Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Where have you gone, my blue-eyed goy? If you grew up lonely on the beach in southern California in the 1950s, as alienated as an Aron from the sports-car culture and the pompons, the drive-in church and the grunion and surfer cults, you chose your emancipating fantasy from a rich debris of driftwood: James Dean, Jackie Robinson, Robert E. Lee, Mahatma Gandhi; bog-Irish semi-poet singing “Danny Boy”; Wobbly with cowboy boots; Bolshevik, but like Trotsky, scribbling as the alpenstock came down; Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. It is really no more preposterous, after a boyhood reading of Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue and Thieves in the Night, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State, to have dreamt yourself a kibbutznik, some sort of soldier-scholar, reading Marx and listening to Mozart after you’ve milked the cows… before communal sex. Instead of sand dunes and swamps, orange trees and potash; the white donkey and the red heifer and socialism with a suntan. Adolescence is all injury anyway; wounded feelings; blank incomprehension. So you appropriate the sufferings of a people to whom crimes beyond imagining have already occurred, and lay claim simultaneously to the great realms of modern thought, to the tragic determinisms of Marx and Freud, Einstein’s relativity, Kafka’s paranoia. And then you do something about it. Europe didn’t work out. Let’s start over again, from scratch. It’s as if you turned the pages of Partisan Review with a sword.

  But all of this is Aroning: Megiddo and catacombs and citadels of David; the Jerusalem Star restaurant, full of Palestinian intellectuals, across the street from Ariel Sharon’s house in the Arab quarter of the Old City; Masada, where the Zealots might have been better off hiking down the road to the Ein Gedi Spa for a mud pack, a sulfur rinse, and a Dead Sea float. It is possible on a single day to spend the afternoon at the Dome of the Rock, looking down; an evening hour at the Western Wall, looking up; to still have time for dinner in East Jerusalem and be back at the swimming pool at the King David before you hear a ram’s horn. Two religions are on top of each other, a third next door, archeologists digging underneath, and what they’ve opened is a vein. Solomon built the First Temple, and Babylonians destroyed it. Herod built the Second; Romans did it dirt. The Wall is all that’s left, propping up the plateau with the Mosque of Omar, built by Greek slaves. From the rock where the gold dome sits, the Prophet went to Heaven on a white horse. When the Crusaders came in the eleventh century, Muslims fled to the roof of the Dome, where they were slaughtered anyway. Inside the Dome, as if inside an ornate clock, under the golden mosaics and gaudy Ottoman tile work, there’s something scary. Let your eyes go into an arcade, stare at a vine scroll. What it sees are the insignia of vanished empires, the breastplates, crows, and double-winged diadems of Byzantium and Sassanid. In stocking feet, you get the creeps. The Dome is a trophy case: Look what Daddy brought home from his Holy War. They have been throwing rocks at the prophets in this desert for three thousand years. Only the Uzis and napalm are modern. A secular-humanist Israeli literature may have come of conscience and of age—David Grossman’s Aron is everybody’s wunderkind—but the Age of these politics is Bronze.

  Eduardo Galeano Walks Some Words

  IN A LATIN America rampant with Magical Realists, Eduardo Galeano calls himself a Magical Marxist—“one half reason, one half passion, a third half mystery”—which may explain why, in Walking Words, after the affair of a white rose, a sprig of coriander, and a police truncheon, José is convicted of a “violation of the right of property (the father’s over his daughter and the dead man’s over his widow), disturbing the peace, and attempted priesticide.” And why Calamity Jane leaves South Dakota for a Comayagua brothel where, with a magic lasso, she ropes her very own archangel. And why in Haiti anyone telling a story before dark is disgraced: “The mountain throws a stone at his head, his mother walks on all fours.” And why a cowboy who turns himself into a jaguar finds it afterward impossible to “disenjag.” If Jesus on His Second Coming is not a happy camper (“They want me to jump without an umbrella…. A pancake from God”), it’s even worse for the bandit Fermino. While Fermino’s soul goes straight to heaven,

  On earth his corpse was split in two. The body was thrown to the vultures and the head to the scientists…. Their analysis revealed a psychopathic personality evidenced by certain bulges in the skull characteristic of cold-blooded assassins from the mountains of obscure countries. [His] criminal destiny was also apparent from one ear that was nine millimeters shorter than the other, and from the pointed head and oversized jaws with large eyeteeth that continued chewing after he was dead.

