Foreign Correspondence (9 page)

He gives me the stamp; he always does. And then, when I tell him what it is for, he even looks pleased to have helped me. I skip away and post a letter to a pen pal in Israel.

• • •

Of an evening, our dog would hear my father’s tread on the front steps before a figure appeared fuzzily through the ripple-glass door.

Timing was everything. If the dog ran to the door by six or a little after, the evening would be uneventful. Any time after six-thirty, things got iffy. My mother, making dinner in the kitchen, would glance at the dining-room clock, dry her hands on a tea towel and go to greet him. No matter what came after, they always hugged like newlyweds.

You could tell how it would be by his mouth. Usually it was an amiable mouth, turned up at the corners, ready to smile at the dog, greet the cat and enjoy a quiet evening in front of the television or in bed with a book. On nights he was late, it would be another man’s mouth; a mean, thin line attached to a bellowing, unreasonable stranger who would pick a fight over a piece of lint on the floor or the position of the soap dish.

We learned to give this metamorphosed man a wide berth, which is one reason we had abandoned attempts at a family dinner. With plates propped on our laps in front of the TV, it was possible that the outbursts of irrational anger would be directed at a politician on the nightly news, or a grammatical lapse in a sit-com script.

One Tuesday evening I’d settled down to enjoy the weekly episode of “Star Trek.” I had already completed the obsessive-compulsive routines necessary to savor this, my favorite hour of the week. To better assimilate every detail of the plot, I positioned myself on the floor, three feet from the screen, cushions propped, pad and pen beside me to jot down notes during commercial breaks. William Shatner’s sonorous voice had no sooner intoned the familiar “Space. The final frontier” than my father erupted from his armchair.

“It isn’t, you know! What about the human brain! We’re only using one percent of the brain’s capacity—that’s the final
bloody frontier! Hell’s bells, who writes this garbage?” His voice, his wonderfully trained singer’s voice that could fill an auditorium, boomed like a cannon in our living room. “Stop yelling,” my mother said. “I’M NOT YELLING!” he yelled. On he went, and on, about the intellectual deficiencies of Hollywood script writers, the narrowness of the cultural debate, our inferior moral fiber for supporting such drivel by watching it.

There was no way to short-circuit one of these diatribes. To interrupt was simply to refocus his anger on oneself. By the day after, he would have forgotten everything he’d said. The positive side to his amnesia was that it taught us not to take his abuse to heart. The negative side was that the whole argument could be rerun dozens of times, often word for word. That was how it was with the “Star Trek” introduction. If my father had been drinking, the words “The final frontier” would be like the bell to Pavlov’s dog. He would thunder, “It isn’t, you know!” And off he would go again on his tirade. Eventually, we made a joke out of it, competing to see who could be quickest to get out the words “It isn’t, you know.” My father would look at us with a puzzled expression, murmur, “Too bloody right,” and wander off to find a mis-hung tea towel to complain about.

These alcohol-induced tempers were the unscourable residue of my father’s earlier self, a small untidy corner in what had become an otherwise orderly life. One or two of them were the blight on each otherwise tranquil week.

But for six days in June 1967, the belligerent stranger didn’t appear at the door at all. Instead, my father arrived home early every night, anxious to catch the headlines on the six o’clock news. Afterward, he spread the evening papers on his bed and pored over the maps inside. Tiny Israel was at war, and he cared passionately.

That meant I cared too. Unlike my mother, who could enter
a child’s world with ease and spend comfortable hours there, my father could only deal with us as miniature adults. His strange, sad childhood had left him with no detailed pattern of fatherhood to follow. I learned that if I wanted to talk to him it was easier to follow his adult interests wherever they might lead. Sometimes it was the shade of a sprawling fig tree by the cricket pitch where he managed the local under-sixteen team. Gritting my teeth to keep from yawning through the interminable games, I learned to mark the score card and toss off phrases like “caught at deep fine leg” and “bowled a maiden over.”

Those odd, colorful expressions were all I really liked about the game. I hated sports. Being sick for so long had left me unathletic and poorly coordinated. All through primary school I was the second slowest runner in every race, able to beat only the little girl in my class who had Down syndrome.

