. Unchallenged by the flock, gingerly overlooked by the shepherds, such arrogance, it was obvious to us, refutes the model and invalidates the mission.
Sects and cults are like vultures that feed on the decomposing corpses of traditional religions.
My decision not to be Bar Mitzvah would be greeted with consternation, not by my parents, but by acquaintances who, like ticks, had embedded themselves in our private lives and meddled in matters of personal conscience just to assess the depth of our “Jewishness.” When challenged, I retorted that I found the rituals, the perfunctory protocols, the circular stagnancy of worship tedious and meaningless. Such apostasy in one so young drew sharp criticism, most of it hurled at my father who, his critics protested, should have had the good sense to anticipate and prevent his son’s defection. Rebuke would turn to vitriolic condemnation when, unable to catch up with the public school’s Hebrew-language curriculum, I was enrolled in a French Catholic mission school.
My father had accepted my anti-religious rationale without editorial comment. But I felt I owed him more than flippancy or sarcasm. I needed to articulate my feelings with a candor that not only mirrored their intensity but crystallized them as well. First set on paper then memorized, like a soliloquy, I had recited the following apologia with equal doses of theatricality and conviction:
“It’s the words, papa, words not my own, the injunctions, the admonitions, the supplications, the jeremiads, the breast-beating, the utterances of indebtedness and veneration, all repeated ad nauseam, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his heart, never weeps, never says he’s sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death. I would happily surrender to an all-comforting creed. But God upon whom we turn for succor, whose indulgence we seek for our sins and whose wrath we invoke against our enemies, turns a stone visage to human misery and a deaf ear to our most heart-rending cries.”
I would reprise the theme, less charitably, in a school essay th
at earned me high grades for style and a glacial two-page red-penned review by Sister Louis, of the Order of St. Joseph, in whose care my education would soon be entrusted.
Lacking spiritual guidance, I remember searching, even as a teenager, for an idiom, a concept anchored in reason, not dogmatism, a path devoid of ceremony and mimicry that would lead me to enlightenment and wisdom. When I was old enough to apprehend the enormity of the Holocaust, I found in it no telltale revelation. I discovered no occult moral, no oracular grand design in the extermination of millions of innocent people, no defensible argument buttressing the existence of a deity so impervious to human suffering that it gapes with serene unconcern at the torments it inflicts on its very own creation. My mother’s death -- no, her murder by pancreatic cancer twenty-four years later -- would obliterate the last traces of cautious trust in an omnipotent, just and merciful entity. I rejected as cruel and deceitful the explanation that God works in mysterious ways, and proclaimed that such mythic being was unworthy of veneration.
Nature created man in an infinite variety of models; lacking nature’s imagination, man created God as one of a kind.
Maturity, introspection and exposure to the works of great minds would eventually help blunt this rigidity and lead me to conclude that God, stripped of hackneyed human clichés, is simply inaccessible to human thought. In time, I would challenge this notion of inaccessibility to find that God, ineffable and inscrutable, if beheld as the essence of absolute truth -- or “endlessness” as the Kabbalists perceive it -- is a more approachable concept, one that parallels science’s attempt to bring all natural phenomena under one law. I would become convinced, as I am today, that a unified theory linking the totality of cosmic reality will eventually be elaborated. I would also conclude that, at its core, such theory would contain an irreducible abstraction no less impenetrable than the very concept of God and that God, for lack of a better name, would be ruled “first cause.” Elevating God to such empyrean status, however, did not prevent me from rejecting the institutions created in its name. Marketing, I have always held, somehow debases the merchandise.
Advertising is the wickedest form of deceit: it creates in people the illusion of need.
*
My father favored contrition over righteousness. He derided “the good man” as an uninspiring, spineless creature too timid to misbehave. Echoing a Lutheran perspective that was as unrehearsed as it was devoid of religious inspiration, he often spoke of the banality of goodness:
Better a sin expunged than the triteness of unerring virtue.
He also believed that sins of omission are worse than sins of commission because they are premeditated.
“One can commit a heinous crime on the spur of the moment, ignited by unbridled rage or a sudden burst of folly. One does not abstain from doing the right thing unless urged by intent.”
It would be his lot to discover, no, to re-discover, this time in Israel, that the self-righteous abound even in Zion and that their capacity for evil -- rendered or countenanced -- far surpasses the good man’s pointless innocence.
*
We set sail from Marseille in the fall of 1949 aboard the S/S Kedmah, an old tub that bobbed and wheezed as it sliced through heavy seas during the next seven days. I remember a dank, narrow cabin painted a sickly shade of green, and I can still hear the metal bulkheads groaning whenever the bow lurched into the foot of a wave and the rest of the hull struggled to right itself up over the crest. At times, the stern would lift out of the water and the propeller shrieked as it idled in the air, sending shivers through the length of the vessel. Located below the waterline, the cabin reeked of petrol. The mattresses were thin and emitted foul odors that kept my mother awake. Despondent and bereft, she wept during the entire crossing. My father was unable to console her. He spent much time on the bridge, lost in thought, or playing chess with the captain or first officer.
