The Drifters (32 page)
None yearned for it more than Yigal, who now felt that because of his dual citizenship, he had to evaluate the situation prudently. In Detroit he could rely on peace—not guaranteed and not immune to civil disturbance, but nevertheless a kind of peace. In Israel he knew none, and the difference disturbed him: ‘At Qarash I found I wasn’t a coward. But I don’t think a man ought to live on the edge of Qarash the rest of his life. It was a great experience, serving under the Sabra, but one not to be repeated.’
By September, when the time came for him to fly back to Detroit to finish the American part of his education, he
was quite content to bid Israel farewell, and during the last picnic in the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, he left his sisters and wandered by himself to a high point from which he could survey one of the most impressive sights in the world, beloved by Romans in their day, and by the band of Jesus, and by the Arabs who had followed. Each of these groups had found and left a desert, but the Jews had made it a flowering paradise in which he now sat down to grapple with the big concepts of history.
Maybe the phrase means something, he thought. Push us into the sea! Maybe if the Arabs hold on … refuse to parley with us … bide their time … he hesitated, unwilling to continue this line of reasoning, but the summation came of itself: Maybe it will be like the Crusades. Maybe the Arabs will hoard their strength for two hundred years, and then, slowly, like a glacier, push us into the sea, erasing everything that went before. He began to see how this might be possible, for he was perched on one of the hills used by Saladin in his mighty thrust against the Crusaders, the push that eventually drove them into the sea: If I were a young Arab, I’d plot ways by which this could be accomplished—it would become an obsession with me … He snapped his fingers with the joy of intellectual discovery, even though this particular discovery could bring him no personal joy: And I’d operate not from reason, nor from need, but rather in the spirit of a game. I would oppose Jews just for the hell of it. He paused to digest his thoughts: I’d make it the national pastime—year after year through the decades.
He realized that such a commitment presupposed a renewal of the Six-Day War: It’s going to happen all over again—Haifa under the bombs … tanks crossing the Sinai. The Sabra will become an old man lecturing the new tank commanders—‘Never dig your tanks in to fixed positions.’ What a hell of a life. He saw, however, one gleam of hope: If somehow both sides could sponsor conciliation … honestly … get down to rock bottom and settle these grievances. Shaking his head mournfully, looking regretfully at the Galilee, in which the Jews had accomplished so much and the others so little, he concluded: Not in my lifetime … the bitterness is too great. For the next two hundred years this isn’t going to be a good place to live. But then, with the inextinguishable hope of youth, he thought: Unless we can get together.
With this tentative conclusion, which he chose not to discuss with his sisters, for they did not have American citizenship, he returned to Detroit, where he entered a special hell which kept him in agitation throughout the academic year of 1967–1968. On the one hand, sentimental Jews made a hero of him—none worse than his grandfather, who moved among his acquaintances, saying, ‘You kept telling me that because Jews don’t go out for football they can’t fight. You hear about my grandson … sixteen years old’—but what was worse, he had to listen to inept jokes about the futility of the Egyptians; intuitively he knew that this was not a constructive approach to the problem. The Egyptians he had faced at Qarash may have been poorly led, but they were not cowards, nor were they jokes; they were men faced with problems which permitted no solution.
In the first days of school Bruce tried to explain what had really happened at Qarash—the bravery of the Egyptians, how they had chopped up the Israeli trucks, how foot soldiers had moved in and killed his buddy under the truck—but no one cared to listen. The war was a joke in which Egyptians were the clowns.
More serious, however, was his growing awareness that a surprising number of well-educated Jews in the Detroit area were turning against Israel and finding it fashionable to parade pro-Arab sentiments. He first encountered this phenomenon when a young Jewish leader from the University of Michigan conducted a seminar in Grosse Pointe during which he charged that Israel was no different from Hitler Germany and that Arabs were morally justified in opposing what had to be seen as American imperialism. Bruce considered the first charge preposterous and the second unfounded, but even in his own school three of the top Jewish students announced that they were pro-Arab; when he asked them if they understood what such a statement implied, they brushed him off: ‘It’s in the interest of American Jews to see that Israel is absorbed by its neighbors.’ This pronouncement gained wide currency, and one of the Jewish boys was invited to address the local Rotary Club to explain it.
