by Philip Roth
And still not a word of remorse—not any word at all—about Carol or the kids. Amazing. Though he phones the children every Sunday, and expects them to fly over to visit him at Passover, he’s given not a single sign to me that he’s still in any way fettered by the sentiments of a husband and father. And about my new life in London, my renovation, of more than passing interest even to Shuki Elchanan, Henry has nothing to ask. He appears to have totally repudiated his life, all of us, and all he’s been through, and anybody who does that, I thought, must be taken seriously. Not only do such people qualify as true converts but, for a while at least, they become criminals of a kind—to those they’ve abandoned, even to themselves, even perhaps to those with whom they’ve formed their new pact—and this true conversion can’t be dismissed any more easily than it can be comprehended. Listening to his mentor’s professional voice rising in song above the rest, I thought, “Whatever the tangle of motive in him, he certainly hasn’t been drawn to nothing.”
There was a second song, a melody more lyrical and poignant than the first, and the voice that dominated now was Ronit’s, leading with her folksingerish, fervent soprano. Singing in the Sabbath, Ronit looked as contented with her lot as any woman could be, her eyes shining with love for a life free of Jewish cringing, deference, diplomacy, apprehension, alienation, self-pity, self-satire, self-mistrust, depression, clowning, bitterness, nervousness, inwardness, hypercriticalness, hypertouchiness, social anxiety, social assimilation—a way of life absolved, in short, of all the Jewish “abnormalities,” those peculiarities of self-division whose traces remained imprinted in just about every engaging Jew I knew.
Lippman blessed the wine with Hebrew words familiar even to me, and as I sipped from my glass along with everyone else, I thought, “Can it be a conscious ploy? What if it isn’t still more of that passionate, driving naïveté for which he has always shown such talent but a calculated and devilishly cynical act? What if Henry has signed on with the Jewish cause without believing a word? Could he have become that interesting?”
“And,” Lippman said, lowering his glass and speaking in the smallest, soothing, most delicate voice, “that’s it—the whole thing.” He was addressing me. “There it is. The meaning of this country in a nutshell. This is a place where nobody has to apologize for wearing a little hat on his head and singing a couple of songs with his family and friends before he eats his Friday night meal. It’s as simple as that.”
Smiling at his smile, I said, “Is it?”
He pointed proudly to his handsome young wife. “Ask her. Ask Ronit. Her parents weren’t even religious Jews. They were ethnic Jews and no more—probably, from what Hanoch tells me, like your family in New Jersey. Hers was in Pelham, but the same thing, I’m sure. Ronit didn’t even know what religion was. But still nowhere she lived in America did she feel right. Pelham, Ann Arbor, Boston—it made no difference, she never felt right. Then, in ’67, she heard on the radio there was a war, she got on a plane and she came to help. She worked in a hospital. She saw everything. The worst of it. When it was over she stayed. She came here and she felt right and she stayed. That’s the whole story. They come and they see that there is no need to apologize anymore and they stay. Only the goody-goods need to be approved of by the goy, only the niceys who want people to say nice things about them in Paris and London and New York. To me it is incredible that there are still Jews, even here, even in the country where they are masters, who live for the goy to smile at them and tell them that they are right. Sadat came here a little while back, you remember, and he was smiling, and they screamed with joy in the streets, those Jews. My enemy is smiling at me! Our enemy loves us after all! Oh, the Jew, the Jew, how he rushes to forgive! How he wants the goy to throw him just a little smile! How desperately he wants that smile! Only the Arab is very good at smiling and lying at the same time. He is also good at throwing stones—so long as nobody stops him. But I will tell you something, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman: if nobody else will stop him, I will. And if the army doesn’t like me to do it, let the army come and fire on me. I have read Mr. Mahatma Gandhi and Mr. Henry David Thoreau, and if the Jewish army wants to fire upon a Jewish settler in biblical Judea while the Arab is looking on, let him—let the Arab witness such Jewish craziness. If the government wants to act like the British, then we will act like the Jews! We will practice civil disobedience and proceed by illegal settlement, and let their Jewish army come and stop us! I dare this Jewish government, I dare any Jewish government, to try to evict us by force! As for the Arabs, I will go back to Bethlehem every day—and I told this to their leader, I told them all, and in their own tongue so they would not fail to understand, so there will not be any doubt what my intentions are: I will come here with my people, and I will stand here with my people, until the Arab stops throwing stones at the Jew. Because do not comfort yourself, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman from London, Newark, New York, and points west—they are not throwing stones at Israelis. They are not throwing stones at ‘West Bank’ lunatics. They are throwing stones at Jews. Every stone is an anti-Semitic stone. That is why it must stop!”
