South Jerusalem » Culture and Ideas

Little Secrets– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:20:14 +0000

“Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.”

I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table.

illustration by Avi Katz

“All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I need to get my peripheral vision checked.”

“No, that’s really the way he looks,” said Alon.

Alon is a correspondent for one of the major dailies. I’d called him in desperation on Saturday night because I had a column to prepare and had no idea what to write. Alon knows everyone and everything and I figured he’d be able to slip me a scoop.

“Meet me at 10 a.m. in the Aroma Café on Arlosoroff Street,” he told me. “We’ll brainstorm. And it’s a good place to pick up a tidbit or two.”

The cafe was buzzing at mid-morning. Nearly every table was taken, and at least one person at each table was a familiar face. Over the bar hung a large sign with large letters: “Aroma Arlosoroff: A Quiet Spot For Intimate Encounters.” The morning sun flooded in through the plate glass windows that made up three of the café’s four sides.

“It’s where I meet my most confidential sources,” Alon whispered as we walked through the door. “If you come here, you gotta know how to keep a secret.”

“I see there’s free WiFi,” I said.

“Hey, stop staring,” Alon hissed.

“But that guy over there, surrounded by the paparazzi,” I whispered as we ordered our coffees at the counter. “I mean, I can barely see him through the flashing cameras, but isn’t that the tv celebrity-cum-writer-cum-pop singer-cum-political messiah who’s thinking of announcing his candidacy for the Knesset?”

Alon leaned over to me conspiratorially. “A guy I know who’s deep—very deep—at the Weizmann Institute says that he’s ordered 119 clones of himself so that he himself can occupy every single slot on his slate. But promise not to tell anyone.”

“And that blonde who people keep butting in front of at the cash register—isn’t that the former leader of the opposition? You know who I mean—Tziona whatshername, no not Tziona, Tzruria, or maybe it’s Tzilla …”

“No, I think it’s Tzahala or something like that—wait, it’ll come to me in a minute,” Alon said.

“I can’t believe I don’t remember,” I said as we settled down at a table in the middle of the room. “I mean, after the incisive and passionate stands she took on … well … I think I agreed with her once about something. Oh, and look over there, it’s the president of the Bank of Israel!”

“Could I please have a cappuccino?” Tziona, Tzruria, Tzilla, or Tzahala asked quietly, but the man at the register looked straight past her.

That’s when the former Shin Bet chief arrived the next table over, bearing a tray on which were arranged six double espressos. The table, I should note, wasn’t unoccupied. A somewhat frazzled-looking young mother sat there rocking a baby carriage while she tried simultaneously to calm down the bawling four-year old girl in her lap, sip her ice coffee, and shout into her Samsung. She didn’t even notice when the stranger sat down opposite her.

“You call yourself a kindergarten teacher?” she screamed. “You’re an ogre! You hate children! How dare you tell my daughter that her mother is late picking her up! Don’t you know what I’m going through with my ex, may an Iranian ballistic missile inject fissile material straight into his groin?”

Then she looked at me and shouted even louder: “Who told you to listen?”

“Isn’t he a master of disguise?” Alon chortled. The chief downed his espressos, one by one, in quick succession. “That woman hasn’t a clue that Israel’s former top spy is sitting right next to her!”

A quartet of muscular buzz-cut young men with coiled wires coming out of their ears suddenly barreled through the door and took up positions at each corner of the café. A fanfare sounded and an angry and determined minister of defense strode through the door and went straight up to the cash register, giving the forlorn former opposition leader a push as he went by. The cashier cowered as the defense minister slammed his hand down on the counter.

“Could I please have a cappuccino?” Tziona, Tzruria, Tzilla, or Tzahala asked helplessly, but no one heard.

“My secretary called ten minutes ago to order me my usual,” he said loudly, “and she was told by the idiot who answered the phone that there is no Courvoisier to put in my Americano.”

He surveyed the room and added: “No one here should quote me on that.”

The former Shin Bet chief, who was staring vacantly into the air, said loudly and to no one in particular: “The idiot is the guy who just walked in.”

The defense minister swiveled.

“Who called me an idiot? I dare you to stand up and show yourself!”

“Ofri!” the distracted mother exclaimed as her daughter slipped out of her seat and began pouring her lemonade on her baby brother. The mother jumped up to stop her and two of the bodyguards tackled her. The defense minister strode over and held out his right hand to help her up.

“You imbecile!” the mother kept shouting into the phone. “I’ll call the mayor! I’ll go on tv and tell the world who really runs the kindergarten on Frishman Street! You think I’m lying? You know who’s sitting here next to me?”

“So now I’m an imbecile?” the defense minister said sternly as he shook her hand vigorously and wiped a spray of lemonade off his face. In the meantime Ofri bit the leg of Bodyguard A. He palmed the kid in one of his huge hands, ready to throw her through the plate-glass window, but the defense minister motioned him to put her down.

“As a defender of human rights and free speech and all that stuff,” the minister said, “I am of course willing to defend to the death your right to call me an idiot, but you should take into account that our country faces a deadly threat. A crazy, irrational Islamist regime is developing nuclear weapons that will completely change the geopolitical situation in the Middle East to our detriment. If the world does not take more concerted action by, say, July 19 at 3:30 a.m., we may have to launch a surprise preemptive attack.”

The former Shin Bet chief leaned over to Alon. “Let me tell you, off the record of course, that the defense minister is a messianic maniac who is totally out of touch with reality.”

“Don’t write that down,” Alon warned me.

“Two-tenths of a percent!” the bank president shouted into his iPhone. “The day after tomorrow we’re raising the interest rate by two-tenths of a percent. Yes, it’s final! Just make sure the announcement is embargoed until the press conference!”

“Could I please have a cappuccino?” Tziona, Tzruria, Tzilla, or Tzahala asked, in a slightly louder voice this time.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” the defense minister said to the blurry-faced erstwhile spook. “You know and I know what the public can’t know. I know that you know that I must make tough decisions based on new information that only I know and that you would know if you were still in the know but because it’s new you don’t know now, nor would you have known it even then if I’d known then what I know now about you, so who knows why you think you have the authority to naysay my judgments about what I know best. So, with regard to the newfangled notion that’s got into your noggin about newspaper notoriety, I say, nu?”

“How dare you imply that I am not a good mother!” the woman shouted into her phone.

“I can’t hear you!” the president of the Bank of Israel hollered into his phone. “Speak up, there’s a lot of noise here.”

Then, after listening a moment he said: “Well, just tell the Greek finance minister that I don’t give a booger about what happens to his economy.”

“Was that for attribution?” Alon shouted over to him, but the bank president just waved his finger.

