A. Yehoshua - The Liberated Bride

The two musicians returned to play a modern work by an Italian composer, an intricate and unmelodic dialogue that left everyone relieved that it was over. A hush descended on the hall, where the elegiac mood was heightened by the twilight that was its sole illumination. It was time for Rivlin, the deceased’s protégé and real or apparent heir, to rise and go to the lectern, where he shut his eyes for a moment with such force that he seemed about to burst into an aria. Outside the large windows, at the foot of Mount Scopus, the Old City, bounded by its ancient Turkish wall, merged in the dusk with the neighborhoods around it. Patches of snow gleamed on its golden domes. Rivlin felt a wave of despondency. The hopeless Rashid and the amorous Circe nagged at his mind. His stubborn, patient pursuit of the mystery of his son’s marriage, begun last spring in the garden of the hotel, had ended in a basement on a snowy day in winter by shelves filled with income-tax files.

He took his notes from his jacket pocket, placed them on the lectern, and began to read the opening paragraphs, which he had written out in full to get himself off to a good start.

“Two years ago, my wife and I were on a summer vacation in the Dolomites of northern Italy. One afternoon we took a funicular to a well-known ski site. It let us off on the slope of Mount Cortina, where there was nothing except for a small café. Sitting there was an elderly Italian gentleman, a stocky man with a distinguished if slightly recherché appearance whose face and body language were remarkably like those of Professor Tedeschi. Yes, my friends, he was the very image of our dear Carlo. We were so struck by it that we couldn’t take our eyes off of him. He drank his coffee and ate some cake while conversing thoughtfully with a young companion who — to judge by the deference he showed the older man — might have been his private secretary or student. After a while the gentleman rose, paid the bill, took his burnished, gold-handled cane, and left the café. Yet instead of heading downhill on the funicular to the little valley below, he took the young man’s arm and pointed amiably but firmly with the cane at a bare path that wound toward the summit of the mountain, bald except for a crown of snow. The two of them walked slowly, halting now and then to exchange a few words or look at the scenery, until they disappeared in a sudden haze.

“The elderly gentleman’s resemblance to Professor Tedeschi affected both me and my wife. We wondered where he and his young companion had been heading. And it was then that a thought occurred to me. ‘Imagine,’ I said to my wife, ‘that there had been no Italian fascism or German Nazism and no Second World War. Carlo Tedeschi, who was born to an assimilated Jewish family and considered himself an Italian in every respect, would have finished his medical studies in Turin. A successful, amiable physician, he would have gone hiking from time to time in the mountains near his native city and might have been the man we just saw. It never would have occurred to him to study Arabs or Turks, whom he would have known only as an occasional item in the newspapers.’

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Tedeschi’s Orientalism was a by-product of the tragedy of World War II. Even after the war, he could easily have returned to Italy and resumed his medical studies. But the fate of Europe’s Jews caused him to burn all his physical and spiritual bridges to his native land. He sold his parents’ home in Turin for less than market value, renounced his Italian citizenship, and began a new career on Mount Scopus as a student of Near Eastern history. His mentors, great Orientalists from Germany and Central Europe, had turned to the field for similar reasons. But Tedeschi was not satisfied with their classroom learning and decided to polish his spoken Arabic with a strict old Arab instructor known for his rigor in inculcating a proper accent. The young Italian threw himself into his new field with total dedication. It was more than a career for him. It was a calling, his contribution to integrating the Jewish people into the region they had chosen to live in — a crucial task if they were to survive there.”

There was wonder on the face of the translatoress, who had never heard Rivlin’s vividly told story of her husband’s doppelgänger climbing Mount Cortina in the sunset. He smiled at her tenderly. Getting no response, he turned to the consular officials, who were listening to his Hebrew with attentive incomprehension.

“In recent years,” he continued, “the field of Orientalism has been under unremitting attack. Edward Said’s renowned book, published twenty years ago, is but one illustration of this. Even though the radical accusations of this literary and intellectual critic living in New York were rejected out of hand by most scholars, among them such serious Arab academicians as Jalal el-Azem, Nadim el-Bitar, and Fu’ad Zakariyya, they have served to legitimize the ongoing criticism leveled at their own profession by many young Orientalists. So dubious are they of the scholarly integrity of their field that they would deny it its very name. Suddenly, a time-honored belief in the capacity of rational Western thinkers to understand the history and reality of the Arab world has been called into question. At the end of the twentieth century, we have been asked to adopt a postmodernist sensibility — a rather nebulous concept, I must say — characterized by a more flexible, relativistic, multicultural approach. This alone, we are told, can get us to the heart of an elusive essence that — so forthright Arab writers like Fu’ad Ajami lament — even the Arabs have despaired of understanding.

“The problem is especially severe for Israeli Orientalists, who are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they are suspected by both the world and themselves of being unduly pessimistic about the Arab world because of Israel’s conflict with it. And on the other hand, they are accused of unrealistic optimism because of their deep craving for peace. For the Israeli scholar, whether he likes or admits it or not, Orientalism is not just a field of research. It is a vocation involving life-and-death questions affecting our own and our children’s future. This is why we have a greater responsibility to be accurate in our work. Just as we must refrain from all condescension toward the Arabs, so must we avoid all romanticization of them. We are not German philologists, retired British intelligence officers, or literary French tourists, who can afford to be deluded about who the Arabs are or should be. We are the Arabs’ neighbors and even their hostages — participants in their destiny who are unavoidably part of what we study. We are the old and yet new stranger in their midst, the constant shadow of the Other that, by their own testimony, has become their twentieth-century obsession. The problematic indeterminacy of Jewish identity undermines the old stability of the Arab world that slumbered peacefully for centuries in the desert.”

From the throes of Israeli Orientalism’s double bind, the eulogist gave his worried audience a sorrowful, we-must-carry-on-nonetheless smile. Even the Italians who did not understand him nodded trustingly at his impeccable logic.

“And here,” Rivlin continued, pointing to the photograph of the Jerusalem polymath in the desert, “lies another of Tedeschi’s unique contributions. Growing aware many years ago of the dangers posed to Israeli Orientalism by this symbiotic relationship with the Arabs, he decided to draw a clear boundary. ‘Let us,’ he declared, drawing on his fund of knowledge, ‘learn from the Turks how to belong and not belong to this region at one and the same time.’ And so turning away from Iraq, putting Sudan aside, and even abandoning great Egypt, he traveled northward to Turkey, in whose relations with the Arab world he saw a paradigm for our own.”