Daniel Taub
The Changing Image of Israel in English Literature
Daniel Taub | The Changing Image of Israel in English Literature
- All right, well, once again, it’s my great pleasure to welcome back Ambassador Daniel Taub. And Daniel, today you’re going to be talking about the changing image of Israel in English literature, is that right?
That’s correct.
Yep. Well, I’m so looking forward to hearing that, you know, and to be continued.
With pleasure, with absolute pleasure. First of all, thank you, Wendy, so much. It was a pleasure being with you in South Africa and it’s a real pleasure being with you here on Lockdown. And you know, Lockdown University, probably the only good thing to come out of Corona. As, you know, one of Lockdown’s fans, it’s just a great opportunity, on behalf of so many, for me to be able to express appreciation, you know, to you.
Oh, thank you.
And indeed to Corina, to Carly, and, I don’t know, all the other members of the team that just make these gifts to the Jewish-
Yeah, literally. And to you. We wouldn’t be able to do it without our amazing presenters.
That’s also true. Your incredible presenters.
And the participants, so you know, we’re a real family, because without each other, Lockdown doesn’t exist. So this is a real… This is a success story of community, and it’s so healthy. Community is the key to good health. One of them anyway.
I think that’s true, and this a wonderful… It should go from strength to strength. So as you said, Wendy, the subject tonight is really the changing image of Israel in English literature, and, you know, for me it’s so nice to be able to step back from all of the current challenges here in Israel, but I don’t think it’s right to start without just noting that today marks 300 days since October 7th, which obviously means 300 days of waiting for the 111 hostages to come home, for the soldiers to return, for the process of healing to begin, and I know we’re all praying for that. But this talk is not about that. It’s about Israel in English literature. I should also clarify, it’s not about Jews in English literature, which is a separate subject that a lot has been written about. Many, many years ago when I was an undergraduate studying English literature, I actually wrote a thesis about Jews in early English literature, and I remember it with a little bit of trauma because the practise in those days was to give a handwritten manuscript to a typist who would type it up for you before you gave it in, and I got my thesis back the night before I was supposed to hand it in the following morning, and the typist, bless her, had corrected all of Chaucer and Milton’s spelling. So that was a night that I don’t want to remember. But this is about today and it’s about Israel. And I think if I try and trace back where my interest in this began, it actually began not when I was a student, but afterwards, one night when I was reading a bedtime story to one of my children.
And the book that I was reading them was a book written by Anthony Horowitz. It’s part of a series called the Alex Rider mysteries. Alex Rider is a sort of teenage James Bond. And in this particular book, which is called “Scorpia,” he is up against an organisation of archvillains from all around the world. And in the course of the book, you meet these different archvillains. And I’m reading this book to my son in bed and I come across the villain Levi Kroll, and he’s described as follows: “It was typical of Levi Kroll to be blunt and to the point. He had joined Scorpia from Mossad, the Israeli secret service, and he still thought of himself as a soldier. For 20 years, he had slept with a nine-millimeter pistol under his pillow. An eyepatch hid the empty socket where his left eye had once been.” And my son in his bed is looking at me and trying to figure out why I’ve stopped reading. And the reason that I’ve stopped reading is that I’m trying to figure out in my own mind when it was that the Israeli eyepatched, you know, war hero has changed from Moshe Dayan to Levi Kroll. And that’s really the question that I had in my mind: what happened to this image of Israelis in English literature? And it’s obviously part of a much larger story, you know, the story of Israel in the British literary imagination, and what I’d like to do is try and share with you what strike me as being some landmarks in that journey. And obviously it goes without saying that there are many others.
We can’t cover them all. And if you feel like it, it would be nice if people put in the chat box, you know, other examples that maybe we aren’t aware of or we haven’t got time to cover. But for our purposes, I think probably one of the happiest places to start is with George Eliot and George Eliot’s wonderful last novel, “Daniel Deronda,” which is a novel that really could have been written with a grant from the Jewish Agency. You know, “Daniel Deronda” the novel is really part of a tradition, a British tradition, of proto-Zionism, support for the return of Jews to Israel. Eliot was influenced. She herself influenced others like Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote his own Zionist novel called “Tancred.” But just to stay with “Daniel Deronda,” Daniel Deronda is an assimilated Jew. He’s so assimilated, in fact, he doesn’t know that he’s Jewish. And in the novel, he’s torn between two heroines, one the rustic British Gwendolen Harleth and the other the exotic Jewish Mirah Lapidoth. And through Mira, he meets her brother, who is a passionate Zionist and makes very powerful speeches in favour of Zionism. So here, for example, is just a little taste. “I say,” Mordecai tells Daniel, “that the effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation until our race takes on again the character of a nationality. Then our race shall have an organic centre, a heart and a brain to watch and guide and execute. The outraged Jew shall have a defence in the court of nations as the outraged Englishman or American and the world will gain as Israel gains, for there will be a community in the van of the East which carries the culture and the sympathies of every great nation in its bosom.”
