Books that Affected my Life

At work, there is an Internet site where we were asked to name the books that have affected our lives. When I initially considered what books, I thought of one, two, then three, but the more I thought about the subject, the more complex it became. What about books of my childhood when I was a voracious reader? Can I estimate the effect of Freddie the Pig or Mr. Popper’s Penguins? So I found myself digging back into my past, past Oliver Twist and past A Child’s Garden of Verses. The first book of my childhood I picked was Fisherman Sims, illustrated with lovely watercolors, and which I had loved as a young child (and which I still have). Fisherman Sims was tall and thin like my grandfather, although unlike him, Sims had round apple cheeks. He lived in a small town and decided to move farther and farther out and closer to the pond where he fished, until in the winter he lived by the pond (a genuine Thoreau!) and cut a hole in the ice to catch the fish. Inevitably, he returned to the town and to the two small children who were his friends. I remember the story especially for one picture where the tall, lanky fisherman is sitting in the woods, a bird (I believe) is eating out of his hand, and other wild animals surround him. This was the Peaceable Kingdom of my childhood, in which I believed, and fisherman Sims lived, in my child’s eyes, the ideal life.

The next specific book that I remember its effect was Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, which was read to us in the fifth grade, and to which I associate my love of travel and the exhilarating expectation of adventure in foreign lands. I still remember how he stole into Mecca—and was it the wall of the Taj Mahal he climbed to see the moon reflecting in its pools? Whenever Haiti is mentioned in the news, I think immediately of Halliburton’s remarkable history of Toussaint Louverture, the liberator of Haiti. Halliburton offered me both the romantic lure of travel and a democratic conviction both that anyone could do it and that all people were approachable.

Next I would pick two series of books I read avidly as a child, the Random House Landmark history books and a series in red-orange (I believe) illustrated with silhouettes on the childhood of American heroes, of which the one I best remember told about Davy Crockett, Young Rifleman, a book I read parallel to the release of Walt Disney’s movie of which I was a great fan, even having the record of the song, which I played over and over: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free…” Those were different times, when each morning we clapped our right hands over our hearts and pledged allegiance “to the flag of the United States of America” and recited in unison the Lord’s Prayer. These history books were part of my patriotic heritage. I was—and remain—a strong American patriot, a paradox of an idealist American expatriate living in a country with different ideals.

But it is the next book I thought of immediately (much to my initial surprise) when I first considered making my list: Black Like Me. Black Like Me described the experiences of a white man who disguised himself as an Afro-American and spent six weeks on a Greyhound bus travelling through the American South. The book conclusively portrayed the bigotries of the South, made bitterly ironic by the fact that the man being ridiculed was actually white. But, moreover, for me it displayed my father’s axiom that there are always two sides to every story – here, the false side seen by the whites and the truer side (yet still a mask) of the black man they faced. It was, of course, a paean to equality and a convincing argument that no man should be judged by the color of his skin. It was, moreover, a remarkable anthropological endeavor – j an attempt at a fully empathetic imagination, for Griffin, the writer, had to imagine the motives of the whites, the responses of blacks, and his own troubled understanding.

Alongside this book, I would place both Poverty in America and the essays of James Baldwin as conclusive for me at that period in my life. They helped form my Weltanschauung, my world view. One taught me that poverty was a social condition capable of reproducing over generations; the other gave me the voice of the outsider and enunciated the pain of the minority who suffered from prejudice.

When I was 20 and living in Berkeley, California, for a marvelous summer, I read the Bhagavad Gita, and that would be the next book I would hang on my list. I don’t remember much of it – just a line or half a line – “poised like a lotus in the Atman” – and its image of stillness in moving waters, at one with an unchanging center seemed like an alluring magical portent of how I would like to be and never would be.

Other books no doubt affected me. I often read The Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew. When I am depressed, I would read Shakespeare whose language, intelligence, and human empathy would revive my spirits. I am surprised that there are no books of poetry – perhaps I should add “The Raven,” by Poe, which I memorized in the fourth or fifth grade – or Poe’s “The Bells,” which introduced me to the musical possibilities of language. Or “The Four Quartets” by Eliot – or “Song of Myself” by Whitman, which I read one ecstatic evening.