“Hey people,” the celebrity yelled out, “whadda you say I throw my hat in the ring? Who’s gonna vote for me? Hey come on now, let me see some hands!”

“Could-I-please-have-a-cappuccino?” the former leader of the opposition asked slowly and deliberately as the celebrity shoved her aside and jumped on top of the bar, waving the victory sign. Then he looked over at Alon.

“But let’s keep it quiet for now,” he said. “Because it’s not official yet.”

“Speak up, lady,” the cashier advised.

“I just want a cappuccino,” the former opposition leader said sorrowfully.

“Regular or decaf?” the cashier asked.

She hesitated.

Alon motioned for me to follow him. “This might be your chance!” he hissed. We sidled up to the counter to hear her decision.

“Well, of course, it’s a very complex issue …” she began, but by that time three other people were loudly placing their orders.

“Hey, I owe you an apology,” Alon said. “I was sure I’d get you a story, but everyone’s being so secretive today.”

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” I said. “I think I’ll manage.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

More Necessary Stories satire:
For Whom the Pole Knells

And lots more Necessary Stories here!

Necessary Stories Live!

Benzion Netanyahu’s Legacies

Gershom Gorenberg — Tue, 01 May 2012 17:29:21 +0000

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.

Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”

I leave it to scholars of Spanish and Jewish history to debate whether Benzion Netanyahu’s depiction fits facts or explains them well. But I hazard to say that it is breathtaking example of how historians can write about the present when they portray the past, of how history can be autobiography. Netanyahu explicitly describes fifteenth-century Spain as a dress rehearsal for twentieth-century Jewish life in Germany and in his own native Poland. Jews who believed they could successfully assimilate were deceiving themselves, because gentile hatred was racial, implacable, unconcerned with the optical illusion of religion. Spanish Jews were as willfully blind to the danger as were Polish Jews who ignored the warnings of Netanyahu’s ideological mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky. If Germany and Poland repeated Spain, then all of Jewish history was a series of repetitions, a “history of holocausts,” as Benzion told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 1998.

As loyal son and prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu regularly repeats this doctrine. …

Read the rest here.

Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:44:10 +0000

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

“This night is different,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violinist of the Jerusalem Quartet, “because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

“Shall I prepare the palace for mourning?” asks the chamberlain, weeping, for his son too is dead.

“You will not,” says Pharaoh. “To mourn is to repeat, rehearse, to wallow in death. In the face of catastrophe, we must not look back. Saddle my horse and muster the army.”

“D Minor?” asks the copyist, staring at Mozart’s staves. “But D Minor is the key of tragedy, of suffering. Your first son has just been born. Why this key?”

I cannot focus on the Haggadah nor on the huge backlog of work. Neither Ilana nor I have much strength for cleaning. There is a concert at the YMCA, I tell Ilana. The Jerusalem Quartet is playing Mozart, Kopytman, and Shostakovich. Just drop everything and go, says Ilana. It’s already ten after eight. I hop on my bike and speed down to the Y.

“We will now play for you,” says Alexander Pavlovsky, first violin of the Jerusalem Quartet, “Mark Kopytman’s String Quartet number four, which we have played many times before because of our long collaboration with this greatest of living Israeli composers. But now we will play it again and it will be different because Mark Kopytman is dead.”

A performance of chamber music is much like a Seder, I think to myself. A work of music is like a text read in different times and places, endlessly reinterpreted by players and listeners. Mozart’s string quartets were inspired by Haydn’s, and in turn inspired those of Beethoven, and later Shostakovich and Kopytman, the man who just died. If the Jerusalem Quartet played only newly-composed works at each concert, its audience would have no context, no tradition on which to base its experience of listening. If it played only Haydn’s quartets, it could never bring its audience to look forward and experience the new, rather than just experience anew. Kopytman’s quartet sounds weird and dissonant; even experienced audiences have trouble parsing it. But the same audience might delude itself into thinking it understands Mozart’s simply because melodies and structures that are familiar in form may seem, illusively, to be transparent.

The text of the Haggadah is like a string quartet. It has four movements, it goes slow and fast, varies from major to minor and modulates from key to key. It is interpreted and embellished differently in each year and by each family, for each Seder night is a different night. It can be puzzling and infuriating, seem beautiful in one place while dissonant in another. Yet if its puzzles and dissonances lead us to change the text or abridge it, we would be like a string quartet that plays only those themes and motives it likes from Mozart’s or Shostakovtich’s or Kopytman’s work, permitting itself to revise those parts it thinks the composer got wrong.

My Haggadah’s text has not changed this year, but it is entirely different, because last year was the last time I read it with Niot, and this year is the first year I will read it without him.

Remembering a fallen soldier is like listening to a recording of a concert. The abstraction of the music fills the ear but the eye cannot see and the arms cannot embrace.

On the night of the first Seder, Pharaoh has no time for texts or compositions. He hears no music; memories are a waste of time. His gaze is directed forward, not back, as he leads his army into the desert. His dead son was not so much a son but a sign, a symbol of the future of his dynasty and of the stability of his state. The fleeing slaves threaten the very foundations of his kingdom. Another heir can be sired, but without the slaves who will perform his empire’s hard labor?

The third movement of Mozart’s string quartet in D Minor, one of six inspired by and dedicated to Haydn, is a minuet, as the third movements of classical-period string quartets are supposed to be. But the minor key renders melancholy what should be a stately dance for a celebratory occasion. The dissonance between the nature of the dance and its sound is jarring. It is the sound of a dark and different night. But then comes the middle section, in which the dark clouds give way to a light and jumpy melody that sounds like children playing. But then the night returns, as if the children have died. Tears well up in my eyes. Was Mozart imagining that his newborn son might not survive?

On the Seder night we speak of four children. I have four children. This year, one is dead. Niot had wisdom, mostly of a commonsensical sort, and in his younger years he could be challenging and disobedient. He had a simple and pure love of other people and he asked many, many questions. On the afternoon after Seder night, I spotted him lying on a couch, reading a book. He did not often read books. He did not like string quartets, either. That night I drove him to a bus stop and let him off and said good-by, and did not see him again conscious and alive. This Seder night we will again speak of four children. Every year on Seder night, and not on Seder night, we will have four children. And one will be dead.

And on Memorial Day, two and a half weeks afterward, we no longer mourn only the sons of others. We mourn our son as well. He is buried in the Mt. Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem. The tulip bulbs his older sister planted on the grave have sprouted and are now starting to bloom.

