Foreign Correspondence (10 page)

When my father talked of the Arabs he’d met in the Middle East, it was mainly as figures of fun. His imitation of an Egyptian pimp’s sales pitch—“Nice girls, very cleeeen, very hygieeeen”—was delivered with the stooped, cringing posture that is a classic of the better-recognized brand of anti-Semitism. He had taught me some Arabic he picked up in Egypt: I knew how to say
“Ana miskeen
[I’m poor]” when I wanted to weasel out of paying for something, and
“Malesh
[It doesn’t matter]” when I’d botched a task or made a mess.

Leon Uris’s prose on the subject, meanwhile, took ethnic slurs to lofty heights. Mishal lived in Nazareth, a place described in some detail in
Exodus
when the Zionist hero Ari Ben Canaan takes the American nurse, Kitty Fremont, on a road trip:

They drove through the timeless Arab villages into the fertile carpet of the Jezreel Valley, which the Jews had turned from swamp into the finest farmland in the Middle East. As the road wound out of the Jezreel towards Nazareth again they moved backwards in time. On one side of the hill the lush lands of the Jezreel and on the other, the sun-baked, dried-out, barren fields of the Arabs.… Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars made wretched noises and barefoot, ragged, filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere. Kitty held Ari’s arm tightly as they wound through the bazaar and to a place alleged to be Mary’s kitchen and Joseph’s carpenter shop.

Kitty was baffled as they drove from Nazareth: it was a dreadful place.

“At least the Arabs are friendly,” Ari said. “They are Christians.”

“They are Christians who need a bath.”

I didn’t think any of this would be much help in constructing an appropriate reply to Mishal: “Had any baths lately? I hear you have a lot of dung in Nazareth.” Still, there had to be a reply; pen-pal etiquette demanded it. This went beyond manners into the realm of superstition. To fail to answer a pen-pal letter was to invite the same dose of bad luck as walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella indoors. The only way out of an unwanted correspondence was to keep replies cool, dull and brief, and to delay sending them in the hope that in the long interregnum the other party would lose interest. I crafted something suitable, and let it sit on my desk for weeks.

Meanwhile, I wrote away again to the pen-pal service, asking for another Israeli. I resisted the impulse to scrawl “Send me a goddamn Jew!” across my application. Instead, to make myself perfectly clear, I added “Judaism” to my list of interests.

Mishal’s next letter arrived in no time. Undaunted by my brief note, he’d responded with a lengthy three and a half closely written pages. This was almost unheard of in the early stages of pen-friendship, especially from a correspondent writing in his third language. (Like all Israeli Arabs, Mishal was fluent in
Hebrew as well as Arabic.) Also, he’d enclosed a one-shekel coin, which thrilled me, and a postcard of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, which looked depressingly like St. Mary’s Concord. Mishal wrote of Nazareth’s pilgrims and ancient churches. Living in a Jewish state and on top of a Christian pilgrimage site made religion a defining part of his life.

My father’s stubborn failure to convert to Catholicism had hastened the unraveling of my own faith. As time passed and no conversion appeared to be in the offing, it came to seem extremely unfair to me that a decent bloke like Daddy was doomed to eternal torment. By the time I reached high school, I’d just about had it with the arrogant local priests who were so sure about who God had time for. Darleen, my role model in all matters, had already begun to have Doubts.

When Pope Paul issued the encyclical banning birth control, it was my
casus belli
. I leaped to my feet in religion class and delivered myself of a Martin Lutheresque denunciation of the Church. A wise and humorous woman named Sister Gabriella taught the class. She also coached me in the debating team, and had befriended me in a way I’d never expected from a teacher, much less a nun. She handled my apostasy as she did a poorly prepared debate speech, astutely critiquing the flaws in the development of my argument and pointing out obvious openings for rebuttal. Then, to my surprise, she moved smoothly on with the day’s class topic, the Catholic concept of reincarnation, as if the whole edifice of Rome hadn’t just been shaken to its foundations.

Mishal lived in a place where religion couldn’t be given away like an outgrown suit. In Israel, to be a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim permanently defined both status and prospects. As a Christian, he was part of the majority in Nazareth, but he became a minority every time he left the city.

Yet he seemed at home in the Jewish state. Despite his shaky grammar, he wrote of the beauty of Jerusalem’s Old City, the
constant flow of pilgrims in Nazareth, the modern vitality of Tel Aviv. “I know that you like the life in the kibbutz, and indeed the life in the kibbutz is very nice. There are a big hall to eat in and it is like the socialist life. Everyone works on the farm and in the fields.” He added glimpses of his own life—his flute and guitar lessons, his large family—“I have five brothers and one sister. The number of sisters is equal in our families.” He seemed genuinely curious about my life in Sydney, and as I sat down to reply, I found my resolution to shed him as a correspondent weakening.

“Is there Arabs in Australia? And did you know some of them?” he asked. You bet, I wrote, proudly telling him about my girlfriends. As I wrote about making stuffed vine leaves at Zita’s house, the spicy smells of her mother’s kitchen flooded back to me. I’d enjoyed being part of her boisterous extended family and the female food-assembly line of aunt, grandmother, mother and sisters. I loved it when her grandmother, who spoke little English, covered my hands with her work-worn, callused ones, showing me how to shape the rice and tuck the leaves, all the time burbling encouragement in gentle Levantine Arabic. I wrote of their tiny but productive garden, its neatly staked tomato plants and grape arbor groaning with fruit. Before I knew it, I’d filled several pages myself.

