Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  He is if anything unhappier in the collected broadsides in The Slopes of Lebanon (1987). The 1982 invasion of Lebanon—like “a timely investment in the stock market,” like The Empire Strikes Back—enraged him. Not a pacifist, nor an admirer of the PLO, and equally disdainful of a secular left that “offers peace to the Israeli public as one part of a package that includes… the rights of nude sunbathers,” he still favors a separate Palestinian state: “If only good and righteous people, with a ‘clean record,’ deserved self-determination, we would have to suspend, starting at midnight tonight, the sovereignty of three-quarters of the nations of the world.” King Solomon, after all, gave away twenty cities to Hiram of Tyre, yet Solomon was not struck down, nor condemned by the prophets. Besides, “Hebron and Nablus will not be ours whether or not the prophets once walked there, whether or not the stones our ancestors liked to throw at the prophets still lie scattered there.” So what if Palestinians deceive us? “It will always be easier… to break the backbone of a tiny Palestinian state than to break the backbone of an eight-year-old Palestinian stone thrower.”

  At desperate issue on almost every page of The Slopes of Lebanon is Israel’s soul and the Zionist ideal of a just society: “What have we come here to be?” If the logic of statecraft is that ends justify means, and the rule of thumb is that “it all depends,” then “What began with the biblical words ‘Zion shall be redeemed by the law’ has come to ‘Nobody’s better than we are, so they should all shut up.’” He quotes Isaiah (“Your hands are covered with blood”) and Jeremiah (“For they had eyes but they did not see”). “Veteran defeatists, both of them,” Oz says: “Troublers of Israel. Self-hating Jews.”

  I suggest that some of this is what a sleepless Theo sees, staring at the desert. Never mind that “on the other side there is a forbidden valley containing secret installations.” He’s turned his back on more than Tel Kedar. He was asked himself to help plan Tel Kedar, back in the late sixties. By the light of a pressure lamp at the foot of a cliff, he sketched “rough preliminary ideas for a master plan that was intended to get away from the usual Israeli approach and create a compact desert town, sheltering itself in its own shade, inspired by photographs of Saharan townships in North Africa.” For which he was ridiculed by his boss: “Same old Theo, carried away by his fantasies, it’s brilliant, it’s original, creative, the trouble is, as usual you’ve left one factor out of account: when all’s said and done, Israelis want to live in the Israeli style. Desert or no desert. Just you tell me, Theo, who do you imagine suddenly wants to be transported back to North Africa? The Poles? The Romanians? Or the Moroccans? The Moroccans least of all. And just remember this, chum: This isn’t going to be an artist’s colony.”

  Theo’s days as a senior planner in the Development Agency were obviously numbered, in spite of the British police stations and radar installations he’d once upon a time blown up in the Zionist cause. This great-grandchild of a Ukrainian gravedigger, with a couple of Herod’s master-builder genes, would leave Israel as “a special advisor of regional planning”—to “develop” Veracruz, Sonora, and Tabasco; to redo Nicaragua after an earthquake; to wonder about atrophy, torpor, barrenness, and exile in Peru: “When he came across cruelty, corruption, barbarity, or grinding poverty he passed no judgment… he had not come here to combat injustice but, as far as possible, to attain professional perfection and thereby perhaps, however minutely, to reduce disasters. Honor, the labyrinth, and death were ever-present here, and life itself sometimes flared up like a festive firework display or a salvo of shots in the air: ruthless, spicy, noisy, and cheap.” But not for Theo until, in Venezuela, he met Noa—that Noa who comes home at night in one of two ways, either “setting up a row of electric lights in her path as though to illuminate the runway of her landing” or “as if she had flown into this room by mistake and now she’s in such a panic she can’t find the window. Which is open as it always has been.”

  And the Tel Kedar they made without Theo? It’s hard to believe Elijah would come to such a place: Fifteen identical streets off Herzl Boulevard, with caged poinciana saplings wrapped in sackcloth against sandstorms; “a few eucalyptus trees and tamarisks, blighted by droughts and salty wind, hunched towards the east like fugitives turned to stone in midflight”; green streetlamps and matching municipal benches; a solar panel on every roof, “as if the town were trying to appease the sun’s blaze in its own language”; balconies shut up with cement, plaster blasted desert-gray; a chic northwest residential district “with projections, surrounds and arches, rounded windows and even weathercocks on gables, sighing for forests and meadows”; a commercial southeast of corrugated-iron huts, cement-block sheds, workshops, and junkyards; a billiard parlor for lottery tickets; a library, where only Noa seems to go; and a monument in memory of the fallen, with a cypress at each corner of the concrete column on which metallic letters read, THE BEAUTY OF ISRAEL IS SLAIN UPON THE HIGH PLAC S: “The penultimate letter is missing.”

