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Oct. 5, 2007
Ambivalent playwright
Expectations were shifted by trips to Israel.
RHONDA SPIVAK
"I started smoking in Israel and stopped when I left,"
said Jonathan Garfinkel, the 34-year-old Torontonian who is the
author of the newly released book Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine
Divide.
A tobacco habit was just one unexpected thing that Garfinkel, who
is a poet and a playwright, picked up during his stay in the Holy
Land. This week, he spoke in Winnipeg about the journey that launched
his book and his thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Garfinkel
will also speak at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival in
Vancouver next month.)
During the second intifada, Garfinkel met a Palestinian woman named
Rana at the Toronto International Film Festival. She told him a
curious story about a house in Jerusalem that was shared by an Arab
and a Jew. Garfinkel developed a friendship with Rana, who challenged
the Zionist assumptions he had learned as a child at Bialik day
school in Toronto. Her viewpoints also challenged those he had heard
at his synagogue, the Minsk, in Kensington Market.
"The story of the shared house was my entrée into Israel,"
said Garfinkel, who speaks Hebrew but "put off going to Israel
for a long time." He felt compelled to travel to the country
for the first time to find that house, hoping it might be a model
for peaceful co-existence – and make for interesting writing
material. In the process, he left behind his long-term girlfriend
and risked disappointing his rabbi and fellow congregants.
"My trip was a complete disaster," said Garfinkel. "When
I got there, nothing went as planned. The address for the house
didn't exist and when I finally found the Palestinian and Israeli
family who did occupy the house, they didn't want to talk to me."
Ambivalence is the product of Garfinkel's often humorous
travels in Israel and the West Bank, and examines the complexities
of real life when they come up against ideals and doctrines.
"My intensive education as a child at Bialik school didn't
prepare me for what Israel was ... when I left Israel in 2004, I
left with a kind of pessimism," he recounted. "Everybody
in the conflict was suffering. It was taking its toll on everybody.
I left feeling pretty upset, and I returned in 2006 feeling I needed
to know more."
Near the end of the book, Garfinkel learns that his friend Rana
believes that suicide bombing is a legitimate form of resistance.
When asked about whether he has been able to maintain a friendship
with Rana, given this viewpoint, he responded, "Rana is reading
my book now. To be honest, I'm hoping we're going to have a good
talk about this.... For me, it's important to actually continue
the dialogue with her. I can never support violent resistance. It's
made it difficult for me to look her in the eye at times. I felt
I had developed a trust with her. I'm sure many Israelis on the
left had a similar kind of loss of trust after [Ehud] Barak's efforts
to make peace with [Yasser] Arafat failed. I've heard that the left
in Israel lost a lot of faith in the peace process after that. I
can't help but think that I felt a similar disappointment [with
Rana] that the left felt then. I hope to resume my dialogue with
Rana and convince her to change her mind."
When asked whether he found his "peace" as a result of
his travels, Garfinkel paused. "In a way, I did," he said.
"I am still ambivalent. The peace I have arrived at is acknowledging
that there are these contradictions.
"My views are always shifting. I haven't resolved my ambivalence.
I went to Israel with a lot of innocence. At first, I swung hard
to the left right away. It was kind of a reaction to the education
I had. But by the end, I think I veered towards more middle ground.
But my innocence and stupidity made a good story."
Garfinkel acknowledged that his visits to Israel had shifted his
perspective. "The message of the book," he said, "is
to look for the human in this conflict and to try to get people
not to be afraid to talk about it. We need not to be afraid of ideas
and ideas we don't agree with. In Israel, they debate issues like
crazy. But in the mainstream Jewish community in Toronto, there
is far less debate."
Garfinkel's experiences in Israel also became the basis for a play,
House of Many Tongues. "The play is based on the idea
of the divided house in Jerusalem. But the characters are all made
up. The house is a character: she is a woman and she speaks,"
he noted.
The play has been translated into Hebrew and German and will be
presented at Habima Theatre in Tel-Aviv in the 2008-2009 season.
Rhonda Spivak is a Winnipeg freelance writer.
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