by Philip Roth
“Were you a Zionist when you were young?”
“I never had enough Hebrew, Yiddish, or anti-Semitism to make me a Zionist when I was young.”
“Is this your first trip?”
“No. I was here twenty years ago.”
“And you never came back?”
The way that a couple of the students laughed at that question made me wonder if they might not themselves be considering packing up and going home.
“Things didn’t lead me back.”
“‘Things.’” It was the large boy who’d indignantly asked why the class was listening to me. “You didn’t want to come back”
“Israel wasn’t at the center of my thoughts, no.”
“But you must have gone to other countries that weren’t at the center quote unquote.”
I saw how this could become, if it hadn’t already, an exchange even less satisfactory than my colloquy with the young Chasid at the Wailing Wall.
“How can a Jew,” he asked, “make a single visit to the homeland of his people, and then never, not in twenty years—”
I cut him off before he really got going. “It’s easy. I’m not the only one.”
“I just wonder what’s wrong with such a person, Zionist or not.”
“Nothing,” I said flatly.
“And it’s of no concern to you that the whole world would as soon see this country obliterated?”
Though a few of the girls began to shift about, ill at ease with his aggressive questioning, Ronit leaned forward in her chair, eager to hear my answer. I wondered if there might not be a conspiracy operating here—between the boy and Ronit, and even perhaps including Hanoch.
“Is that what the world would like?” I asked, meanwhile thinking that even if there was no preconceived plot, should I agree to stay the night this could well turn out to be one of the least restful Sabbaths of my life.
“Who would shed a tear?” the boy replied. “Certainly not a Jew who in twenty years, despite the persistent danger to the Jewish people—”
“Look,” I said, “admittedly I’ve never had the right caste spirit—I take your point about people like me. I’m not unfamiliar with such fanaticism.”
This brought him to his feet, furiously pointing a finger. “Excuse me! What is fanatical? To put egoism before Zionism is what is fanatical! To put personal gain and personal pleasure before the survival of the Jewish people! Who is fanatical? The Diaspora Jew! All the evidence that the goyim give him and give him that the survival of the Jews couldn’t matter to them less, and the Diaspora Jew believes they are friends! Believes that in their country he is safe and secure—an equal! What is fanatical is the Jew who never learns! The Jew oblivious to the Jewish state and the Jewish land and the survival of the Jewish people! That is the fanatic—fanatically ignorant, fanatically self-deluded, fanatically full of shame!”
I stood too, putting my back to Jerry and the class. “Henry and I are going for a walk,” I said to Ronit. “I came out really to talk to him.”
Her eyes remained just as bright as before with passionate curiosity. “But Jerry has had his say—you’re entitled now to yours.”
Was it overly suspicious to believe that the naïveté was feigned and she was having me on? “I’ll relinquish my rights,” I said.
“He’s young,” she explained.
“Yes, but I’m not.”
“But to the class your thoughts would be fascinating. Many are children of deeply assimilationist families. The egregious failure of American Jews, of most Jews of the world, to seize the opportunity to return to Zion is something that all of them are grappling with. If you—”
“I’d rather not.”
“But just a few words about assimilation—”
I shook my head.
“But assimilation and intermarriage,” she said, turning quite grave, “in America they are bringing about a second Holocaust—truly, a spiritual Holocaust is taking place there, and it is as deadly as any threat posed by the Arabs to the State of Israel. What Hitler couldn’t achieve with Auschwitz, American Jews are doing to themselves in the bedroom. Sixty-five percent of American Jewish college students marry non-Jews—sixty-five percent lost forever to the Jewish people! First there was the hard extermination, now there is the soft extermination. And this is why young people are learning Hebrew at Agor—to escape the Jewish oblivion, the extinction of Jews that is coming in America, to escape those communities in your country where Jews are committing spiritual suicide.”
“I see,” was all I replied.
“You won’t talk to them about this, for just a few minutes, just till it’s time for their lunch?”
“I don’t think my credentials qualify me to talk about this. I happen to be married to a non-Jew myself.”
“All the better,” she said, smiling warmly. “They can talk to you.”
“No, no thanks. It’s Henry who I’m here to talk to. I haven’t seen him for months.”
Ronit took hold of my arm as I started away, rather like a friend who hates to see you go. She seemed to like me, despite my faulty credentials; probably my brother acted as my advocate. “But you will stay for Shabbat,” Ronit said. “My husband had to be in Bethlehem today, but he’s looking forward to meeting you tonight. You and Hanoch are coming for dinner.”
“We’ll see how things go.”
“No, no, you’re coming. Henry must have told you—they have become great friends, your brother and my husband. They’re very alike, two strong and dedicated men.”
Her husband was Mordecai Lippman.