Intellectual Jews took special umbrage at the conspicuous figure of General Dayan. Whereas some of Bruce’s friends made Dayan a popular hero—anyone could get a quick laugh by wearing an eye patch and declaiming, ‘General
Westmoreland, President Johnson set me to help clean up the war in Vietnam. I can spare you six days’—those who were leading the philosophical attack on Israel pointed to Dayan as evidence of the new Jewish imperialism. Bruce wondered if they knew what they were talking about, and one night when he and his grandfather attended a meeting at which this line was peddled by a clever Jewish writer from New York, Bruce stood in the audience and asked, ‘Are you prepared to sponsor the slaughter of two million Jews in Israel?’ and the speaker laughed and said, ‘Young man, you’ve been listening to fairy stories,’ and Bruce shouted, ‘I’ve been listening to Radio Damascus,’ and the speaker brushed him off airily with, ‘All people engage in hyperbole, just as you’re doing now,’ and the audience had laughed comfortably at having had this ghost laid to rest. Bruce was not trained in psychology, so he could not analyze what impelled some of the Jewish intellectuals to adopt this unexpected posture, but he did know enough to dissect the next phenomenon for what it was worth. Grosse Pointe allowed no Negroes, but nearby Detroit contained many, and wealthy householders in Grosse Pointe listened with approval as their Negro servants began to express violently anti-Jewish sentiments. It was rather exciting to hear one’s maid say, ‘Adolf Hitler was right. Them Jews, they run everything. They the enemy of all good people.’ White matrons were tempted to encourage the Negroes, and nodded gravely when the latter said, ‘Blacks ain’t never gonna have a chance in this here country till we take care of them Jews that’s holdin’ us down.’
At Bruce’s school it was customary to enroll four Negroes each year, basketball players if possible, and since the process of selection was meticulous, boys of more than average ability were enlisted. Prior to the Six-Day War, these Negroes had usually found common ground with boys like Bruce, but in the strange backlash that followed the war, they began to stay aloof from the Jews, especially from Bruce, who was reported to be an Israeli. There was much talk of, ‘Them poor Arab refugees. Maybe we gonna have to go over there and set them free.’
In February the school invited to its forum one of the Arab representatives at the United Nations, and he gave an excellent account of himself. He had a few jokes against the slothfulness of his people, a few titillating views of Islam as an exotic and lovely religion, and a series of
soft-sell persuasions calculated to instill a partiality for his side. In short, he was doing, for the first time, what able Israeli diplomats had been doing at similar forums for the past twenty years. He created a sensation, and after the meeting, conducted an informal session with the students, at which the four Negro students asked a series of probing questions. He told them frankly, ‘The future of your race in Africa is to align yourselves with Islam. The future of your people in this country is to do the same.’ After he had left the campus two of the Negro athletes announced that they had become Muslims, and one snarled at the end of history class, ‘We gonna push you right off that land you stole.’
It was in this rapidly shifting climate that Bruce Clifton graduated with high grades, and this raised a new set of problems, for his proud grandfather launched a series of campaigns which resulted in his getting offers of scholarships to the University of Michigan and Cal Tech. To his grandfather’s astonishment, Brace said, ‘I’m not going to college in America. I’ve enrolled at the Technion in Haifa.’
‘You must be out of your mind!’ his grandfather shouted. ‘Do you realize how tough it is to get into Michigan? Or Cal Tech? Like getting into heaven.’
‘I want a good education,’ Bruce said. ‘At the Technion …’
‘Just because your father works there. Bruce, it’s a high school compared with a place like Michigan … or Cal Tech.’
‘In the fields I’m interested in, it happens to be better than either of them.’
‘Insularity,’ Melnikoff stormed. ‘That’s what’s wrong with Israel. Goddamned insularity.’
But Bruce would not even consider the application forms when his grandfather placed them before him. ‘I’m going to the Technion,’ he said stubbornly, but one night his grandmother came to his room and said, ‘Bruce, when a boy has a grandfather who has a lot of money—who has to write a will whether he wants to or not—with such a grandfather a young boy shouldn’t be obstreperous.’ Bruce looked at her stonily, and she continued, ‘So you’ll be a good boy, please, and tell him you’ll go to Michigan or maybe California. I hear they’re both very nice.’
