I sputtered an apology, threw on some clothes, and raced down to the beach through the hotel’s back exit. I’d been to the restaurant before, a little Italian place with a handful of tables in view of the masts of the sailboats in the marina. Seated at the farthest table in the corner was a little man with a crown of gauzy white hair; all of the color had been sucked down into his dark, bushy eyebrows. Two deep furrows extended from just above his nostrils to either side of his lips, which turned sharply downward at the corners. Altogether the effect was of a gravity that looked to be irreversible until it reached the chin, which tilted upward in proud defiance. He was dressed in an old khaki field vest with bulging pockets, though, judging by the cane hooked neatly on the table edge next to his right leg, any kind of fieldwork had long become impossible. I hurried over to the table and spilled out more apologies.
“Sit,” Friedman said. “I won’t get up, if you don’t mind,” he added. I shook the thick-fingered hand he extended and sat down across from him, still trying to catch my breath. Fumbling with the buttons of my jean jacket, I felt him studying me with a steady gaze.
“You’re younger than I thought.”
I stopped myself from saying that he was more or less as old as I’d thought, and that I was no longer as young as I looked.
Friedman called the waitress over and insisted I order some breakfast even though I wasn’t hungry. I assumed he’d ordered for himself already, and chose something so he wouldn’t have to eat alone. But when she returned, it was with a plate of food for me and only a cup of coffee for him. Despite his shortness—it was no wonder he and Effie had sought each other out—there was something commanding about him. And yet when he lifted the spoon to wring out the tea bag, I thought I saw his hand shake. But his gray eyes, magnified behind the smoky lenses, seemed to miss nothing.
He wasted no time with small talk, and right away started in with questions. I hadn’t expected to be interviewed. But it wasn’t only his authoritative presence that made me prone to revealing myself; it was also something about the attentiveness with which he listened to my answers. It was a windy day, and the sailboats gently rocked and clinked in the marina while whitecaps rammed the breakwater. I found myself speaking freely about my many memories of Israel, of stories my father had told me of his childhood in Tel Aviv, and of my own relationship with the city, which often felt to me more like my true home than anywhere else. When he asked me what I meant, I tried to explain how I felt comfortable with people here in a way I never did in America, because everything could be touched, so little was hidden or held back, people were hungry to engage with whatever the other had to offer, however messy and intense, and this openness and immediacy made me feel more alive and less alone; made me feel, I suppose, that an authentic life was more possible. Many things that were possible in America were impossible in Israel, but in Israel it was also impossible to feel nothing, to provoke nothing, to walk down the street and not exist. But my love for Tel Aviv went further than that, I told him. The shameless dilapidation of the buildings, sweetened by the bright fuchsia bougainvillea that grew over the rust and the cracks, asserting the importance of accidental beauty over that of keeping up appearances. The way the city seemed to refuse constriction; how everywhere, always, suddenly, one ran into pockets of surreality where reason was exploded like an unclaimed suitcase at Ben Gurion.
To all this, Friedman nodded and said that he wasn’t surprised, he had always sensed an affinity with this place in my work. Only then did he at last begin to guide the conversation toward my writing, and the reason he’d asked to meet.
“I’ve read your novels. We all have,” he said, gesturing toward the other tables in the restaurant. “You’re adding to the Jewish story. For this, we’re very proud of you.”
It was unclear who the “we” in question was, since the restaurant was empty but for an old dog with a dusty coat of curly hair, lying on its side in the sunlight. Regardless, the compliment touched a nerve in me, as it has been touching a nerve in Jewish progeny for millennia. On the one hand, I was flattered. I wanted to please. From the time I was a child, I’d understood the necessity of being good and doing whatever possible to make my parents proud. I don’t know that I ever fully explored what was behind the necessity, beyond that it plugged a hole through which darkness could otherwise spill, a darkness that always threatened to pull my parents under. But even as I brought home accolades by the armful and stuffed my parents with pride, I resented the burden and the contortions it required, and knew all too well how it hemmed me in. The very first Jewish child was bound and nearly sacrificed for something more important than him, and ever since Abraham came down from Mount Moriah, a terrible father but a good Jew, the question of how to go on binding has hung in the air. If a loophole was found out of Abraham’s violence, it was this: Let the ropes be invisible, let there be no proof that they exist, except that the more the child grows, the more painful they get, until one day he looks down and sees that it’s his own hand doing the tightening. In other words, teach Jewish children to bind themselves. And for what? Not for beauty, like the Chinese, and not even for God, or the dream of a miracle. We bind and are bound because the binding binds us to those who were bound before us, and those bound before them, and those before them, in a chain of ropes and knots that goes back three thousand years, which is how long we’ve been dreaming of cutting ourselves loose, of falling out of this world, and into another where we aren’t stunted and deformed to fit the past, but left to grow wild, toward the future.
