7

TO ISRAEL, 2009

What we need is a memoir without a self.

A memoir about someone other than “me.”

Of course I can’t know what Gila and my father said or what they meant to each other almost thirty years ago, only what they came to mean to me as I imagined these scenes. While I imagined these scenes, what Gila and my father meant to each other meant more to me than I would have ever suspected. Twenty-eight years after it happened, I got a letter from Gila, who’d seen an essay I’d written about a murder in Israel, a Mafia-style murder. She wanted to tell me some things about her life in Tel Aviv, she said. It had been a long time—long enough, she hoped, that we could talk.

Benjamin Siegel

Meyer Lansky

A woman goes on a journey—Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Tel Aviv, then back to New York. I thought I was covering the murder of an Israeli poet named David Bellen, investigating a fairly straightforward crime story. But it became a story that led elsewhere, a story that led everywhere, a story I would have had no interest in if I hadn’t accidentally found myself inside it. I remember standing that first night in the narcotic gray light of the terminal at JFK, its vast glowing dome momentous and boring at the same time, like some disappointing portal to an afterlife of crowds. The women in their African robes, the men in soccer jerseys, the women from Jamaica with their bright suitcases—everyone seemed suspended in that gray light. Your name is Hannah, the El Al screeners said, a Hebrew name. They asked, more than once, “Why have you never been to Israel?”