South Jerusalem &#187; Culture and Ideas

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

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

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!”

‘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.

Intermezzo — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:32:01 +0000

10 July 1922

To the editor of Kuntres:

My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable of our nation’s musical representatives in the great cultural metropolis of Paris. However, they may be disturbed to hear that said representative is a broken man from a dying world.

The story begins with my arrival in Paris just last week, after the successful conclusion of my agronomy studies in Toulouse.

illustration by Avi Katz

Eager to sample what the great city had to offer, I immediately examined the billboards and proceeded to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (yes, the same place where, just nine years ago, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps caused a riot!) to hear a program of piano concerti. One of the pieces was Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 2 in G major, and the other a work in E major by a composer I was not acquainted with, one Moritz Moszkowski.

I will reluctantly pass over a description of a wonderful performance of the Russian composer’s great work, which I am sure is familiar to all your readers. Some will complain that it is overly long, but I maintain that its every moment contributes to a whole that is a sublime expression of the Russian national spirit.

I could not have been more astounded to find that the conductor chose to follow up Tchaikovsky’s great work with a piece so devoid of weight that it simply wafted through the air of the concert hall like chaff thrown to the winds. Yet the bourgeois audience, largely men in tails and women in elegant evening gowns, cheered the piece as if it were a newly discovered work by Beethoven. In astonishment, I turned to my neighbor, a dark-haired woman whom I took to be one of our own, and introduced myself as a pioneer from Palestine on a European visit. She was most pleased to make my acquaintance but puzzled by my question as to what she had found in this frivolous piece to like. “Il est donc très agreeable!” she exclaimed. “Et il a été composé par un Juif ici à Paris! Il est si triste qu’il est très malade maintenant.”

Composed by a Jew who is now languishing in illness, right here in Paris? I resolved that I must find this Moritz Moszkowski. My new friend told me that the man did not receive visitors, but after consulting with several of her acquaintances further down the row she was able to give me the name of a café on the Rue Blanche where, it was said, the musical “genius” was in the habit of reading the morning newspapers.

I rose early and walked from my pension to the café to make sure that I was there when the composer arrived. I was just finishing my second glass of tea when the door was slowly pushed open by a bony man in a threadbare suit. Only his thick moustache was well-groomed, carefully fashioned into a well-trimmed wing on each side. He chose a copy of Le Figaro from the rack and made his way to a corner table, where he sat down with a sigh. As befits a regular, the waiter had already drawn his coffee and presented it with a large croissant accompanied by a large pat of butter and a bowl of red jam.

He must have felt my eyes on him, for he suddenly looked at me and then unfolded the newspaper and spread it out so that it blocked my view of his face and, indeed, most of his body. I waited a few moments and then, determined to speak with the man, I gathered my courage and walked over to his table. My interlocutor at the concert hall had told me that Moszkowski was Polish-born, so it seemed apt to open in Jargon.

“Mai Ich?” I asked. When there was no response, I said “Puis-je?” Still the newspaper served as a barrier. I took the liberty of sitting down anyway.

“J’ai entendu une performance de votre concerto pour piano la nuit dernière,” I said.

“Dein Franzvezish iz shrekelech,” he said from behind the newspaper.

“I know my French is awful,” I said. “My Hebrew is much better.”

He lowered the newspaper slowly. “Ihr zent fun Eretz Yisroel?” he asked.

“I live and work the land in the Jezreel Valley and came here to follow a course in agronomy,” I explained, as our conversation continued in Yiddish.

He sipped his coffee and eyed me with suspicious interest.

“So what do you think?” he said.

“I think that our oppressed nation must leave a life of oppression and return to its homeland. We must learn to rejoice in manual labor on our ancestral soil and, as part of the international brotherhood of workers and parents, work to achieve a socialist paradise both at home and abroad.”

With a shaky hand he tore off a lump of croissant, buttered it, and chewed it slowly, looking first out the window and then at me.

“I meant,” he said quietly, “the music.”

“Frankly,” I said, “I find nothing in it of the true spirit of our people.”

He considered my words.

“I am a loyal Jew,” he said. “But you are correct to say that the spirit of our people was not on my mind as I wrote down those notes.”

“The first movement,” I said, “had a few interesting moments, but the general ambience is light and elfin, but without the sonorities and dissonances that make our modern composers’ work so authentic.”

He nodded.

“The slow second movement began with some promise. The theme was indeed melancholy and evocative and the piano’s delicate entrance was well thought-out. However, it did not really go anywhere. The third movement scherzo seemed at first to have cadences deriving from a national consciousness, but it quickly deteriorated into a rather tired luft-arpeggio exercise.”

He clasped his hands before him on the table.

“The fourth movement was, however, the most shocking,” I said. “First, you practically stole your theme from Tchaikovsky. And then with the orchestral entry you turned the whole thing into the cheapest, most vulgar dance hall jingle.”

“So you didn’t enjoy it,” he said wryly.

