NOT SO LONG ago in London, Amos Oz told reporters that a reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians had to be Chekhovian, “with everybody a little disappointed,” so that it wouldn’t be Shakespearean, “with bodies littering the stage.” Would you believe, instead, Megiddo? By bus bomb and assassination Ultras and Hamas got what they wanted, which was Bibi and Likud, meaning more settlers on the West Bank, more soldiers on the Golan Heights, and more archeologists and tourists tapeworming into the traumatized bowels of Al-Aksa, while a lizardly Arafat bans books by Edward Said, and a rubber-bullet Olmert pretends to be the bandit prince Bar Kokhba, and the Pillsbury Doughboy in his Oval Office feels their pain. An earlier Amos prophesied a fire upon Judah, “and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem.”
But Oz has been in the desert, hiding out from the reviews of Fima (1993), reconstruing marriage, children, and silence. In the dusty Negev new town Tel Kedar (pop. 9,000), an hour or so away from Beersheba and the daily papers, he has dreamed his way into the heads and hearts of Theo, a sixty-year-old semiretired civil engineer, and Noa, a forty-five-year-old teacher of literature. Theo, a tidy, gloomy insomniac, is so patient mixing a salad he might as well be painting it. Noa, a scatter of pages and ideas, is in such a rush she often fails to finish sentences, so worn out she falls into bed as if axed. Although they’re not legally married, the relationship they’ve settled for is more intimate than most licensed monogamies—an almost hydraulic exchange of skeptical caution and heedless zeal; part pendulum and part crossruff. Although they are childless, Theo is as much Noa’s father as her lover, and Noa, picking up stray children on the rainy highway, listening to Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, feeling guilty about her students, seems to mother half the Middle East. And although neither spends more than a minute thinking about, say, Arabs, Zionism, Judaism, or Jerusalem, their separate peace is about to tested.
One of Noa’s dreamier students, the introverted Immanuel Orvieto, either falls or jumps to his death, perhaps because of drugs. When Immanuel’s father, Avraham, either a military advisor or an arms dealer, arrives from Nigeria for the burial, he also proposes to bankroll, as a memorial, a clinic for adolescent drug users—if Noa, Immanuel’s favorite teacher, agrees to do the scut work. Remorseful at having barely noticed Immanuel while he was alive, Noa flings herself into the project. With his connections, Theo could help. A long career of planning settlement areas, industrial zones, and leisure complexes has taught him how to deal with local and district councils, and from “the old days, when this country was nothing but sand dunes and fantasies,” he even knows the mayor. But Theo, typically, is skeptical. He also knows Noa will resent his help. And so while the teacher plunges headlong into comical committee meetings, bureaucratic farce, archeological memory digs, and self-recrimination, the engineer makes salads, plays chess, listens to BBC news radio, and stares all night at the desert.
We shall presently try to imagine what he sees there, populating absences. But Don’t Call It Night is a novel of domestic accommodation—almost a convalescence. From Tel Kedar, we can’t see Hebron or Gaza, much less the Caracas where Theo and Noa met eight years ago. It’s as if the fevers of eros and history had wasted them. In a town without a past, they are going through the motions. At least these motions—drinking iced tea or mulled wine, stopping at the Paris cinema or Entebbe bar, making rosebuds out of radishes—are reassuringly reciprocal. As they address us in alternating chapters (and Oz watches them watch each other), even the parentheses in their monologues are compensatory. Inside separate chambers, on either side of a hermetic seal, they mimic the same rotary wave. Theo longs for peace of mind. Noa lusts for significance. Eventually, he’ll take a hand in her project. Predictably, she’ll then develop doubts. (Why not an old people’s home instead?) Finally, they discover their interdependence, which is also their consolation.
Meanwhile, we have met a town: Elijah, so-called because every five minutes in the post office queue he asks, “When’s Elijah coming?” Blind Lupo, who apologizes to his own dog for kicking it. Muki, a lecherous investment consultant with sky-blue shoes. Avram, a falafel seller with a brand-new shawarma machine. Chuma, the militant vegetarian with “a particular hatred of potato crisps, mustard, and stuffed intestines.” Not to omit the newsagents, poets, bookbinders, garage mechanics, bank clerks, pharmacists, notaries, a Hungarian cantor, a Russian-emigré string quartet, the former weight-lifting champion of Lodz, and a piano tuner who’s writing a book on The Essence of Judaism. As always in Oz, Israel teems with spinning types who kick against the cartoon bubbles limned around them. As always, there’s a sort of moral blackmail to which the victims too eagerly submit. As always, there are missing mothers—Oz’s own committed suicide when he was twelve—and thus a wounded emblematic child like Boaz in Black Box, with “the look of Jesus in a Scandinavian icon”; like Dimi in Fima, a “slightly cross-eyed albino child-philosopher”; like Immanuel in Night, seeming “to live inside a bubble of winter even in summer.” And also as always there is his oddly angry lyricism. His physical world has an astonishing thickness of texture and scent. His feel for olives, lizards, candles, eucalyptus, marble, and moonlight is almost wanton. Yet this appreciation of surprise beauty is so masculine that it seems to resent its own esthetic shock, to want somehow to bite the face of grace.