I have to say, reading that 150 years after it was published, you know, it’s hard to read it without some kind of mixed feeling because even if, you know, Israel is in some ways a vanguard of the culture of the West in the region, it doesn’t always feel, and particularly at the moment, that the outraged Jews have a defence in the court of nations in the way that George Eliot was hoping. One of the things that’s I suppose sad to say about the novel “Daniel Deronda” is it’s a great piece of pro-Zionist literature. Unfortunately, it’s not regarded as a great piece of English literature. Not one of her best novels, so much so that the famous British literary critic F. R. Leavis actually planned to publish a version taking out the Jewish theme, what he thought was the bad half of the novel, and he was going to call it “Gwendolen Harleth: George Eliot’s Superb Last Novel Liberated From Daniel Deronda.” And of course, there’s no small irony here that this book that tried to make the case for the liberation of the Jews was itself the subject of an attempt to liberate English literature from the Jews. But for all of that, it’s a novel that remains a benchmark of proto-Zionism, philosemitism. And those two things don’t always go together, love of the Jews and support for the idea of the establishment of a Jewish state. Somebody who has never been accused of philosemitism is the Scottish novelist John Buchan.
And you know, there’s a sort of instinctive Jewish canon of English writers that even if we don’t know anything else about them, we have a sense that they weren’t on the right side of antisemitism. So you can think about T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, and I think John Buchan probably has his place on that list, and with some justification. His most famous book was “The 39 Steps,” which has a horrendous plot in which Jewish anarchists are accused of conspiring with Jewish capitalists to bring Russia and Germany into a war that would devastate Europe. And in that book we have some of the characters jibing Jews, and obviously this is before the Second World War, in truly horrendous ways. Here’s one of them. “The Jews. For 300 years, they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the back stairs to find him. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir. He is the man who is ruling the world.” So it’s a little bit surprising to discover that John Buchan was actually a Zionist. First of all, his attitude to Jews itself moderated, but in particular, when he was an MP, he came to know Chaim Weizmann and he actually took up the cause of Zionism. Here, for example, here he is in 1934 speaking at a mass demonstration organised by the JNF, the Jewish National Fund. And he says, “When I think of Zionism, I think of it in the first place as a great act of justice. It is reparation for the centuries of cruelty and wrong that have stained the record of nearly every Gentile people.”
And so I think for people who grew up with that sort of instinctive suspicion of John Buchan, it’s a little surprising to discover that he is somebody that actually had his name inscribed in the Golden Book of the Jewish National Fund. One of the most surprising, one of the most interesting references to Israel actually comes in one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature in English. And I say in English, not English literature, because it’s actually Irish. It’s the most famous book in Irish literature, and that’s “Ulysses” by James Joyce. And “Ulysses” really tells the story of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, who is the son of a Jewish father and is very culturally Jewish and very much obsessed or interested in the idea of the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Towards the end of the book, there’s an extraordinary scene where he’s in a sort of singing competition, a sing-off, if you like, with his friend Steven Daedalus, his Catholic friend. And when he is asked to sing a song, he actually sings the first two lines of “Hatikvah.” And obviously this is long before the establishment of the state of Israel. But to my mind, I think one of the most striking references to Israel comes relatively close to the start of the book where he has gone out of his house and he’s walking along one of the main streets in Dublin, Dorset Street. And as he’s walking along, he comes across a flyer, a pamphlet, that is advertising the purchase of land in Palestine.
And here he is looking at the pamphlet. “He walked back along Dorset Street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim: planters’ company. To purchase vast sandy tracts from the Turkish government and to plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel, and construction. Orange groves and immense melon fields north of Jaffa. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book of the union. You can pay 10 down and the balance in yearly instalments. Address: Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin.” Bleibtreustrasse, of course, “stay true street.” And I think this is fascinating because I think this may be the first description in English literature of a Jewish presence in Israel, in Palestine, that isn’t a fantasy utopia but is actually rooted in the reality of the Yishuv. But as curious as he is about it, Bloom is not persuaded and he decides against it. He says, “No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Volcanic lake, the Dead Sea. No fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and cold. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. The oldest people wandered far over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more.” And I think in 1922, that was a very common and understandable assessment, the impossibility of this barren land giving birth. And I think the contrast between that and the vitality of the fledgling state of Israel was something that appealed to many, many British writers. And I want to say a word about that, but before I do, I want to take a slight detour just to something that’s so curious.
Because not everybody was excited about the return of the Jews to their historic homeland, and one of the ones that wasn’t was George Bernard Shaw. And in the archives of the National Library here in Jerusalem, I came across a short play that George Bernard Shaw wrote about what he saw as the real story of the Balfour Declaration. It was never performed, but it was published in the socialist paper the “New Leader,” and it was called “Arthur and the Acetone.” And it basically draws on the fact that the way in which Chaim Weizmann got the ear of the British government to make the case for Zionism was in the First World War, when the British forces were running short of explosives, he discovered a procedure for making acetone out of, you know, chestnuts and other things and that created a sense of gratitude in the government. And that really is the background to Shaw’s short play. And the play begins with Balfour complaining to his assistant it has become prohibitively expensive to kill Germans, and he wants to know, isn’t there a cheaper way to make acetone? And his assistant says to him, “Well, they’re doing their best, but nothing’s come of it so far. There is a chemist in Manchester who has a microbe that makes acetone for next to nothing.” Balfour says, “Send him here instantly. Why hasn’t he been sent here before?” The assistant says, “It’s impossible, sir, unfortunately.” “Nothing is impossible when we are at war! Why is it impossible?” “He is a Jew, sir.” Balfour says, “Is his microbe a Jew?” The assistant says, “I suppose not, sir.”
