TO JERUSALEM AND BACK Saul Bellow

TO JERUSALEM AND BACK 

Saul Bellow

“Il mondo civilizzato sembra stanco della sua civiltà”

Di Corbin K. Barthold 

Quasi mezzo secolo dopo, “To Jerusalem and Back” di Saul Bellow si legge ancora come un’interpretazione incredibilmente accurata di Israele, degli Stati Uniti e dei nemici dell’Occidente. “Israele è sotto pressione, è un paese che soffre”, dice con un sospiro un visitatore comprensivo. Le organizzazioni internazionali, la sinistra intellettuale e gran parte dell’Europa si schierano contro di essa. Il sostegno americano è traballante. Gli israeliani stanno lottando per la propria esistenza, forse per la stessa democrazia liberale, ma “in quest’ora difficile”, lamenta il nostro pellegrino, “il mondo civilizzato sembra stanco della sua civiltà, e stanco anche degli ebrei. Non vuole più sentir parlare di sopravvivenza”. Il viaggiatore era Saul Bellow, anno 1975. Pochi mesi dopo, Bellow pubblicò un diario della sua visita, To Jerusalem and Back (1976), la sua unica interpretazione di saggistica in piena regola. Ha preso posizione a favore della civiltà in quel libro e altrove, e la sua pretesa di fama letteraria duratura ne ha sofferto. Ma il legame tra Israele e la civiltà è reale, e il racconto di Bellow del suo viaggio in Terra Santa risuona ancora oggi.

In questo libro, come nei romanzi di Bellow, ciò che colpisce innanzitutto sono gli schizzi dei personaggi. Sul volo verso est, Bellow siede accanto a “un giovane Hasid” (“il suo collo è sottile, i suoi occhi azzurri sono strabuzzati, il suo labbro inferiore sporge”) che si offre di pagargli 15 dollari a settimana, per tutta la vita, per mangiare kosher. Bellow fa amicizia con un massaggiatore, "sia sacerdotale che infantile", le cui mani "hanno la forza che la purezza di intenti può dare". Si meraviglia di come uno studioso che conosce, “un vegetariano, un pacifista, un quacchero – il più strano, il più infelice, un bizzarro incantatore”, possa “innamorarsi dell’Islam militante”. Sebbene gli scontri di Bellow con artisti del calibro di Yitzhak Rabin e Henry Kissinger possano essere di un certo interesse storico, i suoi ritratti di uomini più umili sono dove il suo talento risplende..

To Jerusalem and Back è strutturato – se questa è la parola – attorno a passeggiate e conversazioni, visite e cene, pensieri vaganti e impressioni sensoriali. Il libro è indisciplinato e sconnesso. Una recensione del New York Times lo ha definito “irregolare” come diario di viaggio: “un’immagine nitida, seppure raffazzonata, dell’Israele contemporaneo”. A volte, Bellow il turista è una creatura tranquilla: “La valle di Giosafat, con le sue tombe. Una strada stretta e sui pendii acri e acri di pietra. A volte sembra quasi soffrire della sindrome per cui è famosa la sua destinazione: “La luce di Gerusalemme ha poteri purificatori. . . Non mi vieto di riflettere che la luce possa essere la veste di Dio”. In ogni caso, le immagini e i suoni sono solo uno sfondo. L’attenzione di Bellow torna alla politica, al terrore esistenziale di un Israele turbato dalla guerra dello Yom Kippur.

Alcuni dei nemici espliciti sono cambiati negli anni trascorsi da quando Bellow ha scritto (l’Egitto è fuori, per esempio, mentre l’Iran è dentro), ma il desiderio di distruggere Israele rimane. Questo fatto crudele mantiene le meditazioni di Bellow stranamente aggiornate. I suoi pensieri sulla situazione in Medio Oriente sono più approfonditi, potenti, fluenti e utili che mai. Sono le brillanti elucubrazioni del suo antieroe Herzog, spogliato della nevrosi. Bellow si arrampica nell'abisso del conflitto arabo-israeliano, affronta i suoi dilemmi e, in modo impressionante, emerge con il suo portamento cognitivo, la sua bussola morale e la sua grazia intatta. “Gli ebrei”, scrive Bellow, “poiché sono ebrei, non sono mai stati in grado di considerare il diritto di vivere come un diritto naturale”. Il subconscio israeliano è permeato dalla questione di evitare l’annientamento. Il mondo non è comprensivo. “Per quanto riguarda Israele”, “si gonfia di coscienza morale”. I rifugiati dell’Africa e dell’Asia sono trascurati e dimenticati; “Solo il caso dei palestinesi rimane permanentemente aperto”. Le nazioni arabe dominano l’Assemblea Generale delle Nazioni Unite e “potrebbero facilmente approvare risoluzioni punitive”. La cosiddetta comunità internazionale disprezza Israele.

L’Europa non è d’aiuto. Si arriva a credere “che il capitalismo è finito e che la democrazia liberale sta morendo”. Sta scivolando verso l’austerità (quella che oggi chiameremmo decrescita). Nel suo declino gestito, abbraccia “il feudalesimo arabo, il socialismo arabo, il comunismo cinese”. In Francia Le Monde “sostiene i terroristi. . . . Una recente revisione dell’autobiografia di un fedayn parla degli israeliani come colonialisti”. L’abilità militare di Israele è fastidiosa: il salvataggio degli ostaggi dei fanatici del Terzo Mondo sconvolge i piani europei “per un nuovo ordine internazionale”. Può Israele confidare nel sostegno degli Stati Uniti? L’America è una terra di politica caotica, attenzione distratta e fiducia vacillante. Ha “una passione per l’autocritica”, osserva Bellow. "[Noi] ci accusiamo di tutto, siamo sempre sotto orribili accuse, sotto processo e vaneggiamo con le confessioni più improbabili." La maggior parte degli americani sa tristemente poco di Israele. Pochi sono consapevoli, ad esempio, che gli ebrei accettarono il piano di spartizione delle Nazioni Unite del 1947 – una “soluzione a due Stati” – solo per vedere gli arabi respingerlo e attaccare da tutti i lati. Se il Congresso sostiene Israele, il Dipartimento di Stato no. “L’America, che Dio ci aiuti tutti, non è un paese confortevole su cui fare affidamento”, scrive Bellow.

L’intellighenzia di sinistra si è abbandonata a capofitto alla causa araba. Essi “discutono della Palestina secondo categorie marxiste-leniniste: finanza, capitale, colonialismo, imperialismo. I nazionalisti arabi devono solo invocare slogan anticapitalisti e antimperialisti per ottenere sostegno”. Per Noam Chomsky, “i problemi del Medio Oriente” possono essere ricondotti all’“America imperialista”. Per lui, “il principale nemico ha la sua base a Washington”, da dove, attraverso le macchinazioni di un “capitalismo di stato altamente centralizzato”, “tutti i mali fluiscono”. (Bellow offre, in una sola frase, una risposta adeguata a molti libri di Chomsky: “Sono riluttante a credere che questo ‘capitalismo di stato’ sia diabolico, cospiratorio e onnipotente come dice Chomsky.”) Israele non è senza peccato; nessuno stato lo è. Bellow è in sintonia con i difetti della nazione e sottolinea il suo fallimento nell’alleviare le sofferenze dei palestinesi. (Si sofferma tanto sulle ingiustizie israeliane, infatti, da essere stato accusato di essere “intriso” di “pregiudizi antisionisti”.)

Non ci sono risposte facili e Bellow non pretende il contrario. Osservando la scena «si è contagiati dal disordine»; tutti i percorsi verso la convivenza sono “pieni di difficoltà, irritazioni, crepacuore”. Ma Bellow non ha paura di evidenziare il problema alla radice: gli arabi rifiutano di consentire agli ebrei, “finora una comunità soggetta all’Islam, di esercitare la sovranità politica in un’area considerata parte del dominio musulmano”. Le lamentele arabe devono essere ascoltate; ignorarli è un ostacolo alla pace. Ma “gli arabi si vedono tornare nel sangue e nel fuoco, e gli israeliani non accetteranno di sanguinare e bruciare”. “In questo sgradevole paese da sogno”, osserva Bellow, “i sionisti piantarono frutteti, seminarono campi e costruirono una società fiorente”. Oltre a ciò, hanno costruito un Paese democratico e libero. Israele “solo rappresenta la libertà in Medio Oriente”. Gli israeliani non si tirano indietro davanti a tali proposte. Il loro modo di vivere è “tutt’altro che invidiabile, eppure ha uno scopo chiaro”. L’Occidente, al contrario, è senza timone. Le “nazioni democratiche” sembrano “aver dimenticato ciò che fanno”. Il loro legame “con la civiltà che li ha formati si sta allentando e diventa strano” e loro “sono curiosamente letargici riguardo alla loro libertà”.
La causa di Israele non è altro che la causa della civiltà occidentale. Ma l’Occidente è malato. “Molti esultano per la sua morte imminente. Stanchi dei vecchi mali, desiderano “la novità” e non saranno felici finché non l’avranno avuta”. Quasi mezzo secolo dopo, Bellow continua a leggere come un uomo che tiene il polso dell’ONU, della Corte penale internazionale, della Francia e degli Stati Uniti. I messaggi contrastanti dell’amministrazione Biden dopo gli attacchi del 7 ottobre 2023 confermano che, come ha detto Bellow, “gli israeliani devono fare i conti non solo con i loro nemici ma anche con amici difficili”. Spingere Israele a fare concessioni unilaterali; spingere Israele a difendersi con minore risolutezza e vigore; dare lezioni a Israele, spesso in malafede, su ciò che è meglio per lui: queste sono le perenni politiche americane.
“Se vuoi che tutti ti amino”, riconosce Bellow, “non discutere della politica israeliana”. Allora come oggi, la sinistra universitaria, in particolare, ha reagito male al sentimento filo-israeliano. Ma dai tempi di Bellow, il disprezzo si è trasformato in odio. La difesa di Israele è stata a lungo accolta con grida di colonialismo, imperialismo e razzismo (o, più recentemente, “islamofobia”), ma l’antisemitismo incontrollato visto oggi nei campus americani, soprattutto nelle scuole più elitarie, è qualcosa di inquietante e nuovo. . Sebbene Bellow non vivesse abbastanza per affrontare questa barbarie, la vedeva avvicinarsi. Aveva cercato di stare alla larga dalla politica. Tuttavia, aveva anche cercato di sostenere la civiltà e negli anni '60 il tentativo di sostenere la civiltà divenne un atto politico. Ecco Bellow sulla controcultura: “Mentre Maria Antonietta giocava con le pecore,. . . così i ragazzi di Haight-Ashbury richiedono alla civiltà che li ha prodotti la libertà e la felicità dei primitivi”. Nella sua meticolosa biografia in due volumi di Bellow, Zachery Leader conclude che "gli eventi della fine degli anni '60 avvicinarono Bellow alla visione del mondo dei Kristol", cioè Irving e sua moglie, Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Bellow non si è mai considerato un conservatore e si è irritato per essere chiamato tale. Col senno di poi, però, è difficile capirlo, in età avanzata, come qualunque altra cosa. Potrebbe non essersi unito alla destra, ma quando i liberali persero il contatto con la civiltà che li aveva formati, accettò di essere lasciato dalla sinistra. Incoraggiò Allan Bloom a comporre The Closing of the American Mind (1987), poi scrisse una prefazione che, come il volume stesso, costituì un feroce atto d'accusa contro la cultura contemporanea. Ha denunciato la “inconsistenza” e la “trashness” del “nostro discorso moderno sui 'valori'”, gli “attaccamenti focosi” di “scrittori 'attivisti'” come Gore Vidal, e la svolta delle università verso un “ruolo partecipativo nella società”. .” (In privato chiamava le università “centri contro la libertà di parola”.)
In precedenza, c'era il romanzo di Bellow Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), una protesta contro la criminalità urbana e il degrado che precedette di quasi due decenni The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) di Tom Wolfe. Più tardi ci fu la famigerata osservazione di Bellow secondo cui negli Zulu mancava un Tolstoj. Bellow non era fiero di questa affermazione, ma era disposto a difenderla. “Riconosco un tabù quando ne vedo uno”, ha commentato nel 1994. “La discussione aperta su molte importanti questioni pubbliche è ormai da qualche tempo un tabù”. E questo è Bellow, l'anno prima, quando venne in America da bambino: “Il paese ci ha preso il sopravvento. Era un paese allora, non un insieme di 'culture'”. Lo stesso saggio (“Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: Mainly Reminiscence”, raccolto in It All Adds Up) allude alla crisi dell'Occidente e critica l'antiamericanismo degli istruiti. Un quarto di secolo fa, Martin Amis affermò: “Nel 1989, fluttuazioni temporanee – che andavano sotto il nome di correttezza politica – avevano fatto di Saul Bellow una figura di destra”. Quel riferimento alle “fluttuazioni temporanee” era ingenuo dal giorno in cui Amis lo scrisse. La correttezza politica è radicata nei circoli d’élite e Bellow ne ha pagato il prezzo.
Ironicamente, ha iniziato come un outsider pionieristico. Bellow era l'ebreo immigrato che, nel 1953, osò lasciare che la sua controparte immaginaria, Augie March, si presentasse - "senza scuse o sillabazioni", per un ammirato Philip Roth - come "un americano, nato a Chicago". Eppure oggi Bellow viene fuori, nelle parole di un osservatore critico, come “troppo di destra, troppo irritabile ed eurocentrico”. La sua reputazione è “danneggiata” e “non è ancora chiaro se si riprenderà mai”. La sua situazione è aggravata dalla rivolta dell’establishment letterario contro i maschi eterosessuali bianchi (un termine che ora lo include con enfasi). Il fatto che Bellow abbia affrontato questioni difficili con onestà e sottigliezza non è una redenzione. Christopher Hitchens potrebbe criticare la posizione di Bellow su Israele – una volta rimproverò a lungo il grande uomo, a casa sua, sull’argomento – pur applaudendo la sua posizione a favore della civiltà e della civiltà. Hitchens ha riconosciuto che Bellow non ha mai fatto appello al disgustoso o al bigotto. Ma anche Hitchens è un intellettuale d’altri tempi. L’antisemitismo è, ovviamente, solo una forma di moderna intolleranza progressista. Come gli altri, è una manifestazione del risentimento della sinistra per il successo, dei dubbi sul liberalismo e del disprezzo per le tradizioni occidentali. Ma è anche molto più di questo. In To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow riflette se “c’è qualcosa negli ebrei che suscita la follia tra gli altri popoli”. Una misura della civiltà è il grado in cui una società va nella direzione opposta. 

Corbin K. Barthold è uno scrittore e avvocato che vive in California.

 TO JERUSALEM AND BACK 

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow - To Jerusalem And Back

SECURITY measures are strict on flights to Israel, the bags are searched, the men are frisked, and the women have an electronic hoop passed over them, fore and aft. Then hand luggage is opened. No one is very patient. Visibility in the queue is poor because of the many Hasidim with their broad hats and beards and sidelocks and dangling fringes who have descended on Heathrow and are far too restless to wait in line but rush in and out, gesticulating, exclaiming. The corridors are jumping with them. Some two hundred Hasidim are flying to Israel to attend the circumcision of the firstborn son of their spiritual leader, the Belzer Rabbi. Entering the 747, my wife, Alexandra, and I are enfiladed by eyes that lie dark in hairy ambush. To me there is nothing foreign in these hats, sidelocks, and fringes. It is my childhood revisited. At the age of six, I myself wore a tallith katan, or scapular, under my shirt, only mine was a scrap of green calico print, whereas theirs are white linen. God instructed Moses to speak to the children of Israel and to “bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments.” So they are still wearing them some four thousand years later. We find our seats, two in a row of three, toward the rear of the aircraft. The third is occupied by a young Hasid, highly excited, who is staring at me.

“Do you speak Yiddish?” he says.

“Yes, certainly.”

“I cannot be next to your wife. Please sit between us.

”Be so good,” he says.

”Of course.”

I take the middle seat, which I dislike, but I am not really put out. Curious, rather. Our Hasid is in his late twenties. He is pimply, his neck is thin, his blue eyes goggle, his underlip extrudes. He does not keep a civilized face. Thoughts and impulses other than civilized fill it-by no means inferior impulses and thoughts. And though he is not permitted to sit beside women unrelated to him or to look at them or to communicate with them in any manner (all of which probably saves him a great deal of trouble), he seems a good-hearted young man and he is visibly enjoying himself. All the Hasidim are vividly enjoying themselves, dodging through the aisles, visiting, chattering, standing impatiently in the long lavatory lines, amiable, busy as geese. They pay no attention to signs. Don’t they understand English? The stewardesses are furious with them. I ask one of the hostesses when I may expect to receive a drink and she cries out in irritation, “Back to your seat!” She says this in so ringing a voice that I retreat. Not so the merry minded Hasidim, exulting everywhere. The orders given by these young gentile uniformed females are nothing to them. To them they are merely attendants, exotic bediener, all but bodyless.

Anticipating a difficulty, I ask the stewardess to serve me a kosher lunch. “I can’t do that, we haven’t enough for them,” she says. “We weren’t prepared.” Her big British eyes are affronted and her bosom has risen with indignation. “We’ve got to go out of our way to Rome for more of their special meals.”

Amused, my wife asks why I ordered the kosher lunch. “Because when they bring my chicken dinner this kid with the beard will be in a state,” I explain.

And so he is. The British Airways chicken with the chill of death upon it lies before me. But after three hours of security exercises at Heathrow I am hungry. The young Hasid recoils when the tray is handed to me. He addresses me again in Yiddish. He says, “I must talk to you.

You won’t be offended?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You may want to give me a slap in the face.”

“Why should I”

“You are a Jew. You must be a Jew, we are speaking Yiddish. How can you eat-that I “It looks awful, doesn’t it?”

“You mustn’t touch it. My womenfolk packed kosher beef sandwiches for me. Is your wife Jewish?”

Here I’m obliged to lie. Alexandra is Rumanian. But I can’t give him too many shocks at once, and I say, “She has not had a Jewish upbringing.”

“She doesn’t speak Yiddish?”

“Not a word. But excuse me, I want my lunch.”

“Will you eat some of my kosher food instead, as a favor?”

“With pleasure.”

“Then I will give you a sandwich, but ouly on one condition. You must never-never-eat trephena food again.”

“I can’t promise you that. You’re asking too much.

And just for one sandwich.”

“I have a duty toward you,” he tells me. “Will you listen to a proposition?”

“Of course I will.”

