The Counterlife (24 page)

All I could think while slowly rereading Shuki's surprising letter is that there really is no eluding one's fate. I will never lack for those large taboos between whose jawlike pincers I've had to insert my kind of talent. “This rebuke,” I thought, “will follow me to my grave. And who knows, if the fellows at the Wailing Wall are right, maybe even beyond.”

Ramat Gan

Dec. 10, 1978

Dear Nathan,

I'm sitting at home worrying about you out at Agor. What worries me is that you too are going to become enamored of Mordecai Lippman. What worries me is that you are going to be misled by his vividness and take him to be a far more interesting character than he is. Vivid Jews, after all, haven't been absent from your fiction, nor would Lippman be our first delinquent to delight your imagination. One would have to be blind not to recognize the fascination for you of Jewish self-exaggeration and the hypnotic appeal of a Jew unrestrained, as opposed to your relative indifference as a novelist to our gentle, rational thinkers, our Jewish models of sweetness and light. The people you actually like and admire you find least fascinating, while everything cautious in your own typically ironic and tightly self-disciplined Jewish nature is disproportionately engaged by the spectacle of what morally repels you, of your antithesis, the unimpeded and excessive Jew whose life is anything but a guarded, defended masquerade of clever self-concealment and whose talent runs not toward dialectics like yours but to apocalypse. What worries me is that what you will see in Lippman and his cohorts is an irresistible Jewish circus, a great show, and that what is morally inspiring to one misguided Zuckerman boy will be richly entertaining to the other, a writer with a strong proclivity for exploring serious, even grave, subjects through their comical possibilities. What makes you a normal Jew, Nathan, is how you are riveted by Jewish abnormality.

But if he proves so entertaining to you that you decide you must write about him, I ask you to keep in mind that (
a
) Lippman is not such an interesting character as a first impression may lead you to think—get half an inch beyond the tirade and he is a fairly uninteresting, if not to say asinine, crackpot, a one-dimensional, repetitious windbag, predictably devious, etc.; (
b
) Lippman alone is misleading, he is not the society, he is at the fringe of the society; to the outsider, diatribe is the hallmark of our society, and because he's the ultimate diatribalist, one of those here who must give you the whole ideology at one time
every time,
he may even strike you as the very embodiment of Israel. In fact he is a very peripheral paranoid, the most extreme, fanatical voice that this situation engenders, and though potentially he can do even more damage than a Senator Joseph McCarthy, we are talking about a similar kind of phenomenon, a psychopath alienated profoundly from the country's common sense and wholly marginal to its ordinary, everyday life (of which you will have seen nothing, by the way); (
c
) there is, in short, a little more to this country than what you hear out at Agor from Lippman, or even what you heard in Tel Aviv from me (another peripheral character—the peripheral crank, wasted down to his grievances); remember, if you take as your subject his diatribe—or mine—you will be playing with an argument for which people
die.
Young people do die here for what we are arguing about. My brother died for it, my son can die for it—and may yet—not to speak of other people's children. And they die because they are plugged into something which has a dimension far beyond Lippman's menacing antics.

This is not England, where a stranger can live forever and find out nothing. Even in a matter of hours you pick up vivid impressions in a country like this where everybody is airing his opinion all over the place and out in the open public policy is constantly and feverishly being debated—but don't be misled by them. What is at stake is serious business, and however tedious and unrelenting my disgust may be for much that's been going on here for years, however little I continue to adhere to my father's brand of Zionism, my tantrums are informed by an inescapable identification with Israel's struggle; I feel a certain responsibility to this country, a responsibility which is not inherent to your life, understandably, but is to mine. Disillusionment is a way of caring for one's country too. But what worries me isn't that you'll affront my national pride; it's that if and when you write about your visit to Agor, the average reader of Nathan Zuckerman is going to identify Israel with Lippman. No matter what you write, Lippman will come out stronger than anyone else, and the average reader will remember him better than anyone else and think he is Israel. Lippman is ugly, Lippman is extreme, equals Israel is ugly, the Israeli is extreme—this fanatical voice stands for the state. And this could do much harm.