He paused dramatically for a response. I said only, “Good luck,” but those two syllables were enough to inspire an even more impassioned aria.
“We don’t need luck! God protects us! All we need is never to give ground and God will see to the rest! We are God’s instrument! We are building the Land of Israel! See this man?” he said, pointing to the metalworker. “Buki lived in Haifa like a king. Look at the car he drives—it’s a Lancia! And yet he comes with his wife to live with us. To build Israel! For the love of the Land of Israel! We are not Jewish losers in love with loss. We are people of hope! Tell me, when have Jews been so well off, even with all our problems? All we need is not to give ground, and if the army wants to fire on us, let them! We are not delicate roses—we are here to stay! Sure, in Tel Aviv, in the café, in the university, in the newspaper office, the nice, humane Jew can’t stand it. Shall I tell you why? I think he is actually jealous of the losers. Look at how sad he looks, the loser, look at him sitting there losing, how helpless he looks, how moving. I should be the one who is moving because I am sad and hopeless and lost, not him—I am the one who loses, not him—how dare he steal my touching melancholy, my Jewish softness! But if this is a game that only one can win—and those are rules the Arabs have set, those are the rules established not by us but by them—then somebody must lose. And when he loses, it is not pretty—he loses bitterly. It is not loss if it is not bitter! Just ask us, we are the experts on the subject. The loser hates and is the virtuous one, and the winner wins and is wicked. Okay,” he said lightly, a thoroughly reasonable man, “I accept it. Let us be wicked winners for the next two thousand years, and when the two thousand years are over, when it is 3978, we will take a vote on which we prefer. The Jew will democratically decide whether he wants to bear the injustice of winning or whether he prefers living again with the honor of losing. And whatever the majority wants, I too will agree, in 3978. But in the meantime, we do not give ground!”
“I am in Norway,” the metalworker, Buki, said to me. “I go there on business. I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read, ‘Down with Israel,’ I think, ‘What did Israel ever do to Norway?’ I know Israel is a terrible country, but after all, there are countries even more terrible. There are so many terrible countries—why is this country the most terrible? Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya,’ and leave Israel alone.” His dark brown eyes, fixed upon mine, appeared to be set in his head crookedly because of a long jagged scar on his forehead. His English came haltingly, but with forceful fluency all the same, as though he had mastered the language in one large gulp just the day before. “Sir, why all over the world do they hate Menachem Be
gin?” he asked me. “Because of politics? In Bolivia, in China, in Scandinavia, what do they care about Begin’s politics? They hate him because of his nose!”
Lippman cut in. “The demonization,” he told me, “will never end. It started in the Middle Ages as the demonization of the Jew and now in our age it is the demonization of the Jewish state. But it is always the same, the Jew is always committing the crime. We don’t accept Christ, we reject Mohammed, we commit ritual murder, we control white slavery, we wish through sexual intercourse to poison the Aryan bloodstream, and now we have really ruined everything, now we have perpetrated truly monstrous evil, the worst the world press has ever known, upon the innocent, peaceful, blameless Arab. The Jew is a problem. How wonderful for everybody it would be without us.”
“And in America that will happen,” Buki said to me. “Don’t think it won’t.”
“What will happen?” I asked.
“In America there will be a great invasion—of Latinos, of Puerto Ricans, people fleeing poverty and the revolutions. And the white Christians will not like it. The white Christians will turn against the dirty foreigner. And when the white Christian turns against the dirty foreigner, the dirty foreigner he turns against first will be the Jew.”
