For the next fifteen years, he lived in obscurity on the kibbutz. Even as the writer Kafka gained fame in the rest of the world, Friedman said, in Israel he remained unknown. The first Hebrew translation of a Kafka novel—it was Amerika—wasn’t organized by Schocken until 1945. The Trial wasn’t translated into Hebrew until 1951, and The Castle only in 1967. Schocken had good reason to hold off so long, but even once Kafka was available in Hebrew, he wasn’t embraced in Israel. He was a Galut writer—one who embodied the placelessness of exile, and who’d swallowed the sentence of his overbearing father—and this put him at odds with the muscular culture of Zionism, which demanded a total break with the past, an overthrowing of the father. It was only in 1983, on the centennial of his birth, that a conference on Kafka was finally organized in Israel, but to this day, there is still no Hebrew edition of his complete works. Yet this neglect was what allowed Kafka to preserve his anonymity and his freedom.
Hermann Kafka, who’d nearly collapsed at Franz’s funeral, never got over the loss of his son: his health rapidly deteriorated, he became confined to a wheelchair, and in 1931 the cruel and domineering father whose tyranny and obtuse lack of understanding Kafka blamed for the majority of his sufferings died a broken man. It’s impossible to imagine that Kafka didn’t suffer in a different way when he learned that the death he’d carefully staged, and the mourning he’d childishly fantasized about, had hastened his father’s death. It must have made him question whether his father had been half the colossus he so feared. In March of 1939 Hitler’s troops entered Prague, and in 1941 Kafka’s two older sisters and their families were sent to the Lodz Ghetto. Ottla remained in Prague until August of 1942, when she was transported to Theresienstadt. Brother and sister almost certainly exchanged letters, but if anything of that correspondence still exists, it must be hidden in the trove at Spinoza Street. In October of the following year, Friedman told me, Ottla volunteered to accompany a group of children from Theresienstadt to what she believed would be safety abroad. Instead, they were taken to Auschwitz and murdered in the gas chambers. The last known letter of Ottla’s was written to her husband, who wasn’t a Jew and so had been able to stay behind in Prague with their two daughters. She told him that she was fine. Presumably she wrote something similar to her brother. Almost six more months passed until Kafka got the news of her death.
“I don’t believe he was ever the same after that,” Friedman said. He left the kibbutz soon afterward and, beginning in 1944, took up residence in various apartments in Tel Aviv, restlessly moving around the city, hounded by the idea that he would be found out and exposed. At the end of 1953 the gardener Anshel Peleg moved for the final time. He had come to love the desert during his early sojourns there, when the doctors had prescribed its dry air for his lungs. After fifteen years in the kibbutz, and the perennial drifting around the city, he had very few belongings. Max Brod, who by then lived in Tel Aviv as well, kept all of his papers. And so it was with little more than a small suitcase and a backpack full of books that he set out for the desert in the jeep that Schocken had provided.
Forests of Israel
Epstein dreamed he was walking through an ancient forest. It was cold, so cold that his breath hung frozen in the air. The black needles of the pine trees were dusted with snow, and the air was fragrant with resin. Everything was dark—the damp ground, the great high boughs of the trees bathed in muted cloud light, the bark, the cones hanging on above—all except for the white snow and the pair of red slippers on his feet. Surrounded by the tall trees, he felt a sense of being protected, safe from anything that might wish to harm him. There was no wind. The world was still, a stillness very close to joy. He walked a long time, the snow crunching under his feet, and only when he stumbled on a root across the path did he look down and recognize the slippers. Of red felt, brought by his mother’s cousin from Europe, more beautiful than functional, the soles so thin that they barely did their work of protecting his feet from the cold below. The sensation of seeing something long forgotten but intensely familiar washed over him, and in that instant it dawned on him that he hadn’t grown up after all. Somehow, unknown to everyone, most of all to himself, he’d remained a child all this time.