  No wonder Theo’s eyes are on the desert. As development novels go, Don’t Call It Night is up there with Norman Rush’s Mating, and maybe Voltaire’s Candide. And what Theo is probably looking for across the scrub and desolation, on slate slopes in the blue distance and dark scree, besides Arabs and meaning, is the Zionist dramaturge himself, a vanishing act like Shane.

  I experienced strange sensations, I saw and heard my legend being born. The people are sentimental; the masses do not see clearly. A light fog is beginning to rise around me and it may perhaps become the cloud in which I shall walk.

  —Theodor Herzl

  Before there was a Herzl Boulevard in Tel Kedar or anywhere else in Israel, there had to have been the godfather of Zionism—Theodor, the crackerjack journalist, mediocre playwright, “inveterate” misogynist, and manic-depressive brought so vividly to life in Ernst Pawel’s biography The Labyrinth of Exile. Worshipped by his mother, doted on by his father, innocent of Marx and Freud, “amazingly untouched by winds of change that revolutionized philosophy, literature, and the state in his own generation,” he loved Wagner, feared women, and foresaw the cattle cars and death camps. We can’t understand him, says Pawel, without also understanding Prague, where he was born into ambivalence, and Vienna, with its “apocalyptic temper,” and Paris, too, where as a reporter he discovered anti-Semitism (the Dreyfus case) and anarchism (“the voluptuous pleasure of a great idea, and of martyrdom”). Pawel rereads his lame utopian novel, Altneuland; finds in his diaries those “idea splinters” that created the “vatic visionary”; sorts out the original plan (a mass conversion to Christianity!) from subsequent revisions proposing to settle the Diaspora anywhere from Argentina to Uganda; follows the argonaut to Paris, London, Rome, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople as he petitions popes, emperors, sultans, czars, and Rothschilds; and sits in on the assemblies where the playwright hit on an “alchemy of mass manipulation” that “successfully transmuted fantasy into power.” Worn out at age forty-four, Herzl essentially killed himself for the cause. He was nonetheless, says Pawel, “the first Jewish leader in modern times.” And what’s more: “Thus far, the only one. Those who came after him were politicians. Still, Jewish politicians in a country of their own.”

  From Michael Berkowitz’s enriching exploration of the rhetoric and imagery of Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, we get a broader picture of what Herzl and his brilliant and difficult fellow disputants wrought at Basel in spite of Martin Buber. Against all odds and despite a language question (Yiddish versus Hebrew), a built-in Talmudic hostility to pluralism, the deepest Pale of Settlement suspicions, and competing claims from revolutionary socialism, they composed an entire mythopoeic Gesamtkunstwerk. They composed this total theater out of European nationalism and German drinking songs; out of the idea of the Promised Land and a cult of male friendship in student dueling fraternities; out of paintings of the Wailing Wall and photographs of Palestinian flora; from selling books, trees, menorahs, kiddush cups, spice boxes, and Holy
Arks—not to mention merchandising an iconography of Herzl himself, whose manly visage showed up on postage stamps, candy wrappers, canned milk, and packs of cigarettes. As if to schoolmarm this new macho image of an “orientalized” warrior Jew, on horseback with a rifle and Arab headdress, they brought back the matriarchs: Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, Leah. It was agitation and it was propaganda, but it was also as thrilling as Impressionism. “First,” said Herzl to Nahum Sokolow, “there has to be a home and peace for the Jews, then let them choose the culture they want. They will, of course, bring along with them many cultures, like bees who suck honey from different flowers and bring it all with them to one beehive; precisely this mixture will be far more interesting than one monotonous culture.”

  Just how interesting not even a playwright could have imagined, especially a playwright who somehow managed to forget there were Arabs already residing in this dreamscape, for whom Rachel’s Tomb and David’s Tower were as meaningless as Herder’s moonshine on folksy essence or a postcard from Vienna with the angel Zion wearing a Star of David as her halo, pointing from a shtetl in Eastern Europe to a harvest in sanctified Palestine. Even so, before peace and before home, the Zionists did create a culture with heroes, songs, symbols, and a flag with blue stripes borrowed boldly from the talit. Berkowitz is flabbergasted: “A strange nationalism of the twentieth century—in the face of more aggressive and exclusive ideologies—which proclaims that the community producing the finest books, the most sublime poetry, a comprehensive research university, and an advanced agricultural-experiment station would ‘win’ a country.”