Eventually, the pen-pal service sent me another name. The tiny slip read: E boy 7/54, meaning an English-speaking male whose July birthday in 1954 made him an ideal fourteen months older than I. But the really good news came on the next line, with the surname. Cohen!

Even I, who a decade later would fall in love with a man named Horwitz without realizing he was Jewish, recognized Cohen as an unmistakably Jewish name. But then I knew why I recognized it, and my heart sank. Somewhere in my obsessive
reading, I’d discovered that the
cohains
—the priestly class of ancient Israel—weren’t allowed to marry converts. My plan had gone awry again.

Within a couple of pale mauve aerograms, it became clear that my correspondent’s priestly status wasn’t the only impediment to a romance. Cohen was a Jew; Israeli-born, he was even a genuine sabra. But he was also dull. A dull Israeli, just like an Arab Israeli, was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me.

His brief letters were full of football, basketball and the beach—the same dreary subjects that obsessed the Aussie youths to whom I wouldn’t give the time of day. All he knew about Sydney was that the Israeli soccer team had recently played there, and all he wanted to know about me was whether I’d seen the game. Actually, if I’d known, I might well have persuaded my father to take me, in the hope of meeting some Jews. But I still hated sports. I resented the way the Australian sports obsession sapped attention from intellectual achievement. I associated sports with the beer-puking louts who spilled out of the local pub after the games finished on Saturdays, making the footpath into a gantlet to be run by any women who wanted to pass.

It proved difficult to engage Cohen on anything else. He was almost sixteen—just two years from compulsory army service, but my questions on his feelings about this, the kind of unit he would apply for, his vision of life afterward, were lost either in his unwillingness to discuss big issues or his inability to frame adequate responses in his limited English.

A year later, I was surprised to find myself writing a Christmas card to Mishal. But when I thought of sending Cohen a Hanukkah wish, I realized it had been months since we’d last corresponded.

6

French Letters

I was four when I first heard French.

My mother and I were at the railway station on a chilly winter’s day. She had bundled me up in red tights and a matching red corduroy hood that tied in a bow under my chin. I remember a handsome woman leaning down to me and smiling, saying something I didn’t understand. She was complimenting me on my beautiful
chapeau
. My mother latched onto the word and carried it home with us. In the garden, she devised a game named Shop de Chapeau. A large crimson leaf was a flamboyant Easter bonnet, a small sepia and gold one a sophisticated pillbox hat. Packed in old shoeboxes and stacked on tree-branch shelves, they became the stock of the store’s proprietress, Mademoiselle Poohbarre.

“But Madame looks
très chic
in ze green beret!”

“No, I think I prefer something with a brim.”

“Well, in that case, may I show Madame the maroon felt?” I presented my mother with a shoe box containing a fallen camphor-laurel leaf.
“Oh là là! Magnifique, non?”

My mother had never had a chance to learn French, but she loved the sound of the language. We augmented our vocabulary from the television: Maurice Chevalier midday movies, Morticia and her besotted husband Gomez in “The Addams Family” and Pepe-le-Pew, the amorous French skunk in the Warner Brothers cartoons.

I longed to learn French before I knew where France was. I yearned for high school, when foreign-language classes would begin. I was sure that acquiring another language would allow me to break the code of all those older and better cultures that I imagined elsewhere.

If I had opened my ears, I might have realized that I could have learned any number of languages just by listening to the neighbors.

While I was so busy writing away in search of foreigners, the world was arriving on my street. Every time a FOR SALE sign sprouted in a front yard, my mother’s friends—Edna and the other Irish Catholic “old-timers”—would gather to gossip over cups of tea and wonder apprehensively whether the place would be bought by “New Australians.” Almost always, it was. Soon we were surrounded: we had a Turk over the back fence, Serbs next door, Greeks across the road, Italians, Russians, Lebanese and Chinese in the next block.

I was too young to give the changes much thought. But to people of Edna’s generation the sudden diversity was shocking in a country built on racist exclusion. Migrants were supposed to be British, or Europeans who could pass for British. Australia feared Jews, blacks and especially the “Yellow Peril” from nearby Asia. For years, the nation’s best weekly magazine, the
Bulletin
, had carried the slogan “Australia for the White Man” under its masthead. The atmosphere had been so racist that the
immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, could summarize his opposition to Asian migrants with quips such as “Two Wongs don’t make a white.”

The exclusion was enforced by a “dictation test” administered to any nonwhite migrant who somehow made it to Australia’s shores. The test wasn’t, as might seem likely, to measure a would-be migrant’s proficiency in English. If the immigration officer didn’t think the migrants looked white enough, the test could be administered in Gaelic, Latin or Icelandic—any language that would doom them to failure and deportation.

But by wartime there weren’t enough British or Irish migrants to satisfy the labor needs of the growing country, and so a few more exotic people began to slip through the net. Immigration officers were told to select those who were “sixty percent European in appearance and outlook”—whatever that meant.

We called these first non-Anglo-Celtic migrants “Balts” no matter where in northern or eastern Europe they actually came from. Blond, blue-eyed, they were easy enough to get used to, once one got over the annoyance of their funny accents. The “Eye-Ties”—the large wave of Italians, Greeks and other southern European immigrants that followed the Balts—were more conspicuous with their dark complexions and pungent foods, and were met with more racism. It wasn’t until 1965 that the “White Australia” policy was abandoned. Most Australians came to accept, sometimes grudgingly, that diversity was actually making the place more interesting. Now, racism expresses itself in debates over the number of immigrants wanted, rather than what color they should be.