Tag Archives: terrorism

This Is Not a Book Review

15 Friday Jul 2016

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This past Tuesday night, my wife and I dined at a small Parisian restaurant we’d stumbled on almost thirty years ago, and which, I’m happy to say, is just as good as it was then. Since we were feeling romantic and happy with the world, I told the maître d’ how his establishment had figured in our lives. Our first visit happened the same week I asked my wife to marry me; our second, some years later, occurred when she was pregnant with our elder son.

The maître d’ thanked us profusely. “What you’re telling me gives me goose bumps,” he said. He added that what mattered most to his colleagues and him was the passion to prepare and serve food the way it should be done. I said that what was on the plate proved the point; he beamed and said he was touched.

Two days later, back in Seattle, we read about the massacre at Nice. I can’t tell you how revolted, heartsick, and incredulous I feel, how outraged. Among other things, to me, France represents the love for and appreciation of the beauty that makes life more fulfilling. It’s as the maître d’ said, the understanding that even a snippet of the everyday should be created just so, as if there were no excuse for ugliness. Not that there’s no ugliness in France; of course there is, and plenty of it, not least the bigotry and xenophobia that poison public discourse. But you’ll also see there the passion this man was referring to: a moment, an interaction, a way of being that says, This is what life’s about.

During our trip, we encountered many examples of this. A Tunisian market-stall merchant in Dijon urged us to sample his olive oil, easily the best I’ve ever tasted, and when I said so, he wound up telling us about his life and why he’d emigrated to France. An elderly couple who run a bed-and-breakfast in Bourges embraced us when our three-day stay ended and said they’d miss us. Why? I think it’s because we expressed admiration for their city and the care with which they renovated the ancient building that’s their home.

The Paris métro, like any other hole in the ground through which trains run incessantly, is noisy, grimy, and sooty, and the ads are loud and garish, like ads everywhere. But take a closer look at them, and you’ll see that their borders are ornate ceramic tile. Who thought to bother, and why? Who decided, way back when, to name the stations after historical figures or events and decorate them accordingly? Then again, back further when, who thought that a cathedral spire needed meticulously carved ornaments so high above the ground?

The terrorists’ response? Blow it up. Run it over. Shoot it. Hate it. Like any sociopath who fears himself impure and worthless, they see only filth, depravity, sin, which must be wiped out. A café, for instance, isn’t a social hub but a place where men and women mingle freely over alcohol. But it takes a particular sickness to translate that belief into action, to decide that a certain lifestyle, and the freedom to choose it, aren’t merely different or new but an insult, one that can be assuaged only by murder.

I grieve for Nice, for France, for the world we live in.

Life Hangs on Chance: City of Secrets

26 Thursday May 2016

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Review: City of Secrets, by Stewart O’Nan
Viking, 2016. 194 pp. $22

Brand, a Latvian survivor of the Holocaust, drives a taxi in Jerusalem in 1945. But that simple statement skips over many complexities. The British are clinging to their mandate over Palestine, refusing entry to dispossessed Jews like Brand and combing the population for illegal immigrants, whom they deport. Consequently, he must live underground, so his papers, taxi, and apartment come courtesy of a revolutionary cell committed to Israeli independence, which knows him only as Jossi. Since even the possession of a weapon is a hanging offense, ferrying his comrades to clandestine rendezvous or military operations puts him in great danger.

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Jerusalem, VE Day, May 8, 1945 (Courtesy Matson Photographic Service, Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Naturally, Brand becomes more than a chauffeur, about which he has mixed feelings–repugnance at violence, excitement at wielding power, pride in helping create a Jewish homeland. But as his role widens, he realizes that his cell, which he thought belonged to the Haganah, a comparatively moderate organization, has been taken over by the more violent, provocative Irgun. What holds him together is his love for Eva, a fellow Latvian and cell member, who arouses his jealousy by working as a prostitute to gain information.

From this tense, conflict-ridden premise comes a thriller of remarkable depth and breadth, especially considering how spare it is. The jacket quotes a blurb by Alan Furst, and O’Nan deserves the compliment in more than one way. Not only has he shown the same elegant economy as the best of Furst’s more recent World War II thrillers, he’s pushed the envelope. Rather than have Brand be an expert, O’Nan makes him an amateur who can’t master his risky impulses to retain human connection when the smart money says to shut up and pretend you see nothing. But how could he remain silent, when his wife, parents, grandparents, and sister were all murdered, and when he watched a friend stomped to death in a concentration camp? Brand’s confusion and ambivalence, rather than sangfroid or professional devotion, are what drive the narrative.

As with Furst, City of Secrets tastes of atmosphere:

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouins and bankers. . . . The very stones were secondhand, scavenged and fit back into place haphazardly, their Roman inscriptions inverted. It was the rainy season, and the walls were gray instead of golden, the souks teeming with rats. An east wind thrashed the poplars and olive trees, stirring up trash in cul-de-sacs, rattling windows. He’d lost too much weight during the war and couldn’t get warm.

