by Philip Roth
I still find it hard to believe, despite what you told me, that your blossoming Zionism is the result of a Jewish emergency that befell you in America. I would never dare decry any Zionist whose decision to go to Israel arose out of the strong sense that he was escaping dangerous or disabling anti-Semitism. Were the real critical questions, in your case, anti-Semitism, or cultural isolation, or even a sense, no matter how irrational, of personal guilt about the Holocaust, there would be little to question. But I happen to be convinced that if you were repelled or deformed by anything, it wasn’t by a ghetto situation, the ghetto mentality, or the goy and the menace he posed.
You know better than to swallow uncritically the big cliché they seem to cherish at Agor of American Jews eating greedily from the shopping-center fleshpots, with one wary eye out for the Gentile mob—or, worse, blindly oblivious to the impending threat—and all the while inwardly seething with their self-hatred and shame. Seething with self-love is more like it, seething with confidence and success. And maybe that’s a world-historical event on a par with the history you are making in Israel. History doesn’t have to be made the way a mechanic makes a car—one can play a role in history without its having to be obvious, even to oneself. It may be that flourishing mundanely in the civility and security of South Orange, more or less forgetful from one day to the next of your Jewish origins but remaining identifiably (and voluntarily) a Jew, you were making Jewish history no less astonishing than theirs, though without quite knowing it every moment, and without having to say it. You too were standing in time and culture, whether you happened to realize it or not. Self-hating Jews? Henry, America is full of self-hating Gentiles, as far as I can see—it’s a country that’s full of Chicanos who want to look like Texans, and Texans who want to look like New Yorkers, and any number of Middle Western Wasps who, believe it or not, want to talk and act and think like Jews. To say Jew and goy about America is to miss the point, because America simply is not that, other than in Agor’s ideology. Nor does the big cliché metaphor of the fleshpot in any way describe your responsible life there, Jewish or otherwise; it was as conflicted and tense and valuable as anyone else’s, and to me looked nothing like the life of Riley but like life, period. Think again about how much “meaninglessness” you’re willing to concede to their dogmatic Zionist challenge. By the way, I really can’t remember ever before hearing you use the word goy with such an air of intellectual authority. It reminds me of how I used to go around during my freshman year at Chicago talking about the lumpenproletariat as though that testified to a tremendous extension of my understanding of American society. When I saw the creeps outside the Clark Street saloons, I thrilled myself by muttering, “Lumpenproletariat.” I thought I knew something. Frankly I think you learned more about “the goy” from your Swiss girlfriend than you’ll ever learn at Agor. The truth is that you could teach them. Try it some Friday night. Tell them at dinner about everything you reveled in during that affair. It should be an education for everyone and make the goy a little less abstract.
Your connection to Zionism seems to me to have little to do with feeling more profoundly Jewish or finding yourself endangered, enraged, or psychologically straitjacketed by anti-Semitism in New Jersey—which doesn’t make the enterprise any less “authentic.” It makes it absolutely classical. Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as to the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior—to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one’s own anti-myth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation as extreme—and, at the outset, as implausible—as any ever conceived. A Jew could be a new person if he wanted to. In the early days of the state the idea appealed to almost everyone except the Arabs. All over the world people were rooting for the Jews to go ahead and un-Jew themselves in their own little homeland. I think that’s why the place was once universally so popular—no more Jewy Jews, great!
At any rate, that you should be mesmerized by the Zionist laboratory in Jewish self-experiment that calls itself “Israel” isn’t such a mystery when I think about it this way. The power of the will to remake reality is embodied for you in Mordecai Lippman. Needless to say, the power of the pistol to remake reality also has its appeal.
My dear Hanoch (to invoke the name of that anti-Henry you are determined to unearth in the Judean hills), I hope that you don’t get killed trying. If it was weakness you considered the enemy while exiled in South Orange, in the homeland it may be an excess of strength. It isn’t to be minimized—not everybody has the courage at forty to treat himself like raw material, to abandon a comfortable, familiar life when it’s become hopelessly alien to him, and to take upon himself voluntarily the hardships of displacement. Nobody travels as far as you have and, to all appearances, fares so well so quickly on audacity or obstinacy or madness alone. A massive urge to self-renovation (or, as Carol sees it, to self-sabotage) can’t be assuaged delicately; it requires muscular defiance. Despite the unnerving devotion to Lippman’s charismatic vitality, you in fact seem freer and more independent than I would have imagined possible. If it’s true that you were enduring intolerable limitations and living in agonizing opposition to yourself, then for all I know you have used your strength wisely and everything I say is irrelevant. Maybe it’s appropriate that you’ve wound up there; it may be what you needed all your life—a combative métier where you feel guilt-free.