“So let us make a deal. I am prepared to pay you. If you will eat nothing but kosher food, for the rest of your life I will send you fifteen dollars a week.”

“That’s very generous,” I say.

“Well, you are a Jew,” he says. “I must try to save you.”

“How do you earn your living?”

“In a Hasidic sweater factory in New Jersey. We are all Hasidim there. The boss is a Hasid. I came from Israel five years ago to be married in New Jersey. My rabbi is in Jerusalem.”

“How is it that you don’t know English?”

“What do I need English for? So, I am asking, will you take my fifteen dollars?”

“Kosher food is far more expensive than other kinds,” I say. “Fifteen dollars isn’t nearly enough.”

“I can go as far as twenty-five.”

“I can’t accept such a sacrifice from you.”

Shrugging, he gives up and I turn to the twice disagreeable chicken and eat guiltily, my appetite spoiled.

The young Hasid opens his prayer book. “He’s so fervent,” says my wife. “I wonder if he’s praying for you.”

She smiles at my discomfiture.

As soon as the trays are removed, the Hasidim block the aisles with their Minchah service, rocking themselves and stretching their necks upward. The bond of common prayer is very strong. This is what has held the Jews together for thousands of years. “I like them,” says my wife. “They’re so lively, so childlike.”

“You might find them a little hard to live with,” I tell her. “You’d have to do everything their way, no options given.”

“But they’re cheerful, and they’re warm and natural.

I love their costumes. Couldn’t you get one of those beautiful hats?”

“I don’t know whether they sell them to outsiders.”

When the Hasid returns to his seat alter prayer, I tell him that my wife, a woman of learning, will be lecturing at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“What is she?”

“A mathematician.”

He is puzzled. “What is that?” he asks.

I try to explain.

He says, “This I never heard of. What actually is it they do?”

I am astonished. I knew that he was an innocent but I would never have believed him to be ignorant of such a thing. “So you don’t know what mathematicians are. Do you know what a physicist is? Do you recognize the name of Einstein?

“Never. Who is he?”

This is too much for me. Silent, I give his case some thought. Busy minded people, with their head-culture that touches all surfaces, have heard of Einstein. But do they know what they have heard? A majority do not. These Hasidim choose not to know. By and by I open a paperback and try to lose myself in mere politics. A dozen Hasidim in the lavatory queue stare down at us.

We land and spill out and go our separate ways. At the baggage carousel I see my youthful Hasid again and we take a final look at each other. In me he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham. In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity.

It is rather as if Puritans in seventeenth century dress and observing seventeenth century customs were to be found still living in Boston or Plymouth. Israel, which receives us impartially, is accustomed to strange arrivals.

But then Israel is something else again.

We are staying in Jerusalem as guests of the Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the dwellings of serenity.

Mayor Teddy Kollek, irrepressible organizer of wonderful events (some of them too rich for my blood) , takes us to dinner with one of the Armenian Archbishops in the Old City. On the rooftop patio of the opulent apartment are tubs of fragrant flowers. The moon is nearly full. Below is the church, portions of which go back to the fourth century. The Archbishop is, to use an old word, a portly man. His cassock, dark red, swells with the body. On his breast two ball-point pens are clipped between the buttons. He has a full youthful clever face; a black beard, small and tidy. The eyes are green. Present are Isaac Stem; Alexander Schneider, formerly of the Budapest String Quartet; Kollek’s son, Amos; two Israeli couples whom I cannot identify; and the foreign-news editor of Le Montie, Michel Tatu. In the Archbishop’s drawing room are golden icons. In illuminated cases are ancient objects. I can seldom get up much interest in such cases and objects. Middle-aged Armenians serve drinks and wait on us. They wear extremely loud shirts, blue-green sprigged with red berries, but they strike me as good fellows and are neat and nimble about the table. The conversation is quick and super knowledgeable. In French, in English, in Hebrew, and occasionally in Russian. (Tatu, who lived for years in Moscow, chats in Russian with Stem and Schneider.) The Archbishop, who has himself cooked the eggplant and the leg of lamb, tells the company his recipes. He and Kollek discuss seasonings. Schneider recalls a great Armenian. musician and teacher (his own teacher) named Dirian Alexanian, editor of Bach’s Suites for Cello Unaccompanied and the most intolerant perfectionist-“

Just as particular about music as other people are about seasonings. Alexanian said to Pablo Casals after a performance of some of the suites, ‘You made three bad mistakes. Terrible.’ Casals did not answer. He knew Alexanian was right.”

Pale, with black hair in abundance, Tatu is one of those short men who have learned to hold their ground against big ones. He sits with the ease that disguises this sort of tension. His paper is not friendly to Israel. Two or three times I consider whether to mention to him a letter I sent Le Monde during the I973 war about the position being taken by France. I want to ask him why it wasn’t printed. But I succeed in suppressing this-a triumph over myself. Besides, Tatu does not have the look of a man whose life is easy and I don’t see why I should spoil his Jerusalem dinner for him-in his diary it would probably be entered as “An enchanted evening in Le Proche Orient with an Armenian archbishop.” I decide to let him enjoy his dinner. Seeking common ground with my wife (a laudable desire), he tells her that he too is Rumanian by origin. He can safely say this, for his family came to France in the seventeenth century. What is all-important is to be French, ‘or to have been French for a good long time. And French he definitely is. But I can see that the Archbishop gives him bad marks for lighting up after the main course. This is inculte. People of real culture do not smoke at dinner tables. You never know whom you have asked to your palace.

The Archbishop is really very handsome, with his full cheeks, his long clear dark-green eyes, and the short strong beard. His church is venerable rich and beautiful. It contains the head of Saint James the brother of John and many relics. The house of Annas, in which Jesus was questioned and struck, is within the compound. The church’s manuscript collection is the largest outside Soviet Armenia. The antique tiles are gorgeous. But all these things are in some way external: We outsiders are not stable enough to appreciate them. We inherit our mode of appreciation from the Victorians, from a time of safety and leisure, when dinner guests knew better than to smoke after the main course, when Levantines were Levantines and culture was still culture. But in these days of armored attacks on Yom Kippur, of Vietnams, Watergates, Mansons, Anuns, terrorist massacres at Olympic Games, what are illuminated manuscripts, what are masterpieces of wrought iron, what are holy places?

We soon get around to contemporary matters. A call to the telephone; the Archbishop excuses himself in two languages and tells us when he comes back that he has been speaking to one of his Lebanese friends calling from Cyprus or from Greece. He sits down, saying that the influence of Yasir Arafat is evidently weakening and fading. Arafat was unable to complete the classic guerrilla pattern and bring the masses into the struggle. Then someone says that it can’t be long now before the Russians write Arafat off. They have undoubtedly recognized their failure in the Arab world and may even be preparing to reopen diplomatic relations with Israel.

Most of the dinner guests agree that Russia’s internal difficulties are so grave it may have to draw away from Syria. Indeed, it may be forced to retreat from the Middle ‘East and concentrate on its domestic problems. The American grain purchases may not be sufficient. To avoid collapse the Russians may be driven into a war with China. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has won the Middle Eastern struggle by drawing Egypt into the American camp. He is a genius. The Russians are in disarray, perhaps in retreat.

I have been hearing conversations like this one for half a century. I well remember what intelligent, informed people were saying in the last years of the Weimar Republic, what they told one another in the first days after Hindenburg had brought in Hitler. I recall table talk from the times of Leon Blum and Edouard Daladier. I remember what people said about the Italian adventure in Ethiopia and about the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Britain. Such intelligent discussion hasn’t always been wrong. What is wrong with it is that the discussants invariably impart their own intelligence to what they are discussing. Later, historical studies show that what actually happened was devoid of anything like such intelligence.

It was absent from Flanders Field and from Versailles, absent when the Ruhr was taken, absent from Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam, absent from British policy at the time of the Palestine Mandate, absent before, during, and after the Holocaust. History and politics are not at all like the notions developed by intelligent, informed people. Tolstoi made this clear in the opening pages of War and Peace. In Anna ScMrer’s salon, the elegant guests are discussing the scandal of Napoleon and the Duc d’Engbien, and Prince Andrei says that after all there is a great difference between Napoleon the Emperor and Napoleon the private person. There are raisons d’etat and there are private crimes. And the talk goes on. What is still being perpetuated in all civilized discussion is the ritual of civilized discussion itself.

Tatu agrees with the Archbishop about the Russians.

So that, as they say in Chicago, is where the smart money is. The Vatican is the next topic and receives similar treatment. Some Armenian prelates have joined us for coffee and take part in the discussion. Someone observes that the Church is a worshiper of success and always follows the majorities. See what it is doing now in the Warsaw Pact countries, it is making deals with the Communists. Should communism sweep Italy, would the Pope move to Jerusalem? Rather, says one of the prelates, he would stay in Rome and become Party secretary.

And there we are, Kissinger has entirely wrecked Russia’s Middle East policy and the Pope is about to swap the Vatican for the Kremlin. Dessert is served.

In my letter to Le Monde I had said that in the French tradition there were two attitudes toward the Jews: a revolutionary attitude which had resulted in their enfranchisement, and an anti-Semitic one. The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment were decidedly anti-Semitic.

I asked which of the two attitudes would prevail in twentieth century France-the century of the Dreyfus affair and of the Vichy government. The position taken by Foreign Minister Maurice Jobect in the October War of I973 was that the Palestinian Arabs had a natural and justified desire to “go home.” I expressed, politely, the hope that the other attitude, the revolutionary one, would not be abandoned. I made sure that my letter would be delivered.

Eugene lonescu gave the editors one copy of it;

another was handed to them by Manes Sperber, the novelist.

The letter was never acknowledged.

Since I973, Le Monde has openly taken the side of the Arabs in their struggle with Israel. It supports terrorists.

It is friendlier to Arnin than to Rabin. A recent review of the autobiography of a fedayeen speaks of the Israelis as colonialists. On July 3, I976, before Israel had freed the hostages at Entebbe, the paper observed with some satisfaction that Amin, “the disquieting Marshal,” maligned by everyone, had now become the support and the hope of his foolish detractors. Le Monde gloated over this reversal. On July I2, after the raid,

Israel was accused of giving comfort to the reactionaries of Rhodesia and South Africa by its demonstration of military superiority and its use of Western arms and techniques, upsetting the balance between poor and rich countries, disturbing the work of men of good will in Paris who were trying to create a new climate and to treat the countries of the Third World as equals and partners.

Rhodesians and South Africans, said Le Monde, were toasting the Israelis in champagne. But European approval of the raid would endanger the plans of France for a new international order. On July 4-5, again before the rescue, Le Monde bad reported without comment wisecracks made by Arnin in a speech at Port Louis. Addressing the OAS, Amin had provoked laughter and applause among the delegates by saying that the hostages were as comfortable as they could be in the circumstances-surrounded by explosives. “When I left,” he said, laughing, “the hostages wept and begged me to stay.” This broke everybody up.

We step into the street and my friend David Shahar, whose chest is large, takes a deep breath and advises me to do the same. The air, the very air, is thought-nourishing in Jerusalem, the Sages themselves said so. I am prepared to believe it. I know that it must have special properties. The delicacy of the light also affects me. I look downward toward the Dead Sea, over broken rocks and small houses with bulbous roofs. The color of these is that of the ground itself, and on this strange deadness the melting air presses with an almost human weight. Something intelligible, something metaphysical is communicated by these colors.

The universe interprets itself before your eyes in the openness of the rock-jumbled valley ending in dead water. Elsewhere you die and disintegrate. Here you die and mingle. Shahar leads me down from . the Mishkenot Sha’ananirn, which stands on a slope and faces Mount Zion and the Old City, to the Gai-Hinnom (Gehenna of tradition), where worshipers of Moloch once sacrificed their children. He leads me from the Gai-Hinnom up to an ancient Karaite burial ground, where you can see the mingling for yourself. It acts queerly on my nerves (through the feet, as it were), because I feel that a good part of this dust must be ground out of human bone. I don’t know that Jerusalem is geologically older than other places but the dolomite and clay look hoarier than anything I ever saw. Gray and sunken, in the thoughts of Mr. Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses. But there. is nothing in the brilliant air and the massive white clouds hanging over the crumpled mountains that suggests exhaustion.

This atmosphere makes the American commonplace “out of this world” true enough to give your soul a start.

The municipality has turned the Gai-Hinnom into a park. The Wolfson Foundation of London has paid for the planting of gardens, and Arab kids are kicking a soccer ball in the green bottom of the valley. East Jerusalem toughies of fourteen are smoking cigarettes and stiffening their shoulders, practicing the dangerous-loiterer bit as we pass, Shahar lecturing. Shahar-is bald, muscular, and his shirt is ornamented with nags, horseshoes, and bridles-a yellow print on dark blue. Amusing, since he’s a writer and a thoughtful man, anything but a tout. So we look into ancient tombed caverns and the niches into which corpses once were laid. Now truck fenders are rusting there, the twentieth century adding its crumbling metal to the great Jerusalem dust mixture. You can be absolutely sure, says Shahar, that the Prophet Jeremiah passed this way. Right where we are standing.

I find in Elie Kedourie’s Arabic Political Memoirs facts unknown to most about American diplomacy in the late forties. Certainly I didn’t know them. In the Middle East and probably elsewhere, the United States relied heavily on management consultants and public-relations experts. The American firm of Booz, Allen & Hamilton lent one of its specialists, Miles Copeland by name, to the State Department, where he was in I955 a member of a group called the Middle East Policy Planning Committee, the main purpose of which was, in his own words, “to work out ways of taking advantage of the friendship which was developing between ourselves and Nasser.”ˇ

In I947 Copeland had been sent to Damascus (“by whom is not stated,” Kedourie says) “to make unofficial contact” with Syrian leaders and “to probe for means of persuading them, on their own, to IiberaIize their political system.”

Spreading democracy over the world, the Americans first fought rigged elections in Syria, but the old corruption continued despite all their power and money could do. Frustrated, the Americans decided for the best of reasons, as always, to make a heavier move: “The American Minister at Damascus decided to encourage a military coup d’etat, so that Syria might enjoy democracy,” Kedourie writes. This was not considered particularly bizarre; other American ambassadors and ministers in the Arab world were entirely in favor of “genuine” revolution to overthrow old landowners, rich crooks, and politicians. “What was wanted was an elite to underpin the rulers, themselves in turn supported and buttressed by a population which presumably understood, approved, and legitimated the aims of such an elite. Whoever knows the Middle East will agree that such a quest was the political equivalent of the search for the philosophical stone.”

Failing in Syria, the Americans went to work in Egypt.

Kerntit Roosevelt of the CIA “met a number of officers who were involved in the conspiracy which led to the coup d’etat of 22 July, I952.” The Americans wanted the new regime to make the populace literate, to create “a large and stable middle class .•. a sufficient identification of local ideals and values, so that truly indigenous democratic institutions could grow up.” Gliding into a new political realm, the Americans arranged for loans to the Egyptian government. They believed that genuine democracy was now on its way. James Eichelberger, a State Department political scientist who had been an account executive for J. Walter Thompson, one of the world’s largest advertising and public-relations firms, “was sent to Cairo where he talked with Nasser and his confidants and produced a series of papers identifying the new government’s problems and recommending policies to deal with them.” One of these papers, written by Eichelberger himself, was translated into Arabic, “commented upon by members of Nasser’s staff, translated back into English for Eichelberger’s benefit.” This document, called “Power Problems of a Revolutionary Government,” went back and forth, according to Mr. Copeland, “between English and Arabic until a final version was produced.

The final paper was passed off to the outside world as the work of Zakaria Mohieddin, Nasser’s most thoughtful (in Western eyes), reasonable deputy, and accepted at face value by intelligence analysts of the State Department, the C.I.A. and, presumably, similar agencies of other governments.”

Who would have thought that a former American account executive could write: “The police should be ‘politicized,’ and should become, to whatever extent necessary, a partisan para miIitary arm of the revolutionary government”? This is Leninism, neat, with neither ice nor bitters. Or, “The nerve center of the whole security system of a revolutionary state (or of any state) lies in a secret body, the identity and very existence of which can be safely known only to the head of the revolutionary government and to the fewest possible number of other key leaders.” It was Jefferson who said that the tree of liberty must occasionally be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. We must now believe that the same romantic conviction has been alive somewhere in the offices of J. Walter Thompson. The United States is, after all, the prime revolutionary country. Or was Mr. Eichelberger simply an executive with a client to please and a job to do-a pure professional? Or is there in the world by now a natural understanding of revolution, of mass organization, cadres, police rule, and secret executive bodies? This is a shocking suspicion. Of course the paper written by Mr. Eichelberger and his Egyptian collaborators states that the purpose of the Nasser seizure of power was “to solve the pressing social and political problems which made the revolution necessary.”

To solve problems, to help, to befriend, to increase freedom. To strengthen America’s position, and at the same time to do good; to advance the cause of universal equality; to be the iIIusionless tough guy on a world scale; to be a mover and shaker, a shaper of destiny-or perhaps, surrendering to fantasies of omnipotence, to be the nation-making American plenipotentiary, at work behind the scenes and playing confidently even with Bolshevik fire.

And what problems were solved? Nasser solved no problems. Mr. Kedourie doubts that he needed “to call on the resources of American political science for such lessons in tyranny. What does remain most puzzling,” he says, “is why it was thought that the imparting of such lessons could advance the interests of the United States, or even contribute to the welfare of the Egyptian people.”

For an American, the most intriguing question is this: whence the passion for social theory among these high functionaries of the advertising world? How did executive types ever learn of such things?

READING The Sound and the Fury last night, I came upon words in Quentin Compson’s thought that belonged to EE Cummings and the thirties, not to the year I9I0. “Land of the kike home of the wop,” says Compson to himself when he buys a bun from a smaIl Italian girl. This I would have read without flinching in Chicago but in Jerusalem I flinched and put the book down. Returning to it next day, I found Faulkner guilty of no offense. It’s possible that people at the turn of the century were saying “land of the kike” and that Faulkner didn’t borrow it from Cummings. I had been telling Shahar when we were walking in the Gai-Hinnom that I hadn’t liked it when David Ben-Gurion on his visits to the United States would call upon American Jews to give up their illusions about goyish democracy and emigrate full speed to Israel. As if America’s two-hundred year record of liberal democracy signified nothing. If Israel were governed as Egypt is, or Syria, would I have come here at all?