It is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provision for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained…. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don’t see how they can bear it.
—Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back
What’s missing—one of those absences on purpose—is politics. Or what Oz prefers to call “ethics.” Black Box (1989) was consumed by West Bank settlements and Orthodox theocracy. Gideon, “tasting schadenfreude like expensive whisky, in small sips,” has even written a book, The Desperate Violence: A Study in Comparative Fanaticism. In his opinion, we annihilate ourselves and will soon wipe out the species “precisely because of our ‘higher longings,’ because of the theological disease. Because of the burning need to be ‘saved.’ Because of an obsession with redemption. What is the obsession with redemption? Only a mask for a complete absence of the basic talent for life.” Fima couldn’t go to the movies without seeing Palestinians on a private sonar screen: “We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.” Fima, the poet who works in an abortion clinic, “the Eugene Onegin of Kiryat Yovel,” who would give away the whole of South America’s magical realism, “with all its fireworks and cotton candy,” for a single page of Chekhov—this tortured Fima explains:
We must not become like the drunken Ukrainian carter who beat his horse to death when the beast stopped pulling his cart. Are the Arabs in the Territories our workhorses? What did you imagine, that they would go on hewing our wood and drawing our water forever and ever, amen?… Every Zambia and Gambia is an independent state nowadays, so why should the Arabs in the Territories continue come Hell or high water quietly scrubbing our shit-houses, sweeping our streets, washing dishes in our restaurants, wiping arses in our geriatric wards, and then saying thank you? How would you feel if the meanest Ukrainian anti-Semite planned a future like that for the Jews?
And that’s just the recent fiction. For Oz in nonfiction like In the Land of Israel (1983), nationalism is mankind’s curse: “Shall we aspire to rebuild the kingdom of David and Solomon? Shall we construct a Marxist paradise here? A Western society, a social-democratic welfare state? Or shall we create a model of the petite bourgeoisie with a little Yiddishkeit?” He’d be happier in a world “composed of dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythm, all cross-pollinating….” Israel after the Six-Day War was “crude, smug, and arrogant, power drunk, bursting with messianic rhetoric, ethnocentric, ‘redemptionist,’ apocalyptic—quite simply, inhuman. And un-Jewish. The Arab human beings under our dominion might never have been.” And then this remarkable apostrophe:
I study the elusive cunning of the Biblical charm of this landscape: and isn’t all of this charm Arab, through and through? The lodge and the cucumber garden, the watchman’s hut and the cisterns, the shade of the fig tree and the pale silver of the olive, the grape arbors and the flocks of sheep—these picturesque slopes that bewitched from afar the early Zionists like Yehuda Halevi and Abraham Mapu; these primeval glades that reduced the poet Bialik to tears and fired Tchernichowsky’s imagination; the hypnotic shepherds who, from the very beginning of the return to Zion, captured the heart of Moshe Smilansky, who even called himself Hawaja Musa; the tinkle of the goats’ bells which entwined, like magic webs, the hearts of the early Zionist settlers, who came from Russia thirsty for Arab garb and to speed on their horses toward this Arab Biblicality… the tales told around the campfires of the Palmach, the enchanted groves of Amos Kenan and the longed-for cisterns of Naomi Shemer, yearning for the bare-faced stony mountain, for merger into the bosom of these gentle, sleepy scapes so very far removed from shtetl alleyways, so very far from Yiddish and the ghetto, right into the heart of this Oriental rock-strewn tenderness.
