407 - Bellow in the Holy Land

Bellow in the Holy Land
By Carlos Baker

IN the fall of1975, Saul Bellow the novelist spent three months in Jerusalem and environs. His wife Alexandra, a mathematician, was teaching at the Hebrew University on a visiting appointment, and Bellow went along as observer and inquirer, making notes about the people, the scenery, the customs of the country, and above all the predicament of Israel as it now stands in the middle nineteen-seventies. The short book that grew out of this sojourn is part descriptive, part analytical, a happy cross between tractate and travelogue-although, as it moves on, it is the tract that tends to take over.

Bellow was no stranger to Israel, having covered the Six-Day War of 1967 as a correspondent for Newsday, followed by another visit in 1970. Anyone who has not personally visited the Holy Land of both Jews and Christians is likely to profit, however vicariously, from Bellow's sharp-eyed and often witty observations of the land and the people. Through the eyes of a practiced novelist we "look downward toward the Dead Sea, over broken rocks and small houses with bulbous roofs," or watch Arab boys kicking a soccer ball in the greenpark bottomland of Gai-Hinnom, the traditional Gehenna where children were once sacrificed to Moloch. "We eat an Israeli breakfast of fried eggs, sliced cheese, olives, green onions, tomatoes, and little salt fish." We visit a kibbutz spread over the ruins of Herod's Caesarea where Roman fragments are still so abundant that one has "only to prod the ground" to uncover pieces of pottery, chunks of statuary, "a pair of dancing satyr-legs." We wander through citrus orchards and banana groves, roam round a marketplace on the eve of the Sabbath, and enter a Yemenite synagogue to hear the Song of Songs chanted in unison by black-bearded worshippers who have left their shoes, Arabfashion, at the door, and sit singing at their lecterns in stockinged feet. We meet the ebullient and harddriving Mayor Teddy Kolleck, lunch on rubbery chicken with Abba Eban, and tour the Institute at Rehovoth, "one of the world's great centers of scientific research," in the company of its octogenarian founder, Meyer Weisgal.

But over all this hangs a perpetual shadow. Like the people in Stevenson's Aes Triplex who dwell on the flanks of a volcano, the citizens of Israel live under the constant threat of possible annihilation.

Readers of THEOLOGY TODAY Will remember Carlos Baker's critique of Saul Bellow's novel Humboldt's Gift in our January 1976 issue. Here we have Baker's review of Bellow's latest book, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York, Viking Press,1976,182pp., $8.95). Bellow was recently awarded the1976Nobel Prize for Literature. Carlos Baker is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University and a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. In addition to being a teacher and a critic, he has written novels, poetry, and biography. A recent edition of his short stories has just appeared, viz. The Talismans and Other Stories (New York, Scribner's, 1976).

408 - Bellow in the Holy Land

During and after his most recent stay, the compassionate Bellow made "what amounts to a personal Israel syllabus" of dozens of books and scores of articles on the external and internal problems that confront the modern Jewish state. His major preoccupation appears to be the presentation and analysis of the views of those historians, political scientists, and economists whom he regards as best informed on the subject.

One of these is Jacob Talmon, a distinguished and highly articulate scholar with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends at the Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como in the summer of 1973. Bellow calls him (correctly) "an energetic and dramatic talker" who is able to "draw his wide historical knowledge" into any conversation. It is Talmon's view that Israel's right to exist must be won by special exertions, "by some special atonement, through being better than others." But he has seen his adopted homeland, "which was briefly so proud and confident after 1967," being reduced, almost overnight, to a state of near beggary, "while its mortal enemies with their petro-dollars have become the world's most potent bankers and investors." A gentle and deeply learned man, Talmon is overwrought by the incipient threat to world Jewry if Israel should be extirpated.

Talmon, of course, is only one among many. No one, says Bellow, is now "at ease in Zion." The world crisis and that of the state are both dramatically evident in the deteriorating quality of domestic life in Jerusalem. Taxes are heavy and still rising; the value of the Israeli pound is falling; inflation gobbles purchasing power; many people hold two jobs to make ends barely meet; dozens of families mourn the loss of sturdy sons at war. The one fact unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state, says Bellow, is that they cannot take their right to live for granted. Others can, but they cannot. Without American approval and help-the figure of two billions annually is mentioned-Israel would not have come into being. Even with such help, no people has been obliged "to work so hard on so many levels" for roughly a quarter of a century to establish a truly modern country in what was formerly a virtual desert. It is, he says, "both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian."

From the first it has been America's policy to protect Israel from her foes. Bellow is not by nature a propagandizer for anything except humanity, but he knows that there are Molochs abroad along the borders, itching (in Auden's phrase) to boil the children of Israel, eager for the end of a great experiment. For my part, I remember Jacob Talmon, bending close over a tome in the sunny library of the Villa Serbelloni, or strolling the gravelled garden paths in close and informative conversation-a man deserving of peace and of the right to think and set down his thoughts. For him, and others like him, I wish as fervently as Bellow for Israel's survival.