Yet the others all seem more like commentary, not the essential.

APAC and Israel - or my Sister Jane

Several weeks ago, when Bernard Avishai wrote a piece about APAC’S cheering reception of Bibi Netanyahu, he asked himself why these intelligent and no doubt well-meaning people would support continuous building in Jerusalem. “I do not mean to ask this question cynically. There is some kind of hole in the heart that backing Netanyahu over "Jerusalem" seems to be filling. There are intelligent and decent people gathered at AIPAC, and many young people who are eager to stand for something. What is it, other than the insistence that they, who "didn't do anything," fiercely admire Israelis who did something?”

It is impossible to write in the name of all the members of APAC or all those Jews who support Israel whether right or wrong, but I can, at least, talk about my sister, who, although not in APAC, is an ardent member of Hadassah and an unswerving supporter of Israel (far more so than her brother).

My sister Jane came of age in the 1950’s in an American suburb. The last of our grandparents immigrated to the States in 1904; my sister and I were raised with no connection to Europe, Yiddish, or Orthodox Jewish culture. But, in the 1950’s, outside Washington, D.C., it was quite apparent that we were Jews. The first two streets in our neighborhood were closed to Jews and blacks. She was the only Jew in her class in high school—and could not attend her best friend’s Sweet Sixteen because it was held in a restricted country club. Despite Jane’s economic success and assimilation into America, that insecurity still best defines her Jewish identity—she knows that in a flash she can become a persona non grata. So, in part, she holds on to Israel to guarantee herself security even in America. Israel must be steadfast to save her from her own precarious situation.

It would be wrong, however, to limit her strong support for Israel to an existential anxiety that rather easily devolves into fears of another Holocaust. For her, belief in Israel is an article of faith. What I am trying to convey is that her faith in Israel is the substance of her Judaism. She knows no Hebrew, is rather illiterate in Jewish matters (other than sentimental Yiddishkeit, which she, no doubt, learned as an adult). Her husband of 20 years is a non-Jew; both Chanukah and Christmas are celebrated at home. She is a completely assimilated Jew except for this – her devotion to Hadassah and her reverence for Israel.

But perhaps I have probed too far into my sister’s psyche, and the answer to Avishai’s perplexity is far simpler. I have only to consider my own American Zionism before I settled in Israel and learned its Zionist history. I knew nothing of the Second Aliyah or the secular, anti-religious Socialism that built this country. My Zionism was based on quasi-religious sentiment; and I would imagine that like me, those in APAC are moved by populist nostalgia, unconnected to the actual history of the modern State, and shaped by the insecurities of a minority. Or rather, perhaps, as nothing gives one a stronger sense of identity than to have an enemy, in pluralistic America, the very tolerance makes being Jewish an ambivalent proposition: Israel and unquestioning loyalty offers an escape from the intolerable quandary of liberal tolerance. Since they live in the United States, they have no urgency to be responsible or rather they have only responsibility to themselves and the nostalgic fantasy that gives them strength.

A Man's a Man for a That

Part 1

On a Thursday night at the end of January, I drove to Jerusalem to celebrate Robbie Burns’ birthday. My friend Naomi has a Scot cousin who every year brings out the whiskey, the haggis (which, this night, was not a haggis* at all, as it had none of the offal that characterizes the dish) and with revelry, jokes and toasts in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Arabic, celebrates the birthday of the Scots bard.

The celebration was rung in to the sound of bagpipes performed by a young man in red tartan kilt, black vest, and a white purse on a chain below his waist. Lenny, Naomi’s cousin, also went about in a kilt, as did a number of the other guests, several of whom spoke in an accent so thick, it might have been cut as easily as the haggis.

The Bard, whose name was given an inimitable pronunciation (at least to me) that was a cross between Barnes and Burns, as if someone spoke with a mouth full when trying to say a German umlaut, was praised in a long toast that claimed facetiously that Rabbie Burns was none other than Rabbi Burns, who secretly belonged to either a Shabbatei Tzvi sect or Chabad.

To my surprise if not amazement, I discovered in Wikipedia not only that the Burns supper in honor of the Bard’s birthday has been celebrated since 1802 but it has a proscribed order.