So, when my father’s attention wandered from the crease at the cricket ground to a volcanic plateau called the Golan Heights, I was only too happy to follow him there.

He was a convert to the Zionist dream. Serving in Palestine in World War II, the socialist in him had fallen in love with the idea of the kibbutz. His California family, transplanted East Coast WASPs named Ithamar and Winthrop, with roots going back to the American Revolutionary War, had been garden-variety anti-Semites. His own experience in Hollywood had exposed him to all the conspiracy theories of Jews controlling press, pictures, radio and finance. But the unexamined prejudices with which he grew up couldn’t long survive his encounters with the swamp-draining, poverty-embracing Jewish pioneers. These Jews were underdogs, and my father naturally gravitated to their cause.

“What did we see in Palestine?” he wrote in a wartime letter to an Australian friend. “We saw acres of barren, badly cultivated land, suddenly studded with some glorious green oasis rife with all manner of growing things, a jewel of productiveness in
the midst of a wasteland. This would be a Jewish community farm, inhabited by Jews from every part of the world, living, working together happily, harmoniously; generous and friendly to outsiders, and in very few ways resembling the palm-rubbing, money-grubbing, successful Jew we know and so often despise in our own setting.”

During that week in 1967, I peered over his shoulder at the newspaper maps as he traced the progress of the fighting for me, describing the geography of the Sinai Peninsula and the Jordan Valley. It was the first time I had paid attention to anything in the newspapers beyond the comics. For six days my head was full of the kibbutznik children huddled in shelters as the Syrian mortars rained down. When Israel won, we celebrated.

From then on, I read Leon Uris and Anne Frank, learned Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” by heart and ostentatiously hauled around a dog-eared copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Eventually I took to wearing a Star of David to school, much to the consternation of the nuns.

With the same intensity I had expended on becoming Mr. Spock and recreating the bridge of the
Enterprise
in the school playground, I decided I would become a Jew and move to Israel. To practice for my new life on the kibbutz, I cultivated my mother’s modest vegetable garden to the point of soil erosion and designed an ambitious tree-planting campaign to drain our desiccated backyard’s nonexistent swamp.

One problem in my scheme seemed insurmountable, though. I had never met a Jew. I had hoped that Joannie might be Jewish, but when I wrote to her about my growing Israel obsession, her reply had been disappointing. “I have read both ‘Mila 18’ and ‘Exodus’. I enjoyed (if that’s the word) them both, even though my last year’s history teacher insists that if anyone can’t write it’s Leon Uris. As for support of either Arab or Israelis, I suppose that I support Israel, although there’s right
and wrong on both sides. I don’t have any allegiance to Israel because I’m not Jewish, but many of my friends who are consider Israel rather than the USA to be their true homeland. I don’t really blame them; I’d rather be almost anything than an American.…”

Right and wrong on both sides! Stunned by my pen pal’s victimization by Arab propaganda, I scrawled a long, boring reply setting out the Zionist case. How could her Jewish friends have left her laboring under such a misapprehension? But at least Joannie had some Jewish friends. My prospects for finding any seemed dim. Sydney’s small Jewish community had settled far away in the affluent eastern suburbs, where Mitteleuropean matrons gathered at coffee shops to nibble Sacher torte and talk about opera. Our western suburbs neighbors were still overwhelmingly of my mother’s Irish stock—hard-worked housewives who relaxed over a “cuppa” at the neighbors’ or gathered at the local Returned Services League club (the Australian version of the American Legion) for a flutter on the poker machines or the Wednesday afternoon races.

At school we had increasing numbers of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Lithuanians—but all of them were Catholic. Two of my best friends’ families were from the Middle East—Zita’s from Lebanon and Angela’s from Alexandria, Egypt. Another classmate, Monique, was a Palestinian whose father’s village was destroyed by Israelis after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Monique spoke Arabic and French before she’d learned English. Working in her third language, she was no match for me in history-class arguments. I remember her eyes, filled with tears, as she sat down in frustration after I’d delivered a passionate oration rebutting her account of her family’s forced flight at the hands of the Jewish fighters.

