Jabotinsky: (pouring for him) Careful. This is very strong vodka sent over by a priest in the Urals. Only this can stoke the fires of my soul when I’m writing.

Ben Gurion: Since when does your soul need stoking with vodka to produce another attack on me and my party? I though your writing was effortless.

Jabotinsky: True, attacking you and your party I can do in my sleep. But look, this is Russian, not Hebrew (shows him the papers) and it belongs to my alternative universe, my novel. My solace and refuge from the bickerings of the Jews.

Ben Gurion: (looking at the papers) May I? This is the novel itself…? The Five?

Jabotinsky: How do you know about “The Five”?

Ben Gurion: Berl Katzenelson read some chapters in a Russian magazine and ordered me to study them before our meeting. He wanted me to have an insight into your soul.

Jabotinsky: Ordered? Berl Katzenelson can order you?

Ben Gurion: Definitely. Berl may be a year younger than me but he holds a spiritual and moral authority over me. He’s a teacher, guide and true brother who seeks no power for himself, and even when he disagrees with me or votes against me, I’m always sure of his confidence in my leadership. Amongst your followers, have you anyone like Berl?

Jabotinsky: Sadly, my followers are too keen to follow. Too faithful, too unquestioning. I have to be my own “Berl”.

Ben Gurion: What about Uri Zvi Greenberg? He may have defected from my labour movement but I still admire his poetry.
Jabotinsky: Uri Zvi Greenberg isn’t a moral or a spiritual authority. He’s a hysterical, humourless man still haunted by the trauma of the trenches. And I’ll let you in to a secret – unlike you, I’m not keen on his poetry. As a rule I don’t think poets and authors are useful in public life, in the end their concern is for books and poems and scholarship. Take care of Berl, he’s a precious asset. He was in the Jewish Brigade I founded, in the Great War. We had our disagreements, but I’ll always value him as a man of truth worth.

Ben Gurion: You know, although Berl objects to me making a secret deal with you, he still supported our agreement against all its opponents. He’s even more concerned than I am by the prospect of a civil war in Eretz Yisrael.

Jabotinsky: I’m afraid of that too, but if you insist on maintaining your stranglehold on Zionism, we have no option but to liberate it forcefully from your grip.

Ben Gurion: Our stranglehold? How? By building settlements and factories? Establishing kibbutzim?
Jabotinsky: Slow down, slow down. (places a cautious arm on Ben Gurion’s shoulder) Will you tell me what you and Berl thought of my first chapters?

Ben Gurion: I took it lightly; it amused me that the Duce could be lovesick. But Berl found it profoundly disturbing.
Jabotinsky: Disturbing? Why?

Ben Gurion: Because if these imaginary, assimilated Jews in your turn-of-the-century Odessa really are so liberated and confident, so well-loved and accepted in their Gentile surroundings, Berl is convinced they’ll meet a bitter end.

Jabotinsky: A bitter end?

Ben Gurion: He thinks you’re setting us up for a reversal later, when all their joy and levity will end in doom and destruction.

Jabotinsky: Is that what he said? What intuition…

Ben Gurion: (surprised) But how can they be doomed? You’re the author, you control their fate. Why would you choose to be cruel?

Jabotinsky: Ben Gurion, it’s history that is cruel. The next chapters will bring the revolution; the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin followed by the World War. You know better than most that when the Gentiles revolt it’s the Jews who pay the price.

Ben Gurion is silent. He picks up a page from the table, browses.

Ben Gurion: And will Marussiah finally succumb to the author’s loving advances?

Jabotinsky: (laughs) Not the author, my friend, the narrator. The author doesn’t need the love of a fictional character. He has his own beloved woman to whom he has striven to be faithful for many years.

Ben Gurion: All right, the narrator…

Jabotinsky: The narrator will never capture Marussiah’s heart. She’ll leave her Gentile lover and marry the dull pharmacist chosen by her parents… and finally, in the end… she will be set alight by her kitchen stove.

Ben Gurion: Set alight? How can you give her such a terrible ending?
Jabotinsky: (impatient) That’s enough now! I got carried away. An author should never reveal his plot before it’s written. Half the time the characters ignore his will anyway. But we didn’t arrange this final meeting to debate prose. If reports from Tel Aviv are to be trusted, your comrades are planning to reject our little agreement, just as I predicted in Rutenberg’s hotel room. So we should use this meeting to define the rules of engagement for the battle that will now rage in the Zionist Federation.

Ben Gurion: (pensive) You return to Paris tomorrow?

Jabotinsky: Yes. Where will you be heading?

Ben Gurion: Home, to Tel Aviv.

Jabotinsky: Alas, Tel Aviv…Jerusalem…they haunt my dreams. But before we dive into our last argument, you’re still my guest and it would be wrong to contest a hungry rival. Come, have a look, our hostess left us a few dishes…

Ben Gurion: No, I’m not hungry, not for cooked food. I wouldn’t say no to a slice of bread.

Jabotinsky: Just bread…?

Ben Gurion: Well, perhaps with an egg of some sort…

Jabotinsky: An egg? What sort of egg?

Ben Gurion: Fried, maybe an omelette if that’s possible…

Jabotinsky: (embarrassed) To be honest… in the kitchen I’m completely helpless. Opening a tin of sardines makes me as proud as if I had personally erected a steel bridge across the Volga.

Ben Gurion: I’ll do the frying. In Sejera we had this huge pan and I’d make omelettes for the whole crowd. When Paula lets me, I have a rare talent for it; I just flip it at the perfect moment so it’s neither watery or burnt dry. Do you think we can rustle up a few eggs in this place?

Jabotinsky: (enthusiastic) Of course, we must find some eggs and you can demonstrate your hidden talent for frying, although it’s not just eggs that you fry to perfection – you do the same in politics, flipping people and ideas about without burning a single one.

They go to the corner of the kitchen, light a large flame in the stove. Ben Gurion prepares the omelette while Jabotinsky sits at the table watching, amused and beguiled.

Jabotinsky: So I have a question for you. Let’s assume we have our Jewish State and its Prime Minister, whomever he is, invites you to join the Cabinet. Which Ministry would attract you the most?

Ben Gurion: I’d start a Ministry for Identity.

Jabotinsky: Is there such a thing?

Ben Gurion: No, but it will be essential. We need a Ministry to straighten out our poor old Jewish identity that’s been crippled by centuries of exile. At the heart of it I would plant the words of the Prophets.

Jabotinsky: What a bold idea. It would tempt me too, although I might straighten out the warped Jewish identity in a rather different way. So if I were to join this cabinet I’d choose an easier role.

Ben Gurion: That being?

Jabotinsky: Secretary for Defence, Minister of War.

Ben Gurion: Minister of War? You, Jabotinsky? The poet, the author, the orator…

Steam is rising from the stove and there is a scorching smell.

Jabotinsky: Yes, because my wars would be shorter and more efficient than any waged by you Socialists. Fewer dead, fewer injured, less destruction on both sides.

Ben Gurion: How?

Jabotinsky: Because I wouldn’t let a single Jew or Arab harbour false illusions. I wouldn’t offer the Arabs a compromise that they won’t accept. I would speak to them clearly and honestly, without guile. They’re neither wicked nor foolish, as your friends in the Brotherhood of Nations might fancy. From the minute our feet touched the ground of Eretz Yisrael, they’ve known what our intentions are. Like some posturing virgin we persist in denying the fact that from its inception the Zionist Movement has carried in its womb the embryonic Jewish state. But the Arabs spotted this long ago and as they awake from four hundred years of Ottoman-induced slumber they will ensure that this embryo dies, along with its mother. If we don’t rush to deliver the Jewish state, this baby will die in the womb or be delivered stillborn to the English. Or it will be born a monster.

Ben Gurion: A monster???

Jabotinsky: Ambivalence, procrastination, religious extremists from all sides and enemies of Zionism will turn it into a monster. That’s why we need a state as soon as possible. An independent sovereign state with clearly charted borders and a wall of steel before its enemies. But within in: generosity, equality and respect for all. An outward wall of steel but from the inside, velvet-covered marble, embellished with images of hope.

Ben Gurion slides the omelette from the frying pan onto a tray, divides it in two, places each on a plate and starts to eat hungrily. He suddenly throws down his knife and fork.

Ben Gurion: There’s no such thing as steel on the outside and velvet on the inside! You’ve been away from Eretz Yisrael for so long you’ve lost touch with reality. We in the workers’ parties are trying, slowly and carefully, to separate the Arabs and ourselves by securing Jewish labour in Jewish enterprises and building separate Jewish settlements in uninhabited areas. Yes, Sir, another acre and another goat, but the time is not yet ripe for the Jewish State. If we induce this premature infant of yours, the Arabs will destroy it and the English will let them, because then they won’t be responsible for our security. You’ve have been gone too long, you don’t know the situation.

Jabotinsky: And you are completely alienated from European Jewry! You have no concept of the new nationalistic anti-Semitism that’s poisoning the air. When you and your friends finally decide the time is right to bring the Jewish state into the world you’ll be too late – not enough Jews will survive.

Ben Gurion: You speak with such cruel pessimism.

Jabotinsky: It’s reality.

Ben Gurion: A leader can’t allow himself to be controlled by pessimism.

Jabotinsky: It’s easy for you, you’ve already changed your identity. You have no need for your Ministry. You’re not a Jew, you’re an Eretz Yisraelite, a Palestinian.

Ben Gurion: Maybe I am, and that’s why I see the world from the perspective of my small patch of land.

Jabotinsky: The Jews included?

Ben Gurion: Especially the Jews. Whose home are we in?

Jabotinsky: The Yaacobi’s, Shlomo and Edna, dear, loyal friends. Unlike you, I have no machine to arrange my travel and lodgings. I depend on the good will of my friends.

Ben Gurion: So come, instead of walking out on the Zionist movement, join us in a grand coalition. We’ll give you the Ministry of Information, we’ll be partners on other matters. You’ll have inside influence and this “machine” you so admire will look after your travel and lodgings.

Jabotinsky: You may be sincere, Ben Gurion, but I won’t subjugate my views for your purist comrades. You speak for a mere two percent of the Jewish people while I speak for millions in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Lithuania and Galicia, in Austria and Russia… Why should we join you? You join us!

A knock at the door.

Translation by Dr David Janner-Klausner Adapted for stage by Amy Rosenthal

The New Israel Fund celebrates Israel’s 64th Independence Day with the British premiere of A. B. Yehoshua’s new play: Can Two Walk Together? 6.30 pm, Thursday 10 May 2012 at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole St, W1 Ticket: £25 Patron Ticket: £45 (incl priority seating)

Book online at www.newisraelfund.org.uk or call 0207 724 2266
The Tel Aviv premiere will take place in May 2012