I don't look upon danger as they do at Agor, but that doesn't mean there
is
no danger. Even if to my mind Agor is itself the greatest danger, there is still the danger from without that is no less real and could be far more horrendous. I don't say this rancorously—I don't accuse all of the Gentiles of being against us, which is the line they take in Lippman's cave, but we do have unrelenting detractors who despise us: you had dinner with some in London the other night, I was interviewed by another on the BBC, they work at newspapers in Fleet Street and all over Europe. You yourself may understand when face-to-face with Lippman that he is a lying, fanatical, right-wing son of a bitch perverting the humane principles on which this state was founded, but to them you would be presenting in Lippman the filthy heart of Zionism, the true face of the Jewish state that they relentlessly represent to the world as chauvinist, militant, aggressive, and power-mad. Moreover, they will be able to say a Jew wrote the bloody thing and he's telling the truth at last. Nathan, this
is
serious business: we have enemies with whom we are continually at war, and though we're much stronger than they are, we are not invincible. These wars in which our kids' lives are at stake are filling us with a sense of death all the time. We live like a person who is being pinpricked so much that it's not our life that's in danger but our sanity. Our sanity and our sons.

Before you sit down to entertain America with Lippman, take a minute to think about this—a vivid story, maybe too vivid, but I'm trying to make a point.

In 1973, had the Arabs attacked on Rosh Hashanah instead of Yom Kippur, we would really have been in a bad way. On Yom Kippur almost everybody is home. You don't drive, you don't travel anywhere, you don't go anywhere—many of us don't like it but still we stay home, it's the easiest way. And so when they attacked that day, even though our defenses were down—because of overconfidence and arrogance, and misreading the other side—when the alarm went out, everybody was home. All you had to do was say goodbye to your family. There was nobody on the roads, you could get to where you had to go, you could get the tanks out to the fronts, and everything was simple. Had they attacked a week earlier, if their Intelligence people had had the intelligence to tell them to strike on Rosh Hashanah, a holy day less solemnly observed, when at least half the country was someplace else—tens of thousands of people all over the Sinai, down in Sharm el Sheikh, people from the south up in Tiberias, and all with their families—had they attacked on that day, and everybody had to get the family home before they joined their unit, and the roads were full, people going in every direction, and the army couldn't get the big trailers with the tanks out to the front, then we would have been in real trouble. They would have run right in, and it would have been utter chaos. I'm not saying they would have conquered us, but we would have been knee-deep in blood, our homes destroyed, children attacked in their shelters—it would have been horrifying. I'm pointing this out to you not to make a case for the Israel's-survival-is-at-stake school of military thinking but to demonstrate that a lot of things are illusory.

Now the next point. Virtually everything we have right now, we have to get from abroad. I'm thinking of those things that, if we didn't have them, the Arab countries wouldn't tolerate us for a minute (and I include plutonium). What keeps them at bay doesn't come from our resources but from somebody else's pocket; as I complained to you the other day, mostly it comes from what Carter appropriates and what his Congress wants to go along with. What we have comes out of the pocket of the fellow from Kansas—part of each of his tax dollars goes to arm Jews. And why should he pay for the Jews? The other side is always trying to undermine us, to erode this support, and their argument is getting better all the time; just a little more help from Begin in the way of stupid policy, and they can indeed foster a situation in which the reluctance to keep shelling out is going to grow until finally nobody in the U.S. feels obligated to fork over three billion a year to keep a lot of Yids in guns. In order to keep doling out the dollars, that American has to believe that the Israeli is more or less the same as himself, the same decent sort of guy after the same sort of decent things. And that is not Mordecai Lippman. If Lippman and his followers are not the Jews they want to pay money for, I won't blame them. He may have a vivid enough point of view to enchant a satirical Jewish writer, but who from Kansas needs to support that kind of stuff with his hard-earned dough?

By the way, you haven't met Lippman's Arab counterpart yet and been assaulted head-on by the wildness of
his
rhetoric. I'm sure that at Agor you will have heard Lippman talking about the Arabs and how we must rule them, but if you haven't heard the Arabs talk about ruling, if you haven't
seen
them ruling, then as a satirist you're in for an even bigger treat. Jewish ranting and bullshitting there is—but, however entertaining you may find Lippman's, the Arab ranting and bullshitting has a distinction all its own, and the characters spewing it are no less ugly. A week in Syria and you could write satires forever. Don't be misled by Lippman's odiousness—his Arab counterpart is as bad if not worse. Above all, don't mislead the guy in Kansas. It's too damn complicated for that.