He is if anything unhappier in the collected broadsides in The Slopes of Lebanon (1987). The 1982 invasion of Lebanon—like “a timely investment in the stock market,” like The Empire Strikes Back—enraged him. Not a pacifist, nor an admirer of the PLO, and equally disdainful of a secular left that “offers peace to the Israeli public as one part of a package that includes… the rights of nude sunbathers,” he still favors a separate Palestinian state: “If only good and righteous people, with a ‘clean record,’ deserved self-determination, we would have to suspend, starting at midnight tonight, the sovereignty of three-quarters of the nations of the world.” King Solomon, after all, gave away twenty cities to Hiram of Tyre, yet Solomon was not struck down, nor condemned by the prophets. Besides, “Hebron and Nablus will not be ours whether or not the prophets once walked there, whether or not the stones our ancestors liked to throw at the prophets still lie scattered there.” So what if Palestinians deceive us? “It will always be easier… to break the backbone of a tiny Palestinian state than to break the backbone of an eight-year-old Palestinian stone thrower.”
At desperate issue on almost every page of The Slopes of Lebanon is Israel’s soul and the Zionist ideal of a just society: “What have we come here to be?” If the logic of statecraft is that ends justify means, and the rule of thumb is that “it all depends,” then “What began with the biblical words ‘Zion shall be redeemed by the law’ has come to ‘Nobody’s better than we are, so they should all shut up.’” He quotes Isaiah (“Your hands are covered with blood”) and Jeremiah (“For they had eyes but they did not see”). “Veteran defeatists, both of them,” Oz says: “Troublers of Israel. Self-hating Jews.”
I suggest that some of this is what a sleepless Theo sees, staring at the desert. Never mind that “on the other side there is a forbidden valley containing secret installations.” He’s turned his back on more than Tel Kedar. He was asked himself to help plan Tel Kedar, back in the late sixties. By the light of a pressure lamp at the foot of a cliff, he sketched “rough preliminary ideas for a master plan that was intended to get away from the usual Israeli approach and create a compact desert town, sheltering itself in its own shade, inspired by photographs of Saharan townships in North Africa.” For which he was ridiculed by his boss: “Same old Theo, carried away by his fantasies, it’s brilliant, it’s original, creative, the trouble is, as usual you’ve left one factor out of account: when all’s said and done, Israelis want to live in the Israeli style. Desert or no desert. Just you tell me, Theo, who do you imagine suddenly wants to be transported back to North Africa? The Poles? The Romanians? Or the Moroccans? The Moroccans least of all. And just remember this, chum: This isn’t going to be an artist’s colony.”
Theo’s days as a senior planner in the Development Agency were obviously numbered, in spite of the British police stations and radar installations he’d once upon a time blown up in the Zionist cause. This great-grandchild of a Ukrainian gravedigger, with a couple of Herod’s master-builder genes, would leave Israel as “a special advisor of regional planning”—to “develop” Veracruz, Sonora, and Tabasco; to redo Nicaragua after an earthquake; to wonder about atrophy, torpor, barrenness, and exile in Peru: “When he came across cruelty, corruption, barbarity, or grinding poverty he passed no judgment… he had not come here to combat injustice but, as far as possible, to attain professional perfection and thereby perhaps, however minutely, to reduce disasters. Honor, the labyrinth, and death were ever-present here, and life itself sometimes flared up like a festive firework display or a salvo of shots in the air: ruthless, spicy, noisy, and cheap.” But not for Theo until, in Venezuela, he met Noa—that Noa who comes home at night in one of two ways, either “setting up a row of electric lights in her path as though to illuminate the runway of her landing” or “as if she had flown into this room by mistake and now she’s in such a panic she can’t find the window. Which is open as it always has been.”
And the Tel Kedar they made without Theo? It’s hard to believe Elijah would come to such a place: Fifteen identical streets off Herzl Boulevard, with caged poinciana saplings wrapped in sackcloth against sandstorms; “a few eucalyptus trees and tamarisks, blighted by droughts and salty wind, hunched towards the east like fugitives turned to stone in midflight”; green streetlamps and matching municipal benches; a solar panel on every roof, “as if the town were trying to appease the sun’s blaze in its own language”; balconies shut up with cement, plaster blasted desert-gray; a chic northwest residential district “with projections, surrounds and arches, rounded windows and even weathercocks on gables, sighing for forests and meadows”; a commercial southeast of corrugated-iron huts, cement-block sheds, workshops, and junkyards; a billiard parlor for lottery tickets; a library, where only Noa seems to go; and a monument in memory of the fallen, with a cypress at each corner of the concrete column on which metallic letters read, THE BEAUTY OF ISRAEL IS SLAIN UPON THE HIGH PLAC S: “The penultimate letter is missing.”
No wonder Theo’s eyes are on the desert. As development novels go, Don’t Call It Night is up there with Norman Rush’s Mating, and maybe Voltaire’s Candide. And what Theo is probably looking for across the scrub and desolation, on slate slopes in the blue distance and dark scree, besides Arabs and meaning, is the Zionist dramaturge himself, a vanishing act like Shane.