Translated by Jessica Cohen

More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and hunger will doubtless take their toll further down the road, you will probably keep running like this, without stopping even for a moment, and your footsteps will be audible on the asphalt throughout the night from here all the way to the lights of Jerusalem, and you can listen to them with the relief of knowing they are your own feet, and the familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road, and the damp, sticky coolness of the wind, and the burn of the smoldering red ember in your gut, and you know how the precise rhythm of your steps will translate into syllables and words and melodies, you know this from the hundreds of races and meets and runs, and although the conditions tonight are especially harsh, harsher than ever before perhaps, still your victory is assured, because tonight you will conquer the urge to run, or at least, with the sharp knife of night air that rips through your lungs, you will dismember the viperous tuber that has impelled you to run for over three years now, and all you must do is stick to the confident, manly beat of five and slide yourself, head and rifle, down into the stupefying motion of shin and thigh, using the centrifugal force to drown the needle-thoughts and the pin-thoughts and the rhythmic beat of the ember, so that the sight of her merciful-blue eyes or the memory of her fingers singeing your skin only ten minutes ago might surface in the watery expanse of your mind and float away, and you will grip the road with your feet again and again, propelling your body ahead with a broad but measured step, and maintain your breath to the beat of five so that you will not stop even for one moment on this long road that winds among Arab villages and tiny green plots and grapevines, and onward through the village of Sho’efat that sleeps with its eyes open, and you will run further down the narrow, pitted road to Jerusalem, which will blink at you in bewilderment with its nocturnal amber stoplights, and silently you will glide along the treeless boulevards of stone, and you will weave through the city like its walls aglow in the dark until you find the riverbed that leads to the sea, and even if you go less than half the way, it does not matter because tonight you are both the runner and the finish line, and the results are predetermined, yet still you will keep running as hard as your lungs allow, and in the past few minutes you have covered over one and a half kilometers, and at first, when you had just left the boy’s home, you moved in total blindness, staggering on your dizzy, disobedient feet, but then they found their natural rhythm and supported your body from below, and you were carried along like an animated being shedding perfect tears of glass, on your strong muscles that rescued you efficiently from the core of anguish that needed three people to bear it, and awakened your lungs to the rhythm and your blood to the beat, and it was they who led you confidently past the headquarters’ huts and the roll-call yard and the mess-hall, and from there, skipping quietly and mechanically over the slack rope at the camp’s entrance, to the main road that leads to Jerusalem, and it will take several minutes to accustom yourself to the idea that it is your body that is now exposed to the night winds and the odors of gasoline and burnt rubber that waft up from the road rushing beneath your shoes, and to the faint whispers coming from the villages that huddle as you pass them by, but this thought is obstructive and weakening and you will banish it from your heart and continue to run along the yellow line on the side of the road and fix your gaze on the drops of yellow that dance through the damned tears until you no longer know whether they are the village lights or only the stripe refracted in your tears, and in fact it is of no importance so long as you can flood them with rhythmic barrages of the blueness of the boy’s cousin’s eyes when she looked at you, and that was what sequestered you from his room only moments ago, wading through the turbid nightmare that erupted inside your head, fleeing, seduced like a moth by the lights, sacrificed with every step on the altar of the keen magnet that patiently waits behind you and inside you always. Foot road shin breath pause, air inhaled and compressed, one two three four five, breathe, everything is under control, including the usual stab of pain, run, launch words into the air and fly on them, or even just meaningless fragments of syllables, like the ones Yoash emitted in his final attempt to trap you, or perhaps the boy’s secret words that had no fixed meaning, and the more you keep speaking into yourself the more the foreign voices from outside will die down, the bitter bray of a donkey or the distant engine of a car, and you will be able to hear her voice better, even the loathsome giggles she emitted at first, so long as you understand her eyes, even if the cost is the rhythmic pain of the ember that has glowed in your innards for the past three and a half years, whose pale radiance you sometimes imagine you can see through the layers of flesh and skin, from that spot where it began to whisper many years ago, though only your mother’s X-ray eyes noticed, for she told you explicitly when she turned off the engine outside Yoash’s house and looked at you in the rearview mirror that even though she and Yoash believed this was merely a temporary crisis, it was still best to try and make good use of this unpleasant situation because, after all, we are thinking-people, and we must vigorously confront any obstacle or confusion we encounter and remove its sting by profoundly, and sometimes painfully, scrutinising the facts and the deeds, and it is possible, and please bear in mind that she does not say these things decisively, that your developmental pace up to now, all your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure, and she has guessed these difficult things, she has known them, she has preserved them in her mind for many years without wanting to utter them, but then this temporary, foolish crisis came along,

The familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road

and with it the time to say these things, and she will tell you one more thing now, because this evening she sees you are willing to listen, which might be a sign of things to come, so she will tell you that life, son, is a long-distance run, and you have perhaps not paced yourself correctly, and so you have stumbled a little, and how fortunate that you have parents who love you and care for you and understand you, who are willing to give you any assistance, and if you let us help you, we will, and so now get out of the car and go into Yoash’s house and do not cheat him and turn off the light he leaves on for you, because I will be sitting here in this car just like I have done every Sunday and Thursday for the past year, week after week, from now until nine this evening, one whole hour, and I will wait for you to come back and I will watch the house, and I do not want to see the lights go off as soon as you go in, not only because it is unfair to Yoash, who believes there is a light on in the room, but because the light will force you to think, son, to be alert and vigilant, and that is also part of the profound scrutiny which I spoke of, and now go, I will wait. She is sleeping now, my mother. Every night at exactly midnight she covers her typewriter. Then she stretches, and from my room I hear a short sigh of pleasure. Now will come the rhythmic breaths.Ten sit-ups to strengthen her aching back. A few seconds of relaxation. Here come the dull clicking sounds. Sitting in her study, she cracks the joints of every finger. Father calls it ‘driving the nails in the day’s coffin,’ but she says it’s just the daily maintenance of her work tools. Everything that happens from then on is predictable too, and for that reason transfixes me: the hum of the electric toothbrush, the deep gargling of water in her throat, the decisive nose-blowing, the final rituals of the night. At twelve-thirty she is asleep, utterly indifferent to the staccato echoes of her routines still oscillating between the walls of the house.

All your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too
fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure

Years ago a radio interviewer asked her if she wrote in the wee hours of the night,‘which are so felicitous for contemplations.’ Mother told him nights were for sleeping. In my room I would count by my heartbeats the time that passed from the moment they wished each other good night until I heard the sounds of her gentle snoring. Then Father would turn the light off and roll over in bed. A few hours later, on my way to the bathroom, I would look at them. Two pale beans in their pods on either side of the bed. I could have gone in and slept between them and they would never have sensed me. Me and another child. But always, as I stood there in wonderment, my mother would suddenly growl at me in the dark to go back to my bed at once. She always saw me, and I was never surprised—she had said more than once, after all, and often promised: Mother will see you wherever you are, son.
Now you must pretend, you must imagine, that this is a race—let’s say, the race for the Chief of Staff cup that will be held in a week, or next month’s inter-command track and field event, and in any case the silence around you is extremely sharp, the roar of the crowd and the chatter of the politicos and the grating songs over the loudspeakers all fade away after the third or fourth lap, replaced by the blood drumming in your ears, and the delicate pearls of thought shine their light, the events observed from their insides, the embered whispers, and all that time your feet drum a regular beat, and on the fifth step, where the inhalation ends, there will always be one breathless second, and again the five exhalation steps, and now too, in the lucid quiet around you, there is no one to surmise that this is not one of your public runs, that the low, tangled bushes are not coaches squatting by the side of the track, that the pale rocks are not referees or slightly bemused overweight clerks, and how fortunate that thus far, and it’s already been more than fifteen minutes, not a single car has driven past to violate the darkness, and you can keep running in peace, engulfing the night with your transparent web, like you used to do when you had only just learned of the serenity that comes with running, and together with your father you would spin around your childhood neighbourhood, make its streets gallop beneath your shoes, envelop it in the thin mesh of fibres you secreted from your brain, and after you had left him, tired and chuckling and defeated, at the doorway to your house, you would assail the side streets and the alleyways again like a silent bat, traverse the yards and the men and the women and the children, suffocate in the dense bubbles of their dreams and their strenuous groans, and not for a single moment did you wonder why you did this over and over again or what the meaning of this new pleasure was, except that every night, at an almost fixed time, you were once again unable to tolerate the tapping of the typewriter and the drumming of your father’s fingers on his lap while he listened to his choral LPs on headphones, and you had to get out immediately, you had to run even before you had finished tying the shoelaces of your sneakers properly, to conquer your secret routes again, and this thing that you were unable to explain to your mother when she wondered, and wondered again, and said that although she did not discount healthful athletic activity in and of itself, for some reason your new physical enjoyment, your physical addiction, if she were being accurate, seemed to her the furthest thing possible from healthful, and while she did not wish to judge in matters she did not understand, she had to tell you that there was a certain brutishness in the pleasure you derived from moving your feet, but, as she said, perhaps she simply did not understand it, and if you could ever manage to explain yourself clearly without stuttering, you might convince her, because, after all, you know she always admits her mistakes.
Here comes the first car, floating silently round a distant bend, its headlights striking the sky and the hills, and you must slow down a little and be prepared to slip onto the side of the road, where you will freeze like a stone or a rusty piece of iron junk, but for now, as long as it is distant, as long as it is silent, it’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers and thwart your painful sallies from the misty night into the inner darkness, where you are still allowed to maintain that which exists and the reddish ember does not trouble you with unfamiliar burns, because in the past three and a half years you have kicked it onto hundreds of asphalt strips and race tracks and sandy beaches, and you have dulled its sting along the imaginary elliptical line you ran around in stadia and huge sports arenas, and you have diluted its pungency in your classmates’ seething whirlwinds of joy, and the proud cheers of unfamiliar soldiers from your camp, and the slaps on the back from fellow athletes, so that you can now deceive yourself, you can believe that within you there lies a darkness almost like the one that teemed between your father’s hands when he allowed you to peek excitedly, or like the kind in the boy’s closet, where he took you so that you could teach him the double-mirror game, and even as your glazed reflections danced in front of you, turning you both into an intangible vision, even then you did not ask him what was troubling him, and in fact you never asked him a thing, because you knew very well how injurious the tone of the question would be, having spent the last three and a half years in a furious and exhausting effort to defend yourself against the stinging questions they dug into you, and even now you cannot rid yourself of those impenetrable tunes, which you gratingly repeat to yourself to the beat of five every time you run, what’s happening to you, what’s gotten into you, where did we go wrong, who is to blame, and over and over again those words, that slashing motion, alighting from the lower depths of guile and reaching upwards, where they ram into your refusal, stubbornly gather the shards of their fall and glide upwards again, this time carrying demanding hostility, you are to blame, only you, you hide, you lie, and for a deceptive blink of an eye they let you be, the kind and merciful people, and consult with one another, and they are so impertinent that they do not hide their intentions from you, they genially explain their methods and approaches, all with the friendliest and lightest of

It’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers

attitudes, as though you were their partner, fighting on the same side, because what do they want, after all, they do not wish to harm you, or to hurt you, God forbid, their only desire is to help you, to lance the distress you harbour and allow it to trickle out so that you can go back to being as you were, and again and again they sigh involuntarily when they remember the child you were, such a talented boy, who won over the hearts of adults and children with his special wit, his sense of humour, which was not at all childish, and with his wondrously quick mind, but that is not what we are discussing now, not at all, and that, they tell you audaciously, is something we will surely come to as we continue our interesting conversations with you, and at this stage we are willing to settle for the bare minimum: that you talk to us, that you give some clue about what happened to you or what it is that you fear so much, and in fact, that you stop walking among us like a bitter and burdensome riddle. But pay attention, the yellow headlights are emerging around the bend too quickly, throw yourself to the side, be careful, you almost hit the rock, nicely done, and now keep running, do not stop even for a moment and do not look back, carry me, feet, one two three four five inhalation, one two three four five, like a silent glowing owl the Mercedes cut through the night, and in the illumined chamber you saw a fat Arab man with a cigar in his mouth and next to him a woman, not young, perhaps a little tipsy, who laughed inaudibly, and now the single molecule of light has melted into the mountains like a hovering firefly, leaving in its wake the odour of burnt gasoline and cigar smoke and women’s perfume.

Excerpt from Runner (title story from the collection Runner, 1983)

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954 and studied philosophy and theatre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. His work has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

Language sets borders.

Language designates border crossings.

Language marks a new homeland, like a flag planted on a foreign planet. People can always argue later whether or not the shadow cast by the flag in the documentary photographs is accurate or whether it is all a fake.

Few things reveal a loss of identity or a new beginning as clearly as language does.

I am a shape-shifter, a linguistic Oboroten*, a changeling my parents snuck into the immigration cradle, sharp- tongued and inscrutable and manipulative, drilled from earliest childhood in switching from one linguistic register to another with no concern for collateral damage: an interpreter and a bringer of chaos.

Even as a young child, I was, like all emigrant children, already skilled in blackmail and in using others. A captive word queen, imprisoned by her own court.The hierarchy flips unexpectedly; the parents are dependent on their children. This gives the child an unfathomable sense of power and impotence, being still at the mercy of parents, who, nonetheless, could not manage without her, who gasp for words like fish out of water.

The parents, in turn, are born again through their children, if they allow themselves to be assimilated into a new world, to be permeated, incorporated, and changed.

I am pregnant with my family. I clone them into the new land they have shoved under my feet without asking.

