by W. E. Gutman
All this must surely have had great dialectical merit but to a 13-year-old boy with uncontrollable erections and a roaming eye for the girls these cerebral contortions lacked meaning or utility. Here I was, a young irreligious French Jew, familiar with “our ancestors, the Gaul” but unacquainted with the Gittites, Gileadites or Gibeonites. I could describe Napoleon’s seven military campaigns but I knew nothing about Nathan, Nahum or Naphtali, whose exploits I could much less read -- in Hebrew -- let alone discuss. So to my immense relief, after less than a month, I was quietly removed from that eminent institution and given a seat in Sister Louis’ all-girl class at the Lycée Français St. Joseph. I resumed my studies in French under the agonized gaze of Jesus crucified dominating the facing wall and surrounded by a dozen demoiselles de bonne famille whose coy, sidelong glances kept me in a perpetual state of arousal which I struggled to contain with periodic fits of buffoonery.
*
Fought and won just before we arrived in 1949, the War of Independence had been a war of reaffirmation and Jewish self-assertion against the armies of four Arab countries that had pounced on the newly founded State of Israel. King Hussein had sent crack British-trained commando troops across the Jordan, occupying Judea, Samaria and the eastern half of Jerusalem, including the Old City and Temple Mount, and destroying all Jewish settlements. Egypt had seized Gaza. Syria and Iraq had attacked from the north and the east.
Israel had waged the first of its five wars with severe handicaps. Great Britain had drastically trimmed the territory granted the Jews and reduced to a trickle the number of settlers allowed to come to its shores. It then prevented the Jews from arming themselves while allowing increasingly large shipments of weapons to the Arabs of Palestine. Possessing virtually no tanks, artillery or aircraft, Israel’s ragtag forces were outnumbered and outgunned. Israel’s very life hung in the balance. The 20-month carnage cost the lives of 6,000 Israelis, many of them Holocaust survivors. By June, the Jews had reached a state of near-exhaustion. Yet even on the brink of disaster, they somehow held on and managed to repel the Arab onslaught. Writing in A Place Among Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu, whose anti-Palestinian virulence I would one day denounce, recalls that –
“… the Jewish state was now a fact. It had come into the world after an agonizing labor. It would have no happy childhood, either, with frequent cross-border attacks by Arab marauders and daily promises from Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and other similarly disposed neighbors that Israel would shortly be “exterminated.”
*
Having failed to destroy the newborn state in 1948, the Arabs would resort to an unremitting campaign of terror. Border villages were repeatedly shelled at night with mortar fire. Lurking in the dark, exploiting the ensuing confusion, the marauders then attacked from all sides, slaughtering old people and children in their beds.
Fierce battles must have taken place in the Greek Colony. During the next several months, I found many live bullets and spent shells in the scrub-filled vacant lots adjoining the main thoroughfare. Rummaging through the skeletal remains of houses destroyed during the conflict, or whose erection had been halted, also yielded large numbers of projectiles and spent ammunition. Boys in the neighborhood taught me how to pry the slug from the shell and set fire to the powder. We would then gather copper casings in burlap sacks and sell them to a scrap dealer.
There was such a scarcity of copper at the time that my playmates and I pilfered every bit of copper and brass we could find -- lengths of tubing, electrical wiring, fittings, faucets, flanges, lugs. When copper became scarce or no longer safe to filch, we tore loose sheets of corrugated metal roofing, gutters and spouts, and harvested tin cans, cast iron manhole covers, barbed wire, in short anything we could easily haul away. We would pool the few coins we earned from this illicit commerce to buy cigarettes and gain entry at the Semadar, the local movie house where Flash Gordon, Abbott and Costello, Charlie Chaplin, Tarzan and Laurel and Hardy were standard fare.
*
Tsena -- “modesty” in Hebrew -- is the word Israelis coined to describe, with a lyrical restraint characteristic of heroes, the long and difficult period of penury that lingered after the war. Reminiscent of the privations we’d endured in France, Tsena was ubiquitous and all pervading. Gasoline, engine parts and specialized tools were in short supply, putting a strain on public transit and delaying the movement of vital goods between cities. Construction projects were on hold for lack of bricks and mortar. Every able-bodied man 45 and under was in the reserves, on 24-hour call, and often summoned to leave family and job for “parts unknown.” This exigency, in the face of continuing border skirmishes and sporadic terrorist assaults, impeded the timely erection and repair of infrastructures vital for the absorption of new immigrants who were now “ascending” to Israel from all corners of the globe.
