September 1973
Sandra’s letter arrived yesterday, and my first coherent thought after reading it was that I had better resign from this White House job at once. I am clipping her letter to these yellow scrawls exactly as it came: four long, coarse blue sheets of messy single-spaced typing, all spotty with inked-in letters.
Kibbutz Sde Shalom
September something
Dear Dad
I don’t know where the kibbutz got hold of this decrepit Underwood with two keys missing, but it’ll have to do. Zeh mah she-yaish. Israeli byword, “That’s what there is.” Time is short. Dudu Barkai is going up north in an hour or so, to report to his unit for thirty-day reserve duty. He’s a tank captain, as well as a laundryman, kibbutz leader, and violinist. Dudu will give my letter to a man who’s flying to Washington. This is Mom’s idea, that I explain myself to you direct. It took me a couple of days to get through to her, and I don’t know how I’ll do with you in a couple of typed pages, but all right, I’ll try.
I put off my return, as you know, to hear Professor Landau lecture, and to finish some kibbutz work. When the two weeks were up I travelled by bus to the airport, all set to go home, but feeling rotten about it. When I walked into the terminal, I decided—or rather, realized—that I wasn’t going to leave. So I asked a girl at an El Al desk where I could cash in my ticket. She advised me to hang on to it and keep the return date open. When I told her that I was staying indefinitely, making aliya, she gave me the kind of smile you’ve never seen on the face of an Israeli, old Dad, and she directed me to the refund office on the mezzanine.
I have to tell you what followed, because it’s another face of Israel. The girl in that office wouldn’t give me the refund. Said it was too close to plane departure time, or something. Her English wasn’t very good, but her obstinacy was Class A. She kept saying, “Ain lee somchoot.” When I got mad and hollered at her to translate, she hollered back, “I dunt hev somchoot,” which wasn’t much help. We got into a real shouting match, I yelling at her that I wanted to make aliya, and she screeching that she didn’t have somchoot.
Then in walked this dark lean young Israeli guy and asked what the problem was. I explained, and he gave me that special smile, and said, “Come with me.” I turned in the ticket for a fistful of Israeli money. “You really want to make aliya?” he asked. “Are you crazy?” And then he inquired where I was staying, and what I was doing that night. He looked sad when I said I was returning to Sde Shalom. He said that was very far, and everybody was crazy there, but it was a nice place.
Abe Herz says somchoot means authorization. He says this country is infested with creatures in offices who “don’t have somchoot.” These are called pakidim, office-holders, and the whole bureaucracy is in fact wryly known as Pakidstan. It is the curse of Israel, he said. It has worn him down. It almost drove him back to the States. The only hope, according to Abe, is if enough Americans come here, stick it out, and change things.
From the airport I went up to Jerusalem and saw Grandma. Another spur-of-the-moment decision. I spent the night with her, and she regaled me with reminiscences of her childhood. Even after we turned out the lights she went on with her stories.
Did she ever tell you the one about a sort of Boston Massacre they had in Minsk? The Czar announced some liberalization measures, and the Jews went pouring out in the streets, rejoicing and carrying on, and troops appeared and started mowing them down. She was out there in the mob, and she fell and was trampled. Later she crawled out of the main square, which she says was all covered with bodies, and went home, where they had thought she was dead. “It was the only time in my whole life that I was ever afraid,” she said. “That was what really made me decide to go to America. I was never afraid before, and I’ve never been afraid again. I want you to remember that, about me.”
I believe her. In that respect Grandma is like the people here. They aren’t afraid. They are mighty concerned about the Egyptians and the Syrians—the intelligent ones are, others are off on a euphoric binge—but their ability to defend themselves gives them, I don’t know, straight backs. That was what first attracted me about Abe Herz. He’s American to the bone and always will be, but he’s acquired that air. The Jewish fellows I knew back home didn’t exactly have it, and if you’ll forgive me, old father, despite your war service you don’t have it.
When I told Grandma I was making aliya, she said, “Oh, I knew you would. You like that American lawyer.” Exasperating! I think I convinced Mom there’s more to it than that. Whether I can convince you I don’t know, but that’s your problem. Actually Abe has extremely mixed feelings about my staying. He is terribly worried about the military situation. But I saw how it cheered him up, when I told him I’d turned in my ticket. “You’re even dumber than I thought,” he said, “and I thought you were pretty damned dumb.” Those were the words, but the music was nice.
