BAGHDADI PROPOSAL...5

After a day or so, Adah returned home. It got to be evening in Jerusalem and Shabi and I were in his kitchen drinking Arak again.

“It’s such a beautiful night. Let’s go sit outside. I made a nice spot for sitting outside. Let me show you. Take the glasses.”

We walked across dewy lawn. There was a full moon out, or so I imagine. The water in the pool was as still and blind as a dead body. We went to the leafy rear, in front of the artist’s studios and behind the pool. He had a couch there with a wooden table. It looked like a set-up for an Annie Leibovitz photo, especially after we settled there.

He poured himself a few teaspoons of Arak then leaned back on the arm of the west end of the couch. He put his legs up. I had my back against the eastern arm of the couch.

“You know, when Tova first left me I was broken. I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong in the marriage. I couldn’t understand what she was doing -- oh! Be comfortable, my dear. Put your feet up -- so, I did not know what I was going to do in the beginning. She told me there was no point in discussing it anymore.”

He took a sip of his Arak and quietly set the glass down. The question ran through my head: What was going on with Tova? I didn’t let that one out, though.

“I was very, very sad. Now, I am glad it’s all over. I see now I am able to do things that I did not even imagine before,” Shabi said. He ran his hand over the top arch of my foot. I pulled my knees to my chest.

His eyes moved toward mine. “Don’t worry, my dear.”

I lay my legs back out. He put his hand back on the top of my foot. He sighed and continued with his talk.

“I like Adah very much. She is…” he paused. “a very nice…” he paused again, “friend. But her sons are giving her some trouble, and I do not know if this will be good for my life and my family.”

He said those words like he was patting someone on the head comfortingly; It was the tone an art teacher uses when breaking the news to Mom that little Jane isn’t exactly the cueball of class.

I looked into his face. It was lit by a soft light through leaves. He was reminding me with his words of men I’d met in past years and slowly learned to avoid. Men who called the woman at his side “girlfriend” until another attractive female comes into his space. Now, the girlfriend is called “a friend of mine.” I usually know what’s going on when a guy introduces with that phrase.

I saw the game now. Shabi wasn’t committing to an identifying term for Adah so long as I was sitting here with him in Jerusalem. Her ears weren’t near.

“Do you see everything that has changed since you were here? I turned this building from a chicken house into some artist’s studios. I get rent for these now. I am making an income every month from the hotel. There are two other apartments I rent out on the property, too. I take in a steady income every month now. I do not have to work as hard as I once did. I have time to live my life, today, my dear.”

When I think back to what he told me that clear October night, I think about how plain it was. He had the guts to lay his cards on the table now. I felt emotionally dizzy; good, bad and unsure. The Baghdadi proposal. I’ve never had the guts to say such a thing. I was a coward compared to him.

He was giving me the overview of his finances, his plans for the future. I could see this was no light talk for him, or some thoughtless plan. He was discussing the way he intended to spend his emotions, his attentions and his time during the second half of his life. He was saying it as his country was again in conflict. Mine was not. Why should I take him seriously? Why did he make such hopeless efforts?

It is rare for a woman to hear this kind of heartfelt speech from a man. I can never get truth like that from the men I see anymore. I miss what I never see. I still think about what Shabi said. He could have said a lot of other things, but chose to say what he said on that night.

All I had to do was look around and compare what I had waiting for me at home, even if I was going to endure complete poverty the rest of my life. At home, I knew the language, the culture, and it was reasonably safe on the American street. But in Jerusalem, I would always need to watch where I was aimlessly walking.

One reason why I am glad I was born a woman is that I am not expected to make these all-or-nothing statements, especially to someone who has traveled across the globe for a two-week look. If I were an Israeli, surrounded by enemies, war and hate, asking a woman who was preparing in one week to return to one of the most materially and intellectually fortunate countries on earth today, I would be afraid to say what Shabi said that night. In all my life, I do not know if I will ever take a chance like the one Shabi took that night.


















Mirav and Lurene visit Tova. Lurene meets Avi and Omer.
One day, Shabi’s daughter, Mirav, stopped by the house. In conversation, I’d mentioned that I would have liked to see her mother, Tova, while visiting….any chance?

She answered she was just intending to drive over to see her mom the next day.

When the time came, I was sitting on the front steps of the small house in Amminidav that Mirav shared with her husband, Avi.

