The value of Israel's existence

PAT JOHNSON

Edited by Alan Dershowitz, the essay collection What Israel Means to Me is a curious little document. Bite-sized pieces, ranging quite wildly in style and format, offer a range of reasons for affinity with Israel.

The book, which displays Dershowitz's name prominently, is actually by 80 "prominent writers, performers, scholars, politicians and journalists." Not all of them are as articulate as the renowned Harvard law professor, but the collection is an odd and delightful skim across the attitudes of a range of diverse individuals who, it's safe to say, have never appeared before between the same covers. Where else, for instance, would you find Christina Applegate, best known as the libidinous Kelly Bundy on TV's Married ... With Children mixing it up with televangelist Pat Robertson, Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee and a host of Israeli and American academics?

There are a clutch of heartwarming vignettes as these people reflect on the meaning of the Jewish state in their individual and communal lives, but it does not shy away from the challenges and conflicts.

J.J. Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Forward, recalls his formative experience as a young Zionist in Israel in the 1960s. From that time on, Goldberg has been attentive to the things that unite and divide the Diaspora and the homeland.

"The bonds that unite us," he writes, "are strong and many-faceted, but the chasm dividing us is deep and wide, and it is growing wider by the year."

CNN talker Larry King reflects on the visionary Jews who imagined a state and the trauma of the Holocaust, which led the world to concur with the need for a place where Jews control the immigration policy.

"I've never been a particularly observant Jew," writes King, "but when I look upon Israel's achievements, its strength and its vibrant democracy, I feel tremendous pride to be a Jew."

Barney Frank, the veteran U.S. congressman, sees in Israel's experience, among other things, the evidence that a non-discriminatory army can fulfil the most vital security issues.

"The argument for banning gay and lesbian people from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces is that the presence of homosexuals in a military unit would cause such friction as to interfere with the unit's fighting capability," writes Frank. "The rock on which this logic shatters is the experience of the Israel Defence Forces. Gay and lesbian Israelis serve openly and with distinction in the IDF, and I have yet to meet any American prepared to argue that the Israel Defence Forces have somehow been rendered ineffective in this regard."

These voices are joined by noted spoon-bender Uri Geller, Let's Make a Deal host Monty Hall, the Wiesenthal Centre's (and one-time Vancouverite) Rabbi Marvin Hier, sexy novelist Erica Jong and many others, who each express similar emotions and hopes (everyone's for peace) in different words.

Dershowitz, in his introduction, states plainly what so many leave unspoken.

"With nearly six million Jews now concentrated in tiny Israel, a nuclear bomb could do in a minute what it took Hitler years to do," he writes. "Israel's survival as a Jewish democratic nation is among the great moral imperatives of the 21st century."

This strange little book gives 80 good reasons why.

A presence of absence

When Daniel Mendelsohn's book The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, relating his tenacious investigation into the fate of six of his family members "killed by the Nazis," landed in the hands of eager readers, it was met with rapturous reviews. The literature of the Holocaust is broad and deep but, still, new interventions can illuminate the catastrophe in innovative ways.

The book begins with Mendelsohn as a child, overhearing snippets of family secrets, details of a past too dreadful to approach; tales whose salient details were spoken in Yiddish, with the deliberate intent of keeping the next generation blissfully ignorant.

Young Daniel, in his own self-portrait, is an inquisitive information-gatherer and so the hidden pieces of the family puzzle haunt him. That, and the fact that his likeness to Shmiel, a lost uncle he never met, caused family elders to melt into tears when the child would walk into a room, instigated a search that would eventually take Mendelsohn to the Galician town of Bolechow, where generations of his family had lived in relative security and happiness.

Curiosity and familial piety led Mendelsohn to a harrowing and illuminating, if not completely satisfactory, discovery.

"Long ago," Mendelsohn writes near the end of the book, "I had begun my search hoping to know how they had died, because I wanted a date to put on a chart, because I thought my grandfather, who when I was a boy, used to take me to graveyards where he would talk to the dead, my grandfather whom I knew to be flawed but had adored anyway, who had had breakdowns, who had committed suicide, might rest a little easier – a sentimental notion, I am aware – if I could finally give an answer to the question that, whyen I asked it of him, he would merely repeat to me with a shrug and a shake of the head that said he would not talk about it: What happened to Uncle Shmiel? He would retreat into an uncharacteristic silence, then, and I told myself that one day I would find the answer: that it was here, it was then; that now we knew, could go to a place where we could put a rock on a grave and talk to him, to Shmiel, too. We had gone to learn precisely how and when he had died; and had, for the most part, failed. But in failing we'd realized, almost accidentally, that until we went, nobody ever thought to ask about what can't be put on a chart: how they had lived, who they were."

The Lost joins an emerging literature of the Second (and Third) Generation, illuminating the catastrophic ripples spreading concentrically from the 20th century's grisly history to the whispered secrets and Yiddish confidences that formed a Jewish American boy's worldview. Mendelsohn's odyssey belongs to a genre of genealogical and historical forensics and, since it is a story well told, draws the reader along in an inter-continental mission.

In the months and years following the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, it is said, the roads of the rural South were crowded with freed slaves travelling in search of families divided by the cruelty of the "peculiar institution." In recent decades, the road that is Jewish literature has been crowded with the sort of quest Mendelsohn has undertaken to restore, at least in the realm of understanding, the shattered remnants of his family's story. All of these stories are filled with grief and regret, lost chances and extraordinary survivals. These stories, in many cases, tell themselves. But in the hands of an able writer, these memories, compiled from shards, become vital new tiles in the mosaic of our knowledge of this horrific epoch. The Lost, while not without its faults, is a masterpiece of the genre.

Pat Johnson is director of development and communications for Vancouver Hillel Foundation and editor of www.mvox.ca.

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