BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...7

On the drive back with Mirav, I was uncharacteristically silent. Mirav turned her face to me.

“Lurene, what is wrong?”

“Nothing. Just thinking about the political matters I read about this morning,” I said.

It was a lie. I was thinking about all I’d just seen with Tova. I think Mirav could tell I was lying. She drove cheerfully back to the moshav.



One mistake men of every culture make – Norwegian, Czech, Mexican, South African, and Chinese – is to see themselves as enhanced, more alluring, with a reputation for womanizing.

The sexual roamer is attractive to women who either have ulterior motives or have a key screw loose in their heads. I am not trying to insult; it’s simply a law of love for every society I’ve visited. It’s the cold, hard law of life in the United States, too.

For some years, the player may think he’s doing well, and having the greatest time in life a man can concoct for himself.

As these men skateboard through their 30s and waterslide through their 40s, they attract women who are either too dim-witted to understand the inevitable result of the relationship, or women who’re equally cunning in romance. By the time the poor man is into his late 50s, he has one or two health problems and, hopefully, has learned to moderate his behavior.

If he’s a real idiot, still walking the same glitzy road in his late 50s, he’s with women that even other women don’t trust.

One friend I had, a handsome, 60-year old man who was well-traveled and had his eyes always open for new women, was just like this. But he began getting women who were either with him for a few months only, or with him because they needed help keeping a roof over their heads, i.e., recovering cocaine addicts, mothers who need help paying the bills for their aimless kids -- I mean literally aimless -- kids that, even if launched by Mom with a bow toward their point in life, complain while flying 150 mph toward the bull’s eye that they lost their key again.

My personal opinion is that the only way to face this breed of man is warily. Insist on meeting a few of his long-time female friends.

He may have none.

If you don’t take these precautions, you’re going to be left, after he’s had his fun, to rot alone like a 1950s billboard on the Route 66 of failed love.

I begin with that commentary because I’m intending to recall a handsome man who was just that type, but defied all those laws: Uri Levi. Today, I still have to ask myself if I turned my back on him unfairly. Should I have taken him seriously?



Uri was definitely an Israeli lover of women all over the globe.

You could guess in the first 15 minutes of dining with him by the contemplative way he paused, wine glass elegantly in hand, before reciting like actor Lawrence Olivier his Marcia story, Wendy story, and Beatrice story. Those are just the American names!

In Uri’s case, around him lay ex-wives and ex-girlfriends everywhere, plainly visible if you poked around. They were of all nationalities. Israelis like himself, visitors to Israel, Costa Ricans, visitors to Costa Rica, San Francisco East Bay chicks, friends of East Bay chicks. The list gets long. (I never knew him to go out with a New Yorker, but maybe that’s because they’re so hard to sweet-talk.)

He’s got kids from one, kids from another, and kids from women he doesn’t even know – but that is due to his being a sperm donor, as if what the world lacks is Uri’s genes.

Truthfully, I couldn’t fault Uri for that last item. Who can say what will become of that child? Who can predict what will become of any child? Uri’s regular kids – the kids who grew up calling him Abba or Dad -- were smart, good-looking and healthy. They lacked for nothing material.

I still recall my first meeting with Mr. Levi. We agreed to meet at the Diggery Inn in Oakland, California. It was in the Oakland Hills, above Fruitvale and below Montclair. It’s a lovely area of the East Bay community, peaceful. Montclair’s the site of an occasional murder, but even that is a big story in the city’s main daily, The Oakland Tribune, since it normally does not happen in that neck of Oakland.

For those who are not familiar with the San Francisco Bay area, Oakland’s a major city, cultural magnet, crime shrine and commercial flashpoint that easily matches San Francisco and San Jose on each evening’s financial and crime news broadcasts.

In this case, it was May of 1989 and I’d put an ad in The Oakland Tribune seeking any individual who could help me in my upcoming trip to Jerusalem. I did not save the advertisement, but it was asking for helpful tips, financial grants, or friendly faces in anticipation of my travel to Jerusalem. I did not know anyone in Jerusalem.

I’d won a spot in the foreign study program. I would be at The Hebrew University for one academic year. Jerusalem was, at the time, a literal riot scene with the advent of the first Intifadah.