To the best of my knowledge, no one in Egypt today mourns Pharaoh’s son. His grave is unknown. His dynasty ended long ago. The ancient kingdom of Egypt crumbled and the people who live in that land today speak a different tongue, worship a different God, and listen to different music. Pharaoh pushed forward. He had a kingdom to build, wars to win. There are no tulips. But each year the Jews take a drop from their wine glasses and set it aside, in memory of Pharaoh’s oldest son.

Kopytman’s string quartet is unexpected, at times lyrical, at times jarring. Pavlovsky and his three partners lunge, grimace, and grin as they play. It is a signature piece of theirs and they have not recorded it. It can be heard only when they play it with their arms and bodies. They first played it under the composer’s direction. But now he is an abstraction, and they continue to play without him.

A Seder is like the performance of a string quartet. The composer is long dead but the notes remain and we may play them as we see fit and as we feel best. On Memorial Day the players are dead as well. We can only recall the music in our minds. The music may be happy, but it does not lighten our hearts.

We continue to perform our Seder without Niot. We look backward, and forward, like a composer.

We now live in other nights.

******************************

The Niot Project, established by our family in Niot’s memory, in partnership with the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem, offers comprehensive assistance to Israeli teenagers with learning disabilities and their families. For more information, see The Niot Project on the SAE website.

See also:
The Day of His Birth (on SoJo)
June 6, 2011

Links to more Necessary Stories columns

The Niot Project / “בנאות למידה”

Haim Watzman — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 08:09:54 +0000

Haim Watzman

Dear Friends,

This coming week, during the Pesach holiday, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of our son Niot z”l. Niot, a soldier in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was killed in an accident. We miss him very much.

In Niot’s memory, his family has established, in cooperation with the Society for the Advancement of Education, the Niot Project to help teenagers with learning disabilities and ADHD. We have prepared a brochure explaining the project, and more detailed information is available on the Society for the Advancement of Education website.

We would be pleased to have your support for this important project. Donations may be made in the following ways:

In the USA: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made by making out a check to “PEF Israel Endowment Funds Inc.” and mailing it to 317 Madison Avenue, Suite 607, New York, NY 10017, USA, with a cover letter indicating that the donation is for The Niot Project, at the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem.

In Israel: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made through either of the following routes:

By mailing a check made out to the Society for the Advancement of Education (Address: P.O. Box 16252, Jerusalem 91162, Israel).

Via bank transfer: Account Name: Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem; Bank Discount (11); Beit Hakerem Branch (069); Account (11800).

Donations may also be made on-line.

Wishing you a happy Pesach,

The Watzman Family

חברים יקרים,

בשבוע הבא, בחג הפסח, נציין שנה ללא בננו נאות ז”ל. נאות, ששירת בחטיבת גולני, נהרג בתאונה בעת שירותו בתאונה. אנחנו מתגעגעים אליו מאוד.

לזכרו, אנחנו הקמנו, בשיתוף-פעולה עם “האגודה לקידום החינוך”, את הפרויקט “בנאות למידה” לעזרת ילדים בעלי לקויות למידה ובעיות קשב וריכוז. הכנו חוברת המסבירה על הפרויקט. ניתן למצוא מידע מפורט יותר באתר של האגדודה

נשמח לקבל את עזרתכם. ניתן לשלוח תרומות בדרכים הבאות:

לשלוח שיק לפקודת “קהילת ידידיה”, בית-הכנסת של משפחת ויצמן, שתשמור את התרומות עד להקמת הפרויקטים. תורמים בדרך זו יקבלו קבלה המזכה אותם בזיכוי מס הכנסה ישראלית. נא לשלוח שיקים – בציון “למוטב בלבד” ו-”קרוס”-

שליחת המחאה (צ’ק) לפקודת “האגודה לקידום החינוך, ירושלים” לכתובת: ת.ד. 16252, ירושלים, מיקוד 91162.

העברה בנקאית לבנק דיסקונט (11), סניף בית הכרם (069), חשבון 11800. נא לציין כי התרומה היא עבור “פרויקט בנאות למידה”.

תשלום מאובטח באמצעות כרטיס אשראי באתר האינטרנט של האגודה

Spring — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:58:46 +0000

Haim Watzman

Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides.

Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert hill come to life for a brief week or two after a late and south-wandering thundershower. We lay on velvet-red poppies with voluptuous black irises and brassy-yellow mustard flowers watching two formations of our platoon converge from the west and south on the slopes of the next hill over. That hill, guarded by evil-eyed cardboard cutouts of Syrian soldiers, was ours to conquer. Nuriel, Dani, and I were the fire team meant to keep the paper riflemen’s heads down with high-intensity machine gun and mortar fire until the two attack forces were positioned to make their final run toward the defensive positions. Nuriel’s arm, its spare dark down glistening, was draped over his MAG machine gun. Dani’s much thicker elbow rested on a pack full of assorted charges for his 60mm mortar. I was the team leader. The platoon had done a dry run of the maneuver an hour before and now the live fire version was beginning. But the formations were still far off and we awaited our lieutenant’s order to begin the barrage. So we had taken the opportunity to make a round of coffee on Nuriel’s camp stove.

illustration by Avi Katz

Nuriel, a baby-faced kid new to our unit, just six months past his three-years stint in the Givati Brigade, was explaining to us why he had felt compelled to tell Merav, to whom he had just gotten engaged, that he first fell in love with another woman on a flower-strewn hill like this one during his first furlough after basic training.

“My friend Mendy and I were hiking a trail on Mt. Meron in the Galilee,” he told us, “and we saw two spots of white on a boulder. We got closer and saw that it was two girls in linen shirts washing their faces in a spring that spurted out from the side of the mountain into a large pool. One had long, straight hair as black as a raven and the other wore a floppy light blue hat. They were completely drenched, they’d been swimming in the pool.”

Dani whistled.

“You guys won’t believe this, but the first one looked directly at Mendy and the one in the blue hat looked straight at me. He and I stopped in our tracks—it was like we were seeing a vision from heaven. I felt the girl looking straight into my eyes. We walked slowly toward them and they got up and held out their hands in welcome.”

“And?” said Dani.

“And that was it,” said Nuriel, with a dreamy smile on his face. He rolled over on his back. “We walked the rest of the trail together, the four of us. Her name was Dafna and we were together for nearly a year afterward.”

“After you screwed her by the spring?” Dani said. “That’s what you told Merav?”

“Dani,” Nuriel chided him, “I’m talking about love, not sex. That’s why I had to tell Merav about it. Didn’t you ever fall in love like that?”

“Sure,” said Dani. “Of course I did.”

“There’s nothing like first love,” Nuriel continued. “I’m not saying it’s the best or that it’s what you want for the rest of your life, but it tells you so much about a person. That’s why I thought Merav had to know about it. I told her that story about me as soon as I realized that we were heading toward a wedding.”

