and a moderator. In Wendy’s mind, this place, to which the Jerusalem municipality brought visiting artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals from abroad, should be more impressive and distinguished, with wood beamed ceilings and stone fireplaces, overstuffed chairs and small portable microphones that could be clipped to the speakers’ clothing. There should definitely be better chairs for the audience. Those are the amenities that would be in a room for a talk like this at Princeton, Wendy thought. She looked around, dismayed at having to sit on the hard plastic for the duration, an hour at least, probably more.
Most of the audience in the three-quarters-full room were in their forties and beyond. Wendy felt conspicuously young. The visiting speaker didn’t know Hebrew, so the proceedings would be in English. Perhaps that limited attendance? Wendy could see someone she thought was Avner Zakh at the front of the room. There weren’t a whole lot of kipot in the crowd, maybe five or six, and two or three women were wearing berets. The man she thought was Zakh was in front chatting with those around him, and there weren’t seats up there anyway. Wendy started to walk forward to be as close to the front as possible. When she reached the middle of the room, she saw a woman about her age, reading an English language magazine. The woman, who had long black curly hair, tawny skin, and dark brown eyes, was sitting in the middle of the row. There were two empty seats near her.
Wendy decided to try to get to the middle of the row, to sit near the English magazine reader. She said to the man on the aisle, “Excuse me? I’m trying to get to those seats.”
He stood up and allowed her to pass.
“Thanks,” Wendy said, stepping past the first few people in the row to sit one empty seat from the woman her age.
Once seated, purple messenger bag on floor, Wendy asked the woman reading the English magazine, “Are you here on a Fulbright?”
“Excuse me?”
“A Fulbright? Are you in my group?”
“I’m a journalist. Orly Markovsky. “
Wendy looked at her. “Orly Markovsky? Camp Kodimoh?” she said, stunned.
Orly looked at Wendy and replied, “Wendy?” with an upward quizzical lilt in her voice. She added “Wendy Goldberg?”
“When did we last see each other? At thirteen, so . . . 1983?”
“You were the only person I liked in that bunk,” Orly said. She paused and added, “This is so weird. What are you doing in Israel now?”
“I’m writing my dissertation. My fellowship group of graduate students was invited to come tonight so I guessed you might be one of them. The only person in the group I’ve met is my advisor. He’s up front.”
“I’m a freelance journalist, working on a book. I’m hoping to get a piece about this debate in a hip publication.”
The participants were assembling on the dais, not seated, but still standing and chatting, even though it was ten minutes after the lecture’s scheduled start time. Finally, a preliminary rustling and settling in emanated through the room, as Emma Fletcher, the chair of the Hebrew University English department, tapped the microphone to get the audience’s attention.
“We’ll talk after. I’m glad to see you again,” Orly whispered to Wendy across the still empty seat between them.
On the podium, Fletcher began: “Welcome to the fall 1996 Van Leer Lecture of the Hebrew University English Department. We are pleased to have Phillipe Berger with us from Palo Alto”—she paused for the polite applause—“and Yedidya Hartheimer with us from Jerusalem.” The stronger applause from the hometown crowd necessitated a longer halt. “The format we’ve devised is that each panelist will speak for fifteen minutes. Then, I will pose a few queries addressed to both speakers, and finally I’ll accept questions from the audience. Yes?” She looked around to be sure her audience concurred with her ground rules before continuing.
“Our honored guest will be first. Phillipe Berger was born in Zurich in 1930. His family sent him on a Kindertransport to England during the war. He stayed on to matriculate at Oxford, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He has taught European literature at the Sorbonne, Oxford, the University of Turin, and Harvard, and is currently Percy Stanford University Professor in Palo Alto. Professor Berger has received every major award for his writing, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Prix Médicis. This is his first visit to Jerusalem and we are honored and pleased to welcome him. Professor Berger.”
To the sounds of mild applause, Berger rose from his seat and stepped to the lectern. He began: “Our eternal homeland,” and was silent a long moment.
“The fixity of the text is the only place the Jewish people can truly be at home. The longing for perpetuity can never be found in a fixed physical abode, only on the page, the permanence of the black ink burnished by the whiteness of the space around it, the blank space a flame in which burn for all time the passions that created the writing. The word is where the Jews, the lecteurs de durer, enduring readers, belong. Only in the margins, in the disputations with what is around us, can we truly fulfill our destiny as individuals and as a people. We must remain there, on the margin, never in the center, never allowing ourselves to be trapped in what is, only what is in formation, in becoming. The margin is flexible; it yields,” he continued. Somewhere in this message, Wendy’s mind had begun to drift off for a brief snooze.
Wendy was roused by the polite applause marking the end of Berger’s presentation. She opened her eyes to hear Fletcher introduce Yedidya Hartheimer. “The writer Yedidya Hartheimer needs no introduction to this audience. We are all aware of his two novels and his penetrating book of journalism, Victims in Power: Children of Survivors Serving in the Territories, which has won many prizes, including the PEN Writers of Conscience Award, the Prix de Rome, and the National Jewish Book Award. We are fortunate to have you with us. Yedidya.”
“The aron hesafirim hayehudim, the bookshelf of Jewish texts, is ours. We who live here in Eretz Yisrael, speak its language, the language of the Torah, the prophets, daily, as we wander on these eternal hills. Without the land the Bible is . . .” he made a cutting off gesture with his hands, “zeeffft, nothing. This place is for me, eretz hakodesh, the holy land. Not because I am a religious person—I cannot take the privilege to claim that for myself—but because it is ours, the place we have yearned for, these centuries. Now, we are like dreamers and have returned. It is ours, to bring our Jewish ethos into every stone in this country.
“Moshe Rabbeinu stood benikrat hatzur, in the cusp, the cleft of the stone, to behold God, ahorei, literally, from behind. But those who are intimate with the language know ahorei can also mean belatedly. Moshe sees God belatedly. And that, I am afraid, my friends,” Hartheimer said with an air of prophecy and sadness,” is what will happen to us if we do not realize the miracle. I am purposely using this word ‘miracle’ with religious overtones. In this wonder that is the modern state of Israel, with Jewish sovereignty, we have Jewish culture in all its glory and grossness, from Hebrew hip-hop and Jewish whores and drug dealers, to high art, Hebrew opera, and epic poetry. If we do not understand the treasure of our miraculousness, of our permission to be at the center once again, if we continue to only see ourselves as outsiders, as victims, we are in grave danger. I want us to stand in the stones of this place, not belatedly cognizant of our power like Moshe, but grasping it fully. I want us to take it with each and every stone, to use it to create a place with a fully Jewish ethos, to be the moral creatures we can be, created with the possibility of being divine, b’tzelem Elohim. We can overcome our mortal flaws, even to make peace with our enemies. That is the possibility we have been