Avi was a doctor at a nearby facility, which was probably ten minutes in driving from Amminidav, if that even. Their boy was playing nearby. He was a funny-looking, happy kid. Happy and three or four years old, maybe. He had silky, thin brunette hair and tremendous eyes, more similar in face with his father. Isn't it strange how children are like that? In a family of three or four children, it seems some of the children will take right after mom, and some after dad, and some, I swear, you don't know what the great one was doing when the design was drawn. Such children have faces that seem completely their own property. As if mom and dad didn't have much say in the matter.

Avi sat next to me on the front porch for a few minutes as Mirav readied the boy for lunch. She intended to feed him, then leave him with his father while we took a drive to visit her mom. My heart was beating a little quickly because I was so excited to see Tova after ten years. Better concentrate on the people around you right now, I reminded myself. I could hardly think, though.

I wanted to chat with Avi about something less traumatic than his work. I’d been reading Descartes on the plane, so I wondered if that might be a topic that could pass as conversation. A lot of people don't like philosophy, I knew.

But I was by now well into Descartes' work, and I wanted to make a nice impression on Mirav and her husband after this long absence. I wasn't sure what nice topic to pick in the midst of these new days of blood. Plus, doctors see nothing but blood. How about some math? Wait for him and Mirav to say something?.....Oh! How could I forget! Philosophy!

Mirav was a young mom, and I knew her from years back. Still had the long, thick hair and approachable manner. I could follow her lead in conversations. I could see how she would have married carefully, but easily.

But what about Avi? I figured there was a chance that an educated guy in Israel would know about Descartes. Descartes delved into the mechanics of “existence” in the 17th Century. Since Israelis tolerate so many nasty questions from today’s world about why they exist, “existence” without the lousy attitude seemed a fun topic. (“Oh, sure!” I hear someone in audience now yelling.)

I couldn’t go wrong with Descartes. In Israel, maybe it would even be like chatting about Leonard Bernstein for a few minutes.

To my delight, and relief, Avi liked the topic. He seemed prepared to chat about philosophers for a few minutes as I waited for Mirav while relaxing on his front porch. We heard the sounds of his boy’s laugh in the background. If my recollections are accurate, Avi not only knew the basics of Rene Descartes, but ran through descriptions of five or six other famous philosophers – Sartre, Nietzsche, Plato, and more. He sat on the steps and crossed his arms on his chest. He smiled while hearing me start with three or four words.

"Yeah, I looked at some philosophy. I could understand Socrates, but I never got Immanuel Kant," he said.

"I never read him," I said. "What's he like?"

"Thick. Complicated. Like trying to understand algebra in a lot of areas. I didn't enjoy reading it as much as some of the others," he said.

A few years later, when I had time to read some of the Critique of Pure Reason, which came out in 1781, Avi's comments made perfect sense.

If one genuinely reads Kant, I thought (while taking my second aspirin with the pages open before my eyes that day), one would have to at least admit it’s hard to grasp with a light reading; one doesn’t pop open a beer and put one’s feet to the old stool and read Kant. His notions about time, space and transcendental logic alone are enough to make the reader scream. Almost each paragraph is highly complex when it hits the mind. To understand Kant, you have to spend the better part of an American workweek on the page. It’s probably worth the effort, but whether one has the time to understand such things is the real question! It kept us away from thinking about the grenades of Gaza, that's for sure. So, Kant worked that day.

It’s not so important what Avi’s ideas about philosophy were, though. What came to my head was that Shabi’s daughter, Mirav, found a smart, sensitive husband. They’d grown up together, too. Both of them were playing in Amminidav together in their yards.

“When my parents married, they hardly knew each other,” Mirav said to me in her Israeli-accented English. “Me and Avi grew up together. We were always best friends, so getting married seemed natural.”

Outside that, my short time at Mirav’s home before we drove to see Tova was kind of humorous. Mirav kept apologizing and joking with sighs of exasperation because the house was a little disheveled. I hardly noticed it. It looked like the normal cottage of a young married couple starting their married life with their small boy. They didn't have a lot of furniture. That was all I noticed.


The time came to visit Tova, Shabi’s former wife. I became accustomed to her when I stayed there eleven years ago. She was a woman of Hungarian origin. Her father lived in a Kibbutz somewhere in Northern Israel when I lived in Jerusalem before. The poor man was a virtual mental vegetable. He didn’t speak Hebrew, and never came completely out of shock from what happened to him during the Holocaust. Survivors functioned at various intellectual levels, and required various amounts of assistance. He was one of those who didn’t come out in good shape. He hardly seemed to realize what really happened in 1989.