“Mere enjoyment is a luxury we cannot afford. Music must inspire,” I argued. “A Jew in our times should write music that expresses our nation’s aspirations, hopes, and glorious future. At a time when the Jewish people’s fate hangs in the balance, when our brothers are have been slaughtered simply for being of the people of the book, it is incumbent on every one of us to shoulder the task of leading our brethren out of ignorance and superstition and into membership in the family nations living on their own soil.”

“You advocate, then, propaganda, not art,” he said. Then, after a short pause: “I have striven all my life to be an artist.”

“This is not art,” I said. “This is casual diversion, pabulum for the merchant class.”

He stood up. His whole body shook as if he were in the throes of a convulsion. He shouted at the top of his voice:

“We have only been able to feel engrossed where nothing beyond our more or less amusement-craving Phantasy was roused through the presentment, stringing-together and entanglement of the most elegant, the smoothest and most polished figures—as in the kaleidoscope’s changeful play of form and color—but never where those figures were meant to take the shape of deep and stalwart feelings of the human heart!”

The denizens of the café all stared at him. Some of them smiled and other snickered. They must have known the strange man well.

He collapsed into his chair, as if exhausted, and then turned to tell me what I already knew.

“This was said of another great Jewish composer,” he said. “By that great advocate of our people, Richard Wagner. I will not abandon the Western musical tradition to that Satan.”

“You can’t win. Europe will kill you,” I declared. “Of course Wagner was a vile anti-Semite. But he recognized that nations have collective spirits, and he expressed that of his nation in his music. You must admit that.”

“I admit nothing.” He leaned back in his chair. His hands were shaking but he had a triumphant look on his face. “What I say to you, you impudent young boor, is that music is meant to lift us up to heaven, not press us into the soil of our homeland or anyone else’s. And I promise you that once the current and sinister fad for national self-expression and overwrought profundity passes, ten years from now, twenty years from now, fifty years from now, ninety years from now, Jews and non-Jews will be listening to and applauding my piano concerto here in Paris, and in Berlin, and London, and New York, and Moscow.”

I pitied the poor man.

“I suspect that even in Tel Aviv and that valley of yours they will as well,” he said. “We Jews are an eternal people. We can wait until the ideologues pass into the depths of history. I have lost my daughter, my wife, and my fortune, but not my conviction that mankind, the Jews included, must take pleasure in beauty, not subjugate it.”

He raised his newspaper once more, and shook it three times as if to say that our interview was over.

He is a lonely, ill, and elderly man, bitter and frustrated. I can feel compassion for him as a person, but on the national level I see his passing as symbolizing our people’s transformation from ignorance to full self-knowledge, from frivolity to hard and productive labor. The hard and ugly fact is that it will not be long—perhaps fifteen years, twenty at most, before no fashionably dressed Jewish men and women will attend evenings of diverting music in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. They will have been annihilated spiritually or, who knows, physically by then. And Europe will reject Moszkowski’s music simply because it was composed by a Jew. Wagner has set in motion a crescendo that cannot be silenced. Only in our own land will we be able to sing, simply and sadly, of what we have lost. And if we do not have music to inspire the hearts of our pioneers, our people will have nowhere to flee to. Moszkowski’s romanticism is a thing of the past. It will be no more. Music must be harnessed to the engine of history and if we enjoy it the less for that, so it must be.

A Music Lover from Eretz Yisrael

The Truth About Dave — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:51:42 +0000

I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well.

It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It was a big spread about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth that many Christians believe bears an image of the crucified Jesus. New research, the magazine reported, proved that the cloth and the image indeed dated from the first century AD.

illustration by Avi Katz

“Wow,” said Dave, putting down the magazine and digging into the chocolate ice cream I’d dished out to him in my family’s kitchen. “We all gotta become Christians now!”

“Ha,” I said. Dave had, after all, been in my Hebrew school car pool. His Mom made a mean kugel and his older sister was going out with the son of the military attaché at the Israeli embassy.

“I’m serious,” said Dave. “It says here that it’s Jesus on the shroud. That means you have to believe in him.”

I grabbed his arm because I was afraid he was about to mark an ice cream cross on his chest. “I don’t know, Dave,” I said. “How can you be so sure? And let’s say they’re right. How do you get from that to the catechism?”

“What’s a catechism?” Dave asked, wrestling his arm free and stuffing more Ben & Jerry’s into his maw.

He found out. For four months he wouldn’t let me alone. He told me how he’d been born again and how he was going to heaven and that only the grace of Jesus could save me. Look, he was my friend, so I listened patiently and tried to calm my Mom down and explain that Dave was just going through a phase.

Since Dave and I were best buddies we went off to college together. College changes guys, and after a week I noticed that Dave had stopped kneeling down by his bed each night to say his prayers. He stopped shaving and his hair started growing out.

“The assassination of Salvador Allende by the nefarious forces of world capitalist oppression,” he told me, “proves that Mao was right. The march of history moves only in one direction. The peasants and downtrodden will stride on to ultimate victory and all those who oppose them—indeed, all those who do not join them—will be consigned to the trash bin of history. It is time for you to follow me into the Workers World Party.”