I figured I might attract some calls from good-deed doers who had contacts in the area and, if I was lucky, a financial contributor. I never got any financial gifts, but I did get a few calls from people giving useful hints about how to do well as a visitor to the area. Nice people, too. Not weirdoes as one might assume an ad like that could attract. (In fact, I sometimes wonder where the hate-spewing weirdoes were that week. What’s wrong with me?)

So, Uri called. He sounded like a rational, Israeli guy. We had a good conversation, though I can’t now remember the details of it. I have a vague memory of him having a respect and thirst for societies of the third world in South America.

He made vigorous efforts to understand history. Both his own and that of different cultures, including the Islamic ones that hated his own. He most loved the cultures he made no clear difference in, was ignored within. There he was standing amid Mexican peasants so he could be a brown-skinned invisible man somewhere, relax.

The restaurant was down the block from me on Park Boulevard. I always liked that street, paved with palm trees in the middle. Hollywood’s casting call in Oakland, and just the stage a man like Levi needed to enter my life, or any woman’s life, for that matter.

The moment my eyes landed on him, I knew the handsome face and manner in some way. The easy but determined walk, the lopsided grin. It was the way he looked at me, smiling, his head bobbing up and down like the tricky boat that knew the waves of the San Francisco Bay that day.


As I’ve said, I try to avoid these men in romance, but this was not a date.

If it had been a date, I would have had to remind myself that starting a relationship with a Don Juan is like trying to satisfy your taste for iceberg lettuce with Stinging Nettles, then trying to calm the sting of those with an elegant glass of battery acid.

If you’re a woman unfortunate enough to be recently married to one, picture a woman falling from a plane, landing on the steel-cold pavement of Moscow. That woman is you.

If you know what you’ve got and think you can save your union with counseling, you may as well leave your problems for the Tooth Fairy, and then take a match to your head to address your dandruff. At least you’ll see results.

So, Uri had evidently left the moshav in Jerusalem, with his kids still living in it, to chase a woman he liked, and chase dreams of the United States.

I don’t know what the exact story is, but this is what his daughter Galit said, if I am remembering it right.

Uri and I had a nice lunch, but it was clear by the end of it that he had viewed our meeting as a launching pad for romance. We saw one another casually three or four times more, I think, and talked on the phone often. He seemed to know something about everything, so it was hard not to talk. It was hard not to like him even if you did not want romance.

One time I was playing some foreign music I’d been given. Uri called.

“Iran. I know it!” he said.

“You recognize this music? I got it as a gift a few days ago.”

“I know Iranian music the second I hear it,” he said.

Before I left for Tel Aviv, he called Shabi Gamlieli in Moshav Amminidav in Jerusalem.

“Please, help her, Shabi. I love the girl,” he reportedly said to Shabi before I got on the plane to Tel Aviv in 1989.

It was a profitable, academic year for me in Jerusalem, but I’ll get to that some other time. Cutting to my return to San Francisco, I returned to my talks and friendship with Uri Levi. I went multiple places with him, dinners, camping trips with him and his kids from one of his marriages. I stayed at his home one time for several weeks. I became friends with his beautiful, older daughter, Galit, who had moved to be with her father from Israel. She was also from Amminidav. She had a great sense of humor, which added to her vanity, somehow.

One time, she came to a Halloween party dressed as a Mermaid -- carp suit if you ask me. You had to be in her living room that week, listening to her detailed plan: She was going to be hot. She thought she could get the attention of her new husband that way. She was afraid of his ex-girlfriend, who was going to the party.

I did not go to that party, but I can see the face of her competitor that night stepping into the room, well enough.

For seven years, I hung out with Uri and his kids. Often, he would mention his idea that he’d always pictured us as a serious couple.

I brushed his comments off. I always was too busy with an Iranian man I was going with, Kaveh, to take Uri seriously in that regard. It looked stupid to Uri, because Kaveh and I argued regularly and broke up frequently, only to get back together. Kaveh wouldn’t let our relationship get on a serious footing. He did not want to marry. He was a refugee from Iran’s revolution and a combatant in the Iran-Iraq War. I never pictured myself with an Iranian man, but we were together on this rocky path for years.

