| s-203
| It's possible that people at the turn of the century were saying 'land of the kike' and that Faulkner didn't borrow it from Cummings. |
| s-204
| I had been telling Shahar when we were walking in the Gai-Hinnom that I hadn't liked it when David Ben-Gurion on his visits to the United States would call upon American Jews to give up their illusions about goyish democracy and emigrate full speed to Israel. |
| s-205
| As if America's two-hundred-year record of liberal democracy signified nothing. |
| s-206
| If Israel were governed as Egypt is, or Syria, would I have come here at all? |
| s-207
| But then, to its more severe leftist critics, some of them Jews, Israel is not the 'democratic exception' it is said to be. |
| s-208
| The New Left sees it as a reactionary small country. |
| s-209
| Its detractors tell you how it abuses its Arab population and, to a lesser extent, Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Orient. |
| s-210
| It is occasionally denounced by some Israelis as corrupt, 'Levantine,' theocratic. |
| s-211
| Gossip traces the worst of the Israeli financial swindles to the most observant of Orthodox Jews. |
| s-212
| I am often told that the old Ashkenazi leaders were unimaginative, that the new Rabin group lacks stature, that Ben-Gurion was a terrible old guy but a true leader, that the younger generation is hostile to North African and Asian Jews. |
| s-213
| These North African and Oriental immigrants are blamed for bringing a baksheesh mentality to Israel; the intellectuals are blamed for letting the quality of life (a deplorable phrase) deteriorate. |
| s-214
| 'We came here to build a just society. |
| s-215
| And what happened immediately?' |
| s-216
| I speak of this to Shahar. |
| s-217
| He says to me, 'Where there is no paradox there is no life.' |
| s-218
| In Jakov Lind's interesting brief book on Israel, Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying, 'The Jews know hardly anything of a hell that might await them. |
| s-219
| Their hell is a personal dissatisfaction with themselves if they are mediocre.' |
| s-220
| Jews do, it is well known, make inordinate demands upon themselves and upon one another. |
| s-221
| Upon the world, too. |
| s-222
| I occasionally wonder whether that is why the world is so uncomfortable with them. |
| s-223
| At times I suspect that the world would be glad to see the last of its Christianity, and that it is the persistency of the Jews that prevents it. |
| s-224
| I say this remembering that Jacques Maritain once characterized European anti-Semitism of the twentieth century as an attempt to get rid of the moral burden of Christianity. |
| s-225
| And what is it that has led the Jews to place themselves, after the greatest disaster of their history, in a danger zone? |
| s-226
| 'Wouldn't it be the most horrible of ironies if the Jews had collected themselves conveniently in one country for a second Holocaust?' |
| s-227
| This is a thought that sometimes crosses Jewish minds. |
| s-228
| It is accompanied by the further reflection (partly proud, mostly bitter) that we Jews seem to have a genius for finding the heart of the crisis. |
| s-229
| The Valley of Jehosaphat, with its tombs. |
| s-230
| A narrow road, and on the slopes acres and acres of stone. |
| s-231
| Caves, graves, litter, fallen rocks, and in tiny schoolrooms Arab boys singing their lessons. |
| s-232
| Even in November the place is uncomfortably warm. |
| s-233
| The Jordanians built a road over Jewish graves. |
| s-234
| The municipality of Jerusalem is planning to build a new road and will tear the Jordanian one up. |
| s-235
| The Herodian relics are all that relics should be columns distorted, well worked over by time, Absalom's tomb with its bulbous roof and odd funnel tapering out of it. |
| s-236
| The armies of the dead in all directions, interminable. |
| s-237
| A fine thing to obsess yourself with, burial and lamentation and lying about under the walls of Jerusalem waiting for the Messiah's trumpet to sound. |
| s-238
| a few Arab hens are scratching up dust and pecking. |
| s-239
| Not a breakfast egg comes to the table that isn't death-speckled. |
| s-240
| Parties of American girls come down the slope in their dungarees, with sweaters tied by their sleeves about the waist. |
| s-241
| Above, to the left, a Muslim cemetery. |
| s-242
| Everything reflects the significant event, for the significant event is beyond question historical and political, not private. |
| s-243
| She thinks that it is sly of me to deny this. |
| s-244
| Not to submit to what societies and governments consider to be important. |
| s-245
| Stendhal's heroes, when they are in prison, choose to think above love. |
| s-246
| E E Cummings, locked up by the French government, finds his aesthetic paradise in the detention camp of Ferte Mace. |
| s-247
| The bravest of modern writers are the Mandelstams and the Sinyavskys. |
| s-248
| Before he died of cold, hunger, and exhaustion in Siberia, Osip Mandelstam recited his poems to other convicts, at their request. |