Bruce explained that he needed to know Israel better, that he wanted to reestablish association with the boys he
had grown up with, and that nothing could keep him from returning there. The next morning he scribbled a hasty note to his grandfather, enlisted a friend to drive him to the airport, and boarded a plane to Israel, but when he found that it stopped at London, he decided on the spur of the moment to break his journey and visit his other grandparents in Canterbury.
On the third day of his visit, Bruce was astonished by something his Grandfather Clifton told him. He had always regarded the Cliftons as strange and unimportant people, deriving this interpretation from comments made at odd times by Grandfather Melnikoff—‘They’re downright stuffy’ and ‘As a lawyer he’s pettifogging’—but on this day Grandfather Clifton said, ‘Son, I want you to lunch with me at my club. Time you understood British ways.’ And he took Bruce to his dark and somber club, where everyone looked to be over sixty, even those in their thirties, and he showed Bruce how to order dishes that were the mainstay of the menu: beef with Yorkshire pudding and trifle. When the bowl containing the latter was passed, Bruce took a modest helping, whereupon his grandfather grabbed the serving spoon and piled the riches on his grandson’s plate. ‘Boys always like trifle,’ he said. ‘I did. Your father, too.’
When the dessert was finished—one of the best Bruce had ever tasted, with its curious combination of flavors: sherry, custard, raspberry—Grandfather Clifton led the way to a dark-paneled room, where he asked the servingman to fetch a briefcase crammed with papers. When these were delivered he said, ‘Bruce, I’ve been watching your progress carefully. You’re a remarkable boy … one of the few. You’ve proved you have that glorious trio: character, courage, intelligence. Your parents gave you the character. Courage you developed yourself. God gave you the brains. What you going to do with ’em?’
‘Science, I think.’
‘No, I mean which country?’
‘Oh … I’ve been wondering about that.’
‘I know. How are you inclining?’
Bruce took a deep breath and said, ‘This sounds arrogant but since you’re the first person who’s asked me
point-blank … What I mean is, since you’re the first person who’s discussed it in an intelligent way … Well, to put it bluntly—when I’m in Israel, I prefer the United States, and when I’m in Detroit, I prefer Haifa.’
‘Precisely,’ Mr. Clifton said in crisp, sardonic tones. ‘Just about what I’d do. But human values rarely balance. Which way do the scales tip?’
‘If they tip, I’m not clever enough to detect it.’
‘Good. I hope you’re telling the truth, because it makes my task easier.’
‘What task?’
‘I hope that Israel and America are in balance. Because you’re not confined to those two, Bruce. You’re also an English citizen.’
‘I’m what!’
‘When you were born I was much impressed with the thoughtfulness of your Grandfather Melnikoff—ensuring that you would be entitled to an American passport. I thought about this for two weeks, satisfied myself that he was right, and had you registered as a British subject.’
‘How?’
‘Because I had always taken careful steps to ensure that your father retained his British papers—no matter his great concern about Israel, no matter his dedication to Jewish causes. Legally I kept him a resident of Canterbury.’ He paused, shuffled among his papers, found what he was seeking, and handed it to Bruce. ‘You, too, are a citizen of this city. This birth certificate proves it. This next paper is an application for a British passport. We’ll get the photographs this afternoon and the passport tomorrow.’
Before Bruce could respond to this startling news, Grandfather Clifton produced two other sets of papers, one an application to Cambridge University, the other an application to the best science college within that university. ‘If you want to spend your life working on the practical application of science.’ he said, ‘attend the Technion with your father in Haifa. If you want to build bridges, enroll in one of the American universities. But if you want to be a scientist—if you want to judge the field as a whole and make what contribution your brain entitles you to make—go to Cambridge.’
While Bruce held the papers in his lap, Clifton took out yet another document, the passbook of a Canterbury bank. In it, starting back in 1952, the bank had entered
from time to time notations of small savings which Clifton had set aside for the education of his grandson. The total was now over two thousand pounds, meticulously saved from the small fees accruing to a lawyer practicing in the provinces. ‘I did not want you subservient to your Grandfather Melnikoff,’ he explained. ‘He’s a wonderful man, and if you were a race horse he would train you prudently. But you’re an intelligence—a sensitive brain with enormous capacity—and I don’t think Melnikoff could ever appreciate that.’