So reassured that the microbe is not Jewish, then they summon Weizmann and Balfour offers him, you know, exorbitant sums of money. Weizmann says, “I do not ask for money.” So Balfour says, “There must be some misunderstanding. I was informed that you are a Jew.” And then Balfour tries tempting Weizmann with all sorts of other things, with a peerage and everything, and then finally Weizmann reveals the only thing that will make him part with his microbe, and that is Jerusalem. And Balfour agrees. And at that point, George Bernard Shaw himself walks onto the stage reading the Balfour Declaration and muttering, “Another Ulster? As if one were not enough!” So as I say, mercifully, that play was not performed. And I think in a way that was in a minority, because there was within… Certainly within British literary circles, there was a lot of excitement about this extraordinary and unexpected invigoration of a barren land. And I originally came across a book that I think has been largely forgotten that was written by a British soldier who was posted in Israel, in Palestine, during the Mandate period. It’s called “13 Days” and it’s by a writer called Ian Jefferies. It turns out that “Ian Jefferies” was actually his pen name. His real name was Peter Hayes. Afterwards, he became quite an eminent psychiatrist. But at the time he was a soldier, a decorated soldier, in Palestine, and in this story, a very, very funny story, he becomes captivated by and befriends the Haganah fighters. I’ll just give a flavour of one of his first meetings with them. One moment.
He writes, “I was away from school sick or something when antisemitism did the rounds, so I missed it, and when I got to Palestine, I really hadn’t any ideas on the subject at all, except that it seemed an untenable point of view. But after a while, I slipped without fervour into being pro-Semitic, which I suppose is logically as fatuous. But you have to allow for this when I say that as a group, the Yehudis were very imposing that evening. They drank without haste and avoided patriotic songs so that they made less display than the air crews during the war. Personally, they were as handsome as Parisians, and when I looked at them, I felt the stab that you used to get in the war when you heard a friend had joined the Fleet Air Arm.” And then shortly afterwards, obviously, an extremely attractive young Haganah woman soldier comes in and, you know, obviously a plot develops between them. But that is… And through that I should mention, the character in the novel actually becomes a gun runner for the Haganah, and as far as I can figure out from some hints that were made by the author later, it seems like this was a true story, so that’s an extraordinary piece of British and Israeli history that maybe should be rediscovered. But this excitement, this sense of how deeply appealing the vitality, the rebirth within Israel, really reached a peak after 1967 in the late ‘60s and the in '70s, and I think the theme that really reflected that in a certain part of British literature was the kibbutz, which was itself a tremendously potent experience. In the 1970s, throughout the 1970s, close to a hundred thousand British volunteers spent time on kibbutz. And some of them afterwards became quite prominent. You know, Helen Mirren volunteered on kibbutz. Carol Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher’s daughter. Boris Johnson spoke many times about his time on kibbutz and so on. And for many of them, it was a very deep and lasting experience.
And some people wrote about it. Here is a book by a writer from Sheffield, Jonathan Nicholas, and his book is called “Kibbutz Virgin.” And I don’t think “virgin” is coincidental because a lot of these books, you know, hormones play a part in them. But he describes what the experience was like for him. He talks about, you know, that sense of inadequacy. He says, “Israeli soldiers were of course everywhere, standing and talking in small groups or walking around in pairs wide-eyed and serious. Their M16s and Uzis were fully loaded and slung to the front rather than over the shoulders. They were the modern day Roman army, irresistible and all-powerful.” And alongside, you know, the heroism, I think there was something else that appealed to many of the British volunteers and that was the sort of simplicity of kibbutz life, the sparseness of it, the sort of earthy idealism. Here is Jonathan Wilson again. He says, “Amid the harsh, prosaic reality of daily kibbutz life, personalities and attitudes were more important than the size of your house, the type of car you drive, how many figures you had in the bank, or your family background. All these were irrelevant. We were all stripped bare and exposed for who we really were.” And this notion of stripping bare, of a place in a sense where you find out who people really are, was the theme of a play written about British volunteers on kibbutz. It was called “Not Quite Jerusalem,” an excellent play that was made into a slightly less excellent film, by Paul Kember. And you know, it has many of the elements of some of the stories we’ve spoken about.