“We have no desire for such a catastrophe,” Lippman explained. “We have seen enough catastrophe. But unless something momentous is done to stop it, this catastrophe too will occur: between the hammer of the pious white American Christian and the anvil of the dirty foreigner, the Jew in America will be crushed—if he is not slaughtered first by the blacks, the blacks in the ghettos who are already sharpening their knives.”
I interrupted him. “And how do the blacks accomplish this slaughter?” I asked. “With or without the help of the federal government?”
“Don’t worry,” Lippman said, “the American goy will let them loose when the time is ripe. There is nothing the American goy would like better than a Judenrein United States. First,” Lippman informed me, “they permit the resentful blacks to take all their hatred out on the Jews, and afterward they take care of the blacks. And without the nosy Jews around to complain that they are violating black civil rights. Thus will come the Great American Pogrom out of which American white purity will be restored. You think this is ludicrous, the ridiculous nightmare of a paranoid Jew? But I am not only a paranoid Jew. Remember: Ich bin ein Berliner as well. And not out of run-of-the-mill opportunism—not like your handsome, heroic, young President when he announced that he was one with them to all the jubilant ex-Nazis, before, unfortunately, he succumbed to his paranoid nightmare. I was born there, Mr. Nathan Zuckerman, born and educated among all the sane, precise, reasonable, logical, un-paranoid German Jews who are now a mountain of ashes.”
“I only pray,” said Buki, “that the Jew senses in time that such a catastrophe is on its way. Because if he does, then the ships will come again. In America there are young religious people, even secular people like your brother, who are tired of purposeless living. Here in Judea there is a purpose and a meaning, so they come. Here there is a God who is present in our lives. But the mass of Jews in America, they will not come, never, unless there is a crisis. But whatever the crisis, however it begins, the ships will sail again, and we will not just be three million. Then we will be ten million and the situation will be a little corrected. Three million the Arabs think they can kill. But they cannot kill ten million so easily.”
“And where,” I asked all of them, “will you put ten million?”
Lippman’s answer was ecstatic. “Judea! Samaria! Gaza! In the Land of Israel given by God to the Jewish people!”
“You really believe,” I asked, “that this will happen? American Jews sailing by the millions to escape persecution resulting from a Hispanic invasion of the U.S.A.? Because of a black uprising, urged on and abetted by the white officials, to eliminate the Jews?”
“Not today,” said Buki, “not tomorrow, but yes, I am afraid it will happen. If not for Hitler we would be ten million already. We would have the offspring of the six million. But Hitler succeeded. I only pray that the Jews will leave America before a second Hitler succeeds.”
I turned to Henry, eating as silently as the two Lippman children. “Is that what you felt living in America? That such a catastrophe is in the offing?”
“Well, no,” he said shyly. “Not really … But what did I know? What did I see?”
“You weren’t born in a bomb shelter,” I replied impatiently. “You didn’t make your life in a hole in the ground.”
“Didn’t I?” he said, flushing, “—don’t be so sure,” but then would say no more.
I realized that he was leaving me to them. I thought, Is this the role he has decided to play—the good Jew to my bad Jew? Well, if so, he’s found the right supporting cast.
I said to Buki, “You describe the situation of the Jew in America as though we were living under a volcano. To me it seems you feel so strongly the need for so many million more Jews that you’re inclined to imagine this mass emigration pretty unrealistically. When were you last in America?”
“Daphna was raised in New Rochelle,” he said, motioning to his wife.
“And when you looked up in New Rochelle,” I asked her, “you saw a volcano?”
Unlike Henry, she wasn’t reluctant to have her say; she’d been waiting her turn, her eyes on me, ever since I’d silently sat there while they’d sung in the Sabbath. Hers was the only animus I felt. The others were educating a fool—she was confronting an enemy, like young Jerry, who’d given it to me at the ulpan that morning.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Daphna, replying to mine. “You are a friend of Norman Mailer?”
“Both of us write books.”
