Here We Go Again

Oh, no! Not another election, I cried when I heard the news on the radio. Once again, after enjoying an uplifting symphony concert we get into the car, turn the radio on to catch up on the day’s news and are hit with the devastating information that since the government is in an untenable position, the decision has been made to dissolve the sitting parliament (Knesset) and set the country on course for another election just about one year after the previous one.

We all know what this means. We have been here five times in the past three years. It means endless discussions on the radio and the TV, as well as never-ending recriminations by commentators and politicians amid accusations of back-stabbing and failure to live up to promises and expectations. Above all it means the vision for some (and nightmare for others) of the return to power of a prime minister charged with grave criminal offences.

The one pleasant surprise in all this was the civilized, even friendly, way the two leaders of the outgoing government, Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, summed up their year in office, took their leave of one another and reviewed the way they had managed the country. Even so, the collapse of the government cannot help leading to a long, painful and expensive election process.

One solution is to follow the advice of a friend and simply refrain from listening to or watching the news. Easier said than done. I agree that hiding one’s head in the sand could prove to be the one way of avoiding stress, but then one risks being ill-informed when the moment of truth arrives on election day.

Among my many sins, I managed to garner an M.A. in Communications from the Hebrew University at one stage of my life. Admittedly, the focus of my studies was not so much the content of the news but rather the linguistic style (register) of various (Hebrew) news programmes on television. I felt that my background as a translator and editor equipped me for this, and it undoubtedly was a fascinating exercise in language analysis for me. At least, as I thought at the time, I wasn’t devoting my thesis to analyzing the cultural impact on Israel of the American TV series ‘Dallas,’ as one of my  fellow-students did. At the time it seemed to me to be an extremely weak topic for a thesis, but I must have been wrong, as the student concerned went on to have a successcul academic career.

In those far-off days (the 1970s) there was only one TV channel in Israel, and each evening most people sat down to watch the fare provided. By now the plethora of channels, as well as access to foreign ones, means that the audience in Israel cannot be analysed quite so easily. Above all, it means that people are exposed more easily to differing views, though it seems that the viewing audience tends to choose channels and programmes that fit their world-view.

The date for the election has not yet been set, but because of the need to allow political parties time to organize and possibly regroup, the prospective date has been set for some time in October or November this year. Thus, we face four or five months of some kind of legislative limbo, with the Knesset unable to pass new laws and the interim government unable or unwilling to introduce or pursue policies. In other words, the country will find itself in a stalemate which bodes ill for its economic and social stability.

Biblical-style visionaries are claiming that the good Lord promised the Land of Israel to the Jews, and this underlies the Zionist ethos. As is often the case, Jews argue among themselves as to how much of the Promised Land is concerned. And when it comes to defining Zionism it is difficult to pin it down. Others (mainly Moslems) point out that the First and Second Temples lasted only a few hundred years each while the El-Aksa Mosque has been sitting atop the Temple Mount for over a thousand years. Whether any of this proves anything is a moot point, and the argument tends to go in favour of whoever is in a physically and military stronger position.

So we will just have to sit and wait for the decision at the ballot-box, and somehow learn to live with the consequences. Because that’s democracy.

Silbermann

This novel by Jacques de Lacretelle, which I read in French, was first published in 1922 It describes the life of a French schoolboy and his relations with a Jewish classmate. The general atmosphere in the school is one of rigid discipline and, as is often the case with teenagers, the pupils tend to form friendships and cliques which exclude anyone who is different.

The boys are divided by religion, with some of the pupils residing in a Catholic institution, while others, including the narrator, are generally Protestant and live with their parents in a suburb of Paris.

The book begins as the youngsters return to school after the long summer vacation. The narrator’s friend, Philippe Robin, returns from the countryside where he has been instructed in the arts of hunting, fishing and shooting by his uncle, and has absorbed his relative’s anti-Semitic sentiments, complaining that the environment was tainted by ‘too many Jews.’

The arrival in their class of a Jewish pupil passes without undue attention until one of the teachers calls upon the Jewish pupil, Silbermann by name, to recite a passage from one of the books they have been required to read. The narrator is struck by the Jewish pupil’s ability to infuse meaning into the phrases, bringing him to a fresh understanding of the text.