A non-Jewish volunteer who comes to volunteer on kibbutz and falls in love with a tough, tanned kibbutz girl. But it has other elements as well, and one of the ones that that I find really interesting, two other volunteers are sort of comic characters in the play and what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to… trying to find out in their own minds how to connect the Jews that they know with the Adonises that they’re seeing on the kibbutz. I remember once as a kid in Israel, I heard two public schoolboys from Britain come on the bus, and not thinking that anybody could understand them, one of them said in a very loud, confident voice to the other, “Isn’t it strange that Israelis are so dark when Jews are generally so pale?” And you can understand where that question comes from, and that in a sense is the sort of question that these two characters, these sort of witty volunteers, are trying to answer. And one of them gives his own version of how the idea of volunteering on kibbutz developed. And he says the following: “We gave them this land, you know.” “Who?” “Us. We gave the Jew boys this strip of land. Balfour. I must say, you’ve got to hand it to them. You’ve got to admire them. I mean, only the Jews could come up with a clever idea like volunteering. Just think: they get free labour. That’s clever. They get people to travel thousands of miles to give their free labour. Now that’s brilliant. Not only that, but they even get them to pay their own effing airfare! Now that’s what I call genius.” “He pulls his glasses to the end of his nose and he imitates a music hall Jew.” That’s the stage instruction. “Now Mr. Balfour’s been kind enough to give us this strip of land. It’s going to be sand, sand, and more sand. Not much, but it’s a start. But I’ve been looking at the figures, and to get this place off the ground is going to take a great deal of work, but we’re only a small deal of a people. What we need is labour. What we’ve got is sand.
Now, somebody in their right mind is going to work for a handful of that? Now, I’ve been in the library all morning trying to figure out how you create labour out of nothing and I’ve come up with the following. Surplus energy, that’s the key. Now, what group has surplus energy? You’ve got it. The young, the idealistic, the stupid. Now, I’ve been looking at the word 'volunteer.’ If we can only find some reason to convince them that it’s worth paying their own passage, it will give it shape, and boy will it be cheaper! Now, I’ve been looking at the word ‘sex,’ but with who? Oh, I’ve got it! With each other.” And so on. And so that is his explanation of how Jewish canniness and kibbutz heroism sort of go together. The kibbutz, of course, was a very powerful symbol not just for non-Jews but for Jews too, you know. And parallel to these, there are books… There’s a Jewish writer called Jonathan Wilson who chronicles his experiences on kibbutz in a somewhat similar way. He writes, “It was quite clear that the male kibbutzniks were allowed to seduce the female volunteers while we male volunteers were like young tribesmen who hadn’t passed their initiation rights. We lived together in huts and all the Israeli women were off limits. In any case, none of us stood a chance. We were a bunch of wimpy Westerners up against the heroes of the Six Day War. Forget it.” There’s a sort of irony in these chronicles of kibbutz life, these visitors to Israel, ‘cause the general course of the narrative is it’s the non-Jews that stay and the Jew that leaves. I mean, here again is Jonathan Wilson.
He describes towards the end of his account of his time in his Israel, he goes, “I was head over heels in love with Jerusalem, in love with its noise and its silence and its electric and daunting politics, the sensual overload that it offered every day, sense, colours, vision. All the anxieties of a self-effacing English Jew had fallen away from me, that night flash from the past no more than a raindrop on Freud’s windshield. Aside from my Hebrew language problem, I felt completely at home. So naturally I left.” You know, there’s something about this, I don’t know, diaspora Jewish comfort with discomfort, you know, that gets reflected in these novels. There’s novels that we won’t have a chance to look at. But it’s interesting. A couple of novels that are set in Israel. Bernice Rubens wrote one called “The Sergeant’s Tale” and Linda Grant, who I hope we’ll come to, wrote a novel called “When I Lived in Modern Times.” They have a similar plotline which is a Jew who actually comes to Palestine but uses that to hide his Jewish identity and enable himself to be British in a way that he’s sort of become addicted to their own dissonance. One of the attractions of kibbutz was the fact that it had a slightly anti-establishment feel to it. It offered a sort of ability to rebel. And I think Israel provided that surface for Jews in another way as well. It became a different type of rebellion. I just mentioned Linda Grant, and in addition to her novels, she wrote a really lovely book of essays called “The People on the Street,” which really charts her own journey in relation to Israel, her changing relationship. It starts with defection, which turns into rebellion. You know, her earliest memory of Israel it turns out is a kind of rebellion and she describes it as follows, as I think a young girl in Liverpool.
She says, “I had had a number of differences of opinion with my parents about Israel and Zionism. I started by refusing to come out at the Blue and White Ball at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, where Jewish girls in white dresses with blue sashes across their budding chests were presented against the backdrop of the Israeli flag to the lord mayor, who happened to be Jewish, while the orchestra played 'Hatikva.’ I can’t say I rejected this event out of ideological conviction, more a gut feeling that in 1968 there were better things to do than be a Jewish debutante.” But what starts as a sort of instinct comes in the way that she describes it, as she grows a little bit older, to something far more calculated. And now she describes how Israel for her became something of a weapon that she could use in her personal battle against her parents. “Israel for them,” for her parents, “was a flag, a national anthem, pride. Above all, I think, pride, the antidote to humiliation. And so when I learned about anti-Zionism, I knew that at long last I had a sharpened weapon in the endless war I was fighting against my father, his authority, his physical size. My anti-Zionism was a form of cruelty and abuse which had nothing to do with any Palestinians I’d ever met. It was sound and fury.
