Larry’s English-language summer course, “Sociology of
Israel,” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Mount Scopus, was supposed to
be an introduction to the people of Israel, but it was basically a joke. The
only people in the month-long intensive were Americans, Canadians and British,
and the class didn’t meet any Israelis except for a few guest speakers. It only
included three field trips—a weekend in Tel Aviv and one-day trips to an
archaeological site and to a kibbutz.
The professor was a jovial, bearded American
immigrant, or oleh, who had three pet
topics. The first was the once-privileged position of Egged bus drivers, and
how that was now fading away. The second
was that nothing gets done in Israel without protectzia, or political influence. The third was the kibbutz way
of life and the diet prevalent in the kibbutzim—yogurt, white cheese, chopped
tomatoes and cucumbers, eggs, olives and pita.
He didn’t talk much about the conflicts between
Ashkenazim and Sephardim, Jews and Arabs, secular and Orthodox – the very
things that interested Larry deeply. The only good thing Larry saw coming out
of this class was the fact that the three course credits would be transferred
to his own college, the State University of New York at Binghamton, that
September, the September of 1972.
Larry began exploring Jerusalem on his own, including
the Old City, where he saw an Arab vendor selling T-shirts with the legend,
“Don’t Worry America, Israel Is Behind You.” He wondered how the guy could sell
shirts whose message he almost certainly disagreed with. On the same trip, he
also saw a guy with an outdoor schwarma stand who was oblivious to the flies
buzzing around the meat. Didn’t he know
there was something wrong?
In the New City, Larry spent a lot of time in Richie’s
New York City Pizza, famous for its bulletin board where American teenagers
left messages for each other. The pizza would never have passed muster in New
York itself. The European-style cafes on
Jaffa Road, like the Cafe Alaska, looked enticing, but Larry didn’t feel he
belonged there. Despite several attempts to learn the language, he couldn’t get
the knack of speaking and understanding Hebrew.
He did go to falafel
places a few times, but some of the items on the menu confused him. He knew
falafel and he knew kebab, but what was “chicken schnitzel?” Was that a cutlet?
If, so, why the hell couldn’t they just say
cutlet? It was clear that the Israelis’ frame of reference, at least that of
the older generation, was European, not American.
Of course, Larry also went to the Wall, and to the
Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl to visit the grave of his uncle, Nathan, who
was killed during the War of Independence in 1948. His father insisted on that.
The irony was that Nathan had been a member of a left-wing Zionist group,
Hashomer Hatzair, that had believed in Jewish-Arab cooperation. But once the
fighting started, of course, all bets were off.
Although most of Larry’s
classmates were his age or a little older, in their early twenties, Robert, a
balding, overweight man with thick glasses in his thirties, was assigned to be Larry’s
roommate. Robert, a social studies teacher in an inner-city high school in
Brooklyn, loved to talk about the music he grew up with in Brownsville –
doo-wop.
Larry himself was a closet doo-wop fan (closet because
most people his age either ignored or belittled the music). Back home, he
listened to radio oldies shows. He bombarded Robert with questions about the music.
“There were lots of group collectors in the old days,”
Robert patiently explained in his deep voice, which no doubt was an asset in
the classroom. “They listened to everything on the radio—Fats Domino, the
Everly Brothers, Elvis—but they only bought songs by the groups.”
“Who was your favorite group?”
“The Harptones! They lasted a long time, and their
songs came out on a million different labels.”
“Do you
remember any songs that didn’t become hits, but were personal favorites of
yours?”
“One of them was `Three Kinds of People in the World’
by the Vocaltones.” Larry had heard “Two Kinds of People in the World” by
Little Anthony and the Imperials, but “Three Kinds of People” was a new one for
him. He’d have to give it a listen.
“Yeah,” Robert told Larry the next day, “I really
loved those old ‘50s songs. “Earth Angel,” “In the Still of the Night,” “A
Thousand Miles Away,” “Can I Come Over Tonight” by the Velours, “Walk Away
Renee” by the Left Banke….” Robert’s memory was playing tricks on him, Larry
thought. Not only was “Walk Away Renee” from the mid-‘60s, it had a totally
different sound than the 50s songs he’d just mentioned. Larry let it go.
