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FROM THE BATTLEFIELD OF BEIEFS
Date: November 6, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Roger Rosenblatt
Lead:
IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL
By Amos Oz. Translated by Maurie Goldberg-Bartura. 257 pp. San Diego: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95.
AMOS OZ, describing what it is like to be a famous novelist living on a kibbutz, once told of a friend who always combs his hair before passing by Mr. Oz's window lest he should appear in one of Mr. Oz's books with his hair in disarray. In his latest work, ''In the Land of Israel,'' it seems that everyone has intentionally uncombed his hair in the author's presence, either tearing at it in some public display of anger or temper, or fluffing it out crazily as a scare tactic. On the surface, then, this is an untidy book, just as Israel is an untidy country, heaving with arguments, curses and cajolings, a country where everyone is pleading at once with hands upturned to heaven.
In fact, ''In the Land of Israel'' is brilliantly controlled, a careful if galloping report by an artist wearing a journalist's mask, who portrays his country through conversations. Last autumn Mr. Oz traveled throughout Israel interviewing and listening to people. The extraordinary dialogues he wrote from these encounters first appeared in the socialist newspaper,
Text: Roger Rosenblatt, a senior writer at Time, is the author of ''Children of War.'' Davar, before they were drawn together into this book. The voices are not types. They rise from the crowd and, having had their say, blend back in, like flights in a blues number - all except two of the voices, which do not blend in, and which may be said to represent the two souls of the book in combat.
The first belongs to a man Mr. Oz calls Z, who is not further identified. A man in his 50's, heavy-set, tan, lounging shirtless in gym shorts, Z is Israel the warrior. He derides Mr. Oz as a Zhid, an Uncle Tom hypocrite appeaser. The invasion of Lebanon was glorious, says Z, because possibly it has finally finished all that stuff about ''the Jewish monopoly on morality.'' He plunges deeper: ''And there's one more thing, which is maybe even more important than all the rest. The sweetest fruit of this juicy war in Lebanon is that now it's not just Israel they hate. . . They finally hate all the nice Zhids, too, the ones who keep shouting that they're different, not like those Israeli hoodlums, that they're a completely different kind of Jew, clean and decent. . . It won't do those clean Zhids any good, just like it didn't do them any good in Vienna and Berlin.'' Deeper still: ''Listen, friend . . . a people that let its children be made into soap and its women into lampshades is a worse criminal than its tormentors.'' The final twist: Z will absolve all Zhids from guilt. He is willing and happy to do the dirty work so that Mr. Oz and his friends can then offer Israel their petty humanistic values. He proposes a deal: He will get rid of all the Arabs while Mr. Oz writes their lovely epitaphs. Mr. Oz says nothing in reply. The chapter is entirely Z's.
Mr. Oz does have his say - not immediately after Z, but later when he responds to Z and all his other antagonists. The author's voice is important to the book. It is necessary, to establish that he is no ordinary self- effacing reporter on a quest, but a public figure who for years has participated in major national controversies and who regularly gives his views of things to the international press, ''ratting'' on his homeland. It would be unnatural if he did not have a voice in this work, but his speech (an actual speech he gave to the residents of Ofra, a Jewish settlement on the West Bank) is only tangentially political. Mainly it is a brief for humanism. That is the real battle of Israel, as Mr. Oz sees it (as Z sees it as well, from the opposite perspective) - one between humanists and nationalists. He comes out strongly for ''spiritual pluralism,'' for a world made up not of nations but of ''dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythms, all cross-pollinating.''
Mr. Oz has been calling for such a utopia for years in essays and fiction. In three short stories published under the title, ''The Hill of Evil Counsel,'' he had reached back eagerly to a more fluid, albeit vulnerable, period in Israel's early history. His speech at Ofra is the liberal's creed: Life changes, individuals count; the only way out of the nation's ''moral distress'' is not to celebrate its isolation, but to concede that no one is alone.