I am a linguistic Janus with one face turned inward and one turned outward. My inner face, the one with the inside view, speaks Russian, the other, German. German is the language of battle, Russian the language of family. When I want to fight with my mother, my inner language becomes wedged in on itself like a pile of boulders.Then I usually switch to German and she is outraged by the sudden betrayal.

She is less agile in German and more prone to missteps. So we sit across from one another at the table set with beautiful cobalt blue Russian porcelain. Over steaming cups of sweet black tea between us, we throw parts of speech at one another. Whoever hits the first bull’s eye gets to drink.

We have spread a dark tablecloth embroidered with red roses over our Ikea table. We have a samovar, although it is fake, heated with electricity instead of coal, a decoration for the imported household. Just like my changing identity.
When I accompany the clients who are entrusted to me to the hospital as their interpreter, I speaking soothingly in Russian inside our little exile-bubble, in which we navigate through Vienna. Occasionally, I speak out angrily in German using the Viennese dialect, since our ways often provoke a far from friendly response. My clients are mostly Muslim and wear headscarves. Our language is the only thing we have in common, that and not being grounded.

‘But you’re a Jew,’ they sometimes say. ‘Why do you help us?’

‘Because. . . ’ I begin but usually stop, since the question makes me feel confused and ashamed.

Because we have the same words, although our life stances are diametrically opposed. Because I recognize your suffering as mine and cannot bear to look past it without comment, which would probably be more advisable, but has no place here.

Anyone who has experienced the fragmentation of exile never forgets it. Afterwards, one presumably spends the rest of one’s life trying to put the little pieces back together, simultaneously reaching for an even greater unity, as do all those who have more than one language and many more words at their disposal.

And yet, the attempt to reach a common language from different levels can also cause disastrous misun- derstandings. Everyone knows that building the Tower of Babel did not always go smoothly. Such failures in understanding are particularly sharp when they arise in a psychotherapy session. It is as if a handsome and airy ivory tower penthouse were erected on top of the Babylonian one.The analyst gazes out of the oriel window down onto the beautiful scenery of the unconscious and breathes in the fresh morning breeze. On the other hand, the client, sitting across from him in the white upholstered chair, still can only smell the acrid winds of war.

Immobile, weighing almost 31 stone, the former boxer sinks into the soft cushions and remains silent. It has been almost twenty minutes.Trying to reach this patient who lives in a completely different cultural sphere and is obviously in a very bad way, the analyst resorts to the usual methods. He adapts his expressions to fit the patient’s own, while the patient immediately begins to copy the analyst, in order to keep his weakness from showing.This makes interpreting endlessly difficult, because I soon lose track of which who is trying to adapt to whom and how and whose words are really whose. As the first few sentences pingpong between them, the experiment works well.Yet, the patient does not understand the concept of psychotherapy, much less of psychoanalysis. All of the analyst’s attempts to explain fail dismally. In his village, where the patient had lived for more than forty years, there was not even a doctor. He sweats and becomes agitated. He says that he would not like mentals. The analyst is delighted to have finally found a concept the patient seems to know. So he lets the fatal question fall: ‘Have you had any experience with mentals?’

The boxer’s grim face darkens even further. He clenches his enormous fists so tightly, the cartilage cracks resoundingly. He raises them towards the psychiatrist’s bespectacled face, now covered with beads of sweat like the patient’s.Then the patient blurts out,‘I had to subdue them with towels! I hated it, but I had to do it anyway!’

I try to dispel the image of how the patient might try to subdue my colleague, perhaps even me, with towels, even though he would not really want to. After a long back and forth, it becomes clear that by ‘mentals’, he means the mentally handicapped people in his village no one dared get near when they had episodes. Every time it was the boxer who reluctantly had to step up and keep them from harming themselves.

The world, as always, is changing. No attempt to keep it from changing will bring relief.

Outside, all is new.

People are now of divided mind. Double-tongued. Two-faced.

Some are more at a loss than others, yet setting down roots in new places more quickly.

When I dream, languages and images blend into one universal dream language, always comprehensible, at least within the dream, not setting obstacles for anyone, never putting my sense of belonging in doubt.

Acceptance precedes arrival.

It is bold step that not only the newly arrived must take.

In the beginning was the word. I dream of home.

*  The oborot is a creature in Russian folklore, hermaphroditic and similar to a werewolf, which can assume the shape of several animals as well as human shape.

Born in St Petersburg in 1970, Julya Rabinowich moved to Vienna with her parents in 1977 and has lived there ever since. She is a critically acclaimed playwright and Splithead, which Portobello Books published on 3rd February (translated from German) is her first novel. Julya Rabinowich will be reading from her work at Jewish Book Week 2011 on March 2nd at 1 o’clock. www.jewishbookweek.com

Chapter 9 Verse 29:

Queen Esther, daughter of Avichayil,and Mordechai the Jew, wrote about the enormity of all the miracles that established the holiday.

What you read every year in that scroll? Not my version, which is too bad for you.The literary aftermath is a story in itself:

It was about a month after the hubbub, the fighting and killing and burying the poor dead gentiles; Uncle Morty came to my chambers and told me to write an executive summary about what happened, with a shout out to him and how the Jews owed him their lives. He was in a big rush, too; he wanted copy to send with his letter to the landsman, asking for donations and sponsorships for the first annual Purim memorial donor dinner.