Sharing in the collective hardships and anxieties of the newly founded state, life in Zion assumed for us the characteristics of a Passover Seder preamble -- bitter herbs, salty tears and the memory of choices not fully explored. Uprooted, disheartened, daunted by the challenges and uncertainties facing the infant nation, intolerant of the climate and unable or unwilling to learn Hebrew, my mother buried herself in domestic chores. She kept the house immaculately clean and fed a family that, within a year of our arrival, would be augmented by her mother, who, owing her age, had been granted exit from Romania.
Preparing meals, an all-day affair, was as much a labor of love as a feat of wizardry. Basic staples, including eggs, butter and meat, were rationed. The icebox -- we had no refrigerator -- was often empty, save for oranges and a few desiccated vegetables kept questionably fresh by a large block of ice purchased daily from a vendor who led a horse-drawn carriage and rang a loud bell. Indifferent to food -- I spent hours on end reading or listening to the radio -- I don’t recall being inconvenienced by the scarcities we endured.
Owing its thick stone walls, our house was cool in the summer but winters were chilly and damp and kerosene heaters were strategically placed to keep it warm. The kerosene dealer, a wizened bearded old man who sharpened knives and resoled shoes, also steered a horse-drawn cart with wobbly wheels that shrieked dolefully at every turn. He too rang a bell but its timbre was more high-pitched than the iceman’s.
*
Between 1948 and 1952 nearly one million Jews were expelled from Arab countries. Most went to Israel. A large number came from French-speaking Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Others crossed the Tigris and the Euphrates fleeing Iraq and Kurdistan. There was little about the latter that matched my perception of Jews. Dress, manner and speech -- the men wore loose-fitting pantaloons, vests and turbans, blew their noses through their fingers, chain-smoked, snorted and spat copiously and communicated loudly in an alien and dissonant tongue -- betrayed strange influences to which I was unaccustomed. It would take a generation of assimilative processes to turn coarse desert Jews into modern Israelis.
Overnight, a group of Kurdish Jews commandeered our semi-attached garage and turned it overnight into a synagogue and community center. Several times a year, they would convene outside the temple at about midnight and conduct prayers dedicated to the moon. Their loud and lugubrious wails woke us up but religion would prevail. When my father complained, the Ministry of Religious Affairs replied tersely -- I’m paraphrasing -- that being unoccupied, and with space at a premium, the garage had been declared eminent domain and “donated.” The letter also obliquely alluded to my attending a Catholic mission school and advised against entertaining future grievances against “pious Jewish brethren.”
Circuitous and irresolute at first, the community’s resentment against my parents for sending me to a Catholic school reached a furious pitch when I befriended a Palestinian girl my age. Leila, the daughter of a local tribal chieftain, was beautiful, smart and proud. My parents took an instant liking to her and did nothing to discourage what was my first teen romance. One day, a delegation of about half a dozen persons headed by a rabbi came
to our house unannounced. The rabbi addressed my father in Yiddish. He scolded him for sending me to the Lycée St. Joseph and directed him to discourage me from “fraternizing with the enemy.” He meant Leila. My father, never to be trifled with, especially by bigoted busybodies, stood his ground. He was magnificent. I don’t remember his words and won’t attempt to reconstruct them for fear of diluting what must surely have been a knockout riposte. What I vividly recall is that he then opened the door and invited the “delegation” to get the fuck out of our house.
Predictably, my father’s attitude did not help mend fences in the Greek Colony. Acrimony and ugly rhetoric festered for the duration of our stay in Jerusalem.
Leila ceased to visit. I looked for her. Her father told me she was no longer allowed to see me. “It’s best.” There was sadness in his voice. I was heartbroken.
*
One day, “Cousin” Suzanne came to visit from Tel Aviv for a weekend.
“Guess what I brought you.”
“What?”
“Chocolate.” My mouth watered at the thought. “Thank you.”
“Well, the thing is, you see, it’s like this. I got so hungry on the bus that I ate the whole bar. Will you forgive me? I promise to bring you some next time I come.”