At last he came to a clearing, and in the center of the glade he saw a stone pedestal. Bending, he brushed away the snow and the golden letters appeared under his fingers frozen with cold:
IN MEMORY OF SOL AND EDIE
THE SUN AND THE EARTH
When he woke, a shivering Epstein discovered that he had sweated through the sheets. He stumbled through the hotel room and turned off the icy blast from the air conditioner. Pulling back the heavy drapes, he saw that it was already morning. He slid open the glass door to the terrace, and a warm breeze floated in, carrying the sound of breaking waves. He felt the sun on his skin and inhaled the salty air. In damp pajamas, he leaned over the railing, squinting at the oily light that sat heavily on the surface of the water. He thought about swimming again. It would feel good after the strange intensity of the last days. He thought again of the Russian who’d pulled him out from under the waves, who had only laughed and clapped him on the back when he’d offered remuneration, and told him that if he stayed out of the water it would be payment enough. But why shouldn’t he go back in again? On the contrary, it was exactly because he had nearly drowned that he should now march right back into the sea, before there was a chance for the fear to gather tension and solidify into an impasse. He was a strong swimmer, had always been a strong swimmer. This time he would pay more attention. And anyway, the water was calmer today, the black flags gone.
But as he reentered the cool room in search of his bathing suit, the dream of the forest came back to him, the darkness and the white snow all as vivid as before. Suddenly he gleaned something of its essence, and halted excitedly in front of the unmade bed. He sank down on the duvet, only to leap up again a moment later and begin to pace. But why hadn’t he thought of it before? Back on the terrace, he dipped his body out for the whole view. Of course—but yes—it made such beautiful sense!
He dug through the damp bed sheets in search of his phone, and had a fleeting thought of the lost one. Who knew where it was now? Somewhere in Ramallah, making calls to Damascus. The rumpled bed was empty. He checked the desk, then came back and lifted the book he’d laid facedown on the night table before going to sleep, and discovered the new phone under its pages. He dialed his assistant Sharon, but after two rings remembered that it was the middle of the night in New York. After the sixth, he gave up and called his cousin instead.
“Moti, it’s Jules.”
“Hold on——Unbelievable! This son of a bitch just cut me off. What did you say? Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“Who do I speak to about planting—”
“What?”
“Go on, speak to who about what?”
“Trees. Planting trees.”
“Trees? Like for, what do you call it—”
“Trees! The way they’ve been doing since before there was a State. My mother used to send me out with a blue-and-white collection box.” Epstein could remember how the coins would jangle in the tin box as he ran from house to house, but could not recall the name of the foundation. “Trees for the slopes of Jerusalem, I think. I don’t know, for Mount Hebron. Later on, in Hebrew school, they showed us the photograph of kids wearing the kova tembel planting the saplings we’d raised money for in America.”
“What, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael?”
“Yes, wait—the Jewish National Fund, right? Can you get me in touch with someone there?”
“You want to plant trees, Yuda?” Moti asked, using the Hebrew nickname Epstein had gone by as a child.
“Not trees,” Epstein said softly, “a whole forest.” The goose bumps rose on his arms as he remembered the stillness gathered under the soft, dark boughs.
“We have enough trees. Now it’s water that’s the problem. Last I heard they were working on turning salt water into fruit. I wouldn
’t be surprised if they tried to convince you to dig a hole in the ground instead. The Edith and Solomon Epstein Memorial Reservoir.”
Epstein pictured his parents’ hole, and the winter rain falling.
“Of course they’re still planting trees,” he snapped. “Can you get me a number or no? If not, I’ll talk to the concierge.”
But Moti wouldn’t think of letting Epstein go to someone else for a favor he himself could do that might later be repaid. “Give me half an hour,” he told Epstein, lighting a cigarette and exhaling into the phone. When he got to Petah Tikvah he would make some phone calls. He thought he might know someone who had a connection there. And Epstein didn’t doubt it: there was nothing that Moti—who had fought in three wars, married and divorced twice, and had more professions than Epstein could recall—couldn’t rustle up.
“Tell them I want to build a forest. Pine trees, as far as the eye can see.”
“Sure, a two-million-dollar forest, I’ll tell them. But, God help me, it hurts. In case you change your mind, there’s a place I can show you, all glass and Italian marble, and a Jacuzzi with a view all the way to Sicily.”