But then, to its more severe leftist critics, some of them Jews, Israel is not the “democratic exception” it is said to be. The New Left sees it as a reactionary small country. Its detractors tell you how it abuses its Arab population and, to a lesser extent, Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Orient. It is occasionally denounced by some Israelis as corrupt, “Levantine,” theocratic. Gossip traces the worst of the Israeli financial swindles to the most observant of Orthodox Jews. I am often told that the old Ashkenazi leaders were unimaginative, that the new Rabin group lacks stature, that Ben-Gurion was a terrible old guy but a true leader, that the younger generation is hostile to North African and Asian Jews. These North African and Oriental immigrants are blamed for bringing a baksheesh mentality to Israel; the intellectuals are blamed for letting the quality of life (a deplorable phrase) deteriorate-I had hoped that six thousand miles from home I would hear no more about the quality of Iife and then there is the Palestinian question, the biggest and most persistent of Israel’s headaches: “We came here to build a just society. And what happened immediately?”

I speak of this to Shahar. He says to me, “Where there is no paradox there is no life.”

In Jakov Lind’s interesting brief book on Israel, Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying, “The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await them. Their hell is a personal dissatisfaction with themselves if they are mediocre.”ˇJews do, it is well known, make inordinate demands upon themselves and upon one another. Upon the world, too. I occasionally wonder whether that is why the world is so uncomfortable with them. At times I suspect that the world would be glad to see the last of its Christianity, and that it is the persistency of the Jews that prevents it. I say this remembering that Jacques Maritain once characterized European anti-Semitism of the twentieth century as an attempt to get rid of the moral burden of Christianity. And what is it that has led the Jews to place themselves, after the greatest disaster of their history, in a danger zone? A Jewish professor at Harvard recently said to me, “Wouldn’t it be the most horrible of ironies if the Jews had collected themselves conveniently in one country for a second Holocaust?” This is a thought that sometimes crosses Jewish minds. It is accompanied by the further reflection (partly proud, mostly bitter) that we Jews seem to have a genius for finding the heart of the crisis.

The Valley of Jehosaphat, with its tombs. A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone. Caves, graves, litter, fallen rocks, and in tiny schoolrooms Arab boys singing their lessons. Even in November the place is uncomfortably warm. The Jordanians built a road over Jewish graves. The municipality of Jerusalem is planning to build a new road and will tear the Jordanian one up. The Herodian relics are all that relics should be-columns distorted, well worked over by time, Absalom’s tomb with its bulbous roof and odd funnel tapering out of it. The armies of the dead in all directions, interminable. A fine thing to obsess yourself with, burial and lamentation and lying about under the walls of Jerusalem waiting for the Messiah’s trumpet to sound. A few Arab hens are scratching up dust and pecking.

Not a breakfast egg comes to the table that isn’t death-speckled. Parties of American girls come down the slope in their dungarees, with sweaters tied by their sleeves about the waist. Above, to the left, a Muslim cemetery. The great Golden Gate that will open when ‘ the Redeemer appears stands sealed. Just beyond, the Garden of Gethsemane. As its name indicates, it was an olive grove. Now pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus trees grow there below the domes of the Russian Orthodox church. Opposite it there are olives still, which Arabs are harvesting with long poles. They hit the branches, they thresh the leaves with their sticks, and the fruit rains down.

As we go up into the Via Dolorosa, we hear an exciting jingle. Arab boys are racing their donkeys down the hill.

You look for sleighs and frost when you hear this jingle belling.

Instead, there are boys stem and joyous, galloping hell-bent on their donkeys toward the Lions’ Gate.

”Rode from Ramiah to Lydda,” Herman Melville wrote in his travel journal of I857. A mounted escort of some 30 men, all armed. Fine riding. Musket shooting.

Curvetting & caracoling of the horsemen. Outriders.

Horsemen riding to one side, scorning the perils.”

And a few days later, on the barrenness of Judea, “whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape-bleached -leprosy-encrustation of curses—had cheese-bones of rocks,-crunched, gnawed, & mumbled-mere refuse & rubbish of creation-like that laying outside of Jaffa Gate -all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish …. No moss as in other ruins-no grace of decay -no ivy-the unleavened nakedness of desolation-whitish ashes-lime-kilns . … Village of Lepers-houses facing the wall-Zion. Their park, a dung-heap.-They sit by the gates asking alms,-then whine-avoidance of them & horror. Wandering among the tombs-till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils.”

ANWAR Sadat’s American visit. You have to discuss this with Israelis before they will consent to talk about anything else. An indignant librarian, a middle-aged woman whose face is so hot it is almost fragrant with indignation, demands of me in a super distinguished all but Oxonian accent, “How do you account for it!”

I shrug. This is what I would say if I did answer her:

Americans love to open their hearts to foreign visitors.

These visitors are sometimes treated as if they were the heroes of an Arabian Nights’ tale. We’ll show them how good we all are and well-meaning and generous and open minded and evenhanded. We will be full of emotion and the visitors will be correspondingly full of emotion, and after they have been wined and feted and dined and toasted and televised and paraded and clapped and the supplying of loans and atomic plants and military hardware has been discussed they will love us. I trust that they will give us better love than they are getting from us, for ours is a very low-quality upward-seeping vegetable-sap sort of love, as short-lived as it is spontaneous. As soon as they leave they are forgotten. An old Mormon missionary in Nauvoo once gripped my knee hard as we sat side by side, and he put his arm about me and called me “Brother.” We’d only met ten minutes before. He took me to his good bosom. His eyes began to mist. I was a prospect, an exotic prospect in old tennis shoes and a sweatshirt. His heart opened to me. It opened like a cuckoo clock. But it did not give me the time of day.

“But don’t Americans know that Sadat was a Nazi?” the librarian says.

Well, yes, well-informed people do have this information in their files. The New York Times is sure to have it, but the Times as I see it is a government within a government. It has a state department of its own, and its high councils have probably decided that it would be impolitic at this moment to call attention to Sadat’s admiration for Hitler.

I tell the lady that I have sent ‘a copy of a eulogy of Hitler written by Sadat in I953 to Sydney Gruson of the Times and also to Katharine Graham of The Washington Post.

“Will they print it?” she asked.

“Difficult to guess,” I tell her. “The Times ought to be stronger in politics than it is in literature, but who knows.

Of course it must do financial news and sports well enough. If it covered ball games as badly as it reviews books, the fans would storm it like the Bastille. Book readers evidently haven’t got the passionate intensity of sports fans.”

What disturbs is whether Americans understand the world at all, whether they are a match for the Russians the Sadats are in themselves comparatively unimportant.

To dissident Russian writers ,like Lev Navrozov, the Americans can never be a match for the Russians. He quotes from Dostoevski’s The House of the Dead a conversation between the writer and a brutal murderer, one of those criminals who fascinated him.ˇ I haven’t the book handy, so I paraphrase. “Why are you so kind to me?” Dostoevski asks. And the murderer, speaking to one of the geniuses of the nineteenth century, answers, “Because you are so simple that one cannot help feeling sorry for you.” Even when he robbed Dostoevski, he pitied him as one might “a little cherub-like child.”

Navrozov, exceedingly intelligent but, to a Westerner, curiously deformed (how could an independent intellectual in the Soviet Union escape deformity?), sees us, the Americans, as children at whom the StaIins smile through their mustachios. Perhaps there is a certain Vautrin admiring romanticism in this. Dostoevski, no mean judge of such matters, thought there was much to he said for the murderer’s point of view. Navrozov extends the position.

Liberal democracy is as brief as a bubble. Now and then history treats us to an interval of freedom and civilization and we make much of it. We forget, he seems to think, that as a species we are generally close to the “state of nature,” as Thomas Hobbes described it-a nasty, brutish, pitiless condition in which men are too fearful of death to give much thought to freedom. If Hobbes is too nifty an authority, let us think of the social views of Jimmy Hoffa. Or of the Godfather. Or of Lenin, as Navrozov accurately characterizes him. And this is what America, bubbling with political illusions, is up against.

So, at least, Navrozov thinks. Perhaps Alexander Solzhenitsyn agrees with him in part. Apparently Russians are all inclined to see us in this way. My own cousin, Nota Gordon, two years out of the Soviet Union, says to me, “You are no match for them. You do not understand with whom you are dealing.”

Nota held the rank of captain in the Russian army and fought the Germans until I945. He was three times seriously wounded. He has the family look-the brown eyes, arched brows, dark coloring, and white hair. He has, besides, the gold crowns of Russian dental art. Criminals released from prison during the war served in his company. Nota has no swagger but he is war-hardened. There was no food sent to the front lines. You ate frozen potatoes, you foraged, and you stole. You could depend on your criminal soldiers to bring in provisions. “I myself had absolute authority to kill anyone in my command. At my discretion. No explanations necessary,” says Nota.

We are first cousins but he is Russian, I am an American, and in his Russian ,eyes an American is amiable, good natured, attractive perhaps, but undeveloped, helpless: all that Dostoevski was to his fellow convict the murderer.

Nevertheless, I see that in a book called Things to Come two Americans who think themselves anything but undeveloped and helpless, Herman Kahn and B Bruce-Briggs, are not impressed by Russian achievements.

“Most striking is the disappointing performance of Soviet foreign and domestic policy since the late I950’s,”.they wrote in I972. “In the foreign policy field the Soviets have had an almost uninterrupted series of defeats and disappointments.

They have failed to extend their influence in Europe … . Their attempts to ingratiate themselves with India and other neutralist nations have gained them little .

… For fifteen years the Soviet Union had been supporting the Arabs against Israel in the Middle East and all they have to show for it is the humiliation of their proteges and the capture and destruction of their equipment by Israel. The Arabs have shown no inclination toward Communist ideology and their oil continues to flow to the West. (The only other choice for the Arabs is to leave their oil in the ground.)”

I copy this out for my own entertainment-a specimen of illusionless American political analysis. These views no substitute for common sense-are based upon careful staff work at the Hudson Institute. The Messrs. Kahn and Bruce-Briggs say in a prefatory note that their book is “basically an organizational product. All of the staff at Hudson have contributed in some way to this work, as have the thousands of people with whom we have discussed these issues at meetings, seminars, and briefings at the Institute and other locations around the world.”

What the literary imagination faces in these political times. One of the finest Israeli writers, AB Yehoshua, speaks about this in an excellent book of interviews, Unease in Zion, edited by Ehud ben Ezer. “It is true,” Yehoshua writes, “that because our spiritual life today cannot revolve around anything but these questions [political questions], when you engage in them without end you cannot spare yourself, spiritually, for other things. Nor can you attain the true solitude that is a condition and prerequisite of creation, the source and its strength. Rather, yon are continuously summoned to solidarity, summoned from within yourself rather than by any external compulsion; because you live from one newscast to the next, and it becomes a solidarity that is technical, automatic from the standpoint of its emotional reaction, because by now you are completely built to react that way and to live in tension. Your emotional reactions to any piece of news about an Israeli casualty, a plane shot down, are pre-determined.

Hence the lack of solitude, the inability to be alone in the spiritual sense, and to arrive at a life of intellectual creativity.”

During the Six Day War, Yehoshua says that he felt himself linked to a great event, that he was within a historic wave and at one with its flow. This was a pleasant and elevating feeling. But today, unable to see the end of war, he has lost the sensation of being borne upon any such wave. “You do not achieve peace from history,” he says. “The feeling of being swept along and of uncertainty as regards the future prevents you from seeing things in any perspective whatsoever…. You live the moment, without any perspective, but you cannot break free of the moment, forget the moment. You cannot cut yourself off and not read newspapers or stop hearing the news over the radio for weeks on end, as you could six or seven years ago.”

It is slightly different with us. Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing-a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the U.N., the financial collapse of New York. We can’t avoid being politicized (to use a word as murky as the condition it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so huge and so terrible), can be screened out. The study of literature is itself heavily “politicized.” There is a clever, persistent young woman who writes to me from Italy, who insists upon giving the most ordinary occurrences in my novels a political interpretation.

A cafeteria lunch in New York actually refers to a meeting in Canada between Churchill and Roosevelt, and a tussle with a drunk in the hallway of a rooming house corresponds to D-Day. Everything reflects the significant event, for the significant event is beyond question historical and political, not private. She thinks that it is sly of me to deny this.

Not to submit to what societies and governments consider to be important. Stendhal’s heroes, when they are in prison, choose to think above love. E. E. Cummings, locked up by the French government, finds his aesthetic paradise in the detention camp of Fert.. Mace. The bravest of modem writers are the Mandelstams and the Sinyavskys. Before he died of cold, hunger, and exhaustion in Siberia, Osip Mandelstam recited his poems to other convicts, at their request. Andrei Sinyavsky, in his prison journal, concentrates on art. Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics. Then human feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their proper place-the foreground.

My friend John Auerbach comes up from Caesarea to see me. A kibbutznik seaman, he has just returned from a voyage. I have known him for only a few years but he has become a dear friend. I had been warned that as I grew older the difficulty of forming new friendships would be great. On the contrary, I find it much easier now at sixty to draw near to people.

John looks too much the writer-slight in person, delicate -to be a chief engineer. He does, however, hold an engineer’s ticket and can do complicated emergency repairs in mid-ocean. Boyish, bearded (the beard is short and copper-brown), nervous, a bit high, thinner than when I saw him last, he carries a cardboard valise containing books and booze and pajamas and a house present. He is delighted to be here, and he is suffering-the one activates the other, He is grieving for his son. Adam Auerbach served in an electronic-warfare unit and was returning from a military action when the helicopter in which he was flying crashed We embrace and then we go out of doors with a bottle to have a drink and get some sun.

Even on a sunny morning the stone buildings of Jerusalem chill your hands and feet. Stepping out, I feel a bit numb, like a wasp in autumn. We sit on a stone wall over the garden and drink aquavit. He wants to talk. He loves books passionately, he wants to discuss American literature, to hear marvelous things from me. But I can see that the big current of his suffering has begun to run heavily.

He has returned from a voyage, he is out in the sun shining from the hills of Moab, he is drinking aquavit with a dear friend, looking over at Mount Zion. But his son is dead.

At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. They were killed.

Everyone was killed. John somehow obtained Polish seaman’s papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus, joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, married, and had two children. His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again. He says, “I ask myself in what ways my life has not been typical. For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical-war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among Germans, death of wife, death of son. Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz. Nothing exceptional.

“

John sails infrequently now. He doesn’t like the new huge tankers. Super mechanized, ultra efficient, they give the crew no time in foreign ports. The cargo on the voyage from which he has just returned was Dead Sea potash.

They were to bring home Italian steel. North of Naples they had bad weather and engine trouble, but they reached their harbor and anchored near two Japanese ships. On the pilot’s advice they were moved farther into port by two togs. Within five hours John had repaired the engines, but the port officials claimed that the ship was incapacitated and demanded that the captain post a twenty thousand dollar bond against expenses that might be run up by his “crippled ship.” True, the ship had had to be moved into its berth by the togs but it had been crippled only briefly. Well, this matter was in dispute. The ship lay unloaded and demurrage fees mounted-in brief, a holdup by local racketeers. The same everywhere, now.

Everybody has some con going, says John, who loves American slang. The home office in Haifa was trying to get protection from the insurance company. There were long days in port with nothing to do. The town was covered in potash dust. Waiters and bartenders wiped dishes and glasses continually. Brushing at dust was the commonest gesture in town. A community of about twenty thousand people had traffic jams worthy of Rome, cars as a matter of course rushing into the reserved bus lanes, screwing everything up and honking madly. It all came to a panting standstill morning and evening without fail.

To get away from the traffic snarl you could climb a nearby mountain and come down to a deserted beach, similar to the beach at Sdot Yam. John and his dog, Mississippi, went there every day. The German tourists had gone home, the bathing cabins were nailed shut. It was lovely, the small waves coming in steadily. In little pangs, said John.

Part of the American Sixth Fleet was anchored nearby. The aircraft carrier John F Kennedy, with its helicopters, reminded John of the death of his son. He passed the time with young American sailors. On shore leave they wear civilian clothing now. This probably makes them less rowdy. One of the boys was from Oklahoma, near Tulsa.

He had heard of Israel, but only just, and he was not especially interested. John was delighted by this. A clean young son, he said. Such ignorance was refreshing. The young sailor knew nothing about holocausts or tanks in the desert or terrorist bombs. Back at sea, John had to stand double watches in the engine room because he was shorthanded. Off duty, he read in his cabin and chatted with his confidante, Mississippi.

The crew said he was drinking himself silly in his quarters. When the ship passed Stromboli at night, there was a streak of crimson lava flowing from the volcano and the sailors wouldn’t leave the television set to look at this natural phenomenon. But an owl from the island, disturbed by the sparks, flew out to the ship and was discovered next day on the mast. One of the young sailors carried it down. Then an engine man from the Balkans said, “In our village we nailed owls to the church door when we caught them.” They shut the owl in the paint locker while they debated what to do with it, and in the night John set it free. The bird scratched his arm rather badly. “Go back to Stromboli, you dumb bastard,” he said. So it flew off and the ship continued on its foul way. It’s the water pumped into the tanks for ballast and then pumped out again that pollutes the seas, says John.

Before I left Chicago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg said to me, “Going to Jerusalem? And wondering whether people will talk freely? You’ve got to be kidding, they’ll talk your head off.” He spoke as a Jew to a Jew about Jewish powers of speech. In flight, if the door of your plane comes open you are sucked into space. Here in Jerusalem, when you shut your apartment door behind you you fall into a gale of conversation-exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophecy. From diplomats you hear cagey explanations; from responsible persons, cautious and grudging statements rephrasing and amending your own questions; from parents and children, deadly divisions; from friends who let themselves go, passionate speeches, raging denunciation of Western Europe, of Russia, of America. I listen carefully, closely, more closely than I’ve ever listened in my life, utterly attentive, but I often feel that I have dropped into a shoreless sea.

The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival-the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades. At first this is hard to grasp because the setting is so civilized. You are in a city like many another well, not quite, for Jerusalem is the only ancient city I’ve ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use. Still, the city is a modem city with modem utilities. You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink. Uneasy, you go out to your civilized dinner. Bombs are exploding everywhere. Dynamite has just been thrown in London; the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute.

Yet here you sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. You know that your hostess has lost a son; that her sister lost children in the I973 war; that in this Jerusalem street, coolly sweet with night flowers and dark green under the lamps, many other families have lost children. And on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents-two on a break from night school,stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died. But in the domestic ceremony of passed dishes and filled glasses thoughts of a destructive enemy are hard to grasp. What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted.

Others can; you cannot. This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a .decent regime.

No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right.