But now there was more. The need to make one’s parents proud is deforming enough; the pressure to make one’s whole people proud is something else again. Writing had begun so differently for me. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, I’d grasped it as a way to organize myself—not just to explore and discover, but to consciously grow myself. But if it had been a serious occupation, it had also been playful and full of pleasure. And yet as time passed, and bit by bit what had been only an obscure, idiosyncratic process became a profession, my relationship to it had changed. It was no longer enough for it to be the answer to an inner need; it also had to be many other things, to rise to other occasions. And as it rose, what had begun as an act of freedom had become another form of binding.
I wanted to write what I wanted to write, however much it offended, bored, challenged, or disappointed people, and disliked the part of myself that wished to please. I’d tried to rid myself of it, and on a certain level had succeeded: my previous novel had bored, challenged, and disappointed an impressive number of readers. But because the book, like the ones before it, was still undeniably Jewish, filled with Jewish characters and the echoes of two thousand years of Jewish history, I’d avoided sloughing off the pride of my landsmen. If anything, I’d managed to increase it, as part of me must have secretly hoped to do. In Sweden or Japan they didn’t care much about what I wrote, but in Israel I was stopped in the street. On my last trip, an elderly woman in a sun hat secured with a strap under her chubby chin had cornered me at the supermarket. Gripping my wrist between her meaty fingers, she’d backed me into the dairy section to tell me that reading my books was, for her, as good as spitting on Hitler’s grave (never mind that he doesn’t have one), and that she would read every page I wrote until she herself was in the ground. Pinned against the kosher yogurt display, I smiled politely and thanked her, and only after she held up my wrist in the air like a heavyweight champion’s and shouted out my name to the disinterested checkout girl did she finally leave off, though not before flashing the faded green numbers tattooed on her forearm like the badge of an undercover police.
A few months before that, my brother had gotten married at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The toasts had gone on for a long time, and when they were finally finished I’d made a beeline for the ladies’ room. I’d made it halfway across the lobby when a woman in a headscarf had pushed a stroller into my path. I tried to move around her, but she wouldn’t let me pass, and, looking me in the e
yes, she’d spoken my name. Frazzled and confused, I was also on the verge of wetting myself. But I wasn’t getting away so easily. With a flick of the wrist, she tore back the hood of the stroller to reveal a tiny red-faced infant. In a hoarse voice, she whispered the name of a girl in one of my books. The baby swiveled its tiny head, and when its myopic gray eyes passed over me, both seeing and not seeing, her hands jerked out in front of her like a monkey trying and failing to grasp the branch, and she let out an earsplitting scream. I looked up at the mother’s swollen face and saw tears welling in her own eyes. “Because of you,” she whispered.
But worst of all was the previous year, when I had come to attend the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, been taken on a special tour of Yad Vashem, and afterward was separated out from the other (non-Jewish) festival writers and escorted to the museum’s back offices. There, under a brooding oil painting of Wallenberg dark enough to look like it had been rescued from a house on fire, I was presented with photocopied papers concerning my murdered great-grandparents, along with a bag from the museum gift shop. “Go on, open it,” the director encouraged, pushing the bag into my hands. “Oh, I’ll open it later,” I suggested. “Open it now,” she commanded through a smile of gritted teeth. Three or four of the staff hovered around me, watching feverishly. I opened the bag and peered in, then closed it again, but the director grabbed it away, dug into it, and lifted out a blank notebook commemorating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Could the message have been any clearer if the endpapers had been printed with piles of dead children’s shoes? Back at home in New York, I tossed the notebook in the trash, but an hour later, overcome with guilt, plucked it out again. Sitting down at my desk, I desperately tried to write something on the first page to strip it of its power, but after sweating it out for a quarter of an hour, all I’d managed was to scribble down a list of things to do—(1) Call plumber, (2) Gyn apt, (3) Fluoride-free toothpaste. Then I’d shut the cover and buried it at the back of a drawer.
“So? You’re writing a new novel?” Friedman asked me now.
I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my chest despite the cool air.
“Trying,” I said, though I had not been trying, had in fact avoided trying these last three days, as no sooner had I checked in than I understood that beginning a novel about the Hilton while actually at the Hilton would be even more impossible than beginning a novel about the Hilton while at home in Brooklyn.
“And what is the subject?”
“I haven’t gotten that far,” I said, shifting my eyes to the hotel looming on the cliff above the beach.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
When I didn’t reply, Friedman gently folded the napkin on his lap and returned it in a neat rectangle to the table. “You must be wondering why I asked to meet you.”
“Beginning to, yes.”
“Let’s walk.”
I glanced at the cane by his arm.
“Don’t let it fool you.” Friedman unhooked the stick and deftly hoisted himself to his feet. The old dog lying prostrate on the floor jerked up her head and, when she saw that Friedman really meant to go, pushed herself back on her haunches, splaying her front paws to leverage her weight against the floor, and creakily rose from the thighs. Then she cast off her inertia with a spasmodic shake, sending thousands of motes of dust exploding into the light.
We made our way past a small shop with sun-faded surfboards in the window and up to that promenade that runs along the sea. The dog followed discreetly after us, occasionally sniffing halfheartedly at a boulder or pole.
“What kind of dog is she?”
“Shepherd,” Friedman replied.