“Funny. With me it was the opposite,” Dani said. “When I asked Leah to marry me, she refused to answer until I had told her about my first love. She said it was a story she needed to hear before she decided.”

Nuriel broke off a chunk of chocolate wafer and dipped it in his coffee. “I can understand that.

“In my case,” said Dani with a tease in his voice, “it might have meant no wedding.”

“You mean because she was jealous?”

The radio crackled.

“Roger,” I said into the handset.

“Ten little ones,” crackled the lieutenant’s voice.

“Ready and waiting,” I crackled back. Then, to the other two, I said: “Ten minutes. Helmets on. Nuriel, get back in fire position.”

“Not so fast,” Nuriel said. “Sun feels so good on my face.”

“Picture it,” Dani says. “I’m kneeling in front of her, engagement ring in hand, ready to put it on her finger, and she grabs her hand back and says: ‘You’re not doing anything with that ring until you tell me who was first.’”

“Surprised you!” Nuriel smiled.

“And I said, my first woman? And she said, just like you, she said, no not sex, love. And you know what? I was so high and confident that I didn’t miss a beat. ‘Leah, honeybunch,’ I say to her, ‘I first fell in love with a glass.’”

Nuriel turned his head toward Dani. “Come on, be serious.”

“I’m perfectly serious,” Dani said. This was when he held his glass up to the sky. “I’m telling you just what I told Leah. Look at it. Have you ever noticed the beauty of a well-made Turkish coffee glass? Petite, not as big as your hand. That graceful curve from the narrow base up to that full, inviting lip. There’s simple aesthetic perfection there.”

“Oh come on, Dani,” Nuriel objected. “Guys don’t fall for tableware.”

Dani placed the glass gently on the ground next to his mortar. “I was just fifteen. It was a beautiful day at the beginning of spring and my Mom had dragged me and my two sisters to visit my grandmother. I was desperate to be outside playing, but we had to sit there and tell Grandma about school and sing the Four Questions for her like we were still in kindergarten.”

“When I felt I just couldn’t sit any more I asked if I could go out. Grandma said, but you haven’t had anything to drink! And she went to the kitchen and came out a minute later with a tray of cookies and glasses just like these filled with sweet tea and mint. I took a glass and gulped down the tea as I gazed desperately at the gently swaying branches of the poplar outside her second-story window. And suddenly I felt so alone, more alone than I’d ever felt before.

“It was like a part of me had gone missing, a feeling so intense that I felt that I could not go on living if that emptiness were not filled. My grandma poured me more tea and I didn’t even thank her, just drained the glass again and then held it up before me, between me and the tree. I’d never looked at anything that way before. Suddenly I saw what a magical thing it was, how that glass was more beautiful than anything else in the universe. And I realized that I could never part with it. I wanted it beside me all the time. It was the only thing that could make me complete. This glass was my life and without it I would make a mad dash for the balcony window and leap to my death.

“‘Dani, what are you doing?’ my mother asked in her stop-embarrassing me tone of voice. I sensed that my life depending on subterfuge. I smiled, asked my grandma for another cookie, and then when she and my Mom were safely involved with a recipe for moussaka, I slipped the glass into my pocket. Grandma had so many of them that she never noticed.

“When we got home I went to the bathroom, carefully washed out the tea and crystallized sugar, dried it off with my bath towel, and placed it under my pillow. For the next two weeks the glass was in my pocket during the day and next to me in bed at night.”

“Guys,” I said, “Two minutes. Helmets.”

We strapped them on. Nuriel rolled onto his stomach and slapped a belt into the MAG. I removed an explosive mortar shell from my pack and handed it to Dani, who kneeled down next to his weapon and fiddled with the coordinates. Our heads low, we saw the hill before us through a screen of scarlet and golden flowers.

Nuriel grinned. “I bet Leah loved that story.”

Dani shrugged his shoulders. “She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She just stared at me. Then she said, ‘Are you playing games with me? Now is not the time for games.’ And I said, ‘I am perfectly serious.’ She asked, ‘And how long did your affair with the tea glass last?’”

“And I told her that I loved that tea glass passionately for close to two weeks. It was everything to me. I thought about it all the time and fondled it lovingly in my pocket. But then one evening I took it out of my jeans to put it under my pillow and I suddenly looked at it and said to myself, ‘Hey, are you bonkers? It’s a glass! You can’t be in love with a glass!’”

The radio crackled. “Fire team!” said the lieutenant’s voice.

Nuriel drew back the machine gun’s bolt.

“And what did Leah say?” Nuriel asked in the last silent minute we had to us.

“She didn’t say anything,” said Dani. “She held out her hand and I put a diamond ring on her finger. And I said, ‘Don’t you want to hear about my second love?’ And she said, ‘I’d rather not.’”

“Wow,” said Nuriel, shaking his head in disbelief. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” said Dani.

“Fire!” crackled the lieutenant’s voice.

“Fire!” I shouted.

Nuriel let loose a long volley and Dani’s mortar boomed. Smoke and dust rose from the hill before us. Lying flat, we watched through the poppies as the two attack forces advanced up opposite slopes. We kept up the barrage.

“Do you ever miss it? That tea glass?” Nuriel shouted over the din.

“Leah’s my life,” Dani shouted back. “She’s like nothing else in the world. But, like you said, that first infatuation. You never love that way again.”

******************************

Winter is the first in this quartet of army stories.

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Once More, With Feeling — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:23:13 +0000

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

The sniffles turned into sobs during the dissonant piccolo solo. The Israel Philharmonic was about four minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and the weeping distracted me from the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, who seemed not so much to be cuing the orchestra as to performing a long slow death dance.

The tears were coming from a little girl in a long-sleeved dress who was sitting two rows in front of me in the Jerusalem Convention Center’s high balcony. She looked to be about eleven years old and she held her hands tightly to her cheeks as she wept. Her shoulders heaved in a way that seemed to indicate that she was holding much more sorrow inside than she was letting out. But then the strings returned with a desperate restatement of the opening theme that descended a chromatic scale into a lower depth of agony. When the music dissolved completely into a virtual silence, she let out a very audible throaty gasp. The older couple sitting in front of her turned around to eye her. A boy in a black kipah who was sitting one seat away—apparently an older brother—sidled over beside her, gave her a smack on the back of her head, and whispered something angry in her ear.

*

“Good day, Dmitri Dmitryevich.”

When the phone first rang, the composer had removed his glasses begun to polish them obsessively. It rang again and he tried not to be at home. But Nina had said gently: “You must pick it up,” and signaled that she would listen in on the extension.