To be sure, many Israelis refuse to admit that this historic uneasiness has not been eliminated. They seem to think of themselves as a fixed power, immovable. Their point has been made. They are a nation among nations and wilI always remain so. You must tear your mind away from this conviction, as you must tear it from “civilized” appearances, in order to reach reality. The search for relief from the uneasiness is what is real in Israel. Nationalism has no comparable reality. To say, as George Steiner says, that Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model can’t he right. The Jews did not become nationalistic because they drew strength from their worship of anything resembling Germanic Blut und Eisen but because they alone, amongst the peoples of the earth, had not established a natural right to exist unquestioned in the lands of their birth. This right is still clearly not granted them, not even in the liberal West.

At the same time Jews are called upon (by Mr. Steiner in The Listenerˇ ) and call upon themselves to he more just and more moral than others.

Mr D of the Foreign Ministry is wearing a suit.

Israelis seldom dress up. Even more exceptional is Mr. D’s necktie, for in Israel gentlemen favor the Whitmanesque-or Ben-Gurionesque-open collar. I have been told that Winston Churchill gravely disapproved of Ben-Gurion’s informality of dress, but I cannot vouch for this. Mr. D, however, is a proper diplomat who grew up under the British Mandate. Although he fought against it, he loves England and is happier in London or Oxford than anywhere else in the world except Israel. He gives me a brief rundown of the diplomatic posts he has held. He doesn’t actually say that he hates Sweden-I say it for him. He intimates that in Stockholm everyone was very correct, faultless, but perhaps also heartless. France? Well, what can one do about the French, they are so wonderful, they are so disagreeable. France is an open society for those who are willing to become French. Americans? A strange and mixed lot. Decent people but crude and lacking finish-not to be compared with the best products of English culture. We are drinking tea, English tea with milk in it. On every archway of my flat there is a mezuzah. Through the lattice windows we see Mount Zion and the Muslim parapets.

Late afternoon light on the stones only increases their stoniness. Yellow and gray, they have achieved their final color; the sun can do no more with’ them. I try ‘Mr. D with one of my questions. He has worked in Washington. Do Americans know what is going on in the world? Admittedly, he replies, the Americans are well informed, their information-gathering apparatus is formidable.

But to be well informed, I persist, is not the same as understanding what goes on. My correct visitor grants me this. Does he agree with the Armenian Archbishop and with M Tatu of Le Monde that Kissinger has outwitted the Russians by getting Egypt to accept the Sinai agreement? Mr. D does not think that Mr. Kissinger has foiled Russia in the Middle East. The inevitable speculation follows: What is Kissinger? The Israelis are profoundly and bitterly intrigued by him. How did he get his power, anyway? We go over the usual points. Without a real base, he has the wizard exotic aura of the clever Jew, the Jud Suss, the financial manager or business agent of small German princedoms. He has a bold hand, he is cagey, he is a jet-setter, a glamour-lover, and a publicity expert. He seems to understand that since television has created an entertainment culture in the United States, you must join the entertainment world if you have no other power base, becoming something of a star. Kissinger has done this brilliantly. Perhaps it is after all his dramatic talent that accounts for everything. His good friend Danny Kaye can be serious as well as comic, and Kissinger can be playful. In diplomacy he is too roughly playful. Israel’s present ambassador has been dominated by the overmastering Kissinger. I have been told that he got Simchah Dinitz to lobby for a Sinai agreement. It was infra dig for an ambassador to haunt the corridors of the Senate Office Building, to solicit votes in congressional offices, said my informants. Israel is poorly represented in Washington. For Israel, the Washington job is the most important of all diplomatic assignments and yet inadequate people are continually sent over. But then Israel is poorly governed now. The founding generation has no adequate successors.

Does Mr D think that the Russians, disappointed in their efforts in the Arab world, might like to resume diplomatic relations with Israel? That is up to the Russians, says Mr D. “If we approach them they will take it for a sign of weakness. They will come to us if and when it seems profitable to them to re-establish such relations.

To open their embassy in Ramat-Gan would bring them certain advantages. They could more easily gather information. As it is, they must depend upon their agents.

Possibly they will get the Poles to come back and do the job for them.”

Mr. Kissinger, in Geneva, arranged private talks between Andrei Gromyko and the Israelis. This was in December I973. Gromyko, though he seems publicly surly, sour, rude and inflexible, knows how to reverse himself.

The forbidding Gromyko addressed Foreign Minister Abba Eban with sweetness, as an old colleague should.

How many wonderful occasions they had shared. They had quarreled, yes, and their disputes had at times been murderous, but on the human level-and Gromyko is after all human-there are private sentimental attachments.

I have been told often by people who should know (again a few days ago by a young American woman who had just received her Ph.D. in Russian literature) that Russian, the language itself, is one of the strongholds of the human heart. It has what social scientists would call “charismatic depths.” A commonplace Russian conversation will contain most affectionate expressions. And even if you condemn people to death you are obliged by the genius of the language to frame the death sentence in loving words. There would seem to be a struggle between light and darkness within the mother tongue, and perhaps Russian history is in part a rebellion against these loving expressions by which “realistic” people feel themselves betrayed. They speak loving words and they may feel that a mind stirred by love is dangerous. Peril mobilizes your defenses, and then you murder because your soul has been moved. But a Gromyko can feel secure enough behind the mountain range of corpses to speak sweetly in private to the representative of a tiny country with whom he is having an intimate cup of tea.

He told Eban that Russia has never been Israel’s enemy.

Israel was born with the blessings of the Soviet Union.

That is true enough. But what of the billions in Russian military aid to Syria, and what of the SAM missiles, the arming of Palestinian terrorists, the denunciations in the Soviet press and in the U.N.? Ah well, it is true we are against the territorial expansion of Israel, and we cannot accept aggression, occupation, and the rest of it. But we are not really unfriendly toward Israel. From first to last our attitude has been consistent.

Hearing of such a conversation, you get the feeling that Israel is something like an insecure tooth on which the Russians don’t choose to use the pincers. They will work it back and forth and when it is sufficiently loose they will take it out with their fingers.

The intelligent Mr D is well bred and speaks decently, exaggerates nothing, and is devoid of pretensions.

What Mr. D says, and he says it quietly, is that for him it is bliss to be in England.

Last week, the novelist Amos Oz observed to me that Israel contains more different visions of Heaven than any outsider can imagine. Everyone who carne over brought his own dream of Paradise with him. On Oz’s own kibbutz, people work hard until 2 p.m. Then they wash and rest and dress, and after lunch, many of them being Russian in origin, they read serious books and listen to music; they spend their afternoons and evenings gravely discussing Marxism. Their greatest pleasure is to talk in the old way about revolution and socialism and the future of mankind. The German Jews here often rest in a Kultur paradise, reading Homer and Plato and Goethe, and listening to Mozart.

The old barber at the King David Hotel, Ephraim Mizrahi, a native of Jerusalem, asks me how old I am. He then says, “I, too, am sixty.” We are speaking Spanish-Ladino, rather. He is a charmer: his hands shake a bit but he gives an excellent haircut. His blue eyes are small and overhung with wild white hairs.

I speak to him about Hubert H. Humphrey, and a blue flame awakens again in those two embers. A sort of senile strength and cheer straighten his body. He adores Hubert H. Humphrey. Signed photos of Humphrey hang on every wall. He has often cut Humphrey’s hair. He has received senatorial and Vice-Presidential letters from Humphrey. I take the trouble to go around and read them. They are rich in congressional corn. Everything is big and open, congratulatory, wonderful and frank.

“How do you like that?” says Ephraim. “Un hombre tan importante que me escribe and me ha dado su retratoa mi, un barbero sencillof’ The senator looks extremely healthy and so does his wife. They are holding hands and strolling, dressed in sportswear, through the flowers.

Feeble Mizrahi returns to his snipping. I wonder whether my ears will be safe when he unfolds his straight razor. But that is merely peripheral. What goes through my mind is that Humphrey is really an awfully clever politician. Thousands of influential American Jews, big givers, stop at the King David. How ingenious of Humphrey to win the barber’s heart and cover the walls of his shop with letters and photographs. And perhaps Humphrey really lost his heart to the old boy. Anyway, no harm has been done to Mizrahi, sighing and doddering and clipping behind me. Humphrey is, indeed, a friend of Israel and could be counted on to be one even if he had become President. Alexandra and I saw Humphrey not long ago at a banquet given in the White House for Harold Wilson. Wilson, fatty, stooped, and short, without the slightest interest in the people being introduced to him, his longish white hair lying on the dusty collar of his dinner jacket, was merely getting through the, evening, longing for his bed and his mystery novel. And there was Humphrey, slender, fit, elastic, eager, rosy, and garrulous. Alexandra and I had just come up from the lobby. On the ground floor, a young Marine in dress uniform, covered with campaign ribbons, was playing baroque Italian music on a harp. We checked our coats, another uniformed Marine escorted Alexandra up the stairs, and there was a Marine orchestra playing tunes from Broadway musicals. Then we entered the East Room and joined the other guests. I knew, or thought I knew, many of them, having seen their faces on television and in the papers. But this was illusory. I have never met Cary Grant or Danny Kaye - I only feel that I have. Senator Humphrey was the only man there with whom I could claim to be acquainted.

“There’s someone I know,” I said. to Alexandra, and I introduced her to the senator, who shook our hands.

But he was in one of his public states. The fit was on him. He conldn’t bear to be confined to the two of us.

He was looking for someone more suitable, for the most suitable encounter, the one it could be death to miss.

He was gripped by an all but demonic desire for the optimum encounter. He touched our hands, he looked beyond us and was gone. Nelson Rockefeller suffered from the same disorder. It was pnly the old senators without Presidential ambitions who did not hasten from guest to guest. Wrinkled senior elephants like Hugh Scott wailed patiently for their food.

Alexandra smiled at me and said, “Senator Humphrey doesn’t remember you.” But he was next to her at table and she told me after dinner that he had suddenly remembered me. “Minneapolis, and so on.” She rather liked him.

Kissinger was deep in conversation with Danny Kaye.

Their arms about each other. One of Kissinger’s assistants earnestly said, “That is an old relationship and a very meaningful one.” Nelson Rockefeller, stockier and shorter than I had thought him to be, crossed the room to shake my hand. He had taken me for someone else and recognized his error in mid-course when it was too late to turn aside. We did the handshake bit, I murmured my meaningless name, and the Vice President went on to seek a more significant encounter. This gave me some sense of what it was to be had in thrall, like the poor knight in Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”-only in public life.

When we left, the attendants below could not get us a cab. They said, “Cabs won’t come to the White House.”

“Why?”

“Well, they’re sore at us. They answer a call and by the time they get here the party’s taken a ride with somebody else. So now they say to hell with the White House.”

We were advised to go on foot, along the old State Department Building and out through the gate to Pennsylvania Avenue. And so we did, under a cold rain that ruined Alexandra’s silk shoes. There was little traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. I planted myself in mid-street and stopped a cab. The driver refused to take us to Our hotel.

He was Virginia-bound, he said, and he drove off. Then the police pulled up and said, “What are you doing here?” They took in Alexandra’s evening dress and were astonished at us. The place was dangerous. From the curb they kept an eye on the situation. They didn’t want the President’s guests mugged after a bash. The White House behind us was filled with light. Guests were still dancing in the beautiful old rooms.

By and by an old black man pulled up in his cab and took us out of the cMl rain. “Awright,” he said, “get in.”

And we went home.

We had eaten turtle soup and dark-gray slices of squab and wild rice and palm-heart salad and a chocolate something for dessert, and we had drunk California wines.

We had shaken hands with Danny Kaye and with the President and the First Lady and Kirk Douglas and Senator William Fulbright and Beverly Sills and Margaret Truman Daniels and Harold Wilson and Nelson Rockefeller (a matter of mistaken identity) and with Hubert Humphrey and with many wives-wives who might have belonged to an organization called Prom Queens of the Thirties. I got into bed at the Enfant Plaza Hotel and I understood a little the phenomenon described by neurologists as an insult to the brain. As I closed my eyes, the night opened mercifully before me and my spirit” gratefully left this world.

The journal of Andrei Sinyavsky, whose pseudonym is Abram Tertz, has not yet been published iu English. I have the French edition. I translate:” … no longer men but great sweeps. Spaces, fields, not characters,” he says, speaking of his fellow prisoners. “Human frontiers blur where they touch the infinite. Beyond biography. Man, each man, eludes biography. When you try to support your weight on ‘personal characteristics’ you sink up to the waist. Personality is a ditch covered lightly by a growth of psychological traits, temperaments, habits, ways of doing things. I have no sooner taken a step toward an approaching stranger than I find that! have fallen into a hole.” And, “We have come into the world in order to understand certain things. Only a few things, very few, but exceedingly important.” Art is a meeting place. Of the author and the object of his love, of spirit and matter, of truth and fantasy, of the line traced by a pencil, the contour of a body, of one word with another. These meetings are rare, unexpected, ‘Is that you?’ ‘Is it you?’ Recognizing each other, both parties are seized by a frenzy, and clasp hands. In these gestures of surprise and joy we see art.”

The exhaustive report of Amnesty International, an unofficial group concerned with prisoners’ rights, has been released in London to Reuters, UPI, AP. It deals with prisoners of conscience and political dissidents in Russia who suffer so desperately in the camps that they inflict fantastic injuries on themselves. “Hunger, excessive work, and other privations, including medical neglect, have led some prisoners to commit suicide.” They feign escape in order to be shot by their guards. They practice “collective self-mutilation.” Evidence has been taken from Edward Kuznetov, among others : “I have seen convicts swallow huge numbers of nails and quantities of barbed wire. I have seen them swallow mercury thermometers, chess pieces, dominoes, needles, ground glass, spoons, knives, and many other similar objects. I have seen convicts sew up their mouths and eyes with thread or wire, sew buttons to their bodies or nail their testicles to a bed, swallow a nail bent like a hook and then attach this hook by way of a thread so that the door cannot be opened without pulling the ‘fish’ inside out. I have seen convicts cut open the skin on their arms and legs and peel it off as if it were a stocking or cut out lumps of flesh from their stomachs or their legs, roast them and eat them, or let blood drip from a slit vein into a tureen.” But enough! -

The report states, “There are at least I0,000 political and religious prisoners in the USSR today.” Held under conditions that “violate international standards for the treatment of prisoners.”

How much of this is known in the free countries of the West? The information is to be found in the daily papers. We are informed about everything. We know nothing.

GUNS are a common sight in Jerusalem at any time. In every quarter of the city, as in every community in Israel, there are armed civilian patrols that include students. Daily, before schools open in the morning, they are examined by parents for bombs. Arab students were asked to participate on the campus of the Hebrew University but refused. In my opinion it was a mistake to ask that they he part of such patrols. They are trying tei avoid a charge of “collaboration.” The status of the Israeli Arabs is ambiguous anyway. They do and do not enjoy equal rights. They cause great uneasiness. More than once I have been told that the Palestine Liberation Organization would like to provoke riots in the Old City and the authorities fear that explosions like the one the other night in which six adolescents were killed may provoke them. These would be politically disastrous, since the Arabs have demonstrated their control of the U.N. General Assembly and could easily put through punitive resolutions. The PLO is said to have circulated in the U.N. photographs of the youthful victims with the claim that they have been “executed.” Fatah terrorists in the Golan recently shot three young men; . They came over the Syrian border with guns and hatchets, intending to cut off the heads of their victims-this according to the deposition of the terrorist captured earlier. Terrorist violence always threatens and often occurs. One has to learn to live with the rumors. I heard the other day that another bomb had been found and dismantled in Jerusalem.

My friend Joseph Ben-David, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University, assured me that there had been no bomb, but that same day the dismantling of a new bomb was reported in the papers. And, toward midnight, party guests excuse themselves to go on patrol duty.

We are having tea and cake with Shula and David Shahar and the poet Dennis Silk, and I report a conversation I had with Mahmud Abu Zuluf, the editor of El Kuds, the largest Arab newspaper in Jerusalem. The moderate Abu Zuluf is hated by the leftists. His life and the lives of his children have been threatened. His automobile was once blown up, but he continues to follow the line of conciliation and peace. His office is furnished like the waiting room of a parking lot-seats covered in dark plastic, a desk on which people sit as well as write, a pleasant relaxed dustiness here, a place where no one fusses over trifles. There is one work of art in the office, facing the editor: the picture of a pretty kitty with huge eyes, a creature too young to look so amorous. The editor is stout and large-a very large, unmenacing, and even dreamy round-faced man, wearing what the English call a lounging suit. He has on gaudy socks, and his feet are enormous. He doesn’t so much shake your hand as gather it into his own. I’m prepared for a most pleasant snow job. Who am I that he should tell me what he actually thinks? He presses a button-like any person who is anyone in Jerusalem, he can ring for an attendant. Coffee is ordered.

It is David Farhi who has brought me to El Kuds.

Farhi, an Arabist, held the post of Adviser on Arab Affairs to the West Bank Command and is a friend of Mayor Kollek’s. Quickly drinking down his coffee, he excuses himself; he wants me to have an uninhibited chat with Abu Zuluf. So the editor and I sip supersweet stuff from the tiny cups, and while composing machines clatter in the rooms beyond he tells me-his mood is somewhere between boredom and passion-that the Jews must give ground in East Jerusalem, they must divide authority with the Arabs. They are too reluctant to accept realities, too slow. The longer they wait the worse things will be. The Arabs are continually gaining strength while Israel becomes weaker. Between cloudiness and intensity, sometimes vague, sometimes opinionated, Abu Zuluf taps hard on the desk top with the flat of his hand and says, “More war, more men lost, more dependency upon your country. While the Arab nations become richer, more modern, more influential. No, Israel must come forward quickly with peace plans and initiate negotiations, show a wiIlingness to negotiate.” There are no peaceful moments in Jerusalem,. not for those who are making inquiries. You lean back with a cup of coffee to luxuriate in the Oriental conversation of an intelligent man. Immediately you are involved in a tormenting discussion.

Now at tea I tell the Shahars what Abu Zuluf said. I do not like to speak lightly about these matters to them, knowing what they have personally suffered. There are few families in Israel that have not lost sons in the wars. One does not make casual political conversation here. In the next room at this moment, the Shahars’ sixteen-year old son is doing his homework. When he finishes with physics he will practice his Schumann on the piano.

Soon he will be old enough for military service. And William Colby of the CIA testified before a congressional committee that in the next war victory might cost Israel nine thousand dead and thirty six thousand wounded men. Such a victory would signify defeat. The hospitals are still busy with the casualties of the last war. The seventh victim of the Jaffa Road blast, a girl of fifteen, has just died. And U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim has come to Jerusalem to discuss the Syrian-border question. Mr. Waldheim is not widely admired in Israel.

