40

IN THE BATHROOM OF his suite thirty-one stories above the roiling streets below, where thousands of American Jews are flooding in to demonstrate outside the United Nations General Assembly, Shai Oren, ambassador to the UN of all that is left of the State of Israel, shaves himself carefully with a straight razor, as he does every morning.

The razor was his father’s, a prosperous furrier in Dusseldorf who in 1939 brought it with him to what was then British-governed Palestine. The Nazis had closed his business two years before. It took every pfennig the old man could gather together to buy the family out—what little savings were left, his wife’s jewelry, the proceeds from the sale on terrible terms of their country house, the sale on even worse terms of a small Courbet that had hung over the fireplace in their home in the Oberkassel.

The razor, with its bone handle and Solingen blade, both worn down, like the old man himself is a talisman, a touchstone, a memory in ivory and steel of the time before the Oren family, then Kiefer, came to Israel as refugees, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs, heavy woolens unsuited to Israel’s climate, and a new German-Hebrew dictionary.

In 1939, Ambassador Oren’s father was thirty, spoke no Hebrew, and his only knowledge was of furs, not a likely path to success in the Middle East. Like tens of thousands of other German-Jewish refugees, who insisted on wearing jackets in the Palestinian heat, and ties, and proper shoes, not sandals, Ambassador Oren’s father was part of a lost generation, unintentional Zionists, a people cut off from their Central European roots.

Among the few who did succeed in the holy land were a small group of architects who immediately found work as Jewish willpower built up the land (and who later emigrated to the US when the building boom ended), along with those whose professions were portable: bankers, musicians, doctors, dentists, accountants. Lawyers either learned Hebrew and prospered or could not and didn’t. The rest, like Ambassador Oren’s father, whose optimistic first act in the holy land was to exchange the old family name, German for pine, to its Hebrew equivalent, were condemned to agriculture or modest commercial activities. Some sold cigarettes in the street. The old man had held out until little Shai was six before slitting his throat with the same razor his son now holds in his right hand.

He has shaved half his face, holding his chin in his left hand like an object unconnected to him, stretching the skin for a clean cut. “This is it,” he thinks. “I have reached the same state as my father, hopeless and fatigued and no longer sure of who I am.”

Ambassador Oren had always considered the old man a failure, gutless in the face of a wall of impossibilities. All his life, Ambassador Oren had never backed down in the face of calamity. As a veteran member of Knesset who had seen his party disintegrate into factions and then into separate parties, he had been compelled to make political deals that sickened him in order to keep his seat so that he would have the chance later to do for Israel what Israel had done for him. He had seen his boyhood friends, friends even from kindergarten, perish in war. He had buried his elder son at the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. He kept silent when the younger son emigrated to California to take a position at Stanford, raising his grandchildren to be what he thought of as “surfer Jews,” ignorant of Israel, ignorant of the Holocaust, ignorant of everything outside the Pacific Coast hothouse in which they were raised. They speak no Hebrew outside a few choice curse words, of which they are inordinately proud, and the odd terms for food, sex, and micturition. On the few occasions each year they saw him, now most often via Skype, they called him Grandpa. Ambassador Oren had always expected to be called the Hebrew equivalent, Saba, but their Hebrew was not even up to that. He had lived through his wife’s death by cancer, followed by a progression of good but inadequate women whose company brought him only momentary cheer and then unfathomable loneliness. Through all this, he marched on, ever fearful that he might take his father’s course.

Now he examines himself in the mirror of the large bathroom of the ambassadorial suite. It is guarded by a team of rigorously trained young security men and downstairs by a detail of New York Police Department whose numbers had tripled since what happened happened. He never thinks of it in terms other than “what happened,” or “the thing that happened,” as if it were a freak storm or a flood or an electrical fire, and not the ongoing catastrophe and something even worse, far worse.

He puts the razor to his throat, pauses for just a moment, then continues shaving in fluid, practiced strokes, careful as ever to avoid even the smallest nick, the tiniest drop of blood. Whatever else might happen, he has work to do.