He cleared his throat and said: “Good day to you, Iosif Vissarionovich. What may I do for you and the Soviet state?”

“We would like to ask a favor,” the voice on the other end said. “I have been told that you have said that you are too ill to attend the world peace conference in New York. I was hoping that you might make a special effort, given the importance we attach, in the wake of the Great Patriotic War, to promoting anti-imperialism among the world’s artists, writers, and musicians. Just four years after the defeat of Germany a new fascism is rearing its ugly head and it is my feeling that your contribution to the struggle is essential.”

Dmitri closed his eyes.

“Comrade Stalin,” the composer said haltingly, “how may I speak for Soviet music in New York when so much of my own music is not being played in my own country?”

“What do you mean, isn’t being played. What isn’t being played?”

“Well, for example, my Sixth Symphony.”

“Oh that,” said Stalin. “Wouldn’t you agree that it is not one of your best? So cold and formal. Not at all music of the people. And that first movement theme. I believe some of the critics termed it ‘cosmopolitan.’”

Dmitri put on his glasses to look at Nina, who mouthed the word “Jewish.” He nodded.

*

Noseda’s arms swooped to the sky, his baton pointing straight up as if it were a straw through which he hoped to gain a breath of air. When an oboe entered with what seemed to be a reassuring variation on the theme, the conductor’s arms came slowly down to his sides. A solo flute flitted by like a songbird flying home to nest at dusk. I glanced at the girl. She was leaning slightly forward, her hands gripping the armrests of her chair as if, rather than comforted, she was anticipating a nightmare. Her brother glared at her and elbowed her in the side, but she did not respond.

A solo bassoon spoke for the night and then the strings came in again with the plaintive theme, softer and softer, as the conductor bent, then recoiled as if receiving a blow. His knees bent and he slowly contracted himself. The violins faded into darkness.

“The socialist revolution requires music that the workers can easily comprehend,” the dictator said. “It must express their feelings, simply and directly. I believe you are well aware of that. You have wisely criticized some of your own music for being too far removed from the people.”

“Of course, Iosif Vissarionovich,” said the composer. “Still, my Sixth Symphony.”

Nina, cradling her receiver against her shoulder, flourished with her right arm, as he himself did when he wanted the orchestra to offer more.

“My Sixth Symphony,” he said with a grimace that the phone could not convey, “expresses both the sorrow that the worker feels at temporary setbacks in battle and production, and the joy of accomplishment and victory.”

He heard papers being shuffled on the other end.

“Oh come now, Dmitri Dmitryevich. First consider its structure. You begin with a long slow movement, then add a scherzo and a finale. As if you mislaid your first movement somewhere. Every symphony worthy of its name beings with a stirring allegro that lightens the cares of the worker after a long day at the factory. The only exceptions I can think of are manifestly bourgeois works by the likes of Mahler and Schoenberg. Certainly you do not want to be in a class with such champions of the capitalist esthetic.”

“But Tchaikovsky …”

“But beyond that you build that entire slow movement around a four-note motive that includes only two tones. You are playing abstract games there, Dmitri Dmitryevich, not writing music. It has no authentic feeling at all.”

*

The boy was clearly embarrassed. During the brief pause between movements, the people sitting around him and his sister turned to stare. He tugged at the girl’s sleeve and dragged her out of their row and into the next one back, a section over, where there was a cluster of vacant seats. The girl sat down in her new seat obediently and turned her face toward the orchestra below. The second movement scherzo began with a snickering clarinet. Noseda perked up like Petrouchka coming to life and seemed to be pointing to sections of the orchestra not just with his hands but with his feet as well. The girl began moving her limbs in concert with the conductor’s. Her brother grabbed her right arm.

*

“The scherzo,” the composer said defensively, “was inspired by works of our great founding comrade, Lenin.”

“It has been said,” Stalin noted, “that the scherzo is insincere.”

“I can assure you,” Shostakovich said, “that I mean every note of it.”

“And the presto finale,” Stalin said. “It makes my skin itch, it’s so frenetic.”

Noseda leaped into the air. Literally leaped, as if this were the only way he could get the cellos’ attention. The music took off like a train going off its tracks.

“Elation,” the composer said. “It is elation. Victory. The victory of the socialist will.”

“Really?” said the dictator. “It sounds almost like a parody to me. It leaves me cold. No, not cold. Annoyed.”

“I defer of course to your superior insight, Iosif Vissarionovich.”

The girl suddenly clambered up on her seat and began conducting the orchestra herself. Her brother doggedly tried to get her down but she shoved him away, fixed only on the music.

“I know of no order banning the symphony,” said Stalin. “But I can understand why our orchestras might be reluctant to play it.”

“Thank you, Iosif Vissarionovich.”

“So you will make the trip to New York.”

Dmitri eyed Nina. She shrugged helplessly. Could he trust even her?

“I will be only too happy,” the composer sighed, “to be of service to the people.”

When the drums and trumpets came in for the final climax, the girl turned and looked straight at me. Then she leapt from her chair and bowed and beamed at the concertgoers around her. Her brother hid his face in his hands. She extended her hand to him and pulled him up beside her, shaking his arm with gusto. Noseda held out his hands and raised them triumphantly heavenward. The crowd applauded. “Bravo!” I shouted. “Bravo!”

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Confessions of a Cross-Sitter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:39:51 +0000

Haim Watzman

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

I would not disturb you at your studies were it not that the problem I face is pressing and the agony of my soul no longer bearable. Nor would I dare to write you under a false name, if it were not so embarrassing, but this you will no doubt understand as you read. I plead with you to respond quickly and with all the wisdom at your disposal, as my family, my livelihood, and my soul are all at stake.

It’s about public transportation. That is, I have a bus issue. Perhaps the word “issue” might be misunderstood. Perhaps I should say a seat problem. But perhaps that, too, may sound improper. Let me get to the point.

illustration by Avi Katz

Each morning I kiss my wife and children good-by and descend the narrow stairs from our modest apartment in the Holy City of Jerusalem and wait, along with many of my neighbors, for the number 2 bus. As befits our God-fearing neighborhood, the passengers board and the men take seats in the front and the women proceed to the back.

I swipe my Rav-Kav card and begin to walk down the aisle. A seat presents itself but I decide to try further back. I continue down the aisle toward the swivel section of the double bus.

For quite a long time after glatt-kosher buses began running in our neighborhood, I convinced myself that I was just looking for a more comfortable or convenient seat. But yesterday I was confronted with the truth.

