I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  The apartment was on Be’eri Street, I remember. More precisely, it was at 4 Be’eri Street, the address my research now tells me was where Meyer Lansky had lived when he wasn’t living at the Dan. I’ve been back to look at the building a few times—I went just yesterday to look at it again. Of course I hadn’t seen the apartment yet when I came home that night from Jerusalem, having watched Lansky from afar as he stood outside the Palace of Justice. I closed the door behind me and stood inside the hall and called out Rachel’s name, but she didn’t answer. I sensed even then that there was a reason she wasn’t answering. It was almost midnight and she stood there at the stove with her back to me, wearing her old shapeless robe. She would have been six months pregnant with Eliav. When she finally turned, I had an unmistakable glimpse of my own irrelevance.

  Yours,

  David Bellen

  It was in the business center of a Hampton Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina, that I first read this e-mail. I sat there piecing together its significance beneath the fluorescent light, wondering what I was going to say in three weeks to Bellen’s ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, in Jerusalem. Of course Bellen never mentions the waitress’s name in his e-mail. I supposed it was possible that she wasn’t Gila. I supposed it was possible that there was another waitress at the Dan Hotel who also happened to have an empty apartment in Tel Aviv, or, more plausibly perhaps, that the waitress, whoever it was, had borrowed the apartment from someone else. Perhaps it was at someone else’s apartment, and not the one in Gila’s photographs, that the waitress had slept with David Bellen in 1973. But perhaps not.

  He would have been still in his twenties, Gila, a little older, thirty-four. He comes into the hotel bar and orders coffee, and when he introduces himself the name David Bellen means nothing to her, nothing to anyone at that point. He tells her where he’s been—he’s been covering the Lansky trial—and she’s silent for a moment, but not long enough for him to notice. Everyone in Israel has been following the case. She doesn’t react to the name with interest or humor or excitement. Perhaps the young journalist doesn’t even tell her his full name. Perhaps he’s just David, like so many other Israeli men.

  I’ve been back to look at the building a few times—I went just yesterday to look at it again.

  I read that sentence a few times before I referred back to the date of the e-mail’s composition. “Yesterday,” I realized, was only two days before Bellen had died.

  I flew to Ben-Gurion International Airport for the second time in December of 2011, about seven weeks after Eliav’s death. I had saved to my cell phone the photograph Gila had taken of us together after our lunch the previous year in New York, that uncomfortable picture in which I seemed to be willing myself into invisibility or ghostliness. “Strange,” Gila had said that afternoon. Everyone says that word, “strange.” Of course the photograph I really wished I had on that second trip to Israel was one of the 5×7 prints Gila had shown me of the empty apartment, the apartment I now suspected was at 4 Be’eri Street. I had called Gila’s friend Hugh to see if by any chance he’d found those prints among Gila’s belongings. I hadn’t known until then how naïve a question that was. There are of course services that handle such things, professionals who clean out the houses of deceased people who leave behind no relatives or friends, or whose friends are too busy to sort through the remnants themselves. The 5×7 prints, like so much else that Gila had left behind, had been thrown away.

