LETTER FRO M ISRAEL
503
who walk in step on the Egyptian friezes. In Galilee one sees the
snow-capped mountain of Hermon where once the women sat and wept
for Tammuz buried in the ground each year when the flowers faded
and the crops died and the earth became ash. Now Tammuz and Ehul are
the names of months in the H ebrew calendar. J ehovah, God of Reason,
rules Marduk, the god of force. (But there ' is a tiny school of H ebrew
poets who want to go back to the prcmonotheistic mythology of the
Canaanites, a sort of D. H. Lawrence group). Macadam is laid over
the caravan routes and in Tiberias the stone ruins of Herod Antipater's
castle are surrounded by the ferro concrete cubes of the new suburb
(1920 German style).
The country is in a hurry. There is as yet no architecture, only
building. You will be attracted to the
horns
of Arab Jaffa, the tall
romantic buildings with ,a frail high-set balcony like an impossible set
by Gordon Craig, the amiable scruffiness, the charming insincerity of
the Arab, rather than to the busy purposeful rectangular city of Tel
Aviv, sunbaked concrete, anarchical traffic, busy, noisy, irritable,
bourgeois. The tractors whir in the valleys and, fenced by the cypresses,
the pink and white bungalows of the colonies look oddly suburban in
the grand impersonality of the landscape. The cultivated bougainvillea
and eucalyptus trees, the neatly fenced orange and banana groves,
seem prim and artificial amid the rambling levelness. But the be–
spectacled man on the tractor who with one eye on the textbook goes
to put philosophy
into
action (back to the land for the Jews) is
romantic
in
a less obvious way. The clerks and professors fumbling with
the plough are imbued with what may be called the existential theory
of finding your destiny by creating it, like Whitman's spider projecting
its filament
into
the air. The Babylonian refugees have returned via
Rome, Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Russia, China, India, Africa, the
Mile End Road and Hester Street, blond Poles, redheaded Rumanians,
smooth Germans and swart vociferous Yemenites. There may be no
such thing as the Jewish race but there is for many reasons a J ewish
psychosis. And one feels excitingly as one walks past the hotels and bars
of Hayarkon Street by the Mediterranean in Tel Aviv, hearing the
babble of all nations, that there
is
a compression of the nations within
one
orbit,
a rich potentiality and vitality of peoples, of cultures, of living.
It is a small country but everything, people, politics, landscape, seem
bigger than life
size.
It
is
only forty miles from Tel Aviv to Haifa
or Jerusalem but the problems of booking taxis, (railways have only
recently started running again) , the loneliness of the country, the abrupt
rear of hills, make it seem much larger. Zionism does not quite fit in
