Culture and Ideas

Successful New York Debut!

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Haim Watzman

Last monthafter Saturday morning services at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, I stood up in Rabbi Andy Bachman’s spacious study. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Were the personal stories of life in Jerusalem and Israel-forged humor of my Necessary Stories presentation going to click with the 50 sophisticated New Yorkers I found before me?

I’m happy to say that it went splendidly. From the start, people laughed in the right places—the best indication that they were engaged and entertained. And when the audience started breaking up before I’d had a chance to present my final segment, it wasn’t because they were bored. They explained that the children’s activities being held in parallel were coming to an end and that they had to pick up their kids.

Kudos came later by e-mail: “Haim Watzman transports his audience both in time and place in an authentic, heartfelt and intellectually thought-provoking performance,” wrote Doris Traub. David Greenberg, to whom I owe thanks for helping arrange the appearance, gave me this blurb: ““Haim Watzman brings the Israeli experience to life in a way that a history book never can. He reminded me again why Israel means so much to me. Mr. Watzman’s program was at once funny, thought-provoking, wise and enjoyable.”

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Rachel Goes for a Swim–“Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

<em>photo by Haim Watzman</em>
photo by Haim Watzman
“It’s their land and they can do whatever they want with it,” Roni shrugs. Now, I should explain that a Roni shrug is a geological event. His ninety-minute daily workout in the pool and the weight room has given him shoulders that undulate like a massif in an earthquake. At middle age, he’s got the physique of a seventeen-year old. He’s also got the same annoying macho bluster. This model male knows everything unequivocally, especially where the power lies.

I’m trying to persuade Roni to join the fight to save the Jerusalem Pool. We’re standing in said pool’s scruffy, humid men’s locker room, suiting up. A few weeks before, the management had put up signs announcing that it would no longer renew annual memberships. The owners of the property, who also run the pool, wanted to demolish the pool and build three luxury apartment buildings.

“Just because you own a piece of property, it doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with it,” I say.

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What Would Brenner Say? — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

“Write a short descriptive passage,” suggested the red-headed creative writing teacher who sat uncomfortably at the head of the table. We eight acolytes bent our heads submissively, pondered, and began to write.

<em>Drawing byAvi Katz</em>
Drawing by Avi Katz
We sat at a long narrow table, in a long narrow room, in the Haim Hazaz Writers’ House in Jerusalem’s Old City. A brisk walk of a bit over half an hour had gotten me there from the apartment in Baka that I’d recently moved into with my wife Ilana, following our marriage just a few months before. Ilana was pregnant and I did not yet know that the appearance of our first child would herald a long period when I’d have to work hard to suppress my creative urges and apply myself to supporting my family. I planned to be a writer. In Hebrew.

That didn’t seem to be a far-fetched goal at the time. I had a good command of my adopted language. I’d spent my first year in Israel in Hatzor Haglilit, a development town up north more forgotten and forsaken than Brigadoon – when visitors chanced on that mythical Scottish town once a century, they at least found it charming and were tempted to stay. Hatzor was a centrifugal village – whoever could get out left, and those that remained did so only because they were at the bottom of the bucket. There was little to do and nowhere to do it, nothing worth seeing and nowhere to see it, and only two inhabitants who spoke English. My ulpan Hebrew was quickly supplemented by street slang and underclass argot.

Beyond that, I forced myself to read Hebrew as much as I could. I refused to buy a newspaper in English (and in any case, The Jerusalem Report didn’t exist yet).

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Rachel and Mt. Nevo–A Translation

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Haim Watzman

<em>Mt. Nevo, photo by Argenberg</em>
Mt. Nevo, photo by Argenberg
I’m reading Rachel’s collected poems straight through for the first time. And being a translator (but not, I should emphasize, a poet), I can’t resist the temptation to try my hand at an English version of one. This is an ongoing project that I’ll be updating as I polish and improve it.

I told Rachel’s story in my book A Crack in the Earth. I noted there how Mt. Nevo was a central image in Rachel’s lyrics—and a central image for her readers as well. Nevo is the mountain from which Moses looked out over the Land of Israel, which he would never enter. In Rachel’s poetry, it’s the place from which the speaker looks out on an alternative life, the life longed or hoped for. The poetess stands in the wilderness and looks to the Promised Land.

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Rachel as a Metaphor–Why Israeli Democracy is Just as Bad/Good as All Others

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Haim Watzman

In politics, the pure is the enemy of the good. One need look no further than the discussion that ensued in response to my post Votes Are Not Enough. Some of the most prolific correspondents there, coming from both the right and left, shared the implicit assumption that democracy, if not pure, is not democracy.

Unfortunately, they won’t be able to read the fine essay that Nurit Gretz published in the arts and literature section of Friday’s Ha’aretz—the piece, in Hebrew, seems not to be available on-line. Gretz addresses a problem of the same genre and in doing so shows how wrong purism can be.

She does so by writing about one of the icons of Labor Zionism, A.D. Gordon, the Second Aliya’s guru of back-to-the-earth socialist egalitarianism. One of Gordon’s disciples was the poetess Rachel Bluwstein, who lived and worked at Kevutzat Kinneret on the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee, where Zionist farmers first tried to work on a communal basis. Bluwstein—universally known in Israel today as Rachel the Poetess—lived in accordance with Gordon’s teachings. She abandoned the middle-class life she’d known in Russia and set aside her aspirations for education and culture to become a simple farmer.