“We’re in college,” I said. “The parties that interest me are ones with girls.”

But it was no good. I was his best friend and he did not want to enter the socialist paradise without me. He plied me with pamphlets and dragged me to demonstrations. It seemed like we couldn’t have a conversation in which Trotsky was not mentioned. It got annoying at times, but what are friends for if not to serve as sounding boards for what you have on your mind? I tried to be a good listener.

“Why can’t you accept the truth?” he would sometimes shout in frustration.

“Well, you know,” I said. “I tend to be skeptical. To see the other side of every question.”

Ultimately, though, Russians with beards couldn’t compete with Katrina, a slender Danish exchange student whom Dave found one afternoon on the quad, standing behind the booklet-laden table next to his. Dave tried to cure her of false consciousness, but the end result was that he switched tables, from Workers World to EST.

“It’ll change your life,” he insisted, with his face very close to mine, at the EST guest seminar he organized in our room. “It’ll transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you’ve been trying to change or put up with clear up just in the process of life itself!”

He was holding a pen and a form that asked for four hundred bucks in exchange for spending an entire day locked in a hotel conference room with a guy yelling at me.

“I kind of like my life as it is,” I demurred. “Anyway, I don’ t have the money. I guess I’ll just have to wait around for the thing I’m putting up with to clear up in the process of life itself.”

“I am so disappointed in you,” Dave said. “Four hundred dollars is nothing when you get the truth in return.”

On the day we graduated Katrina jilted Dave and ran off with a Scientology practitioner. Dave’s parents, who were desperate to get their truth-hungry son on track, offered the two of us a free trip to Israel. So we stuffed a few pairs of jeans into our backpacks and set off for a kibbutz in the desert.

“At worst, the goyim want to kill us,” said Avner, the curly-haired reserve paratrooper major who went out with us to set up sprinklers in the cotton fields. “At best, they won’t lift a finger to help us. Israel is the only hope for Jewish survival. And if we die here, at least we die with honor, after fighting with everything we’ve got.”

Back on our cots, Dave turned to me and said, “You know, what Avner said is really true.”

“Uh-oh,” I said.

“We’ve got to make aliya. It’s our responsibility to the Jewish people. And serve in the IDF, in the toughest and most dangerous unit we can get into. Are you with me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve just been here one day.”

“A single day is sufficient to learn the truth,” Dave said in his wisest tone of voice.

I really wanted to go home at the end of that summer, but Dave wouldn’t hear of it. So I went with him to the Ministry of Absorption and signed up to be Israeli. His motivation: Zionism. Mine: to get Dave to shut up.

Once he became Israeli, David realized that Zionist truth came in several flavors. He started out as a committed Labor Zionist, then a devout advocate of Greater Israel. Then he decided that the true Zionist message was one of unity and he became a radical proponent of a series of movements whose truth lay in their commitment to the premise that all other Zionist truths really meant the same thing—Dash, Shinui, the Third Way and then the Center party.

Whatever it was, he wouldn’t let me alone. Whatever party he was in was the only one that could save Israel and the Jewish people. He spared no effort to force me to agree with him. Look, he was my friend, so I listened as politely as I could

It was when he was canvassing votes at the Western Wall one Friday afternoon that he was picked up by Meir, the eternal Jew who has for the last two millennia set up Shabbat meals at the Kotel. Meir’s sharp eye immediately saw that Dave was a truth seeker, a promising receptacle for the Holy Fire.

On Sunday, Dave enrolled in Aish HaTorah.

“All God’s truth is in these books,” Dave said when I visited him at the yeshiva in the Old City. “There’s no need for any others.”

“Hey Dave, it’s not for me,” I said.

“Stop resisting,” he said. “Conquer your evil impulse. You always are so full of questions. Torah is the answer.”

“I can’t help being skeptical,” I said.

“I feel so sorry for you,” he said. “The truth lies within reach and you turn your back.”

Not that turning my back helped. Dave barraged me with invitations to classes and lectures. He signed me up for newsletters and had unctuous rabbis telephone me late at night.

After all these years, it started to get to me.

“Dave,” I said to him one Friday afternoon when he was trying to drag me to his house for a Shabbat dinner. “Could you, well, maybe give me a break?”

He dropped my arm in astonishment.

“Give you a break?” he said. “But you’re my friend! How can I leave you in the dark when I’ve seen the light?”

“Doesn’t friendship mean accepting me as I am and not trying to change me into something else?” I asked.

“How ungrateful!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you understand what I have tried to do for you? My entire life has been devoted to saving you from eternal damnation, from suffering the fate of an egg broken to make the omelet of the proletarian revolution, from the angst of postindustrial existential crisis, from assimilation and a second Holocaust, from the perils of extremism, and from a life cut off from God. And you claim that I’m insensitive? If that’s how you feel, go off and live your benighted life as you wish. Just don’t come running to me when you miss the bus to ultimate redemption!”

Dave and I weren’t friends any more. I was sad about that, but it was a relief to be able to find my own way through life without someone nagging me the whole way.