  Whimsy with a sting: This Magical Marxist began his vagabond life as a newspaperman, in Montevideo and again in Buenos Aires, always leaving town a step before a dictatorship got him. On that road, he became a historian. His Memory of Fire trilogy is famously anecdotal and juxtapositional, a rollercoaster and Ferris wheel. (Imagine an account of our century that leaps in a single bound from Superman to the Bay of Pigs, while keeping one eye on General Trujillo as he reviews the troops at West Point with an ivory fan, another eye on Carmen Miranda dancing for the king of Belgium with a banana, and a third on Pancho Villa reading the Arabian Nights.) Late in the 1980s, however, after completing Century of the Wind, Galeano turned to something different—still political, still literary, still anthropological, but a lot more personal.

  In The Book of Embraces (1991), we heard about his thinning hair, his heart attack, and his wife, Helena, for whom at night “a line formed of dreams wishing to be dreamed, but it was not possible to dream them all.” We got gossip about such buddies as Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. And, as if Latin American boom-boom had for a night cohabited with Pascal and Lichtenberg, there were eavesdroppings, aphorisms, minitexts, and footnotes on friendship, courage, muscle, wind, theology, art, silence, a snowy beach in Catalonia, and the culture of terror. “There is a division of labor in the ranks of the powerful,” Galeano explained; “The army, paramilitary organizations, and hired assassins concern themselves with social contradictions and the class struggle. Civilians are responsible for speeches.” And: “In the final analysis, it doesn’t bother anyone very much that politics be democratic so long as the economy is not.” And: “We are all mortal, until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.” He also collected graffiti. On a Bogotá wall: “Proletarians of all lands, unite!” (And, scrawled underneath in another hand: “FINAL NOTICE.”) Or, in Montevideo: “Assist the police. Torture yourself.”

  Walking Words is an anthology of stories about “ghouls and fools,” derived from the urban and rural folklore of the Americas, with “windows” between chapters for the stray paradox and sneaky afflatus, and woodcut illustrations, like sarcophagus rubbings, by the Brazilian cordel artist José Francisco Borges: a kind of commonplace book of mysterious transcendence. But it could also be thought of as a line of dreams wishing to be dreamed by Helena. Besides Jesus and Calamity Jane, shoemakers, coachmen, fishermen, wine sellers, coffee grinders, and socialist-realist poets dream about tango dancers, soccer stars, and Moon People; frogs with feathers and parrots “born from grief”; St. George on a Yamaha motorcycle, warlocks on seahorses with vests of burning fat, and a Virgin at sea so busy resuscitating the drowned that “she didn’t have time for bad luck on dry land.” Often these dreamers feel awful, as if “dirty water rains inside me.” Or like a tabloid headline: “KILLED MOTHER WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE.” A cure for the blues will not come cheap: “Candido charged for his miracles in advance. He was no cheap saint. ‘What do they want?’ he’d grumble. ‘A favor from God for the price of a banana?’”

  Yet always, somehow, there is levitation: “Memory eats the dead. The vulture, too. Just like memory, the vulture flies.” Besides: “We come from an egg much smaller than the head of a pin, and we live on a rock that spins around a dwarf star into which it will someday crash. But we’re made of light, as well as carbon and oxygen and shit and death and so much else.” Finally, wonderfully: “The Church says: The body is a sin. Science say
s: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.” It’s oddly Rabelaisian, with a Kurtness of Vonnegut—as if magic tricks and peasant cunning were still capable of subverting the greedhead warlocks and the banal surfeit and oppressive patterning of the admass media/consumer grid. One dreams so, like Helena.