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The Oration Vocation–“Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

Demosthenes, de: Römische Statue einer Privatperson, die vor 1818 zu Demosthenes umgestalltet wurde; Römisch-Germanischen Museum Köln 8. April 2006, Author: Marcus Cyron “I don’t like him already,” Leo Shocken barked to Inga, his svelte, silver-blonde assistant, who had just led me into his office. Large-jowled Shocken lounged behind a large desk strewn with files, calendars, and banana peels. He held a half-filled tumbler of bourbon in his hand and both his stocking feet were propped up on the desk. A thick cigar stood erect between his chomped teeth, pointing in the direction of a side wall festooned with the autographed photographs of the most famous Jewish synagogue speakers of our age.
“Misteh Hocken, it’s Misteh Atzman,” she said, tottering on her super-high heels. There was a whiff of Transylvania in her accent. Or maybe it was Palo Alto. She hadn’t yet managed to pronounce enough complete words for me to tell.

“I don’t care who the hell it is,” Shocken growled, looking me straight in the eye. “What can he do?”
Inga swayed precariously. “He a eaker,” she volunteered.

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Necessary Stories Live–On YouTube

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Haim Watzman With thanks to my daughter Mizmor, who filmed and edited, I offer this preview of my new “Necessary Stories” program. It includes selections from four of the stories. For more on my speaking topics and availability, see my Speaking and Performance page. Am I really genetically smarter than my Sephardi wife? Find out … Read more

Skipping the Summit for the Movies

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new article about the superb new Israeli film Ajami (and the silliness of the protests against the Toronto Film Festival) is up at the American Prospect:

The advance publicity accurately predicted that this week’s U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian summit would fall short of great historical drama. Despite Barack Obama’s efforts, his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas would not be the denouement of successful diplomacy. Emotionally as well as physically, the get-together in New York on Tuesday would be half a world away from the unsolved conflict. Following updates on news sites would be an exercise in escapism, I concluded.

Instead, to stay real, I went to the movies. More specifically, I went to see Ajami. Like last year’s Waltz With Bashir, it’s an example of Israeli cinema’s maturation as engaged art, harsh and sympathetic. Ajami focuses on Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who are fated to live on both sides of the conflict. In the process, the film’s Palestinian and Jewish co-directors blur the boundary between fiction and documentary.

The film is named for a neighborhood in the coastal city of Jaffa. Until 1948, Jaffa was the cultural center of Arab Palestine. When it was conquered by Jewish forces that year, all but a few thousand of the Arab residents fled. Jewish immigrants moved into abandoned houses, and Jaffa was annexed by the neighboring Jewish city of Tel Aviv. The remaining Palestinians became Israeli citizens and outsiders. Ajami, a mostly Arab neighborhood, has stayed poor and crime-ridden.

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Red Briefs and Rain Ink–“Necessary Stories” Column in The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

The dust rose so high to the sky that heaven and earth seemed to have reverted to a dull yellow primordial chaos. The engines of dirt-caked, drab army transports rumbled, the horns of master sergeants’ white vans honked. I stood, trying to be seen and heard, at the Fatma Gate in Metula, seeking a ride up to my base at Ana, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

As of early summer 1983, the IDF had been bogged down in Lebanon for a year. Rational procedures and clear rules had been drafted for transporting soldiers to and from and through the Cedar Republic, but like so many army regulations, few knew them, and no one obeyed.

The way to get from Metula to Ana was to stand as close to the gate as the military police would allow and hold out an arm. An occasional driver would notice the lonely soldier through the smokescreen thrown up by the Holy Land’s parched soil, take pity, and stop long enough to ask where I needed to go. More often then not, they were going somewhere else. I needed to be back at base by 3 p.m.; driving straight up from Metula, the trip took at least three hours. It was already nearly an hour before noon, and I was getting desperate.

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One Measure of Awe, Please. Hold the Nationalism.

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Gershom Gorenberg

I’d been at Rosh Hanikra recently for a wedding, held in the evening on the small plaza set on the side of the bluff, overlooking the sea. The grottoes were lit at night, but the water rushing into the chasms from the open sea was dark.

Until last week, though, it had been many years since I visited in the daytime, buying a ticket for the cable car down to the grottoes. Since my previous visit, a short introductory movie has been added to the tour, shown in the now-blocked railroad tunnel that once crossed the border into Lebanon.

The film explains how waves, wind and salt carved the grottoes in the rock. It shows how sea turtles lay their eggs on the bluff – the mothers returning to where they were born, the newborns racing at night toward the shine of the waves to escape predators.

And then there’s an explanation that the place was once called Sulamah shel Tzur, the Ladder of Tyre, in Hebrew. (Actually, the name refers not just to the bluff, but to the mountain ridge that ends at the bluff, and that one needs to ascend to come up or down the coast.) The film explains that according to legend, Abraham entered the Land of Israel here and received the promise, “To your seed I will give this land” (Gen. 12:7). 

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