Robert Matas – Page 2

Calderon begins discussion with Bride

Newly elected Knesset member Ruth Calderon caused a sensation last year when she engaged a member of the Sephardi religious party Shas in a discussion of Talmud during her inaugural speech in the Knesset. She had brought her copy of the Talmud to the podium and read a short excerpt about Rav Rehumi, who stayed at the yeshivah to study on Yom Kipper eve. He fell to his death at the moment that his wife realized he was not coming home.

Calderon read the cryptic tale first in Aramaic “for the music” and then in Hebrew. The story is one of 17 included in A Bride for One Night, an English translation (by Ilana Kurshan) published earlier this year by the Jewish Public Society. The book was originally published in Hebrew, in 2001.

image - A Bride for One Night cover — In the lingo of these modern times, this book is a “disruptor.”

Although the talmudic tale focuses on Rav Rehumi, Calderon in the book re-imagines the event from the perspective of his unnamed wife. The vivid first-person account portrays the wife’s challenging life, from her joy in marriage to her anxiety as she waits.

Similar to the format of the Talmud, Calderon also offers commentary on the story. “Just between us,” she writes in her breezy style, “Rev Rehumi was a rather mediocre scholar.”

Calderon draws a parallel to the legends of Odysseus, who took 10 years to return home after the Trojan War. “The time has come to turn to the true hero of the story, she who carries Rav Rehumi on her shoulders. She is like Odysseus’ Penelope,” Calderon says, referring to the wife of the wandering warrior. “If Rav Rehumi achieved any fame, it is thanks to his wife.”

The commentary, with footnotes, offers some observations about the Rav’s emotional life, romance and morals. Calderon also provides sources for further readings.

In the lingo of these modern times, this book is a “disruptor.” Calderon has flung open the doors to the study halls. She has liberated the ancient texts, taken them out of the exclusive preserve of religious male scholars and made them accessible to anyone who is interested in learning about how to be a good human being.

Calderon brings a strong woman’s voice to talmudic vignettes about a world that is, in her words, “topsy-turvy, frightening and funny. It is a world in which the impossible happens.”

A mortal steals the knife of the Angel of Death, God asks to be blessed by a human being, the wife of a Torah scholar dresses up as a prostitute and seduces her husband, a rabbi sets a test for his wife that leads to her suicide. Legend, creative literature, relationship advice, folk sayings, guideposts for a moral life – Calderon turns the kaleidoscope just a little bit and the ancient Talmud becomes a text for modern times.

The title of the book, A Bride for One Night, comes from a text in the Babylonia Talmud. In two different passages, highly respected itinerant rabbis ask, Who will be mine for a day? The question is associated with a woman selected by the community as a “wife” for the duration of the rabbi’s stay. Calderon imagines these situations from the perspective of a widow who has been asked to be a bride for one night.

“I don’t know how one learns a story like this in a yeshivah,” she writes in her reflections on this scandalous passage. “I read it with mixed feelings.”

After considering several possible ways to understand the tale, she concludes that the concept of marriage for a day is intended as a test of Western conventions about love.

Calderon approaches the sacred text with the belief that the contemporary Jewish bookshelf should include the Talmud, Midrash, kabbalist works and other religious texts, as well as Jewish literature and Torah.

The Talmud and other sacred texts are the common denominators of all the Jews of the world, she said recently during an address to graduates of Hebrew College in Boston. More than half of the Jews in the world are secular.

Calderon was raised in a secular family and neither her school nor the local library had a copy of the Talmud. She had to search for copies of sacred texts. She began to study Talmud after her army service.

“This is something that belongs to me, is part of me and I had to reclaim it,” she told the graduates.

Long before she entered politics, Calderon was involved in studying Talmud and bringing sacred Jewish texts to all Jews, regardless of religious affiliations or their level of learning. She founded Elul in Jerusalem, Israel’s first “secular yeshivah” for men and women, religious and non-religious. She also started Alma, a Home for Hebrew Culture, in Tel Aviv.

For many years, she studied daf yomi, a daily page of the Talmud, with a chavruta, a study partner. She has a doctorate in talmudic literature from Hebrew University.

With this book, Calderon challenges the reader to imagine the life and inner thoughts of religious leaders, to see beyond the text on the page and flesh out all those mentioned in the tale. She takes ancient theology, often with outdated and distasteful concepts, and reinterprets them for the modern age.

Similar to Talmud, her book is best read with a study partner. She has said during the U.S. promotional tour for the book that the imaginative tales reflect what she was thinking at the time she wrote them, and that she might offer an entirely different point of view if she were to become engaged once again in studying those passages. Yes, she is right there. A Bride for One Night is just the beginning of the discussion.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. A Bride for One Night is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve it, or any other book, call 604-257-5181 or email library@jccgv.bc.ca. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

The indefatigable people

With antisemitism on the rise in France, England and around the world, and Israel once again facing strong headwinds, it seems like a good time to turn to history in search of some perspective on current events.

Earlier this year, PBS aired a popular two-part series on Jewish history written and presented by historian Simon Schama. The account was based largely on his book The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD (ecco, 2013), published last year in Great Britain. The second volume – from 1492 to the present – is expected this fall.

Schama, a highly accomplished, award-winning historian, has written 16 books and 40 television documentaries, focusing mostly on art histories and histories of France, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States. He has also written a book about Israel and the Rothschilds.

In The Story of the Jews, he abandons the distance of an academic historian right at the start. This is the story of his people, not an abstract theoretical exercise of writing history. He is emotionally invested in this project and his passion spills out on every page.

It is also clear from the beginning that he is foremost a storyteller. With incredible details, Schama delights the reader with engaging vignettes about both ordinary and powerful people. He recreates pivotal moments in history by describing the events in the life of individuals, from Sheloman, a young Jewish mercenary in service of the Persian authorities in 475 BCE, to Abraham Zacuto, a talmudist and astronomer who put together the almanac used by Christopher Columbus in 1492.

His chatty approach to history occasionally drifts sideways, as if he just thought about something else he has to tell you. It is sometimes difficult to keep up with him, as he jumps across centuries, from country to country, commenting about historical figures without much of an introduction.

Yet, the story he tells is compelling. Schama wanders through numerous far-flung Jewish communities offering fascinating glimpses of their lives and surprising perspectives on Jewish worship, relations with non-Jews and violence against Jews.

