Culture and Ideas

Israeliness and the Art of Mountain-Climbing

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at the Daily Beast:

The news photos of Nadav Ben-Yehuda arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport from Nepal shows a gaunt-faced young man with one hand bound heavily in bandages. Ben-Yehuda became a hero, one could say, because he chose not to conquer the mountain.

I feel personal gratitude to him.  Ever since I read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air—more precisely, ever since I mainlined the book’s horrors directly into my nightmares—I’ve believed, or wanted to believe, in the theoretical certainty that an Israeli mountain climber would act as Ben-Yehuda did. Three hundred meters from the peak of Mt. Everest, he turned the theoretical prediction into reality.

Before I talk about Ben-Yehuda, a word more about Krakauer’s book. As you may remember, it’s a first-person account of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Everest. Too many people reached the top during the same opening in the weather, which  ended in a savage storm. Nine climbers died while Krakauer was on the mountain. Several people made desperate efforts to save others, even dying in the attempt.

This is just the setting of the nightmare. The nightmare, as Krakauer unflinchingly relates,

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Little Secrets– “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

“Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.”

I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table.

illustration by Avi Katz


“All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I need to get my peripheral vision checked.”

“No, that’s really the way he looks,” said Alon.

Alon is a correspondent for one of the major dailies. I’d called him in desperation on Saturday night because I had a column to prepare and had no idea what to write. Alon knows everyone and everything and I figured he’d be able to slip me a scoop.

“Meet me at 10 a.m. in the Aroma Café on Arlosoroff Street,” he told me. “We’ll brainstorm. And it’s a good place to pick up a tidbit or two.”

The cafe was buzzing at mid-morning. Nearly every table was taken, and at least one person at each table was a familiar face. Over the bar hung a large sign with large letters: “Aroma Arlosoroff: A Quiet Spot For Intimate Encounters.” The morning sun flooded in through the plate glass windows that made up three of the café’s four sides.

“It’s where I meet my most confidential sources,” Alon whispered as we walked through the door. “If you come here, you gotta know how to keep a secret.”

“I see there’s free WiFi,” I said.

“Hey, stop staring,” Alon hissed.

“But that guy over there, surrounded by the paparazzi,”

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Benzion Netanyahu’s Legacies

by

Gershom Gorenberg

My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:

Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.

Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”

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Other Nights — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

“This night is no different from other nights,” says Pharaoh, “True, on previous nights I have had a son, and on this night I do not. But this is not relevant to what I must do now.”

“This time sounds different from other times,” says Mozart, “for in previous times I did not have a son, and now I do.”

What time is it? I write this two days before the Seder night. It will reach its readers a few days before Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers.

It is not a good time, I tell the friend who sits down next to me on the row of chairs outside the sanctuary. I have a glossed Haggadah open on my lap. I am trying to prepare for this year’s Seder, to think of how to retell, once more, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the sea. Pesach is next week and my son Niot, who was a soldier, will have been dead for a year. The earth has circled the sun a single time since the last Seder, which was the last night he was with us. We are cleaning and preparing once more to eat matzah and bitter herbs and tell again the story of how we came out of Egypt. Two and a half weeks later we will again remember the fallen soldiers. But this year is different, for there is a newly fallen soldier to remember, and he is my son.

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The Niot Project / “בנאות למידה”

by

Haim Watzman

Dear Friends,

This coming week, during the Pesach holiday, we will mark the first anniversary of the death of our son Niot z”l. Niot, a soldier in the IDF’s Golani Brigade, was killed in an accident. We miss him very much.

In Niot’s memory, his family has established, in cooperation with the Society for the Advancement of Education, the Niot Project to help teenagers with learning disabilities and ADHD. We have prepared a brochure explaining the project, and more detailed information is available on the Society for the Advancement of Education website.

We would be pleased to have your support for this important project. Donations may be made in the following ways:

In the USA: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made by making out a check to “PEF Israel Endowment Funds Inc.” and mailing it to 317 Madison Avenue, Suite 607, New York, NY 10017, USA, with a cover letter indicating that the donation is for The Niot Project, at the Society for the Advancement of Education, Jerusalem.

In Israel: Tax-deductible contributions to the Niot Project can be made through either of the following routes:

By mailing a check made out to the Society for the Advancement of Education (Address: P.O. Box 16252, Jerusalem 91162, Israel).

Donations may also be made on-line (choose the Niot Project button).

Wishing you a happy Pesach,

The Watzman Family

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Spring — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides.

Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert hill come to life for a brief week or two after a late and south-wandering thundershower. We lay on velvet-red poppies with voluptuous black irises and brassy-yellow mustard flowers watching two formations of our platoon converge from the west and south on the slopes of the next hill over. That hill, guarded by evil-eyed cardboard cutouts of Syrian soldiers, was ours to conquer. Nuriel, Dani, and I were the fire team meant to keep the paper riflemen’s heads down with high-intensity machine gun and mortar fire until the two attack forces were positioned to make their final run toward the defensive positions. Nuriel’s arm, its spare dark down glistening, was draped over his MAG machine gun. Dani’s much thicker elbow rested on a pack full of assorted charges for his 60mm mortar. I was the team leader. The platoon had done a dry run of the maneuver an hour before and now the live fire version was beginning. But the formations were still far off and we awaited our lieutenant’s order to begin the barrage. So we had taken the opportunity to make a round of coffee on Nuriel’s camp stove.

illustration by Avi Katz

Nuriel, a baby-faced kid new to our unit, just six months past his three-years stint in the Givati Brigade, was explaining to us why he had felt compelled to tell Merav, to whom he had just gotten engaged, that he first fell in love with another woman on a flower-strewn hill like this one during his first furlough after basic training.