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If you knew the damage she did today…. I wasn’t impressed by the tantrum, either, all part of the act. The village guy came off worse than she did, believe me—poor fellow—and we can’t ever go back there now. If this episode gets known it could make us notorious, let alone what it does to the people we’re trying to help. Let’s hope it gets forgotten as quickly as possible. So leave that shot out of the film, all right? Though I’m sure she’d be pleased if you left it in. Thanks. All right, I’ll explain. What Sandra really wanted, I think, was a good story to take back to her friends at college, about how she joined this group fighting apartheid and went out with them to back up the Palestinians who were resisting the occupation. It was all about her, not about us and what we were trying to do. At first we liked her. She had a lot of energy and she said she’d taught herself some Arabic and as there was only one other person in the group who knew the language we suggested she might join us. We thought she’d be useful when we went to the military courts.
Someone had told her that we’d adopted this village and wrote reports we sent to the army. Sometimes our lawyers took cases to the Supreme Court, though we couldn’t do that too often. But when we asked her to make notes on our visits she always made excuses—she didn’t know Hebrew, she didn’t have any legal background, and so on.
She was really looking for a piece of the action. Not to go along to big demonstrations, where she’d be anonymous, but to take part in confrontations with the soldiers, something to make her look like a heroine. But we didn’t see that at the time. At first she was useful, because she’d wangled an American press card somehow and waved it at the lazier soldiers at the road blocks. But after a while she began to get on our nerves. We were born and brought up here, we don’t hate the country, just the occupation and what it’s doing to us. For Sandra everything was black and white. Israel’s corrupt to the bone, every soldier a murderer, that kind of thing. What she didn’t understand was what a shambles the occupation could be. So she was surprised that the soldiers at the checkpoints sometimes let us through easily, like today, though we weren’t really supposed to cross the line—all those warning signs. And sometimes we split up and travelled in Arab taxis with Jerusalem number plates, by side roads, and met up with the villagers on the other side. She thought that was really brave. But the army doesn’t mess with Israelis, and even if we get arrested they let us go quickly. Nothing we do is heroic. Big disappointment for Sandra. We ought to have seen straight away that she was a liability. Look, our job is to get facts: where the boundaries of the village were, which land was cut in two by the Wall, which crops weren’t harvested or bulldozed, where settlers had taken their land and so on. Our reports get read and if we’re lucky someone takes notice. Considering how few of us there are, we get a lot of attention—people like you make that possible. Not that we really make an impact. But the main thing is that the army and the Shabak know we’re here watching. Sets limits. Sandra got in our way. She was too emotional, and she prompted the villagers to tell her stories we didn’t think were true but had no way of checking: a child taken hostage by the army until his father, who was hiding somewhere, gave himself up, or a woman who maintained she was given a body search by a male soldier at a checkpoint. Sometimes she even put words into the villagers’ mouths, like asking to see what damage the soldiers had done to a house looking for suspects, where no one had suggested there was damage. We wanted evidence, not complaints the army could just wave aside as rumour. We took notes and videoed, and then we checked maps and documents with our lawyers. That sometimes got results; Sandra’s bleeding heart wasn’t going to get any.
She wasn’t much help in the local military court, either. In theory the courts are open to the public, but it didn’t work like that. After all, they’re inside army compounds, you can’t just wander in. They wouldn’t let you in with your cameras. We’ve a letter authorising us to enter, but it takes time for the soldier on the gate to take it to an officer, and we’re often late arriving in the courtroom—it’s a small room in a big hut, actually. We have to show our identity cards, and of course Sandra only had her passport, and the guards didn’t like that: foreign ‘activists’, trouble makers. In the end they’d let us in, but Sandra still went on complaining loudly about oppression and censorship. Inside there was no room for more than a handful of people, and sometimes we felt bad that we were let in, and a prisoner’s family was left outside. That didn’t occur to Sandra, of course, she wanted to sit as near as possible, even if it meant elbowing a prisoner’s mother or wife aside. Most of the prisoners on trial—village people—were there for petty reasons: for trying to cross the Wall to get to their fields, or taking part in demonstrations against the occupation. They were usually remanded in custody by the judge (lawyers doing reserve duty, most of them) unless the family stumped up bail. Which they very often did, because they needed the man’s earnings. When Sandra asked why they were letting someone go, we explained, and she sniffed and said it was obviously a good way of making money for the army. It turned out that she didn’t know Arabic, either. Just a few words. She couldn’t make head or tail of what the Palestinian defence lawyers were saying when they spoke to the prisoner. The prisoners hardly ever said anything, but if they did Sandra would either pretend she couldn’t hear or she’d say ‘it was something about having hit someone’ and we wouldn’t be much wiser. Even the lazy army interpreter was better.
The army prosecutors and the Palestinian defence lawyers got on quite well (Sandra muttered something about collaborators) as long as the offences were trivial; they’d all been through it a hundred times before. But Sandra wanted a full account. So we ended up having to translate the Hebrew proceedings for Sandra, rather than Sandra translating the Arabic for us. She was especially interested when there was a more serious offence—someone who’d hidden a gun, or had relations with Hamas. In those cases the prosecutor and the judge got in a huddle, so no one could hear. When the defence lawyer asked for more details, they told him they were classified and the trial was adjourned for another few weeks until the Shabak produced the evidence, which only the judge was going to see anyway. You can imagine what Sandra made of that.
Sometimes the defence lawyer was an Israeli. I remember on one of Sandra’s visits it was a woman who liked making dramatic speeches, saying that the trial was a farce, that the prisoners were part of a legitimate political movement, and so on; it didn’t help the prisoner and impressed no one. Except for Sandra, of course. When we translated for her, she stared at the lawyer with shining eyes and it was as much as we could do to stop her applauding. For a long time we put up with all this, because after all not everyone wants to run the risk of getting tear gassed, especially older people who have spare time but can’t run fast, and when you’ve been once or twice its the same thing over and over again.
What you saw. Village kids with Palestinian flags,and people videoing the cranes and the bulldozers and the settlements going up on the other side. Then a couple of the kids start throwing stones, or a group of young men gets through the gate in the fence and then the tear gassing starts, or stink bombs. Once, recently—not in the village we go to, but somewhere much better known—a gas canister hit a young protester in the chest, and killed him.
So demonstrating isn’t without risks, and no one in our group wanted to hear a word against Sandra after what happened about a month ago. A soldier fired a tear gas canister and instead of exploding it bounced. Most people ducked or ran, but Sandra just picked up the canister and threw it back. It fell short of the soldiers, of course (she couldn’t throw it very far) but they were angry and the villagers jeered and cheered. She’d burned her hands because the metal canister was hot, and the villagers made a fuss of her and put leben on her hands and bandaged them up. I was the only one who wasn’t impressed, to me it was just acting. But what really got us arguing with one another was what she proposed about a month ago. She said she’d heard that what she called ‘the real action’ took place when we weren’t there—at night. The soldiers would arrive in the middle of the night and bang on doors looking for someone. Nine times out of ten the man they were looking for wasn’t at home, and it wasn’t a coincidence. Someone probably heard them coming and he skedaddled, but it frightened the kids when the soldiers came storming in (they were on edge too because there was just the outside chance that someone might be waiting for them) and sometimes they ordered everyone out, or turned the house upside down. We’d heard about that, of course, but we hadn’t actually seen it for ourselves. Sandra had a point. The men they did find usually were released after a week or so, they hardly ever found a real suspect, someone with blood on their hands, but the main idea, I think, was to alarm the villagers and put a stop to the demonstrations. Of course, it didn’t.
But Sandra learned that a group like ours had stayed in another village overnight once to see what was happening, and she wanted us to do the same. Well. Everyone felt uncomfortable. We couldn’t deny that we ought to be there when the raids took place, but most of us started wondering how that would play at home, whether families would object. Only Boaz, a student from an Arabicspeaking Iraqi family said he’d go too. Me? I just thought it was pointless. The raids didn’t happen very often in our village, and we might just have sat there waiting. A friend fills in for me in the lab; we’ve switched schedules so on the days I come here, I work in the evening, but he’s getting restive already and if I want more changes that will be an excuse for him to say: enough.
Sandra’s suggestion put us all on the spot, and that annoyed everyone, except for Boaz, because he wanted to make an impression on her. Maybe I should mention her appearance. You’ve only seen her from a distance, with dirt on her face, but actually she’s very striking looking. Alright, beautiful, I suppose. It affects people, and situations, doesn’t it? Not irrelevant. No use pretending otherwise. This whole mess would have been avoided if she’d been plain.
Anyway, Sandra and Boaz started going there at night a couple of times a week. The mukhtar put them up but I don’t think they got much sleep. They fancied themselves as watchmen. She didn’t turn up as regularly on our visits as she had done before, now that she had a special mission, in her view. Which, frankly, was no loss. But when she did come with us she started saying that we didn’t really know anything about the people we were trying to help, and that we ought to get closer to them, as she was doing. I remember one of her lectures in particular.
‘Little birds’, she said. ‘Do you realize that they still keep little birds in cages? They feed them on all kinds of seeds, not commercial stuff. The mukhtar has a canary. That’s special’.
Boaz nodded.
‘At first I thought they should let them out, but then I thought: it’s all part of their lifestyle, we don’t have the right to interfere’. ‘We don’t’ agreed Boaz.
‘What’s your point, Sandra?’ I asked. ‘Like we keep them cooped up in cages too, don’t we?’ she said. ‘Those wire fences. Did you know that they couldn’t get their relations together for the mukhtar’s daughter’s wedding last week’ She glared at us as if we were responsible. ‘There was an incident on the road from Ramallah, so the army slapped a curfew on the whole area. That’s the sort of thing we ought to be reporting, not just the raids and the tear gas.’
We all looked at one another. Everyone expected me to shut her up. So I tried to. ‘Sandra, we have to concentrate on specific abuses’, I said. ‘Everyone knows the occupation interferes with their lives. It’s inevitable. You don’t know why there was a curfew last week; they might have been looking for a terrorist. There are such people you know.’
‘I don’t believe this!’ said Sandra, pretending to be surprised. ‘Are you actually defending the army?’
‘Are you saying that there’s no danger at all from terrorists?’ someone shot back. ‘What you call terrorists they call resistance fighters’ said Sandra.
‘Is that what they’re saying in the village?’ someone asked.
‘I don’t believe this!’ said Sandra again. ‘Are you trying to make me into an informer?’ Now we all were getting angry but she insisted: ‘They’re all good people, trying to get on with their lives. Take Fuad the mukhtar’s son: he’s studying computer sciences in Ramallah and half the time he’s late for his lessons.’
‘Computer sciences?’
‘Why not?’ said Sandra. ‘That’s just what I mean! You see them all as simple farmers we have to protect, but some of the younger generation want lives just like ours.’
‘Not exactly’ said Boaz. ‘The clan still counts’. He gave her an angry look, and she opened her mouth to say something, and then didn’t say it. I wondered at the time why she didn’t answer him while she was about it, and thought maybe because they were the two young people in the group and the rest of us were much older and too sedate for her. It turned out to be for a different reason. It was bad enough that Sandra distracted us from the main job we had to do. Now we had to cope with the tensions between her and Boaz. He was obviously besotted with her, always at her side, following her around and trying to protect her when the demonstrations got nasty. She didn’t seem to notice, or if she did she brushed him away. I want to explain something else. Apart from those two young ones, we in the group have family lives, not private lives, if you see what I mean. None of us meet outside the group, we’re too busy, it isn’t a social gathering. We came together accidentally because we wanted to do something apart from reading the papers and moaning about the occupation, or saying politics didn’t interest us and we just wanted to get on with our lives. What went on (or didn’t) between Sandra and Boaz was unimportant, but it started to be annoying when it involved us, or rather me. Boaz was a student in my faculty and I suppose he thought of me as someone with authority.
Boaz came to the lab one evening and asked if he could have a word with me privately. I said only fifteen minutes as I had to get home, so we sat down, and I looked at my watch. ‘I’m worried about Sandra’ he blurted out.
‘She’s seeing Fuad in Ramallah’. ‘Well, there’s no law against it’ I said, trying to make a joke of it, though I knew quite well that it wasn’t funny. He looked reproachful. ‘Anyway, how do you know?’
Boaz reddened. It was clear that he’d been following Sandra, but he couldn’t admit it, so he ignored the question. ‘ It might not be such a good idea for her to wander around by herself, we’re not exactly popular there’.
‘Look, Boaz. Sandra’s American, not Israeli, and she’s got a press card. She can take very good care of herself and Ramallah’s a modern town; people there are actually more polite than in Tel Aviv. Apart from the fact that I’m not her father!’ (As if, I thought, fathers would have any clout where Sandra was concerned.)
But something else was clearly disturbing Boaz, and I knew he would not say what it was. ‘Fuad’s all right. I don’t think it’s our business’ I said.
‘I’m not saying he isn’t, he’s educated, like us, but his family isn’t.’
‘Meaning?’
‘They might not like it’.
‘That’s his problem’.
Silence. Boaz obviously wanted me to intervene, but how? He must have realised that talking to Sandra was quite impossible.To warn her off a young man because he was Palestinian? There were Jewish women married to Arabs in Israel, after all, if that was the idea, though a West Bank Palestinian was a different matter, and I wasn’t sure marriage was on the cards, for Sandra anyway. As to speaking to Fuad, that was out of the question. We hardly knew him. He was one of the more militant youths in the village, a natural leader I thought, and not too keen on the rest of us, either. So why he had appealed to Sandra was no mystery, apart from the fact that he was exceptionally good looking too, and spoke quite fluent English. I still wasn’t quite sure whether or not to believe Boaz. I tried a different tack. ‘Isn’t it possible that she’s trying to find out more about students in Ramallah, their problems? Or maybe he wants to go to the States for further study and wanted her advice. Why not?’
‘I saw them kissing. I think there’s a place they go’.
So Boaz had been following them, and who knew where? I didn’t think that they could have been kissing in the main streets of Ramallah. ‘And he probably does want to go to the States.
She might get him a visa’.
I felt I should stop him there and then. ‘Look, Boaz. It’s not your business what they’re up to. I can’t interfere and don’t want to anyway, nor can you. Leave them alone.’
‘You’ll see’ he replied angrily. ‘There’ll be trouble’. And before I could reply, he stormed out. You can imagine that by this time I was furious with Sandra. Our task was difficult enough without a love triangle (if it was one) and, although I hadn’t said so to Boaz, I thought there would be trouble too. I’d had talks with Fuad’s father, the mukhtar, myself, and I knew he wasn’t happy with what we were doing in his village, or with the demos his son was organising. He thought the village was attracting too much attention and sooner or later they’d have to pay for it when we weren’t around. He kept telling me that all they wanted was peace and quiet and that now many of the road blocks had been removed more men would find work in Ramallah or Jenin and that the youngsters didn’t want to harvest olives any more, they had more ambitious plans. I didn’t tell the others about what Boaz had said because I knew that they would start staring at Sandra and Fuad and the villagers would notice. I tried to be discreet, but I couldn’t help noticing the way the two of them avoided contact, not even looking at one another, in the village. I don’t know what Boaz had seen when they stayed over in the village (perhaps that was when it had all begun) but in any case those visits ended, Sandra saying that there hadn’t been a single raid while they were there and it was just a waste of time.
But now Boaz had suddenly got very friendly with the mukhtar. He stopped joining the crowd at the fence, he stopped videoing, he took the village women’s embroidery to Jerusalem to sell for them, and he even went with the mukhtar and his wife when they visited their daughter in another village which was in trouble with the army because of Hamas supporters there. I didn’t know what to think about this. Was he trying to impress Sandra? Or had he, I wondered, made contact with the Shabak? So that they’d keep an eye on Fuad when he was in Ramallah? Was Boaz gathering information about what went on in the district? It was an awful thought, which gave me some sleepless nights, but I decided it was nonsense: if that were really the case and Sandra found out, she’d never speak to him again.
What you saw today wasn’t an ordinary protest demonstration. You have to understand that. When I said you could come along with us today to film in the village, I hadn’t the faintest idea of what was going to happen. I thought there might be trouble because of the settlers’ building on another tract of land which was still being argued about in the courts. But that wasn’t the reason for the rioting today. Do you remember I had a call on my mobile when we were on our way? That was Boaz. He said we shouldn’t bother to come today because there wouldn’t be any demonstration, there was going to be a family celebration of some kind and all the village would be there. He’d been invited as a friend of the family—that was how he put it—but we needn’t come. I tried to explain that it wasn’t just our group, that you’d be coming along too, and he didn’t answer (there was some kind of interference) and then he said alright, but there would be nothing to film except for the celebration. What actually happened was this: the family celebrating was the mukhtar’s family, and what you saw was Fuad’s engagement to a girl from a nearby village. I didn’t realise that, of course, with all the people milling about and the food being served. And you were off filming everything and I couldn’t explain to you what was going on, but you must have seen the photographs being taken of the fianceÅLs. I didn’t recognise Fuad at first, because he was wearing a suit and a keffiya rather than a shirt and slacks, and he didn’t look his usual brash self but rather sheepish, hand in hand with the girl, who looked shy. There were a couple of soldiers on the watchtower on the wall behind the fence, and they were looking on, laughing. Maybe it was a relief for them to see a crowd busy with something else than protests. I looked around for Boaz, who was talking to the mukhtar, and then I realised that he had known all the time what the celebration was about, and why he didn’t want us to be there, but it was too late. You didn’t know the story, and as far as you were concerned the celebration was a bonus—scenes from village life, right?—and maybe the serious stuff would come later. Which it did, when Sandra finally turned up; her taxi driver had trouble at a checkpoint. When Fuad saw Sandra he pulled his hand away from his fianceÅLe, muttered something to his father and went indoors. I tried to say something to Sandra but she was following him. Boaz saw what was happening and tried to head her off but she was too quick for him. No one else understood what was going on.
Then Fuad came round on the other side of the house and Sandra was with him now. They were obviously quarrelling and people were starting to take notice, the mukhtar was frowning and the fianceÅLes family were asking questions. Sandra was shouting and Fuad was trying to quieten her, looking around nervously. The mukhtar was beckoning to him and you were taking shots of the soldiers on the watchtower.
Then it happened, what you saw, just as you turned around, how Sandra swung her arm back (I suddenly remembered her picking up that gas canister) and slapped Fuad’s face (did you get the whole thing?), first with the flat of her hand and then with the back of it. Wham! I’d never actually seen a woman hit a man, except in a film. The soldiers who saw it obviously didn’t understand what was going on. Sandra started the riot, no one else. But when people closed in on her, looking angry, one of the soldiers got the idea that we Israelis were under attack, and the others came running through the gate firing into the air. It must have just seemed a muddle to you, those kids who’d been cramming themselves with food calling to one another and running towards the fence; the young men and Fuad, still in his best, running after them and the stones flying. The people who hurried back to cars and drove off were the fianceÅLes family. Then the tear gas barrage started and rubber bullets too, and all because Fuad had been assaulted by one of our people, a woman to add insult to injury. You got your film, though you didn’t realise why the mukhtar was waving his fists at us and Sandra was coughing and crying from rage as much as tear gas. You couldn’t understand why we had to leave so fast, surely we were used to this kind of thing…I hope the rubber bullets and the stones didn’t do too much damage to the camera.
Alright. Do us a favour. You can just say in the commentary that it was a family celebration that turned into a violent demonstration when soldiers intervened. Tensions always run high around Ramadan. The worst of it is that we can’t go back to the village again. They’ve declared it a closed military zone. In any case, I don’t think they ever want to see us again. But one thing Sandra did for the villagers was to make them more visible. As Boaz says, they have computers and iPods now and they can share their stories with the world. Just look at their website. So maybe she did some good after all.