More than is usually acknowledged, the Jewish community has lived in harmony with paganism, Christianity and Muslim societies. Yet the portrait of Jewish history, as he presents it, is not pretty.

Despite periods of well-being, sometimes stretching over hundreds of years, the story of the Jews is an account of a people caught in a Sisyphean cycle of settlement, prosperity, persecution and devastation, over and over again, beginning in Egypt in the 13th century BCE.

Schama delves deep into the brutal rhetoric and cruel fantasies that provoked the recurring waves of murder and expulsion. Over two millennia, the venom spread from Egypt to Palestine and throughout the empires of Persia, Greece, Rome and Constantinople, through the Near East and the Iberian peninsula.

He shines an especially bright light on the vile attacks by the disciples and followers of Jesus, who turned Jews into god-killers and child murderers. He writes about Jewish moneylenders, international traders, tax collectors and confidantes of royalty who were once in favor and then were not.

Schama begins his story in Elephantine, an island in the Nile. The Persians in 525 BCE found a thriving, well-established Jewish community in Elephantine, with a temple that had many similarities to the First Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed 61 years earlier.

Documents describing Elephantine provide the first hard evidence of daily life of Jews in antiquity. The Elephantine community was wiped out by the mid-fourth century BCE.

Again and again, Jewish communities were decimated. England expelled its Jews in 1290; France issued edicts expelling Jews in 1306 and again in 1394. Spain followed in 1492 and Portugal in 1497. Schama identifies 29 towns under Christian rule across Europe that kicked out Jews between 1010 and 1540.

Many civilizations have thrived and then disappeared. But Judaism has always found a way to thrive and survive. Schama attributes the durability of Judaism to its devotion to words.

Judaism depends neither on its leaders, its places of worship nor its institutions. The Jewish people are the People of the Book; words are the invisible thread that binds Jews together over the millennia, Schama posits. And, according to his perspective, the Torah is the work of the religious and intellectual elite in the eighth to fifth century BCE, nearly 500 years after the Exodus was supposed to have happened.

Reverting to his role as academic, he notes that no evidence – archeological or otherwise – has turned up to substantiate the Exodus story. By his account, the Hebrew Bible is a picture of Israel’s imagined origins and ancestry that converges at some point with the reality of Jewish history.

The genius of the priests, prophets and writers, intellectual elites, was to make their writing sacred, in standardized Hebrew, as the exclusive carrier of YHWH’s law and historic vision, Schama writes. “Thus encoded and set down, the spoken (and memorized) scroll could and would outlive monuments and military forces of empires.”

The Hebrew Bible was fashioned to be the common possession of elite and ordinary people, he writes. The divinity was reflected in the words of the Torah, not in an image of a divine creature or a person. And the message of the Torah was not confined to a holy sanctuary. It is to be posted on the doorpost of every Jew and bound on the head and arms of all Jews as they prayed.

“No part of life, no dwelling or body, was to be free of the scroll-book … the Torah was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and counsel…. The speaking scroll was designed to survive incineration … the people of YHWH could be broken and slaughtered, but their book would be indefatigable.”

In other words, survival depends on, as his subtitle says, “finding the words” for Torah study and the story of the Jews.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Simon Schama’s book is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve it, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

Chua and Rubenfeld attempt to explain success

Jews are the quintessential successful minority group by any economic measure. They are disproportionately represented in the top rankings in business, finance, the arts, scientific research, architecture, medicine and law.

Likewise, Mormons and new immigrants to the United States from China, Cuba, India, Lebanon, Nigeria and Iran make the A-list in several sectors of the economy. Meanwhile, black Americans and other groups are stuck in poverty with high unemployment and poor education.

Those are bold statements that many will dismiss as thoughtless stereotypes. But are the generalizations baseless?

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (Penguin Press, 2014) is an exploration into the murky world of these sweeping statements. Amy Chua, the “tiger mom” who gained notoriety for her harsh approach to child-rearing, teams up with her accomplished husband Jed Rubenfeld to investigate some of the reasons why some groups rise to the top of their fields, become wealthy and win awards while others seem to be stuck in a rut.

They look for similarities in the lives of numerous celebrities, corporate leaders and ordinary folks, both those who have done well and those who have failed. They dissect statistics from census tracks that identify highest income and medium household net worth for different ages within several racial, cultural and religious groups. They count CEOs and CFOs, the percentage of students at Harvard and other Ivy League schools, and the winners of Nobel Prizes, as well as cultural awards such as Pulitzers and Academy Awards. They slice and dice the numbers in numerous ways and come out with specific cultural traits – a set of values and beliefs, habits and practices – that they conclude are similar among all the overachieving groups.

• Disproportionately successful groups have a deeply internalized belief in the specialness or superiority of their group, rooted in theology, history or a social hierarchy from their homeland.

• Members of the group have a feeling of insecurity and anxiety about losing whatever they have. They feel what they do is never good enough.

• Those that succeed emphasize discipline and controlling impulses. They stand up to temptation and persevere despite difficulties.

The authors conclude that people grappling with a superiority complex and deep insecurities are often consumed with resentments that push them to overachieve. The chip-on-the-shoulder attitude feeds their ambition and creates an “I’ll show them” mentality. Impulse control mixed with strong ambition yields a toughness and resilience. Members of the group who succeed found virtue in enduring hardships, deferring gratification and standing up to adversity.

There is some truth in what they write. The biographies of prominent Jewish figures often include anecdotes reflecting those traits. Although Jews are “Chosen People,” they are haunted, at least in the world of Philip Roth and Woody Allen, by insecurities stemming from unrelenting parental pressure and social scorn, real and imagined. Impulse control has been foundational to Judaism religion, with its 613 injunctions, and its countless prescriptions for a traditional Jewish way of life. It is those forces that Chua and Rubenfeld say converge to produce success.

Jewish overachievers are not the only ones. Chua and Rubenfeld find parallels with the traits of the disproportionate number of Mormons who are top executives of Fortune 500 companies, with Asian American students with the highest grades (but reportedly the lowest self-esteem of any racial group), and Cubans in Miami who have become millionaires and hold a disproportionate number of managerial and professional positions in the city, and dominate local politics. Other immigrant groups under similar pressures also do well.

