A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

“A living soul at last!” the Orientalist declared. “What is this? Just because the city doesn’t charge admission, does this place always have to be closed?”

“For you, we’ll even charge admission.” The woman, who wore her hair in an Orthodox-style puff, grinned at him.

“Admission to an author’s house?” Rivlin was in a fighting mood. “What for, to pay your salary?”

She laughed. “Good Lord! If my salary came from admission fees, I’d have starved to death long ago.”

Rivlin paid thirty shekels for himself and his guest and declined the offer of an information sheet. The two men walked silently around a large, nondescript room, the famous author’s salon that was now used for lectures about him, and climbed a steep staircase to his study. Its walls were lined with books, mostly large rabbinic volumes. Standing on a worn rug was a small, old desk with an antique typewriter, a museum piece in its own right. The room was cold, and an elevated, built-in fireplace, though its blue tiles enlivened the gloom, did not look to Rivlin as though it had been used even in the author’s lifetime.

The room had a single window looking out on the yard. Beneath it, bulky and graceless, was the renowned lectern on which the Nobel Prize winner — in awe, it was said, of the Hebrew language — had written his prodigious output of novels and stories standing up. A sheet of paper covered with his tiny, nebulous script lay on its slanted top. Beside that were his eyeglasses. Rivlin, not daring to try them on, picked them up and immediately put them down again.

The rain outside beat down harder, casting a thick pall. The lamp in the room shone feebly. Yo’el took out his reading glasses and perused the titles on the shelves, now and then taking down a book to look at it. An expert on Third World agriculture and the effects on it of global warming, he had a wide range of interests and encouraged Rivlin to send him Israeli magazines and periodicals, as well as new volumes of Hebrew fiction and poetry, which he avidly read on his long flights. It was his way of keeping in touch with the country, his up-to-date knowledge of which often surprised people.

“How Spartan it is here,” he remarked.

“Yes,” Rivlin said. “Agnon was said to have been a great miser.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Yo’el came passionately to the author’s defense. “It’s not a question of money. It’s an attitude toward life. Look at these books. Some were expensive. There are even rare manuscripts. It’s not miserliness that you’re looking at. It’s a radically modest way of life. I’ve seen the same thing in the houses of other real intellectuals, East and West. I have the greatest respect for it.”

Rivlin took a large, heavy volume from a shelf, glanced at it, and put it back. “Just the title page puts me to sleep,” he said.

“What can you expect? An eternal people like the Jews didn’t go around producing best-sellers. But don’t think that the sacred literature of other peoples is any more lively. And if you look at where all these books come from, you’ll find an amazing variety of periods and countries. Some were printed in places that even the geographers have never heard of. They may seem tedious now, and perhaps they always were, but for better or for worse they’re still the context for many things — including the great works of the man whose house we’re in. That’s why he preferred to spend his money on them and not on rugs or paintings.”

“Far be it from me…” Rivlin left the sentence unfinished. His brother-in-law, whose nationalist ardor was satisfied with seven hours in his native land, sometimes baffled him.

“Especially when I’m in places where no Jews ever lived,” Yo’el continued, “I think of the rabbis, who purged their discourse of all historical concreteness to make a distilled, abstract essence of it even when dealing with the petty details of life. It transcends time and place, which why it fits together so naturally in a library like this, assembled to meet the specifications of its owner.”

“Which were?”

“I don’t know. I only know that the man who worked in this room and consulted these books knew how to get the most out of them and to make the connections between them. He wasn’t interested in history, but in something else… something more important…”

“More important in what way?” Rivlin picked up the gauntlet. “All these books, with their endless hairsplitting commentaries, never helped the Jews to survive, let alone to prepare for the next catastrophe.”

“And those Jews better anchored in history or reality were better prepared?”

“Yes,” the Orientalist said. “I think so. It’s a fact.”

“Would you say that about the Israelis?”

“Why not? As long as we’re able to free ourselves from our own myths…. But we’d better get a move on, Yo’el. Hagit and Ofra’s aunt is sick, and they can’t spend too much time with her.”

And seeing that his brother-in-law was loath to leave the great author’s room, Rivlin added:

“The reason you’ve developed such a nostalgic, sentimental attitude toward Judaism, Yo’el, is that you spend all your time at international conferences. You inhabit a bubble of virtual reality. If you lived in this country and saw all your tax money go to support parasitical yeshiva students, most of whom don’t even study, you’d talk differently.”

“You’re wrong.” Yo’el’s smile was tolerant. “I’m not nostalgic about Judaism, and I’m perfectly realistic. I have no illusions that what’s written in these books has any answer for the suffering and the hardship that I see all the time. I’m talking about something different. Not the content but the template — a style of thought such as you find in a wonderful, if sometimes wearisome, book like Agnon’s The Bridal Canopy, which I read last year in Laos and Cambodia. It gave me more insight into the Third World than no end of documents. That’s what I’m looking for: a template that Israel — and you know how attached I am to it — has lost….”

“But a template for what?” Rivlin asked impatiently.

Yo’el paused by the old lectern and glanced at the page of writing. His glasses, which resembled the author’s, had slipped down his nose, giving his broad, strong face a spiritual mien.

“For giving Israel more of what Judaism once had.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About how Israeli identity might be freed from its provincialism and given wings. How it might adopt a more spiritual attitude toward a world in need of new ideas. It should be possible to combine the Jewish genius for ahistorical abstraction with Israel’s scientific accomplishments — with the curiosity, the collective solidarity, the ability to improvise, that so many Israelis have….”

“Mostly to improvise unnecessary problems,” the Orientalist opined.

“Don’t lose your sense of proportion,” Yo’el corrected him. “Believe me, I know the problems of other peoples. Real ones of hunger and civil war and terrible natural disasters. I’m tired of spoiled Israelis whining all the time, as if the only point of comparison with their situation were the tranquillity of Europe — as if Europe itself hadn’t been within living memory the site of the most horrible of atrocities, not to mention what just happened in Bosnia….”

Rivlin smiled. “Yes, I say the same things in defense of the Middle East when I hear it attacked. But it doesn’t really do any good.”

“What I’m saying,” Yo’el continued, removing the glasses from his nose and laying them absentmindedly on the lectern, “is that it’s time for Israel to look beyond its local squabbles. Globalism, with all that’s frightening and fascinating about it, is our business, too. We have to think of ways to cope with it. We should learn from the way we were in the 1950s, both more modest and more driven by a sense of mission.”