But when Moti called back later that afternoon, he told Epstein that everything had been arranged. “We have a meeting with them tomorrow,” he said. “One o’clock at Cantina.”
“Thanks. But there’s no need for you to come. It’s not your kind of thing. There’ll be no naked women.”
“That’s what worries me. What you do with your life is your own business, but you’re sixty-eight, Yuda, you’re not going to live forever, and here you are finally divorced, free, and you have your mind on rabbis and forests, oblivious to the fact that there are always naked women everywhere. I’m looking at one right now, wearing a yellow dress. And this is a form of joy, I tell you, that you will never find in a forest in memory of your parents, who, as far as I remember, had no interest in trees. Am I wrong, Yuda? But a woman, this is something your father, may his memory be a blessing, could have understood. Think about what I’m telling you. I’ll see you tomorrow at one,” he said, and before going back to the shiva call he was paying, phoned the owner of Cantina to tell him to put aside his most expensive bottle of Chardonnay.
A few days later, Epstein was standing atop a mountain, flanked by the JNF’s head of outreach, one of their forestry experts, and Moti, who had insisted on taking off from the real estate office where he worked to accompany his cousin. The JNF’s director of development was abroad, but Epstein had refused to wait, and so the head of outreach had been sent instead, a small publicist in cheap sunglasses who’d worn the wrong shoes. She’d been driving all day, and, having brought him to three different sites, was now at the far edge of her outermost reach, and had begun to lose patience. The last place she’d brought him had been devastated by forest fires and was in desperate need of rehabilitation. His gift would be enough to replant the whole area, she’d explained. One day his children would come to walk there in the cool shade of their grandparents’ forest, and his children’s children, and, God willing, their children after that.
But, surveying the landscape of charred stumps, Epstein had shaken his head. “Not it,” he’d murmured, and turned back toward the car.
What exactly was he looking for, then? the head of outreach had demanded, catching up to him.
“You heard him,” Moti had piped up from behind, throwing himself once more into the backseat next to the forestry expert, a young woman in khaki shorts, fluent in all things arboreal, who, as far as Moti was concerned, was the only thing that had made the day bearable. “He says it’s no good, so it’s no good. Yallah.”
Pushing down the strap of her sandal, the head of outreach rubbed her blistered heel in the driver’s seat while Epstein only repeated that he would know the place when he saw it. And so she swallowed back her frustration and started the engine, turning up the air conditioner to the max, and blotting the sweat from her forehead with a tissue on which her orange makeup came away. Behind her, Moti began to shake a cigarette from his crumpled pack but, feeling Galit the forestry expert’s disapproving look, shoved the pack back in his pocket, coughed, and checked his phone again to see if there was reception. Leaning forward, Galit told Epstein about the forestation work the foundation was doing in the wadis to stop erosion. But Epstein wasn’t interested in planting in the wadis, and so after a while she too fell silent and leaned back in her seat, having told Epstein nearly everything she knew about the Mediterranean region, the Irano-Turanian and Sahara-Sindi regions, about arid and semi-arid, average yearly rainfall, seedlings per dunam, soil quality, slopes and plains, the Jordan Rift, the lithology of Mount Hebron, the advantages of Mediterranean oak, pistachio, carob, tamarisk, Aleppo pine, and Christ’s thorn, names that seemed to her to rustle something in the depths of him, without ever touching on whatever it was he really wanted to know.
Twenty minutes later, they reentered a cellular zone and the head of outreach’s phone buzzed with a text from the office suggesting a last location. Moti slumped down with a groan and threw back his head, either because of the texts that had just tumbled through to his own phone or because he had already considered Epstein’s money in the clear, his work for the day done.
Slowly turning his head, he opened his eyes and looked at Galit.
“Sweetheart,” he said quietly in Hebrew, “is there anything you like aside from trees? Because if you can arrange for this forest not to happen, I can get you a week in a hotel in Eilat with your boyfriend. My friend has a place right on the Red Sea. You’ll go scuba diving, lie on the beach, and you’ll see how quickly you’ll forget all about this erosion business.” And when Galit only rolled her eyes, Moti turned his face the other way and looked out at the desert.