Still, when my Android rang last week, it was so great to hear Dave’s voice.

“Hey,” he said. “I owe you an apology. Now I realize that you were right all along. Truth is elusive. Texts are indeterminate. Values are relative. We can only grope our way through the universe.”

“Oh Dave,” I said. “What is it now?”

“Don’t you understand? Postmodernism is the answer.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am absolutely certain,” he said. “And you must be, too.”

Team Niot Update

Haim Watzman — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:46:26 +0000

Niot with his teacher Gabi Yeruyshalmi

Here’s a brief update on what’s going on with Team Niot, the project to help learning disabled students that my family and I are setting up in memory of my son Niot.

We are working on the project in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Education, an organization that runs Dror, the high school that Niot attended, and other schools in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel. Now that we’ve gotten past summer vacation and the high holidays, I’ll be sitting down with the people at the AAE to discuss the details, and I’ll post a more detailed update here as soon as we know more.

We originally also planned a second project to help lone soldiers (soldiers whose families are overseas) in the Golani Brigade, where Niot served. But the Brigade commander and personnel officer have informed us that other organizations are already covering this need well and we’ve thus decided to devote our full energies to the Team Niot project.

Team Niot will be based on a core of educators and professionals who themselves worked with Niot and whom I will present to you as the project gets up and running. Stay tuned.

Plane Story — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:16:09 +0000

    illustration by Avi Katz

“The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.”

I look up from 60C on my Delta flight from JFK to TLV. A pudgy young guy in a white shirt and a beard is standing over me.

“I’ve got the window,” he says apologetically.

I snap my laptop shut and squiggle out of my aisle seat.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were writing something.”

“It’s ok,” I say as he squeezes past me with a hat box and a large plastic bag full of cookies. He places them on 60B.

“I saw at the desk that no one’s sitting here,” he explains. He points at the computer. “Work?”

“Yes,” I say. “A story. I have a column in a magazine and the deadline is coming up. I’m just trying to get it started before takeoff.”

“Well, don’t let me bother you. By the way, I’m Yehuda.”

“Haim,” I say. “Thanks. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to write it.”

I settle back into my seat, pull down the tray table, and reopen the laptop. I tap out:

“‘Stand clear of the closing doors, please,’ I hear Niot intone, a broad smile on his face. The door opens and I walk down the corridor to the platform.

“Last February this space was not silent and I was not on my own. I’d arrived in the early morning from Israel with Niot and his two sisters, all of us on our way to a family reunion. He’d chain-drunk Coke the whole flight and was in high spirits.”

Suddenly the seat in front of me pivots back, nearly crushing my screen and pushing the computer so close to my body that further typing is impossible. I look up and see a black cloth kipah. A loud voice emerges from below it:

“Steward! Steward! Where’s my blanket! Look, he’s not listening to me.”

The last sentence is directed at the red-haired young man sitting across the aisle, who is talking up the young woman sitting behind him, across from me. The figure under the kipah leans into the aisle—he has a bushy beard and intense eyes.

“I’m Shmuel,” he said at high volume. “Who’re you?”

“Hi,” the young man said. “I’m Nadav.” He speaks English well, but with a notable Israeli accent. Unlike most of the other men sitting in our vicinity, his head is uncovered.

“Nadav!” Shmuel proclaims. “Do you know who Nadav was?”

“He was a king of Israel,” says Nadav.

“A king of Israel!” Shmuel exclaims. “I never heard of a Nadav who was king of Israel.” He pushes himself up from his chair and surveys the passengers in the back section of the airplane, as if to ask if any had heard of this King Nadav.

“Sure,” says Nadav. “Not for very long, though. Just a couple years.”

“I don’t know about that Nadav,” says Shmuel. “I was thinking of Nadav, the son of Aharon, the high priest. Do you know about that Nadav?”

A steward passes between them and asks Shmuel to return his seat to the upright position for takeoff and to keep his voice down as other passengers are trying to sleep.

“All right, all right,” says Shmuel. “Tell me,” he says, leaning far over until he looks Nadav directly in the eye, “what do you do?”

“I’m studying biology at Ben-Gurion University,” Nadav replies. “I just spent the summer working in a lab at MIT. We’ve developed method for tracking the degradation of proteins in bacteria.”

I power off my laptop and take out my copy of “Wuthering Heights.”

Yehuda stops chatting in Yiddish with the yeshiva student behind me and turns to me.

“Is that—waddayoucallit—fiction?” The plane speeds down the runway.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s a famous mid-nineteenth century novel about good and evil, set in northern England.”

“Once I tried reading a novel,” Yehuda relates as the plane tilts up and into the air. “My brother gave me the first Harry Potter book and said that I had to read it. I got through the first few chapters and it was pretty good. But I really prefer reading about real things. You know, history, science, that kind of stuff.”

I glance at Nadav, who is displaying far more forbearance than I would for the lecture he is receiving from his neighboring Habadnik.