  Amos Oz in the Desert

  NOT SO LONG ago in London, Amos Oz told reporters that a reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians had to be Chekhovian, “with everybody a little disappointed,” so that it wouldn’t be Shakespearean, “with bodies littering the stage.” Would you believe, instead, Megiddo? By bus bomb and assassination Ultras and Hamas got what they wanted, which was Bibi and Likud, meaning more settlers on the West Bank, more soldiers on the Golan Heights, and more archeologists and tourists tapeworming into the traumatized bowels of Al-Aksa, while a lizardly Arafat bans books by Edward Said, and a rubber-bullet Olmert pretends to be the bandit prince Bar Kokhba, and the Pillsbury Doughboy in his Oval Office feels their pain. An earlier Amos prophesied a fire upon Judah, “and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem.”

  But Oz has been in the desert, hiding out from the reviews of Fima (1993), reconstruing marriage, children, and silence. In the dusty Negev new town Tel Kedar (pop. 9,000), an hour or so away from Beersheba and the daily papers, he has dreamed his way into the heads and hearts of Theo, a sixty-year-old semiretired civil engineer, and Noa, a forty-five-year-old teacher of literature. Theo, a tidy, gloomy insomniac, is so patient mixing a salad he might as well be painting it. Noa, a scatter of pages and ideas, is in such a rush she often fails to finish sentences, so worn out she falls into bed as if axed. Although they’re not legally married, the relationship they’ve settled for is more intimate than most licensed monogamies—an almost hydraulic exchange of skeptical caution and heedless zeal; part pendulum and part crossruff. Although they are childless, Theo is as much Noa’s father as her lover, and Noa, picking up stray children on the rainy highway, listening to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, feeling guilty about her students, seems to mother half the Middle East. And although neither spends more than a minute thinking about, say, Arabs, Zionism, Judaism, or Jerusalem, their separate peace is about to tested.

  One of Noa’s dreamier students, the introverted Immanuel Orvieto, either falls or jumps to his death, perhaps because of drugs. When Immanuel’s father, Avraham, either a military advisor or an arms dealer, arrives from Nigeria for the burial, he also proposes to bankroll, as a memorial, a clinic for adolescent drug users—if Noa, Immanuel’s favorite teacher, agrees to do the scut work. Remorseful at having barely noticed Immanuel while he was alive, Noa flings herself into the project. With his connections, Theo could help. A long career of planning settlement areas, industrial zones, and leisure complexes has taught him how to deal with local and district councils, and from “the old days, when this country was nothing but sand dunes and fantasies,” he even knows the mayor. But Theo, typically, is skeptical. He also knows Noa will resent his help. And so while the teacher plunges headlong into comical committee meetings, bureaucratic farce, archeological memory digs, and self-recrimination, the engineer makes salads, plays chess, listens to BBC news radio, and stares all night at the desert.

  We shall presently try to imagine what he sees there, populating absences. But Don’t Call It Night is a novel of domestic accommodation—almost a convalescence. From Tel Kedar, we can’t see Hebron or Gaza, much less the Caracas where Theo and Noa met eight years ago. It’s as if the fevers of eros and history had wasted them. In a town without a past, they are going through the motions. At least these motions—drinking iced tea or mulled wine, stopping at the Paris cinema or Entebbe bar, making rosebuds out of radishes—are reassuringly reciprocal. As they address us in alternating chapters (and Oz watches them watch each other), even the parentheses in their monologues are compensatory. Inside separate chambers, on either side of a hermetic seal, they mimic the same rotary wave. Theo longs for peace of mind. Noa lusts for significance. Eventually, he’ll take a hand in her project. Predictably, she’ll then develop doubts. (Why not an old people’s home instead?) Finally, they discover their interdependence, which is also their consolation.