Zita and Angela were easier converts to my point of view. The two of them helped me write and perform a one-act Holocaust
play for English class.
(SCENE: WARSAW GHETTO 1942. A DIMLY LIT CELLAR.)
They played Ruth and Eva, two Jewish sisters hiding from Nazis. The centerpiece was a long monologue by Ruth, ostensibly read from her diary, cataloguing Nazi crimes against Jews in Poland, including the horrors of a death camp identified in the script as Austwich.

Speech delivered, Ruth becomes expendable. Two Nazis break into the cellar. (We enlisted a Lithuanian classmate who had the right tall blond looks for one of these parts; for the other we had to make do with an Italian.) The first Nazi, Helmet Fitzbrak, summarily executes Ruth. The other Nazi berates him: “You mad man—you ruined our sport. The men would have loved her.” Eva then swallows a cyanide pill.

At this point I make my entrance as the girls’ brother Baraak, a brave resistance fighter. Baraak shoots Helmet, stabs Wilfred. Alone on the corpse-strewn stage, he delivers a stirring monologue to the effect that resistance is the secret of joy.
(CURTAIN)
.

Incredibly, this was well received by our English teacher, and we got an excellent mark for it. Emboldened, I asked her to add Leon Uris to the class reading list. When she explained that she thought his books were execrably written propaganda, I was completely baffled by her sudden failure of discernment.

I decided that there was only one way around the lack of Jews in my circumscribed orbit: I would have to find an Israeli pen pal. It seemed unlikely that I would find such a person in the Spock fan-club newsletter. Israelis were surely too busy tilling the soil and fighting guerrillas to watch TV. I imagined them huddled around crackly radios, listening to the news and an occasional Holocaust documentary.

I was considering writing to the Israeli Embassy in Canberra when I noticed a small advertisement in the children’s pages of the Sydney newspaper for the International Youth Service, an organization a world away, in Finland, that arranged pen-pal
correspondences. For a small fee, they would pair Australians with would-be correspondents elsewhere in the world.

Obviously, my plan called for my correspondent to be a boy, so I could eventually marry him. For the same reason, he needed to be at least a year older than I. Listing these requirements in my request to Finland’s International Youth Service, I pondered what to write under “interests.” I put down “Zionism, agriculture” and then, to make myself sound a little broader, since I had read that kibbutzniks valued learning and culture as well as the skills of farmer and warrior, I added “science, art, reading, flute and pets.” I mulled the inclusion of “pets” for a while before opting for honesty over strategy. I hoped that my Israeli—no doubt laboring long hours in the cow sheds and turkey coops—wouldn’t think pets were too bourgeois.

After a long wait, the reply finally came. I returned home from school to find it sitting in the silver dish on the side table where my mother put the sorted mail. She took care of the bills. What was left, most days, were the letters in answer to my father’s eclectic correspondence. But since I’d started writing to Sonny and Joannie, often there would also be a letter in the dish for me.

The Hebrew postmark and the stamp picturing Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate thrilled me. His name was Mishal, and as I tore the letter open, I was prepared to fall in love with my young sabra correspondent, right there where I stood on the pale green carpet of our dining room.

From the first paragraph, the letter was a litany of tiny disappointments. Mishal wrote that he didn’t live on a kibbutz. However, it could have been worse; he wrote that he had worked on one “in the summer for a few days.”

It seemed that Mishal’s family wasn’t exactly pioneer stock. His father, rather than draining the Hula Swamp, worked as a French-polisher. Somehow, French-polished furniture hadn’t figured in my mental image of Israeli interiors. Hand-hewn
cypress logs propped on spent shell casings was more the kind of décor I’d pictured.

But the worst blow of all came in paragraph four, where Mishal listed the languages he knew. “I also know Arabic, because I am an Arabian fellow.”

Yech. I stuffed the letter back in its envelope, picked up my school case and trudged dejectedly to my room. It hadn’t occurred to me that in asking for an Israeli pen pal I might get a reply from an Israeli Arab—a descendant of one of the 156,000 Arabs who had stayed and not fled during the 1948 war, and so became Israeli citizens. I needed an Arab boy for a pen pal like I needed an outbreak of acne. I wasn’t too impressed by the males in my Arab girlfriends’ families. Their brothers seemed spoiled to me. And I preferred my own father’s benign detachment to the stifling presence of their fathers, always hovering and anxious, outside the most staid of parties or school functions.