A chance encounter with Silbermann when both are out walking in the woods near Paris brings the narrator to the realization that his new classmate, who is evidently endowed with superior intellectual abilities to the other boys, is subject to discrimination and isolation by the rest of the class. Entranced by the prospect of benefiting from the knowledge and intelligence of Silbermann, the narrator takes upon himself the mission of befriending him and redeeming him from his isolation.

The relations between the two boys grow stronger, with Silbermann imparting his wisdom and insights to the narrator, and the narrator happy at finding the intellectual stimulation that he has been unable to obtain from the other boys. As their friendship grows, the other boys in the class become increasingly aggressive and violent towards Silbermann, so that during the recess he is subjected to verbal and even physical taunts and attacks. While the narrator is unable to protect his friend from the attacks, he remains by his side and is himself eventually isolated and shunned by his schoolmates.

The visit by the narrator to Silbermann’s home reveals a luxurious apartment around which contains objets d’art (Silbermann’s father is an antique dealer), and he suddenly sees that his own home is not in the best of taste. His own father is a lawyer, and by chance it falls to him to adjudicate in a case where Silbermann’s father is accused of fraud. At his friend’s request, the narrator seeks to intercede on Silbermann senior’s behalf with his father, whereupon he is subjected to a lecture about the sanctity of the law, the pursuit of justice, and the absolute refusal of his father to take any personal relations into consideration.

The narrator’s parents advise their son to abstain from any further relations with Silbermann, and it is at their instigation that Silbermann’s father is asked to remove his son from the school. This leaves Silbermann with no option but to leave France and join his uncle in the USA where, instead of becoming a man of letters, as he had hoped, he will become a merchant in the jewelry trade.

Before Silbermann leaves France he and the narrator have one final meeting in the woods where they first met. Silbermann embarks on a lengthy tirade, telling his friend that Jews will always rise to the top wherever they are, that they are a superior race, that ‘the chosen people’ is not just an empty phrase but the true nature of Jews everywhere. Enumerating the wealthy Jewish families in Paris and their lavish homes, he derides the intellectural inferiority of the nations in which Jews find themselves, and the benefit those nations derive from having Jews in their midst. This speech, which combines brilliance with arrogance, leaves a lasting impression on the narrator (and on this reader).

Bearing in mind that this book was written in 1922, long before the Holocaust and all the horrors it conveyed, there us something almost visionary in the account of the behaviour of the boys in the class, in many cases even aided and abetted by their teachers, as well as in the account of Silbermann’s arrogance and sense of intellectural superiority.

At the end of the book the narrator finds that in order to curry favour with an important politician, his father has exonerated Silbermann’s father, and this realization causes his ultimate breach with his parents.

I found this well-written book both gripping, entertaining and enlightening, and would recommend it as a prescient account of life in pre-war France (and Europe) for anyone who is prepared to make the effort to read it in French.

Eichmann in Jerusalem Again

When the Nazi criminal, Adolf Eichmann, was put on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 I was nearing the end of my time at a high school for girls in London. There was a fairly strong Jewish contingent, but the overwhelming majority of pupils were Christian. In fact, several of the girls in my class stated that it was their ambition to go to Africa as missionaries, though whether they actually did so or not I never found out.

So, as well as trying to keep up with schoolwork and the impending A-level exams, I found myself suddenly confronted with a subject with which I had only a passing acquaintance. My parents had arrived in England as refugees from Germany just before the war, and they – and we, their children – devoted considerable energy to becoming as English as possible, learning to ‘fit in’ and be ‘just like everyone else.’ The subject of the Holocaust was never discussed in our household, although we children were aware of the losses our family had suffered (we had no grandparents).

I know now that for me becoming just like everyone else was mission impossible in England at that time, though I believe that the country as a whole is far more tolerant and accepting of others than it was then. And so the impact on me of the widespread publicity and coverage given to the Eichmann trial was little short of traumatic. Suddenly the Holocaust and all its horrors were brought to light and laid out in front of me in the newspapers as well as on the TV screen.