I was perusing the Hamedir chapter of the Ketubot tractate, preoccupied with understanding Shmuel’s claim that no divorce is necessary in certain cases where a bridegroom has conditioned marriage on his wife not having taken vows not to wear colorful clothes or to enjoy certain kinds of food. I did not notice those around me as I walked down the aisle. I kept walking and then, out of the corner of my eye spotted an inviting seat. I sat down, and felt a sense of peace and wholeness that my normally tortured soul has not felt for many years now. It’s the kind of feeling you yourself must know, the sense of completeness that overwhelms you when you have a hiddush, an insight into a difficult question of Torah or halacha that no one else has ever thought of before.

This wonderful sensation was rudely interrupted when Mrs. Schechter, who happens to be my downstairs neighbor, screamed straight into my left ear.

I looked up, bewildered, to meet fifty pairs of glaring female eyes. I looked around. I had seated myself in the ezrat nashim, the women’s section in the back. I realized that I should get up and apologize, that had had committed a thoughtless infraction.

But, rabbi, I was not able. It felt so right to be there. As if this was the place I should have been my entire life, since I was the smallest boy in Rabbi Breslau’s heder and Moishe Bach, now commander of the Greater Givat Shaul Modesty Patrol, beat me up every morning. I stared at the black coats and hats of the men in front of me. They were starting to turn and stare. The thought of moving up to the front to join them nauseated me. It was all I could do to raise my arm to press the red button that signaled the driver that I wanted to get out. As soon as he pulled up at the next stop I shot out of my seat and bounded into the fresh air. I found a bench and sat down in horror with myself. To atone for my sin I recited the entire book of Psalms then and there. But it did not help. Rabbi, I have realized that while I occupy a man’s body, my bus ticket is that of a woman. What am I to do?

A Desperate Soul

*

My dear Desperate Soul, may the Almighty comfort you in your tribulations,

We cannot understand the ways of The Holy One, Blessed Be He. Did he not answer Job out of the storm wind and say, “Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. Wilt thou also disavow my judgment? Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayst be in the right?”

The Lord of the Universe has seen fit to give you a soul of a special kind, a man’s soul, but one that feels not lust but affinity for the souls of women. I cannot know the divine plan, but perhaps you have a special task before God, to understand the daughters of the King and offer them succor, just as Elisha the prophet did for the Shunamite woman.

But of course you must strengthen your soul with study and prayer and never make this immodest mistake again.

With great love in the Torah,

Rabbi Baruch Rosencrantz

*

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

Since the words of a great scholar of Torah must be considered to be the words of God himself, I have devoted myself for the past two weeks to intensive study, prayer, and penance. Furthermore, after consulting with my wife, we agreed that I should henceforth go by foot to the kolel where I study, and that on rainy days I would apportion money out of my meager stipend to pay for a cab, so that I might not again encounter a temptation and fail.

The sweet words of our Holy Torah provided me with much comfort and my soul began to feel strong, although my heart remained broken. But then something even worse happened.

Yesterday, on the Holy Sabbath, I entered our small neighborhood synagogue deeply engrossed in the recitation of the sacrificial service that precedes the morning prayers. I did not notice where my wayward feet and heart were taking me, that they were climbing stairs when they should have been walking straight to my seat by the Holy Ark. I sat down and felt a sense of tranquility and was certain that your advice had brought me to wholeness and healing. But then Mrs. Schechter screamed, this time in my right ear. I looked up and found that I had taken a seat in the balcony reserved for the women. Mrs. Schechter began beating me with her copy of Tzena U-Rena and calling me a pervert. I gathered up all my strength and ran home in tears to my wife and children.

What am I to do?

Ever More Desperate

*

Dear Ever More Desperate,

Our Sages said that God sends tribulations to righteous men so that their merits may be to the benefit of all of Israel. You may consider yourself blessed that the Creator has chosen you as a vehicle for sanctifying his Chosen People.

Nevertheless, like Abraham our Father, you must meet the challenges sent your way and not give in. I suggest fasting on Mondays and Thursdays and ritual immersion three times a day, before meals.

In humble submission,

Rabbi Baruch Rosencrantz

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

I must express my heartfelt gratitude that a scholar and spiritual guide of your stature has deigned to concern himself with a worm like me, and to reply so swiftly to my entreaty.

I received your reply at sundown and, overjoyed, wished to immediately begin the course of action you prescribed. With my mind conscious only of God’s blessings to me and my poor family, my feet took me directly to our neighborhood mikveh, the ritual bath that God in his mercy has given us so that we may be cleansed of our impurities. Determined to face bravely the tests that God has imposed on me, I strode straight into the changing room, undressed, and headed for the pool of living water. Did not Rabbi Akiva, the wisest of our Sages, say: “Fortunate are you O Israel! Before whom do you purify yourselves? And who purifies you? Your Father in Heaven! As it is said: “I will sprinkle upon you pure water and you shall become purified.” I closed my eyes, said the required blessing, and plunged in.

Then I heard Mrs. Schechter scream, first in one ear, then the other.

The Modesty Patrol was called in and Moishe Bach beat me up. Only by going down on my knees and telling him that I am under your spiritual care was I able to convince him not to call the police. Mrs. Schechter has in the meantime told my wife that my children will be kicked out of their schools and that the minimarket up the street will no longer serve me. I am ashamed to show my face at the kolel.

Rabbi Rosencrantz, what am I to do?

Suicidal

*

Dear Suicidal,

The Holy One Blessed Be He expects us to turn over the words of the Torah time and time again to discover His counsel. Did not Rabban Gamliel himself bathe in the bathhouse of Aphrodite, saying “I have not come into Aphrodite’s domain, she has come into my domain?”

What I mean is, you must keep up your studies. Just take a different bus.

With expectations of Israel’s immediate redemption,

Rabbi Baruch Rosencrantz

******

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Unstocking the Characters: Thoughts on Three New Works of Short Fiction

Haim Watzman — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:21:25 +0000

Haim Watzman

I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers.

But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction on-line—I was at a bat mitzvah and the DJ’s bone-vibrating music had driven me outside—so I persisted in perusing “Recognition,” the latest short story published by the on-line journal Guernica . In fact, I had a chance to read two other stories as well: David Riordan’s “Mutts” at the Boston Review and ”The Waiting Room”, an excerpt from a novel by Leah Kaminsky at JewishFiction.net. It’s interesting to note that all three offer stock characters, ones we might feel, at the beginning of the story, that we’ve read about so often that we don’t care to read about them anymore. But the first two stories surprise us by using technique to give us a new take on old material. The third fails.