But such sweeping statements set off alarms. Caustic reviews since the book was released earlier this year dismissed their conclusions as racist, faulty social science and, some may say even worse, dull prose. Reviewers attacked Chua and Rubenfeld, two Yale University law professors, for sloppy thinking and loose use of language.

Chua and Rubenfeld are accustomed to public attention, although usually of a different sort. Chua was on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world after the release of her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011. Rubenfeld has written two international bestselling novels and two books on constitutional law.

They challenge those who assume equality is always beneficial. They suggest that promoting self-esteem, instant gratification and excessive freedom in parenting may be counter-productive.

Clearly frustrated by the response to their new book, Chua and Rubenfeld have said their work has been misunderstood and misrepresented. They believe they have been aggressively attacked because their conclusions run counter to contemporary political correctness. They challenge those who assume equality is always beneficial. They suggest that promoting self-esteem, instant gratification and excessive freedom in parenting may be counter-productive.

They attribute the uproar over the book also to an aversion to talk about opinions about various cultural, ethnic and religious groups doing significantly better than others, views that are often expressed privately but not in a public forum.

They got that right. It’s a minefield filled with explosive emotions and ugly name-calling. However, they are right in insisting that the overheated rhetoric contributes nothing to an understanding of the subject. We should not avoid discussion of hot issues, especially those that have given rise to some of the worst atrocities in the world. Chua and Rubenfeld raise matters that should engage society in dispassionate debate.

So let’s turn the spotlight on their generalizations about cultural traits to see whether they stand up.

Chua and Rubenfeld try to inoculate their conclusions from criticism with 78 pages of notes and listing the names of 50 research assistants who worked with them. They claim statements about economic performance and cultural attitudes are backed up by empirical, historical or sociological evidence. “But when there are differences between groups, we will come out and say so,” they write.

They look at characteristics of those struggling in poverty and at a variety of explanations for their situation, such as IQ levels. They conclude that the disparities between rich and poor cannot be explained by these alternatives.

They also note the transitory nature of the accomplishments achieved through the sense of superiority, insecurities and hard work. Success wipes out insecurity and eases assimilation; equality undermines personal ambition. They conclude that traits that helped disproportionately successful groups rarely survive beyond the first two generations.

They downplay the impact of politics, social institutions and education. Personal responsibility plays virtually no role in their theories. Factors that have nothing to do with religion, culture or race, such as the lack of opportunity, discrimination and the devastating impact of economic forces, are minimized. Chua and Rubenfeld gloss over examples that do not fit their theories.

Despite their extensive references to research, the book reads as if Chua and Rubenfeld started with conclusions and then went out to find evidence to back up what they wanted to say. Focusing on cultural traits has blinded them to other influences. They downplay the impact of politics, social institutions and education. Personal responsibility plays virtually no role in their theories. Factors that have nothing to do with religion, culture or race, such as the lack of opportunity, discrimination and the devastating impact of economic forces, are minimized. Chua and Rubenfeld gloss over examples that do not fit their theories. Are they cherry-picking results and leaving out conflicting evidence? An answer to that question will be left to the experts in the field.

Anticipating probably the most controversial attack, the charge of racism, the authors write they are identifying psychological attitudes, not characteristics from birth. They acknowledge that significant differences exist within every racial, cultural and religious group. Even the subgroups they identify were not monolithic. But, they say, that did not make the culture traits less real or powerful.

They also anticipate critics who say the traits they celebrate often do not lead to happiness. They acknowledge that the attributes of success come with their own distinctive pathology that misshaped lives. Deeply insecure people were often neurotic and a sense of superiority led to arrogance and easily morphed into racism. They concede that the “triple package” might not be a recipe for happiness. Indeed, the rewards of the triple package were mostly financial. However, they posit that material success can lay the foundation for a happier life.

So, what are we left with after so many qualifications? As pop sociology, the book provides numerous provocative sparks for conversation around the Shabbat table. They identify some traits of some people who have achieved much. But many would insist their glib generalizations are just plain wrong. At times, they seem to give the strongest arguments against their own conclusions. And, even if you accept what they say, it is doubtful that many parents would want their children to follow the direction that Chua and Rubenfeld have set out.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve this book, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

A family underworld – Bossin and Lansky

Children rarely pay much attention to what their parents are doing. Children of parents on the wrong side of the law are no different. They may overhear conversations around the house, they may see headlines in the media but they do not really connect the dots. Two books this spring offer portraits from the criminal world: years after their fathers died, the daughter of notorious New York mobster Meyer Lansky and the son of Toronto bookie Davy Bossin look back with fondness for their dads.

Both men were in illegal gambling. In fact, stories about some characters mentioned in one of these books are fleshed out in the other. However, the families led extremely different lives. Lansky, who organized “organized crime,” lived in unbound luxury, while Bossin, a bookie who worked for people who were Lansky associates, had a more modest life. Yet both fathers were sons of Jewish immigrant families who came to North America in the early 20th century. Born three years apart, their Jewish roots were never far from the surface, regardless of what else they did.

Canadian folksinger Bob Bossin tells the story of his father in Davy the Punk: A Story of Bookies, Toronto the Good, the Mob and My Dad (Porcupine’s Quill). Bossin was 17 years old when his father died in 1963. He searches to understand what his father did, piecing together an image from recollections of family and friends, newspaper clippings and official government records. With his talent for storytelling and sense of wry humor, Bossin provides a cinematically rich narrative that allows readers to feel they are eavesdropping on conversations among close friends who are not such bad guys. It’s easy to picture the circle of seasoned Jewish men sitting around a coffee-stained table, telling tales.

book cover - Davy the Punk — Bob Bossin tells the story of his father in *Davy the Punk*.

Bossin frankly admits that some of the anecdotes he recounts may be not completely true. He comes from a family of storytellers who, he says, quoting U.S. journalist A.J. Liebling, diverge from recorded history “only to improve upon it.” In this world, a good story trumps just about anything else.

Bossin begins at a Toronto ballpark, Maple Leaf Stadium, where his father’s cronies swap stories, argue politics and only incidentally watch baseball. They talk about Benny the Shoykhet, who was a bookie and kept a few kosher chickens in case of a police raid, and Arnie “the Shnook” Schneider, who was busted for bookmaking 67 times but was never sent to jail. Mysteriously, the court lost records of previous incidents and considered each arrest as a first offence.

With stories about his grandparents, Bossin places his family inside the historical moments of a generation of Jews who emigrated to North America from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Davy was born a few months later, in 1905, on a ship taking his grandmother to reunite with his grandfather in Toronto.