“Nadav and Avihu were the sons of Aharon, the high priest of Israel,” Shmuel tells him. “They had the great privilege of serving God in the Holy Tabernacle. They could enter the holy precincts and make sacrifices. But what happened to them? The Torah tells us ‘vayakrivu lifnei Hashem esh zara,’ they offered a foreign fire before God. And then God killed them. Really. That’s exactly what happened. But why would God kill these two guys who were bringing him an offering? Why would they offer a foreign fire when they are privileged to be so close to God? You know what the Or HaHayyim says? You know the Or HaHayyim?”

“Tell me,” says Nadav.

“The Or HaHayyim was Rabbi Haim ben Atar, a Moroccan who came to Jerusalem and one of the great commentators on the Torah. He reminds us that the word for sacrifice, ‘yakrivu,’ also means ‘close.’ Nadav was so close to God that he was already worthy of the next world. So God took him and his brother. His father, Aharon, was sad, of course, but he did not say a word. He understood that his sons had reached a higher level of holiness than even he, the high priest, had.”

“Real stuff, when you read it, you know it is real,” Yehuda explains to me. “But when you read fiction it’s not real, so why should you read it?”

“I read a lot of non-fiction, too,” I tell Yehuda. “But I think there are things we can get from made-up stories that we can’t get from non-fiction.”

“Like what?”

“Well, you enter into other people, their minds, and the way they use language. Fiction gives you a chance to consider how your life might be if you lived in a different place, in a different time, or under different circumstances. Also, stories bring home to us that we live within language and that the way we speak and write affects the way we see the world. Each story we read reminds us that we can tell our own stories in hundreds of different ways.”

“Ok,” says Yehuda.

“You’ve studied Torah, so that idea should be familiar to you,” I explain. “Take any story from the Bible or Rabbis. Take, say, the story of David and his son Avshalom.”

“But that’s a true story,” says Yehduda.

“So say it’s true. Even so, the story was written using a particular structure, and with particular words. The same story could be told in lots of different ways, but it was written in this particular way. So when we study the book we need to ask, like our commentators always do, why these words were chosen and not some other words.”

Yehuda thinks this over. “Tell me more about the novel you’re reading.”

“One thing that’s intriguing about it,” I say, “is the way it is told. There is a narrator who tells us the story as he hears it from a servant woman, who in turn includes things she has heard from yet other characters. I’m pondering why the author decided to tell the story in such an indirect way. She could, after all, have simply told the story in her own voice.”

“I don’t know much about the Bible, but we learned some in school,” Nadav tells Shmuel. “And I seem to remember learning that one interpretation is that Aharon’s sons were killed because they thought none of the available women were good enough for them.”

“That’s also true,” says Shmuel. “I think that that appears in the Holy Zohar. You know the story of the Holy Zohar? How it was written by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai?”

“Still,” Yehuda insists, “I like to read about real things, like history.”

“Why are there so many books about, say, World War II?” I ask him. “Why do people keep writing books about it? If there were just one real story about the war, we’d only need one book. Historians would long ago have said all there was to say about what happened.”

“I never thought of it that way,” says Yehuda. “So it’s like Talmud. You keep studying and each time you study it you understand it in new ways.”

“Right. Take this conversation. When you recount it to someone tomorrow, think of how many ways you could tell it.”

“Wasn’t the Zohar written in the Middle Ages in Spain?” Nadav asks.

“It was revealed to us then,” says Shmuel. “But it was actually given by God to Moses and written down later by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. “There are truths you don’t learn at Ben-Gurion University. Now tell me about these bacteria of yours. What’s wrong with their proteins?”

“But I’m keeping you from writing your story,” Yehuda apologizes. “What kind of story is it?”

“A sad one,” I say. “About my son. He died five months ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” Yehuda says. “I should let you write.”

“I don’t think I can,” I reply. “Not this one, anyway.”

Over the loudspeaker a steward asks us to close all windows and turn off lights so that the passengers can sleep through the New York night and into the European morning. Shmuel tips his chair back again, Yehuda dons a neck pillow, I wrap myself in a red airplane blanket, and Nadav puts his head down on his tray table.

About four hours later, I’m the first to wake up. I get up, stretch, go to the lavatory, then take out my tallit and tefillin and recite my morning prayers. Afterward, as I wrap up my phylacteries and fold my prayer shawl, Nadav stirs, and we chat briefly about his research. I sit down with my book. Shmuel stretches and says a general good morning to everyone around him.

Nadav looks behind him. The girl is still sleeping. He leans over to Shmuel.

“Hey,” he says. “Tell me a story.”

Visitor at Cambous — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:18:39 +0000

    illustration by Avi Katz

We passed him as we trudged up an earthen path in search of a Bronze Age site north of Montpellier in southern France. He had wispy hair and the soft contours of a man grandchildren love to cling to, but the steady stride of a good walker. Giving us a sideways glance, he walked past us under the oak branches that roofed the trail. But when my daughter, Mizmor, crouched down and exclaimed, in Hebrew, about a patch of wild thyme, he turned back in his tracks.

“So you, too, are seeking your roots?”

Mizmor and I looked at each other and the other members of our party.