People say that he simply doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about. And I am as tactful as possible describing my talk with Abu Zuluf. The Shahars are being polite to me and say little at first. Dennis Silk lowers his eyes. He is one of those bulky men clad in sensitivity. Like me, he’s going bald. His hair grows in long and random tufts.

His nose is nobly hooked, and slender. He senses the coming storm and he is flushing.

When Shahar begins his reply, he is at first mild. He does not agree with Abu Zuluf, he says. The Jews have . not been infiexible and negative. Concessions are continually offered. They are rejected. The original U.N. partition plan of I947 was turned down because the Arabs could not tolerate any Jewish state, not even a minuscule one. If a state was what they wanted, they might have had it years ago. They rejected it. And they invaded the country from all sides, hoping to drive the Jews out and take the wealth they had created. This country had been a desert, a land of wandering populations and small stony farms and villages. The Zionists under the Mandate made such economic progress that they attracted Arabs from other areas. This was why the Arab population grew so large. In Jerusalem, Jews had outnumbered Arabs and Christians for a very long time.

Before they were driven out of the Old City in the late forties they were a majority. But this was how the world settled Middle Eastern business: Jordan, or Trans-Jordan, was arbitrarily created by the British-yes, by Winston Churchill himself, probably with a pencil, between drinks. “Here, we will give this stuff to those Hashemites.” So now you had a “legitimate” nation there. The Egyptians had the slenderest of claims on Sinai during the forties. I know that some of what Shahar is saying is not true, but I say nothing. After World War I, when Britain wanted Sinai part of the Palestine Mandate and France disagreed, it was allotted to Egypt, which had not asked for it. On what was their present claim based, Shahar asks. All these countries, suddenly so proud, nationalistic, and demanding, had been mere bits and pieces of the Ottoman Empire. The Saudis, the dollar proud defenders of Jerusalem, have little historical connection with the city. “Six generations of my family were born in Jerusalem,” says Shahar, growing hot. Shahar is a novelist, and a good one. He loves French literature.

Proust he adores. We often chat in French, and a word of that beloved language describes him well. He is costaud, sturdy; he has a big frame, broad shoulders, a muscular throat, big veins. The veins are swelling now. I am beginning to irritate him with my American evenhandedness, my objectivity at his expense. It is so easy for outsiders to say that there are two sides to the question. What a terrible expression. I am beginning to detest it.

“They don’t want our peace proposals. They don’t want concessions, they want us destroyed!” Shahar shouts and slams the table. “You don’t know them. The West doesn’t know them. They will not let us live. We must fight for our lives. It costs the world nothing to discuss, discuss, discuss. And the French are whores and will sell them all the weapons they want, and the British too. And who knows about the Americansl. And when the Arabs at last have their way, perhaps the French and the British will be nice and send ships to evacuate our women and children.” Now Shahar has named the seldom named dread: he has invoked the nightmare of annihilation.

This is what Israel lives with. Although people will not often speak of it, it is always there. I look at . Silk’s big exquisite face. It is turned downward and he is gazing at the table. As for me I say no more. Can I tell Shahar that the “conscience of the West” will never permit Israel to be destroyed? I can say no such thing. Such grand statements are no longer made; all our hyperbole is nowadays reserved for silence. We know -that anything can happen. For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

AT the Knesset, security measures are very strict.

They stop your taxi at the gate and you get out and either a small office where six or seven soldiers stand about in their berets, machine guns on the floor. They are talking about the movies and Frank Sinatra’s coming visit. You state the object of your visit at the desk. You have come to have lunch with Mr. Abba Eban, now a member of the Knesset. Your passport is checked and a phone call is put through to Mr. Eban’s office. An old religious Jew in black, bearded, approaches with Talmudic-looking octavo volumes under his insufficient arms. He is cheerful, with good teeth, his nose is rich in capillaries, and he states the object of his visit good-naturedly and at length. Behind him a young couple, demonstrative lovers, stroke each other’s heads while waiting for their passes to be issued. The official behind the desk asks to see some of the Talmudic-looking volumes, brings his fingers to his brow, and immerses himself in a dense text. A learned conversation ensues.

I wait. Finally I am directed to enter a curtained booth, where a soldier searches me for weapons, feels the lining of my raincoat (the weather is foul today), looks into my hat, has me mount a small platform and feels my legs, pockets, and sides. He opens my fountain pen and examines it. Then he grunts and nods me out of the door toward the great open square before the Parliament Building. The Knesset is grandiose. A country of three and a half million should have something more compact and modest, but the founders are not famous for their good taste. Teddy Kollek has told me that after I967 Ben-Gurion was all for tearing down the walls of the Old City. “Let it all be open. Make one city, no wall” he argued. “No sense of beauty,” says Kollek.

At the information desk the attendants are stem, but the ladies who take your coat gossip amongst themselves.

One is knitting a circular object in bright-pink wool. I explain that I have come to lunch, and I am directed down the stairs. There are two dining halls, one for meat eaters-the ancient dietary segregation. Mr. Eban is waiting.

He is reading several newspapers simultaneously papers under his arms and papers in his fingers. His big eyes further magnified by big tinted lenses seem to flood the small Hebrew print with eye power. His glasses are black rimmed rectangles, and he bears himself with plump ambassadorial dignity. He and I go to a table in the meat eaters’ hall and order boiled chicken and Wiener schnitzel, respectively. A bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon is bumped down on the table and we pour it and sip. Mr. Eban has not yet found what he was looking for in the newspapers and pulIs them from under his arms like a man preparing to send semaphore signals. I try to assist him with small talk while he flutters through Ha’aretz. At last the meal is served. My perturbed spirit sighs and I pick up a spoon. Mr. Eban is shy but also superconfident-gloomy but not rudely gloomy. He does and does not wish to be where he is. His thoughts go about the world like a satellite. His is a type with which I am completely familiar. The soup plates are removed and the chicken efficiently set before Mr. Eban. It is Jewish chicken, boiled in its skin, sitting upon waves of mashed potatoes and surrounded by shores of rice and brown gravy. My schnitzel is made not of veal but of some other animal tissue, difficult to cut. So I eat my rice and sip the Schweppes. Hungry Mr. Eban is full under the chin. His voice is Oxonian, his views are highly organized.

He is not a listener. But I have come to hear what he has to say.

He says that relations between Israel and the United States have never been better. Israel is receiving more aid from America in this period .than in all the years since it was founded. The American role in the war of I973 has been widely misunderstood. Kissinger did not race off to Moscow out of weakness or because the Russians threatened to intervene. True, he needn’t have made it look as though he were answering an imperious summons. Perhaps his speed seemed servile, but what he did was right. America already had the upper hand, and what was necessary at the time was to acknowledge Russia’s power in the Middle Bast and to make the Soviet Union a party to the cease-fire. To push on to Cairo would have meant the loss of another thousand Israelis and might have caused Russia to intervene. What Russia requires is recognition of its great power-deference. It must be invited to sanction all arrangements, it must be consulted. Kissinger had already won his victory.

Then detente is not a meaningless term?

Not at all, if you define it carefully.

And what if it is defined as Solzhenitsyn defined it in his address to the AFL-CIO?

You cannot expect Russian dissidents to describe Russia impartially.

Mr Eban does not take the severest view possible of the Soviet Union. He does not see it as the worst society in history or as a demonic empire seeking to extend its power, dedicated to the destruction of capitalist democracy. He takes a more balanced view. The Soviet Union may be a wicked superpower but it can be understood, encompassed, and managed. It is not an inhumanly solid and brutal thing. It also blunders, hesitates; its human weaknesses are reassuring. Only see what Mohammed Heikal’s book The Road to Ramadan reveals about Russia’s leaders. Heikal says that on one occasion when he observed them they endlessly circulated a memorandum among half a dozen people before taking a minor decision. Three signatures on a document were needed before an order could be given. What the Russians want is to hold what they already have and to keep the other superpower off-balance. In I973 they did not urge Syria and Egypt to attack Israel but took a cautious position.

They don’t want the destruction of Israel-only its withdrawal to the I967 borders.

The report I had heard of Eban’s private conversation with Gromyko was accurate.

As for the PLO, in Eban’s view it is an embarrassment to the Russians, and Arafat presents them with many difficulties. The PLO’s intervention in Lebanon is not a famous success. The Russian.. have been disappointed in Egypt. Perhaps they would like Sadat removed. By a coup d’etat? Mr. Eban is too diplomatic to answer bluntly.

He peels the stippled skin from his drumstick. I smell the steam of boiled fowl, I see the meat, and I attempt the schnitzel again. Institutional food in Israel can be got down if you shut your eyes and think of other things. What comes to mind, unfortunately, is what I saw two days ago in the Old City while strolling with John Auerbach.

Young rams were being loaded into a truck for slaughter. They tried to run away. They were grabbed by Arab workmen, picked up by the fleece, and thrown writhing into the truck while everyone shouted curses. “Your sister’s cunt,” the men were yelling. Off to the side were the malodorous fresh hides of animals just butchered.

When will we stop this slaughter and turn to greens and nuts and fruits? It is not a bad question to ask when you hear a highly civilized man discoursing on politics while eating lunch.

Has Mr. Eban ever heard Dr. Kissinger’s personal explanation of the policy of detente?

Dr. Kissinger has never sat still long enough to describe this fully to Mr. Eban. People are forever approaching him with messages; Dr. Kissinger is always jumping up.

And now the rain has increased; winter is upon us. Have I transportation? There are no taxis to be had for love or money. With all his newspapers, Eban rises to his feet and offers to drop me off. His car is waiting. We leave the Knesset by the members’ exit. Some of the members are full-bearded and wear skull caps. As we drive to the Jaffa Road Eban and I discuss American politicians. It is apparently true that President Gerald Ford only recently learned that the American Embassy was not in the capital of Israel but in Tel Aviv. Eban is reluctant to criticize the President, but he admits that he is no Lyndon Johnson. “There was a clever man,” says Eban with admiration. I had heard that Johnson once received Eban with the words, “Mr. Ambassador, Ah’m sittin’ here scratchin’ my ass and thinkin’ about Is-ra-el.”

Eban confirms the truth of this but explains that Johnson spoke in a most friendly manner. Familiarity without contempt. Eban asks me what I think of the Democratic candidates-of Henry Jackson, for instance. Well, I’ve twice shaken hands with Senator Jackson and I know no more about him than you can learn by shaking a politician’s hand. And what of Hubert Humphrey? senator Humphrey is a better man than most. President Johnson put him in a very bad position. It is a pity that Humphrey was not brave enough to resist. It is true that he is garrulous.

Groucho Marx said of him, “I don’t know what sort of President he’d make. He talks and talks and talks. He’d make a helluva wife.” My theory is that Humphrey learns by talking and that the process is in part educational.

A man in public life is far too busy to read much except newspapers and drafts of bills; but Humphrey picks up a good many intelligent opinions, and by debate, repetition, embellishment, and editing he may create something after all. He knows the right thing when he sees it, or when he says it. His record in the Senate is impressive.

The rain has stopped. I get out of Eban’s car and thank him and say good-bye. The Jaffa Road, its shops shut since midday for the siesta, is sodden and bleak. I pass the little coffee shop outside which the bomb exploded a few days ago. It is burnt out. A young cabdriver last night told Alexandra and me that he had been about to enter it with one of his friends when another of his pals called to him. “He had something to tell me so I went over to him and just then the bomb went off and my friend was there. So now my friend is dead,” said the cabby. His voice, still adolescent, was cracking. “And this is how we live, mister! Okay? We live this way.”

EBAN’S attitude toward Russia is shared by many. In a different form, I heard it recently at the Beth Belgia, one of the Hebrew University buildings, from Professor Shlomo Avineri, who is a historian and political scientist. As stated by Professor Avineri, the position is something like this: After World War II, it was widely believed that capitalism had ‘ taken a new lease on life. But this was an illusion. The postwar prosperity of capitalism was based on cheap energy and low priced raw materials from backward countries. The price of these has now risen, and the last free ride of Western capitalism is over-over for all except, perhaps, America.

Other Western countries must now prepare to live on a more austere standard. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, life has immensely improved. The lower classes are beginning to eat well and dress comfortably and live in warm apartments. It is principally the old middle class that is unhappy-the professionals, the intellectuals. And across the face of Europe we will see a gradual evening out of privileges and a redistribution of the good things of life. The Western centers of old Europe are growing dinner, but Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland are brightening up. This, rather than expanding Red imperialism and the subjugation of Europe by Russia, is what we should be considering. If I understand him, Professor Avineri is saying that an independent sort of communism is developing among Russia’s satellites and that Western communism is becoming more democratic, less obedient to Moscow. In any case, the world is being transformed, and neither superpower is what so many of us had always assumed it to be. This is the sort of thing one hears in Paris or Milan rather than Jerusalem. Such a vision of the future evidently grows out of assumptions about the decline of American prestige and influence. It takes for granted that in fighting the extension of communism in Southeast Asia the United States made the greatest mistake in its history. A desire to accept a new view of communism is one of the results of the Vietnam disaster and of America’s internal political disorder. Besides, Israel’s utter dependency upon the United States leads Israeli intellectuals to hunt for signs of hope in the Communist world.

I often wonder why it should rend people’s hearts to give up their Marxism. What does it take to extinguish the hopes raised by the October Revolution? How much more do intellectuals need to learn about the USSR.?

Knowing something about life in Communist countries, I disagree completely with Avineri. In my judgment this is a frivolous analysis-heartless, too, if you think how little personal liberty there is in Eastern Europe. One has no business to give away the rights of others. But I look again at Professor Avineri and see that he is an engaging fellow, far from heartless. I conclude that he ˇis only trying out these views. Tomorrow, in another mood, he may take a different line.

David Farhi says that Sadat, on his American visit, proclaimed his Arab loyalties and set himself up as a super-Arab in order to be free from suspicion. The Arab world has accused him of softening.

Having made the gestures of solidarity, he is free to detach himself and to deal with internal Egyptian problems -overpopulation, economic stagnation, disease. Professor Michael Brecher, of the Hebrew university, an Israeli of Canadian origin, wonderfully talkative and minutely informed, agrees with Farhi and adds that Sadat’s regime is in danger. The Russians are vexed with him. Egyptian university students, a number of whom were junior officers in the war of I973, are critical and dissatisfied.

Egypt’s propagandistic revision of the events of the war do not take them in. They know how poorly they were led and how quickly Israel recovered from the defeats of the first days. If the Russians are organizing a coup d’etat, they have an angry student population trained in warfare to recruit from.

Behind exchanges like this stand images of torpid towns on the Nile and of undernourished people, ill with bilharzia. The world to be coped with is a world in which what has always been has become intolerable. The Egypt of my picture is the Egypt of Edward Lane and other observers and travelers. It extends over the entire region -the Sudan and Ethiopia. It has now been decreed that ages of inertia are at an end, this must be changed, and the change must begin at once. No one can say just what the new imperative will produce. In old age, Tolstoi said to A B Goldenveizer, who often played Chopin for him, “Perhaps it is because I am unwell, but at moments today I am simply driven to despair by everything that is going on in the world: the new form of oath, the revolting proclamation about enlisting university students in the army, the Dreyfus affair, the situation in Serbia, the horrors of the diseases and deaths in the Auerbach quicksilver works …. I can’t make out how mankind can go on living like this, with the sight of all this horror round them.”

Are we wrong to think that our horrors today are much greater? This morning’s paper reports that nine men were found dead in an Argentine ditch, blindfolded and shot through the head; that South Moluccans seized a Dutch train and murdered some of the passengers.

Scores of people are killed in the streets of Beirut every day; terrorists take hostages in London and explode bombs in Belfast. As an American, I can decide on any given day whether or not I wish to think of these abominations.

I need not consider them. I can simply refuse to open the morning paper. In Israel, one has no such choice. There the violent total is added up every day. And nothing can be omitted. The Jerusalemite hooked by world politics cannot forget Gerald Ford and China, Ronald Reagan and CaIifornia; he is obliged to know that Harold Wilson has just asserted in a speech that England is still a force to be reckoned with. He cannot afford to overlook the latest changes in the strategy of the French Communist Party nor the crises in Portugal and Angola; he must remember the mental character of the Muslim world, the Jews of the Diaspora. Israelis must, in fact, bear in mind four thousand years of Jewish history. The world has been thrown into their arms and they are required to perform an incredible balancing act. Another way of putting it: no people has to work so hard on so many levels as this one. In less than thirty years the Israelis have produced a modern country - doorknobs and hinges, plumbing fixtures, electrical supplies, chamber music, airplanes, teacups. 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. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don’t see how they can bear it.

A walk in the Old City with Sholem Kahn, who is on the faculty of the Hebrew University. He takes me through the Greek section of the Christian quarter and we visit the small Franciscan bookshop.

The old clerk is a Christian Arab who served more than fifty years ago in the Turkish army and likes to talk about the barbarous old days. In the windows, Franciscan translations of medieval Italian travel narratives. “And how is Father Hoade?” asks Kahn, inquiring about the translator of these works.

“Oh, he went to Rome and died three years ago.”

“Ah, did he. What a pity. Awfully nice fellow,” says Kahn, himself awfully nice. And after all, this is how it happens. You are born in Ireland, put on a habit, translate medieval Italian travel narratives in Jerusalem, go to Rome, and die.

Kahn insists on showing me some ancient baths at the lower end of the Old City and we ask our way through endless lanes, where kids ride donkeys, kick rubber baIls, scream, fall from wagons, and build small fires in buckets to warm their fingers, for the weather is cold: A freezing east wind blows above the arches of the covered streets. The ancient stone is very cold. The sun does not often get into these streets. A gang of black Sudanese boys shout frantic advice at a driver backing his truck into a narrow lane, scraping the Arabic inscription of a plugged fountain, the gift of some eleventh-century sultan, I imagine. Kahn asks again for his Turkish baths.