My empathy with the Palestinians was a failure of empathy for my parents.” I want to come back to Linda Grant, but if we’re thinking about this kind of rebellion, probably the most biting, even wicked expression of it comes in a book that was a cult book at the time, “The Glittering Prizes” by Frederic Raphael. It was also made into a television series. It charts the journeys of a group of undergraduates at Cambridge and in their lives afterwards, and one of them is Adam Morris, who is the one who seems to be most closely modelled on Frederic Raphael himself. He is Jewish, he’s super talented, he becomes a TV writer, but he’s full of neuroses. And at one point in the book, Raphael describes the speech, again, a wickedly rebellious speech, that Adam Morris gives to the Hampstead Jewish Historical Society. Just to give you a little flavour. “‘Arabs,’ Adam said. ‘It would be marvellous if they’d all just disappear. Well, wouldn’t it? Imagine. We wake up tomorrow morning, have a nice cup of tea, and what do you know? Over to the newsroom and they’ve all disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth, all 100 million of them. Gone. No blood, no mess. Nothing but empty camels, full oil wells, and a very faint odour of the Angel of the Lord with healing in his wings.’ Adam might have been addressing the nation, so careful with the consonants was his delivery. He now paused and considered his actual audience. There were not more than a dozen of them in a small upstairs room in Belsize Park. It was a meeting of the Hampstead Jewish Historical Society.” They try to push back and Adam responds with, you know, extraordinary irreverence.
One of them, a Holocaust survivor, says, “‘Mr. Morris, my name is Mrs. Hirsch. May I say something? Israel was bought and paid for with the blood of six million martyrs.’ ‘Maybe,’ Adam said, ‘that wasn’t what the Arabs wanted for it.’” And so on, and it really gets worse, until the leader of the society feels the need to shut it up with the announcement, to say, “I’d like to tell you about next month’s meeting. The subject will be memories of the Warsaw Ghetto.” So it’s obviously deliberately shocking, but ultimately, Adam’s speech, his diatribe, is not about Israel and it’s not about the Hampstead Jewish Historical Society. It’s about Adam, who can’t live with his Judaism or without it. You know, very early on in the book, his antisemitic headmaster tells him that “you are your own worst enemy,” and it may well be true, you know, but there’s nothing that he can do about it. You know, when he’s speaking about his Jewish identity to his non-Jewish wife, he basically says it’s a birthmark, it’s something that he can’t get rid of. You know, the notion of Jews that can’t escape their Jewishness and it expresses itself as a kind of shocking iconoclasm, rebellion, you know, brings me to an extraordinary book by Howard Jacobson, “The Finkler Question,” which really has as its subject the need to rebel, the need to be critical of Israel. But before we look at that, I think it’s worth taking a moment to think about Howard Jacobson’s own journey in relation to Israel.
And “The Finkler Question” is not the first time that he’s really written about Israel. Some 20 years earlier he wrote a sort of travel diary, I think you would call it, called “Roots Schmoots.” And in this book, amongst the many places in the world he visits, he visits Israel. And he really does a deal with his Australian Catholic wife of the time. As he says it, she will get the sun in Eilat and the midnight mass in Bethlehem and he will get to find out what it’s like for a Jew to return to the Promised Land with a prohibition on his arm. But the truth is, that’s not really what he’s looking for. What he’s really looking for is a provocation. I mean, that’s not to say he’s not moved when he lands, of all places, in Eilat Airport, Ovda Airport. He gets moved in a way he quite didn’t expect. And then of course he’s thrilled by the Israeli girl who is teaching aerobics next to the pool. He describes her as having a Nefertiti profile and a voice more gravelly than the Negev. So this is Jewishness with a body, the thing that you come to Israel for. But actually the thing that he’s come to Israel for, as I said, is an argument, and he finds several actually. And many of them are very funny. You know, he’s looking for a fight and he sees when he’s in Jerusalem a poster for a discussion at the Israel Centre in Jerusalem on the question of a Torah state in Israel. So he goes along to listen in to this very, very funny debate, discussion, in the Israel Centre. I’ll just give you a little flavour. You know, one of the characters who is participating in this discussion belongs to a woman who is dressed in green, who’s come in late, is wearing a snood. He describes her.
“She is pale-faced, olive pale. She wears spectacles. I don’t mean she is in spectacles. I mean she wears them. All artificiality has been scoured off her skin, yet there is such a vanity of austerity about her you cannot believe the effect has been achieved without artificial means. It takes makeup to unmake you to this degree. She would have you see her as a Hebrew nun, but there’s more activity in her face than most monastic orders would allow. She assumes at once, despite arriving late, an air of moral and intellectual superiority to everything that is being said. She’s not American. She’s Israeli. She doesn’t press this advantage overtly, but she lets the fact of it play like music through her words. When she speaks, you hear it. Also when she speaks, she rolls a sweet between her fingers. I’m confident that she will unwrap the sweet eventually and put it in her mouth while someone else is talking so that her cheeks will bulge contemptuously with it. But not yet. She knows to save the sweet.” So the discussion carries on. Although he thought he was going to remain silent, you know, when the participants describe their vision for a Torah state in Israel, finally he can control himself no longer. And he describes it. “Something snaps in my soul and at last I break all my working rules, a felony for which the punishment is suffocation by snood, and cause silence and consternation to fall on the room by announcing myself as a non-Torah Jew from England, I know who I am now, who has turned up tonight to hear what fine examples might be set to him by Torah Jews and has found here in Israel, irony of ironies, nothing but blasphemy and sacrilege.”
