Game for a Brief Break from Our Of Late Lunatic Asylum-Located Lives? Come Virtually Walk With Me Back Through Our People’s Three-Millennia Homeland Presence
It’s human nature to collect things. My neighbor collects stamps and regaled me for more than ten seconds with one bearing the likeness of Calvin Coolidge. For decades I collected “used” books (you know, the stuff libraries are made of) on Jewish history. I haunted used book stores and Jewish neighborhood library book sales. Just on our three thousand year homeland presence, I have over a thousand. Stroll back with me this week through them.
It was my son Jon, when he was young, who got me started. I’d been appointed chair of my Lodge’s “Israel” committee, and armed with a budget of $50 told to incite “Zionism” among our members. Jon suggested I visit our local library’s monthly used book sales and hand out my Jewish history finds as my monthly reports. Three months or so into my committee chairmanship term, which until then had been going quite well, I banged into a wall. “Anti-semitism!”, I cried to the Librarian. “All the books are still $1, except those on the Jews, which are now $2.” “It’s not anti-semitism,” she calmly replied. “It’s supply and demand. Some nut is buying them all up.”
For years, a good friend positioned to do such things offered me a modest remuneration for my thousand-plus Jewish history book collection, which he’d donate to a 501c3-bearing library. For years, I wouldn’t dream of it, but this year I commemorated a millstone birthday, eighty, at which even the most homestead-ensconced of us entertain thoughts of “downsizing.” “Ok,” I said, “I’ll just keep some favorites.” Fortunately, my books database that I keep turns out to be woefully incomplete, so between those on the favorites’ shelves in my den and the many more on dusty shelves down in the basement, the total turns out far more than that “thousand.” So, as I pack and shlep upstairs carton after carton of what might have started off for but never made it to Lodge meetings, I’ve made a few “finds” that I hadn’t appreciated when they fell into my bag at the store or the sale. I’ll tell you about a few of these as we wander through the newly enhanced categorized bookshelves in my den, what my wife calls my enhanced eccentricity evidence.
A caveat or two before we commence. By “categorized,” I mean I collect (well, have decided to keep) only selected homeland history periods over those three thousand years, and selected aspects of those periods. It’s homeland appreciation I’m after, not academic history. And my favorites among these are those that by me are most readable. I really liked what distinguished military and political affairs writer Donald Robinson wrote in his preface to his anthology (one of this week’s basement finds), Under Fire: Israel’s 20-Year Fight for Survival: “I’ve tried to choose those selections that would best illustrate the gallantry, the excitement, and the sorrow of a people perpetually on the firing line.”
Today’s State of Israel
Independence and 1948 War: I have lots of books on Israel’s sovereign rebirth in 1948, including a first edition of Zeev Sharef’s Three Days and a first printing of Dr. Dov Joseph’s The Faithful City. Such accounts are by the Franklins and Paines, Washingtons and Jeffersons of our Jewish homeland’s reborn independence. On Americans’ involvement in Israel obtaining arms and planes and using them in the ‘48 war, I have, of course, Slater’s The Pledge, but also the more obscure but intensely readable I Am My Brother’s Keeper by Jeffrey and Craig Weiss.
A very readable military historian (among other roles) account of Israel’s heroic War of Independence is in the first part of Chaim Herzog’s The Arab-Israeli Wars, and on a single heroic battle I have Larkin’s The Six Days of Yad Morechai. (I was there and saw the site, like I did Degania and others, but what I remember most about Larkin’s book is that I bought it at the top of Masada and was somewhat out of breath at the time.)
1956, 1967 and 1973 Wars: I have only a few books on the Sinai Campaign, but these include Dayan’s own, and Marshall’s and Henriques’, and from the basement this week Keith Kyle’s highly praised thick Suez.
I have lots, of course, some by its generals, on the Six Day War, and have read almost all of them more than once. I particularly like first person accounts, e.g., masterly woven into Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate (“in the cockpit, inside the tank, under the helmut”), and in Bondy et al’s Mission Survival anthology (“the people of Israel’s story in their own words – from the threat of annihilation to miraculous Victory”). A good read is Yael Dayan’s Israel Journal: June, 1967, of her assignment as a military correspondent lieutenant with Sharon’s shifting headquarters.
On the Yom Kippur War, with its frightening outset and astounding outcome, I commend for readability Herzog’s The War of Atonement and Asher and Hammel’s Duel for the Golan. I didn’t appreciate who Cheetah Cohen was until I read Pressfield’s The Lion’s Gate, so when Cheetah’s Israel’s Best Defense: The First Full Story of the Israeli Air Force popped out of the basement this week I said “How about that!” His first-person chapters on the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War pass Donald Robinson’s tests for “the gallantry, the excitement, and the sorrow” (as, on sorrow, do Pressfield’s “The Ghost Company” chapter and Yael Dayan’s Jerusalem visit chapter near the ends of their accounts of the Six Day War).
Pre-State Struggle Against the British Blockade
This week, I dusted off Donald Robinson’s Under Fire: Israel’s 20 Year Fight for Survival. I’m still in the opening “Valiant Beginnings” chapter, in which there are exceptionally moving passages by a refugee on a ship intercepted by the British just shy of Palestine’s shore, by eloquent author Arthur Koestler in a “letter to a parent of a British soldier in Palestine – Put Yourself Into the Place of a Jew,” and by Itzhak Gurion on Dov Gruner, including verbatim the moving letter to Begin found on Dov’s body following his having been hung by the British.