The Bossins remained poor and continued to feel the sting of antisemitism in Canada – Eaton’s and other stores would not hire Jews, for example. But, in Canada, there were no pogroms. The Bossins, like other Jews, were left alone to live their lives.

Bossin believes that his father quickly abandoned his Judaism in the New World, but a small spark remained. Every week, his father went back to his parents’ home for Shabbat dinner.

The family finally escaped poverty and prejudice through horses. Bossin cautions that his account may not be exactly true but, if it is, his father was 11 years old when legendary racetrack owner Abram Orpen brought him into the gambling business. By the age of 17, his father was a “tout,” who hung around the racetrack offering tips to betters. Eventually, he became “a lay-off artist.” Bossin explains that bookies spread their risk of unexpected losses by laying off bets, similar to re-insurance in the insurance industry. Arnold Rothstein, a powerful U.S. gangster best known as the man who fixed the 1919 World Series, developed the system for bookies across North America.

As “a bookie’s bookie,” his father avoided run-ins with the law for almost 20 years. His father was also involved in broadcasting horse-race results for bookmakers from tracks across the country. He ran the Toronto operation for U.S. gangsters, eventually having more than 50 phones in his home. Police repeatedly tried to close him down, beginning in 1939, but the only penalty he ever paid was a $10 fine for running a business out of his home.

Every incident mentioned in the book leads to another engaging story about his father’s circle of friends, punters, gangsters or the occasional crackdown on gambling. Bossin’s father, who is lovingly portrayed as a quiet, generous man, moved from horses to nightclubs in the early 1950s, running Theatrical Attractions, a talent agency that booked stars such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Ella Fitzgerald. He managed the Crew Cuts before they had big hits. Davy died at the age of 58.

Excellent storyteller that he is, Bossin saves one of his best stories for the closing. He discovers his mother had an affair shortly before he was born. Was Davy really his father? He decides, yes. “It was on Davy’s knee, or beside him at Maple Leaf Stadium, or tucked between him and his cronies at a delicatessen, that I learned that nothing beats a good story. No question about it, I am Davy’s son.”

***

In Daughter of the King: Growing Up in Gangland (Weinstein Books), Sandra Lansky, assisted by writer William Stadiem, writes mostly about her own life. Along the way, she offers a complimentary portrait of her father.

Meyer Lansky got his start in booze and illegal gambling during Prohibition. Once liquor became legal, he became a nightclub impresario. At the front of the house, he had A-list entertainers; at the back, he ran glamorous but illegal gambling dens. He operated clubs with partners across the country. He was accused, but never convicted, of establishing his businesses through a network of associates who relied on graft, bribery and murder.

book cover - Daughter of the King — Similar to Bob Bossin, Sandra Lansky was also unaware of her father’s activities as she was growing up.

In the late 1950s, shortly before the Cuban Revolution, Lansky opened a luxurious casino in Havana. The good life evaporated after Fidel Castro shut down the casino in 1960. Once Lansky returned to Miami, Robert Kennedy and the FBI launched an aggressive crackdown on organized crime, with Lansky clearly a target. However, when he was finally brought to trial in 1973, he was acquitted.

Similar to Bossin, Lansky was also unaware of her father’s activities as she was growing up. She was a teenager before she heard anything about his reputation, and she never confronted him to find out if the accusations were true. A loyal and loving daughter, she portrays government efforts to stop gangland murders and illegal gambling as unwarranted campaigns against a hardworking businessman. For her, gangsters Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel were uncles, not the kingpins of criminal networks.

Although she knew many of the mobsters, she includes no new revelations about the mob. Instead, she offers Oprah-type admissions about her upbringing as a spoiled rich kid, her torrid affairs with Dean Martin and others, her disastrous marriage and her drug addiction. With its irritatingly sassy tone and sordid tales of decadence, the book makes it difficult to like, or even be sympathetic, to any of the people in her life.

Her father moved much further away from his Jewish heritage than did Davy Bossin, so far that his daughter did not realize she was Jewish until she was a teenager. She writes that her parents did not see themselves as Jewish. But she relates that she found out her father in the late 1930s used his muscle men to break up Nazi rallies on the Upper East Side and helped mobilize dockworkers to root out Nazi sympathizers during the war. He also provided arms and money to Israel in 1948.

When authorities came after him in the 1950s, he responded viscerally to the barely concealed antisemitic and anti-immigrant bigotry of the crusaders. “I will not let you prosecute me because I am a Jew,” he defiantly told them. In the 1970s, he tried – unsuccessfully – to escape U.S. crime busters by claiming citizenship in Israel, where his grandparents were buried.

Meyer Lansky died of lung cancer at 81. Forbes had estimated his net worth at $300 million. But where was the money? The family never found it. At least, that’s what his daughter says.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Both of the books reviewed here are available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve them, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

New biography of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander focuses on her work

In 1963, landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander was appalled when she saw park workers at Jericho Beach burning logs that had broken away from booms. She called up Bill Livingston, the Vancouver Park Board superintendent, and suggested placing the logs along the sandy beaches for people to sit on. Livingston thought it was a good idea.

Fifty years later, it’s often hard during the summer months to find a vacant spot along one of the logs lining Vancouver’s beaches. Changing the landscape of the city’s beaches is one of many ways in which Oberlander has contributed to making Vancouver one of the world’s most livable cities. However, despite being Canada’s preeminent landscape architect, Oberlander remains unknown to most of the people who enjoy the benefits of her work, and Susan Herrington, professor of architecture and landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia, sets out to raise Oberlander’s profile with the recently released biography Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Making the Modern Landscape.

image - Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Making the Modern Landscape book cover — *Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Making the Modern Landscape* comes after several public tributes and publications about Oberlander’s achievements.

The book comes after several public tributes and publications about Oberlander’s achievements, including an extensive oral history available online at the Cultural Landscape Foundation (tclf.org) and a biography for teens called Live Every Leaf: The Life of Landscape Architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander (2008). Oberlander has also co-authored two books: Trees in the City (1977) and Green Roof: A Design Guide and Review of Relevant Technologies (2002).

