If a Place Can Make You Cry: Dispatches From an Anxious State
By Daniel Gordis
Crown, 279 pages, $24
Storm of Terror: A Hebron Mother’s Diary
By June Leavitt
Ivan R. Dee, 186 pages, $22.50
The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle: Israeli Lives
By Igal Sarna, translated by Haim Watzman
Pantheon, 212 pages, $23
When Yitzhak Rabin delivered his inaugural address as Israel’s prime minister in 1992, he directed his most daring words at the national character, one forged by war and terror. “No longer is it true that the whole world is against us,” he declared. “We must overcome the sense of isolation that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century. We must join the international movement toward peace, reconciliation and cooperation that is spreading over the entire globe these days, lest we be the last to remain, all alone, in the station.”
Rabin’s address not only presaged the Oslo peace process and the famous handshake at the White House with his former enemy, Yasser Arafat. It also served to confirm and advance several dissident trends in Israeli letters. Beginning in the late 1980s, a group of so-called new historians, led by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Tom Segev, wrote revisionist accounts of Israel’s founding that challenged the traditional Zionist narrative of outgunned Jewish settlers and Palestinians who fled by choice. A young generation of fiction writers, among them Orly Castel-Bloom, Gadi Taub and Gafi Amir, pointedly abandoned the social realism of literary forebears like Amos Oz to depict private lives in a fragmented, postmodern style.
But in literature as in so many other aspects of Israeli life, the Al Aqsa intifada has shattered every assumption that had been premised on a peaceful, negotiated resolution to conflict with the Palestinians. There is no going back to the moral innocence of Israel before its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but neither is there any illusion about Israel’s becoming a normal state in a normal region, part of what Shimon Peres, in his more utopian moments, called a “new Middle East.”
The three books under consideration here all address, to greater or lesser degrees, the despair of a country hurled back from incipient peace to existential war. June Leavitt, in her diary “Storm of Terror,” describes the experience from the standpoint of that most reviled of Israelis: a settler in the intensely right-wing West Bank community of Kiryat Arba. Daniel Gordis, an American rabbi who moved to Israel with his family in 1998, writes as a chastened peacenik. And while Igal Sarna, an acclaimed journalist for Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, does not directly take on the Al Aqsa intifada in a collection of articles from the 1990s, he conveys in the best of them the psychic hold that past wars still exert on the nation.
For all that is worthy from Leavitt and Sarna, Gordis has produced the seminal volume of the three. In fact, if an American reader wants to grasp the torturous reality of Israel today, I would recommend Gordis’ book and Castel-Bloom’s recent novel, “Human Parts,” which, I hope, will be translated into English and published in the U.S. soon.
The exact moment when Gordis most indelibly captures the depression and paralysis in Israel involves Rabin. Gordis recounts taking a group of Jewish scholars to the memorial in Tel Aviv on the site of Rabin’s assassination. Normally, this shrine bears flowers and candles. Now it is May 2001, eight months into the Al Aqsa intifada, and three months since Ehud Barak, Rabin’s protege, was routed at the polls by Ariel Sharon. Yet, as Gordis notes, nobody says much about Rabin. “It surprised me,” Gordis writes, “but I soon realized why. The sense of tragedy that used to accompany any mention of him has dissipated. It’s not because time has passed–we Jews are very good at perpetuating memory. It’s dissipated because we used to think that with his death, the peace process also died. But now, most of us believe he was wrong.”
That is the sound of sorrow, not gloating, because Gordis arrived in Israel firmly entrenched in the peace camp. He divides “If a Place Can Make You Cry” into halves designated “Before” and “After,” and this simple device establishes the trajectory of his narrative, of his personal journey. Early in the book, one reads about Gordis going with Israeli doves to protest the demolition of a Palestinian home in East Jerusalem and trying to invite a couple from Gaza to his home for dinner. (His wife, the family hawk, refuses.) In the optimistic Jerusalem of 1999, a police officer chases a stray donkey, not a suspected suicide bomber. Even in February 2001, Gordis maintains enough residual hope to cast his vote for Barak’s re-election as prime minister. But the next month, when Israeli peace activists plead with Gordis to join them in filling the trenches the Israeli army has dug to isolate a Palestinian village, he cannot bring himself to participate. “I still care about all the things that I cared about when I went to those villages in the spring of 1999,” he says, “but I’m also sick of putting my kids to bed to the sound of gunfire.”