I experienced strange sensations, I saw and heard my legend being born. The people are sentimental; the masses do not see clearly. A light fog is beginning to rise around me and it may perhaps become the cloud in which I shall walk.
—Theodor Herzl
Before there was a Herzl Boulevard in Tel Kedar or anywhere else in Israel, there had to have been the godfather of Zionism—Theodor, the crackerjack journalist, mediocre playwright, “inveterate” misogynist, and manic-depressive brought so vividly to life in Ernst Pawel’s biography The Labyrinth of Exile. Worshipped by his mother, doted on by his father, innocent of Marx and Freud, “amazingly untouched by winds of change that revolutionized philosophy, literature, and the state in his own generation,” he loved Wagner, feared women, and foresaw the cattle cars and death camps. We can’t understand him, says Pawel, without also understanding Prague, where he was born into ambivalence, and Vienna, with its “apocalyptic temper,” and Paris, too, where as a reporter he discovered anti-Semitism (the Dreyfus case) and anarchism (“the voluptuous pleasure of a great idea, and of martyrdom”). Pawel rereads his lame utopian novel, Altneuland; finds in his diaries those “idea splinters” that created the “vatic visionary”; sorts out the original plan (a mass conversion to Christianity!) from subsequent revisions proposing to settle the Diaspora anywhere from Argentina to Uganda; follows the argonaut to Paris, London, Rome, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople as he petitions popes, emperors, sultans, czars, and Rothschilds; and sits in on the assemblies where the playwright hit on an “alchemy of mass manipulation” that “successfully transmuted fantasy into power.” Worn out at age forty-four, Herzl essentially killed himself for the cause. He was nonetheless, says Pawel, “the first Jewish leader in modern times.” And what’s more: “Thus far, the only one. Those who came after him were politicians. Still, Jewish politicians in a country of their own.”
From Michael Berkowitz’s enriching exploration of the rhetoric and imagery of Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War, we get a broader picture of what Herzl and his brilliant and difficult fellow disputants wrought at Basel in spite of Martin Buber. Against all odds and despite a language question (Yiddish versus Hebrew), a built-in Talmudic hostility to pluralism, the deepest Pale of Settlement suspicions, and competing claims from revolutionary socialism, they composed an entire mythopoeic Gesamtkunstwerk. They composed this total theater out of European nationalism and German drinking songs; out of the idea of the Promised Land and a cult of male friendship in student dueling fraternities; out of paintings of the Wailing Wall and photographs of Palestinian flora; from selling books, trees, menorahs, kiddush cups, spice boxes, and Holy Arks—not to mention merchandising an iconography of Herzl himself, whose manly visage showed up on postage stamps, candy wrappers, canned milk, and packs of cigarettes. As if to schoolmarm this new macho image of an “orientalized” warrior Jew, on horseback with a rifle and Arab headdress, they brought back the matriarchs: Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, Leah. It was agitation and it was propaganda, but it was also as thrilling as Impressionism. “First,” said Herzl to Nahum Sokolow, “there has to be a home and peace for the Jews, then let them choose the culture they want. They will, of course, bring along with them many cultures, like bees who suck honey from different flowers and bring it all with them to one beehive; precisely this mixture will be far more interesting than one monotonous culture.”
Just how interesting not even a playwright could have imagined, especially a playwright who somehow managed to forget there were Arabs already residing in this dreamscape, for whom Rachel’s Tomb and David’s Tower were as meaningless as Herder’s moonshine on folksy essence or a postcard from Vienna with the angel Zion wearing a Star of David as her halo, pointing from a shtetl in Eastern Europe to a harvest in sanctified Palestine. Even so, before peace and before home, the Zionists did create a culture with heroes, songs, symbols, and a flag with blue stripes borrowed boldly from the talit. Berkowitz is flabbergasted: “A strange nationalism of the twentieth century—in the face of more aggressive and exclusive ideologies—which proclaims that the community producing the finest books, the most sublime poetry, a comprehensive research university, and an advanced agricultural-experiment station would ‘win’ a country.”
Oz recalls what it felt like in his childhood: summer evenings and neighborhood scholars in his parents’ garden; Revisionists from Odessa, socialist Zionists from Bobruisk, scholars of mysticism and of deserts, interpreters of Maimonides, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Lassalle, and Jabotinsky; “atheists, vegetarians, and other assorted world reformers, each with his own personal plan for the salvation of the People and the Reform of Humanity in one fell swoop. Everyone knew exactly what had to be done—and at once…. When the Hebrew State was born it must be such-and-such, and if not, there would be no point to it.” But: “All this is finished here.”