Herrington’s fascinating book goes one step further, unraveling the numerous influences throughout Oberlander’s life that shaped her professional development. Herrington places her innovative urban designs, her use of plants and her commitment to sustainability in the context of trends in landscape architecture over the past six decades. The biography is, as Herrington asserts, as much a history of modern landscape as a portrait of Oberlander’s life.

An impressive collection of photos and landscape sketches are sprinkled throughout the book to flesh out the scholarly account. The list of stunning accomplishments in a stellar career is balanced with references to some of her grand ideas that did not work out.

But the book will disappoint those looking for a popular biography with a window into her personal life; Herrington has taken an academic approach to Oberlander’s life. We become well acquainted with what the landscape architect accomplished. We are told a few delightful anecdotes about her life. But we do not learn much about her feelings or her personal relationships. If you want to get to know her in a more personal way, check out the oral history at the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Also, the book does not pay much attention to Oberlander’s commitment to Israel and her work within the Jewish community. One of the founding members of Temple Sholom, she held a place of honor at High Holiday services for many years, reading the story of Jonah with her late husband, architect and urban planner Peter Oberlander. She designed the synagogue’s garden as well as the biblical garden at King David High School with its plants reflecting the various species and geographic regions of the Land of Israel, as described in the Torah.

Oberlander has been involved in more than 500 projects, including the design of more than 70 playgrounds. Her mother Beate Hahn was a professional horticulturalist and author of several books about gardening with children. Oberlander from an early age did drawings for her mother’s books. She has said she decided at the age of 11 that she wanted to design gardens.

Herrington includes a design of a wooded-parkland that Oberlander completed when she was 15 years old. Already at that time, Oberlander was busy in the garden, learning from firsthand experiences about the benefits of organic gardening, companion plants and attracting birds and insects to mitigate pests.

Oberlander was born in 1921 in Mulheim, Germany, a small city along the Rhine River. Herrington’s book ignores the prominence of her grandfather in Germany (a politician and professor and the University of Berlin) and the hurdles the family faced before leaving Germany in the late 1930s. The family emigrated to the United States and Oberlander in 1940 went to Smith College, a women’s college in western Massachusetts, to study architecture and landscape architecture. By coincidence, she stayed in a room across the hall from Betty Friedan, who went on to write The Feminine Mystique. However Oberlander’s contact with strong feminists did not turn her into an outspoken crusader for women’s rights.

Herrington emphasizes the significance of Oberlander as one of the first women in a male-dominated profession, but Oberlander never claimed to be a feminist. She told Herrington she never questioned whether a woman could pursue a professional career outside the home while raising her children, she just did it.

Herrington emphasizes the significance of Oberlander as one of the first women in a male-dominated profession, but Oberlander never claimed to be a feminist. She told Herrington she never questioned whether a woman could pursue a professional career outside the home while raising her children, she just did it.

Oberlander went on to Harvard in 1943. A year later, her mother, without Oberlander’s knowledge, asked the university to allow her to take a year off to work in an architectural office. Her mother thought her drafting skills were inadequate. Together, they decided she would take a year off. (The book does not tell us how that intervention affected her relationship with her mother.) Oberlander found a drafting job but was fired three months later and returned to complete her studies. She moved to Vancouver in 1953 after marrying Peter Oberlander.

Bringing together much that has been written with original research, Herrington shows how the landscape of some of Vancouver’s most familiar places (Robson Square and the Museum of Anthropology), as well as prominent national and international landmarks (the New York Times building, National Gallery in Ottawa and chanceries for embassies in Washington and Berlin) came out of Oberlander’s experiences as a child in the Weimer Republic, her exposure to seminal thinkers in school and her contact with leading figures in the profession.

Oberlander’s commitment to exhaustive research, modern design with abstract shapes and unadorned lines, and community involvement in planning were evident from the start of her career in Philadelphia. In design work for public housing, private residents and playgrounds, she saw the role of landscape architects as working for the community, not the wealthy. She shaped spaces to spark the imagination and creativity of their users. Her innovative work on playgrounds, with informal play areas and separated spaces for different age groups and activities, became a standard for progressive play areas across North America.

Even in the early 1950s, her plans reflected strong ecological values, attributes that would become her trademark in later years. Her designs integrated current strands of trees and plants as much as possible and followed the contours of the land. Years later, she set standards of excellence with her work on green roofs and green buildings.

Oberlander paid close attention to how people reacted to landscape design, what feelings were stirred by design and color, to understand how they used the space. She created areas intended to foster creativity and imagination while relating to the local context.

Herrington tracks Oberlander’s professional development as she shapes design to incorporate ideas from psychology, art and ecology. Oberlander paid close attention to how people reacted to landscape design, what feelings were stirred by design and color, to understand how they used the space. She created areas intended to foster creativity and imagination while relating to the local context.

By the mid-1970s, she had moved from playgrounds to urban landscapes that became havens for adults in densely populated areas. Herrington writes about Oberlander’s 30-year collaboration with Arthur Erickson and influences that had an impact on her high-profile projects.

Throughout it all, Herrington writes that Oberlander never lost her commitment to serve all of society. She continued to work on modest gardens for private homes, public-housing projects, playgrounds and landscapes for people with special needs. And, Oberlander has never forgotten her past. “Why would I disregard the very reasons why I joined this profession in the first place?” she told Herrington.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Making the Modern Landscape is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve this book, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

Shteyngart has come long way

Gary Shteyngart is widely regarded as one of the most entertaining storytellers in contemporary literature. The highly enjoyable memoir Little Failure (Random House, 2014), his fourth book after three well-received novels, is his story as a Jewish immigrant from Russia trying to make sense of his place in the new world.

image - Little Failure cover — Beyond biography, *Little Failure* offers a rare glimpse into an international phenomenon.

Celebrity memoirs are often intended to settle accounts or redeem reputations. Shteyngart uses his memoir to share the important moments of his life, from his birth in Leningrad through his difficulties as an immigrant to the publication of his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which won the Stephen Crane Award for first fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for fiction.

In Little Failure, he writes with humor and introspection about the family’s struggles – the poverty, the hesitation in abandoning ways of the old country and the missteps in trying to fit in. As he moves through a Hebrew parochial school and on to Oberlin College, he delves into the frustrations and absurdities of immigrant life.

Tales of violence at home and unrelenting bullying in the schoolyard are followed by comical accounts of teenaged drinking, pot-smoking and attempts to connect with women. Several incidents will be familiar to those who have read his novels. He often uses events from his own life in his writing.