  Oz recalls what it felt like in his childhood: summer evenings and neighborhood scholars in his parents’ garden; Revisionists from Odessa, socialist Zionists from Bobruisk, scholars of mysticism and of deserts, interpreters of Maimonides, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Lassalle, and Jabotinsky; “atheists, vegetarians, and other assorted world reformers, each with his own personal plan for the salvation of the People and the Reform of Humanity in one fell swoop. Everyone knew exactly what had to be done—and at once…. When the Hebrew State was born it must be such-and-such, and if not, there would be no point to it.” But: “All this is finished here.”

  Some of this fizz just didn’t travel, as those of us who grew up pretending to be Jewish cowboys slaughtering Arab Nazis have reason to know from a visit to Ben Yehuda’s pedestrian mall in Jerusalem after our rented car has been stoned on the Sabbath. Cypress and honeysuckle, vineyards and olive groves, vipers and goats, chalk and salt—“Not ‘the land of the hart,’” Oz has pleaded, “and not ‘the divine city reunited,’ as the clichés would have it, but simply the State of Israel. Not the ‘Maccabeans reborn’ that Herzl talked of, but a warm-hearted, hot-tempered Mediterranean people that is gradually learning, through great suffering and in a tumult of sound and fury, to find release both from the bloodcurdling nightmares of the past and from delusions of grandeur, both ancient and modern.”

  So many wars, and before and after each, the scavenging of the bonepickers.

  This generation has created a new religion, the religion of history, a belief in the history of its people as a religious faith…. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they fought with verses from the Bible. Through archaeology these people discover their “religious” values; in archaeology they find their religion, they learn that their forefathers were in this country 3,000 years ago. This is a value. By this they fought and by this they live.

  —Yigael Yadin

  This is what those Temple Mount tunnels are all about, besides a provocation and a real-estate expulsion scam. From Neil Asher Silberman’s A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael Yadin, we gather that for most of this century archeology in Israel has been a Zionist dig, an identity-politics daydream of a glorious antiquity segregated into ethnic cultures with unchanging racial characteristics. Think of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a ticket of admission and a warrant. Not for nothing did Yadin’s father spend his student days at the University of Berlin. Translating “The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness,” he might as well have been reading a right-wing newspaper. And his soldier son improved on him; a veteran of so many battles, including Irgun versus Palmach, a Lawrence of anti-Arabia, he must have imagined himself a Bronze Age warlord, especially at Hazor, in whose rubble he deciphered a rousting of inconvenient Canaanites. Yadin loved it; what afflatus: to stand at Megiddo, where Solomon built a temple on the ruins of Tuthmose III. To burrow into the caves of Nahal Hever and find a basket of skulls left over from the bandit prince himself, Bar Kokhba. To glory in Masada—never again. From fallen columns, charred beams, headless statues, smashed pottery, shattered frescoes, ceramic fragments, bronze coins, goatskin bags, incense shovels, Roman tunics, and some Aramaic scribbled on papyrus, to intuit Eretz Israel—the Covenant as Deed in Perpetuity, handed down by archers, cavalry, charioteers, catapult stones, and a battering ram. Never mind dissenting archeologists like Yohanan Aharoni, who counter-imagined a “gradual migration” of the Israelites into Canaan and a “social process” of assimilation instead of a turf war of gloryhounds with shofars for shillelaghs. Joshua was Yadin’s kind of guy, a Little Big Horn in reverse.

  Amazing that the ultra-Orthodox, for whom Mahmoud from East Jerusalem collects garbage and fixes sewers, should so much hate the bonepickers—“Death to the Hitlerite archeologists!”—who shovel the same sand-dune fantasies. On the other hand, Oz has also talked to the settlers, who sound like a column by A. M. Rosenthal:

  As soon as we finish this phase, the violence phase, step right up, it’ll be your turn to play your role. You can make us a civilization with humanistic values here. Do the brotherhood-in-man bit—Light unto the Nations—whatever you want—the morality of the Prophets…. Be my guest. That’s the way it is, old buddy: first Joshua and Jephthah the Gileadite break ground, wipe out the memory of Amalek, and then maybe afterward it’s time for the Prophet Isaiah and the wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the kid and that whole terrific zoo. But only provided that, even at the end of days, we’ll be the wolf and all the gentiles around here will be the lamb. Just to be on the safe side.