At a similar moment of introspection, Gordis delivers the defining passage of the book, and, one might say, of the current Israeli soul:
“We’re part of a society being rocked and shocked to its very core, coming to terms with the fact that its founding ideologies have all died, and that none have arisen to replace them. The right wing thought that by moving to the territories and building settlements, it could guarantee that that land would never be returned. . . . The left always said that the Arabs were just like us–that given a fair settlement, they too wanted to end the conflict and live in peace. . . . So no one is able anymore to believe in what they used to. But when you live in a place where you have to fight to stay, you can’t manage without a governing ideology. And that’s why we’re barely holding on in any way except militarily.”
Gordis’ Jerusalem qualifies as serene, though, next to the Hebron and Kiryat Arba of June Leavitt’s “Storm of Terror.” Unlike Gordis, she had reason to expect the worst. Leavitt embodies the person known in Israel as hardal–a slang term that fuses ultra-Orthodox (haredi) and nationalist (leumi). Born and raised in assimilationist comfort on Long Island, N.Y., she followed a religious awakening to Israel, moving with her husband into Atzmona, one of the settlements in Sinai, in about 1980. It speaks volumes about her viewpoint that she refers to leaving Atzmona, which was evacuated and razed as Israel returned Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David accords, as a form of exile. She replanted her family in Kiryat Arba, one of Israel’s earliest and most controversial settlements; it was the political base of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the exponent of Arab expulsion, and the home of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the murderer in 1994 of 29 Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in adjacent Hebron.
The surprise and the value of Leavitt’s book lie in its ability to complicate all the conventional images of settlers. Her own household ranges from a liberal daughter with body piercings to a son who founds an illegal settlement. Her husband has at various times endorsed the anti-Arab militancy of the Moledet Party and negotiated with Palestinian Authority officials to ensure that Hebron and Kiryat Arba could remain Jewish enclaves within a Palestinian state. With her tarot cards and meditation and health food, Leavitt owes as much to the 1960s counterculture as to the settler movement. And that combination is not as improbable as one might imagine: The desire to settle biblical Israel, to graze herds where the patriarchs walked, offered that elusive sense of authenticity that the ’60s rebels found so lacking in materialist America.
The problem with the fantasy, of course, was that it conveniently ignored the Palestinian claim to those lands. In an unintended way, “Storm of Terror” explains how settlers tried to resolve the contradiction. Leavitt depicts the Oslo accords as destroying the harmonious relations that had existed between Jews and Arabs in the Hebron area; she approvingly quotes local Palestinians chastising Jews for being weak when all that Arabs understand is force. In such passages, one hears echoes of Southern whites of the civil rights era, who insisted blacks were just fine with segregation till the outside agitators showed up.
Igal Sarna’s collection of articles, “The Man Who Fell Into a Puddle,” tries awkwardly to address the Al Aqsa intifada in a brief new introduction. In fact, this book was published in Israel in 2000, and it has to rise or fall on its own terms, not with a publisher’s synthetic attempt to provide what journalists call a news peg. And Sarna succeeds marvelously well on those terms. He specializes in the damaged and disappeared lives of Israelis, Jewish and Arab: an immigrant who jumps to her death off a desert cliff; a man who comes to America, only to die homeless; a teenager driven mad by nine years of Syrian imprisonment; a Jewish mother who abandons her child to create a separate life as a Palestinian. Sarna tells these stories with an elegant melancholy; he has been served brilliantly by translator Haim Watzman, who preserves every evocative detail, every tripping cadence.
The question that nags me, however, is whether Sarna’s anthology qualifies as a book in any way other than being between hard covers. There is surely value in being introduced to a sampler from a gifted writer such as Sarna, but a collection of articles is also a book on the cheap. What plot or argument unifies it? What makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts? The answer, in Sarna’s case, is nothing. That conclusion is unfortunate, because lurking in the anthology is the book he might have written. Two of the most powerful chapters describe the carnage during and soul-searching after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Egypt’s surprise attack nearly defeated Israel. Would that Sarna had devoted his entire book to the war. Such a focus would have provided the thematic cohesion and narrative drive his insightful reportage deserves. It also would have let a reader know the author more intimately, because Sarna’s experiences as the commander of a tank company that was crushed by the Egyptian advance surely inform his activism in the Israeli peace movement and his journalistic taste for broken lives.
Some of the same issues of form hover over the Leavitt and Gordis books. Leavitt has essentially published her personal diary, with all the immediacy and artlessness that implies. “If a Place Can Make You Cry” had its genesis in e-mails Gordis sent to family and friends in America (many of these were published in The New York Times Magazine last year), but he has organized and augmented them to provide a sense of organic completeness to the book. The volume ends on the eve of Passover last March, the night before a Palestinian set off his suicide bomb at a seder in Netanya. “[T]omorrow night, when we sing `Next Year in Jerusalem,’ those of us who live in Jerusalem will really mean it,” Gordis writes. “If we’re alive next year, we’ll be here.”