And so after driving back down through the Jordan Valley as far as Mount Hebron, at almost five in the afternoon they’d finally arrived here, on a slope of a mountain in the northern Negev. And here, where there was nothing except the sky and the stony earth turning red and gold in the sunset, Epstein was asked to imagine a forest.
The light filled his head. Filled it from the bottom to the brim, and threatened to overspill him. When the sensation had passed, and the light drained, the awe remained behind like a sediment, a fine sand as old as the world. Dizzy, he walked away from the others to stand alone on an outcropping above the sloping hillside, and saw endless rows of saplings unfurling in the beating sun.
There was a time, Galit had told him, when the whole southern and eastern Mediterranean, from Lebanon down through North Africa and Greece, had been covered with forests. But with each war they had been plundered for timber, turned into fleets that in the end had sunk to the bottom of the sea with their drowned. And bit by bit, as the trees were stripped away and the land plowed into fields, the earth dried out, and the fertile soil was blown away by hot winds, or washed away by the rain and rivers, and where once six hundred cities had flourished on the coast of North Africa, the population dwindled, and sand blew through and covered the ruins of empty cities with dunes. As early as the fourth century BC, Plato wrote about the devastation of the forests that had once covered all of Attica, leaving behind only the skeleton of the land. And so it had been here, too, Galit told him. Mount Lebanon was stripped for the temples at Tyre and Sidon, and then the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem; the destruction of the forests of Sherin, Carmel, and Bashan was the theme of the prophet Isaiah in 590 BC, and Josephus wrote about the widespread devastation of huge swaths of forests during the Jewish Wars some five hundred years later. Jerusalem, too, had once been surrounded by forests of pine, almond, and olive, and the whole region from the Judean Hills all the way down to the coast: all of it once covered with lush, dark forest, a word, Epstein realized, after a lifetime of uttering it in ignorance, was composed of the words for rest.
Moti came up behind him, lit a cigarette, and exhaled with feeling. Even he was muted by the boundless expanse. They stood together in silence, like old friends who had spoken
about many personal things over the course of their lives, when in reality, despite all the years they’d known each other, they had never really spoken about anything at all.
“What is it with Jews and hills?” Epstein finally said, more to himself than Moti. “They’re forever going up to experience their important things there.”
“Only to come hurrying down again.” Moti crushed the butt of his cigarette into a rock. “Unless they have to be brought down in body bags, like from Masada, or from Beaufort, like Itzy’s son. Personally, I prefer to stay to the bottom.” But Epstein’s back was to him, so Moti couldn’t see his response, if there was any.
“Yuda,” he said again after a long while, “what are we doing here? I’m asking you seriously. I’ve known you my whole life. You don’t seem like yourself these days. You’re forgetting things—the other day you couldn’t remember that Chaya is called Chaya, though you’ve been calling her for fifty years, and then you left your wallet on the table after you paid. And you’ve lost weight. Have you seen a doctor?”
But Epstein didn’t hear, or chose not to hear, or had no wish to answer. Minutes passed, in which they sat looking out at the distant glowing hills in silence, until finally Epstein spoke.
“I remember when I was seven or eight, soon after we moved to America. There was this kid, two or three years older, who started up with me after school. One day I came home with a bloody nose, and my father caught me in the hall and dragged the story out of me. He was livid. ‘You go back there with a stick right now and crack him over the head!’ My mother heard this and came rushing into the room. ‘What are you saying?’ she shouts at him. ‘This is America. That’s not how they do things here.’ ‘So how do they do things?’ my father bellows back. ‘They go to the authorities,’ my mother says. ‘The authorities?’ my father said, mocking her. ‘The authorities? And what do you think the authorities will do? Anyway, that’s snitching, and our Yuda is no snitch.’ My mother shouted that I would never be a brute like him. Then my father turns back to me, and I can see he’s thinking things over. ‘Listen,’ he finally says to me, narrowing his eyes. ‘Forget the stick. You go right up to him, and you grab him like this,’ he says, and with one huge hand he takes me by the neck and pulls my face to his, ‘and you tell him, You do that again, and I’ll murder you.’”