I hope that you'll see not only the high comedy of what I'm saying but the gravity as well. The comedy is obvious: Shuki the Patriot and P.R. man—the call for Jewish solidarity, for Jewish responsibility, from your perverse old guide to Yarkon Street. So be it—I am a ridiculously twisted freak, as hopelessly torqued by the demands of this predicament as anybody else in our original history. But then that's a character even more up your alley. Write about an Israeli malcontent like me, politically impotent, morally torn apart, and weary to death of being angry with everyone. But be careful representing Lippman.

Shuki

P.S. I'm not unaware that you've been up against this sort of argument before from Jews in America. I myself always thought that you couldn't write that stuff unless you were more confident about the world you were describing than any of the people who were attacking you. American Jews are tremendously defensive—in a way being defensive
is
American Judaism. It's always seemed to me, from my Israeli perspective, that there's a kind of defensiveness there that's a civil religion. And yet here I am suddenly outdoing your most censorious critic. “How can you think of betraying us like this?” Here we go again. There are endangered Jews on the one hand, vulnerable through misrepresentation to the most dire consequences, and on the other hand there is the dangerous, potentially destructive Jewish writer poised to misrepresent and ruin everything; and that Jewish writer isn't any old Jewish writer, but, because you are inclined to be funny and ironical about things one is supposed to be
for
or
against
—because, paradoxically, it is your
Jewish
gift to make things look ludicrous, laughable, or absurd, including, alas, even the Jew's vulnerable situation—he frequently turns out to be you. At the symposium here in 1960 you were condemned from the audience by a vociferous American-born Israeli citizen for being unforgivably blind in your fiction to the horror of Hitler's slaughter; nearly twenty years later you finally return only to be warned by me about the three billion dollars in American aid without which we here could find ourselves at a terrible disadvantage. First the six million, now the three billion—no, it
doesn't
end. Cautionary exhortation, political calculation, subliminal fear of a catastrophic outcome—all this Jewish
fraughtness
(if that is English) is something that your Gentile American contemporaries have never had to bother about. Well, that's their tough luck. In a society like yours, where eminent novelists are without serious social impact whatever the honors they accumulate and however much noise or money they make, it may even be exhilarating to find that the consequences of what you write are real, whether you like it or not.

Aloft/El Al

Dec. 11, 1978

Dear Shuki,

Stop calling me a normal Jew. There's no such animal, and why should there be? How could the upshot of that history be normalcy? I'm as abnormal as you are. I've just become in my middle years one of the more subtle forms that the abnormality takes. Which brings me to my point—it's entirely debatable as to whether in the halls of Congress it would be Lippman who would get them to scratching their heads over the three billion dollars, or whether it might not actually be you. It's Lippman, after all, who is the unequivocal patriot and devout believer, whose morality is plain and unambiguous, whose rhetoric is righteous and readily accessible, and to whom a nation's ideological agenda is hardly an object for sardonic scrutiny. Guys like Lippman are a great success in America, actually seem quite normal, are even sometimes elected President, whereas the guys like you that we've got are not regularly rewarded with congressional citations. As for the average taxpayer, he might not find a hypercritical, dissident journalist highly attuned to historical paradox and scathing in his judgment of the very country with which he remains deeply identified as sympathetic a figure as I do—nor is he at all likely to find him preferable to a Jewish General Patton whose monomaniac devotion to the narrowest nationalist cause may not be as alien to Kansas as you think. My writing about Shuki Elchanan instead of Mordecai Lippman is not going to do Israel any good in the Congress or among the voters, and you're unrealistic to think so. It may also be unrealistic to think that even if I were inspired to fictionalize Agor, my story, read by my congressman, would thereby alter Jewish history. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Jewish history, Congress does not depend upon prose narrative to figure out how to divvy up the take; the conception of the world held by 99% of the population, in Congress
and
out, owes a lot more—