Naomi Shepherd is a British/Israeli journalist, historian and author. Her biography of Wilfrid Israel won the Wingate Prize and was translated into German and Hebrew. Her first collection of stories on Israeli themes, ‘Ashes’, was published in 2001. She has written many other books on Israeli and Palestinian history’. Resident for many years in Jerusalem—partly described in her memoir ‘Alarms and Excursions’—she now lives in London.

Since the accident, Oshri had been selling policies like crazy. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with his slight limp or with the paralysis in his right arm, but people who’d sit through an appointment with him would take it all in, and buy everything he had to offer: life insurance, loss of earning power, complementary health insurance, you name it. At first Oshri kept recycling the one about the Yemenite who was run over by an ice cream truck the very day he bought his policy, on his way to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, or the one about the guy from the suburbs who’d laughed when Oshri had offered him health insurance and one month later called in tears, having just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. But very soon he realised that his own personal story did the trick better than any of the others. There he was, Oshri Sivan, insurance agent, in the middle of a meeting with a potential client at a café near the Downtown Shopping Arcade, when all of a sudden, right in the middle of their conversation, a young man who’d decided to end his life jumps out of an eleventh- floor window in the building next to them, and wham! falls right on Oshri’s head. The fall kills the young man, and our Oshri, who has just finished telling his Yemenite-and-ice-cream-truck story to another reluctant client, loses consciousness on the spot. He doesn’t come to when they splash water over his face, or in the ambulance, or in the emergency room, and not even in the ICU. He’s in a coma. The doctors say it’s touch and go. His wife sits at his bed and cries and cries, so does his little girl. Nothing changes for six weeks until, all of a sudden, a great miracle occurs: Oshri comes out of his coma, as if nothing had happened. He simply opens his eyes and gets up. And along with this miracle comes a bitter truth: our Oshri, who was so admirable in the things he preached, could kick himself for the way he practised them, and since he’d never had a single insurance policy himself, he couldn’t keep up with his mortgage, and had to sell his apartment and move into a rental. ‘Look at me,’ Oshri would end his sad story, with a lame attempt to move his right arm. ‘Look at me, sitting here with you at this café, spitting blood to sell you a policy. If only I’d put aside thirty shekels a month. Thirty shekels, which is nothing really, — barely a matinee ticket without the popcorn — and I’d be lying back like a king, with two hundred grand in my account. Me, I had my chance and I blew it, but you — aren’t you going to learn from my mistake, Motti? Sign on the dotted line and get it over with. Who knows what could land on your head five minutes from now.’ And this Motti or Yigal or Mickey sitting across from him would stare for a minute and then take the pen he held out to them with his good arm and sign. Every single one of them. No ifs, ands or buts. And Oshri would wink goodbye, because when your right arm is paralyzed there’s no shaking hands, and on his way out he’d be sure to blurt out something about how they’d done the right thing. And so, without much effort, Oshri Sivan’s battered bank account quickly began to recover, and within six months he and his wife had bought a new apartment with a much smaller mortgage than the one they’d had before. And with all the physiotherapy he got at the clinic, even his arm started getting better, though when clients held out their hand to him, he’d still pretend he couldn’t move it at all.

‘There’s blue and yellow and white and a soft sweet taste in my mouth. There’s something hovering high above me. Something good, and I’m heading toward it. Heading toward it.’

At night he went on dreaming about it — not about the accident. About the coma. It was strange, but even though a long time had passed since then, he could still remember, down to the last detail, everything he’d felt during those six weeks. He remembered the colours and the taste and the fresh air chilling his face. He remembered the absence of memory, the sense of existing without a name and without a history, in the present.  Six whole weeks of present. During which the only thing he felt within him that wasn’t the present was this little hint of a future, in the form of an unaccountable optimism attached to a strange sense of being. He didn’t know what his own name was during those six weeks, or that he was married or that he had a little girl. He didn’t know he’d had an accident or that he was in the hospital now, fighting for his life. He didn’t know anything except that he was alive. And this fact alone filled him with enormous happiness. All in all, the experience of thinking and feeling within that nothingness was more intense than anything that had ever happened to him before. As if all the background noises had disappeared and the only sound left was true and pure and beautiful to the point of tears. He didn’t discuss it with his wife or any other human being. You’re not supposed to get that much joy out of being close to death. You’re not supposed to get a thrill from your coma while your wife and daughter are crying their hearts out at your bedside. So when they asked whether he remembered anything about it, he said he didn’t, he didn’t remember a thing. When he woke up, his wife asked if, when he’d been in the coma, he’d been able to hear her and Meital, their daughter, talking to him, and he told her that even if he couldn’t remember hearing them he was sure it had fortified him, and given him strength, on the unconscious level, and a desire to live. That was what he told her but it wasn’t true because when he was in a coma he really did hear voices on the outside sometimes. Strange, sharp, yet at the same time unclear, like sounds you hear when you’re under water. And he didn’t like it at all. Those voices sounded menacing to him, they hinted at something beyond the pleasant, colourful now in which he was living.

‘May you never know sadness again.’

Oshri couldn’t make it during the shiva week to pay a condolence call on the family of the guy who’d dropped on his head. He couldn’t make it to the unveiling of the headstone either. But when the first anniversary rolled around, he did go, with flowers and everything. At the cemetery there were only the guy’s parents and his sister and some fat high school friend who looked to Oshri a little gay. They didn’t know who he was. The mother thought he was her son’s boss. His name was Oshri too. The sister and the fat guy thought he was a friend of the parents. But after everyone had finished placing little stones on the grave and the mother started asking around, he explained that he was the one that Nattie (that was the guy’s name) had landed on when he jumped out the window. As soon as the mother heard this, she started saying how sorry she was, and couldn’t stop crying. The father tried to calm her down, and kept giving Oshri suspicious looks. After five minutes of her hysterical sobbing, the father told Oshri stiffly how sorry he was for everything that had happened to him and that he was sure that Nattie too, if he were still alive, would be sorry, but that now it would be better for everyone if Oshri left. Oshri agreed at once and quickly added that he was almost fine by now and that when all was said and done it hadn’t been so terrible — certainly not when you compared it to what Nattie’s parents had been through. The father cut him short in mid-sentence: ‘Are you planning to sue us? Because if you are, you’re wasting your time. Ziva and I haven’t got a penny to our names, you hear me? Not a penny.’  The words only made the mother cry harder, and Oshri mumbled something that was supposed to reassure them, about how he had no hard feelings against anyone, and after that, he left. As he was putting the cardboard yarmulke back in the wooden box at the entrance to the cemetery, Nattie’s sister caught up with him and apologised for her father. She didn’t exactly apologise, actually, just said that he was an idiot and that Nattie had always hated him. This father, it turned out, had always been sure everyone was out to get him and in the end that was what had really happened, when his partner ran off with his money. ‘If Nattie could see how things here turned out, he’d be happy,’ the sister said and introduced herself by name. Her name was Maayan. Out of habit, Oshri didn’t take the hand she held out to him. After so many times of pretending with clients that his arm was utterly paralysed, it reached the point where even when he was home alone he sometimes forgot to use it. When Maayan saw that he wasn’t taking her outstretched hand, she shifted the handshake ever so naturally and touched him on his shoulder — a touch which, it turned out, made both of them a little uneasy. ‘It’s strange having you here,’ she said after they had both been silent for a moment. ‘What is Nattie to you? You didn’t even know him, after all.’ ‘It’s a shame,’ Oshri mumbled. ‘That I didn’t know him, I mean. He sounds like somebody who was definitely worth knowing.’ Oshri wanted to tell her that his coming there wasn’t strange at all. That he and her brother had some unfinished business between them. There had been so many people at the café that day and of all the people there, he was the one that Nattie had dropped on. And that was why he’d come today, to try and understand why. But even before he had a chance to say it, he realised it would sound stupid, so he asked her instead why Nattie had killed himself — so young and all. Maayan shrugged dryly. He wasn’t the first person to ask her that, he guessed, and she didn’t really have an answer for the others either. Before they went their separate ways, he gave her his business card and said that if she needed any help, no matter what it was, she should call. And she smiled and thanked him but said she was an independent person and managed very well on her own. After taking another look at the card, she said: ‘You’re an insurance agent? That’s really strange. Nattie always hated insurance, said it was bad karma. That taking out a policy was like the opposite of believing things would go well.’ Oshri got defensive. Lots of young people think that way, he said, but once you have children you look at things differently. And even if you want to believe things will go well, you can never be too careful. ‘Still, if you need anything,’ he told her before she left, ‘do call. I promise not to try to sell you insurance.’ And she smiled and nodded. They both knew she wouldn’t be calling.
While Oshri was on his way home from the cemetery, his wife phoned. She wanted him to pick up Meital from the class she took after school, and Oshri agreed right away. When she asked him where he was, he lied and said he’d had an appointment with a client in Netanya. He couldn’t explain to himself just why he’d lied. It wasn’t because of the touch that he could still feel on his shoulder, and it wasn’t because he’d gone to the memorial service for no good reason. If anything, it was because he was afraid she’d get a sense of how grateful he was to that guy, Nattie, who must have been just as smart, as successful and as loved as Oshri was, and had still decided to put an end to it all and jump out the window. When he picked Meital up, she proudly showed him a model airplane she’d built. He admired it and asked her when she was planning to fly it in the sky. ‘Never,’ Meital gave him a derisive look. ‘It’s just a model.’ And Oshri nodded, embarrassed, and said she was such a smart little girl.

‘Pleasant dreams’

Ever since the accident, he and his wife made love a lot less often. They never talked about it, but he had the feeling she thought it was okay too. As if after the accident and everything she was so glad to have him back that she wasn’t planning to keep score. Whenever they did make love it was nice, just as nice as it had been before, except that now his life had taken on another perspective, one that had to do with that world, a world you can only reach when something falls on you from a high floor, a perspective that seemed to have dwarfed everything else. Not just the sex, but his love for her too, and his love for his daughter, everything.
When he was awake he couldn’t remember exactly what that world of the coma had felt like, and he probably couldn’t have described it if he’d tried. Only once had he made the effort, with this blind woman whom he’d been trying to sell life insurance to. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected her, of all people, to understand, but after three sentences he realised he was only scaring her, so he stopped. In his dreams though, he really could go back there. And ever since that day in the cemetery, his coma dreams recurred more often. Sometimes more than once a night. And ever so slowly he felt himself becoming addicted to them. So much so that in the evenings, long before he got into bed, he would begin to tremble with excitement, like someone who after many years in exile was getting on the flight that would take him home. It’s funny, but sometimes he was so excited that he couldn’t fall asleep either. And then he’d find himself lying in bed, frozen, next to his sleeping wife, trying to lull himself to sleep in all sorts of ways. One of them was masturbation. And ever since that memorial service, whenever he masturbated, he’d think of Maayan, and how she’d touched him on his shoulder. It wasn’t because she was beautiful. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t beautiful, though her beauty was the fragile kind that comes with youth. The kind whose expiry date was coming up very very soon. As it happened, his wife had once had that same kind of beauty, many years ago, when they first met. But that wasn’t the reason he would think of Maayan. It was because of the connection between her and the man who had helped him reach that world of colours and quiet, and when he’d masturbate over Maayan, it was as if he was masturbating over a world that suddenly, thanks to her, had taken on a woman’s shape.
Meanwhile, he was churning out policies at a dizzying pace. Without even meaning to, he got better and better. Now, when he tried to sell them, he’d often find himself in tears. It wasn’t a manipulation. It was real crying that came out of nowhere. And it would shorten the meetings. Oshri would cry and then he’d apologise, and right away the clients would say it was okay and sign. It made him feel a little like a swindler, the crying, though it was as genuine as could be. Because of this, he could also work fewer hours. And he could afford to sleep later too. On weekends he could spend sixteen or twenty hours sleeping, until it reached the point where his wife asked him to go to the doctor for a checkup. And Oshri went, because he didn’t want his wife to suspect anything, and when he told the doctor about all the hours he spent sleeping he tried to seem unhappy about it. The tests showed nothing. The doctor recommended more sports and all kinds of changes in his diet. And Oshri promised he’d try, and later gave his wife some half-false version that said that sleeping a lot was part of the recovery process.