In this manner, life moved on. One night, Uri and I went out to a restaurant on San Francisco’s Nob Hill. It was a small, quiet French restaurant.

Uri was intending to ask me to marry him, or suggest a new relationship between us of a serious, committed nature. I did not guess this, but it had come down to an either/or night for him – one of few such nights in a man’s life. He wanted to marry, and he was sick of waiting around for me to devote myself to a life with him and his kids.

“Seven years I’ve waited for you, Lurene. Seven years. Seven is a very important number for Jews. Do you know that?”

“No,” I said, as if telling the waiter I didn’t need my water glass refilled. What a blind idiot I was. Sitting there, looking at him like he was a discount tire billboard on Oakland’s East 14th Street.

Like a 3 p.m. sun in Death Valley, I sat there dumbly radiating heat. I was afraid to say anything and make the situation worse.

“Are you going to start with me or not?”

“No,” I said repeated, meekly. “Not now.”

“Then you never will,” he said, taking his wallet out to pay the bill. He had tears in his eyes. It was stunning to see that night how seriously he felt. It did not change my position, though.

It was the last time we would talk for many years. Many, many years.

This is where I come to my point: Committing to a man who has a history of womanizing, infidelity, two-timing, or lying to women is like hiring a boxing promoter with a long prison record to direct your investment needs. Oh, you might see a good fight, but your original investment?

As your dollars wave goodbye? Probably not. There goes the cute house and the picket fence and the whole dreamy scene: Poof.



So, that was Uri Levi. Now, here I was in Jerusalem again with Shabi. It was 2 a.m. We were in the kitchen. Shabi’s phone rang. It was Uri.

Shabi must have told him earlier that I was in Jerusalem.

I gestured to get the receiver.

Shabi put his finger over his lips and waved me down.

He talked for a time in Hebrew, and then hung up.

“Why didn’t he want to say hi?”

“He didn’t want problems with his wife.”

I leaned back in my seat and smiled. Any woman married to Uri is watching him. Uri had money and intelligence and many other good traits – I’ve no problem admitting that -- but a loyal husband he’s probably still not.

I will now always wonder what underlying effect the Uri Call, as my memory now terms it, had on my unfolding and fateful decisions toward Shabi that evening. I have to say this because I then forced myself to see the man in front of me as he really was.

“Lurene, I spoke with my daughter, Hagar. We talked about you staying here with us. She said she would accept you to be with us here. Stay here with us in Jerusalem. We could even have one child,” said Shabi.

I sat looking at Shabi blankly, just as I had with Uri some three years ago. His face, after Uri’s call, had turned into a big STOP sign.

“Well….” I said.

Now, I had to quit lying to myself and face at least part of what drove me to the plane in San Francisco. It was regret. Regret led me back to Israel that day. Regret that I was not fulfilling my opportunities in life, and life was running fast. I had regrets over a million small things, like books I was given and never finished reading. I had Principia Mathematica on my shelf and never read it. I had relationships I never finished, and never even started while people waited as long as they could. There was a man who asked for my help in Cairo back in 1990, a Jewish tourist who felt alone and terrified. I did not remain with him even though it's all he was asking. I still think about that man. Especially that man. Why didn't I help? Why did I not do so many things I could have done? Yes, it's no mystery today when I look back on this trip why I boarded that plane when few others would. I wanted to be there this time because there was no other time.


But what about Adah? Why hadn’t he told her something was amiss between them already? Was I supposed to toss the ice water in her face for him? If he'd already decided to go so far as to propose that we have one child, why had he not warned Adah of his reluctance to commit to his relationship with her? Regrets or not, the landscape did not look real to me on this night.
We never know ourselves completely. You can never know yourself completely because a great part of the meaning of what you are to the world is trapped -- PAUSE -- in the glance of a passing stranger on a New York street, or in a Los Angeles elevator, or….

Shabi took my hands in his and sat up from his chair. He pulled them upward. “Come on. Let’s go now, Lurene.”

He wanted us to walk together for the first time to his bedroom, and into what I was supposed to view as a new life.

He kept pulling. I kept pulling back. He kept pulling, and I kept pulling my hands back. He yanked, I pulled my hands back.