When Brand goes into action, there’s tension aplenty. But the author also captures tension of a different kind, the everyday variety. Brand must wait for information, which usually comes unexpectedly and never fully enough to satisfy his curiosity. Every drive through Jerusalem means passing British roadblocks, where there’s always a chance he’ll be discovered as an illegal immigrant, or that soldiers will search his car and find what he’s not supposed to have. He craves Eva’s company, but also her love, which she denies him, and which he’s learned never to discuss. Accordingly, every move Brand makes, even if it’s to stay in his apartment, alone, ratchets up the stakes.

City of Secrets manages to suggest much about politics and hatreds without having to narrate them, an admirable part of the economy I mentioned. O’Nan conveys the bitter divisions between the Haganah and the Irgun; the British occupiers’ anti-Semitism; and the moral challenges inherent to fighting for a righteous cause. I like City of Secrets much better than a novel I reviewed on a similar subject, I Lived in Modern Times, or, for that matter, O’Nan’s West of Sunset, about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years. That was a nice novel; City of Secrets is terrific.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Nobody Escapes: I Lived in Modern Times

19 Saturday Dec 2015

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Review: I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant
Penguin, 2000. 260 pp. $24

In this disturbing, insightful novel, Linda Grant portrays the Jews who worked to create the state of Israel in 1946-47 as anything but heroes. They’re gangsters and lowlifes who somehow managed to survive the Holocaust; longtime German and Austrian residents who look down on their Eastern European brethren; arrogant revolutionaries; terrorists; and displaced people who think the world owes them a favor.

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mind you, the British trying to enforce their mandate over Palestine are vicious anti-Semites, and worse. They believe that they had it tough during the world war, can’t decide whom they despise more, Arab or Jew, and express choleric amazement that their inferiors could dare rebel against them, the world’s most practiced colonialists. The only participants in this novel who get a free pass–or almost do–are the Arabs, aside from a rare bombing or sniping, referred to but never shown.

No doubt, the mainstream, heroic narrative about the founding of Israel (or anywhere else) needs correction. Nevertheless, this novel goes too far the other way, so much so that it offends me, though I share some of the author’s political views. Like her, I’m ashamed that my Israeli coreligionists oppress Palestinians today (of which I’ve seen glimpses, first-hand). Yet I reject her blanket portrayal of Israel’s founders as either misguided hoodlums or blind idealists, or of Jews as fractious and arrogant, or that any nation born in war is doomed to fight perpetually. War has always made nations, whether we’re talking about the United States, Serbia, or the Netherlands. How and when those nations make war afterward is another story, but in I Lived in Modern Times, Israel’s path seems predetermined and entirely of Jewish making, which is more than a little neat.

That said, Grant has written a provocative, illuminating story about identity. Her heroine, Evelyn Sert, is a young woman born in England of Eastern European Jewish parents. Through her British passport, she takes ship for Palestine in 1946, pretending to be Christian so as to evade the rules against Jewish immigration. She’s heard of the wonderful experiment that will build a new nation according to modern principles, in which a Jew may find a life without fear and ideals to live by.

But reality doesn’t measure up. First, she tries a kibbutz, whose socialist roots and practices (including free love) appeal to her, only to find that the heat and the hard labor wear her down, and the men treat her like a slab of meat. She settles in Tel Aviv, resuming her former occupation as a hairdresser, but her best customers are British women whose husbands are the police, one of whom believes she recognizes Evelyn from the boat.

So Evelyn splits herself. She dyes her hair blond, calls herself Priscilla Jones, and goes to the beach with these women and their husbands, listening to their diatribes. Her Jewish boyfriend, a mysterious chap who speaks fluent Hebrew, gives her the passion she’s always wanted but insists that she know her place as a woman. This poses a struggle for Evelyn, who has other ambitions and is more literate, smarter, and deeper than he is. Yet Johnny, the name she knows him by, also protects her, giving her a false passport that keeps her safe from the police as Priscilla Jones–for a while. It’s his other underground activities she’s nervous about.

As her openly Jewish self, however, the German and Austrian emigrés, though they open up a cultural world she’s missed since leaving England, also condescend to her as an ignorant bumpkin from Eastern Europe. That wears on her, but even worse, Evelyn tires of what she calls “the so-what people.”

So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers.

Like the contortions of self that Evelyn submits to as an immigrant to a bewildering, divided land, these passages about the social pecking order based on birth or suffering hit the mark. However, after a while, you begin to wonder why Evelyn is so passive, why she doesn’t stand up to her lecturers or simply walk away. It’s particularly jarring toward the end, when she allows someone to bully her into an action I don’t believe she’d ever take. Unlike the case in some historical novels, which rewrite history to achieve the desired result, I Lived in Modern Times takes the opposite route, putting the heroine in a false position to evade an inconvenient historical event. It doesn’t work.

As with its protagonist, this novel’s contortions come to a peculiar end.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.