“We came to see the ancient village,” I said.

“Oh yes. Down there. You’re just two minutes away. But it’s closed.”

“Closed? But I thought it’s just some ruins out in the open.”

“No, no, they have an exhibit there, and a reconstructed homestead. It’s fenced off. But you can look in from outside.”

Mizmor said she was disappointed.

“You are seeking your roots? I am Sabag. Perhaps you remember me?”

“Roots? In a Bronze Age village?” I asked.

“I am Sabag,” he said again hopefully. “From Tunis. You, too, are Tunisian?”

“Not by a long shot,” I said.

His face fell.

“I came here to visit the chateau,” he said, waving a hand in the direction of the wall that ran along the path.

The wall enclosed the expansive grounds of a huge country house. After turning off the road, we had parked our car close to a gate in the wall, through which we’d seen a manicured lawn and the carefully tended shrubbery of Le Chateau de Cambous. According to my guidebook, it is a 16th-century castle built by an ultra-Catholic noble, Antoine de Cambous, during France’s wars of religion. For his fierce opposition to the Protestants, King Henry III rewarded him with the estate in the midst of the rebellious Protestant countryside of Languedoc.

The stranger hadn’t quite given up finding a long-lost friend. “I am Sabag,” he repeated. “From Aliyat Hanoar.” Aliyat Hanoar, or Youth Aliya, I knew, was a program that had taken young Jews from their home countries, prepared them for life in the Jewish state, and then brought them to Israel.

Sensing our puzzlement, he explained.

“We came from Tunisia. We were children. Families were convinced to send their children to Israel because there was no future in Tunisia. They were especially afraid for the girls, who might be abducted or raped. With the girls they usually sent an older brother to watch over her. We sailed to Marseilles and from there they took us to this chateau. Aliyat Hanoar rented it and used it as a camp to prepare us for life in Israel. There were hundreds of us here, for months at a time. Then we went to Israel. Now I came back to see it.”

“Aliyat Hanoar ran an overnight camp for hundreds of teenagers at a French chateau?” I asked in astonishment.

He shrugged. “I thought maybe you also came to seek your roots. The ancient site is just over there.” And he trudged on.

The path ended at the fence encircling the ancient village. Walking alongside, we saw the excavated floors of stone houses and, further back, a house that had been rebuilt according to the archeologists’ best guesses as to what the structures here had looked like. There were also stone benches arranged in an open triangle, where a guide or counselor could tell fidgety youngsters about what we know and don’t know about the Bronze Age people who lived here. The explanatory sign site was set just far back enough to be unreadable from outside the fence.

On my own side of the Mediterranean I could have offered my companions a bit of knowledge about 5,000 year-old civilizations, but here I was confronted with the remains of a community that had thrived even before this land was called Gaul by the Romans. Were they Celts, I wondered aloud to Mizmor? Those fierce warriors whose indefatigable spirit the Romans could not help but admiring? The ones who cut off their enemies’ heads and displayed them on poles around their villages? (A week later, at a museum, we’d see real skulls found at Celtic sites displayed on poles in glass cases. There we’d also learn that the Celtic custom was relatively restrained compared to that of the Iberians, who hung the severed heads of their adversaries from their belts.)

Mizmor had in the meantime discovered blackberry bushes growing along the fence and we feasted until we had picked all the fruit in reach.

“I wonder why he came alone,” I asked Mizmor as we headed back to our car. “Isn’t that kind of strange?”

Mizmor agreed that he seemed lonely. I thought that we might see him again and that I’d ask him to tell us more about his life at the castle. But he was nowhere in sight.

Instead of getting back on the asphalt, we decided to take a dirt road that branched off behind the chateau’s wall. Trees taller than any we are used to at home stood sentry on either side. A few minutes later we came upon a solitary homestead on the right side of the path, an old house and a converted barn separated by a garden boasting ripe tomatoes of several varieties.

Between the garden and the barn two figures squatted on the ground. My first impression was that we had come across a pair of Gallic women sifting through the roots and leaves they had gathered that morning. But when we parked our car alongside we saw they were washing pottery. We admired the tomatoes and the intricately painted and decorated ceramics. One of the women motioned us to follow her into the barn, where we discovered a large display room full of pots and dishes in exuberant geometrical patterns and styles. But there were also huge and disconcerting fired clay sculptures, a crocodile, a wolf, and a bull, looking like ancient totems housing the spirits of this patch of Mediterranean foothills – Iberians, Gauls, Greeks, Romans, Franks, Catholics, Protestants, Jews.

I later learned that many of the region’s Protestants, the descendants of those who survived the brutal swords of Antoine and his knights, had hidden Jews under the Vichy regime and saved them from being shipped to death camps. I also found, on the web, an evocation of the Zionist camp at the castle, posted a couple years ago by one Charles Bar Tov-Sherlo.