If despite all the problems, I do stick it out and find my place, I’ll certainly miss America. Nobody has to tell me that. In my most radical phase, I only wanted America to live up to itself. I hated the Vietnam war, and the vile creep you incomprehensibly work for in the White House. God knows you made me aware of being Jewish, soaked it into me, but the result was only obdurate resentful negativism that spilled over into all my thinking. Your friend Peter Quat expresses how a lot of my generation feel. In my radical crowd, we anti-Zionist and anti-Israel Jews were doing straight “School of Quat” politics, as Abe’s father would call it. It’s natural, I assure you, if you’re disgruntled at what seems to be the unfortunate accident of being born Jewish in America.
Now that I know a bit about Israel, it is a social and political labyrinth unlike anything else one studies in political science. So I’ve lost interest in my thesis, or in any M.A. thesis right now, though Abe urges me not to give up the idea. One thing I might do here some day is teach, he says, if I do stay on, and a Johns Hopkins M.A. would “sweeten” my résumé.
A thesis I might do eventually is an in-depth comparison of the Israeli hawk and dove views. It’s a genuine study. I’m just beginning to grasp that, starting from identical facts of geography and population, with logic on both sides very hard to fault, they come to opposite conclusions. Curiously, they agree on only one point. Israel needs another million Jews—preferably Americans, because they have the highest level of know-how—but in a pinch any warm bodies, a million more of them. Then, says the hawk Landau, the Arabs will give up the hope of erasing a country of four million, and Israel can settle the territories in peace. Then, says the dove Lev, with no fear of being overwhelmed, Israel can make peace and give back all the territories.
Surprisingly my Arab gentleman friend (whom I presume you remember, old Dad!) said that, too, in a different way. With thirteen million Jews outside, and only a small fraction inside “the Zionist entity,” he argued, what kind of “Jewish homeland” is that? And even those inside are mostly refugees, and a lot of them leave if they can go elsewhere. Zionism is a fraud, he said, a vestige of British colonialism, a mere intrusion of the west into Islam like the Crusaders. Just an episode, and it will be liquidated the same way in the end. Another Holocaust, though he didn’t use the word.
Listen, old Dad, the Holocaust bores me. Shocked? That’s God’s truth. I mean the Holocaust studies, all that academic going on and on about it. Either you do something about it, or you forget it. They’re dead and gone. I wasn’t alive then. You were. What were you doing, Dad, when the Germans were killing the Jews? Do you wish you’d done more about it? And if they could talk from the grave, those dead six million, don’t you think they would say, almost with one voice, “Go to Israel, make it work, make it safe”? I’m quoting Abe again, but that argument of his hits home to me. How does it strike you?
Dudu just looked in, quite spiffy in uniform, and asked me to hurry up. I love the man, Dad, and I love these people, and I love this little land. What else can I tell you? I have to give it a shot. It’s a very rough existence, after America. I have no idea what I’ll end up doing. Teach? Could be, but learning Hebrew that well, what a job! I’m not a kibbutznik type, that’s for sure. So far all I know is, I’m marvellously happy here. No negativism, no alienation, much pain in the ass from pakidim, otherwise sunny joy of life. Also, a hope of doing something with my life that can matter and make a difference. That’s a brand-new feeling.
Do you know why I went to see Grandma? Because when we first arrived, and I saw her standing there in the airport, I was hit by a wave of relief and admiration. You had told me she was at death’s door. That was why you were making the trip. And by God she was not only there, she was on her feet! In a muddled way I can’t spell out, that feeling about Grandma and my feeling about Israel overlap. She’s where I’m from, and so is this place.