* * *
From the moment that we started along the path that sloped down the hill toward the two long unpaved streets that constituted Agor’s residential quarter, Henry began making it clear that we weren’t going to sit in the shade somewhere having a deep discussion about whether or not he’d done the right thing by seizing the opportunity to return to Zion. He was now nothing like as friendly as he’d seemed when I’d showed up in front of his class. Instead, as soon as we two were alone, he immediately turned querulous. He had no intention, he told me, of being reproved by me and wouldn’t tolerate any attempt to investigate or challenge his motives. He’d talk about Agor, if I wanted to know what this place stood for, he’d talk about the settlement movement, its roots and ideology and what the settlers were determined to achieve, he’d talk about the changes in the country since Begin’s coalition had taken charge, but as for the American-style psychiatric soul-searching in which my own heroes could wallow for pages on end, that was a form of exhibitionistic indulgence and childish self-dramatization that blessedly belonged to the “narcissistic past.” The old life of non-historical personal problems seemed to him now embarrassingly, disgustingly, unspeakably puny.
Telling me all this, he had worked up more emotion than anything I’d said could possibly have inspired, especially as I had as yet said nothing. It was one of those speeches that people spend hours preparing and delivering while lying in bed unable to sleep. The smiles up at the ulpan had been for the crowd. This was the distrustful fellow I’d talked to on the phone the night before.
“Fine,” I said. “No psychiatry.”
Still on the offense, he said, “And don’t condescend to me.”
“Well, don’t knock my wallowing heroes. Besides, I wouldn’t say condescension has been my strong suit, not so far today. I myself wasn’t even condescended to by that kid up in your class. I was mugged by the little prick in broad daylight.”
“Forthright is the style out here—take it or leave it. And no shit, please, about my name.”
“Relax. Anybody can call you anything you want, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You still don’t get it. The hell with me, forget me. Me is somebody I have forgotten. Me no longer exists out here. There isn’t time for me, there isn’t need of me—here Judea counts, not me!”
His plan was to ride over to Arab Hebron for lunch, only a twenty-minute drive if we followed the sho
rtcut through the hills. We could use Lippman’s car. Mordecai and four other settlers had gone off by truck to Bethlehem early that morning. In the last several weeks, disturbances had erupted there between some local Arabs and the Jews of a little settlement newly erected on a hillside outside the city. Two days earlier rocks had been thrown through the windshield of a passing school bus carrying the Jewish settlement’s children, and settlement members from all over Judea and Samaria, organized and led by Mordecai Lippman, had gone to distribute leaflets in the Bethlehem market. If I hadn’t been visiting, Henry was to have skipped his class and gone with them.
“What do the leaflets say?” I asked.
“They say, ‘Why don’t you people try living in peace with us, since we mean you no harm. Only a few among you are violent extremists. The rest are peace-loving people who believe, as we do, that Jew and Arab can live in harmony.’ That’s the general idea.”
“The general idea sounds benign enough. What’s it supposed to mean to the Arabs?”
“What it says—we intend them no harm.”
Not me—we. That’s where Henry’s me had gone.
“We’ll drive through the village—it’s right down there. You’ll see how the Arabs who want to can live in peace, side by side, only a couple of hundred yards away. They come up here and buy our eggs. The chickens that are too old to lay, we sell to them for pennies. This place could be a home for everybody. But if violence against Jewish schoolchildren continues, then steps will be taken to stop it. The army could move in there tomorrow, weed out the troublemakers, and the stone throwing would be over in five minutes. But they don’t. They even throw stones at the soldiers. And when the soldier does nothing, you know what the Arabs think? They think you are a shmuck—and you are a shmuck. Any place else in the Middle East, you throw a stone at a soldier, and what does he do? He shoots you. But suddenly they discover in Bethlehem that you throw a stone at an Israeli soldier and he doesn’t shoot you. He doesn’t do anything. And that’s where the trouble begins. Not because we are cruel, but because they have found out we are weak. There are things you have to do here that are not so nice. They don’t respect niceness and they don’t respect weakness. What the Arab respects is power.”
Not me but we, not niceness but power.
I waited by the battered Ford that was parked on the dirt street outside the Lippman house, one of the cinder-block structures that had looked from the entry road like pillboxes or bunkers. Up close you couldn’t quite believe that life within was very far from the embryonic stage of human development. Everything, including the load of topsoil deposited in a corner of each of the dry, stony yards, proclaimed a world of bare beginnings. Two, maybe even three of these little settlement dwellings could have been stored without difficulty in the basement of the sprawling house of cedar and glass built by Henry some years back on a wooded hillside in South Orange.
When he came out of Lippman’s, it was with car keys in one hand and a pistol in the other. He tossed the pistol into the glove compartment and started the engine.
“I’m trying,” I told him, “to take things in stride, but it’s going to entail almost superhuman restraint not to make the sort of comment that’s going to piss you off. Nonetheless, it’s a little astonishing to be going off for a drive with you and a gun.”
“I know. It’s not how we were raised. But a gun isn’t a bad idea driving down to Hebron. If you run into a demonstration, if they surround the car and start heaving rocks, at least you have some bargaining power. Look, you’re going to see a lot of things that are going to astonish you. They astonish me. You know what astonishes me even more than what I’ve learned to do in five months here? What I learned to do in forty years there. To do and to be. I shudder when I remember everything I was. I look back and I can’t believe it. It fills me with revulsion. It makes me want to hide my head when I think how I wound up.”