But the dog bore no resemblance whatsoever to a shepherd, German or otherwise. If anything she was more sheep, only one lifted from pasture and put away in storage for a very long time, where its woolly and colorless coat had begun to disintegrate.
A motorcycle shot past and the driver shouted something to Friedman, who shouted back in return. Whether I’d witnessed a brief skirmish or a greeting of acquaintances, I couldn’t say.
“I don’t need to tell you that this is a difficult country,” he said, leading us toward Hayarkon Street. “There’s no end to our problems, and every day we have new ones. They multiply. We deal with them poorly or not at all. Slowly they’re burying us.”
Friedman stopped and looked back at the sea, perhaps for some sign of the missiles. More had been exploded yesterday, preceded by the deafening whine of the sirens. The first time it happened, I’d left my café table and gone down into the basement shelter. The seven or eight people gathered in the concrete room had about them the air of people waiting in line at the grocery store, except that when the boom sounded, there was a smattering of low “wows,” as if someone in the line had tried to purchase something extraordinary. The second time the siren sounded, I was with my friend, Hana, who merely stopped what she was saying and tilted her face toward the sky. Almost everyone around us had remained in place, too, either because they believed in the impenetrable dome above or because acknowledging the danger would also require acknowledging many other things that would make their lives less possible.
I scanned the sky for a sign, too, but there was none, only the white furrows of the sea whipped by the wind. When Friedman turned back, the lenses of his glasses had darkened in the sunlight, and I could no longer see his eyes.
“For twenty-five years, I taught literature at the university. But no one has time for literature anymore,” he said. “Anyway, in Israel, writers were always luftmenschen—impractical and useless, at least according to the founding ideals, which, however far we’ve strayed from them, still reverberate. In the shtetl, they knew the value of a Bashevis Singer. However hard times were, they made sure he had paper and ink. But here, he was diagnosed as part of the disease. They confiscated his pen and sent him to pull radishes up in the fields. And if he should somehow manage to write a few pages in his off hours and publish them, they made sure he would be punished by taxing him at the highest possible rate, a practice that continues to this day. The idea that we would support the production of literature through programs and grants, as they do in Europe and America, would be unthinkable here.”
“Nearly every young Israeli artist I know is looking for a way to leave,” I said. “But for writers there’s no way out of the language you’re born into. It’s an impossible situation. But then, Israel seems to specialize in those.”
“Fortunately, we don’t have a monopoly,” Friedman said, guiding me up the steps of the small park next to the Hilton. “Anyway, not all of us agree,” he said.
“None of you agree. But I don’t know which disagreement you’re referring to now.”
Friedman looked at me sharply, and I thought I saw a flash of skepticism in his face, though it was hard to say, being unable to see his eyes. I’d meant to make a joke, but instead I must have struck him as an amateur. Before I could arm myself against it, the desire to please or perhaps just not to disappoint rushed in, and I cast around for something to say that would convince him that his instincts about me had been right; that he’d had good reason to single me out and invest hope in me.
“We were speaking about writing,” Friedman said before I had a chance to redeem myself. “Some of us here never forgot its value. That the reason we continue to live on this contested scrap of land today is because of the story we began to write about ourselves in this place nearly three millennia ago. In the ninth century BC, Israel was nothing—a backwater nation, compared to the neighboring empires of Egypt or Mesopotamia. And that’s what we would have remained, forgotten with the Philistines and the Sea Peoples, except that we began to write. The earliest Hebrew writing we’ve found dates to the tenth century BC, the time of King David. Just simple inscriptions on buildings mostly. Record keeping, nothing more. But within a few hundred years something extraordinary happened. From the eighth century, suddenly there is evidence of writing all over the Northern
Kingdom of Israel—advanced, complex texts. The Jews had begun composing the stories that would be collected in the Torah. We like to think of ourselves as the inventors of monotheism, which spread like wildfire and influenced thousands of years of history. But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.”
As we crossed a pedestrian overpass, the wind picked up, sending sand flying through the air. I knew I was meant to be impressed by his speech, but I couldn’t help feeling he’d given it a hundred times before in the university lecture hall. And I was getting tired of beating around the bush. I still had no idea who Friedman really was or what he wanted of me, if he wanted anything at all.
The bridge led us into the dank, shadowy area beneath a concrete overhang, part of the complex of buildings around Atarim Square, whose threatening Brutalism made even the Hilton look inviting. What had once been a semi-covered arcade of shops had long ago been abandoned, leaving the building to erode more fully toward the hell its architect had once only toyed with; the whole place was haunted by a sense of the post-apocalyptic. The stench of urine was overwhelming, and the stained concrete blocks rose around us like a prison worse than any Piranesi ever imagined. The question I’d been unable to ask since I sat down at the restaurant rose up again, and I knew that if I didn’t say it now, before we exited into the sunlight, I would lose my courage.
“Effie told me you used to work for the Mossad.”
“Did he?” Friedman said. The tapping of his cane echoed in the cavernous space, along with the click of the dog’s nails behind us. But Friedman’s level voice gave away nothing, and I felt a flush of heat rise up my neck, part embarrassment and part annoyance.