For me, this was yet another adventure. I’d flown on an airplane, traveled by train, explored the entire Paris subway network. Even the garishly painted wooden stallions of the old merry-go-round in the Tuileries Gardens or at the foot of the Sacré Coeur, had delivered the thrills of motion and emancipation. One can imagine what a voyage to the “Levant” meant to a twelve-year-old boy enamored of atlases, travel posters and stamps from faraway places. Let’s see what magnificent odyssey the future yields, I murmured to myself. The thrill of living rests in the discovery of tomorrow’s infinite possibilities.
But as the French coast receded in the distance, bathed in twilight’s milky opalescence, a million city lights twinkling in the afterglow, I remember being overcome with sadness and disquiet. Too young to lament the loss of earthly possessions -- we had discarded anything deemed superfluous, shipped a few pieces of furniture in a large wooden crate -- I was old enough to experience and pinpoint the cause of this strange new malaise. It dawned on me that I was rootless, incomplete, truncated, a seedless weed grafted onto a sterile bough, flotsam forever adrift on the currents of fate. Separation anxiety subsided after a couple of days, replaced by moments of exhilaration, flashes of freedom and serenity, now that I was one with the sea, a slate-blue, animate expanse that stretched, heaving and shimmering, all around me. But the inner turmoil that had assailed me shortly after embarkation resurfaced when I sighted land in the distance. It grew sharper as the diamond-studded nighttime visage of Mount Carmel came into view high above the port city of Haifa. And as we disembarked, lugging our weathered cardboard valises onto the darkened pier, I was revisited with the same feelings of dislocation, uncertainty and impermanence that had ushered all of our migrations. Years of privation, false starts and setbacks would follow.
*
Home for the next four years was a large square house with three-foot stone walls and coifed with a gently sloping ivy-patched red tile roof. Located in Jerusalem’s Greek Colony, a quiet, lush oasis south of the busy downtown district, the house sat at the center of an inner courtyard fenced off by a stone parapet and a forged iron gate. Lined on one side with towering eucalyptus trees, the gate ended on each side with a portico flanked by two tall columns that my father promptly nicknamed “Boaz” and “Jachin.” I would have to wait nearly forty years to learn, by initiation, the cryptic symbolism these pillars conveyed.
The backyard was overgrown with a tangled expanse of wild flowers, bushes and tall grasses where lived a couple of venerable desert tortoises. I adopted them both, christening one Schmiel -- he looked “Jewish” -- the other Franz, a name befitting his decidedly “Teutonic” features -- a square jaw and a pugnacious nature. I was very fond of them. Several generations of chameleons that thrived in the garden, two stray dogs and a lame crow would become cherished pets and, when fellowships with the neighborhood kids turned mercurial, noble and fascinating companions.
It was on Boaz that my father proudly affixed a freshly painted sign. It read, in Hebrew and French: ARMIN GUTMAN, MD, GP -- GYNECOLOGY/ OBSTETRICS. Below, in smaller cursive letters, the sign read: Diplomate of the Faculty of Medicine, Paris.
Across the street, unbeknownst to him, a curtain had parted and someone had witnessed this proclamation. The sign would be defaced or vanish in the middle of the night and had to be replaced several times. Though my father was never able to prove it, suspicion fell on a fellow physician, an older man with whom relations, cool and distant at first, eventually turned glacial. Within less than a year, the small but steady clientele that my father had cultivated would be reduced to a trickle. Rumors alleged that my father was performing abortions, a procedure he vehemently opposed except in the rarest of cases, and that several of his patients had died in the process. Neither claim was true. His fellow doctor and neighbor, my father conjectured, was behind this odious smear campaign but no proof of such complicity would ever surface. Struggling to make a living, my father did not have the energy to play detective. Logic suggested, however, that at a time of great post-war economic frailty, in a community boasting only one physician, the arrival o
f a younger competitor on the block was bound to be seen as a threat and arouse resentment.
Such is kismet in the realm of wolves. Unlike people, wolves cannot be corrupted.
Another near-catastrophe would take place shortly after we moved in when someone set fire to the wooden container that had housed our furniture during the crossing. Awaiting removal by the trash collectors, it had been resting in the yard. When we were awakened early one morning to shouts of “Fire, Fire,” the blaze had nearly consumed the crate and combustible packing material within, scorching a set of shutters and igniting a tree whose branches dangled perilously over the roof. We summoned the fire brigade and the pyre, labeled “suspicious,” was quickly brought under control. I enriched my vocabulary with a new and frightening word: arson.
*
Surreal is how I remember the morning I was ushered to my desk by the headmaster of Jerusalem’s prestigious Rehavia High School. Surreal and daunting. I was first introduced to my classmates, a formality greeted with indifference. I was then handed a Talmudic text and invited to demonstrate my powers of deduction by joining in on a debate involving the hypothetical death of a cow being cared for by someone other than its owner. Various scenarios, I recall, influenced the custodian’s legal obligations. Had the cow been unwell? Was it being looked after on the owner’s premises or elsewhere? Did it fall ill before or after leaving its owner’s shed? Was it the victim of negligence or foul play? Did it die of old age? Was it gravid? Did its master own more heads of cattle or was it an only cow? Was it being raised for beef or for dairy? Had it been purchased, inherited or received as a gift?