I have, of course, Begin’s The Revolt, and on the Irgun and Lehi J. Boyer Bell’s Terror Out of Zion. It was my sons’ Max and Jon, in their youth, who introduced me, inadvertently, to the great books on the Aliyah Bet. I would take the kids to our suburban synagogue’s Sunday School each week and then come back and pick them up. This back-and-forth is silly, I said to myself one week, pouring myself a coffee in the synagogue kitchen, and settling into the library (the shule’s librarian being more tolerant than Hogwarts’ on food and drink in that sacred precinct), and rather randomly picking out a book – Ariel Eliav’s Voyage of the Ulua. It hooked me, in several weekly installments. Every Sunday, the Congregation’s President made his rounds, giving the librarian and me, in passing, enthusiastic hellos. After a month, he paused before me, “May I ask you a question?” “Certainly.” “And just what is your job here?”
Patzert’s Running the Palestine Blockade is up there with Eliav’s. Gruber’s, Holly’s and Kaniuk’s are the most moving I’ve found on the Exodus. There are a lot of first person accounts of the Briha, the organized escape of Jews from Europe, and the unbelievably heroic exploits of Palestinian Jews who went there covertly, including by parachute during the War, to rescue trapped Jews and then partisans and survivors, but these books are not easy reading, except for I.F. Stone’s Underground To Palestine. Read that one. But if you do tackle, e.g., Dekel’s, Habas’, Avriel’s, Bauer’s or Schwarz’s books on what it took to get these unwanted Jews out of Europe, you’ll appreciate [1] that European persecution of Jews began centuries before and continued on after the Holocaust, [2] the Jewish people’s absolute need for our sovereign homeland state, and [3] that the survivors’ intense determination to go to Palestine originated and remained in themselves, and that what the Palestinian Jews did was to enable it.
The Zionist Movement
I have Hess’ Rome and Jerusalem and Herzl’s Jewish State. Dr. Weitzmann’s Foreword to the Jewish State edition I have fairly says: “As we peruse the pages of this little book today, our feelings vacillate between admiration and astonishment,” between penetrating analysis and passages that are “incredibly naïve.” But this is the book that launched a thousand ships, albeit most of them British destroyers. So I took on – all right, as a test of commitment to Zionism – Lowenthal’s translation of Herzl’s thick Diaries. It readably shows a far far from naïve tireless side of him, worthy of his place in our history. And it’s really there (p. 224), how he reputedly prophetically summed up on September 3, 1897, the First Zionist Congress: “If I were to sum up the Congress in a word – which I shall take care not to publish – it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this aloud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.” And then, in 1947, fifty years to the year, with the UN’s adoption of the resolution for partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, everyone did.
Pre-Zionist Palestine
I have a few books on visits to Palestine that are over a hundred years old. Among them (1887) is Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. They’re all really in there, the quotations of desolation extracted, e.g., by Katz in Battleground (p. 109): “Desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds – a silent mournful expanse …. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country…. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies…. Palestine is no more of this workaday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition, it is dreamland.”
Between Hadrian and Herzl
Over my decades of used book store haunting, I found precious few books on Palestine, particularly Jewish physical presence in Palestine, between the times of Hadrian and Herzl. There’s of course the Ben-Gurion edited The Jews In Their Land, but the best expression of the significance of that uninterrupted homeland Jewish physical presence is that of a British theologian-historian, Parkes, in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, in which he wrote that the continuous tenacious presence of the Yishuv all through the post-biblical centuries, in spite of every discouragement, had written the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” And he blasted us Jews for ignoring this and harping on the perhaps more romantic-seeming exile & return. I came across Parkes being quoted approvingly by Katz in Battleground (pp. xv-xvi), in which he called the gap between facts and knowledge of that continuous Jewish homeland presence an “astonishing area of Jewish neglect.”
So taken was I with this that I wrote a book about it (really), Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine. In the first draft I sent to my non-vanity, if not rich because of it, publisher, I’d set the book’s opening scene in the Second Temple’s smoking ruins. He fired back, “But what about King David and all of that stuff?” Me: “If we can’t connect the dots between Hadrian and Herzl, King David and all that stuff doesn’t matter.” But it does matter, of course. It’s the foundation stone of our three thousand year homeland presence. And so chapter 1 became chapter 4. A lot of neat stuff was being unearthed around that time – Conquest-era Edom, Tel Zayit, Khirbet Qeiyafa (my book got a first-hand explanation-to-laymen of that one), what may be King David’s fabled Jerusalem palace. They’re all in my book.
Ancient Israel
I have tons of books on the history and archeology of ancient Israel, of course, and if I would recommend one to you for gripping reading, it would be Yadin’s Bar-Kochba: The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome. This is at the very end of ancient Israel, of course, but the excitement of this book is encapsulated on one page in italics at its front. It tells of a gathering of archeologists and political leaders at President Ben-Zvi’s home at which Yadin, in his turn, displayed a slide of an ancient document and told the assembled group and the President: “Your Excellency, I am honoured to be able to tell you that we have discovered fifteen despatches written or dictated by the last President of ancient Israel 1800 years ago.” This electrifying announcement “brought Bar-Kochba out of the shadows of legend and restored to Jewish history a real-life hero of his people.” The book captures this discovery and the momentous reaction that followed.
Well, fellow stroller, that’s a sampling of my tiny sampling of our people’s homeland presence over the past 3,000 years. There’s still a fair number of book-filled shelves still gathering dust down in my basement. Who knows what I might discover, amongst what at downsizing-eighty I’ve years ago forgotten are there, next week.