| s-249
| Andrei Sinyavsky, in his prison journal, concentrates on art. |
| s-250
| Perhaps to remain a poet in such circumstances is also to reach the heart of politics. |
| s-251
| Then human feelings, human experience, the human form and face, recover their proper place the foreground. |
| s-252
| My friend John Auerbach comes up from Caesarea to see me. |
| s-253
| A kibbutznik seaman, he has just returned from a voyage. |
| s-254
| I have known him for only a few years but he has become a dear friend. |
| s-255
| I had been warned that as I grew older the difficulty of forming new friendships would be great. |
| s-256
| On the contrary, I find it much easier now at sixty to draw near to people. |
| s-257
| John looks too much the writer slight in person, delicate to be a chief engineer. |
| s-258
| He does, however, hold an engineer's ticket and can do complicated emergency repairs in mid-ocean. |
| s-259
| Boyish, bearded (the beard is short and copper-brown), nervous, a bit high, thinner than when I saw him last, he carries a cardboard valise containing books and booze and pyjamas and a house present. |
| s-260
| He is delighted to be here, and he is suffering the one activates the other. |
| s-261
| He is grieving for his son. |
| s-262
| Adam Auerbach served in an electronic-warfare unit and was returning from a military action when the helicopter in which he was flying crashed. |
| s-263
| We embrace and then we go out of doors with a bottle to have a drink and get some sun. |
| s-264
| Even on a sunny morning the stone buildings of Jerusalem chill your hands and feet. |
| s-265
| Stepping out, I feel a bit numb, like a wasp in autumn. |
| s-266
| We sit on a stone wall over the garden and drink aquavit. |
| s-267
| He wants to talk. |
| s-268
| He loves books passionately, he wants to discuss American literature, to hear marvelous things from me. |
| s-269
| But I can see that the big current of his suffering has begun to run heavily. |
| s-270
| He has returned from a voyage, he is out in the sun shining from the hills of Moab, he is drinking aquavit with a dear friend, looking over at Mount Zion. |
| s-271
| But his son is dead. |
| s-272
| At sixteen John escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, leaving behind his parents and his sister. |
| s-273
| They were killed. |
| s-274
| Everyone was killed. |
| s-275
| John somehow obtained Polish seaman's papers, and for several years he worked in the engine rooms of German freighters. |
| s-276
| When the war ended he came to Israel via Cyprus, joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam, married, and had two children. |
| s-277
| His first wife died of cancer about ten years ago and he has married again. |
| s-278
| He says, 'I ask myself in what ways my life has not been typical. |
| s-279
| For a Jew from Eastern Europe it has been completely typical war, death of mother, death of father, death of sister, four years in disguise among the Germans, death of wife, death of son. |
| s-280
| Thirty years of hard work, planting and harvesting in the kibbutz. |
| s-281
| Nothing exceptional.' |
| s-282
| John sails infrequently now. |
| s-283
| He doesn't like the new huge tankers. |
| s-284
| Supermechanized, ultraefficient, they give the crew no time in foreign ports. |
| s-285
| The cargo on the voyage from which he has just returned was Dead Sea potash. |
| s-286
| They were to bring home Italian steel. |
| s-287
| North of Naples they had bad weather and engine trouble, but they reached their harbor and anchored near two Japanese ships. |
| s-288
| On the pilot's advice they were moved farther into port by two tugs. |
| s-289
| Within five hours John had repaired the engines, but the port officials claimed that the ship was incapacitated and demanded that the captain post a twenty-thousand-dollar bond against expenses that might be run up by his 'crippled ship.' |
| s-290
| True, the ship had had to be moved into its berth by the tugs but it had been crippled only briefly. |
| s-291
| Well, this matter was in dispute. |
| s-292
| The ship lay unloaded and demurrage fees mounted in brief, a holdup by local racketeers. |
| s-293
| The same everywhere, now. |
| s-294
| Everybody has some con going, says John, who loves American slang. |
| s-295
| The home office in Haifa was trying to get protection from the insurance company. |
| s-296
| There were long days in port with nothing to do. |
| s-297
| The town was covered in potash dust. |
| s-298
| Waiters and bartenders wiped dishes and glasses continually. |
| s-299
| Brushing at dust was the commonest gesture in town. |
| s-300
| A community of about twenty thousand people had traffic jams worthy of Rome, cars as a matter of course rushing into the reserved bus lanes, screwing everything up and honking madly. |
| s-301
| It all came to a panting standstill morning and evening without fail. |
| s-302
| To get away from the traffic snarl you could climb a nearby mountain and come down to a deserted beach, similar to the beach at Sdot Yam. |