OTHER Israelis - mostly Jews but some Arabs - offer their opinions on the state of the nation. Mr. Oz was clever enough not to tape- record his conversations, thus freeing himself to substitute verisimilitude for replication. Whenever possible, he faithfully transcribes what people said to him, but certain choices of language and rhythm are clearly his, and Maurie Goldberg-Bartura's translation carries all the curves and edges of the original language. An urgency or despair is added to these conversations by the fact that Mr. Oz conducted them in October and November 1982, shortly after the Phalangist massacres of Palestinians in the camps of Lebanon that were under Israeli military jurisdiction. What Mr. Oz wants to know is what the world also wants to know: Who are these Israelis? Or, as a woman named Sarah asks near the end of the book, ''What will become of us?''
In the Guela quarter of Jerusalem, where Mr. Oz began his reporting odyssey, the Orthodox Jews have no doubt about the answer as they rail against the vanity and luxury of secular Israel. (Only a few weeks ago 200 Orthodox Jews assaulted Jerusalem's Mayor, Teddy Kollek, in the streets with bottles and tomatoes, knocking Kollek to the ground.) They await the Messiah who alone can reveal the Promised Land. Mr. Oz notes that the only power equal to the Messiah's in this quarter is the memory of Hitler, which the Orthodox preserve to advance their case. Mr. Oz explains the polar forces: ''Because of Hitler you have no right to quarrel with this sort of (Orthodox) Judaism. Because of the awaited Messiah this Jewry enchain you and threaten to reconquer what you have wrested from their hands.''
The ''you'' is Mr. Oz, the new- race sabra, the flower of Zionism whose mere existence is a stench to the Orthodox, as is Israel itself. ''What's to celebrate?'' an Orthodox teacher in the quarter asks, referring to Israeli Independence Day. ''Anyone who doesn't leave is ashamed of it (Israel) and anyone who doesn't leave and is not ashamed of it, steals from it shamelessly. What's to celebrate here? What's the big deal? That we've become like the goyim?''
So opposed is this teacher to the state that he compares David Ben-Gurion to Hitler (''May his name and memory be wiped off the face of the earth''), then typically softens his tune, imploring his idolatrous listener to repent: ''You think, maybe, that you came here by chance, where your feet led you? Let me teach you that man does not walk by chance. Moreover, man does not walk.'' Mr. Oz asks what he means. ''Simply this: Man does not walk except to where he is led, and he is not led except to where his heart desires, and his heart does not desire unless the desire be from the depths of his soul.''
I think Mr. Oz deliberately chooses to start his journey where, he says, Hitler and the Messiah ''dominate'' the wall graffiti and the souls of people ''like twin pillars of fire,'' because he feels that Israel lies between those pillars. And Mr. Oz, like Samson, is ready to push both pillars aside, the murderous past and the crippling future, in the name of a hopeful present. Still, he implicitly acknowledges that he may have undertaken his journey because of desires he cannot fathom. He has no fellow feeling with the Orthodox railers, but he takes them seriously. The first stop on his journey thus announces that all Israel's voices will be taken seriously and honored and in the ensuing chapters, hate and love, politics and superstition, even Jew and Arab will bear the same weight.
THE book then moves from voice to voice; each offers something different from the one before it, but, with the exceptions of Z's voice and Mr. Oz's own, they are not starkly different from one another. Each builds on an earlier one rather than drowning it out. After the religious zealots come the nationalist zealots in the village of Bet Shemesh, Moroccan Jews on whose political support the former Prime Minister Menachem Begin relied for much of his power. While they serve up Cokes and cigarettes at an outdoor table, they fire accusations at the author for his public criticisms of Mr. Begin. Is it loyal, they ask, ''to rat on us to the world?'' And what right has Mr. Oz to tear down a man like Mr. Begin, a saint? Or is it that the Ashkenazi-European-cultivated Jew looks down his quasi- Aryan nose, like the rest of the Israeli establishment, on these Orientals, the ''riff raff'' of Bet Shemesh? ''You want the world to think that Israel was once a beautiful, civilized country, but now Begin and his niggers have taken over.''