‘Congestion on the coastal road’

One weekend when they were returning with their daughter from a visit to his wife’s parents on a kibbutz, they passed an ambulance and a two-car collision. The drivers ahead of them slowed down to rubberneck, and his wife said it was disgusting, and that only in Israel did people behave that way. Their daughter, who’d been asleep in the back, woke up because of the sirens. She put her face up to the window and looked out at one man, who was unconscious, covered in blood, being carried away on a stretcher. She asked them where they were taking the man and Oshri told her they were taking him to a good place. A place filled with colours and tastes and smells that you couldn’t even imagine. He told her about that place, about how your body becomes weightless there, and how even though you don’t want anything, everything there comes true. How there’s no fear there, so that even if something is going to hurt, when it happens it turns into just another kind of feeling, a feeling that you’re grateful to be able to have. He went on and on talking until he noticed his wife’s chiding look. On the radio they reported heavy traffic on the highway, and when he looked in the rearview mirror again he could see Meital smiling and waving bye-bye at the man on the stretcher.

Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

It was quite a coup, one that had attracted the attention not just of the Jewish press, or the British press, but even the worldwide media. Shlomo Luei, Director of the Festival, appeared blinking on various international news feeds. ‘It seemed the natural progression,’ he said. ‘For years, we’ve had demonstrations at the Festival of various aspects of traditional Jewish life that people no longer do at home: koshering chickens, baking challa, taking clothing apart to separate wool and linen and so on. This year we wanted to present a much fuller picture of that ancient way of life; we were very lucky that the Blattsteins  agreed to take part.’

The Blattstein family: father Moshe, mother Leah, son Joshua, 12 and daughter Judith, 16  had been housed in a large enclosure in the centre of the exhibition. Soundproofed from the noise of the expo hall, and surrounded by electronically-controlled one-way glass, they could choose whether or not they looked at the people looking at them. Mostly, they chose not to. In the enclosure they went about their lives calmly and quietly. Mrs Blattstein cooked and cleaned, remembering always to keep meat separate from milk and to say the prayer before taking a lump of uncooked challa dough and burning it in the fire. Mr Blattstein  studied his holy texts and taught Joshua to do the same; it would be the boy’s barmitzvah soon. Judith studied too, but only the texts permitted for women. It was all very fascinating.

The exhibit drew record numbers. For the first time, the Festival of Judaism had to issue timed tickets to prevent undue crowding. Shlomo Luei received a special commendation. The young expo team were nominated for a prestigious award. In their soundproofed glass box, the Blattsteins  chatted and ate and sang and lit the Sabbath candles. Outside, the crowd moved mostly in silence, hands — and sometimes faces — pressed to the glass, like fish observing the world outside their tank, a world which was so different that anything more than a brief visit would prove deadly.

Ellie Markowitz had booked her tickets early, and with particular excitement. She’d always loved the Festival of Judaism, ever since her parents had taken her as a small child. Then, it had  seemed to her the very height of tradition, the essence of what it meant to be a Jew.  To read the preparatory materials, to study the exhibits, to attend the lectures: these were Judaism. She’d been astonished when her grandmother had said that, actually, the Festival of Judaism was a fairly modern invention, barely 50 years old.

‘But what did they do before that?’

‘Oh, before that…’ her grandmother rolled her eyes to the ceiling with the effort of recollection, ‘well, it had been dying for a long time you know. People didn’t feel comfortable anymore in those synagogues. Everyone thought that Real Judaism was meant for someone else. Not the average person. It’s better now: everyone can enjoy the Festival.’

Later in life, Ellie had educated herself about the history of the Festival of Judaism. Her grandmother had been right, broadly. There had been a slow but inevitable decline, predictable for generations. Traditional Judaism was for a certain kind of person: married (but only once), straight, both partners born of Jewish parents, themselves parents of children. Each element was slowly chipped away. The divorce rate hit 50 per cent, and even those who remarried remembered how hard synagogue life had been when they split up, and stayed away. Those who’d  never married understood that they weren’t welcome in the synagogue once they were over 35. Those who fell in love with someone who wasn’t Jewish found no place. Those who were gay came to understand that a 3,000-year-old religion was too stiff and inflexible ever to accommodate them. Those who were infertile found the emphasis on Jewish Continuity too painful to bear. Those women who, with every passing year found the ladies’ gallery and the kiddush rota harder to stomach, received no relief. And even the few remaining married, Jewish, heterosexual couples with children found the thing difficult: one had to be wealthy enough to buy a house within walking distance of a synagogue, one had to ensure that one’s children also married Jews or face ostracism, one had above all to be willing to tolerate the exclusion of one’s friends and family. The numbers fell, and fell, and fell. The great progress of human civilization and thought moved on, while Judaism sat in the dust at the side of the road and watched it pass by.

The Festival of Judaism had been initiated when, for the first time, the active membership of Britain’s synagogues dipped below 1,000 people. The Festival had been a great success: at last, an inclusive Judaism. One had only to buy one’s ticket, spend an hour or two at the festival, and take a brochure home. No one knew how many active members there were of the handful of synagogues still remaining. Most people were surprised that any were left at all.

In their enclosure at the centre of the exhibition hall, the Blattsteins were preparing for Sabbath. This was a popular time of the week and scalped tickets were changing hands for high prices. Ellie felt pleased to have booked early. With her friends Steve and Adam she wandered the concourse, eagerly following the Blattsteins around the areas of their temporary home. Here was Judy Blattstein, in the dining room, laying the table for the Sabbath. Here was Joshua Blattstein, in his bedroom, practising his bar mitzvah portion again.

‘Bet that’s not the only thing he’s practising furiously at his age,’ whispered Adam. ‘Shhhhh!’ said Ellie. ‘Why? He can’t hear us. And even if he could, what’d be the harm?’ ‘It’s just not …’ Ellie frowned, ‘they’re from a more innocent time, you know?’ Adam rolled his eyes and wrapped his arm around Steve’s waist. Steve kissed him gently on the crown of his head and said: ‘I do think there probably wasn’t a time that was totally innocent about sex? Or masturbation? Embarrassed isn’t the same as innocent.’ ‘I know,’ said Ellie, ‘it’s just that…’ ‘Shhhh!’ said  Adam, ‘look, they’re going to light candles!’

This was one of the highlights of the week. Mrs Blattstein and Judith stood before the tray with its six silver candlesticks.  They lit the candles, almost perfectly synchronised in movement, then made that curious beckoning gesture with their hands, stretching out towards the candles and then bringing their cupped hands to their faces,  as if to scoop the light into their eyes. Eyes covered, they muttered the holy words and then, the tension visibly dropping from their shoulders, they embraced. ‘Gut Shabbes,’ said Judith to her mother. ‘Ahhhhh, see?’ said Ellie. ‘Wasn’t that lovely?’ Steve smiled. Adam shrugged: ‘Yeah, alright. What’s going to happen now?’ Ellie consulted the exhibition notes. ‘Now Mr Blattstein goes off to synagogue.’ ‘That’s the place where they men pray and the women watch, right?’ ‘Yup,’ she looked further down, ‘part of the order of service depended on whether you were descended from the Priestly caste. Adorable. And, not only could women not take part in the service, they weren’t allowed to become President of the synagogue board either.’ ‘What about gay men?’ said Steve. ‘Oh ummm … wait, I think that’s in another section.’ Ellie flipped through her guide, ‘oh yeah, here it is. Oh. Yeah. No, they weren’t so cool with it. Sorry.’ ‘What a surprise. Shall we get some food while Blattstein goes to pray?’

Twenty minutes later, after a warming bowl of Traditional Chicken Noodle Soup, they returned to witness the family meal. Mr Blattstein came home from synagogue. His wife welcomed him to the table. The family raised their voices in song: the traditional melodies to greet the Sabbath, to praise the woman for her hard work in creating the day. The expo hall fell completely silent as the Blattsteins sang the simple looping harmony.

‘Beautiful,’ whispered Ellie when they were finished. Adam nodded, thoughtfully. ‘Don’t you think they’re a bit like pandas?’ Steve said. ‘I mean, cute and cuddly, but it turned out to be a total waste of time spending billions of pounds trying to save a species that only ate bamboo and didn’t like having sex.’ They watched in silence for a minute or two, as Joshua told his father about the Talmud he’d studied that week while Mrs Rosenblatt scurried to rearrange the hotplate and make things ready in the kitchen, ‘Just like pandas,’ he said, ‘if they’d really had any kind of survival instinct they’d have moved with the times. They didn’t want to live.’

‘It’s not like the pandas at all,’ said Adam. ‘They weren’t cute and cuddly. Look at the literature. This way of life might look adorable, but that’s just because we know we don’t have to live it. They were vicious and bigoted and racist and misogynist and homophobic. They didn’t make people happy, they made people miserable. Including themselves. They weren’t pandas, they were smallpox. We should be holding a bloody party to celebrate that they’re gone.’

Steve shrugged. Ellie sighed. Adam was always outspoken like this, but she knew perfectly well that he and Steve had decided to have their son Tomas circumcised even while Adam continued to deny that he felt any link at all to his Jewish roots. ‘It’s just a tradition,’ he’d said, ‘like if I was part Navajo I might learn to raindance or something.’ She’d made a noncommittal noise and said nothing.

Steve and Adam left at 9.30pm; they’d promised the babysitter they wouldn’t be home too late. Ellie stayed, though. Her ticket was good until midnight, and she enjoyed the peace of the hall as the evening wore on and more and more people went home. Mrs Blattstein was the first to go to bed, changing into a nightgown in the modesty suite, before settling down to sleep in the bedroom whose see-through walls automatically pixellated after 9pm. Mr Blattstein followed soon after, while Joshua and Judith stayed up past 11 playing a complicated card game and reading. At last, Joshua too went to sleep and Judith went to her bedroom.

On the Sabbath, when the Blattsteins tried not to use electrical devices, the pixellation of the glass walls and the lighting worked automatically. Judith, a night owl, had set her lights to stay on a mild glow most of the night, so she could read in bed. Ellie was the last person left in this part of the expo hall. There wasn’t much to see, after all. Mr and Mrs Blattstein were asleep in a blacked-out room. Joshua was asleep too. Only Judith was still sitting up in bed, reading.

At 11.50pm the warning bell sounded in the hall, and yet Ellie still did not leave. She didn’t know what she was waiting for. She watched the quiet house. She wondered what it would be like to live somewhere like that. So narrow. A community full of identical families, who rejected anyone different. Ellie herself was 36 and single; a community of families like the Blattsteins would have no place for her. It would have no place for the marriage of Steve and Adam, no place for their son, no place for most of her friends. And yet … not everything that is lost is good, but it has still been lost and perhaps it is right to mourn for it. Perhaps one should occasionally mourn even for smallpox, still more for the panda.

At 11.55pm, Judith crept out of bed. Only Ellie was there to see her. Only Ellie, her hand resting on the glass of Judith’s bedroom wall, saw the girl tiptoe across the room to the row of dials controlling the one-way glass. Judith ran her fingertips across the dials and, decisively, flicked a switch. Ellie looked at her and became suddenly aware that Judith could see her too. Judith gasped, her eyes wide. Ellie, in her jeans and T-shirt, stared at Judith, in the long nightgown.

Judith’s hand went back towards the dials and switches. She held up a hand to Ellie’s on the glass. Palm to palm, fingertips to fingertips. Ellie smiled. Judith smiled. The girl flicked the switches and the glass walls turned black.
‘Time now please,’ called the attendant, ‘time to leave now.’