  Meanwhile, we have met a town: Elijah, so-called because every five minutes in the post office queue he asks, “When’s Elijah coming?” Blind Lupo, who apologizes to his own dog for kicking it. Muki, a lecherous investment consultant with sky-blue shoes. Avram, a falafel seller with a brand-new shawarma machine. Chuma, the militant vegetarian with “a particular hatred of potato crisps, mustard, and stuffed intestines.” Not to omit the newsagents, poets, bookbinders, garage mechanics, bank clerks, pharmacists, notaries, a Hungarian cantor, a Russian-emigré string quartet, the former weight-lifting champion of Lodz, and a piano tuner who’s writing a book on The Essence of Judaism. As always in Oz, Israel teems with spinning types who kick against the cartoon bubbles limned around them. As always, there’s a sort of moral blackmail to which the victims too eagerly submit. As always, there are missing mothers—Oz’s own committed suicide when he was twelve—and thus a wounded emblematic child like Boaz in Black Box, with “the look of Jesus in a Scandinavian icon”; like Dimi in Fima, a “slightly cross-eyed albino child-philosopher”; like Immanuel in Night, seeming “to live inside a bubble of winter even in summer.” And also as always there is his oddly angry lyricism. His physical world has an astonishing thickness of texture and scent. His feel for olives, lizards, candles, eucalyptus, marble, and moonlight is almost wanton. Yet this appreciation of surprise beauty is so masculine that it seems to resent its own esthetic shock, to want somehow to bite the face of grace.

  It is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provision for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained…. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don’t see how they can bear it.

  —Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

  What’s missing—one of those absences on purpose—is politics. Or what Oz prefers to call “ethics.” Black Box (1989) was consumed by West Bank settlements and Orthodox theocracy. Gideon, “tasting schadenfreude like expensive whisky, in small sips,” has even written a book, The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism. In his opinion, we annihilate ourselves and will soon wipe out the species “precisely because of our ‘higher longings,’ because of the theological disease. Because of the burning need to be ‘saved.’ Because of an obsession with redemption. What is the obsession with redemption? Only a mask for a complete absence of the basic talent for life.” Fima couldn’t go to the movies without seeing Palestinians on a private sonar screen: “We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.” Fima, the poet who works in an abortion clinic, “the Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel,” who would give away the whole of South America’s magical realism, “with all its fireworks and cotton candy,” for a single page of Chekhov—this tortured Fima explains:

  We must not become like the drunken Ukrainian carter who beat his horse to death when the beast stopped pulling his cart. Are the Arabs in the Territories our workhorses? What did you imagine, that they would go on hewing our wood and drawing our water forever and ever, amen?… Every Zambia and Gambia is an independent state nowadays, so why should the Arabs in the Territories continue come Hell or high water quietly scrubbing our shit-houses, sweeping our streets, washing dishes in our restaurants, wiping arses in our geriatric wards, and then saying thank you? How would you feel if the meanest Ukrainian anti-Semite planned a future like that for the Jews?

  And that’s just the recent fiction. For Oz in nonfiction like In the Land of Israel (1983), nationalism is mankind’s curse: “Shall we aspire to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon? Shall we construct a Marxist paradise here? A Western society, a social-democratic welfare state? Or shall we create a model of the petite bourgeoisie w
ith a little Yiddishkeit?” He’d be happier in a world “composed of dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythm, all cross-pollinating….” Israel after the Six-Day War was “crude, smug, and arrogant, power drunk, bursting with messianic rhetoric, ethnocentric, ‘redemptionist,’ apocalyptic—quite simply, inhuman. And un-Jewish. The Arab human beings under our dominion might never have been.” And then this remarkable apostrophe:

  I study the elusive cunning of the Biblical charm of this landscape: and isn’t all of this charm Arab, through and through? The lodge and the cucumber garden, the watchman’s hut and the cisterns, the shade of the fig tree and the pale silver of the olive, the grape arbors and the flocks of sheep—these picturesque slopes that bewitched from afar the early Zionists like Yehuda Halevi and Abraham Mapu; these primeval glades that reduced the poet Bialik to tears and fired Tchernichowsky’s imagination; the hypnotic shepherds who, from the very beginning of the return to Zion, captured the heart of Moshe Smilansky, who even called himself Hawaja Musa; the tinkle of the goats’ bells which entwined, like magic webs, the hearts of the early Zionist settlers, who came from Russia thirsty for Arab garb and to speed on their horses toward this Arab Biblicality… the tales told around the campfires of the Palmach, the enchanted groves of Amos Kenan and the longed-for cisterns of Naomi Shemer, yearning for the bare-faced stony mountain, for merger into the bosom of these gentle, sleepy scapes so very far removed from shtetl alleyways, so very far from Yiddish and the ghetto, right into the heart of this Oriental rock-strewn tenderness.