608
PARTISAN REVIEW
name Israeli-fashion to Eliezar ben-Khoury, or something of the sort.
It was doubly annoying because, having handed over my obnoxious pass–
port and gone tensely to wait outside the shack-like Control Building,
I was shortly joined by a loud-mouthed British newspaperman who
in–
sisted on telling me an Israeli joke about my ministerial homonym. "But
KAPLAN," he shouted at the end, "what does KAPLAN do all day?"
While he was hopelessly spoiling his punch-line, I made my way to
a Coca-Cola machine, which emerged bright-red from a pile of sand
nearby. I have an uneven sense of humor, under the best of circum–
stances. So I aspired singlemindedly to Coca-Cola, until I was joined by
an Egyptian, who had been standing discreetly
in
the meager shadow of
the shack. He helped me operate the machine and eagerly lapped up
his
drink, but fortunately did not insist on conversation. The sun was very
hot and the passport-control seemed very, very long.
So I stood there, between the unsubtle Briton and this absurd and
reassuring machine, meditating on the inconvenience of my name.. ..
Koestler's argument was that it constituted a malevolent handicap, a
gratuitous danger, and in this he was certainly right. To bear such a
name was like wearing a yellow star, or a beard with earlocks; it placed
me in a category to which I did not, in any fruitful way, belong.
It
ex–
posed me and my children to massacre, simply because I hadn't the
energy and courage of my apostasy. It obsessed me-said Koestler-with
the problems of a mass of strange and rather outlandish people who
meant nothing to me in particular, but who nevertheless became,
ex
officio,
my brothers, comrades, accomplices. In short, it invaded my life,
which should have been entirely applied to the problem of being; and
forced it to turn always about the problem of being-a-Jew. Always, of
course, was too much to say. Much too much. But the fact of the matter,
he insisted, was that my name gave me nothing but trouble.
Koestler has since despatched a series of articles from Tel Aviv,
in
which he attempts to reduce this, our impatience and revolt, to a reason.
Licking his chops, he argues that the establishment of Israel has made
it possible, at last, to envisage the liquidation of the Jews, at least inso–
far as they are a phenomenon of the European Pale. On one hand, he
makes a great point of the transformation of the European immigrants
in Palestine, which he had already noted in his novel. In a single gen–
eration, or two, the stooped and flat-footed intellectual, with his moist
palms and preconsumptive breath, becomes a blond and sun-tanned
peasant, endearingly stupid. Furthermore, Israel is increasingly peopled
by Middle Easterners and North Africans, who accelerate the general
destruction of the "Jewish type."