But Jacobson is anything if not a equal opportunities arguer, and later on in the evening he finds himself back in his hotel and there he meets a couple from Tunbridge Wells, a non-Jewish couple who have come out to volunteer helping the Palestinians, and he finds that if anything even more annoying than his argument earlier in the evening. He describes them. It’s actually their honeymoon. “They pack me around with baby talk. It’s like having my tummy tickled. They can’t get over the warmth and friendliness of the Palestinian people. Travelling on a bus with them is, well, just lovely. Their eyes meet in a love tryst. They are getting off on the Palestinian people. It’s a sort of extended honeymoon that they are on. It’s gone cold in the vicinity of my heart. We are past dealing with rights and wrongs, truths or untruths. I smell the enemies of my soul. Forget the Palestinians. With them we’re just having a family quarrel. The enemies of my soul come from Tunbridge Wells. For a couple of mad minutes, thanks to Philip, I regret having fought with my people over the Torah. This is the effect the enemies of your soul have on you. They convict you of disloyalty. They turn you into Mordecai. They put a snood upon your head.” So it’s a book with a lot of anger. Strikingly, Israel is actually not a major feature of his journey. It wasn’t a part of his original trip. The real roots for him lie in Lithuania, which I suppose makes “The Finkler Question” two decades later all the more surprising. Finkler, who is the very Jewish central character, is not looking for an argument.
Like a number of Jacobson’s other sort of main characters, he is consumed by neurosis and envy and he’s looking for fame and affirmation, and he finds it, actually, when he is being interviewed on “Desert Island Discs.” And here’s how it goes. “For his book, he picked the ‘Dialogues’ of Plato, but he also wondered if they would bend the rules this once and let him take along the complete ‘Harry Potter’ as well. ‘As light relief from all that seriousness?’ the presenter asked. ‘No, that’s the Plato,’ Finkler said, joking of course, but also meaning it for those who wanted him to mean it. To prove to his wife….” His wife is not Jewish. “To prove to his wife that she was not the only Jew in their marriage, he made much of going to synagogue every morning with his father and listening to him saying prayers for his parents, great searing lamentations that moved and marked him deeply. You could hear, he thought, a pin drop in the studio. His Jewishness had always been immeasurably important to him, he confided, a matter of daily solace and inspiration, but he couldn’t stay silent about the dispossession of the Palestinians. ‘In the matter of Palestine,’ he went on, with a falter in his voice, ‘I am profoundly ashamed.’” And all of a sudden he starts to get recognition as a Jew who is prepared to speak up as a Jew against Israel. And this becomes his status. It’s something that his wife, his non-Jewish wife and his non-Jewish friends, cannot get their heads around. He is a member of an organisation, he becomes the head of an organisation called Ash, which is short for “ashamed Jews,” and they try to figure it out.
“‘How can they be ashamed? How can you be ashamed of a country that’s not yours?’ Treslove, the friend, was truly puzzled. ‘It’s because they’re Jewish.’ ‘But you said they’re not ashamed of being Jewish.’ ‘Exactly, but they are ashamed as Jews.’ ‘Ashamed as Jews of a country of which they’re not citizens?’ Tyler laid a hand on his arm again. ‘Look, what do we know? I think you’ve got to be one to get it.’ ‘Be one what?’ ‘Be a Jew. You’ve got to be a Jew to get why you’re ashamed of being a Jew.’ ‘I always forget that you’re not.’ ‘Well, I’m not, except by adoption and hard work.’ ‘But at least that way you’re not ashamed.’ ‘I’m not. If anything I’m rather proud. Though not of my husband. Of him I’m ashamed.’ ‘So you’re both ashamed?’ ‘Yes, but of different things.’ ‘He is ashamed because he’s a Jew and I’m ashamed because he’s not.’” So altogether a sort of fascinating journey that he goes on. And Finkler starts getting more and more standing in woke circles as a Jewish voice critical of Israel. Before I go back to actually what happens with him, I want to mention what I think is a really interesting and funny description of the wokeness of academia which comes from a British non-Jewish outstanding novelist called Ian McEwan in a book called “Solar.” And “Solar” actually describes… At its centre is a Nobel Prize-winning professor of physics, Michael Beard, and he makes the mistake in a lecture of quoting research that suggests that there might be some statistical linguistic differences between men and women, and the moment that he suggests that there is something potentially biological that is different between men and women, he comes under massive attack and he is summoned to a hearing in the senate where his tenure is going to be revoked and he’s going to lose his job.