They are followed by Israeli settlers on the West Bank who threaten to do some ''spring cleaning'' if the authorities do not control the rebellious Arabs. The Arabs themselves talk of conciliation and coexistence with bitterness and confusion. Abu Haled, a writer and educator, asks, ''Do you know what the hardest thing was for me to swallow? That we are two similar peoples.'' Abu Haled then relates an epiphany. When he was a boy, he accompanied his mother on a visit to Acre. It was his first trip to Israel. He was full of fear as they walked in a park. Suddenly his mother urgently needed to find a toilet. But the boy could not muster the nerve to ask a Jew where the toilets were. Finally his mother made known her problem to a Jewish girl, who took the old woman by the arm, ''as if she were hugging her,'' and led her to the toilets. Seeing that, Abu Haled burst into prolonged tears. ''To this very day I don't understand those tears.'' Mr. Oz provides several such silent pauses.
Still, ''In the Land of Israel'' comes to no real end. Mr. Oz even undercuts his speech on humanism by following it with the observations of a ''wise man'' who tells the author that even his liberal, freewheeling (meaning heretical) views are part of God's plan for the Chosen People that Mr. Oz has ridiculed. But the sage's words only remind us that these arguments are unending. The concluding section of the book makes the same point; Mr. Oz, back home at his kibbutz, is upbraided by neighbors who read his manuscript. ''Why did you suddenly decide to present our case with the rumblings of some fanatic here or some psychopath there? Aren't there any normal people left in this country?'' They constitute another reminder of fluidity and continuity, which is Mr. Oz's theme. If Mr. Oz has enemies in his land, they are not just the Z's, but all the forces of adamancy and finality. In a sense, Mr. Oz refuses to end his own work, his final chapter being a list of reactions and rebuttals to the book itself, ending on the ambiguous, ''So be it.''
THE problem all along, for Mr. Oz and those he has interviewed, is what sort of place Israel should be. For Jews the question may seem antilogical. Is there really a place, one place, for those who have been forced to wander so long that their identities have been bound to a condition of wandering, and who now find their Diaspora confined to a single location? Is this a cause of their agitation, the turbulence in the bottle? The meaning of Mr. Oz's early novel, ''Elsewhere Perhaps'' (1966), is that only in places other than Israel do the normal laws of conduct obtain and the true Israel may always lie somewhere else. The people whose conversations are recounted in this book are also looking elsewhere, yet there is nowhere else to go. Americans will recognize the problem.
Perhaps for this reason the power of the voices in the book lies as much in things unspecified as in their rantings - in the tears, the street prophecies, the gnomic phrases, the figure of God whose name is invoked continually. Everyone agrees that ''the land is God's,'' although there are differences of opinion on who are the preferred tenants. Still, since divinity hovers over them, these voices do not express only views, but prayers and imprecations. It is curious to find so much mystery tied to practical matters, but something spiritual and fundamental underlies this search for place, something Mr. Oz hears and wishes to express.
This is not a ''fair'' book, in the sense that it calls up equal numbers of bright and foolish peace-seekers and warmongers. It is not a debate, but a work in progress, and that is what Mr. Oz would have Israel be. His fellow kibbutzniks may complain that he exhibits only the freaks of the nation, the extremes, but the extremes are his main concern. He described his compatriots to a magazine reporter several years ago: ''Either they have the best country in the world, the purest, the fulfillment of the highest moral standards, or else there is total disillusionment.'' He added: ''Paradoxically, the outside world tends to view Israel with much the same perspective.'' It is the hard lines, everybody's hard lines, that Mr. Oz wishes to erase. His final plea in this book is for patience, because in spite of everything, including their words which fly up against his, Mr. Oz believes in people. How else could he have written so stunning a book?
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