When Robert wasn’t talking about music, he was talking
about his experiences as a teacher. Unfortunately, like many of his generation,
the experience of the 1968 teachers’ strike, which pitted the largely white
teachers’ union against a black school district, left him with a bitter
attitude toward black people in general.
“Half of these kids, they don’t want to learn, and there’s
no way you can get them to speak good English,” Robert said. “I be doin’ this,
I be doin’ that—and last term, one of the kids told me that a friend of his was
called Jewboy.”
“Did you ask him why?” Larry asked.
“No, I didn’t bother to do that. If I did, he’d
probably just say, `Because that’s his name.’”
Robert told Larry about a job interview he’d had with
a black principal, whom he accused of anti-white and anti-Semitic bias. “Yes,”
he remembered the principal saying, “We want a good mix of teachers here, some
male, some female, some black, some white…” Larry couldn’t see how that could possibly
be construed as anti-white. Instead of arguing with Robert, he asked him why,
if he felt the way he did, he didn’t transfer to a school in a more
middle-class area. It turned out that Robert had several disciplinary write-ups
on his record that worked against him.
In the dormitory as a whole, the summer
English-language students spent most of their time in each other’s rooms. They
had hour-long bull sessions, fueled by endless bottles of Maccabee Israeli beer
and occasional hits of Arab hashish. The Canadian students loved to criticize
America because of the Vietnam War.
“There are two words that define America—arrogance and
pride!” said Steve, a kid from Toronto with shoulder-length reddish hair.
Although Larry was opposed to the Vietnam War, he still felt hurt by these
remarks. There was more to America than just Nixon and Vietnam, Larry
protested inwardly.
Two of the Canadian guys were Orthodox, wouldn’t turn
on the lights on Shabbat and wore tzitzit
under their shirts. Still, their religious beliefs didn’t prevent them from
getting hold of a watermelon and carving it into the shape of a female breast,
to the amusement of the other guys.
Indeed, other than classwork, the students’ main
activity seemed to be trying to pair up with members of the opposite sex. Since
guys outnumbered girls by two to one, this wasn’t an easy task. Only two
couples got together. In the first, Al, a smooth-talking guy in his
mid-twenties with mid-length blond hair and a goatee, took up with Gigi, a
thin, nervous, olive-skinned girl.
When he wasn’t with Gigi, Al sometimes talked about the
sexual experiences he’d had as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria. “You sit
down at a table in a cafe, and Nigerian girls come up to you, and you talk to
them and then say, `Let’s get it on.’ Most of them have never been with a white
guy before, and to them, it’s a new thrill,” he said.
The other couple consisted of Marc, a tall British guy
of 19 who was already starting to lose his hair, and Olivia, a 32-year-old New
Yorker who was one of the few non-Jews in the bunch. Everyone was shocked
because of the difference in their ages, but Steve, the guy from Toronto,
wasn’t surprised. “It’s that suave English accent of his that gets her,” he
explained. These two couples were often seen together in the campus snack bar.
Larry did come close to being in a relationship, or at
least he thought so. But the encounter was still-born. One day, while Larry was
walking around Zion Square after class, an American girl around his age
approached him. She had long brown curly hair and was wearing jeans, a peasant
blouse and sandals. She walked up to him:
“Hi! I wonder if you can help me. I was going to fly
back to Seattle on Sunday, but I left my bag on an Egged bus, with my passport,
money, everything. I need a place to stay while I contact the American Embassy
and get everything sorted out. And I need to get back there soon—I have a
kidney infection.”
Larry was a little suspicious of her story, but she
seemed open and honest. But his room was so small. And what would Robert think
about this? Would he be angry? Then there was the matter of her kidney
infection. Could that be contagious in some way? He wasn’t sure, since biology
wasn’t his strong point. Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no….
