DAPHNE MERKIN
After the Massacre :
Life Under a Low
Sky
Everything hangs low in Jerusalem, even the sky. The weather seems
close at hand, though it is less of a constant theme than it is in New York,
where nightly the news is stopped dead so overcommunicative weather–
people can expound on atmospheric conditions. If life were more of a
teleological process, Jerusalem could be said to be a city of primary causes:
love, war, death, bullets, milk, children, newspapers, bread, sun, rain,
water, children, car crashes, children, children, children. Don't you see a
lot of
soldiers carrying guns,
people who've never been to Israel always want
to know. But once you're there you get used to the soldiers and the guns
slung casually across their backs like knapsacks. What you don't get used
to is the pride Israelis take in their young, the way adults seem to bestow
a collective indulgent glance upon them. The rare instance of teenage
violence aside (several months ago two fifteen-year-old boys from an
affiuent suburb of Tel Aviv killed a cab driver for kicks, in a case eerily
reminiscent of Leopold and Loeb) and the occasional article on the
problems of adolescence notwithstanding (the cover of
The Jerusalem
Report
for the week of March 10th proclaimed, "Don't Judge a Kid by
His Leather," promising to divulge "The Surprising Truth about Israel's
Much-Maligned Youth"), the concept of Generation X is inconceivable
in Israel.
I had arrived with my four-year-old daughter at the end of February,
looking for a way out of New York and its self-involved buzz - out of
my life and its cramped dramas, as well. There was nothing further I
wanted to know about Tonya Harding or Nancy Kerrigan (by the time I
returned the latter was already parodying herself, gotten up in blonde
Valkyrie braids on
Saturday Night Live),
and nowhere further to go for the
moment in the divorce proceedings I was enmeshed in. Israel beckoned
like a clean slate - surely, that has always been part of its appeal. And sit–
ting on the TWA flight, waiting to take off, I felt I had been right. While
the American crew explained everything to do with seat belts and emer–
gency procedures and life- rafts at exhaustive length, the Hebrew-speaking
steward came on with a few succinct, slightly mocking instructions, as if
to say,
You know the rules. Try and stick to them, okay, bubbele?
It was a cool, clear Monday afternoon when we got into Ben-Gurion
airport, where the luggage carts were free for the taking; no fumbling for