All these thoughts were brought back to the surface of my mind by the recent TV broadcast of the first of three programmes presenting the tape recordings made in 1960 by a Nazi sympathizer, a Dutch journalist called Sasser, who was living in Buenos Aires and was friendly with Eichmann there. He interviewed Eichmann over the course of several sessions, and so we hear Eichmann declaring how proud he was of his contribution to achieving the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish problem by sending six million of them to their deaths in concentration camps. Eichmann had been responsible for organizing the trains that criss-crossed Europe, collecting and transporting the masses of individuals in inhuman conditions to work as slave labourers and gassed in the concentration camps.

At his trial in Jerusalem Eichmann claimed to have been ignorant of the fate of the Jews, that he had been a lowly clerk, someone who had simply done his job. After hearing the tape recordings of his voice it is clear that he was no mere cypher. He was imbued with the Nazi ideology of the purity of the Aryan race and the threat of its contamination by alien blood, i.e., Jews. This incorporated a burning hatred of anything and everything Jewish – men, women and children, literature, music, art, society, religion and the very air they breathed.

I have a faint recollection of one of our teachers at school bringing the subject of the trial up in class and asking for our views about it. Some girls were incensed at the idea of the ‘poor chap’ being kidnapped from his home and family and made to stand trial in a foreign country. Most of us Jewish girls thought it only fitting that someone who had played such a pivotal role in so many murders should pay the price for it. When  Eichmann was finally executed and his ashes scattered over the sea some of us recoiled at this ‘barbaric’ treatment, but no one on any side seemed to be very distressed, and of course, those were times when our attention was focused more on Elvis Presley, Tommy Steele and similar teenage idols.

But hearing Eichmann extolling his achievements in his own voice must inevitably shut the mouths of those who claim that the Holocaust never happened.

Tel Aviv — the Nation’s Playground

To start with, there’s the Mediterranean Sea, with its long sandy beaches, kept relatively clean by the municipality, with designated areas for people to play games (ah, the dreaded ‘matkot’ with their constant noisy batting to and fro of a ball against wooden bats), another area for dogs off the leash (but they must be well-behaved) with a special shower for dogs, and the wonderful kilometer after kilometer of the promenade. Anyone venturing out early in the morning (say, 6 a.m., even on a Saturday, supposedly the day of rest), as I did, encounters throngs of other like-minded people, whether singly, in pairs, small groups or even large groups, walking, jogging or running along it. Some people even manage to conduct a conversation as they jog, which seems almost superhuman to me. There are couples or groups wear matching outfits bearing slogans or designs aimed at attracting attention, but most people wear modest sports gear, and of course the ubiquitous sports shoes. And of course, there are also people walking their dogs, though always on a leash. I didn’t notice any dog-poop on the promenade, so presumably their owners were dutiful about cleaning up after their pets.

Always accompanying us as we made our way past the enticing sandy beaches was the constant sound of the waves as they crashed onto the sand. Even if one just stands and looks at the sea, with the azure sky above and the occasional palm tree or scrubby bush breaking the monotony, we feel that the salty sea air is doing us good.

It all takes me back to the summer holidays of my childhood, when the family would decamp to a rented house in Bognor Regis, on England’s south coast, where the chilly waves of the Atlantic ocean would embrace us children as we bravely waded into it, trying to avoid getting entangled in the ubiquitous seaweed. I haven’t ventured into the sea in Tel Aviv, so don’t know if there’s seaweed there or not. What I did notice, however, is that at various points along the promenade Beach Libraries have been set up, where books may be borrowed (and users are requested to return the books after using them).

The city of Tel Aviv itself is awash with eateries, pubs and places of entertainment of all kinds, though we mustn’t forget that it is, after all, a city where real people live – and that house prices there are among the highest in the country.

Our long weekend there was occasioned by a concert of the Israel Philharmonic orchestra and a performance of Handel’s opera ‘Alcina’ within the space of three days. While on this occasion we didn’t use the opportunity to visit the impressive Tel Aviv Museum, we were able to enjoy the delights of the city in various other spheres. For example, as we ate breakfast in our hotel overlooking the sea we could witness people running and playing on the promenade and the beach, and nearby nets had been set up on the sand enabling people to play energetic games of volleyball. The sight was a veritable perpetuum mobile of active energy and sporting prowess.

The one jarring note was a notice at the side, indicating a path leading up towards the town bearing the message ‘Tsunami evacuation route.’ I wonder who thought of that contingency in the placid Mediterranean Sea.