A week after the expo closed, it was announced that, very sadly for her family, Judith had decided to leave the community. She had met a man. A non-Jewish man. There was a flutter of interest: how had she met him? Then a flutter of embarrassment from the expo committee: he had in fact been one of the organisers of the exhibition. They had fallen in love. It was a very sweet story really. The Blattstein family refused to comment. It was understood that they were planning a move to one of the Traditional Reservations; perhaps in America or Israel.

‘That Judith,’ said Steve, ‘I knew there was a glint in her eye.’ ‘Joshua’ll be gone too as soon as he’s old enough,’ said Adam. ‘What kind of life is that for a teenager?’ Ellie shrugged. ‘What do you think they’ll do when there are just 1,000 of them left across the world?’ she said, ‘or 100? I mean, do you think they’ll ever think of relaxing some of those rules? Or welcoming more people in?’ ‘Nah,’ said Steve, ‘they’re locked in now. If they change their minds they’ll have to admit they were always wrong.’ ‘Until what? The last Jew?’ said Adam. ‘The last Jew dies and then they’re all gone? Like what happened to the Shakers and the pandas?’

‘Not really,’ said Ellie. ‘I mean, I’m a Jew, and you’re a Jew. Our mothers were Jewish. There must be millions of people all over the world who are Jewish by birth, even more who have a connection to it. Steve, you’re married to a Jew and you and Adam could just decide that your son’s a Jew. Maybe when the last one’s gone, the last person who felt like they had a right to call themselves a Real Jew, Jewish can just be something you …’

‘Something you can choose to be?’ said Steve, ‘something you can call yourself? Something where you are the one who gets to decide what it means.  Something to do just because you want to, because it speaks to you, because you think the idea of one God and the Sabbath are beautiful?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ellie. ‘When you say it like that, it sounds a bit improbable.’

Naomi Alderman wrote this short story in response to: Connection, Continuity and Community British Jewish Women Speak Out, a review initiated and implemented by an independent group of professional and lay women led by Rosalind Preston OBE. The full report can be found at: www.boardofdeputies.org.uk/file/ConnectionContinuityCommunity.pdf

Naomi Alderman’s new novel The Lessons will be published by Penguin in April 2010.

In between shows, Uncle Nathan was a dutiful clerk at the VAT office. He was not bitter that life had led him to this — a narrow room, a desk, forms piled high. ‘You see, it was here on this wall that it all began,’ he would say, pointing to the plaster wall opposite his desk and drifting away into sweet remembrance. The wall was bare, with no pictures or windows. Only the roving silhouette of Uncle Nathan’s finger, no longer merely pointing now, but capering — a seahorse, a ballerina, a fighter plane.
As Uncle Nathan chuckled, his eyes aglow, his interlocutor would abandon any notion of pitying this man hunched over a broken desk squeezed between a door and a file cabinet. It was a miserable alcove, sliced out of a larger office. The partition had been ordered years before — six clerks on one side to help customers, and Uncle Nathan on the other with a broken ventilator wedged into the wall above his head.
‘But it’s all right. Without this wall, where would I be?’ And a jubilation of fingers would dance recklessly on the wall as Uncle Nathan astonished his guest: a shark, a tractor, a magician, a paratrooper.
On summer evenings, we gathered in the yard with our eyes glued to the outer wall of the building, waiting for Uncle Nathan. Neighbours brought chairs, knitting and transistor radios. They collapsed in their seats and sat there sleepily, their eyelids drooping. High above, Uncle Nathan would zigzag his hands back and forth to cast his creations upon the wall — a hedgehog, a chariot, Ben-Gurion, a cannon. From year to year, the spectacles grew more involved — a prince, a pomegranate, dancing butterflies, an acrobat.
When Uncle Nathan was pensioned off with a partial severance package, he said, ‘It’s all right,’ and for a long time he withdrew into his little ground-floor apartment, unseen and unheard. Since he lived alone, no one knew what went on between his four walls, but at night, through the slits of the perpetually drawn window blinds, one could detect the beam of a flashlight shining on the white wall inside.
When summer came he debuted his new shows, but there were no more lions or monkeys or train engines.
‘Guess!’ Uncle Nathan shouted, spurring us on. He looked a bit peculiar, a little stooped. He wore a long-sleeved shirt. ‘Guess! Guess!’
When our guesses died down he patiently explained. ‘It’s Stelmakh scoring his famous goal — the moment of impact as he headbutts the ball past the great Lev Yashin!’
And indeed, a comparison with the black-and-white photograph immortalizing Israel’s goal against Russia revealed a magnanimous imagination and a depiction of even miniscule details. Every single finger, and thumbs too, came together to represent the legendary scene.
‘Now guess this one!’
Shadows wove swiftly together. No one could guess.
‘Come on, it’s the paratroopers standing in front of the Kotel. Can’t you see?’
‘Do a train engine!’ someone called out from the darkness.
But Uncle Nathan persisted. His face was radiant with the love of his craft. He juggled his fingers. ‘Here’s Sarah Aaronsohn, hero of the Nili underground, committing suicide. And this is Operation Entebbe, just as the first Hercules lands at the airport. Now let’s see if you can guess this one!’
When we sat shiva for Grandpa Mendel at Danny’s place, Uncle Nathan did Mordechai Spiegler scoring his World Cup goal.
‘Not now, it’s not right,’ someone murmured, and the emotionally restrained crowd offered quiet yet heated consent.
But Uncle Nathan went on. ‘Here’s 1977, President Sadat stepping off the plane at Lod Airport. And this is 1978, “A-ba-ni-bi” winning the Eurovision Song Contest. The encore. And now, the three-way handshake at the Camp David peace accords.’
At Oren’s bris he did Eloise kissing Abelard. Uncle Menachem said, ‘Goyishe stuff. Not appropriate,’ and a hum of agreement went through the room. It was enough. This had to stop.
‘Okay, if you don’t want it, that’s fine,’ Uncle Nathan said meekly. He smiled. Then he sat down between Avner and Sima and leaned back quietly.
No one noticed that he wasn’t at Galia’s wedding. He came to Avraham Kimel-Strusman’s shiva, but only sat near the table, slack-jawed, and stared at the pretzels and juice and the stack of yarmulkes.
He was absent from the Passover seder. On Shavuot the whole family gathered at Aunt Perla’s for blintzes, cheesecake and a blank wall. Without Uncle Nathan.
The blinds in his apartment were always drawn. I hoped he was getting ready for summer, but at nights I saw no light through the slats.
When summer began, they came to tell Aunt Perla that Uncle Nathan was hospitalized. In a mental institution. Everyone wanted to know what had happened, and Aunt Perla said, ‘A breakdown.’
An embarrassed trickle of guests proceeded to visit him. People sat and talked. Brought him soft pretzels, juice, pocket money. Tried to cheer him up. ‘Won’t you do a monkey? Or a lion? Paratroopers at the Kotel?’ They gave him frightened looks.
When we left the hospital we stood in the sunny parking lot. Uncle Yitzhak’s Bella wanted to know if what had happened to Uncle Nathan ran in the family. ‘Is it genetic? Because I’ve heard they had other cases.’
‘Well, Nathan is not exactly family,’ said Uncle Menachem and looked at everyone. I looked back at him.
‘I thought he and Aunt Perla were family,’ I said.
They got angry at me. ‘What are you talking about? Don’t interfere.’
Then Uncle Menachem recounted how he had met Nathan after the war, in Poland. He was a stranger, not-family, taken in out of pity because he had lost everything. Uncle Menachem didn’t look at me while he talked, but at Bella. And at everyone else.
Danny said, ‘We always treated him like family. How could this have happened? Poor man…’

They kept visiting him every once in a while, to spend the odd twenty minutes by his silent side, even though he was not-family. But he was slowly forgotten. How long can you sit next to someone who doesn’t even say hello?
We neighborhood kids gathered at Uncle Nathan’s wall. We tried — a train engine, an alligator. But we sensed that the magic was far away, sitting on a chair in a hospital room without talking to anyone.
Aunt Perla visited Uncle Nathan every two weeks. She said he was doing well, that he was quiet, that he’d even become a little religious in the hospital, but not too much. No one took him home for the holidays, but they said he’d made some friends in the institution. That’s nice, everyone said. Eventually Aunt Perla said this couldn’t go on any longer. After all, we were like family, and we had to have him over. No one argued. She was free to invite him. Everyone came to the dinner she hosted, just a little something on Saturday evening after Shabbat.

When Uncle Nathan walked in he looked the same as always but slightly paler, and there was a large black yarmulke on his head. His eyes were shiny and his mouth was slack, as if he was about to make a joke at any moment. Everyone went up to him and asked how he was, they even hugged him, and said, ‘It’s good to see you.’
Uncle Nathan smiled cautiously.
‘You’ll do a show for us today, we heard?’ some people asked.
Uncle Nathan squirmed. ‘That’s what they say.’
After cake and coffee it was time for Uncle Nathan. They stood him silently opposite a big white sheet that someone had hung across the balcony. When Aunt Perla signaled that everything was ready, Uncle Nathan slowly turned to face the sheet.
He pricked up one finger and waved its shadow as if inspecting something important. Everyone watched. When would he start? We were waiting for monkeys, alligators, tractors.
‘Guess what this is,’ said Uncle Nathan. His voice sounded odd, and the only thing on the sheet was his single finger sticking straight up. ‘This is one,’ he explained.
The room was silent. Everyone looked at the new black yarmulke and waited. When would the show start?
Uncle Nathan added another vertical finger.
‘And this?’
‘Two…’ some hesitant voices offered.
‘That’s right,’ Uncle Nathan confirmed, and closed his eyes approvingly. Then he stuck up another finger. ‘And this?’
‘Three!’ the calls came from around the room. I was calling out too now, ‘Three!’
‘And this?’
‘Four!’ we all cheered.
Uncle Nathan opened his eyes, rearranged his yarmulke, and his face took on a grave expression. ‘For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away…’
‘Um…what?’
‘…because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes.’
‘What are you talking about, Nathan dear?’ asked Aunt Perla.
Uncle Nathan concentrated and cast a complicated silhouette on the sheet. ‘This is Uncle Yitzhak, who for years abused little children and touched them. Ask Galia and Ami. They have problems to this day. They told me.’
A new silhouette.
‘And this is half a loaf of bread. Perla will remember. In the ghetto, during an aktion, they said if she told them where the others were hiding they’d let her live and give her half a loaf.’
‘Nathan dear…’
‘And this is the silhouette of a man sitting with his foot in a cast. It’s Danny, whose wife Rachel put a cast on his leg before the Six Day War so he wouldn’t be sent to fight, and instead he worked at the headquarters and got a commendation for homefront contributions. Ha!’
That was all Uncle Nathan had time for, because Danny got up and lunged at him, and so did Boaz, and others joined in too. They wrapped the white sheet around him to make him shut up and hold him still, but Uncle Nathan squirmed like a white blister. He didn’t yell or scream, he just fought, as if he still had more in him. They held him down firmly and called the paramedics.
Afterwards, every Shabbat, I went with Mom and Dad to sit with the family. Every Shabbat. Anyone who didn’t come was gossiped about.
I wanted to understand what Uncle Nathan had said about Uncle Yitzhak. And about Aunt Perla. But they told me to stop — Enough, Uncle Nathan was nothing but a poor old man who had gone crazy. Aunt Perla still went to visit him every two weeks. They said she was a righteous soul. I asked her, ‘What happened to him? What did he say about Danny?’ But she sighed. ‘I have enough trouble,’ she said, ‘now you’re starting too?’
When Passover came, everyone told each other how good it was that the holiday was here, so we’d have a little peace and quiet. We all went to Holon, where Danny had announced he was hosting the seder that year.
We wore yarmulkes and mumbled our way through the haggadah, and it no longer seemed strange that Uncle Nathan was not with us, that he was in that place. Danny kept bowing his head, and I noticed that his shadow on the wall looked like a sack propped over his shoulders. Uncle Yitzhak, who hardly ever came to family gatherings anymore, put his hand over his eyes and had almost no shadow at all. I looked at Galia sitting next to her husband, singing, ‘Had he brought us through the sea but not sunk our oppressors in it — dayenu,’ and her shadow was swaying more than she was. I looked at her and at Uncle Yitzhak. What had Uncle Nathan said? Why wouldn’t anyone explain it to me? Why wasn’t I allowed to ask?