“My friend Mendy and I were hiking a trail on Mt. Meron in the Galilee,” he told us, “and we saw two spots of white on a boulder. We got closer and saw that it was two girls in linen shirts washing their faces in a spring that spurted out from the side of the mountain into a large pool.

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Once More, With Feeling — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

illustration by Avi Katz

The sniffles turned into sobs during the dissonant piccolo solo. The Israel Philharmonic was about four minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and the weeping distracted me from the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, who seemed not so much to be cuing the orchestra as to performing a long slow death dance.

The tears were coming from a little girl in a long-sleeved dress who was sitting two rows in front of me in the Jerusalem Convention Center’s high balcony. She looked to be about eleven years old and she held her hands tightly to her cheeks as she wept. Her shoulders heaved in a way that seemed to indicate that she was holding much more sorrow inside than she was letting out. But then the strings returned with a desperate restatement of the opening theme that descended a chromatic scale into a lower depth of agony. When the music dissolved completely into a virtual silence, she let out a very audible throaty gasp. The older couple sitting in front of her turned around to eye her. A boy in a black kipah who was sitting one seat away—apparently an older brother—sidled over beside her, gave her a smack on the back of her head, and whispered something angry in her ear.

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Confessions of a Cross-Sitter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

To the respected Torah scholar, Rabbi Rosencrantz, may he live a good and long life, amen:

I would not disturb you at your studies were it not that the problem I face is pressing and the agony of my soul no longer bearable. Nor would I dare to write you under a false name, if it were not so embarrassing, but this you will no doubt understand as you read. I plead with you to respond quickly and with all the wisdom at your disposal, as my family, my livelihood, and my soul are all at stake.

It’s about public transportation. That is, I have a bus issue. Perhaps the word “issue” might be misunderstood. Perhaps I should say a seat problem. But perhaps that, too, may sound improper. Let me get to the point.

illustration by Avi Katz

Each morning I kiss my wife and children good-by and descend the narrow stairs from our modest apartment in the Holy City of Jerusalem and wait, along with many of my neighbors, for the number 2 bus. As befits our God-fearing neighborhood, the passengers board and the men take seats in the front and the women proceed to the back.

I swipe my Rav-Kav card and begin to walk down the aisle. A seat presents itself but I decide to try further back. I continue down the aisle toward the swivel section of the double bus.

For quite a long time after glatt-kosher buses began running in our neighborhood, I convinced myself that I was just looking for a more comfortable or convenient seat. But yesterday I was confronted with the truth.

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Unstocking the Characters: Thoughts on Three New Works of Short Fiction

by

Haim Watzman

I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers.

But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction on-line—I was at a bat mitzvah and the DJ’s bone-vibrating music had driven me outside—so I persisted in perusing “Recognition,” the latest short story published by the on-line journal Guernica . In fact, I had a chance to read two other stories as well: David Riordan’s “Mutts” at the Boston Review and ”The Waiting Room”, an excerpt from a novel by Leah Kaminsky at JewishFiction.net. It’s interesting to note that all three offer stock characters, ones we might feel, at the beginning of the story, that we’ve read about so often that we don’t care to read about them anymore. But the first two stories surprise us by using technique to give us a new take on old material. The third fails.

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Winter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

“Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander.

Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all afternoon. The cardboard targets scattered there, painted in green with the suggestive outline of a helmet-clad infantrymen aiming straight at us, are full of holes already. We have our arms crossed over our chests and our heads are down because we’re trying to stick our noses into the warm place between our arms and our torsos. 

illustration by Avi Katz

An icy wind inflates the backs of our shirts, which are soaked with sweat from our last charge up the hill with full packs. The platoon’s other guys are scattered around near us. Amar and Kochin, short and solid like Middle Earth dwarves laboring at a forge, are desperately trying to light a gas stove to make coffee, even though they know the canister’s empty. Mandelbaum the radioman switches on his flashlight so he can continue to read the book he’s been perusing during breaks in the training. He reads like a goat grazes, whatever’s at hand, halachic responsa, windblown newspapers, the labels on cans in ration boxes. Diki has splayed himself on the hood of the truck that brought us here, trying to absorb some of the heat that the gray metal has stored from the fierce afternoon sun.

Tourjeman, who’s the platoon medic, accuses Yoel. “We’re all going to die of hypothermia. You said we’d be back on base before dark.”

“Only idiots go out to train in the Negev and don’t bring their coats with them,” says Yoel, who did not bring his coat, either.

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Intermezzo — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

by

Haim Watzman

10 July 1922

To the editor of Kuntres:

My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable of our nation’s musical representatives in the great cultural metropolis of Paris. However, they may be disturbed to hear that said representative is a broken man from a dying world.

The story begins with my arrival in Paris just last week, after the successful conclusion of my agronomy studies in Toulouse. 

illustration by Avi Katz

Eager to sample what the great city had to offer, I immediately examined the billboards and proceeded to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (yes, the same place where, just nine years ago, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps caused a riot!) to hear a program of piano concerti. One of the pieces was Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 2 in G major, and the other a work in E major by a composer I was not acquainted with, one Moritz Moszkowski.

I will reluctantly pass over a description of a wonderful performance of the Russian composer’s great work, which I am sure is familiar to all your readers. Some will complain that it is overly long, but I maintain that its every moment contributes to a whole that is a sublime expression of the Russian national spirit.

I could not have been more astounded to find that the conductor chose to follow up Tchaikovsky’s great work with a piece so devoid of weight that it simply wafted through the air of the concert hall like chaff thrown to the winds.

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