The imbecile.
“Why did you tell me you brought me chocolate?”
Confused, Suzanne, a family friend who earned a living as a pedicurist, grimaced awkwardly. Her large, round bovine eyes filled with tears. There had been no malice in her faux pas. She just wasn’t very bright.
Stupidity is no impediment to lechery and Suzanne, in her early twenties, was as horny as she was dim-witted. Sharing my narrow bed that Saturday night -- my parents had gone to sleep and were occupying the only other bed in the house -- Suzanne unceremoniously placed a hand on my penis, stroking it gently, and guided mine toward her pubic area. Her caresses brought on a fierce erection and the urge to thrust myself, I knew not exactly where or how, into this squirming, sighing protoplasmic mass that now covered my face with kisses and sought my mouth with hers.
Suzanne spread her legs to receive me. As she did, my hand chanced upon a slimy shaft of such mammoth proportions that I mistook it for a penis. I later learned, perusing one of my father’s gynecological atlases, that the colossal appendage was a prolapsed uterus that Suzanne could push back in at will through her vagina. The poor girl tried as best she could to conceal her discomfiture and secrete the grotesque infirmity while attempting to revive, to no avail, my deflated libido. Repulsed by the incongruity, I turned my back and eventually fell asleep. I remember dreaming that I was slithering on my belly through a dark, steep, viscous tunnel of unimaginable length. Then, an explosion of ecstasy ripped at my loins and I awoke to find that Suzanne had me in her mouth. I surrendered to the last vestiges of pleasure, feigning sleep at first then dozing off mercifully at last.
When I arose in the morning, Suzanne was up and about, helping my mother with some chores. We glanced at each other when no one looked. She smiled softly. I returned the smile. Suzanne took the bus back to Tel Aviv that afternoon. I never saw her again. All I thought about was chocolate.
A DISSOLUTE LITTLE BRAIN
Sister Louis and her younger colleague and substitute, Sister Clémence, a diminutive nun armed with a razor-sharp intellect and a tongue to match, were strict disciplinarians, founts of erudition and skilled teachers. They would struggle, for the next two years, to educate me or, as they put it, “to deposit something of value inside this untidy, dissolute little brain of yours!”
The broad knowledge the Sisters of St. Joseph possessed -- they were licensed to teach everything from algebra to zoology -- was often overshadowed by an appalling lack of objectivity. It was their very scholarship that enabled them, wherever they could, to skew history or to rewrite it by opining unabashedly about people long dead or editorializing about events exhaustively chronicled in the otherwise unembellished secular French government curriculum they were required to follow. Royalists, as are all devout French Catholics, they steadfastly extenuated the arrogance and cruelty of French monarchs by insisting that they were, after all, “good Catholics.” It is true that many of them spent much time genuflecting in their private gilded chapels on ermine stoles and rich brocades while their vassals lived in squalor, starved and died of the plague. Distant abstractions, the Crusades and the Inquisition elicited a kind of nostalgic admiration stripped of all compunction for the horrific crimes committed in their name.
I remember learning about the events that took place on the night of August 23, 1572, better known as the Saint-Bartholomew massacre, during which 3,000 Protestants were slaughtered in the streets of Paris on orders of Catherine de Medici. Reviewing the incident did not seem to evoke in my teachers any discernible unease. (News of the slaughter had been cheered by Spain’s Philip II, himself busy purging Spain of Protestants, Jews and Moors, and Pope Gregory XIII who, for lack of better things to do, reformed the calendar.)
It was at that time that began germinating in me the notion that the Inquisition, as an ethos and instrument of statecraft, did not expire in the bonfires of the Dark Ages but endured. It would mutate into the ghoulish instrument of colonization, racism, slavery, segregation, wars of imperialism (territorial and political) and the curtailment of civil rights in times of internal strife. Future events, some of which I would write about, among them the murder of Central American street children by police, and the state-sponsored persecution of indigenous minorities, would help crystallize this insight. I would later discover that historian Jacques Barzun, writing in From Dawn to Decadence, had far more eloquently reached the same conclusion:
“The many dictatorships of the 20th century have relied on [the Inquisition] and in free countries it thrives ad hoc -- hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War. In the United States at the present time the workings of ‘political correctness’ in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called ‘sensitive’ are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisition.”