“Um, I don’t think I can help you. I live in a tiny
room in a dormitory and I share it with another student.”
A few days later, Larry saw the same girl on
Ben-Yehuda Street. She was smiling. “I met a man with an apartment here, a
journalist. He has a big apartment, and he’s helping me,” she said. Mazel Tov, Larry
thought enviously.
As the semester neared its end, Steve said, “There’s a
lot of positive energy in this country. Remember the weekend we all went to Tel
Aviv? I went to Haifa the next weekend, and I visited my cousins in Netanya on
the way back.”
“Did you hitchhike?” Larry asked. “Professor Brodsky
said…”
“Listen, I know what Professor Brodsky said, that
everybody hitchhikes, and that might have been true six, seven years ago. But the
last few years, since the ’67 war, things have changed. There have been some
incidents. Everyone’s more security conscious.”
“I can see that.” Larry, who had gone on anti-Vietnam
War demonstrations at home, found it hard to take the sight of Israeli
soldiers, most of them his own age or a little older, casually carrying their submachine
guns in public.
“As far as this semester is concerned,” Steve
continued, “forget about it! I didn’t find any girlfriends whatsoever! What’s
the last time you heard of a 19-year-old taking a vacation and not finding a
girl?”
Larry laughed. “Would you ever consider living here?”
he asked Steve. He thought of his own parents, who, as Labor Zionists, lived in
Israel for two years, from 1949 to 1951.
“I don’t know, Larry! I very well might retire here.
But I don’t think I’d spend my productive years in Israel.” Larry was unsure,
so he just nodded.
On the last day of class, he said goodbye to Robert in
his room
“I envy that guy Al, the one who used to be a Peace
Corps volunteer, the one who’s hooked up with that shy, nervous chick,” Robert
said. “He travels all over the world, and no matter where he goes, he seems to
have a great fuckin’ time!”
“Uh, what about you?” Larry asked. “At home, I mean.
You have a girlfriend?”
Robert sighed. “No, haven’t had a girlfriend in a few
years. I go to a lot of Jewish singles socials and dances, you know, like
Temple Beth El in Great Neck. But I can’t seem to meet anybody.”
Maybe if he lost about 50 pounds he’d be in a better
situation to find someone, Larry thought. Robert sensed that both of them were
uncomfortable with this topic and started discussing music again.
“Did I tell you,” Robert asked, “that when I was a
student in Thomas Jefferson High School in the ‘50s, the Italian guys were so
much into rock and roll that they formed little groups in the lunchroom, just
like the Black kids did? Yeah, you’d see a group of Italian kids singing at one
of the tables, with a lead singer, a falsetto and a bass….”
Since they both lived in New York, Larry and Robert
exchanged numbers. But Larry knew they wouldn’t see each other again. Robert
was 32, or 12 years older than Larry. There was the Generation Gap to consider.
When Robert was Larry’s age, people over the age of 18 didn’t wear T-shirts or
jeans in the street unless they were “beatniks,” girls were supposed to wait until
they were married before having sex, young adults were expected to live with
their parents until marriage, and if you even mentioned the word “socialism,”
you were suspected of being a communist. A whole different world.
A few days later, Larry waited for his flight at Lod
Airport. The place was jammed with hundreds of kids—kids going back to New
York, to Philly, to Montreal, to Chicago, to Los Angeles and to a hundred other
places.
Two young women with too much makeup and too-tight
blouses and jeans were approaching anyone their age in a state of near panic.
They had bought bottles of arrack, an Israeli liquor, for all their friends,
but they belatedly found out that they could only take a few with them before
they had to start paying a tax. They were looking for someone who could take
the remaining bottles in their luggage, then meet them at JFK Airport and give
them back. Larry just steered clear of them. Why look for trouble?
He was wandering around the terminal absent-mindedly
when he heard his flight called. Clutching his bag, he walked toward the gate,
back to his family in the Bronx, back to a summer job waiting for him in a
local supermarket, back to friends old and new -- back to America.