He threw up his hands.

“Oh, forget it all!”

He walked back to his room and shut the door.

I couldn’t believe after all these years of wanting to return to Jerusalem, and even after getting the news of Tova’s departure; I resisted, and gave no reason for my refusal. But this is what I did.

I slept fitfully. It must have been nothing compared to the way Shabi slept, if he slept at all. The next morning, when I came out of Hagar’s room, he was standing at the closet, looking for a towel. He was in his underwear. I shrieked.

“Oh, Lurene. I am looking for a towel. A towel!!”

I drew my breath back in. “I’m sorry. I am not quite awake, that’s all.”



Baghdadi Betrayal

After Shabi digested the answer to his proposal, he seemed to be trudging through grief with anger. At the same time, he seemed to be searching for a reason for his failure. He could not understand why I’d said no.

I’m not sure I knew yet, either. Even though I am the one who decided not to start the relationship because he had a girlfriend and I did not want to get myself into a foreign controversy any more than I was already in simply by flying into the country, I also wondered why, after having so many affectionate conversations over the years, I could pass up the opportunity to make it real.

Had he not done everything he could to provide the details as to what he was proposing?

He did, yet, I needed to see some sort of impending separation between Adah and Shabi. When he spoke on the cell phone with Adah in the car, I did not hear a relationship in its final stages. I felt even if he made moves to part with her, the separation would be done in phantom steps for years. He would never completely make the break. He would turn into the man with the ex-girlfriend in the wings. He wasn’t going to wave goodbye so easily, and neither was she.

Michal would never be on my side, either. She liked Adah.

I was hearing him say “we” when Adah was in the room, and calling her “a nice friend” when she was not and he was facing just me.

The fact was, Shabi had not given Adah fair notice. He expected me to do it for him, and in the worst way.

Sorry, friend. Not me.

That was my answer.

-- END EPISODE NINE –

-- EPISODE TEN; CONCLUSION --


The true cure for our world is a few inches beneath the glassy surface of a Venezuelan stream, waiting quietly. You lean down and see your reflection and enjoy a moment of complete serenity. “I was always looking,” you hear yourself whisper, “and now I’ve…”

SUDDENLY, HE’S IN YOUR FACE. YOU HAVE THREE SECONDS. MOVE OR DIE. RIGHT NOW!

That’s a real alligator in your real face. Not a TV alligator. An alligator, dammit! One that will K I L L Y O U! That’s right, the face you can reach up and touch right now. When it happens, we’re all real. Just you and the reptile. The most tremendous sight of your life is now a remote, locked cell. You’d better do something accessible to your instincts for life or you’ll be dead by the time you count to five. There is no key, no lock, no bars. Your problem is much worse in today’s world, and deep down, you know that.
That’s reality. This garbage we’re swimming in as a civilization over and over and over again incessantly is not reality. It’s self-immolation. Wake up. Now.



Any Country: Its Boundaries

Once in a while, I thought of the situation of the country I was in, and why the world thought of Israel in different terms than it regarded other countries.

We seldom are aware that countries are human constructs. No country exists in a fundamental way, though its people may behave as if their country exists like air and water. When people say Israel does not truly exist by law, I think the speaker does not realize what a country, any country, is in the first place. It is a geographical area given boundaries by human thought. This will always be true.

Israel exists because there are people inside a zone who believe it to be so and because there is a culture specific to the place that cannot be transferred in thought or deed to another culture. That means Egypt, that means Iran, that means Madagascar, that means Sweden, and yes that means the United States too…..take your pick! That’s right, no other country. You don’t have to like it, because it exists whether you, who are reading this, exist or not, and whether I, who am writing this, exist or not.

A few years back, we had something called the Soviet Union. Today, it doesn’t exist because of a change in world consciousness. Yesterday, there were a lot of things extant that aren’t today. That fact demands recognition.

It wasn’t the Soviet land that vanished; minds in Europe switched one ghost for another. Countries are categories of human thought, vaporous and vital like exhaled breath but bound by time at all their boundaries.

