Zachary Lazar - I Pity the Poor Immigrant

From an e-mail dated 12/22/2008, forwarded to me from David Bellen’s “Drafts” folder by his ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, on 12/2/2011, about three weeks before I was to interview her in Jerusalem. The e-mail was originally addressed to Bellen’s friend Adam Harris, an editor at an American magazine who had rejected Bellen’s essay “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”:

Dear Adam,

I understand your reluctance — the piece is far too long — but I wanted to thank you for your kind words anyway. What I did not include in the piece was yet a further confession. In the fall of 1972, I saw Lansky once in person. I had been sent to cover his trial, not even for a newspaper but for a small journal of literature and politics that ceased to exist before it could even run my story. My then-wife Rachel and I were living in a small one-bedroom flat in Tel Aviv, expecting our son Eliav, and we were gravely in need of money. I took the bus to Jerusalem with no set idea of what I wanted to ask Lansky if I even had the chance.

It turned out of course that he was thronged. It was the day the supreme court handed down its decision denying him citizenship, and afterward I could only see him from a distance, speaking to some newsmen, looking down briefly at the lapel of his suit jacket. I remember that his clothes could not have been more impeccably clean. They shone against his matte skin, making him seem somehow less visible by comparison. I remember his words that day were oddly poetic. He compared his loss to the recent shock of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Germany. “Look what happened last week in Munich,” he said. “Young branches cut down. I’m an old man.”

When I returned to our apartment in Tel Aviv that night, it was later than I’d planned and Rachel, pregnant and uncomfortable, was standing in her nightgown at the stove. I had spent the last few hours in the bar at the Dan Hotel, the hotel where Lansky had lived throughout much of his stay in Tel Aviv. It was a place I’d never liked, a place not for Israelis so much as foreigners, yet in my role as “journalist” I somehow felt the need to assert my right to sit there. I hadn’t counted on the impact of Lansky’s fame, its strange mutedness — I remembered looking at him and marveling and also wondering why I was marveling. I noticed that the sound of his voice, his physical proximity, had caused something profoundly untrustworthy to stir inside me. It was his very mildness that caused this.

At the hotel, a waitress about my own age brought me coffee. When I remained there after the other customers had left, she came for the empty carafe and we ended up talking. She told me she was hoping some day to move to New York. I remember that — at the time, the very words “New York” suggested a place scarcely less romantic and unreal than the one conjured by the matchbooks from Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo Club. I didn’t believe she’d ever see New York. I didn’t even believe I would. I didn’t have any money to take her somewhere when her shift ended — I thought the whole thing was over when I paid my bill. Young, stupid, “poetic”—I can look for words to explain what happened next, but explanations are beside the point. “Impatient” might be the right word. Preyed on by an impatience that made every appetite a panic, something crucial I feared missing out on.

It was about nine months later, a few months after Eliav’s birth, that the waitress took me to an apartment in a part of the city that I seldom went to. We walked there all the way from the Dan Hotel. She led me into the foyer of a small gray building and we took the tiny elevator up to the third floor — no one around, no sounds of life, the apartment whose door she opened completely empty — no furniture, not even a single chair, just the bare, scuffed floors. I didn’t want to ask for explanations. I guessed that whatever explanation she might have given me would not have been the truth. She ran some water from the tap until it finally ran clear, then she filled a glass that had been left on the counter. The glass could have sat there for years. I watched her slender back beneath her blue dress as she drank. It would have been a few months before the Yom Kippur War, a war which had yet to start but that everybody knew was coming. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.

The apartment was on Be’eri Street, I remember. More precisely, it was at 4 Be’eri Street, the address my research now tells me was where Meyer Lansky had lived when he wasn’t living at the Dan. I’ve been back to look at the building a few times — I went just yesterday to look at it again. Of course I hadn’t seen the apartment yet when I came home that night from Jerusalem, having watched Lansky from afar as he stood outside the Palace of Justice. I closed the door behind me and stood inside the hall and called out Rachel’s name, but she didn’t answer. I sensed even then that there was a reason she wasn’t answering. It was almost midnight and she stood there at the stove with her back to me, wearing her old shapeless robe. She would have been six months pregnant with Eliav. When she finally turned, I had an unmistakable glimpse of my own irrelevance.

Yours,

David Bellen

It was in the business center of a Hampton Inn in Charlotte, North Carolina, that I first read this e-mail. I sat there piecing together its significance beneath the fluorescent light, wondering what I was going to say in three weeks to Bellen’s ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, in Jerusalem. Of course Bellen never mentions the waitress’s name in his e-mail. I supposed it was possible that she wasn’t Gila. I supposed it was possible that there was another waitress at the Dan Hotel who also happened to have an empty apartment in Tel Aviv, or, more plausibly perhaps, that the waitress, whoever it was, had borrowed the apartment from someone else. Perhaps it was at someone else’s apartment, and not the one in Gila’s photographs, that the waitress had slept with David Bellen in 1973. But perhaps not.

He would have been still in his twenties, Gila, a little older, thirty-four. He comes into the hotel bar and orders coffee, and when he introduces himself the name David Bellen means nothing to her, nothing to anyone at that point. He tells her where he’s been — he’s been covering the Lansky trial — and she’s silent for a moment, but not long enough for him to notice. Everyone in Israel has been following the case. She doesn’t react to the name with interest or humor or excitement. Perhaps the young journalist doesn’t even tell her his full name. Perhaps he’s just David, like so many other Israeli men.

I’ve been back to look at the building a few times — I went just yesterday to look at it again.

I read that sentence a few times before I referred back to the date of the e-mail’s composition. “Yesterday,” I realized, was only two days before Bellen had died.

I flew to Ben-Gurion International Airport for the second time in December of 2011, about seven weeks after Eliav’s death. I had saved to my cell phone the photograph Gila had taken of us together after our lunch the previous year in New York, that uncomfortable picture in which I seemed to be willing myself into invisibility or ghostliness. “Strange,” Gila had said that afternoon. Everyone says that word, “strange.” Of course the photograph I really wished I had on that second trip to Israel was one of the 5×7 prints Gila had shown me of the empty apartment, the apartment I now suspected was at 4 Be’eri Street. I had called Gila’s friend Hugh to see if by any chance he’d found those prints among Gila’s belongings. I hadn’t known until then how naïve a question that was. There are of course services that handle such things, professionals who clean out the houses of deceased people who leave behind no relatives or friends, or whose friends are too busy to sort through the remnants themselves. The 5×7 prints, like so much else that Gila had left behind, had been thrown away.