Let’s start with “Mutts.” Jack is a teenager in Dodgeville, a name that evokes small-town America (according to Wikipedia, the “greater Dodgeville area” in Iowa County, Wisconsin, has a population of 6,529). His Dad, who likes to set up a makeshift camp on the front lawn and drink beers with his friend Big Ed while listening to whatever ball game he can find on the radio, has brought home a Labrador from the dog pound that he intends to breed with Big Ed’s bloodhound to produce the perfect dog.

He has a theory about this: the best in all species spring from a mingling of common stock, not the congress of blue bloods. “Look at the great ones,” he likes to say. “They’re mutts, always mutts. Spartacus, DaVinci, Lincoln, Babe Ruth . . . That’s nothing but a pack of orphans, bastards, and slaves. Yet they’ve made their mark, goddammit.” To survive in this godforsaken world, he claims, to really compete and succeed, you need some dirt under your fingernails, a little hunger in your gut.

What prevents this story from being just another small town tale is its internality. We see the story through Jack’s eyes, even though he hardly speaks. While the narrator doesn’t offer us Jack’s explicit thoughts on this, we sense that Dad’s philosophy of rearing his son parallels his theory of breeding. The abortive attempt to romance the Lab and the bloodhound end up telling us a lot about Jack and his life without telling us anything directly. We feel Jack’s life from within. Subtly, Riordan makes what seems at first a stock character into the entire world that is an individual human being.

This is exactly what Kaminsky fails to do. As with the other two stories, my first impression almost led me to stop reading at the start. Australian-born Dina lives in Haifa. Bombs are going off—it’s the height of the Second Intifada—and she fears for the life of her young son. She’s married to David, a tough Israeli who says macho things like “People forget how many wars we’ve had. An Israeli woman would take it all in her stride. It’s all part of life here. The kid only reacts to your overreaction; you’re the one making him nervous. You want to run back to your so-called peaceful Australia, hide among the goyim?” On top of all this, Dina is the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

It’s a set of characters and situation we’ve seen countless times in fiction, but Kaminsky adds nothing new. Compare and contrast the Holocaust and its Jews to modern Israel and its Jews has a pedigree in Jewish and Israeli literature that goes back as far as World War II itself. So is the gendered presentation Kaminsky gives us. True, this is a novel excerpt and perhaps in some other place the author takes us beyond the stereotypes. But all we have is character and narrative. There is no twist of style that takes us into these hackneyed stereotypes to understand their souls.

Let me be honest. When writers write fiction about writing, I usually gag. Not always. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of my favorite novels. But few authors have what it takes to paint themselves three-dimensionally. The act of imagination nearly always demands the opposite, getting away from oneself. Too many writers seem to think that their troubles with writer’s block, or worse with getting grants, is something that those of us who live out in the real world can and should sympathize with.

So, as I said, when “Recognition” began this way, I almost stopped: “Dear Applicant: We have received your application for a Fellowship.”

It was the strike-out in the next paragraph that caught my eye. What follows that unpromising first sentence is a series of versions of the protagonists “Statement of Plans” about the novel, or rather “life box” she is seeking funding to write.

Sheehan tells her story indirectly. We see the protagonist only through her desperate efforts to compose an artist’s statement that will get her money. It’s a statement that is, time after time, dishonest, because she’s trying to write what she thinks the judges want. Yet, by the end, we know this woman. We feel her desperation, we feel her frustration as she seeks to fit her vision into the coffin that the application demands that she build around her inspiration.

In her book on Shakespeare’s sonnets, Helen Vendler says that the purpose of a poem is to recreate in the reader or listener the precise emotional state that the author seeks to convey. It’s not an exhaustive standard, but it’s an important one, one I sought to meet in my recent army story, “Winter”. Riordan and Sheehan achieve that. Kaminsky doesn’t.

Winter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:02:38 +0000

Haim Watzman

“Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander.

Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all afternoon. The cardboard targets scattered there, painted in green with the suggestive outline of a helmet-clad infantrymen aiming straight at us, are full of holes already. We have our arms crossed over our chests and our heads are down because we’re trying to stick our noses into the warm place between our arms and our torsos.

illustration by Avi Katz

An icy wind inflates the backs of our shirts, which are soaked with sweat from our last charge up the hill with full packs. The platoon’s other guys are scattered around near us. Amar and Kochin, short and solid like Middle Earth dwarves laboring at a forge, are desperately trying to light a gas stove to make coffee, even though they know the canister’s empty. Mandelbaum the radioman switches on his flashlight so he can continue to read the book he’s been perusing during breaks in the training. He reads like a goat grazes, whatever’s at hand, halachic responsa, windblown newspapers, the labels on cans in ration boxes. Diki has splayed himself on the hood of the truck that brought us here, trying to absorb some of the heat that the gray metal has stored from the fierce afternoon sun.

Tourjeman, who’s the platoon medic, accuses Yoel. “We’re all going to die of hypothermia. You said we’d be back on base before dark.”

“Only idiots go out to train in the Negev and don’t bring their coats with them,” says Yoel, who did not bring his coat, either.

“We followed your example,” Brosh says. “Like good soldiers are supposed to do.”

“That was the idiotic part,” I say. “Because it is well-known that officers never get cold, or hungry, or tired. They inject them with something at the end of officers’ course and it lasts for life.”

“If you’d get moving again you’d warm up,” says Yoel, jumping up and down like a retard.

“If I get up my frozen balls will shatter and my wife will be very frustrated when I get home,” says Brosh, who is in his third year of clinical psychology at Hebrew U.

“What do you have to say about that, Mandelbaum?” Tourjeman shouts. Mandelbaum, rocking back and forth on his haunches, smiles and calls out:

“There’s light in the dark, and a darkness at night.”

“What did he say?” Tourjeman asks me.

“He said: ‘There’s a light in the dark, and a darkness at night,’” I reply.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I am alive enough to quote,” I say, “but far too close to ice to gloss.”

“Hey guys,” Yoel calls out to the others. “Let’s get a move on. We’ve got a dry run and a live-fire exercise and then we head back.”

No response.

The dusk turns to night.

“It’s really dismal here,” I say. “Nothing’s more depressing than nightfall in the desert in December.” Yoel eyes me. I sigh. I’m the sergeant. I slowly get to my feet, wincing as an especially strong gust cools my body by another two degrees.

“Okay, guys,” I call out. “Gomrim holchim. We finish, we go.”

Amar and Kochin curse and give up the fight. They shoulder their rifles and drag their packs over.

“Mandelbaum,” I shout.

“Be right there,” the kid says amiably. “Just let me finish this page.”

“Diki!”

No response.

“Brosh,” I say despairingly. “Go get Diki.”