The woman who is due to be making the case against him in the senate hearing is a prominent feminist academic by the name of Nancy Temple, but at the very last minute, she cannot come. And it looks like nothing can save him except for the fact that Nancy Temple’s replacement is another feminist academic, but one who comes from Israel, which puts the very politically correct audience in something of a quandary. Here’s how Ian McEwan describes it. “Nancy Temple’s replacement was Susan Appelbaum, a visiting academic from Tel Aviv who lectured in cognitive psychology and was as light as a bird in her red and blue frock, with a twittering voice to match. She was nervous speaking in public and made an awkward start. In the theatre, there was suspicion and some confusion. From the point of view of the audience, which seemed to be of one mind in all things, she had points in her favour and points against. It was clear she was speaking against Beard. On the other hand, she was a Jew, an Israeli, and by association an oppressor of Palestinians. Perhaps she was a Zionist. Perhaps she had served in the army. And once she got underway, the hostility in the room began to grow. This was a postmodern crowd with well-developed antennae for the unacceptable line. Its heart, when not seized by correct utterance from correct quarters, turned cold.” In the end, the same political correctness that damned him actually saved him. So going back to Finkler, it’s this kind of dissonance that starts wearing away at his conviction. He finds internal inconsistencies. He’s called upon to say that Israel’s responses to attacks are disproportionate, but then he starts thinking, well, disproportionate to what? And it must be disproportionate to some provocation, but how then can he be saying that its responses are unprovoked and so on?
And suddenly you see him somewhat losing confidence. And towards the end of the book, he has been invited to participate in a public debate about Israel, while on the other side of the debate are the community Jews, the leaders of the Jewish community. And there is a very wry description that I have to say has some echoes of things that I think will sound familiar. In this debate, actually a colleague of Finkler makes the opening speech and then the community leaders respond. And here’s how Jacobson describes it. “The community Jews were no match for her, which wasn’t saying much. Had they been the only speakers, they’d still have contrived to lose the debate. They confounded themselves. Finkler sighed as they went through routines that had been tired when he first heard them from his father 30 or more years before. How tiny Israel was, how longstanding were Jewish claims to the land, how few of the Palestinians were truly indigenous, how Israel had offered the world, but every effort at peacemaking had been rebuffed by the Arabs, how much more necessary than ever a secure Israel was in a world in which antisemitism was on the increase. Why didn’t they hire him to write their scripts?” And then at some point in the debate, Finkler, rather like Howard Jacobson himself in the Israel Centre in Jerusalem 20 years earlier, snaps, and he finds himself giving the speech that he thinks that the community leaders should have given.
And if you want to read it, you can find it in “The Finkler Question.” I do want to start to draw to a close, and so I think… I think one of the things that is worth pointing out is how much of the literature that purports to be about Israel isn’t actually about Israel. Israel is a sort of concept. And Howard Jacobson said that himself in an essay he wrote. “For the purposes of my narrative, Israel exists only poetically in the imaginations of those who cannot adequately describe themselves without it.” And he goes on to say, “I happen to think that this is largely true outside my novel as well, that Israel performs a function greater than itself, enabling or disabling ideas about belonging and disengagement, fanning the flames of ancient allegiances and animosities. For many Jews and non-Jews in this country, Israel has become a figure of speech, the occasion for wild and whirling words, a pretext for bottling up or setting loose emotions which originate somewhere else entirely.” And I think that’s very often the case. In a sense, Israel is somewhat like the shtetl, which has become a fantasy or projection. It’s either a warm and loving home or it’s a claustrophobic and backwards ghetto depending on the place that we’re projecting from. And Israel itself is a kind of screen for a projection. You know, the screen has some contours, but the colours and the shapes tend to come from the identity of the person that’s projecting. So where does the real Israel fit into all of this?
When I was in the UK, I was struck by how many conspicuously Jewish commentators, writers, columnists there were in the leading medium. You know, if I would look through the weekend papers, I would probably find at least 10 Jewish bylines with people for whom being Jewish was part of their public identity. But Israel was complicated. It was a repeated, nagging, awkward theme. You know, just to give a couple of examples, here’s Hugo Rifkind writing in the “Times.” He writes, “All Jews are not Israel and Israel is not all Jews. Indeed, if you’ve met Israelis and you’ve met British Jews, you may have noticed that they don’t even have much in common. David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, once declared that Zionism would only be complete once there were Jewish policemen arresting Jewish prostitutes and throwing them in Jewish jails, and in North London, I must confess, that’s just not the way things are going. It is a rare Jew nonetheless that can honestly maintain that his or her Judaism is wholly incidental to his or her views on Israel and to his or her reaction to what Israel does. My own response, I’ve noticed, takes the form of hypersensitivity, and there’s a lot, frankly, to be hypersensitive about. It’s like fighting my way through a thicket.” And here at the other end of the political spectrum is Jonathan Freedland writing in the “Guardian.” “Through it all is the weariness. I feel it myself, a deep fatigue with this struggle, with the actions of both sides and, sometimes especially, with their cheerleaders abroad. And I’m weary of those two sides’ followers waving the flags of Israel and Palestine as if these were rival football teams, my team all good, their team all bad. My team the perennial David, their team a permanent Goliath.”