“How was that?”
“You saw it, you were there. You heard it. What I risked my life for. What I had that operation for. Who I had it for. That skinny little kid in my office. That’s what I was willing to die for. That’s what I was living for.”
“No, it was a part of living. Why not? Losing your potency at thirty-nine isn’t an ordinary little experience. Life came down very hard on you.”
“You don’t understand. I’m talking about how small I was. I’m talking about my grotesque apology for a life.”
It was several hours on, after we’d been through the alleyways of the Hebron market and up to the ancient olive trees by the graves of Hebron’s Jewish martyrs, and then on to the burial ground of the Patriarchs, that I got him to expand a little on that grotesque life he’d abandoned. We were eating lunch on the open terrace of a small restaurant on the main road out of Hebron. The Arab family who ran the place couldn’t have been more welcoming; indeed, the owner, who took our order in English, called Henry “Doctor” with considerable esteem. It was late by then and aside from a young Arab couple and their small child eating at a corner table nearby, the place was empty.
Henry, to make himself comfortable, draped his field jacket over the back of his chair, the pistol still in one pocket. That’s where he’d been carrying it during our tour of Hebron. Shepherding me through the crowded market, he pointed out the abundance of fruits, vegetables, chickens, sweets, even while my mind remained on his pistol, and on Chekhov’s famous dictum that a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One must eventually go off in Act Three. I wondered what act we were in, not to mention which play—domestic tragedy, historical epic, or just straight farce? I wasn’t sure whether the pistol was strictly necessary or whether he was simply displaying, as drastically as he could, the distance he’d traveled from the powerless nice Jew that he’d been in America, this pistol his astounding symbol of the whole complex of choices with which he was ridding himself of that shame. “Here are the Arabs,” he’d said in the marketplace, “and where is the yoke? Do you see a yoke across anyone’s back? Do you see a soldier threatening anyone? You don’t see a soldier here at all. No, just a thriving Oriental bazaar. And why is that? Because of the brutal military occupation?”
The only sign of the military I’d seen was a small installation about a hundred yards down from the market, where Henry had left the car. Inside the gates some Israeli soldiers were kicking a soccer ball around an open area where their trucks were parked, but as Henry said, there was no military presence within the market, only Arab stallkeepers, Arab shoppers, scores of small Arab children, some very unamicable-looking Arab adolescents, lots of dust, several mules, some beggars, and Dr. Victor Zuckerman’s two sons, Nathan and Hanoch, the latter packing a gun whose implications had begun obsessively to engage the former. What if who he shoots is me? What if that was to be Act Three’s awful surprise, the Zuckerman differences ending in blood, as though our family were Agamemnon’s?
At lunch I began with what couldn’t be taken right off as a remonstrance or a challenge, given his enthusiasm about the antiquity of a wall that he’d wanted me to see at the Cave of Machpelah. How holy, I asked, was that wall to him? “Suppose it’s all as you tell me,” I said. “In Hebron Abraham pitched his tent. In the cave of Machpelah he and Sarah were buried, and after them Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. It’s here that King David reigned before he entered Jerusalem. What’s any of it got to do with you?”
“That’s where the claim rests,” he said. “That’s it. It’s no accident, you know, that we’re called Jews and this place is called Judea—there may even be some relation between those two things. We are Jews, this is Judea, and the heart of Judea is Abraham’s city, Hebron.”
“That still leaves unexplained the riddle of Henry Zuckerman’s identification with Abraham’s city.”
“You don’t get it—this is where the Jews began, not in Tel Aviv but here. If anything is territorialism, if anything is colonialism, it’s Tel Aviv, it’s Haifa. This is Judaism, this is Zionism, right here where we are eating our lunch!”
“In other words, it didn’t all begin up that outside flight of wooden stairs where Grandma and Grandpa lived on Hunterdon Street. It didn’t begin with Grandma on her knees washing the floors and Grandpa stinking of old cigars. Jews didn’t begin in Newark, after all.”
“The famous gift for reductive satire.”
“Is it? It might be that what you’ve developed over the last five months is something of a gift for exaggeration.”
“I don’t think that the part that the Jewish Bible has played in the history of the world owes much to me and my illusions.”
“I was thinking more about the part you seem to have assigned yourself in the tribal epic. Do you pray too?”
“The subject’s not under discussion.”
“You do pray then.”
Riled by my insistence, he asked, “What’s wrong with prayer, is there something wrong with prayer?”
“When do you pray?”
“Before I go to sleep.”
“What do you say?”
“What Jews have said for thousands of years. I say the Shema Yisrael.”
“And in the morning you lay tefillin?”
“Maybe one day. I don’t yet.”
“And you observe the Sabbath.”
“Look, I understand that this is all outside your element. I understand that hearing all this you feel nothing but the disdainful amusement of the fashionably ‘objective,’ postassimilated Jew. I realize that you’re too ‘enlightened’ for God and that to you it’s clearly all a joke.”
“Don’t be so sure what to me is a joke. If I happen to have questions I wouldn’t mind answered, it’s because six months ago I had a different brother.”