The climate of fear and suspicion that befell America following the tragic events of September 11, 2001 would lend credence to the notion that the inquisitorial spirit, dormant in times of tranquility, will be speedily aroused in times of turmoil. To its immense credit, America, while vigilant, did not succumb to wholesale paranoia -- or at least did not openly admit to doing so as it secretly began to snoop into the lives of private citizens and launched undeclared, illegal, immoral and unwinnable wars.
Half a century earlier, injecting personal bias into their instructions, the sisters of Saint Joseph presided over their own kangaroo court. They scorned the Huguenot Henri of Navarre, but lavished him with praise when, crowned Henri IV and fearful for his neck, he converted to Catholicism. “Paris vaut bien une messe!” (“Paris is well worth a mass.”) Praise turned to condemnation when the king, now firmly enthroned, issued the Edict of Nantes, a decree restoring religious and political rights to French Protestants. A few chapters forward, my teachers applauded the Edict’s revocation, 87 years later, by the “Sun King,” Louis XIV, the archetype warmongering despot whose conceit was eclipsed only by his thirst for ostentation. Unaware of, or utterly indifferent to the immense suffering of their subjects, Louis XVI, who spent his reign tinkering with clocks, and his wife Marie-Antoinette, who plundered the nation’s coffers to keep the court royally entertained, elicited pity and sympathy.
“Ils étaient très pieux et se recueillaient en prière plusieurs fois par jour,” they intoned, exculpating crooks because “they were very pious and joined in prayer several times a day.” As these enormities were being casually spouted, I would retrieve from the depths of memory images of priests sprinkling holy water on tanks and canons and the fuselage of dive bombers so that Christians of one nation could wreak death and
destruction upon Christians of another nation with the full blessings of the “Almighty God.”
My impious orations, smack dab in the middle of history class, would elicit stern, if florid, reminders of God’s irrefutability:
“Between God and us rises a tall glass partition, transparent for Him, opaque for us,” Sister Louis would sermonize.
To which Sister Clémence would add, “God does not reveal Himself; we wouldn’t recognize Him anyway. To be found, He must be discovered.
“Discovered? Discovered?” I would retort. “Logic suggests that what doesn’t exist can’t be discovered. If God -- invented by man -- really existed, wouldn’t he by now have been discovered, validated?”
To which Sister Louis haughtily replied, “God grants us some of his spirit but will never reveal his logic.” (Or, as my uncle often asserted with self-justifying bravado, “I believe in God, therefore he is….”)
What I would learn from these debates and artful equivocations is that God might only be a hypothesis but that to many people he’s indispensable. Troubled by the subconscious fear that reason might dim his existence they struggle to rationalize it.
Knowledge demystifies myths; faith enshrines them.
*
The French Revolution, my teachers insisted, was “an outrage masterminded by Jewish financiers, Freemasons, degenerate philosophers and other irreligious libertines.” This characterization was nowhere to be found in the history text I’d been issued. It’s interesting to note that, in reading selected works by Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire (the chief “degenerate” French philosophers) we were encouraged to analyze and emulate their elegant literary style but enjoined from embracing their “amoral teachings.” The reign of terror that followed the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 was summarily blasted as a “grotesque act of barbarism against Christian values.” Yes, many innocent heads rolled during the two–year frenzy. But Sister Louis and Sister Clémence could not bring themselves to view the insurrection as the cathartic articulation of centuries of misery and oppression or as the impetus that would help rid France, for the first time in its history, from the yoke of feudalism, theocratic control and absolute monarchy. The assassination, in his bathtub, of Jean-Paul Marat, a populist physician, lawyer, journalist and legislator in 1793, would be flippantly dismissed as the “elimination of a scoundrel by a brave Catholic young woman [Charlotte Corday].” Corday, of noble birth, would die on the guillotine. In contrast, the beheading of two royal idlers who bankrupted France while they wined, dined, gambled, gathered in prayer and unleashed their dogs on helpless foxes, they insisted, was murder. Nor did my teachers seem to understand that revolution is a process, not an incident. History manuals tend to think of the French Revolution as a single event rather than a trend. The burgeoning concepts of human rights, equality, suffrage and the abolition of monarchy actually took root 100 years before the storming of the Bastille.