  Rachel Kessler was more imposing than I expected—brown, almond-shaped eyes, short dark hair that spoke not just of practicality but of something more like renunciation. She’d been a dancer in her youth and had by all accounts been very beautiful, and you could still see this in the straight, somewhat clerical way she stood, the simple ease of her long oatmeal-colored sweater and her black soft-sided boots. It was the way my mother might have dressed if she were still alive, the way some women artists dress who are Rachel’s age. I knew by now that Rachel had grown up not in Israel but in Silver Spring, Maryland, that she had fallen in love with Israel and the idea of Israel on a college semester abroad in 1968. She was twenty-four when she married Bellen, twenty-five when they had Eliav, Rachel still a newcomer, an idealistic young woman who’d left behind a family and a stable life in the U.S. for an unfamiliar country in a state of permanent war. You can take an English-language tour now with Rachel Kessler through the various neighborhoods of Jerusalem, as well as tours of Masada, the Knesset, the Israel Museum, Yad Vashem. On my second day there, I went with her on a tour of Center City, including her own neighborhood, Talbiyeh, where she explained to her group that the Palestinian mansion we saw before us had been abandoned by its original owner only to fall into the care of a Jewish refugee, who’d painstakingly catalogued and stored the house’s contents in preparation for the owner’s return, though that owner had never returned, and so what could be done? I have seen the contents of such mansions for sale in the flea markets of Tel Aviv—even now you can buy the furniture and china and jewelry of Palestinians who fled in 1948—but I found myself unable to say anything contradictory to Rachel in front of that audience, unable because of the losses she herself has endured. It’s an interesting story, she’d said when I’d told her the long, complicated tale of Gila and me. Nowadays someone like Gila would be a businessperson. She’d be middle class. Maybe a real estate broker. That’s where the money is now, of course. She’d said this and I’d felt that my story, compared to the story of her and Bellen and Eliav, could only make her feel that I wasn’t a serious writer, that I was something else, perhaps something more like a member of the paparazzi.

  On the afternoon after I followed her tour, we sat at a restaurant near my hotel and talked about Gila, Bellen, Eliav, Lansky, the odd connections between their disparate stories. We had discussed via e-mail the Hebrew word Gila had introduced me to, yored, its sense “of going down, of descending, of being corrupt.” I reminded Rachel now of the epigraph to Bellen’s essay “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” in which the scholar Alan Fried writes of seeing the world through “the gangster’s eye,” the eye that views the world as divided into contrary groups of “wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived.” I gathered that Bellen saw himself and Eliav through that lens while writing the piece and I wondered what Rachel thought about this.

  “I’m sorry to keep reminding you of such unpleasant things,” I said when she didn’t answer at first.

  She looked at her fingers on the stem of her glass of wine. “It’s not all unpleasant,” she said. “They were people I loved. Both of them, very much. In any case, you don’t have to remind me of those unpleasant things. They’re always there.”

  What made it difficult to talk about all this, she told me, was what she could only describe as an uncanny element to the rift between Bellen and Eliav. They’d been at odds from the very beginning, she told me, the rift so fundamental that it seemed predetermined, genetic. Eliav was quiet, inward, watchful. Bellen was not exactly loud but he could be exuberant, even when he didn’t want to be. It was a side of himself he sometimes struggled to suppress in his writing, his South Tel Aviv boisterousness, his coarseness, and this, Rachel thought, was the basis of the problem between him and Eliav, even from the very beginning. Before Eliav could possibly understand any of this, he picked up on his father’s mild shame, intuited it somehow in his father’s posture, his occasional evasiveness or furtiveness. Bellen’s exuberance, which was much stronger than this shame, perversely made Eliav even more silent, more watchful—his father’s irreverence and gaiety seemed to embarrass or disappoint Eliav, who became quieter as he grew more aware of his own scorn.

  “He was ten when David left,” Rachel went on. “But of course he knew it was coming—we both knew that. David couldn’t help himself, it was the way he was made. There were a lot of women. I didn’t like it, I was furious with him, but I loved him. I couldn’t help but love him. But Eliav was always there too, in the background, and he would have to wi
tness the tension between us, no matter how much we tried to conceal it from him. It made David begin to move farther and farther away, not only because of me and my anger but because Eliav was always there, watching it all.”

  It was a warm enough afternoon even in December that we were sitting on the porch beside a wall of gold-colored Jerusalem stone, surrounded by succulent plants and cacti, protected from the sun’s glare by white panels slung like sails from black cords above our heads. When the waitress brought our food, she wore a starched apron and a man’s dark necktie. It was not unlike the restaurant at which Gila and I had had lunch in New York the previous year, I told Rachel. The menu’s graphics were like something from New York—like something from anywhere, I realized. Roasted eggplant with sriracha remoulade, summer rolls with duck breast and avocado, endive salad with Sainte-Maure cheese. All over the world now, everywhere you go, there’s a restaurant that will know how to make the most of whatever is charming about its faded neighborhood and will present it in some understated, idiosyncratic way.