A candy seller, cutting up one of his large flat sticky cakes, a kind of honeyed millstone, appears indignant. His business is to sell cakes, not to give directions. We get into an arcade where a money changer in a turtleneck tells us to retrace aUf steps and turn left. He offers to pay me two pounds on the dollar over the official rate. I take the trouble to tell him how virtuous I feel about this sort of thing, and h ‘ cannot conceal his opinion, which is that I am very stupid. True. If I were thinking, I wouldn’t say such things to a man whose trade is money. But there you are -the fellow with the dollars is frequently foolish. That -and here my thoughts also touch the case of poor Father Hoade, who went to Rome and died there-is life. We make our way out of the arcade and inquire of a stout, cleanshaven storekeeper in Arab headdress and busted shoes who deals in chipped green glassware. He lights up at our question. Yes, of course, he knows. Engaging us in conversation, he offers us coffee. Next he submits to our admiring inspection a crumbled snapshot in color of his son who is studying medicine in Chicago. I tell him that I am from Chicago. He is enchanted. The photograph, smudged by loving thumbprints, passes from hand to hand. So now we are bound together in friendship. The small dead end where we stand has the customary fallout of orange peel and excrement, eggshells and bottle tops.

Almost embracing us with his guiding arms, the shopkeeper escorts us to the Hamam. And here is the place itself at the corner, down a salmon-colored plaster passage that bulges asymmetrically. If this is Ladies’ Day, we will have to turn back. Respectful of ladies’ modesty, our friend opens the door cautiously and holds up a hand in warning. He inquires, shouting into hollow spaces, and then waves us forward. We enter a vast, domed, circular room that is perhaps a thousand years old-one thousand four hundred, our guide insists. For reasons of self respect I am obliged to cut him down by a few centuries.

But who can care for long about the dates. The little idiocy of skeptical revision passes off. I find myself to my joy in an ancient beautiful hot sour-smelling chamber. Divans made up with clouts and old sheets are ranged against the walls for the relaxing clients. Tattered towels hang drying on lines overhead. These lines crisscross up, up, up into dim galleries. An Arab woman, very old, is resting on a divan. One of her short legs is extended. She makes a gesture of Oriental courtesy. In this towel-bannered chamber people rest from the fatigues of bathing.

We go through several steaming rooms, now empty. Our Arab friend says, “You spend a whole night here, you will be a very different man.” I can well believe it. An attendant is scrubbing the floors with a stiff brush. He must be the husband of the ancient odalisque. He is stout, low, bandy-legged, and round-backed. He is so bent that if his deep-brown eyes, the eyes of a walrus, are to meet yours he must look upward. The white stubble and his color-the high color of a man of beat and vapor-are agreeable. “This is not the place I had in mind. The one I wanted to show you is much older,” says Kahn. But I rejoice greatly in this one and ask for nothing better. As we leave, the old woman is conversing with one of her friends, an immense woman and deliciously fat, who has seated herself on the very edge of the sofa. On the cold cobblestones we say good-by, thanking the shopkeeper with the busted shoes. He goes back to his dark green glassware. “I suppose we must give up on the still older bath,” says Kahn. He compensates himself by telling me about Max Nordau.

Chaim Gouri, a poet and journalist, a strong looking man in his early fifties, a head of black curls over a good square lined face-une bonne gueule. A turtleneck of forest green. He tells of a Peugeot belonging to an influential Arab family looted by Israeli soldiers during the Six Day War. Gouri took it from the soldiers and returned it. He was thanked by the Arab family and later invited to dinner by the lady of the house. “I am grateful for the car,” she said, “but after you gave it back to us some of your soldiers came and took from me the jewels my mother had given me on my wedding day.” Gouri promised to do what he could to help. As he did so he saw a Dutch woman, one of the dinner guests, grinning at him across the table. Later this woman explained why the incident had amused her so.

“When the war broke out,” she said, “we in Amsterdam began to store food and clothing for the Jewish refugees we expected to receive. After all, the Arabs threatened to wipe you out. It would not have surprised us if hundreds of thousands of new’ refugees had arrived in Western Europe. And here is a woman who complains that her bangles were taken. And you apologize to her. We in Holland had German soldiers entering our houses. The Germans themselves had Russians …. “

Nevertheless, Gouri’s relations with this Arab family continued to be helpful. He was asked to help recover a certain family property, a house near the Jaffa Gate. He believed that he had made friends, so that when a French journalist asked Gouri to introduce him to an Arab family he arranged an invitation to dinner. At the dinner table the daughter of the house, a grown woman, spoke her mind. Courageously, although Gouri said that she was trembling, she declared, “We will never accept the presence of Jews in our land.” Gouri was shocked by this. I didn’t say what I was thinking, but the matter was clear enough to me as an American and also as a Jew. He wished to influence these Arab friends of his by his goodness. The idea is to clean things up, to feed the hungry, to build schools and hospitals, to hire workers at high prices to which they are unaccustomed, to give back looted cars and necklaces, and thus to win all hearts. But these Arabs play the old Alsace-Lorraine game, with Israel in the role of Prussia and themselves quavering bravely, like the old schoolteacher in Daudet’s patriotic story, Vive la France!

I described Gouri as having “une bonne gueule” because he is, like Shahar, a Francophile. He knows no English. We have been speaking French more or less correctly, in high gear. Now he asks for my opinion of the French attitude toward his country. He describes visiting French intellectuals, Michel Butor among them, who reveal (rather than confess) that they know nothing at all about Israel. He wonders whether I can explain this strange ignorance.

I give him my view: France is a country whose thinkers, sitting in Paris, feel they know all that they need to know about the world outside. That outside world is what they declare it to ˇbe. If you want to know about the Australian Bushman, you look him up in Larousse. Standard works published in France contain, like Keats’s Truth and Beauty, all that is known or needs to be known. Paris, for ˇcenturies the center of European civilization, grew rich in collective representations, in the indispensable images or views by which the civilized world conceived of itself. France was to such representations what British banking was to money. British banking is now close to ruin, but the image-of-the-world-as-seen-from-its-Parisian-center, fortified by the addition of a kind of Marxism, is as strong as ever in France. That is why French visitors strike Israelis as incomprehensibly incurious and ignorant. To wind up our conversation: much of Western Europe believes that capitalism is done for and that liberal democracy is perishing. If France cared anything about liberal democracy, about freedom, it would behave differently toward Israel, which alone represents freedom in the Middle East. But it prefers Arab feudalism, Arab socialism, Chinese communism. It prefers doing business with the Third World. It prefers anything to Israel.

Justice Haim Cohn, when he fell in love with a woman who had been divorced and wanted to marry her, had to apply to rabbinical authorities for permission.

This was denied because a Cohen, one of the hereditary high priests, cannot marry a woman who has been divorced. Then, since a high priest must be physically unblemished, Justice Cohn proposed to mutilate himself in a symbolic fashion-he offered to have one joint of his little finger surgically removed. But he was told that even if he cut off an arm he would remain a Cohen still. Justice Cohn, who represented Israel in the UN Human Rights Commission and went to America often, therefore married the lady in a civil ceremony in New York. Certain of the Cohns’ friends thought it improper for a public servant to be so disrespectful to the rabbis, and Justice Cohn and his wife, yielding to their opinion, were married again by a Conservative rabbi. This rabbi was rebuked by his colleagues and had a hard time of it. So Justice Cohn told me. He is a big man and he looks taciturn, but you find that he has actually told you a great deal within a short time. Another paradox at dinner he seems to be brooding on grim questions but you come away feeling that you’ve had a most cheerful time. Mrs. Cohn, a musicologist, is a large, impulsive, dramatic woman of considerable charm. The Justice was obliged to explain to ms colleagues of the Human Rights Commission why a Cohen had to leave Israel in order to marry a divorcee.

I talked to Professor Werblowsky about his book on Joseph Karo, an impressive work about the great lawyer and the author of the Shulchan Arukh. Karo also left to posterity a personal record called Maggid Mesharim. The Maggid was a spirit that spoke “in silence and solitude” to the rationalist Karo-a voice within his mind.

Maggidism, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was widely accepted by Cabalists, who believed that demons entered men and troubled them, but that angels too might enter a man and speak words of wisdom with him ” … and when thou awakest after having fallen asleep amid thoughts of the Mishnah ..• and thy lips will vibrate. ” I am the Mishnah that speaketh in your mouth. The Shekhinah speaketh to you .. ‘ .. ” Over drinks I asked the ingenious Professor Werblowsky, a slender, handsome man, whether he himself believed in the voice of the Mishnah in the mind or direct communications from the divine spirit. As a historian of religions he took it seriously, but he was himself a rationalist. Eventually such phenomena would yield to rational investigation.

I should have guessed that this lissome, pin-striped professor with a carnation in his buttonhole and a fresh complexion to match would take the modem approach.

Going back to his book, I found that he was indeed a modem professor, who spoke of Karo’s Maggid as the manifestation of “a peculiar technique of spontaneously producing discursive intellectual, even highly specialized theoretical and speculative material without any conscious effort of thought.” A professor’s dream-a steady flow of discourse at the highest level! What other gift would an angel bring to an intellectual? Talk-wonderful inspiring, profound talk. Alexandra and I gladly accept an invitation to a Sabbath dinner with the Werblowskys. The blessings and prayers are elaborate. I have never heard anything as elegant as Professor Werblowsky’s Sephardic Hebrew. Three adolescent children, two daughters and a son, wait on us under the supervision of their mother. The Professor, in patriarchal style, is served first. His wife, pleased with all he does, all he says, visibly dotes on hima rare sight this, in an age of embattled women. Yet who could fail to share the pleasure the soft and gentle Mrs. Werblowsky takes in her husband as he lounges in his large chair, presiding over the table?

My own heart must have a feudal compartment. I have a weakness for hierarchy. I remember how impressed I was in Tokyo when I spent a day with the Sumo wrestlers in their establishment. The Sumo Masters, immense and good-humored, glowing with vital power, their black hair pinned shining at the back of the head, sat before the cauldrons dishing out boiling stew to the disciples, who squatted about them in a circle and were served in order of rank. The Master with one hand could clutch the strongest of them by the head and pitch him out of the Sumo ring. That incomparable arm, pitted with acupunctures near the joints, was stirring the stew of weeds, fish, soybean curds, and nameless invertebrates, strangely aromatic and delicious. In his hand the ladle looked no bigger than a doll’s teaspoon.

I think that Professor Werblowsky does not enjoy the ceremonious Sabbath meal more than I do myself. He reminds me (and he is not, of course, responsible for the odd thoughts that pass through my head) , of a certain Jackie, a small boy in first grade in Montreal’s Devonshire Grammar School, who once made me ecstatic with surprise by eating a plum during class. He took it from his schoolbag. He shined it first on his short pants; then, happy with the plum, happy with his foresight in bringing a plum, happy with himself, he bit into it. This was my discovery of talent. What an ingenious, original, and striking idea it was ‘to eat a plum in class. He was pleased and he carried me with him. I, too, was delighted. So it was with Professor, Werblowsky. So it was, rather, with my irrepressible but welcome association.

But the point of, the evening, and we had many such evenings in Jerusalem, was that no Orthodox family observed the Sabbath more fully than the Werblowskys. I have since read a lecture by Professor Werblowsky, “Le Sbabbat dans la Conscience Juive.” He refers to the Sabbath as “the precious gift of which the Talmud speaks.”

But he adds, “I am using here the traditional language of theologians, not my own.”

There are many Israelis who do not believe, but there are few who have no religious life. Life for the irreligious in Israel is quasi-religious. After all, the Jews are in Jerusalem not onIy because they are Zionists. There are other reasons, and some of these reasons are indirectly or in some degree religious. Such injustices as have been committed against the Arabs can be more readily justified by Judaism, by the whole of Jewish history, than by Zionism alone.

We went walking with Dennis Silk. I had been reading his poems and marionette plays. They had stirred me, and I was in an agreeable state, keen to see the sights. We entered the Old City by the Damascus Gate and went ambling down the vaulted alleyways.

I find the dirt of the bazaar delicious. I am pleased when I see donkeys backing out of bedrooms or bedroom-workshop-kitchens, or bakeries or basket-weaving establishments.

In the alleys, tailors work away on the foot pedals of old Singer sewing machines. I rather like the tourist trash here dangling on strings in the doorways: necklaces, souvenirs, clay lamps, belts, sheepskins, and empty hassocks (you take them home and stuff them yourself), fleece-lined slippers, bush-ranger hats, antique brassware, and battered pieces of everything laid out on the ground-a scavenger’s heaven. And Arabs with kaffiyehs tied with braided cord sucking at the narghiles in corners.

Dennis takes me to a gambling establishment in a coffeehouse, where people are slapping down big playing cards and shooting pocket billiards. The felt is patched with Band-Aids and there is no cue ball-the three shoots the nine, and the five bangs the fourteen. The players are young, dark, slender, and unsmiling.

We go to a body-building establishment near the Via Dolorosa. I call it a body-building establishment for it can hardly be described as a gymnasium, and yet bodies are being built. The walls are not exactly walls but rather hollows, bulges within a larger structure. The space is occupied by an immense collection of unclassifiable objects. In the entry there is an office which is also a concierge’s lodge. From here a broad old man in a beret directs a multitude of activities. Small Arab boys are wiggling the knobs of a mechanical soccer game. Ranks of metal players kick at a steel ball, hardly more than a pellet. In a small alcove beside this, under an electric bulb a raw chicken lies beheaded and waits for dinner, its skin covered with a deathly moisture. Next, a room for athletes.

The walls are covered with photographs of strong men in leotards and leopard skins. Some stand alone, exhibiting their shoulders, thighs, and arms. Some are surrounded by admiring families. It is not exactly clear to me how with such biceps you can embrace your dear ones.

Barbells, dumbbells, and chest developers with springs take up most of the space. Two adolescent boys are nailing leather soles to the floor to give a footing to the weight lifters. They take a serious and highly professional attitude toward their work. In the last room of all, young men are working with the barbells. The barbells rest upon two supports near the top of the table. The young men lie on their backs and work their way upward into the lifting position. These weight lifters, fully clothed and wearing sweaters, perform the press exercise with desperate earnestness.

I recall a muscle-building book called How to Get Strong and How to Stay So, with group photographs of champions of the I890s, mustachioed and dressed in tights-the same look of solemnity and dedication. In this tiny room the young men take turns and press until they can press no more.

From this packing-case gymnasium we go to visit a settlement that adjoins the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Ascending a broken stone staircase, you reach a parapet and come down again a few steps to a sunken floor beside the dome, where you see tall people standing ˇbeside low dwellings. In the December damp a black man in black garments approaches. He is a member of the tiny Ethiopian sect that lives in these cabins and has certain traditional rights in the Holy Sepulcher below. It is now evening and wet; wandering about, we find a narrow staircase and go down. Dennis explains that about a hundred and ten years ago the Coptic rivals of this sect managed to change the locks on the doors that gave direct access to the church courtyard, so that for more than a century these black men have had to take the long way around. It was not until the Six Day War that the Ethiopians had the locks changed and their doors were restored to them. They have two small chapels with holy pictures-fairly primitive-and bands of crimson, green, and yellow painted on the walls, portraits of patriarchs with white beards and staring eyes. From the shadows, priests in round black hats materialize. Centuries ago they took hold here and cling somehow to the side of this sacred place.

COMEDIES in which cries are tom from the heart -Cosi Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro, Sterne’s Sentimental Journey; I am drawn to these, always, and to the Stendhals and Rossinis who carried Mozart.and Sterne into the nineteenth century. From this comes my affection for Samuel Butler-for the Butler at any rate who told in The Way of All Flesh how three sisters played cards to decide which of them was to marry the Reverend Pontifex. Perhaps Jung was right in saying that the psyche of each of us was rooted in an earlier age. I sometimes think that my own sense of fun is nearer I776 than I976.

From the International Herald Tribune, a twentieth century note; Poor Thornton Wilder would have shuddered at his obituary. “Expressing the attitude of thousands of readers, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson said that he had succeeded in making ‘the commonplaces of living yield the gaiety, the wonder and the vault of human adventure.’

“

What the hell is this vault?

These Southern ladies sure know how to perfume a phrase.

Certain oddities about Israel: Because people think so hard here, and so much, and because of the length and depth of their history, this sliver of a country sometimes seems quite large. Some dimension of mind seems to extend into space.

To live again in Jerusalem-that is almost like the restoration of the Temple. But no one is at ease in Zion.

No one can be. The world crisis is added to the crisis of the state, and both are added to the problems of domestic life. It is increasingly difficult to earn adequate wages, since from the first Israel adopted the living standards of the West. Taxes are steep and still rising, the Israeli pound is dropping. The government has begun to impose austerity measures. We meet people who work at two jobs and even this moonlighting is insufficient. The Israelis complain but they will accept the austerity measures.

They know that they must, they are at bottom common-sensical. Yet everyone looks much shabbier and more harassed than in I970.

In almost every apartment house the neighbors tell you of a war widow who is trying to bring up her children. The treatment of young widows and of parents who have lost their sons is, I am told, a new psychiatric specialty. Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country. People feel the pressures of enemies as perhaps the psalmists felt them, and sometimes seem ready to cry out, “Break their teeth, 0 God, in their mouth.” Still, almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare. These are not weak, melting people. Only one sometimes hears on a mild day, by the sea or in the orchards, or when the mountains of Moab draw near in clear light, the wry Yiddish saying: “One could live, but they simply won’t let you.” On this speck of land-an infinitesimal fraction of the surrounding territories-a troubled people has come to rest, but rest is impossible.

They often ask themselves why anti-Semitism should be SO mysteriously pervasive. Even the Chinese, who know little of Jews, are Israel’s enemies. Jews, yes, have a multitude of faults, but they have not given up on the old virtues. (Are there new ones? If so, what are they?)

But at this uneasy hour the civilized world seems tired of its civilization, and tired also of the Jews. It wants to hear no more about survival. But there are the Jews, again at the edge of annihilation and as insistent as ever, demanding to know what the conscience of the world intends to do. I understand that Golda Meir, after the October War, put the question to her Socialist colleagues of Western Europe: Were they serious about socialism?

H they were indeed serious, how could they abandon the only Socialist democracy in the Middle East? And the “civilized world,” or the twentieth-century ruins of that world to which so many Jews gave their admiration and devotion between, say, I789 and I933 (the date of Hitler’s coming to power), has grown sick of the ideals Israel asks it to respect. These ideals were knocked to the ground by Fascist Italy, by Russia, and by Germany.

The Holocaust may even be seen as a deliberate lesson or project in philosophical redefinition: “You religious and enlightened people, you Christians, Jews, and Humanists, you believers in freedom, dignity, and enlightenment-you think that you know what a human being is.

We will show you what he is, and what you are. Look at our camps and crematoria and see if you can bring your hearts to care about these millions.”

And it is obvious that the humanistic civilized moral imagination is inadequate. Confronted with such a “metaphysical” demonstration, it despairs and declines from despair into lethargy and sleep.