And one more. Here is a 50-word description of what it means to be Jewish that the “JC” invited Giles Coren to give. “Nothing is ever simple. It means always buying an extra round so that nobody will call you mean, endlessly hoping Israel will do the right thing so you won’t have to defend it at dinner parties, and praying for girls so you don’t have to talk about circumcision.” So nothing is ever simple. You know, Rifkind is trapped in a thicket, Friedland feels this fatigue, this exhaustion of caring, Giles Coren has got this endless fear of being embarrassed by Israel at the pub. Is there anything else that can give you all of those feelings? And I think probably the closest thing is family that can lay those claims on you. So to try and distil a sort of rough arc from the journey that we’ve travelled, I think we’ve sort of started to move from romantic idealizations of Israel to a sort of fascination with the earthy pragmatism of the Yishuv, of the kibbutz, to a rebellion against that and then a questioning of that rebellion, and finally to a sort of inescapable sense of caring complexity. And I think in a way that sort of parallels a very Zionist narrative, because in a way, it’s the result of a reentry into the world of reality. You know, when you leave the world of utopias, of internally generated expectations, fantasised kibbutz life, then you have to start developing this really complicated relationship with an entity, a near and far entity, that makes a claim on us. And I think there’s obviously a separate discussion to be had about what that means for relationships with Israel, for British people’s relationships with Israel, for Jewish people’s relationships with Israel, but I think if for the purpose of our discussion we’re focusing on that reflection in literature, I’m actually optimistic, because I think we’re talking about a next generation that is going to be far more based on the reality of Israel, you know, and liberated from false projections, if you like.
And if you want to get a little taste of it, I think you can see it in a young generation of American writers now. There’s a sort of second generation of great Jewish American writers. I’m thinking of writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss and Nathan Englander and Joshua Cohen who have all written books about Israel, and it’s striking to compare them to a previous generation of books like by Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. You know, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow would write about cousins in Israel and this younger generation, strikingly, often talk about visiting their second cousins in Israel. You can see there’s something a little bit further. But on the other hand, they are far more rooted in the reality of Israel. As a general rule, they speak Hebrew, they’ve spent extended periods in Israel, they have deep friendships, and there’s something that reads truer. There’s something that reads more rooted in the reality. And just to get a flavour of it and maybe to finish, you know, I think of all the authors that I’ve mentioned, the one who I think comes closest to that in the British literary context is Linda Grant, who I mentioned, both a novelist and the author of those essays, “The People on the Street.” And she herself had lived in Israel. She sees it with a sort of wry humour. She describes Israel as the only country in the world where “excuse me” can sound like a threat.
But she ends her book of essays I think in quite a moving way. And she is on the beach in Tel Aviv and she is trying to make sense of all of the conflicting emotions that she feels, her Arab Israeli friends, her Jewish Israeli friends, and so on. And here’s how she describes it on the beach. “I saw my parents there, walking arm in arm, along the beach-front lights. I saw Samir’s grandparents alighting from the bus that brought them south from Bassa. I saw Jaffa. I saw Jonah washed up on its shore from the whale’s belly. I saw us all. I knew I was among people who are not so pleasant and whom suffering has not improved. To love them is no easy thing, and so I thought, this is where I belong, as a person who has come to understand that love is not a sentimental matter. Love is pain and loss. It must end in grief and mourning because we will close our eyes one day and our beloved will vanish for all eternity. But only in this city does life for me exist in all of its dimensions, our human tragedy with all its comic elements. And still it does.” Thank you. Only if we have time, maybe I’ll just open up and run very quickly down the comments and questions. Let’s have a look.
Q&A and Comments:
So somebody’s commented, somebody’s said, “I don’t think Linda Grant lived in Israel. I seem to remember that she did spend time here. I remember that she had a competition among some of her journalist friends to try and find the best English translation of that very unique Israeli word "davka,” and the winner of the competition, I seem to remember, was the one that came up with a “Casablanca”-inspired line, ‘Of all of the bars in all of the world, davka, you had to walk into mine,’ which I always thought was great.
Would love to receive a list of books.“ I’ll be very happy to provide it. Maybe I’ll send it to you, Wendy, or to Corina. "I would love a lecture like this in American literature.” I would love to try and do this. I would have to do an awful lot of reading. You know, it’s an issue that I’m…
Q: What was the first book I mentioned?
A: The very first book that I mentioned was a kids’ book. It was called “Scorpia.” It was by Anthony Horowitz and it’s part of the Alex Rider series. But the first serious book I mentioned was “Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot.
“Please give the name of a book by Linda Grant.” The book I was quoting from was “The People on the Street,” but the novel I was referring to, I think it’s called “When I Lived in Modern Times.”
I think that’s most of the questions. It’s been a real pleasure spending time with you and let’s hope for good news on all fronts. Thank you very much.