“Let me ask you a question about your colleague Mailer. Why is he so interested in murder and criminals and killing? When I was at Barnard, our English professor assigned those books to read—books by a Jew who cannot stop thinking about murder and criminals and killing. Sometimes when I think back to the innocence of that class and the idiotic nonsense that they said there, I think, Why didn’t I ask, ‘If this Jew is so exhilarated by violence, why doesn’t he go to Israel?’ Why doesn’t he, Mr. Zuzkerman? If he wants to understand the experience of killing, why doesn’t he come here and be like my husband? My husband has killed people in four wars, but not because he thinks murder is an exciting idea. He thinks it is a horrible idea. It is not even an idea. He kills to protect a tiny country, to defend an embattled nation—he kills so that perhaps his children may grow up one day to lead a peaceful life. He does not have a brilliant genius’s intellectually wicked adventures of killing imaginary people inside his head—he has a decent man’s dreadful experience of killing real people in Sinai and in the Golan and on the Jordanian border! Not to gain personal fame by writing bestselling books but to prevent the destruction of Jewish people!”
“And what do you want to ask me?” I said.
“I am asking you why is this genius’s sick Diaspora rage celebrated in Time magazine while our refusal to be obliterated by our enemies in our own homeland is called in the same magazine monstrous Jewish aggression! That’s what I’m asking!”
“I’m not here on behalf of Time or anyone else. I’m visiting Henry.”
“But you are not nobody,” she sarcastically replied. “You are a famous novelist, too—a novelist, what’s more, who has written about Jews.”
“It would be hard to believe, sitting at this table, in this settlement, that there’s anything else a novelist could write about,” I said. “Look, imagining violence and the release of the brute, imagining the individuals engaged in it, doesn’t necessitate embracing it. There’s no retreat or hypocrisy in a writer who doesn’t go out and do what he may have thought about doing in every gory, horrifying detail. The only retreat is retreating from what you know.”
“So,” said Lippman, “what you are telling us is that we are not so nice as you American-Jewish writers.”
“That’s not at all what I’m telling you.”
“But it’s true,” he said, smiling.
“I’m telling you that to see fiction as Daphna does is to see it from a highly specialized point of view. I’m telling you that it isn’t obligatory for a novelist to go around personally exhibiting his themes. I’m not talking about who’s nicer—niceness is even more deadly in writers than it is in other people. I’m only responding to a very crude observation.”
“Crude? Yes, that is true. We are not like the intellectual goodies and the humane niceys who have the galut mentality. We are not polished people and we are terrible at the polite smile. All Daphna is saying is that we do not have the luxury you American-Jewish writers have of indulging in fantasies of violence and force. The Jew who drives the school bus past the Arabs throwing stones at his windscreen, he does not dream of violence—he faces violence, he fights violence. We do not dream about force—we are force. We are not afraid to rule in order to survive, and to put it again as unpalatably as possible, we are not afraid to be masters. We do not wish to crush the Arab—we simply will not allow him to crush us. Unlike the niceys and the goodies who live in Tel Aviv, I have no phobia of Arabs. I can live alongside him, and I do. I can even speak to him in his own tongue. But if he rolls a hand grenade into the house where my child is sleeping, I do not retaliate with a fantasy of violence of the kind everybody loves in the novels and the movies. I am not someone sitting in a cozy cinema; I am not someone playing a role in a Hollywood movie; I am not an American-Jewish novelist who steps back and from a distance appropriates the reality for his literary purposes. No! I am somebody who meets the enemy’s real violence with my real violence, and I don’t worry about the approval of Time magazine. The journalists, you know, got tired of the Jew making the desert bloom; it became boring to them. They got tired of the Jews being attacked by surprise and still winning all the wars. That too became boring. They prefer now the greedy, grasping Jew who oversteps his bounds—the Arab as Noble Savage versus the degenerate, colonialist, capitalist Jew. Now the journalist gets excited when the Arab terrorist takes him to his refugee camp and, displaying the gracious Arab hospitality, graciously pours him a cup of coffee with all the freedom fighters looking on—he thinks he is living dangerously drinking coffee with a gracious revolutionary who flashes his black eyes at him, and drinks his coffee with him, and assures him that his brave guerrilla heroes will drive the thieving Zionists into the sea. Much more thrilling than drinking borscht with a big-nosed Jew.”