Jay Bushinsky of the Chicago Daily News is stable and solid; he has a round, sensible, attractive face.

As we sit chatting in the lobby of the new Hilton Hotel, he tells me that some time ago he was allowed by the Israeli authorities to cover a military operation. A minute island in the Red Sea was raided, the Egyptian garrison taken by surprise. Busbinsky saw a sentry who had been cut down by machine-gun fire. “He was a young boy,” said Busbinsky. “Shot in the leg. Flesh hanging in tatters. Bleeding to death. I said to the commanding officer, ‘Can’t we do something for him?’ and he said, ‘First things first,’ so we went on. And he was right. I never saw the kid again. It stays with me.” Bushinsky and I had met on the Golan Heights in I967 when I was Newsday’s correspondent. When he reminded me of this I told him that David Halberstam, a real correspondent, had made fun of my dispatches, saying that I ran up large Telex bills to describe to Long Island readers the look of a battlefield. In self-defense I asked Halberstam for his definition of real journalism. “When an Egyptian general and his entire army were captured,” said Halberstam, “and a newspaperman asked him why not a shot had been fired, he answered that firing a shot would have given away his position.”

And that, in Halberstam’s view, was one of the most brilliant stories filed in the I967 war.

The point of view is, uncontestably, professional. I wondered, however, whether there weren’t other legitimate viewpoints, and I raised the matter with Busbinsky.

I learned that he, a seasoned newspaperman, was vulnerable, too. He couldn’t get out his mind the memory of an Egyptian boy’s mangled leg.

I had never seen a battlefield before I967 and at first didn’t understand what I was looking at. Riding through the Sinai Desert, I thought it odd that so many canvas or burlap sacks should have fallen from passing trucks.

I soon realized that these bursting brown sacks were corpses. Then I smelled them. Then I saw vultures feeding, and dogs or jackals. Then suddenly there was an Egyptian trench with many corpses leaning on parapets and putrefying, bare limbs baking in the sun like meat and a stink like rotting cardboard. The corpses first swelled, ballooned, then burst their uniform seams. They trickled away; eyes liquefied, ran from the sockets; and the skull quickly came through the face.

Some readers, I thought, might wish to know what the aftermath of battle is like.

Y, an Israeli novelist, tells me how, in I948, when he was only seventeen, he lay all day feigning death among the dead in a field near Jerusalem. The Jordanians had trapped his company and wiped it out. They were dug in on the hillsides and fired on anyone who looked alive. The vultures came, said Y, and began to feed. They began with the eyes always. Y lay there and the birds did not touch him but fluttered near and he heard them, the soft ripping sound that they made. He lay there until dark.

Y is married to a tall American woman whose face is small and wonderfully beautiful. She is very thin and her movements are very slow. When she rises from her seat her unfolding seems endless-she has more joints than a carpenter’s rule. Her speech is slow, she falters. She looks and sounds a bit otherworldly, a strange American nursery child. She and Y live in a poor Arab quarter.

They take in sick children, old cripples, hurt animals.

Nola Auerbach, John’s wife, went to visit her one day and found that she had put an ailing donkey in her bed and was tending it. At times her eccentricities make her seem a bit crazy, but on examination she proves to be not crazy but good. We’ve come to believe that passionate intensity is all on the side of wickedness. Mrs. Y looks a bit like Virginia Woolf. Also like an autistic child I knew in Paris in I948.

Y is convinced that Israel has sinned too much, that it has become too corrupt, and that it has lost its moral capital and has nothing to fight with.

ON a kibbutz.

Lucky is Nola’s dog. John’s dog is Mississippi.

But John loves Lucky too, and Nola dotes on Mississippi. And then there are the children-one daughter in the army, and a younger child who still sleeps in the kibbutz dormitory. Lucky is a woolly brown dog, old and nervous. His master was killed in the Golan. When there is a sonic boom over the kibbutz, the dog rushes out, growling. He seems to remember the falling bombs.

He is too feeble to bark, too old to run, his teeth are bad, his eyes under the brown fringe are dull, and he is clotted under the tail. Mississippi is a big, long-legged, short-haired, brown-and-white, clever, lively, affectionate, and greedy animal. She is a “child dog” -sits in your lap, puts a paw on your arm when you reach for a tidbit to get it for herself. Since she weighs fifty pounds or more she is not welcome in my lap, but she sits on John and Nola and on the guests-those who permit it. She is winsome but also flatulent. She eats too many sweets but is good company, a wonderful listener and conversationalist; she growls and snuffles when you speak directly to her. She “sings” along with the record player. The Auerbachs are proud of this musical yelping.

In the morning we hear the news in Hebrew and then again on the BBC. We eat an Israeli breakfast of fried eggs, sliced cheese, cucumbers, olives, green onions, tomatoes, and little salt fish. Bread is toasted on the coaloil heater. The dogs have learned the trick of the door and bang in and out. Between the rows of small kibbutz dwellings the lawns are ragged but very green. Light and warmth come from the sea. Under the kibbutz lie the ruins of Herod’s Caesarea. There are Roman fragments everywhere. Marble columns in the grasses. Fallen capitals make garden seats. You have onIy to prod the ground to find fragments of pottery, bits of statuary, a pair of dancing satyr legs. John’s tightly packed bookshelves are fringed with such relics. On the crowded desk stands a framed photograph of the dead son, with a small beard like John’s, smiling with John’s own warmth.

We walk in the citrus groves after breakfast, taking Mississippi with us (John is seldom without her); the soil is kept loose and soft among the trees, ˇthe leaves are glossy, the ground itself is fragrant. Many of the trees are still unharvested and bending, tangerines and lemons as dense as stars. “Oh that I were an orange tree, that busie plant!” wrote George Herbert. To put forth such leaves, to be hung with oranges, to be a blessing-one feels the temptation of this on such a morning and I even feel a fibrous woodiness entering my arms as I consider it. You want to take root and stay forever in the most temperate and blue of temperate places. John mourns his son, he always mourns his son, but he is also smiling in the sunlight.

In the exporting of oranges there is competition from the North African countries and from Spain. “We are very idealistic here, but when we read about frosts in Spain we’re glad as hell,” John says.

All this was once dune land. Soil had io be carted in and mixed with the sand. Many years of digging and tending made these orchards. Relaxing, breathing freely, you feel what a wonderful place has been created here, a homeplace for body and souI; then you remember that on the beaches there are armed patrols. It is always possible that terrorists may come in rubber dinghies that cannot be detected by radar. They entered Tel Aviv itself in March I975 and seized a hotel at the seashore. People were murdered. John keeps an Uzi in his bedroom cupboard.

Nola scoffs at this. “We’d both be dead before you could reach your gun,” she says. Cheerful Nola laughs. An expressive woman-she uses her forearm to wave away John’s preparations. “Sometimes he does the drill and I time him to see how long it takes to jump out of bed, open the cupboard, get the gun, put in the clip, and turn around. They’d mow us down before he could get a foot on the floor.”

Mississippi is part of the alarm system. “She’d bark,” says John.

Just now Mississippi is racing through the orchards, nose to the ground. The air is sweet,-and the sun like a mild alcohol makes you yearn for good things. You rest under a tree and eat tangerines, only slightly heavyhearted.

From the oranges we go to the banana groves. The green bananas are tied up in plastic tunics. The great banana flower hangs groundward like the sexual organ of a stallion. The long leaves resemble manes. After two years the ground has to be plowed up and lie fallow. Groves are planted elsewhere-more hard labor. “You noticed before,” says John, “that some of the orange trees were withered. Their roots get into Roman ruins and they die. Some years ago, while we were plowing, we turned up an entire Roman street.”

He takes me to the Herodian Hippodrome. American archeologists have dug out some of the old walls. We look down into the diggings, where labels flutter from every stratum. There are more potsherds than soil in these bluffs-the broken jugs of the slaves who raised the walls two thousand years ago. At the center of the Hippodrome, a long, graceful ellipse, is a fallen monolith weighing many tons. We sit under fig trees on the slope while Mississippi runs through the high smooth grass. The wind is soft and works the grass gracefully. It makes white air courses in the green.

Whenever John ships out he takes the dog for company.

He had enough of solitude when he sailed on German ships under forged papers. He does not like to be alone. Now and again he was under suspicion. A German officer who sensed that he was Jewish threatened to turn him in, but one night when the ship was only hours out of Danzig she struck a mine and went down, the officer with her. John himself was pulled from the sea by his mates. Once he waited in a line of nude men whom a German doctor, a woman, was examining for venereal disease.

In that lineup he alone was circumcised. He came before the woman and was examined; she looked into his face and she let him live.

John and I go back through the orange groves. There are large weasels living in the bushy growth along the pipeline. We see a pair of them at a distance in the road.

They could easily do for Mississippi. She is luckily far off. We sit under a pine on the hilltop and look out to sea where a freighter moves slowly toward Ashkelon. Nearer to shore, a trawler chuffs. The kibbutz does little fishing now. Off the Egyptian coast, John has been shot at, and not long ago several members of the kibbutz were thrown illegally into jail by the Turks, accused of fishing in Turkish waters. Twenty people gave false testimony.

They could have had a thousand witnesses. It took three months to get these men released. A lawyer was found who knew the judge. His itemized bill came to ten thousand dollars-five for the judge, five for himself.

Enough of this sweet sun and the transparent blue green.

We turn our backs on it to have a drink before lunch. Kibbutzniks ride by on clumsy old bikes. They wear cloth caps and pedal slowly; their day starts at six.

Plain-looking working people from the tile factory and from the barn steer toward the dining hall. The kibbuniks are a mixed group. There is one lone Orthodox Jew, who has no congregation to pray with. There are several older gentiles, one a Spaniard, one a Scandinavian, who married Jewish women and settled here. The Spaniard, an anarchist, plans to return to Spain now that Franco has died. One member of the kibbutz is a financial wizard, another was a high-ranking army officer who for obscure. reasons fell into disgrace. The dusty tarmac path we follow winds through the settlement. Beside the undistinguished houses stand red poinsettias. Here, too, lie Roman relics. Then we come upon a basketball court, and they the rusty tracks of a children’s choo-choo, and then the separate quarters for young women of eighteen, and a museum of antiquities, and a recreation hall. A strong odor of cattle comes from the feeding lot. I tell John that Gurdjiev had Katherine Mansfield resting in the stable at Fontainebleau, claiming that the cows’ breath would cure her tuberculosis. John loves to hear such bits of literary history. We go into his house and Mississippi climbs into his lap while we drink Russian vodka. “We could live with those bastards if they limited themselves to making this Stolichnaya.”

These words put an end to the peaceful morning. At the north there swells up the Russian menace. With arms from Russia and Europe, the PLO and other Arab militants and the right-wing Christians are now destroying Lebanon. The Syrians have involved themselves; in the eyes of the Syrians, Israel is Syrian land. Suddenly this temperate Mediterranean day and the orange groves and the workers steering their bikes and the children’s playground flutter like illustrated paper. What is there to keep them from blowing away?

Moshe the masseur is delicate in person; his hands, however, have the strength that purity of purpose can give. He arrives cold from the street in his overcoat, which is bald in places. He is both priest like and boyish, a middle-aged idealistic Canadian.

He seems untouched by life. When people say “untouched by life,” they often mean that one has-not always for praiseworthy reasons-lived on the whole without cynicism. He is fresh, he is somewhat adolescent at fifty. He believes in his work. He has a vocation. He was born to relieve people of their muscular tensions. He talks to you about exercise, breathing, posture, about sleeping with or without pillows, with open windows or shut. None of this is small talk, because he holds the body sacred.

His face is ruddy, his nose slightly bent, his expression tender. r find in him the clean-living Scout’s-honor innocence of the boys I knew who worked out at the YMCA and, still wet from the showers, darted into the street when the thermometer stood at ten below. Moshe comes from Montreal and studied massage under a . French master. Moshe speaks French a bit, Canadian style. His master taught that the body must be treated with the deepest respect. “You don’t pick up an arm as though it was a separate piece of something. You’ve seen Jaws? You saw that fellow’s leg when it sank all by itself when the shark bit him. Well, no arm and no leg should ever be treated as if detached. No real masseur will fling you around. For me, massage is a personal relationship and kind of an act of love,” explains Moshe. He is fragile but holds himself straight; he is intensely sincere. Catching himself too late, he says that, considering my age, I am in good condition. He teaches me to do pushups while I rest my weight only on the fingertips. He also shows me how to relieve a stiff neck by tracing the numbers from one to nine with my head. He makes his own mixtures of almond and olive and wintergreen oils. He takes off his shoes and sits behind me on the couch to snap my vertebrae into place. He is respectful, professionally impersonal, personally full of concern for your bones and muscles, and his conversation is highly informative.

He knows a lot about Jerusalem. He knows army life, too, for he served as a medic in I967 and again in I973 in the Sinai Desert. He tells me what he saw and describes some of the wounds he dressed. He tells me also, faltering a bit, about wounded enemy soldiers for whom there was no transportation. He asks me to make a moral judgment. I taste again the peculiar flavor of that green unripe morality of naive people, of middle-aged North American adolescents-for which no adult substitute has been found. Do the senior members of the class really know the answers to these hard questions?

In an obscure journal, an article by Professor Tzvi Lamm of the Hebrew University charges that Israel has lost touch with reality. Lamm’s view is that although the Zionist idea in its early stages seemed more dreamlike than practical, it was soberly realistic. Its leaders knew just how much power they had - or had not - and adhered closely to their goals. They were not hypnotized and paralyzed by their own slogans. Jewish leadership, and with it Israel as a whole, later became “autistic.”

Autism is defined by Lamm as “the rejection of actual reality and its replacement by a reality which is a product of wish-fulfillment.” The victory of I967 was the principal cause of this autism. Israelis began to speak of the West Bank of the Jordan as “liberated” territory. “The capture of lands aroused … a deep, sincere, emotional response to the territories… and to the historical events that took place in them: the graves of our patriarchs and matriarchs, paths along which the prophets once trod, hills for which the kings fought. But feelings cut off from present reality do not serve as a faithful guideline to a confused policy. This break. with reality did not necessarily blind men to the fact that the territories were populated by Arabs, but it kept them from understanding that our settlement and taking possession of the territories would tum our existence as a state into a powerful pressure that would unite the Arab world and aggravate our insecure situation in a way previously unknown in our history.”

Zionism, Professor Lamm argues, is different from other kinds of nineteenth century nationalism in that it did not originate in order to bring people back to a national homeland. “It arose in order to establish sovereignty, and hence a national home, for Jews without a home ..• it was a rescue movement to save a people in a critical situation by concentrating it within one territory, and allowing it to take its political fate in its own hands.”

Lamm admits the importance of God’s Covenant, of the Promised Land, the Holy Land, Eretz Yisrael, in inspiring the Jews to auto-emancipation. But with success the emphasis shifted; the need to save the Jews was translated into something else-the project of “redeeming the land.” The early Zionist leaders were trying to redeem the people. Realistic Zionist leadership was willing to accept partition “in order to absorb and save Jews rather than to remain faithful to slogans that it itself had coined.” Rescue is the true aim of Zionism-not the “liberation” of the Promised Land but the rescue of the Jews, repeatedly threatened with annihilation. But Lamm believes that Ben-Gurion had a messianic character.

“Ethnocentrism,” or a national “narcissism,” appeared in Israel. By I956 it had become aggressively opportunistic. It attached itself imprudently to the expelled, decayed powers, France and England, “without any consideration for the future.” It relied upon military force and followed the politics of “hiring out our sword” instead of seeking a peace settlement with Egypt. It ceased to think of itself as the sanctuary for rescued people but began to think of a State, with an Army. The effects of the Sinai campaign were, first, to unify the Arab world against Israel and, second, to bring the Arab-Israel dispute into global politics. The Suez War of I956 consolidated the power of Nasser and the cabal of Egyptian colonels and more definitely turned the Egyptian masses, who now connected the Jews with the old imperialists, against Israel.

It was after the Six Day War, according to Lamm, that autism began to prevail over realism. All at once the Israelis were arguing about demography, about getting the Arabs to emigrate, “about keeping Israeli citizenship from the Arabs who would remain,” about rebuilding the Temple. But what did they say about peace? Some said, writes Professor La=, that “in exchange for peace we would grant the Arabs-peace.” The Zionist movement had rejected policies of “positions of strength.” A national coalition without definite policies governed the country. Ideological leadership was abandoned; a “business-minded leadership” took over. Statesmen, thinkers, writers, journalists became proud, lost sight of the true reason for the founding of the state-the “rescue” reason -and became power-intoxicated, deluded. The nation, according to Professor Lamm, now lived in a dream world; political debate virtually ended. The Yom Kippur attack was “a blow to the minds of a public doped with empty slogans, living in a fog, and avoiding reality.” Harder words follow. In the Six Day War Israel conquered and occupied Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian territories. Does it mean to keep them? In I939 England and France had gone to war with Nazi Germany because they could not accept its expansionism, its policy of territorial conquest and annexation. What was wrong for Germany cannot be right for Israel. The comparison may seem harsh, and La= does not go so far as to equate Israel with Nazi Germany. What he does argue is that Israel has for many years demanded that the Arab world recognize a legitimate Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael, but Israel did not, after the Six Day War, declare that it recognized the rights of a Palestinian entity. The Rabin government has recently begun to concede-or, at least, to hint at the concession of-rights to the Palestinians.

I am mildly scolded by Israel Galili, minister without portfolio in the present government, for being ignorant of the government’s Arab policy. I have tried to learn what this policy is, I say. When I arrived in Jerusalem, I obtained a mass of government literature on the subject, but from it no clear picture emerges. I know that the government will not negotiate with the PLO. I know also that it refused to tolerate a Palestinian state on the West Bank, between Amman and Jerusalem. But that is not all, says Mr. Galili. He is a small, solid, keen man with tufts of Ben-Gurionesque white hair and pale but not faded blue eyes. He sizes me up, quite rightly, as an interested inexpert observer. He glances at Shimon Peres, the defense minister, who is present, as if to say, “You see? They hardly ever know what they’re talking about.”

Then he explains that Mr. Rabin has explicitly recognized the existence of legitimate Palestinian grievances.

(I should, perhaps, make it clear that we are lunching at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim and that Mayor Teddy Kollek is present.) I repeat that I have read what the government information service has to say on the matter but see no sign that Palestinian grievances are officially recognized. “Then we are very poor in public relations,” says Mr. Galili. That is true enough.