And who knows, in a year or two things may well change for you, and you’ll have reasons for living there that will sound more congenial to me—if you’re still talking to me—and that will in fact be more like what I imagine to be the reasons that most people live there, or anywhere, reasons that I don’t happen to think are any less serious or meaningful than the ones you have right now. Surely Zionism is more subtle than just Jewish boldness since, after all, Jews who act boldly aren’t just Israelis or Zionists. Normal/abnormal, strong/weak, we-ness/me-ness, not-so-nice/niceness—there’s one dichotomy missing about which you said little, or nothing: Hebrew/English. Out at Agor anti-Semitism comes up, Jewish pride comes up, Jewish power comes up, but nothing that I heard all night from you or your friends about the Hebrew aspect and the large, overwhelming cultural reality of that. Perhaps this only occurs to me because I’m a writer, though I frankly can’t imagine how it wouldn’t occur to anyone, since it’s finally Hebrew more than heroism with which you have surrounded yourself, just as if you went to live forever in Paris it would be French with which you constructed your experience and thought. In presenting your reasons for staying there, I’m surprised you don’t harp as much on the culture you’re acquiring as on the manliness flowing out of the pride and the action and the power. Or maybe you’ll only come to that when you begin feeling the loss of the language and the society that you look to me to be so blindly giving up.
To tell you the truth, had I run into you on a Tel Aviv street with a girl on your arm, and you told me, “I love the sun and smell and the falafel and the Hebrew language and living as a dentist in the middle of a Hebrew world,” I wouldn’t have felt like challenging you in any way. All that—which corresponds to my ideas of normalcy—I could have understood far more easily than your trying to lock yourself into a piece of history that you’re simply not locked into, into an idea and a commitment that may have been cogent for the people who came up with it, who built a country when they had no hope, no future, and everything was only difficulty for them—an idea that was, without a doubt, brilliant, ingenious, courageous, and vigorous in its historical time—but that doesn’t really look to me to be so very cogent to you.
In the meantime, at the risk of sounding like Mother when you used to go off to practice the hurdles in high school, for God’s sake, be careful.
I don’t want to come out next time to collect your remains.
Your only brother,
Nathan
P.S. You will see from the signature that I haven’t bothered about changing my own name, but in England embark upon the search for my anti-self carrying my old identity papers and disguised as N.Z.
Next I recorded in my notebook all I could remember of my conversation the previous evening with Carol; it was seven hours earlier in Jersey and she was about to begin preparing supper for the children when I phoned in as my brother’s deprogrammer before going to sleep at the hotel. Since Henry’s disappearance five months back Carol had undergone a transformation remarkably like his: she too was finished with being nice. That relentlessly accommodating personality that to me had always seemed little more than a bland enigma was armed now with the necessary cynicism to ride out this bizarre low blow, as well as with the hatred required to begin to heal the wound. The result was that for the first time in my life I felt some sort of power in her (as well as some womanly appeal) and wondered what I could possibly achieve persisting on playing the domestic peacemaker. Wasn’t everyone happier enraged? They were certainly more interesting. People are unjust to anger—it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.
“I spent Friday with him at his settlement and then stayed overnight. I couldn’t use the phone to order a taxi the next day because they’re all religious people—nobody enters and nobody leaves on the Sabbath, and nobody could drive me, so I was there Saturday as well. I’ve never seen him healthier, Carol—he looks fine, and, well, you ask me.”
“And is he doing all that Jewish stuff, too?”
“Some of it. Mostly he’s learning Hebrew. He’s devoted to that. He says his decision’s irrevocable and he’s not coming back. He’s in a very rebellious state of mind. I don’t see an ounce of remorse or any real yearning for home. No wavering at all, frankly. That may just be euphoria. He’s still pretty much in the euphoric stage.”
“Euphoria you call it? Some little Israeli bitch has taken him away from me—isn’t that the real story? There’s a little soldier there, sure as hell, with her tits and her tommy gun.”
“I wondered about that myself. But no, there’s no woman.”
“Doesn’t this Lippman have a wife he’s screwing?”
“Lippman’s a giant to Henry—I don’t think that’s in the cards. Sex is a ‘superficiality,’ and he’s burned all superficiality away. He’s discovered the aggressive spirit in himself, assisted by Lippman. He’s seen power. He’s discovered dynamism. He’s discovered nobler considerations, purer intentions. I’m afraid it’s Henry who’s taken over as the headstrong, unconventional son. He needs a bigger stage for his soul.”
“And this jerkwater settlement, this absolute nowhere, he considers bigger? It’s the desert—it’s the wilds.”
“But the biblical wilds.”
“You’re telling me it’s God then?”
“It’s bizarre to me, too. Where that came from, I have no idea.”
“Oh, I know where. Living in that little ghetto when you were kids, from your crazy father—he’s gone right back to the roots of that madness. It’s that craziness gone in another direction.”
“You never found him crazy before.”
