I said I'd write about important books about the region, so let's get to it.
Believe it or not, back in 2006, Amos Oz and I lived in the same town. A deserted desert wasteland called 'Arad.' It was a town that practically symbolized the Israeli dream gone to seed. Even now when the city of Be'er Sheva burgeons--when I lived in Israel it was a shithole--Israel's most prosperous area is still the North where the Mediterranean's climate produces fruit of the vine everywhere.
When the sherut (long distance taxi) driver dropped off in Arad, he pointed out to the desert vista and said to me in Hebrew: "This is Arad. There's nothing here." (Zeh Arad, Yesh Shoom Davar Kahn) Here was a completely planned city like Columbia MD, created to bespeak Ben-Gurion's dream to 'make the desert bloom.' Yet when I got there, one Russian girl turned to me and said three words in English, "Welcome to hell."
Jerusalem and particularly Tel Aviv are cultural centers that can take their place among the world capitals, but Arad was a place almost completely removed from any cultural activity: crawling with Israelis too malcontented to live in more crowded places, the less successful children of the Negev's original residents who never made it North for better opportunities, ex-soldiers haunted by war experience, Soviet emigres and working class Sephardim seduced by the desert's low expenses, senior pulmonary cases needing a desert environ with clean air, hippy artists who painted no pictures but women who posed nude, and low level Russian mafia. It was still Israel - you got fresh pita at six in the morning, a falafel on every street corner, and the bars never closed. But the movie theater still took a smoke break and the mall was closed by dinner time.
Like everywhere in Israel, Arad had its collection of intellectual eccentrics. There was the ex-journalist I once spent a shabbos with, who spent the entire dinner yelling at her British husband. There was the Swiss artist who sold hashish. Then there was the ultra-orthodox mystic who ran Arad's one used bookstore--it was just a kiosk. She didn't speak English but she sold me an English language copy of Don Quixote and gave me an entire speech about how Don Quixote was a reincarnation of Moses.
And yet Arad was known all through the world as the town of Amos Oz, and his wife used to run the artists' program I was there for. We never knew a thing about what Amos or Nilly used to do for the program, but somewhere in this town they were still said to be there, living in the largest house on the town's outskirts with a full window view of the deserted eternity. He was clearly never home when I walked by, and he probably used it as a vacation house to stay in between speaking engagements; but in Arad his presence was everywhere, like a giant whose shadow loomed over every interaction. Residents would speak of him with a kind of awe that such a titan would make home among them. In vain I would go eat at Tokyo Pizza, said to be his favorite place, wondering if I could spot him, get a spot of original wisdom, and maybe get him interested in my first attempts at astonishingly mediocre fiction. My uncle said to just call him up and ask him to coffee. "Israel is just like that." He said. I could only chicken out. I'd still only read a single book of his and I didn't like it much. I could only take it on faith that he was the writer everyone said he was, and what was I going to say? "Duhhh, I hear you write good books..."?
Amos Oz was the intellectual leader of his country. He wasn't its best novelist. Years later, the Israeli novels that most haunt my memory are A.B. Yehoshua's history soaked dreamscapes. And his op-eds were... well... who gives a shit about op-eds?
But then, after I got home, I encountered A Tale of Love and Darkness. Nothing could have prepared me for it. It is one of the greatest books ever written in any country, telling of his mother's suicide and his adventures in pre-Israel Jerusalem, as a farmer/soldier on an early Israel kibbutz, his encounters with all the historical giants of record, but mostly, the many portraits of his family members - types of people who'd be recognized by every Jew, and really every person the world over. Over its six hundred pages, you laugh and cry on nearly every page. It had just been released when I was in Israel, and I was told to drop everything to read it immediately - I didn't. It has since become something resembling the Israeli National Epic.
Five years ago, when Amos Oz died, I wrote an appraisal about him for the Times of Israel. Relatively speaking, it got a lot of attention. Most of the comments on it were somehow deleted. It was at this moment that I realized that the free bloggers were sacrificial lambs to be thrown to the internet cranks - in other words, they thought we were internet cranks too. I tried to use a shul connection with Haaretz to get them to pay me for my writing, and they just offered me another free blog.
There was every kind of crank who answered that article in every kind of tone, and stupidly, I answered them all, telling just about all of them exactly what I thought of them - as is my wont. There was the guy who called Israel's military funding a 'temptation of Mamon.' There was the guy who correctly pointed out something I fumbled in the article, but somehow answered in the tone of a UN Address, beginning every one of his three paragraph with "No, Mr. Tucker," which echoed the famed Arab 'Three No's of Khartoum' after losing the Six Day War - probably intentionally. Best of all was another who said that God commanded Israel to fight all those who oppose our presence in Israel, and that those who would opposed Israel God would 'eliminate.'
It was this moment when I realized that my best option is to write for myself and hope some influential editor would like it in thirty years time.
But we're here to talk about In the Land of Israel. Hopefully that'll be ready tomorrow.
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