The memoir jumps back and forth from his recollection of events in his life to his thoughts as he writes the book. Throughout, Shteyngart keeps coming back to his relationship with his parents, and especially his father.

While writing the memoir, his father apparently told him that he read on the Russian Internet that Shteyngart and his novels would soon be forgotten. His mother identified the blogger who made the comment.

“Do you want me to be forgotten, Father?” Shteyngart thought to himself. His parents have not read his latest book but they know the name of the blogger who says he will be soon forgotten, Shteyngart moans.

His father persisted. Shteyngart was 30th on a list of New York writers. “David Remmick (editor of The New Yorker) was eight positions ahead of you,” his father said. His mother tried to calm the waters. Many writers aren’t acknowledged until after their death, she said in an attempt that did not make Shteyngart feel any better.

A few days later, his parents were kvelling over a book review in France. The French Internet described his book as one of the best of the year.

He appreciates the humor in the situation. “After each teardown, after each discussion of Internet rankings and blogs, after each barrage of insults presented as jokes, my father finishes with, ‘You should call me more.’”

What should he make of these exchanges? “Down and up. Up and down. I am forgotten. I am remembered. I am number thirty. I am beloved in France. What is this? This is parenting.”

Beyond biography, Little Failure offers a rare glimpse into an international phenomenon. The emigration of Jews from Russia has been a cause célèbre for many Jewish communities over the past four decades. Shteyngart’s memoir offers the perspective of Russian immigrants, facing numerous difficulties on the way out of the country and in starting life over in a foreign land.

His family left Russia near the end of a decade that saw 250,000 Jews coming to the West. Israel “begged” them to move to the Holy Land, he writes, but his father “courageously” resisted. A Jewish immigrant aid group helped them establish a home in New York. Shteyngart was sent to Solomon Schechter School in Queens. He does not write about those who helped the family.

The memoir also omits something I would have liked to find out. Shteyngart does not write about authors who have influenced his work or what he reads. However, he does pinpoint those events in his life that helped shape the making of the writer Gary Shteyngart.

To some extent, he was born a storyteller. He writes that he has never been stuck for words. “My mind is running at insomniac speed,” he says in the memoir. “The words are falling in like soldiers at reveille. Put me in front of a keyboard and I will fill up a screen.”

He was introduced to the art of storytelling at an early age. With debilitating asthma from birth, much of his early years in Leningrad was spent in “a fort of pillows and duvets and comforters,” fighting suffocation. He became “a pathological reader.” He recalls at age 5 reading The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a dense 160-page volume by Selma Lagerlif, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Around the same time, his father was making up comic stories, dubbed “The Planet of the Yids,” about a Hebraic corner of the galaxy besieged by gentile spacemen who attacked with torpedoes filled with salted raw pig fat. Famous Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky ran the planet. Whenever the KGB was on the verge of gaining the upper hand, a fearless leader called Igor (Shteyngart’s name before he changed it to Gary) saved the Yids.

Shteyngart remembers inventing his first story at the age of 5. His grandmother, Galya, who once worked as a journalist and editor at a Leningrad newspaper, suggested he write his own novel. She offered him slices of cheese for every page he wrote, a sandwich with bread, butter and cheese for each chapter.

He put together a surrealistic tale of political adventurism and betrayal involving Lenin, Finland and a wild goose. The novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, probably cost a hundred pieces of cheese and at least a dozen sandwiches, he estimates.

His first attempt at writing a story in English came when he was 10, three years after arriving in New York. He was a misfit at school, constantly bullied and ridiculed by his classmates. He considered himself to be one of the most hated boys at Hebrew school.

The 59-page novella, The Chalenge (sic), was an imaginative space adventure involving a blond kid who does not look Jewish, a best friend and a girl caught in the middle between the two boys.

“I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary,” he says in the memoir.

Shteyngart hated himself and the people around him. He was not strong enough to stand up to those who hit him, and he struck back with rage in the imaginary world he created. He discovered the power of laughter from a teacher who was ridiculed during a show-and-tell session in the classroom. He thought the teacher would burst out in tears when kids made fun of her. Instead, she just laughed and continued what she was doing. It was a revelation to him. “She has laughed at herself and emerged unscathed!”

The teacher asked him to bring The Chalenge to school and read a few pages to the class. Excited, he stood at the front of the class and read as fast as he could. “Slowly,” she said. “Read slowly, Gary. Let us enjoy the words.”

Her response startled him. “I breathe that in. Ms. S wants to enjoy the words.”

His classmates listened closely as he read the story aloud over the following five weeks. Reading his story changed how the children interacted with him. They were eager to hear the next instalment. He was not yet one of them on the playground but the terms of engagement had changed. He was no longer a Russian outcast.

Responding to their enthusiasm, he felt the pressure to write something new every day, lest he fall out of favor. It’s a responsibility that has haunted him for the rest of his life, he writes.

“God bless these kids for giving me a chance,” Shteyngart says. “May their G-d bless them every one.”

While still at Solomon Schechter School in Queens, he also wrote a satire of the Torah, called The Gnorah. He described the book as a hatchet job directed at his parochial school religious experience: rote memorization of ancient texts, aggressive shouting of blessings and an ornery rabbi who was the principal. Foreshadowing his writing style over the following decades, he mixed comic references to popular culture figures with the lives of characters in his story. Exodus became Sexodus, Moses was renamed Mishugana and the burning bush was turned into a burning television.

The Gnorah in 1984 marked the beginning of his true assimilation into American English, he writes. It would take almost two more decades before he started to receive awards for his writing.

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook was published in 2002. His second published novel, Absurdistan, was chosen as one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine. And, Super Sad True Love Story won the 2011 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature – the Jewish Independent interviewed Shteyngart when that book came out, prior to his participation in the Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival (see “Satirist launches series,” Nov. 12, 2010, jewishindependent.ca). Shteyngart’s work has been translated into 28 languages.

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Little Failure is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve this book, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

Amos Oz’s Between Friends is a tight collection of short stories

In the early 1950s, at the age of 15, Amos Oz moved to Kibbutz Hulda in central Israel. Idealists at that time still celebrated the kibbutz as a new form of community that would transform human nature. But the reality was something else. In Between Friends (Mariner Books, 2013, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston), the acclaimed Israeli novelist takes us to a fictitious kibbutz in 1950s Israel called Yikhat to meet several characters that were part of that world.

photo - Amos Oz in 2006. — Amos Oz in 2006.