  Is it any wonder that Theo can’t sleep? That he needs Noa, who insists on knowing, “And where are we meant to be shining, and by whom is our shining required?” So what if their love isn’t epic theater or grand opera or a Song of Solomon? That the best they can hope for is more modest than messianic—an autumn sonata, some rock-strewn tenderness, and maybe “the basic talent for life”? What have we come here to be? Oz himself wants to be Chekhov. He can’t be, of course. He is magnanimous enough, but not exactly gentle. Still, trying to be Chekhov in a century written by Dostoyevsky is a kind of heroism. L’chayim!

  Family Values, Like the House of Atreus

  OR THE BROTHERS Karamazov.

  You will remember the scandalous goings-on of the best known family in the glory that was Greece, adultery being the least of it for Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Aegisthus and Cassandra, Orestes and Elektra. Incest, infanticide, patricide, matricide, cannibalism, and other gaudy dysfunctions were almost all that Aeschylus ever wrote about, as if to hype his ratings. Nor do the soaps have anything on Sophocles. I mean, Oedipus murdered his father and married his mother, after which he was visually challenged. These are behaviors as lurid as Caligula’s, who tried to marry his sister. Or Claudius, who, when it didn’t work out with Messalina, had her tried for treason. Or Nero, who wasted his mom. Byzantine family life specialized in stranglings of heirs apparent in their bubbly baths, as well as many lopped-off hands. The best of their emperors, Justinian, married Theodora, the daughter of a bear keeper and a circus acrobat, who, before she showed up in Ravenna mosaics, is said by Procopius in his Secret History to have indulged in “bestial practices [and] unnatural traffic of the body,” afterward complaining that Nature had short-changed her with only three apertures for intercourse. (Moreover, as if for pay cable: “Often in the theatre, in full view of all the people, she would spread
herself out, and lie on her back on the ground. And certain slaves, whose special task it was, would sprinkle grains of barley over her private parts; and geese trained for the purpose would pick them off one by one with their beaks….”) Richard III! Borgias! Romanovs! Medea and Catherine the Great were both Mommie Dearests. St. Augustine deserted a wife and two mistresses. Rousseau dropped off each of his five children by Thérèse at a foundling hospital. To get on with physics when times were tough, Einstein abandoned his baby daughter and never gave her another thought unless we count the theory of relativity as a sublimation. What Susano-o did in the cave of his Japanese Sun-Goddess sister Amaterasu was not only unspeakable but also bad for matriarchy. The Bible is a how-to manual on abusive sex and crazy violence in a sun-stunned, goat-munched desert.

  Or the Mafia. There was an episode of The Rockford Files on NBC in 1977 called “Requiem for a Funny Box.” Like many Rockfords, it involved the Mob. It took James Garner most of the hour to figure out that the Mob had been responsible for the murder of a comedian because the comedian had been conducting a homosexual affair with the son of a Mob boss. Confronted by his outraged capo father, the son with chilling dignity explained that he had felt this way about men since age seventeen and had even tried to talk about it to a father who refused to listen. This son also pointed out that, considering the deplorable nature of the family business, putting on high moral airs about anything was a bit thick. So the father ordered the son shot, too.

  As old as any family value is the family curse. Most of our violence, like most of our sex, is domestic. But we think about both more than we do either, which is why we’ve got novelists, playwrights, poets, movies, and television. Naturally, gathered around the burning storyteller log in our home-entertainment centers, there is a part of us—kind, dutiful, thrifty, hygienic, repressed—that we’d like to see affirmed. But there is another part that is trapped, sad, and furious. This part seems to enjoy seeing all the bad stuff acted out by somebody else in public, as if the bloody fate of kings and queens were a caution; and the bad luck and hurtful sex of the undeserving rich, unfairly talented, and callously handsome were a comfort; and the punishment of the boring and the blameless by random evil and dreadful chance were somehow emancipating, an opportunity to start over after decks are cleared and worlds collapse—as if we were fans of excessive behavior. Who knows which kind of television is better for the domestic tranquility? Or what it means that TV itself, that sleek console full of contorted faces, is the most domestic of our distractions? Perhaps how families present themselves to the box is as important to think about as how those families are presented on the box. We are since the fifties more fluid in our homes, floating in and out of rooms like ghosts, according to the rhythms of spectacle on demand; more episodic and discontinuous, like impatient vagabonds, choosing to tune in to fictitious lives and counterfeit experiences on the shape-shifting menu at the electric Automat; deritualized, as if no longer grounded in our kitchens, dining rooms, front porch, backyard, or stoop, as casual about eating as we are about relationships, zapping emotions in a microwave for a quick thaw or a loud pop; vertiginous, from a lightness of being.