At this point Teddy Kollek observes that the older leaders have never been willing to acknowledge an Arab problem. Golda Meir flatly rejected its existence. Mr. Galili, an old Zionist and kibbutznik, disputes Kollek’s observation. Mr. Peres is too superior a politician to be drawn into a dispute of this nature over lunch. He has really come to discuss literature with me, a fellow writer.

And there is a vast distance between the Zionist idealists Professor Lamm taIks about and the political subtlety of Mr. Peres. Mr. Peres carries an aura. The shine of power is about him. I have observed this before. It was visible in the late Kennedys, Jack and Bobby. They were like creatures on a diet of organ meats-of liver, kidneys, and potent glands. Their hair shone, their coloring was rich, their teeth were strong. I assume this to be the effect of wealth and power, not of the eating of giblets or cod’s roe, for Leopold Bloom, who ate these with relish, did not dazzle Dublin witb his vitality.

But I continue witb Professor Lamm’s argument. What has happened to the old ideals of Zionism, he asks. SettleTO ment of the land was considered by the pioneers not only as a political act but “as the daring creation of a new social, cultural, national” life. The attacks of thieves, bandits, and “pogromists” made self-defense necessary.

But that was very different from what is happening now. Now settlers go into “liberated territories” like colonialists, with army support, and take land from the “natives.”

Lamm names Pitchat Rafiach, the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights, and Kiryat Arba as places where this has occurred. In its realistic period, Zionism took itself to be the movement of a remnant. Hitler very nearly succeeded in destroying European Jewry. To the survivors, Israel meant life. It did not mean political power. “The time has come to abandon the deceptive notion that we are a ‘power’ in the region and the overbearing self-righteousness of our ‘historical rights’ to the land,” Lamm writes.

He has few illusions. Even the most realistic policies will not guarantee survival. The enemies of Israel are terrible. “The forces opposite us are seeking to destroy us: the moderates, politically; and the extremists, physically.

Anyone who does not admit this … is nothing but a dreamer.” Israel must come to a settlement with these enemies. If that is not possible, then “we have little chance of continuing to exist in this land. In comparison with the forces that we must muster, the potential military, political, and economic forces of our opponents … are beyond all measure.” The idea that Israel may prevail by force becomes a nightmare. Professor Lamm calls for a return to political realism. The historical attachment of the Jews to Israel is intense, but so is the feeling of the Arab nationalists; so is the competition between Russia and the West in the region; there is also the matter of the petrodollars and the flow of oil. “If we are lucky, we have not yet spoiled the chance to return to the situation of a society living with reality, fighting for its existence and directed by leaders who dare to stand before it with a political position,” he concludes.

One of the oddities of life in this country: when someone says “the struggle for existence,” he means literally that. With us such expressions are metaphorical. Nor is the word “nightmare” adequate. On television the other night, people in Beirut were murdered before my eyes. Palestinians under siege shot down two of their own comrades, prisoners who had been sent by their Christian captors to ask for a truce. And these are not fictions that we see on the box but frightful realities-“historical events,” instantaneous history. Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps tell us they preferred their worst nightmares to the realities of the morning. They embraced their most frightful dreams and clung to them.

The very Orthodox Professor Harold Fisch, bearded and wearing a skullcap, tells me that “the liberated territories” must be colonized and reclaimed ‘by the Jews.

The West Bank is Promised Land. For that matter the East Bank is too. Professor Fisch, English by birth and dean of something or other at the new university in Beersheba, has no patience with the objections I offer. He tells. me fiercely in his Oxbridge voice that we American Jews are not Jews at all. It is a strange experience to hear such a judgment in such an accent. “You will say,” he adds, “that we may be annihilated by the Arabs in reclaiming our land according to God’s promise. But history sometimes gives us no choice. It is shallow to argue with one’s fate. If this be our fate as a people we must prepare to accept it.”

The famous Institute at Rehovoth, one of the world’s greatest centers of scientific research, bears the name of Chairn Weizmann, the first President of Israel, but it is the child of Meyer Weisgal. Weisgal says he is no scholar, though he was for many years the editor of a Zionist magazine. Yet he was the planner, the builder, the fund raiser, the organizer, and the directing spirit of this place. Early visitors who saw nothing here but sand, heard nothing but the jackals whimpering, were taken by Weisgal to the top of a dune and told, “We will have physics here, and biology there, and chemistry around the comer.” Now Weisgal has his guests chauffeured through the gardens he has created and says, “So we put chemistry in that group, and the physicists over there, and so on. And now let me show you the beautiful memorial we built for Weizmann himself.” His intimacy with Weizmann appears to be unbroken by death. He speaks of him continualIy.

I see the old boy in Jerusalem. As we climb an endless flight of stone stairs in the warm sun Weisgal stops and says, “I’m now eighty one. Eighty one is not eighteen, you know.” His shrewd brows tilt upward. His white hair spreads outward from the widow’s peak, going wide at the back. A bit winded, he continues to climb in his dressy chesterfield with its velvet collar. He gets himself up wonderfully.

His suit is elegantly made. His necktie must be a Hermes. He has aged greatly since we last met ten years ago. I had been taken aback by his handshake: had I never noticed that his hand was mutilated? Two of his fingers have been amputated. His face is as clever and energetic as ever. His nose swells out, intricately fleshy, grainy -a topographical sort of nose. He is recognizably what people in the twenties called “an old sport,” “a good-time Charlie” -one of those men in broad-brimmed fedoras who took drawing rooms on the Twentieth Century Limited in the John Barrymore days, people who knew headwaiters and appreciated well-turn ed-out women. There were many Jews of this sort, big butter-and-egg men who made and lost fortunes. My late friend Pascal Covici, the publisher, was one of these. Pat knew how to order a fine dinner, how long to let wine breathe, how to cherish a pretty woman, how to dart into the street and stop a cab by whistling on his fingers, how to negotiate a tough contract-not so tough, perhaps, since he paid out too many advances and lost his shirt. These Weisgals and Covicis came over in the early years of .the century from Poland or from Rumania and were inspired by America, fell in love with it. Weisgal at thirteen years of age sold marches and papers in the streets. In I9I7 he was a doughboy. Covici raised grapefruit in Florida in I9I9, then, after failing as ‘a fruit grower, opened a bookshop near City Hall, in Chicago. America seems to have instilled a certain boyishness in these old guys, an adolescent candor and gaiety, a love of plain talk. They had, in that generation, no patience with bunk. Weisgal became a great fund raiser; be knew how to talk to millionaires’.

A niggardly millionaire from whom he had expected a large gift to the Institute reluctantly took out his checkbook after he had been entertained at lunch and wrote a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. “Thanks a lot,” said Weisgal, “but the meal has already been paid for.” He tore the check up. In the I920s he would have lighted his cigar with it. Weisgal knows that he operates in the old style. He spoofs himself as he recalls old times with Max Reinhardt, hambone money-raising spectaculars in the Manhattan Opera House. The Jewish journalist and man-about-town is one of the deep ones, strangely disguised. The diligent man of Solomon’s proverb might stand before kings; Weisgal, who is diligent, has done more than stand before them. He knows how to charm the rich and get large sums out of them; he knows how to interest the great. Great men have taken him very seriously. On the walls of his house in Rehovoth are photographs of himself and his wife, Shirley, and their guests and acquaintances-scientists, bankers, and American Presidents. Shirley Weisgal talks in a matter-of-fact way about them. It made Einstein uncomfortable to wear shoes. Oppenheimer openly wept at dinner; he prophesied that a growing number of young American scientists would flee the spiritual vacancy of America and come to work here.

But Weisgal the Zionist pioneer misses the United States. Just now on the stairs of Jerusalem stone he stops again, unwillingly, to catch his breath. Then he says, “Next week I go back to the States. I’m looking forward to that.” Then he takes off the vicuna coat with the velvet collar and hangs it over his frail shoulders: “But it’s no good kidding. I can’t get around the way I used to,” he says. The sun Shines on his strong nose and on the rippled white hair that fans out stiff and wide beyond the clever occiput. “Stern is waiting up there for me. This is bad planning, all these stairs. Well, here goes, again.”

We are climbing to the new studio Teddy Kollek has had a part in building above the Mishkenot Sha’ananim. The violinists Isaac Stern and Alexander Schneider are holding auditions. Dozens of children, many of them recent immigrants from Russia, come daily to play for them. The fiddle culture of the Heifetzes and the Elmans is still strong among the Russian Jews (a death-defying act on four taut strings by means of which you save your life). Stern’s visits to Israel are by no means holidays; he works very hard in Jerusalem. He and Weisgal are organizing something. Stern has told me that he has appealed to the authorities on behalf of soldier-musicians. The hands of a violinist who does not play for months on end may lose some of their skill. The damage can be permanent. “He’s always into something,” says Weisgal. “I don’t lead a restful life myself.”

Weisgal flies to New York soon. From New York he will go to California and from there to Florida. He will speak to hundreds of people. The Institute needs millions of dollars. No need to tell him he’s overdoing things, he knows that quite well. He’s not a carpet-slipper type. “I may conk out any time,” he says. But it occurs to me as we toil upward that dying isn’t what he has in mind. He wants to blow into New York again and talk to physicists and philanthropists, and see his sons and grandchildren, and eat delicious dinners and hear good jokes, and to do there what probably no one else can do for the Weizmann Institute and for Israel. AI; for conking out, he must think of that, certainly. But I remember what Harold Rosenberg said to me one day when I asked him how he felt about his approaching seventieth birthday, “Well, sure, I’ve heard about old age and death and all those things, but so far as I’m concerned it’s all a rumor.”

The children in the Master Class come forward with their fiddles and take positions before Stern and Schneider. A twelve year old boy comes forward.

He is small, dark, muscular, concentrated. He tucks the violin under his chin, rises on his toes, closes his eyes, dilates his nostrils, and begins to play the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E. For a long time. now, I’ve disliked it. I’m down on all this silvery whickering. It depresses me. I associate the Mendelssohn concerto with bad Sunday afternoons, with family dinners, suppressed longings, domestic captivity, and boring symphony broadcasts. Yet as soon as the kid begins to play, there are tears in my eyes. This is idiocy. This small Russian boy is putting me on. The rapt soul et cetera is a trick. I try to smile at his fiddler’s affectations but my face . refuses to obey. I can only think, How did I ever learn to smile such a cheap smile. I’m well rid of it, then, and I sit listening. For five minutes, this boy reconciles me even to the detested Mendelssohn.

Sightseeing with two poets, Harold Schimmel and Dennis Silk, in the Old City. It’s not proper sightseeing, though. I do not, like a good tourist, carry a camera. I’ve never liked cameras, and I haven’t owned one since I940. In that year I photographed some long-legged pigs in Mexico, on the island of Janitzio in Lake Palzcuaro. I’d never seen such stilted pigs, and they were well worth snapping. The camera came from a hockshop on South State Street and there were small holes in the bellows, so that my pigs were speckled white. Schimmel, a student at Cornell in the days when Vladimir Nabokov taught there, did graduate work at Brandeis with Philip Rahv. He has learned Hebrew well enough to write in the language. I feel, with these two, that I’m on a holiday, briefly relieved of the weight of politics. Big Silk has an outcurved profile, a fine bent nose, and his delicate ways amuse me. He becomes absorbed in a display of Persian bottles, his eyes go wide, his underlip comes forward, he moons, and we have to bring him away. Schimmel takes us to a shop specializing in old picture postcards-AIlenby’s arrival in Jerusalem in the Great War is commemorated in every shade of brown.

There are also lacy greeting cards, tons of them; and scribblers; and Greek editions of Zane Grey, for the proprietor is an old Greek gentleman. He has an immense stock of stereopticon slides, and maps, and photographs going back to the last century of patriarchs and pilgrims, and faces from the Ottoman Empire. Great Turkish or Balkan mustachios such as these soldiers and statesmen wear were still common in Chicago in the twenties. One saw them on South Halsted Street, near Hull House, in coffeehouses and candy stores. The men who drove the gaudy white-and-scarlet waffle wagons and announced themselves to the children with bugle calls were rich in such whiskers. (Waffles, half-baked, gluey, and dusted with powdered sugar, a penny each.) We shuffle through the cards, looking for something exceptional. Elias Canetti, an excellent novelist and somewhat eccentric psychologist, argues somewhere that a passion for antiquities shows us to be cannibals, if not ghouls. The cards are the dark yellow of muscatel grapes, but otherwise suggest nothing edible. I pick up a pre-Hitler German picture of Jews praying at the Western Wall. Silk, who is a collector, digs under piles of trash while the Greek proprietor makes us what is evidently a set speech on the great Hellenic tradition of liberty, sounding off about Miltiades and Pericles as if they lived just down the street.

Schimmel and Silk are looking for the weavers’ alley.

What they find instead is a big stone stable, once part of a princely establishment. The carved ornaments, all blackened, go back to the fourteenth century, so we are told by two friendly young Arabs who are tinkering with machinery here. Oh, yes, the stable is still used, but the donkeys and mules are out for the day. Dennis Silk sensitively interrogates the young men. They speak Hebrew well enough to give information. The information is for me, of course. Silk thinks I take a normal tourist’s interest in all of this. It doesn’t matter to me whether the stable goes back to the fourteenth or to the sixteenth century. What interests me is that one of the young men now decides his feet need washing. He hikes up his trousers and squats, grinning to himself-both these Arabs find us amusing-and pours water from a green bottle over his toes, balancing himself ably on one foot. He has what I call cavalry legs, short and full. A woman, too, may have the cavalry leg; it does not prevent her from being shapely.

We never do find the looms. Perhaps the weavers have taken a holiday. We buy round sesame buns and, at an Arab stall stuffed with luxuries, cans of Portuguese skinless sardines in a spicy sauce, and some cucumbers, and we go to Silk’s house for lunch. Silk lives in no man’s land amid the vacant lots. The house just beyond his was a Jordanian outpost before I967, and coming home at night was risky in prewar days, especially if one had been drinking, for it wasn’t altogether clear where the boundaries were. The lots are safe enough now. There are goats and dogs and cats, and decaying buildings that would have been splendid during the Mandate, and weeds and cans and bottles, and a beautiful view of the mountains of Moab in their tawny nakedness. A sharp little bitch trots with us. She must have a litter somewhere near, for she’s so full of milk her udders touch the ground. When Silk opens the door, she enters. “Is that your pet, Dennis?” I ask. He says, seriously and sadly, “No, she’s not. But she was a dear friend of my dog, who died last month, and she still comes looking for him.”

There are not many comforts in Dennis’s house. I can’t decide whether it’s a hut or a cabin. The property belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church and Dennis goes in person to pay the rent three times a year dealing with a strange functionary-part lawyer, part book keeper who always tries to get the better of his poet-tenant. “It’s very Oriental,” says Dennis. “You can’t just put down your money and ask for the receipt. You have to drink coffee and fence back and forth and go through all the Levantine tricks.” Books and pictures fill the two rooms. Dennis is not a tidy bachelor; he doesn’t mind a bit of dust in the place. There’s all the difference in the world between vile dirt and poet’s dirt. I understand why his windows aren’t washed; washing them would make a glare and spoil the tone entirely. This place is perfect as it is-a batik bedspread on the mattress, lots of manuscripts with coffee rings on them. We could do with a little heat, but it isn’t essential, the vodka will warm us. Israeli vodka is very good. So is the slivovitz, raki, and tzuika-even the aquavit here is drinkable. Dennis rolls open the sardine cans, puts out cheese and buns and bottles. Papers and books are not removed from the table, only pushed aside, and we eat and drink. We taik about writers. In a journal lying On the floor is one of Gore Vidal’s interviews. I always read these with pleasure. It’s curious, says Vidal in this one, how full of concepts American speech is: “Americans continually euphemize; they can never call anything by its name …. You never say what you mean; this is not good for character.” We have become the most pleonastic, bombastic people in the world and, furthermore, a nation of liars. I add to this that no people has ever had such a passion for self criticism.

We accuse ourselves of everything, are forever under horrible indictments, on trial, and raving out the most improbable confessions. And all for world consumption. It’s true that we lie a great deal-Vidal is right about that-we lie like mad. There are no Tartuffes in our literature, no monster hypocrites, no deep cynics. What we have in their place is a great many virtuous myths that we apply to our lives with imbecile earnestness. Everything bad is done for the best of reasons. How can a man like Richard Nixon think ill of himself? His entire life was a perfect display of Saturday Evening Post covers. He was honest, he had healthy thoughts, went to meeting three times each Sunday, worked his way through school, served his country, uncovered Communist plots. It is impossible that he should be impure. Moral accountancy in America is a fascinating subject. The blaming, too, is fascinating. People seem to become more American in sharing the blame for offenses they cannot have committed. The descendants of East European immigrants had no share in the crime of slavery, yet they insist that it was “we” who were responsible. What I see in this is a kind of social climbing. My friend Herbert McClosky, a political scientist, prefers to interpret it as moral ambitiousness: a people that expects everything of itself blames itself for everything. I believe that these confessions of national failure and guilt are also a form of communion. We are what we get high on,” said Jerry Rubin in Do It! Anyway, nothing makes us happier than to talk about ourselves. Our own experience as a people has become a source of ecstasy. And here am I, doing it, too.

Schimmel and Silk lead the conversation back to poetry and poets. What was Ted Roethke like? Well, he was a round-faced blond giant-a bit like Silk, come to . think of it. He liked to take off his shoes and his jacket and turn his waistband outward to ease his belly. When he played tennis at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, his volleys tore down the net. I have become a compendium of such information. And yet I never intended to remember any of it. But it amuses Silk and Schimmel, and there is a bottle on the table, and the disorder of Silk’s rooms reminds me of Greenwich Village thirty or forty years ago. Silk, who admires John Berryman and wrote an excellent article on the Dream Songs, asks me whether I can read the poems in Berryman’s own manner. I can try, I say; I heard them from him often enough, in Minneapolis and elsewhere. John would sometimes telephone at three in the morning to say, “I’ve just written something delicious! Listen!” So I know well enough how he recited his songs. I read some of my favorites to Silk and Schimmel. Drink and poetry and feeling for a dead friend, and the short December afternoon .deepening by the moment from a steady blue to a darker, more trembling blue-when I stop I feel that I have caught a chill.

Silk no more minds the cold than a walrus minds the ice.

The poets walk me back to Sir Moses Montefiore’s windmill. I tell them, “It’s been super.” And so it has. “When I came to Jerusalem I thought to take it easy. But no one takes it easy here. This is the first easy day I’ve enjoyed in a month.”

The mill is one of the landmarks of the New City.