Read any history book! Visit an art museum with a collection of art going back at least 500 years and you will see this! One of my personal favorites is an etching made about 1635 by Hercules Seghers, an untitled work depicting his impression of the ruins in the Roman Campagna. Like artists in so many eras, he was barely surviving financially, so it may have influenced his work. But he still showed a stark awareness of the temporary nature of glory. The Campagna as portrayed here, with its menacing, midnight blue sky and crumbled buildings that were once public structures, could to this day humble a tin-pot revolutionary or two.

So, some insist that Israel has no right to exist? Neither does your country, if the hard truth of the universe is measured with the right tool. If we make way for the bones of the matter, The Ottoman Empire existed on ground as solid as Switzerland’s is today. This is so regardless of how we see and regard them today. A dictatorial empire does not need our approval to have once existed, to go on having its redundant influence on diplomatic affairs.

One could go about telling this to struggling nations, but the only purpose would be to insult. This is not a legitimate form of international diplomacy, although some people might think it reasonable, when addressing a fringe slab of geography with no economy or history in the middle of an ocean. Fleeting or not, every nation’s accomplishments deserve recognition.

I sometimes suspect that this is what truly frightens the world about Israel. Israel exposed the idea of nationalism for what it was, and a lot of us don’t like it.

It’s not so shocking. I have long accepted that America exists because most of us agree it does. Our meaning to the world as Americans is one of intellectual and interpretive fragility.

Our existence as nations is a product of the human mind, but we’re in the custody of a universe with an unhuman eye. The fact that the world doesn’t exist for our benefit is obvious. The day we recognize this plain fact is the day we will step far forward in handling our world affairs.




In the entryway near the door to his magnificent house, it was close to noon. It was quiet outside except for the sound of the wind blowing through the leaves outside, which we could hear because of the open window in the kitchen.

“My dear, pack some things. I am taking you to Nahum,” Shabi said. He looked me straight in the eye like someone gazing at a subway door about to open.

I looked at him confused. I was trying to understand what was happening. His face had the expression that can only be used to convey nothing, but what I could not expect was impossible to miss.

I felt he was trying to punish me for an argument where I had said something unforgivable, an argument where I had belittled him and mercilessly teased him in front of a crowd, at just the moment he expected me to save his life.

But by reminding me of an argument we never had – and there is such a thing that can happen between two people – he left me no literal place to go and nothing of substance to protest. This, to me, is the most terrible space that can exist between a man and a woman as they stand looking at each other.

“Nahum? I’ve never talked to Nahum. Why should I pack for a little…”

“Nahum speaks good English. He’s a clever man,” Shabi said with a brief lift of his eyebrows. His eyes were like he was addressing someone he’d heard bad things about, or had put up with too long, though I’d been there only a week since 1990, and he’d invited me to return many times over in his calls to San Francisco. His lips were welded together like a thin zipper.

“Come, dear. Pack your things. You did not come all the way to Jerusalem to sit in a house,” he said.

He flashed me a last glance. I took a step back. Our talks were over. But do I look back with anger or bitterness?

No. It’s not possible. Writing this story is my way of demonstrating that fact. Jerusalem has enough anger today. I’m not going to increase it.

-- END --

Author’s Note:




I want to add a few notes about this manuscript. First, Marten Plante of Palm Springs, California helped me a bit in 2005. He read the material to some degree and suggested I cut the introduction; bring the reader right into the airplane with me as it lands in Jerusalem in October of 2000. Thanks to him, I was able to edit my work a bit more realistically.



Also, I want to mention Dana Negev and Laurie Winestock, friends from San Francisco. Both Israeli, they both spoke excellent Hebrew. One of the poems in this work I originally wrote in Hebrew. Bad Hebrew. They took the English version of the poem and translated it into the correct Hebrew for me. It was for the record of my library, and is only cited within this Jerusalem memoir in English. It is the brief poem near the end of episode one, “It got to be eleven…”



Finally, one is tempted to read a short memoir like this and interpret it as somewhat predictive of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. I try not to think this way, however. By that literary standard, we can as accurately call this memory of mine a harbinger of violent events in multiple locations in the world since October of 2000. Naturally, as an American, I am quite partial to New York.



But a victim of terror is a victim of terror. I know that and quickly acknowledge it on April 11, 2009.



Best Regards,



Lurene Gisee