“The castle’s interior was almost completely lined with marble,” he quotes his sister as saying. And his brother spoke of the French and North African counselors who organized their activities. “Every day we’d go on a walk to see the ruins scattered around the area, and sometimes we’d encounter archaeologists carrying out excavations at all sorts of sites. At the castle itself there was a large central hall in which they’d sometimes turn on a black-and-white television. In the center of the hall was a fireplace to heat the huge room.… The atmosphere in the castle was Jewish, but outside the castle and in the surroundings the ambiance of the approaching Christian holiday prevailed.” Another of his sisters said that the young people there composed a song, “Les Amoureux dans le Chateau de Cambous.” So there were lovers there, too.

Antoine did not keep the castle in the family for long. His son died heirless and the estate passed from hand to hand. In 1983 the French government declared it a historic monument, noting in particular the great room with its fireplace and painted ceiling. It’s now owned by an English couple who have divided it into vacation apartments.

On YouTube I discovered a silent newsreel of Eleanor Roosevelt arriving at the chateau in 1955. American and Israeli flags fly at the entrance, over a plaque proclaiming the castle to be the “Herbert H. Lehman Home, Youth Aliya, American Joint Distribution Committee.” The former US first lady sits with a group of grade school boys, her arms crossed and hands holding the palms of two of them. They are listening intently. She must be telling these North African kids, soon to be Israelis, a story in French. Even as the boys press together to hear the great woman, one of them looks lonely. Perhaps it is Sabag.

Slouching Toward Sodom — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

Haim Watzman — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:34:32 +0000

And the Lord appeared to me by the sycamores of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as I sat at the door to my tent in the heat of the day, and I raised my eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by me. And when I saw them, I ran out to meet them from the tent door and bowed down to the earth to be frisked, for they were surrounded by mean-looking buzz-cut security men with little thingies in their ears.

And I said, “My Lord Bibi, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, even though I didn’t vote for you and never will. Let now a little water be fetched from the kiosk over there and wash your feet because those black Oxfords are really the wrong thing to be wearing on the Mediterranean coast on such a sweltering day.”

Lord Bibi consulted with his companions, the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting and Mr. Daddy Landbucks.

“We can stand,” Lord Bibi said. “We don’t have much time as we have other engagements to the east. We just came by to offer our sympathies and to say that we’ve been trying for years to lower housing prices but have been frustrated by the monstrous bureaucracy deeded to us by our Bolshevik predecessors.”

“But it’s not every day that I have such distinguished guests in my modest tent,” I protested. “Sit, and I will fetch a morsel of bread and then you may go on.”

“Oh, all right,” Lord Bibi sighed.

And I hastened over to the next tent and knocked on the flap.

“Go inhale the gut fumes of a flatulent capitalist cow!” came a voice from within.

“Baki,” I said, “we have important guests.”

“Tell them to go f— their bankers’ mothers.”

I was getting a little giddy from the fragrant, sweet-smelling smoke rising from the tent.

“It smells like you’ve rolled maybe three measures of fine stuff,” I said. “But snap out of it. These guys might be able to find us a place to live.”

Then I hastened over to the kiosk and procured some schwarma in pita and brought it as an offering to the men under the sycamore tree, and I stood by them, and they did eat.

And they said unto me, “Where is this Baki person?” And I said, “Behold, he is still in his tent.”

And Lord Bibi said, “I will certainly return unto both of you when the season cometh round, and lo, you and Baki will be ensconced in fine, expansive, and low-cost apartments instead of these igloo contraptions.”

Now Baki and I had been in our tents for a few weeks now and even when we’d shared a dump in Nahalat Binyamin we’d long since forgotten what it was like to have air conditioning and functioning toilets, and furthermore Baki’s brain had long since ceased to be after the manner of sane human beings. So a wild laugh emerged from his tent and he stuck his grimy, matted beard and red nose out of his tent and said:

“Just make sure it’s well-stocked with vodka and blonde Ukrainian seventeen-year olds.”

And I said unto Baki: “You are embarrassing me.”

And Baki said: “Don’t believe anything these plutocrats tell you. They French-kiss the nether parts of residents of the Akirov Towers.”

And Lord Bibi said, “Wherefore does this Baki sneer at us? Is anything too hard for a prime minister with a large coalition majority?”

And I said unto Lord Bibi, “It really is a bitch that I can’t afford to rent an apartment anywhere within reasonable commuting distance of any job I’m likely to get, especially with the price of cottage cheese what it is. I sort of managed last year but my landlord raised my rent by a third this year. It hardly seemed fair for him to make record profits when he hadn’t even had the place painted or the plumbing fixed since 1981. I couldn’t afford it, so I borrowed this tent. What can you do to help me?”

“Line up the dirty bastard landlords up against a wall and shoot them,” Baki suggested, as he and his flies came over to sit with us under the sycamore tree.

“Now, now,” the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting chided him. “Landlords are just rational human beings responding to market stimuli. Murder or, even worse, price controls will just exacerbate the problem.”

“The problem is not that people are getting rich off their property investments,” Lord Bibi agreed. “The problem is supply. It’s elementary economics. If there are more homes on the market, prices will go down.”

“Markets are theft!” Baki screamed.

