AVIYA KUSHNER
421
about a million people who left the Soviet Union and its crumbling
economy for the hot sun and old apartments of Tel Aviv, many packing
all their belongings into cheap plastic red, white, and blue plaid bags
that stick out on the revolving luggage belts of Ben-Gurion Airport.
Hope moves back and forth, like memory, like population. For a few
weeks last June, the providers of hope and the recipients of it switched
places in Israel, and those plaid bags at Ben-Gurion Airport no longer
looked so helpless, so forlorn and desperate. One million people from a
huge and faraway land have transformed this fascinating and troubled
little country, from its tech companies to its orchestras to its real-estate
values, and this year they have finally begun to pierce Israel's toughness,
making inroads into its very soul.
Terror makes us all change, makes us question our choices, and
sometimes, it makes us move toward perceived safety. Even if no one
wants to admit it, Israel's big hope now, at this time of unprecedented
trouble, is that its newest immigrants won't leave.
Thousands of miles away, in New York City, the hope is similar.
Politicians and regular working people hope that big financial firms
won't abandon Lower Manhattan, that small businesses won't flee, that
families and immigrants won't escape to the as-yet-untargeted suburbs.
What do you do with yourself after a terror attack? You find hope
where you can. Whether in Tel Aviv or New York City, after the misery
of a terror attack, hope tends to transform itself into a clear, defiant,
one-word
mission-stay.
COMING IN
PARTISAN REVIEW:
Proceedings from the
Our Country, Our Culture
conference featuring:
Robert Brustein, James Collins, John Patrick
Diggins, Liah Greenfeld, Hilton Kramer, Edith
Kurzweil, Ray Kurzweil, Michael Meyers, Conor
Cruise O'Brien, Jules Olitski, Cynthia Ozick,
Sanford Pinsker, Norman Podhoretz, David
Pryce-Jones, Edward Rothstein, Gerald Weiss–
mann
and
Jon Westling
