SOB
PARTISAN REVIEW
The main tug of war in the country is that betwecn East and
West. Britain, the United States and Russia have taken the places of
Babylon and Egypt, Rome and Persia. But the essential conflict is tem–
peramental. In Tel Aviv there are three good theaters doing interesting
plays in Hebrew, several cinemas, one or two good hotels and bars.
There are several cafes where the largely German-Jewish population
sip coffee and eat pastries. The shops are modern and the women
stylish. But their hair thins and their complexions get prematurely hag–
gard. In the hot season, the sun brings out a sweat at nine in the
morning, destroys shadow, bears down so that one feels flat as a
lizard. The young New Yorkers with their Hawaiian shirts and
Gershwin records set their wooden huts on the hilltops near the Leb–
anese border where Arab smugglers are caught every night and near
the tombs at Meiron of two great sages of the Jewish cultural heyday.
The jeeps trundle through the sand dunes of the Negev to Aquaba
from where a Jewish fleet may sail again as it has not done sinee
Solomon. The new state is young, brash, sensitive, unsure, provincial,
but it has made the wonderful leap from the bitter interregnum of the
ghetto, the old clothes man, the discreet humility. The people are
taking to Arab dances like the Debka, the lilting galloping rhythms, the
quavering songs, the music of pipe and tabor. Celebrating the new
settlement at Ben Shemen under a moon big as a bicycle wheel, girls in
crimson dresses danced with corn sheaves and pitchers, with no self–
conscious air of dressing up but rather as though resuming a familiar
tradition. In Galilee we sat at a fish fry round a spirit stove while the
mosquitoes twanged against the net and the singing went out from
the island of light into the night on the indifferent land, now cool,
but capable of torrent and gale or, suddenly, the bland sun, an ecstatic
spring and a smouldering summer, the tempcramental J ewish weather.
One feels an affection for the unpredictable, intractable country.
There is something familiar to me in these limestone crags with the
buzzard slowly flying over, the scrub, boulder, shrub, on the heave of
big hills, the land of Golam (now Transjordan) like soft grey folds of
elephant hide, the Jordan lands, blue-rose, graphitic, the green, mottled,
black and dun collapse of the hills to the sea of Galilee, blue as a fallen
sky.
It
may be that the people who have come back may feel an odd
memory of Ha'Ibri. The impact on the East of two thousand years ex–
perience in other lands, the sense of returning to something familiar,
may produce a new mystique. The word "Orientalism" may acquire a
new dignity. Instead of the factual approach of the West, there are the
meditative, the almost feminine, subtleties of argument and values, the
