essays

How can one describe this classic book on Israel? At one level it is a personal account of one American writer's journey to Israel and England and back but scratch beneath the surface and you see the incredible panoply of faces and voices that is Israel. Here is A.B. Yehoshoua who writes "that because our spiritual life ... cannot revolve around anything but [political questions], you cannot spare yourself, spiritually, for other things." Here is a bomb going off in London just as it recently did in Israel. And here is Saul Bellow mourning the "six young [British] people" who were murdered while simultaneously noting that "the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute."

Here is Abu Zuluf, editor of El Kuds whose automobile terrorists have blown up because he is trying to follow what Saul Bellow feels is a "line of conciliation and peace."

Here is the Greek quarter in Jerusalem covered in grapevine; there is the Jewish quarter where the principal relic is the ben-Zakkai synagogue, blown up by the Jordanians when they took over in 1948 and as Saul Bellow walks toward it he hears, somewhere, as Arab boys are racing their donkeys down a hill.

Here is a Yemenite synagogue; there a Souk, the public market. And everywhere there is a profusion of communities: Arabs, Jews from Arab lands, Asian lands, Europe, Africa, Christians, Kurds, Hindus.... Everywhere a cacophony of voices; everywhere people mingling, arguing, making peace, making war, while philosophers philosophize and writers write.

And he sits down to dinner with families who have lost children and as he passes dishes (Sephardic dishes, Indian dishes, Arab dishes, European dishes all mixed together) "on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents-two on a break from school-stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died."

"This is how we live, mister," a cabby tells Bellow (in what language: Ladino, Hebrew, Arabic?), "his voice cracking. "Okay? We live this way."