Some of this fizz just didn’t travel, as those of us who grew up pretending to be Jewish cowboys slaughtering Arab Nazis have reason to know from a visit to Ben Yehuda’s pedestrian mall in Jerusalem after our rented car has been stoned on the Sabbath. Cypress and honeysuckle, vineyards and olive groves, vipers and goats, chalk and salt—“Not ‘the land of the hart,’” Oz has pleaded, “and not ‘the divine city reunited,’ as the clichés would have it, but simply the State of Israel. Not the ‘Maccabeans reborn’ that Herzl talked of, but a warm-hearted, hot-tempered Mediterranean people that is gradually learning, through great suffering and in a tumult of sound and fury, to find release both from the bloodcurdling nightmares of the past and from delusions of grandeur, both ancient and modern.”
So many wars, and before and after each, the scavenging of the bonepickers.
This generation has created a new religion, the religion of history, a belief in the history of its people as a religious faith…. It would not be an exaggeration to say that they fought with verses from the Bible. Through archaeology these people discover their “religious” values; in archaeology they find their religion, they learn that their forefathers were in this country 3,000 years ago. This is a value. By this they fought and by this they live.
—Yigael Yadin
This is what those Temple Mount tunnels are all about, besides a provocation and a real-estate expulsion scam. From Neil Asher Silberman’s A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael Yadin, we gather that for most of this century archeology in Israel has been a Zionist dig, an identity-politics daydream of a glorious antiquity segregated into ethnic cultures with unchanging racial characteristics. Think of the Dead Sea Scrolls as a ticket of admission and a warrant. Not for nothing did Yadin’s father spend his student days at the University of Berlin. Translating “The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness,” he might as well have been reading a right-wing newspaper. And his soldier son improved on him; a veteran of so many battles, including Irgun versus Palmach, a Lawrence of anti-Arabia, he must have imagined himself a Bronze Age warlord, especially at Hazor, in whose rubble he deciphered a rousting of inconvenient Canaanites. Yadin loved it; what afflatus: to stand at Megiddo, where Solomon built a temple on the ruins of Tuthmose III. To burrow into the caves of Nahal Hever and find a basket of skulls left over from the bandit prince himself, Bar Kokhba. To glory in Masada—never again. From fallen columns, charred beams, headless statues, smashed pottery, shattered frescoes, ceramic fragments, bronze coins, goatskin bags, incense shovels, Roman tunics, and some Aramaic scribbled on papyrus, to intuit Eretz Israel—the Covenant as Deed in Perpetuity, handed down by archers, cavalry, charioteers, catapult stones, and a battering ram. Never mind dissenting archeologists like Yohanan Aharoni, who counter-imagined a “gradual migration” of the Israelites into Canaan and a “social process” of assimilation instead of a turf war of gloryhounds with shofars for shillelaghs. Joshua was Yadin’s kind of guy, a Little Big Horn in reverse.
Amazing that the ultra-Orthodox, for whom Mahmoud from East Jerusalem collects garbage and fixes sewers, should so much hate the bonepickers—“Death to the Hitlerite archeologists!”—who shovel the same sand-dune fantasies. On the other hand, Oz has also talked to the settlers, who sound like a column by A. M. Rosenthal:
As soon as we finish this phase, the violence phase, step right up, it’ll be your turn to play your role. You can make us a civilization with humanistic values here. Do the brotherhood-in-man bit—Light unto the Nations—whatever you want—the morality of the Prophets…. Be my guest. That’s the way it is, old buddy: first Joshua and Jephthah the Gileadite break ground, wipe out the memory of Amalek, and then maybe afterward it’s time for the Prophet Isaiah and the wolf and the lamb and the leopard and the kid and that whole terrific zoo. But only provided that, even at the end of days, we’ll be the wolf and all the gentiles around here will be the lamb. Just to be on the safe side.
Is it any wonder that Theo can’t sleep? That he needs Noa, who insists on knowing, “And where are we meant to be shining, and by whom is our shining required?” So what if their love isn’t epic theater or grand opera or a Song of Solomon? That the best they can hope for is more modest than messianic—an autumn sonata, some rock-strewn tenderness, and maybe “the basic talent for life”? What have we come here to be? Oz himself wants to be Chekhov. He can’t be, of course. He is magnanimous enough, but not exactly gentle. Still, trying to be Chekhov in a century written by Dostoyevsky is a kind of heroism. L’chayim!