  “The affairs made him paranoid and extreme,” Rachel said, speaking again of Bellen. “In his personal life, of course, but also in the way he saw the whole world. Because the world is also like this: a glass of white wine on a nice day. Even in Israel, it’s like this. I don’t think he ever really accepted that. In his imagination there was never any room for forgiveness, no room for healing. It bored him, my forgiveness. It was worse than that—it disgusted him. So eventually I had to stop trying to forgive him.”

  I thought of the Ivan Schwebel painting that Bellen refers to in his Lansky essay, the image of King David’s first wife, Michal, confronting him on the street at night as in a Hollywood movie, “her eyes moist and accusing in the way of a betrayed woman.” He has indeed betrayed her and he will betray her further and in the picture both he and his first wife seem to already know this, Bellen wrote. I’m not comfortable when people cry, particularly people I don’t know, in a public place in a foreign country. I guess no one is comfortable with it. Touch her hand, I told myself. Say you’re sorry. I did these things, and Rachel smirked as she kept sniffling, ashamed of herself.

  “Eliav hardly inherited anything from David,” she said then. “But I think it upset him to take what little there was. It will sound simplistic, but I think taking that money was what led to his relapse, his overdose. It took a long time, almost three years, but I think that was the root of it.”

  For everything man does has significance. An evil act will generally cause some disruption or negative reaction in the vast system of the Sefirot; and a good act, correct or raise things to a higher level. Each of the reactions extends out into all of the worlds and comes back into our own, back upon ourselves, in one form or another.

  I thought, wolves and lambs, predators and victims, winners and losers, deceivers and deceived. Except of course that everyone is all of those things. God says to David, And so now, the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore. The sword that comes from outside, in the form of enemies, but also the sword that comes from inside, the sword with which we bifurcate ourselves.

  In this way, everyone is yored in the end.

  At her house back in Talbiyeh, Rachel showed me some of Eliav’s belongings, which she had in boxes and flat files in her study. In particular, she showed me an oil painting made by Eliav when he was only seventeen, a portrait of his father, Bellen. The poet’s homely face was depicted as it was—craggy, eccentric, bespectacled—but with a willful ugliness that rendered it somehow beautiful. The cheekbones and the eye sockets were etched in thick jagged lines, blacks and reds and beiges, like some mask from a thousand years ago. It seemed to have been painted, like all the other work of Eliav’s that Rachel showed me that afternoon, out of a pure and purely unreflective talent. Eliav had been a prodigy, it turned out. That both the artist and his subject were dead now gave the painting of his father an uncanny sense of permanence. There was the watcher and the watched, forever fixed in that relationship.

  There were sketchbooks from his high school years, along with photo albums of more elaborate pieces—paintings and also sculptures of clay, papier-mâché, and even cast bronze. It’s the sketchbooks, though, that I remember particularly well. In them, Eliav would spend five or six consecutive pages executing colored drawings in the styles of various modern masters: Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, Kandinsky, Pollock, De Kooning. Five or six pages would be all it took for him not only to master the particular vocabulary of the artist he was imitating but to ingeniously explore it in different ways through his own inventions. There were no blank pages, no false starts or scratch-outs, no sheets removed. The sketchbook was like a primer on twentieth-century art, executed by a highly skilled draftsman who if anything was a little too skilled. The talent was a kind of shorthand, all technique. I wondered what someone would do with that kind of talent once they got old enough to learn that it was not the same as making “art,” that in fact “art” as it exists now has practically nothing to do with such technique.