Abe’s main argument for what he’s doing boils down to this: if world peace ever comes it’ll start here, with the peace between the Jews and the Arabs. He believes that, and I’m beginning to believe it. He says that’s really why he has hung on. Peace is what the whole human predicament is now all about, and Zion is the place where it will start happening. Geopolitics and theology both point that way. He can give you two solid and rather mystical hours about this, and I can’t give you another line. Dudu is standing over me, and I still have to ink in all the missing r’s and m’s. Then I’ll be going back out to the lool, the turkey pen, where I work. It has the godawfulest stink in the world, that lool. Mrs. Barkai has assigned me there to earn my bed and board. Not much Zionist idealism about the smell of a lool! But to repeat, zeh mah she-yaish. I’ve batted this out all backwards and shallow, left out so much! But there was no time. Thanks, old father, for the Jewish awareness you drummed into me. You gave me the best thing you had.
I love you,
Sandra
That’s Sandra’s letter. Now what?
My game here is played out. In this paralyzed administration my “cultural and educational liaison” has become a joke. To educators and artists this White House is a leprosarium. I am still in charge of the President’s box at the Kennedy Center: that is, I decide which big shot gets to use that flossy cubicle, with its own toilet and bar, to watch operas and ballets. I attend board meetings of the Smithsonian and the National Gallery and so on, but nobody ever seems quite sure who I am or what the hell I am doing there.
Otherwise, all day at the White House, except for my rare confabs with the Chief, I’ve been scribbling or typing away at April House. I was up at dawn yesterday and wrote; went to my office and wrote; came home, and found Sandra’s letter. It was like a hammer blow on the head, but I staggered on, fueled by coffee and bourbon, and wrote.
After a nap between midnight and two A.M., more coffee, more bourbon, and I resumed scrawling. Now outside my library window, the dawn is just painting soft pink brushstrokes across the clouds over the Potomac, like the soft pink skin of a Grade B showgirl’s uncovered thighs. I’ve been back in the Goldhandler frame of mind, working as though night and day were time divisions for other people, and we just kept at it until the boss collapsed on the couch with an exhausted groan to Boyd, “Wake me in fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.”
I once asked Peter why he never wrote about the Goldhandler days. “That opinionated vulgarian? What’s there to write? Who gives a fuck about a thieving radio gagman in the thirties?” Such was his verdict, delivered with a frightening face. Nobody can sneer like old Peter. Well, he may be right but I can’t help it; this Goldhandler stuff has been pouring out.
“What did you mean,” I asked Jan this morning, telephoning her at three A.M.—in Tel Aviv it was nine in the morning, and she was packing to fly home—“when you said, There’s hope’? She’s not coming back.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Hope for what, then?”
“Oh, I forget. See you tomorrow.”
From time to time Jan does the Delphic business.
***
The Vice President is going at last. He is still proclaiming that he will never step down, that he is the innocent victim of nefarious plots, clean as the Lily Maid of Astolat. This fellow, mind you, has been tub-thumping up and down the land for years about law and order, and decency, and honesty, and clean government, and patriotism, and all that time he has been a crook on the take. The blatant hypocrisy of it would boggle the mind, if further mind-boggling were possible these days. But the American mind has already been totally—and perhaps irreversibly—boggled. We may be a hundred years getting over the drop from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to this administration. We may never get over it. The nature of our land may have been changed once for all, as is a virgin lad’s after he is had by a whore.
But I wander drunkenly, while pink streaks mount in the buttermilk sky. The hue and cry after the Vice President has given the Chief a respite. If ever I am to quit, without seeming the last of the rats diving off the wreck, now is the time. The media will gnaw the bones of the Vice President for a couple of weeks. I have stayed on mainly because I did not want to desert a man in a jam. His sensitivity for such things is acute. In this lull, he will not see me as putting distance between myself and a falling President.
Why then don’t I do it?
All right. I am tired enough, and drunk enough, to write down exactly why I will not quit today or tomorrow. My reason is this: every time I try to nerve myself to resign, a voice says to me, sounding clear and crisp as Jan talking on the telephone from Tel Aviv this morning: “NOT YET.” I will let it go at that, because that is the truth of it. I looked myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror awhile ago, splashing cold water on my face, and I was thinking that I must resign today, and I heard that voice say again: “NOT YET.”
Very well then, “not yet,” but damned soon. And to hell with that lonesome bedroom upstairs, me for this library couch.
Wake me in fifteen minutes, Liebowitz.