In the end it was pretty easy to get to him. I just had to duck down in the bus for a while so Aunt Perla wouldn’t see me, and then I had to find his room.
‘Teach me how to make shadow puppets?’ I said to Uncle Nathan.
He looked at me silently.
‘If you teach me, I’ll do what you did,’ I said, and he kept staring at me.
Then he suddenly said, ‘We were all children once,’ and he started to cry. He covered his face and the tears streamed through his fingers and down his hands, but he made no sound.
After a while he got up from his chair. He went over to the wall and began to show me, very slowly — an alligator, a monkey. Then a train engine, a fly, an umbrella.
I started visiting him twice a week. No words, only fingers, and sometimes the name of a shadow puppet — this is a clown, this is a hedgehog, this is Elijah slaughtering the false prophets of Baal. First we did the easy ones, then the tricky ones.
On the first day of summer, I announced that I was putting on a shadow play.

First published in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and  Culture. Translated by Jessica Cohen

I never met him. I know exactly where I was standing when I heard he was dead. It was in March 1986 and a friend came in to tell me that the Jewish American novelist I admired had died. ‘Saul Bellow,’ he said, then paused, ‘No, Bernard Malamud’, he corrected himself.

It was a Malamud moment — mainly serious, half comic, also awkward. I remember I thought to myself: I will never get to meet him now, though I had never before thought of doing so. Malamud, not Bellow, was my man. In July 2005 I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, reading my way through the Malamud archive there and read this in a notebook entry for 21 October 1976: ‘Bellow gets Nobel Prize. I win $24.25 in poker.’ This was the little man, the one who always felt he came second, who, while shaving, would mutter unconvincingly to himself in the mirror, ‘Someday I’m going to win.’ He had known no real success until he published his first novel at the age of 38. I can guess what he would have said the day I heard I was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. But at least it wasn’t alongside a biography of Saul Bellow.

I have been reading the work of Bernard Malamud since I was a schoolboy in Nottingham. In 1969, my teacher, the novelist Stanley Middleton, recommended The Fixer, perhaps because he knew I was Jewish and, like Malamud, the son of a shopkeeper. Much later, I wrote about Malamud in a book called The Experience of Reading published in 1992. It was three years after that, sick of straight-and-narrow literary criticism, that I tried out an experimental book called Malamud’s People: it was a collection of short stories about a variety of people reading my man. I don’t know if it was any good; certainly it struggled to find its publisher and when published had no impact. But it gave feeling to my thoughts, embodied in those imagined human narratives, and some freedom too. I even sent a copy of it to Malamud’s London agent, Michael Sissons, who kindly wrote back to say that Malamud would have liked it, and that he would send it on to Malamud’s widow. When I finally met Ann Malamud near the end of 2002, she had no memory of ever having received it.

How I came to write the first-ever life of Malamud, and meet him that way at least, goes like this. It was graduation day at the University of Liverpool, summer 2002, and after the ceremony I was talking to Hermione Lee, the biographer, who had just been presented with an honorary degree. I said to her that I had seen an advertisement a few months earlier for a conference on biography in Oxford, where not only was Hermione featured but also Malamud’s daughter. Was Janna Malamud Smith going to write her father’s biography, I asked her, because I really wanted to read that book. There had been nothing for sixteen years following his death, the family apparently set firmly against intrusion. At my question Hermione Lee looked really startled and said she had only just stepped off the plane from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had spoken to the Malamud clan. They were now, at last, considering giving permission for a biography, she said, because of Malamud’s dwindling fame. Though she insisted it was not in her gift and that she could act only as an intermediary, she nonetheless said to me directly: ‘Why don’t you write it?’

It was chance, or a calling, something never imagined that I hadn’t even tried for, when many things I had tried for hadn’t come off. It made me wary. I sent on to the family and the estate, via Hermione Lee, what I had already written about Malamud. What followed was a series of informal interviews. Later in that summer of 2002 I met Janna Malamud Smith and her husband David on their holiday in London. We talked and though they were very bright and kind, they did make me accompany them to a Tom Stoppard play. Rightly they insisted upon the difficulties and disadvantages of the enterprise. There were family secrets, they said; I might not like Malamud so much after I knew more about him; there were many examples of biographers who had grown to hate their subjects; and for the purposes of inwardness it really wasn’t ideal that I was English rather than American. The matter was left open until, a month before Christmas, without any guarantees as to the outcome, I travelled to the States, where I had never been, to meet Ann Malamud, the widow, in Cambridge and Tim Seldes, Malamud’s agent, in New York. I got the job, I think, because they could see I loved the work and would put that first, as Malamud himself would have wished. My subject was notoriously reticent and thin-skinned, and he didn’t want his work ‘explained’ by his life. I myself had never written a biography before.

Ann Malamud, I found, had multiple sclerosis, but at the end of the discussions that November she sent one of her helpers to drive me and my wife to Mount Auburn cemetery where Malamud’s ashes were buried under a small stone lozenge bearing Malamud’s words from the introduction to a selection of his stories: ‘Art celebrates life and gives us our measure’.We had only rough directions as to where to find the stone but, superstitiously perhaps, I knew that of the three of us I would find it. And that was the final confirmation, where I made my promise. It was a personal work. Stanley Middleton had once said to me that literary criticism was a very minor art, but that the best thing a critic could do was rescue and fight for the literary reputation of a writer he admired — like Leavis with Lawrence.

The initial work fell into two main parts: interview work and archive work, followed by the writing of the biography itself. First there were interviews to be conducted in the States. Many of Malamud’s friends and colleagues had already died, and the rest were wryly warning me to get to them fast. I spent two weeks recording an extended interview with Ann Malamud in January 2003; then the summer on what my family called ‘The Malamud trail’ — a schlep from New York (Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914) to Oregon (where he got his first teaching appointment in a cow college in 1949). The first interview I conducted that summer was with Malamud’s own publisher Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I had wanted the old firm to publish the biography, but Straus had already cheerfully described the project as ‘ridiculous’. Malamud hadn’t had a life, Straus told me: ‘Saul Bellow’s filet mignon, Bernard Malamud’s a hamburger.’ Later the other partner, the real literary man, Robert Giroux told me that Malamud was acutely aware of how the rich and glamorous Straus looked down on him.

But Giroux was like Malamud, a poor boy who had lost his mother early. Malamud’s mother was a schizophrenic who died in a mental hospital, probably a suicide, when the boy was fifteen. I remember Ann Malamud telling me how her husband had described his last sight of his mother, waving to him from a window in the hospital he wasn’t allowed to enter. This was when I first began to realize that there is nothing like being the first biographer. The life of Bernard Malamud was not yet a history, not yet in that public domain I was supposed to turn it into, but still just that — a life, raw and in pieces, remembered by chance, in snatches or notes, and not wholly recoverable. For every one thing I found or heard, I uneasily suspected that there would be another thousand lost or unspoken, arbitrarily or deliberately. But there among the papers in Ann’s flat, for example, were letters from the father, Max Malamud, impoverished grocer, barely literate immigrant, to the clever literary son — letters which had lain seemingly untouched for years. This wasn’t an archive: this was someone’s flat, an incapacitated person who let me into the back study to open drawers and rifle papers as I wished.

Those letters from the father to Malamud were mainly from 1949-52. In 1949 Malamud had left for Oregon with a new young family, having married out of the faith. It was a move that also precipitated the breakdown of Eugene, Malamud’s younger brother, who it turned out had inherited the mother’s schizophrenia. At the end of 1951, Eugene was committed to King’s County, the same hospital where the mother had been a patient. Max’s anguished letters to Bernie were written in heavy black pencil on the brown pieces of shop-paper that the grocer used to wrap goods and write bills, capital letters put in ungrammatically to mark what Max thought were The Important Words. ‘When you talk to Eugene you see he is a Sick Person . . . I don’t think he Will be all right Soon . . . Any time I see him I go home with a Broken Heart.’ ‘Bernie let me know if you Understand my writing if not I will have Somebody to write the letters for Me.’ And this most poignantly on 15 November 1951: ‘I Asked Eugene how he spels psychiatrist and he speled that for me’. Of all people (who else?) he had to ask Eugene how to spell it, suicidal within that medical hospital. A guilty but determined Malamud, safe in Oregon, had to read these letters. Just as later, he had to read and reply to twenty years of regular letters from poor Eugene himself. I read them, as if over Malamud’s shoulder, in the Harry Ransom Center. Malamud had kept every one of them, it seemed, though even outside the mental hospitals Eugene had had nothing to say, an intelligence with no life to report on. I began to know Eugene’s handwriting so well that I could recognise from the sheer physical nature of the hand when he was heading for the next major breakdown. I could hardly convey this in the finished work. But it came out of Bernard Malamud’s damaged and lingering first life — the life he left behind but never got over — even as he began the second as a writer. As a woman says to the protagonist of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural: ‘We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that.’ I loved Malamud because he was the writer of second chances — not the man who gets everything almost effortlessly, it seems, by sheer genius the very first time, but the more ordinary one who struggling makes his achievements the second time around. Malamud’s characters are ordinary equivalent strugglers. ‘What have you made of yourself?’ Malamud would ask his students.

I may still be naïve as a biographer but to me the most cheering thing about the interviews was that they weren’t much good unless the person loved Malamud, beneath his prickly, easily-jarred exterior. But love comes in various forms, and I also had to get involved in Malamud’s sexual infidelities: part of the human story, also part of what he used to make Dubin’s Lives. Malamud was a plain and awkward man, disguised, defensively formal — aware of himself as sacrificing almost everything he had to his work, and as having had even less in his first life. But when he was famous, when he was a teacher in the all-girl liberal arts college at Bennington, he had chances for compensation. So it was that I became an honorary member of the Bennington alumnae sorority, as I was passed on by telephone from one ageing gal to the next. Most of them said they didn’t want to talk about themselves — but they would tell you what Malamud did with X or to Y. When I rang X or Y to seek confirmation, they would usually threaten to sue me (especially if it was true).

I recall a distinctly fruitless trip down the aptly-named Cow Pat Lane in Bennington where a loyal lady resolutely managed to tell me nothing for a length of time that grimly pleased her. Or the writer-colleague of Malamud’s who invited me to his hospital bedside, the day before heart surgery, only to reassure me as to Malamud’s sexual purity. He was all wired up; I could see the monitors: what would happen on them if I told him outright that I knew he was now lying to me? It is not often you can so gauge response or responsibility. But sometimes it was Malamud I could have killed for his neediness or sleaziness.

Ann Malamud herself had been as bravely honest as she could bear to be. The family secrets were ordinary hurtful things, not Good, not Evil, troubles between man and wife, troubles with the children, things often made disproportionate by people making me guess at them through their reticence. It depressed me that some feelings had died in Ann, who herself died just before my book came out (as indeed — she wryly said to me — she rather wished). Yet when I got to the actual writing, I was less bothered by the sexual stuff, and also had to concentrate on pretending that the wife and the daughter and the son were all (as it were) dead so that I could write the thing straight. To their great credit, they never asked to see the text and I would never have let them.

Here is how it ended. Between the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2005, I could do nothing because my time was wholly filled with being Head of the School of English at the University of Liverpool. In July 2005 I spent two weeks looking at letters and notebooks at the Harry Ransom Center out west (37 boxes). That November I spent a month back east at the Library of Congress in Washington, working my way through the manuscripts and revisions of the novels and short stories (13,000 items, 77 containers, 30.6 linear feet). This was an education in writing. This was where I found him inside his day-to-day work, using and using up his life, transforming it amidst his words, still moving me in minute detail.

But all this you will find in the book — which took me a further year to write — though I would sooner you read his books first or instead: The Assistant, The Fixer and Dubin’s Lives above all, because he was a great novelist and is now best known only for the (fine) short stories.

I care about him more now, not less. I can’t bear it when others don’t and so I buttonhole people with my tale of his neglect, like some Malamud street crazy. I write this with a little comic figure of a Hassid in front of me on my desk. Ann Malamud gave it to me: it was on his. She asked me what I would call the little bending gent with his large sad eyes. I told her that was easy: Manny.  ‘May he ensure that it is a good book’ was what she replied.