There were some in Israel like that, though. Fewer every year because they were dying naturally of old age. I remember going to private homes for Shabbat dinners and, sometimes, there would be one at the table, very old, broken looking, who talked in mumbles, participating in dinner talk only minimally or peripherally. The outlook was probably better when the survivors were younger, just coming from Europe. Most have passed away by this time, and by the time this writing greets others, many survivors – Jewish or not -- will be present only in sacred family photos.

If one assumes from the outside that Israelis treat them lovingly, they would be correct, but it also seemed that modern Israelis often did not know what to say to them exactly, or what was proper procedure on heartfelt occasions. That’s what I thought I was witnessing in 1989-1990, at least. The family routines and practices which sprung up while incorporating survivors into the family episodes might be one of Israel’s unrecognized stories.

For example, I sometimes thought I was noticing a schism between the European war generation, and their children. I felt and saw something substantially different with their outlooks, even in the way they looked at one another sometimes. It wasn’t disrespect, but more like a thick pane of reality between them. In some cases, even a complete reversal in the normal parent/child chain of authority. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist. It’s obvious what you were seeing at the dinner table. Nobody was talking about it because they were used to it by 1989.

I myself half-acknowledged them and half-ignored them. It’s hard to know what to do, how to carry one’s self in the literal dinner table presence of a survivor of Europe’s atrocities. I was an American child of the space age, the new era of Civil Rights.

Neither Tova nor Shabi ever mentioned Tova’s mother. I did not know if she was a victim of the Holocaust. There are many possibilities. I did not want to quiz Tova.

“Nobody understands him,” Shabi said of Tova’s father while we were once visiting in 1989. “Tova does what she can by visiting him, showing her face to him, doing a few things for him.”

Tova did seem to openly carry deep sorrow about her father, but you could see it in an underground-kind-of-way when she was in the same room with him, in her face if you looked carefully and compared it to her usual expressions while puttering around the house. When Tova was next to her dad that 1989 day, I remember her appearing a bit blank, but clearly retaining the postures of the “good daughter.” She did small things for him in the house without being asked, like he was still giving the directions in the house, even if she was there for only an hour or so; she straightened pillows, refilled water glasses.

That would not be unexpected behavior for a family with a war survivor. I’d read stuff about it in the states, saw photos. I thought I had a good grasp. But being in a home containing an old survivor of those years in Europe, and the children who must take care of the survivor until he or she passes on, is a different matter altogether. It’s not a book.

So was seeing the behavior of nearby individuals who were Jewish, but not of European origin. They did not claim European history as exactly their own. This is what was very painful to watch indeed because it was inside families.

Shabi’s family is from Iraq. They had completely different monsters to battle – wait!

Do you notice any thread of similarity in this particular people’s history? It’s all you can take to read half the outline of the last 300 years of Jewish history. Jewish-American princess? Henry Ford’s International Jew? Oh, please!

Come on! Please don’t buy this garbage. Have your disputes and dislikes if you feel you must, but don’t fall for this rot.


So, my memory is of Shabi standing nearby Tova’s crippled father bored, indifferent, but then suddenly seeming to be overcome by an angry face and tone of voice.

“They found him hiding in the forest, eating grass,” Shabi said angrily. “He doesn’t speak Hebrew, he doesn’t speak English. He doesn’t speak anything except Hungarian.”

Shabi displayed a combination of sympathy, confusion, and resentment toward the man. Shabi seemed to want Tova’s father to bounce back, to cheerfully accept his new life in Israel. I don’t think Tova’s dad ever completely did. Time froze for him in Europe. I never knew him.

Tova married Shabi sometime in the 1960s and they had their first child, Ayal, around 1964 or maybe as late as 1968. I’m not sure. I saw a black-and-white photo of Shabi and Tova then holding their new baby; young couple, young state and a young hope. Who cares about murder and hate?

That’s the odd tone I found in Jerusalem during each visit, too. That weird, childish cheer.

In that old photo, both of them are young and smiling like clowns. I’ve never been able to forget that picture. It is embedded in the photo essay of my mind. Now, I was with Mirav to see Tova again after eleven years.

Mirav was driving. She chatted on the way about how she moved toward marriage with her trusted, childhood friend. There was nothing amazing in the story, but it had some slightly calming influence on me. Why? I think because all we Americans born in the 1960s saw during the 1970s as we were growing up was divorce, custody battles, moves to new homes, new schools, alimony settlements and less. Less of the relatives and friends we once had. There were good things about those decades, too, but too few stories about happy ties. So Mirav’s talk about life, predictable or not, was a good example of a stable life. I am not trying to say it was iconic, but the chat is worth mention today because there was nothing amazing about it. Plus, her boy was so cute, running around his little patch of yard.