So in outline form, the order follows:
1. Host’s welcoming speech—This was Lenny’s moment of glory as he mingled more Yiddish words than I knew with Scottish pride and humor.
2. The Selkirk grace – Skipped.
3. Entrance of the haggis. In truth, the haggis (here but a pumpkin shell filled with a thick vegetarian rice pudding, too sweet for both a haggis and my taste) was introduced with bagpipe fanfare. Mercifully, the Burns’ poem, “Address to a Haggis,” which begins, “Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face/Great chieftain o’ the pudding race,” was not recited.
4. Supper – delayed until after “Immortal Memory.”
5. “Immortal Memory” – This was when Bobbie Burns was gloriously transformed into Rabbi Burns.
6. Appreciation (for the former speaker) – Skipped
7. Toast to the Lassies – Thankfully brief, since this year the man who usually raises the toast was spare in jokes and what was there was generally as flat as beer set out on a summer day.
8. Reply to the Toast to the Lassies – The woman, who claimed afterward that it was all “rubbish,” had the perfect timing of a stand-up comedienne and brought down the house with her toast to men.
9. Other Toasts and Speeches – Spared
10. Works by Burns—These were both read and sung. See Part 2.
11. Closing – Oddly skipped, since even to an American heretic like me, the closing of a Burns supper is self-evident: everyone sings “Auld Lang Syne.”

Part 2

I would like to write about one of Burns’ songs. Dina, an American who despite her white hair and age looked like the idealist hippy she no doubt once was, played a dulcimer (what else?) and sang, “A Man’s a Man for a’ That,” by Robert Burns. The last stanza goes:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a' that,)

That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.

For a' that, an' a' that,

It's coming yet for a' that,

That Man to Man, the world o'er,

Shall brothers be for a' that.

“Gree” means the prize for victory. I thought immediately of Schiller’s, “Ode to Joy,” “An die Freude” with its famous line, “Alle Menschen werden Brüder,” and wondered again at the marvelous hope embodied in those lines. Schiller wrote his ode ten years before Burns; both, no doubt, influenced by the American and French revolutions. How simple that period seems in retrospect—although, of course, it wasn’t: the Reign of Terror, Napoleon’s Wars—but the current of events was limited to Europe and, in part, to the New World, as Europe’s extension. There was no immediate knowledge of the globe, no El Qaeda, no war on terror or Iran’s nuclear threat. Burns could have the conviction that sense and wealth, over all the earth, would bear the prize, for all that, and under their influence, mankind would realize that all men are brothers.

In the Middle East, that conviction retains its radical ring. The Middle East, as I’ve written before, is about putting up fences to define who you are, where one is assaulted daily by the bigotries of tribal loyalty, and many if not most Orthodox Jews and Moslems would never consider the possibility that all men might be brothers. I return to a story I’ve told before. Once, on visiting an Arab friend in Nazareth, we switched to English, since he had spent several years in Berkeley, CA. Suddenly, it seemed to me that in English, unlike Hebrew, Arab and Jew ceased to be relevant. English offered a different Weltanschauung—perhaps, after all, because neither of us was English and the language had no native, patriotic roots in the Motherland; it was, in this case, a lingua franca.

And yet, one can argue, that the Jews, especially the Jews, have a case for disbelieving in idealistic, rather Christian convictions of the brotherhood of man, for throughout history, they have been singled out. I might be laughed at for Robbie Burns’ convictions: no proof is forthcoming. That is the power of the narrow-minded, for evil in history is always there to back them up.

Lenny’s son had protested the past weekend and been arrested. Orthodox Jews have occupied a house in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem and literally expelled its occupants for the past 50 years. The justification – the house was owned by Jews before the War of Independence. According to the same principle, much of Jaffa and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and elsewhere throughout Israel should be returned to Arabs.

When Lenny’s cousin, a fat representative of the “booboisie” as Mencken labeled them, her face creamed with make-up, a large diamond glinting on a finger, her grandchildren’s photos tucked in her I-Phone, heard the crowd’s applause for Yotam, she grimaced. We should have shouted his praise to the rafters.

*For those, like me, who may be unfamiliar with the allure of a true haggis, according to Merriam-Webster, a haggis is “a traditionally Scottish dish that consists of the heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or a calf minced with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach of the animal.”