Perhaps Im avoiding some bad stuff. (Susann has read this and reminded me that the bar mitzvah was on the eighth day of Pesach, a holiday for the American Jews but not Israeli Jews. so that they were all violating Jewish Law by traveling to Masada, and that the feast after the ceremony should have observed the dietary laws of Passover, but did not. Also, our Seder with them preceded by a week the events above, rather than following them. I’ll make corrections in the printed edition of all this, should a printed edition occur.) The Seder took place in the entrance way/ dining room of our house. There were eight people present so it was quite crowded, especially because the ritual requires those present to lean on their left sides, which is to sprawl. Our guests arrived by taxi. We had prepared a feast and discussed how we could present the Haggada, the ritual account of the Exodus, in any meaningful way. They had all attended Seders in America. These tended to consist of candle lighting (for some reason, American Jews love candle lighting ceremonies. They have invented fairly moving ceremonies for bar and bat mitzvahs, and many other communal occasions.), a blessing over wine, a child sings “ma nishtana,”ritualized questions no one answers, there are some rapidly read passages, mostly in English, (if someone’s grandfather is present, there may be five minutes of rapid Hebrew added) a song or two, and a very large dinner, sometimes, rarely, followed by another song. Matzo is served instead of bread. Usually, by 10PM or so it is over. Our Seder includes the Haggadah, extended theological and historical discussion, a good dinner, many songs, disquisitions on Israeli society, and whatever else seems relevant to the occasion or to the times in which we live. It rarely ends before two or so in the morning, and on one occasion lasted until dawn and people went afterwards to an early minyan for morning prayers. That obviously would not do this time. Staci did not want to eat any matzo which she considered “gross.” Alan told her it was a designer cracker, which seems to have helped. My sister raved about the gingered carrots and wanted the recipe, which consists mostly of growing the carrots in the hot, sunny long-day Israeli climate. My aunt mumbled that this was “the real thing.” Stephany and Josh sat as if stunned. I said little; I was already dismissed as a religious nut living in desperate poverty in an interesting but truly weird foreign country. Rosalyn was fascinated that I was a reserve infantry soldier. She thought that, at any moment, I might be called upon to rush to the border and shoot Arab invaders, These were not simpletons. Both my sister and her husband had graduated from Rutgers and worked at responsible jobs. They had money, although not nearly as much as they seemed to have and encouraged people to think they had. Their children were not stupid but were so ignorant that they gave the impression of being border-line retarded. They had attended wealthy suburban schools and probably could comprehend books if they ever read tried to read any. But they didn’t. Some years later, when Staci was taking a film appreciation course (there are such things) at the University of Maryland, she expressed anger, real anger, at being asked to read two books about film. She just wanted to watch. My aunt, a very intelligent woman, a widow – her husband had been my Father’s best friend and my favorite uncle – recognized my sister’s lack of knowledge and winced. I like the Roman Catholic concept of “invincible ignorance,“ which is applied to excuse those who, shown the Truth, are unable, despite extensive demonstration, to accept it. At ten o’clock or so, they called a cab and by eleven were safe in their five star hotel. They were, they told me later, very upset that the only kind of bread available the next morning was matzo. And so it was for a week, and it gave them something to tell their friends in New Jersey about Israel. Between the Seder and the bar mitzvah on Masada, it had been a deeply Jewish, religious trip for them. We saw them off at the airport, Rosalyn and I lying to each other about how we would stay more closely in touch. I had made repeated efforts to talk about Sheila; Rosalyn could not, neither then nor later. This was accounted to her as great sensitivity and a sense of loss too great to be expressed. I think, by now, so many years later, that it was a selfish refusal to grant that other people had also been badly hurt by Sheila’s death. She held that hurt as something absolutely hers and resented any effort to ask that it be shared. She had also, and still has, a dislike of intellect, a profound distrust of any thought not of immediate, practical, material benefit. She must have been amused at our hut, although it was full of books. Its poverty was a sign of what books were worth. Now, in 2014, when Susann and I have a nice house and a little money in the bank and far more books and our children are establishing themselves, whereas she has no money and, with one or two of her children, lives on the good ill of other people, ironies flourish and multiply. But I still wish we could be friends. Of the five who sat, twice a day for years, at the round table in the kitchen in Camden, only we two are left. A few weeks after Susann and I were married, my lawyer called and told me that the financial arrangements of the divorce had been settled and he had a check for me. I took a bus to Kiron, where his office was, and he, after deducting sums I thought were greater than what I owed him, gave me a check for a bit more than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of whatever the Israeli currency was at the time. It was, to me then, an enormous sum. I hurried back to Kiryat Ono and the next morning went to a branch of Israel Discount Bank near the Bar Ilan campus to open an account. When I walked up to a cashier’s window in the small, three-such- windows branch and showed the cashier the registered check, she directed me to the glass enclosed office of the bank manager. I feared some difficulty with the check. The manager looked at it, smiled, and asked me if I wanted coffee. I did. It arrived with a small chocolate baguette and an even wider smile. In Israel of the early 1980s this was not a very large sum, but was one deserving of respect. He did the paperwork required to open an account in Susann and my names, and then wanted to discuss what to do with the money. Our financial situation was strange. Susan had a steady income and I had an erratic one which varied between very little and quite a bit. We had enough to live the life we were living. Our landlady had set a rent in Israeli currency unlinked either to the cost of living index or to the dollar, and our rent now came to about thirty dollars a month. (Before we had to vacate the house because it had been sold for redevelopment, our rent fell to eight dollars a month. This included municipal tax, the arnona. When I paid the rent I felt like we were stealing.) We ate well by now. The hard days of macaroni and cheese (cheese was government subsidized) were behind us. Susann’s parents bought a new refrigerator and we got their old one, a great improvement. We had a washing machine so old it merited the respect due the elderly, but it worked and when it didn’t Susann knew, to my wonder, how to fix it. Child support was current then. We had no real debts. Of course, other than that twenty thousand in our new bank account, we had no money. I discussed all this with the bank manager. He seemed absolutely at ease and paid no attention to time. After a while and a second cup of coffee and another pastry, he took out some portfolios of possible investments. He urged me repeatedly to put safety of any investment as the highest value. He showed me how investments in Israel’s major banks had never lost money, and that they grew in value at about eight or nine percent a year. Not only had they never lost money, but he assured me they never could. The government, he very strongly implied, would never permit it. This was not a way to get rich, but was a sure protection against poverty. I bought about nineteen thousand dollars’ worth of stock in Discount Bank, left the rest in our checking account, and went home to tell Susann what I had done for us.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 10:32:16 +0000