We were driving to a modest community somewhere in downtown Jerusalem to see Tova. It was all apartments and cars. Nothing like the luxury she had with Shabi. What makes a woman leave a lovely home and family history to go hole up alone in a tiny apartment, I wondered.

When we arrived, it was indeed small; one room. Nothing modern about it. Small kitchen, minimum furniture, clean, organized, a few nice decorations. But the most stunning thing of all to my eyes was that Tova was literally not the same woman anymore. She must have been some 75 pounds lighter!

“Tova!” I gave her a hug.

“How you? You good?” she said. Her English was fragmentary as it always was. She understood more English than she spoke. She had little need for the language, though.

“Forget me. Look at you. Tova, you look very good. What in the world did you do to yourself?”

We all sat down at the table. Even the way she moved in this apartment was something new to my eyes. In Aminidav, she moved toward, away and between chunks of furniture. Now, the shapes and things in her apartment were things that were fine on their own whether she cleaned them that hour or not; she inhabited the place like it was hers, and as a woman responsible for everything in it. How can I be more vivid? These might have been my most stunning few minutes in Jerusalem that October of 2000.

In Amminidav, her lovely home would have stood up to the finest of San Francisco, I often thought. Yet, she seemed a servant in her own home sometimes. From the time she got up in the morning to the time she curled up on the couch with Hagar to watch the nightly movie, she worked for the house because the house demanded it from each nagging corner. Nothing against the house, of course, but you felt a mild fatigue from her sometimes.

Tova set a bowl of potato salad – Tova-style potato salad I remembered with that tangy flavor. We started talking and laughing. She enjoyed having foreign company for a few minutes. Maybe she was happy I made a point of visiting her during the short trip.

“Yes, Lurene, maybe I will get married again some day, but when I want. I go out on a date sometimes and I come home and do what I like,” she said. “It not marriage I not like. I just did not wanted marriage with Shabi anymore…”

She struggled a bit with her English, but I’d never heard anything more articulate in the language. I knew precisely, to the head of a pin, what she was telling me.

“Is food okay?” she added.

“Hmm? Oh! Yes, yes, the food is good, Tova. I only came here today with Mirav to see you.”

I was sitting at the east side of the rectangular table somewhere, and Tova was sitting at its north border. Mirav was sitting at its northwest corner. Describing those compass points of the table are the only way I can recall our places with respect to one another. When a brief event is important, you remember the lines involved, for some reason. Just the way the brain works, I guess. Really!

One time, a bird attacked me in a park. Deliberately clawed my scalp with his claws! I couldn’t do anything about it. What could I do? Call the San Francisco Police Department? I said nothing, but today recall the angles of his escape, the slant of the little criminal as he returned to his nest. Of course, I only mention it here because I remember the geometry of the event years later.

Mirav now dug around in her purse and produced an envelope. She handed it to Tova. It was the size of a small, child’s birthday party invitation. The envelope had some kind of ornamentation on it suggestive of a greeting card.

Tova picked up a card on the table and opened it while Mirav continued digging through her purse. She and I chatted about something immaterial as Tova viewed the card.

I looked up and saw that Tova was holding this little card open and soundlessly crying. Tears were streaming down her face. Mirav spoke to me.

“That’s a card from my sister, Hagar, that I brought my mother. When my mother left my father, Hagar was the one who couldn’t accept it. She quit talking to my mother. She left to vacation a while in India after she finished the military, to have some time to think out of our father’s house. The house we all grew up in. You know what I mean? Now, she writes my mother this card saying she loves her and forgives her and that everything is behind them now. She’ll return to Jerusalem soon now.”

Tova was opening and closing the greeting card. I was watching her and Mirav was still digging for something in her purse. Tova was opening and reopening like there was something more on the cardstock than the three or so handwritten Hebrew sentences. Watching her, I realized it was like a fragile plate in her hand.

Have you ever watched someone try to describe a controversial symphony right after they leave the auditorium? There is always this 7 to 10 second delay as they try to convert their perceptions into words. In this sense, Tova had no words to denote the card in her hands. Some words, like musical notes or tangible objects, expand once at the mind of the recipient.

The fact Hagar had written Tova from India was an immense weight off both their hearts. What a day it must have been when Hagar returned to Jerusalem