“I always thought he was crazy. If you want the truth, I thought you were all a little nuts. You got off best. You never bothered with it in life—you poured that stuff into books and made yourself a fortune. You turned the madness to profit, but it’s still all part of the family insanity on the subject of Jews. Henry’s just a late-blooming Zuckerman nut.”
“Explain it any way you like, but he doesn’t look insane or sound insane, nor has he completely lost touch with his life. He’s looking forward tremendously to seeing the kids at Passover.”
“Only I don’t want my kids involved in all this. I never did. If I had I would have married a rabbi. I don’t want it, it doesn’t interest me, and I didn’t think it interested him.”
“I think Henry assumes the kids are coming at Passover.”
“Is he inviting me, or just the kids?”
“I thought he was inviting the children. The way I understood it, the visit’s already set.”
“I’m not letting them go by themselves. If he was crazy enough to do what he’s done to himself, he’s crazy enough to keep them there and try to turn Leslie into a little thing with squiggle curls and a dead-white face, a little monstrous religious creature. I’m certainly not sending my girls, not so he can throw them in a bath and shave their heads and marry them to the butcher.”
“I think it may have communicated the wrong idea, my being unable to use the phone there on Saturday. It’s not the Orthodoxy that’s inspired him, it’s the place—Judea. It seems to give him a more serious sense of himself having the roots of his religion all around him.”
“What roots? He left those roots two thousand years ago. As far as I know he’s been in New Jersey for two thousand years. It’s all nonsense.”
“Well, do what you like, of course. But if the kids could get over for Passover, it might open up communication between you two. Right now he’s pouring all his responsibility into the Jewish cause, but that may change when he sees them again. So far he’s fenced us all off with this Jewish idealism, but when they show up we might begin to find out if this really is a revolutionary change or just some upheaval he’s passing through. The last great outburst of youth. Maybe the last great outburst of middle age. It comes to more or less the same thing: the desire to deepen his life. The desire looks genuine enough, but the means, I admit, seem awfully vicarious. Right now it’s a little as though he’s out to take vengeance on everything that he wants to believe was once holding him back. He’s still very much caught up in the solidarity of it. But once the euphoria starts dwindling away, seeing the children could even lead to a reconciliation with you. If you want that, Carol.”
“My kids would loathe it there. They’ve been brought up by me, by him, not to want to have anything to do with religion of any kind. If he wants to go over there and wail and moan and hit his head on the floor, let him, but the kids are staying here, and if he wants to see them, he’ll have to see them right here.”
“But if his determination does start to give way, would you take him back?”
“If he were to come to his senses? Of course I would take him back. The kids are holding up, but this isn’t great fun for them, either. They’re upset. They miss him. I wouldn’t say they were confused, because they’re extremely intelligent. They know precisely what’s going on.”
“Yes? What is that?”
“They think he’s having a nervous breakdown. They’re only scared that I will.”
“Will you?”
“If he kidnaps my children, I will. If this madness goes on very much longer, yes, I may well have one.”
“My guess is that this could all be so much fallout from that ghastly operation.”
“Mine too, of course. I think it’s clutching at God, or straws, or whatever, out of dread of dying. Some kind of magic charm, some form of placation to make sure it never happens again. Penance. Oh, it’s too awful. It makes no sense at all. Who could have dreamed of this happening?”
“May I suggest then that if at Passover you could bring yourself—”
“When is Passover? I don’t even know when Passover is, Nathan. We don’t do any of that. We never did, not even when I was at home with my parents. Even my father, who owned a shoe store, was free of all that. He didn’t care about Passover, he cared about golf, which now appears to put him three thousand rungs up the evolutionary scale from his stupid son-in-law. Religion! A lot of fanaticism and superstition and wars and death! Stupid, medieval nonsense! If they tore down all the churches and all the synagogues to make way for more golf courses, the world would be a better place!”
“I’m only telling you that if you do want him back some time in the future, I wouldn’t cross him on the Passover business.”
&nbs
p; “But I don’t want him back if he’s crazy like this. I do not want to live my life with a crazy Jew. That was okay for your mother but it isn’t for me.”
“What you could say is, ‘Look, you can be a Jew in Essex County, too.’”
“Not with me he can’t.”
“But you did after all marry a Jew. So did he.”
“No. I married a very handsome, tall, athletic, very sweet, very sincere, very successful, responsible dentist. I didn’t marry a Jew.”
“I didn’t know you had these feelings.”
“I doubt that you’ve known anything about me. I was just Henry’s dull little wife. Sure I was perfunctorily Jewish—who ever even thought about it? That’s the only decent way to be any of those things. But Henry has more than scratched the surface with what he’s gone out and done. I simply will not be connected with all that narrow-minded, bigoted, superstitious, and totally unnecessary crap. I certainly don’t want my children connected with it.”