Diki’s real name is Khachaturian. He showed up during our last round of active duty, out at Tapuah junction in Samaria. A big, blonde, blue-eyed guy from somewhere on the steppes, finished his mandatory service just two years ago. He looked like someone who could carry a MAG machine gun as if it were a kitten and appearances did not deceive. He was very cooperative that time but very quiet. No one really got to know him. Then he showed up for this week of maneuvers as if all the air had gone out of him. It was hard to get him up in the morning, hard to get him out of the tent. When we charged up the hill he took a few steps, stopped, then a few more, until he was way behind. I tried to chat him up but he wouldn’t say a thing beyond mumbling something about a girl and a job he’d lost. The guys started calling him Diki because he was so dejected.

Brosh shakes him. Diki heaves himself up slowly, slides off the truck, slings on his rifle, and heads off in the opposite direction. Brosh ambles back.

“He said he has to take a crap.”

We watch as Diki’s flashlight recedes over toward the hill to the south.

“It’s dark, don’t go far,” Yoel shouts. The full moon is just inching up over the horizon, luminous enough for us to make out the jagged blob of the base in the distance.

I get the guys lined up and they shoulder their packs. Yoel gives safety instructions and sends me and Brosh up the hill to light the gasoline-and-burlap tin can lanterns by each target. We’re on the second row when we hear the gunshot. We hit the ground.

“Shit, that imbecile Yoel has told them to start shooting,” Brosh screams.

But there are no more shots.

“Diki?” we hear Tourjeman shout. We run down the hill.

By the time we get there the others are gone, except for Mandelbaum, who is still squatting and rocking.

“What’s going on?” I puff.

Mandelbaum looks up from his book.“There’s the whiteness of dusk, and a gloom in the light.”

Brosh kicks the book out of Mandelbaum’s hand and shines his flashlight on it.

“Poetry?” he demands. “You’re just sitting here reading poetry?”

Mandelbaum defends himself. “I’m guarding the packs.” Then: “It’s Avraham Halfi. Do you know him?”

There are shouts, calls, “Diki! Diki!”

Then: “Medic! Tourjeman!”

“Shit, let’s get over there,” Brosh says to me. We run in the direction of the shouts.

The moon has come up over the hills so we can see pretty well now. The guys are in a cluster next to a runty acacia tree.

Diki is sprawled on his back. His pants are down. Tourjeman is giving him mouth to mouth. Yoel is on one knee, holding Diki’s wrist. There’s a terrible stench.

“He shot himself?” I pant.

“No blood,” says Amar, shining his flashlight.

“No lie,” says Kochin. “He really crapped.”

“No pulse,” Yoel whispers.

“Brosh,” I say, “Run back to the truck and radio for the doctor.” Brosh takes off.

Tourjeman slowly straightens himself.

“Keep going,” Yoel commands.

“It’s no use,” says Tourjeman. “There’s nothing there.”

“What the fuck did he do? How did he kill himself?” I think it’s me yelling, but it sounds like someone else.

Kochin, who lectures in philosophy at a small college up north, makes an inference. “It’s not a suicide.”

Amar, who has six kids from three former wives, observes: “The guy is depressed. He goes off alone. We hear a gunshot. We run over and he’s dead. That’s the only possible story.”

“He’s not that bad a shot,” Kochin observes.

“I can’t figure it out,” says Yoel.

Brosh has come back with a stretcher, which he starts unfolding.

“I suggest,” Kochin, “That as he was doing his business he had a heart attack and that he was in pain so he shot into the air to call for help but that by the time we got here he’d collapsed lifeless into his own feces.”

“That’s ridiculous,” says Amar. “No one dies like that.”

Tourjeman cleans Diki’s butt with bandages and water. We load him on the stretcher and take him back to where Mandelbaum is guarding our gear. We see the headlights of the ambulance coming toward us on the road down below.

“When I first saw him, I felt guilty,” I confess to the others. “Like we should have done more for him so that he wouldn’t feel like he had to shoot himself. But maybe Kochin’s right.”

“He could have tried to shoot himself, then slipped, and then been so scared that he had a brain seizure,” Brosh suggests.

“Coulda died of frozen ass.” That’s Tourjeman.

“Shut up,” Yoel advises. “A buddy of yours has died and you’re cracking jokes?”

Then, after a pause. “Let’s pack up the stuff and go back. They’ll want to question us and I’ll need to notify his family.”

The guys don’t move. Then Tourjeman sinks to the ground by the stretcher. He’s sobbing.

“I killed him, I killed him,” he cries.

Brosh kneels down and hugs him. “That’s stupid. You did everything you could.”

Then Amar is crying, and Kochin, too. And I feel the tears running down my stubbly cheeks and before I know it I’m on my knees and Yoel is next to me.

“Explain it to me, just explain it to me!” Amar demands.

“Mandelbaum,” Kochin calls out angrily. “Mandelbaum, is there something in your book that explains this?”

Mandelbaum, who has been sitting off to the side the whole time, looks up.

“No,” he says.

“What do you mean,” shouts Tourjeman. “Look in your book and explain it to us. What’s it say about a poor lonely guy dying in his own crap?”

“It’s just a book of poetry,” Mandelbaum says. There’s a tone of desperation in his voice.

“I think it would be better if we carry on, Yoel,” says Brosh. “Psychologically, it would be better. We need to be active. Otherwise we’ll collapse.”

The ambulance turns off the road. Its headlights bounce up the path toward us.

“Poetry” demands Tourjeman. “What’s poetry got to do with it?”

Mandelbaum opens his book, shines his flashlight on it, and reads in a clear voice:
“Forever an instant like a face never seen, and a sacrosanct idol. A comedian’s grin.”

The ambulance rumbles up to us, its brakes screeching as it stops hard in front of us.

“Stretcher up!” Yoel commands. But we can’t pick it up because Tourjeman is slumped over Diki.

“Get the hell off him!” the doctor shouts.

Tourjeman wails. “It’s so fucking cold!”

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‘Unmaking of Israel’ in Newsweek’s 10 Mind-Blowing Books of 2011

Gershom Gorenberg — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:16:09 +0000

The lastest issue of Newsweek has a spread on on its writers’ choices for the top 10 books of the year. The Unmaking of Israel is on the list, picked by Peter Beinart:

The online version is the Daily Beast’s longer listing of top reads for the year.

If you’re in Israel and can’t find The Unmaking of Israel locally, you can order a copy from the best best store between the river and the sea, Munther Fahmi’s Bookshop at American Colony Hotel, telephone 02-6279731. And whether or not you buy the book, sign the online petition against the authorities’ egregiously unjust bid to deport Munther from the city of his birth.

The Unmaking of Israel is also available electronically for Kindle, Nook and iEverything.