With an eye for revealing details, Oz recreates a rich world of ordinary, well-meaning people with difficult pasts and passionate dreams. Their anxieties are not unique, stemming from tangled-up longings, failed relationships and unspoken thoughts. Their personal crises would not be out of place as part of daily life in any tightly knit community.

Oz, an acclaimed Israeli novelist who has been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, writes eight stories that are interconnected about the plain folks of the kibbutz – the gardener, schoolteacher, mechanic, electrician and others. They may have once believed they could change the world but, by the time we meet them, they are resigned to their quiet routines, which they undertake without complaint and, in some instances, with considerable pride. However, their emotional lives remain in turmoil, entangled in tussles “between friends.” A pervasive feeling of loneliness in the midst of neighbors they have known for years overshadows all other feelings.

Zvi Provisor is the first kibbutznik we meet. He is obsessed with reporting famines, earthquakes, plane crashes and other disasters from anywhere in the world. Most kibbutzniks dismiss him, with some affection, as the Angel of Death. Kibbutznik Luna Blank offers a sympathetic ear.

As their friendship grows, they meet in her room for coffee. One evening, she is, as Oz writes, so overwhelmed with compassion that she suddenly takes his hand and holds it to her breast.

“Zev trembled and pulled his hand back quickly, with a gesture that was almost violent. His eyes blinked frantically. Never in his adult life had he touched another person intentionally, and he went rigid whenever he was touched … a short time later, he stood up and left.”

In an interview with Haaretz after the book was first published, Oz said he wanted to look at the loneliness in a society where there is supposedly no place for loneliness.

“In a few of the stories, a situation is portrayed of ‘almost touching’: people very nearly touch, but something blocks it. Like [‘The Creation of Adam,’] in the painting by Michelangelo, where finger almost touches finger.

“I am very curious about loneliness and grace, or a moment of grace amid loneliness, because that is a description of the human condition.

“The stories are set on a kibbutz, but they tell about universal situations, about the most basic forces in human existence, about loneliness, about love, about loss, about death, about desire, about forgoing and about longing. In fact, about the simple and profound matters, which no person is unfamiliar with.”

image - Amos Oz Between Friends book cover — *Between Friends* takes readers to the fictional Kibbutz Yikhat.

Not surprisingly, Oz portrays simple kibbutz life with some charm. Kibbutzniks translate Polish novels in their spare time and listen to classical music. Everyone takes his or her turn doing a shift in the dining hall.

Osnat is a quiet woman. She works all day alone in the laundry, beginning at 5:30 a.m. As we are introduced to her, Osnat’s partner Boaz has just told her that he has been in a relationship for eight months with another kibbutznik, the tall, slim Ariella Barash, who works in the chicken coop. Boaz has decided to move into Ariella’s apartment.

On Kibbutz Yikhat, the environment reinforces the characters that live there. Ariella has an old cat and young dog that treat each other much like the kibbutzniks relate to the other kibbutzniks. The young dog was frightened of the cat and would politely give it a wide berth, Oz writes. The old cat would ignore the dog and walk past as if the dog were invisible. Boaz shows some affection for the young dog. “But if the cat should jump onto his lap asking for affection, he heaves him off with such disgust that I cringe,” Ariella writes in a note to Osnat, several days after Boaz has moved in with his new love.

We are not told about Osnat and Ariella’s relationship before Boaz arrived on the scene. However, after Boaz starts living with Ariella,

the two women exchange notes. Osnat, who is not angry about the break-up, continues to worry about Boaz’s health. Ariella tries to justify her relationship with another woman’s partner.

With Oz’s poetic style, the chapter ends with a gentle breeze blowing, “just enough to cool a cup of tea.” A solitary figure abandoned by her lover, Osnat listens to “light music” on the radio and reads a book before going to bed. “Her nights are dreamless now and she wakes before the alarm clock rings. The pigeons wake her.”

Oz is well known as an outspoken advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Middle East tensions and Israeli politics pop up only as a backdrop to the kibbutzniks’ lives. He writes about the effect of events on the kibbutzniks, not much about the events themselves. The characters mention threats to the kibbutz but without any discussion of events.

We learn that Nahum’s wife was killed in a retaliatory raid and that his son was killed during an army incursion into the village of Deir al Nashaf. We are told nothing more about these confrontations. However, we can feel the impact of these tragedies when Nahum struggles as his 17-year-old daughter Edna, a few months before going into the army, moves in with David Dagan, a teacher her father’s age, as well as a longtime friend of her father.

David is a devout Marxist who speaks with authority about ideological issues as well as matters of everyday life. Nahum is an unsure father who does not have the confidence to confront David over the inappropriate affair.

Oz is extremely effective in bringing the reader right into the room with the characters he creates. We are in Nahum’s electrician’s workshop, where he sits, day after day, “shoulders stooped, glasses sliding down his nose, working on appliances in need of repair: electric kettles, radios, fans.”

We are taken to the doorstep of Edna’s dorm room, where Nahum has gone to bring a sweater she has left at his apartment. He listens to the music coming from the room, “a light, lengthy étude that repeated itself in a melancholy way.”

In later chapters, we hear the gossip about kibbutz secretary Yoav Carni. We see the futile efforts of Henia Kalisch as she tries to arrange for kibbutz support for her son to study abroad. Despite whom we meet, there is no escaping the sadness and loneliness that permeates the lives of so many people on Kibbutz Yikhat.

Our kibbutz visit ends with a funeral for shoemaker Martin Vandenberg, an enthusiastic advocate of Esperanto, the universal language that was to unify humanity.

Osnat is the last person to leave the cemetery. She lingers, feeling a sense of peace. In remarks that could be Oz reflecting on the entire book, Osnat feels as if this “hadn’t been a funeral, but a good satisfying conversation.”

Oz does not leave the kibbutz at that point, however. Osnat has a sudden desire to say more, one or two quiet words in Esperanto in tribute to Martin. “But she hadn’t had time to learn anything and she had no idea what to say.”

Media consultant Robert Matas, a former Globe and Mail journalist, still reads books. Between Friends is available at the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library. To reserve this book, or any other, call 604-257-5181 or email [email protected]. To view the online catalogue, visit jccgv.com and click on Isaac Waldman Library.

Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land is a vivid look at Zionism

In collaboration with the Isaac Waldman Jewish Public Library, the Jewish Independent will be reprinting a series of book reviews by Robert Matas, formerly with the Globe and Mail. He has chosen My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (Speigel & Grau, New York) by Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit as the first in the series. My Promised Land has been listed as number one on the Economist’s best books of 2013, is a winner of a National Jewish Book Award and is included on the New York Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2013.

Israel is an incredibly strong country. Its high-tech start-ups spur economic growth while most of the world is trying to sidestep a financial meltdown. Its democratic institutions remain vibrant, while its neighbors disintegrate. Its military, backed up by nuclear power, effectively has stopped any attack on the state over several decades despite virulent opposition to its existence.

image - My Promised Land cover — *My Promised Land* offers a fascinating window into the country at a crucial time in Israel’s history.

Yet the fault lines in Israeli society steadily widen. Internal divisions that threaten the country spread out in all directions. The rumblings of unrest are becoming louder and more frequent, from the occupied territories, the Arab Israeli communities, the ultra-Orthodox enclaves and the non-Ashkenazi underclass.

Ari Shavit, in My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, offers a fascinating window into the country at a crucial time in Israel’s history. Based on family diaries, private letters and interviews and discussions with hundreds of Jews and Arabs over a period of five years, Shavit, a leading Israeli journalist and television commentator, has written a book with the potential to change understanding of the seemingly intractable problems confronting Israel.

This book is not for those who believe Israel requires the unquestioning support of Diaspora Jews. With brutal honesty, Shavit describes episodes in Israel’s history that many would like to remain untold, or at least to be discussed only in hushed whispers within the family. But his account of the life stories of numerous people including Aryeh Deri, Yossi Sarid and others who played pivotal roles in the development of the country is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about Israel.

In a nutshell, Shavit concludes that Israel is vulnerable and will remain vulnerable as long as Israeli cities and farms exist where Palestinians once lived. He argues that ending the West Bank occupation will make Israel stronger and is the right thing to do, but evacuating the settlements will not bring peace. The crux of the matter is that all Palestinians who were expelled – not just those in the West Bank – want to return home and will settle for nothing less.

He is pessimistic about the future. Israel can defend itself now, but he anticipates eventually the hand holding the sword must loosen its grip. Eventually, the sword will rust.

“I have learned that there are no simple answers in the Middle East and no quick fix solutions to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I have realized that the Israeli condition is extremely complex, perhaps even tragic.”

Despite his critical eye on events of the past century, it is difficult to label Shavit’s politics. He was an active member of Peace Now and a vocal critic of the settler movement. But he praises Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for confronting Iran. “I have learned that there are no simple answers in the Middle East and no quick fix solutions to the Israeli Palestinian conflict,” he writes. “I have realized that the Israeli condition is extremely complex, perhaps even tragic.”

***

Shavit explores 120 years of Zionism through vividly written profiles of numerous people beginning with his great-grandfather, Herbert Bentwich, who came to Jaffa on April 15, 1897, on a 12-day trek to explore the land as a home for the Jews. At that time, Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, populated mostly by Bedouin nomads and Palestinians serfs with no property rights, no self-rule or national identity.

“It’s quite understandable that one would see the land as a no-man’s land,” Shavit writes. Bentwich would have to turn back if he saw the land as occupied, Shavit adds. “But my great-grandfather cannot turn back. So that he can carry on, my great-grandfather chooses not to see.”

Israel was settled and continues to be populated by people who do not see others who are right in front of them. The early Zionists bought land, often from absentee landlords, and ignored those who had worked the land for generations. Herzl’s Zionism rejected the use of force. But as the number of Jews escaping European antisemitism, a new breed of Jew arrived.

Shavit describes how kibbutz socialism, with its sense of justice and legitimacy, displaced indigenous Palestinians. Jews who were godless, homeless and, in many cases parentless, colonized the land with a sense of moral superiority. “By working the land with their bare hands and by living in poverty, and undertaking a daring unprecedented social experiment, they refute any charge that they are about to seize a land that is not theirs.”

Tracing the development of the state, he identifies in painful detail the Palestinian villages that were wiped out and replaced with Jewish settlements. Transferring the Arab population became part of mainstream Zionism thinking during the riots of 1937, as Zionists confronted a rival national movement. David Ben-Gurion at that time endorsed the compulsory transfer of population to clear vast territories.

“I do not see anything immoral in it,” Ben-Gurion said. By the time of the War of Independence in 1947/48, Palestinians who did not leave voluntarily were, as a matter of routine, forcibly expelled from their homes and the buildings demolished.

Shavit delves deeply into the sad history of the Lydda Valley, where Jewish settlements began in idealism but evolved into what Shavit describes as a human catastrophe. “Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sends out of the Lydda Valley a column of homeless.”

In the new state’s first decade, Israel was on steroids, absorbing nearly one million new immigrants, creating 250,000 new jobs and building 400 new Israeli villages, 20 new cities and 200,000 new apartments. The new Israelis had little time for Palestinians, the Jewish Diaspora or even survivors of the Holocaust. As it marched toward the future, Israel tried to erase the past. The miracle was based on denial, Shavit writes.

“The denial is astonishing. The fact that 700,000 human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed.”

“Ten-year-old Israel has expunged Palestine from its memory and soul, as if the other people have never existed, as if they were never driven out,” he writes. “The denial is astonishing. The fact that 700,000 human beings have lost their homes and their homeland is simply dismissed.”

Yet the denial was essential. Without it, the success of Zionism would have been impossible. Similar to his great-grandfather, if Israel had acknowledged what had happened, it would not have survived, he writes.

He recounts how the settlements in the West Bank have changed the course of Zionism. They began as a response to a fear of annihilation but evolved into an aggressive movement to dislocate Palestinians and prevent peace agreements. Shavit is convinced the settlements will eventually lead to another war. The settlements are an untenable demographic, political, moral and judicial reality that harms the entire country, he writes. He believes occupation must cease for Israel’s sake, even if peace with Palestinians cannot be reached.

With similar intensity, Shavit offers insight into the Masada myth of martyrdom and reports on how Israel developed nuclear power. He maintains that nuclear deterrence has given Israel decades of peace. He exposes the cracks in Israeli society with thought-provoking portraits of prominent figures from the ultra-Orthodox and Sephardi communities.