  There was another artifact from Eliav’s youth that I remember, though it was not impressive in the same way—it was, perhaps deliberately, unimpressive on the level of technique. It was a series of black-and-white photographs that Eliav had taken in the streets of Tel Aviv in the late 1980s and early ’90s—portraits of ordinary people, working people, men and women in dry cleaners, supermarkets, hair salons, bakeries, garages. The subjects were never looking into the camera. Instead the images had a random, even accidental quality—a quality of neutral surveillance, of ordinary people not realizing they were being looked at—that made them more haunting. I think Eliav understood that these photographs were haunting and perhaps he even understood why. I think this because of a quotation he thought to include on the last page of the album in which he’d arranged the photographs at the age of eighteen. The quotation, from Kafka, was in Hebrew, but Rachel paraphrased it for me (I have given it here as translated by Willa and Edwin Muir):

  In a light that is fierce and strong one can see the world dissolve. To weak eyes it becomes solid, to weaker eyes it shows fists, before still weaker eyes it feels ashamed and smites down him who dares to look at it.

  Rachel’s husband, Dov, had come quietly into the study and stood behind her now where she was seated in her chair, his hand on her shoulder. He was gruff, nearly silent, a white-haired and white-bearded physicist in an expensive blue suit and yarmulke.

  “We’ve been going through these old boxes,” Rachel said to me then. “It was such a strange thing—we just happened to be moving to this new house right when Eliav died. I guess in some ways that was good. It obviously gave us something else we had to think about.”

  She had the album of photographs still in her lap. There was another thing she wanted to tell me that afternoon, it turned out, something she’d never told anyone before, except for Dov. She told me that Eliav used to say that he had a recurring nightmare. In this recurring nightmare, he was forced to stand in an empty room and watch while his father was executed.

  “I always thought that was strange,” she said, looking down, the photo album in her lap now forgotten, unseen. “Not for the obvious reason, but because I had never thought of it as happening in a room. I had pictured it happening outside. But in the nightmare it would happen in a room. An empty room. ‘I was in the room where it happened,’ Eliav would say.”

  In my hotel room that night, I read Haaretz, then the Jerusalem Post, all the while the TV news on in the background, a stream of images accompanied by words I couldn’t understand. Apart from Iran and the fear of Iran, the news seemed to be largely about fanaticism—extremist Jewish settlers who had attacked an Israeli military base in the West Bank, some ultra-Orthodox men who had spat on a young girl walking to school in clothes they deemed insufficiently modest. Though I’d arrived just a few days ago, Israel was already unlike what I remembered from my last trip. I felt surrounded this time not by ancient intractable conflict but by cynical glo
ating—Orthodox women in clothes so unflattering you wondered where they found the stores that sold such items, their sons in football jerseys and basketball shoes and embroidered kippot. I connected my laptop to the hotel’s Wi-Fi and looked further into the story about the settlers who’d attacked the military base. John Walker Lindh—that’s who they reminded me of—the suburban American boy who through aimless disaffection had wound up joining the Taliban. The settlers, I learned, were part of a broader movement known as the Hilltop Youth, who desecrated mosques, assaulted Palestinians and destroyed their fields, and had now attacked one of Israel’s own military bases. It was a photograph, as it often is, that sealed my interest. The image seemed to encapsulate all the contradictions of this group of mostly young men and their romanticized relationship to violence—the organic farming in the desert, the camping and mountaineering T-shirts, the scraggly beards and talisim and ornate skullcaps, their remote outposts consisting of corrugated aluminum sheds, or just tents and old sofas, plastic tarps and rifles and guitars. The incoherent need to believe in something—the need that then goes looking for a cause, an ideal. Fighting the Man. Fighting the Palestinians. Fighting nothing. I had a sudden waking dream there in my hotel room of David Bellen being marched across a field by some of those boys in their beards and cargo pants. I saw it very clearly: Bellen struggling forward over the rocky ground, stooped over and handcuffed, his arms exposed by the short sleeves of a stained white undershirt. His glasses were broken, his face smeared with blood. He was like an animal left in their care, a repository of some collective shame that had to do with the boys’ need to punish him. Whatever game they were playing now was played solemnly, without words, without taunting or joy. It was obvious that Bellen knew what would happen next.