“Calm down, Baki,” I said. “These men wish to help us. Let us harken unto what they have to say. So how will we get more apartments on the market?”

Daddy Landbucks sorely wept.

“It’s very easy,” Lord Bibi said. “Behold, Israel has huge resources of land that are not available for construction. Poor Daddy Landbucks here is desperate to help you out by getting his hands on that land so that he can build high-rise apartment buildings along with the other neighborhood facilities that every modern society requires, such as strip malls, gas stations, and establishments that peddle high-fat junk food.”

Baki spat on Daddy Landbucks.

“Excuse my friend,” I apologized. “He’s an anarchist.”

Baki put on the smile of a cadaver watching a good but untalented friend perform a stand-up routine.

“I’ll be nice!” he declared as he wriggled himself over to Lord Bibi and started feeling him up.

“Hark,” Lord Bibi said. “I am not accustomed to having unwashed hands in my pants pockets.”

“Just ignore him,” I suggested. “Baki is a gatherer. He considers the lily of the field. He does not labor nor does he purchase food. Rather, he lives off nature’s bounty, fruit that falls from trees and the leavings of picnickers.”

“What’s that have to do with my underwear?” Lord Bibi asked uncomfortably.

“He must have smelled a sandwich somewhere,” I said. “Did Sarah make you something for the trip?”

“Okay, okay,” Lord Bibi said as he gently removed one of Baki’s fingers from his ear—a finger Baki licked with great gusto. “I was talking about our land resources. More than 90 percent of the country’s land is owned by the Israel Lands Administration and anyone who wants to build on it has to go through agonizing bureaucratic procedures that take forever. So we don’t have enough housing and that’s why you can’t afford to pay rent.”

Daddy Landbucks wrung out his handkerchief.

“It’s that simple?”

“It’s that simple,” Lord Bibi said, patting me on the back. “Which is why I ask your support for my land reform law, which will enable Daddy Landbucks here to build pretty much whatever he wants wherever he wants. As we like to say, the money always knows where to go and if we just let it we’ll see new housing going up everywhere from the Lachish salient to the Galilean Hills to Hayarkon Park.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “After all, it still takes a long time to build a high-rise. How do I know that if you remove all legal impediments to constructing new housing that buildings will go up fast enough to help me?”

“We have a laboratory!” Lord Bibi crowed. “Just look at Judea and Samaria. It’s a place where laws don’t apply to Jews and look how fast they build houses there! Why, if we do here what we do there you could be in your new apartment tomorrow!”

Baki’s face brightened. “You mean that with this new law I could build whatever I want wherever I want? It sounds lusciously anarchistic to me.”

“Only if you have lots of money,” said the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting. “Which you don’t.”

“And we are not anarchists. We are advocates of private property. What’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine and everything else is Daddy Landbuck’s. This is the central value of a democratic, free-market society.”

“I have a question,” I said timidly.

“Ask away,” said Lord Bibi.

“All this land that Daddy Landbucks wants to build on,” I said. “Aren’t those our little country’s precious land reserves? Aren’t these our all-too-limited open spaces, parks, and green rural areas?”

“But if the money wants them to be built up, then that must be the right thing to do,” said the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting.

Daddy Landbucks was applying his handkerchief to his chin now, because he had stopped crying and was now drooling.

“And if we get rid of our planning boards, won’t Daddy Landbucks be able to build endless housing developments according to his short-term profit calculations rather than an in an environmentally responsible manner? Won’t we end up with high-rises and malls without parks and sidewalks—sort of like suburban Atlanta?”

Lord Bibi was getting impatient. “Verily, I am trying to help you, but you seem more interested in causing me problems. I have a sneaking feeling that you are being paid by the opposition.”

“Do you know Pirkei Avot Chapter 5, verse 10?” I asked?

“Of course,” Lord Bibi said. “I am a great advocate of Jewish values.”

“What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours.”

“Exactly!” said Lord Bibi. “Property means being able to do whatever you want with your money.”

“Careful, my Lord Bibi,” cautioned the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting. “We seem to have happened on a last holdout of the socialist claque that ruined this country.”

“That’s not true!” I protested. “It’s unquestionable that free markets, in general, provide the greatest choice, stability, and prosperity and are fundamental components of a free and liberal society. But a market controlled by a wealthy elite that monopolizes most of the economy’s wealth while paying far less than its share of taxes is not free. Instead of providing freedom and choice, it offers igloo tents to the young and uncapitalized.”

Lord Bibi nodded to the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting and Daddy Landbucks. “We have listened to you carefully. Trust us. We have plans. But we must be going.”

“Where to?” I asked.

“We’re expected in Sodom,” said Lord Bibi.

“We are going to celebrate the launch of an innovative Israeli product, the kind produced by a society based on the maxim that that what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine and everything else is Daddy Landbuck’s.”

“Yes,” I said. “I hear those are the values that prevail there.”

“Cool,” said Baki. “Can I come?”

“Come right along,” said Lord Bibi. “They’ve invented a new kind of bed. One size fits all.”
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