I Pity the Poor Immigrant Read online

  Eliav Bellen is tall and thin, and because his hair is shaved down to stubble he looks somewhat spectral, even in the brightly colored Pop Art T-shirt he wore that day. I thanked him for meeting with us and he neither smiled nor spoke but gruffly nodded at me as if my gratitude was understood. Perhaps he thought it was also understood that I would share his belief that his father’s murder was the work of militant right-wing Jews. He showed me some of the letters and e-mails his father had received in the nine months between the publication of Kid Bethlehem and his murder, most of the correspondence in Hebrew but a fair amount of it in English. The ignorance, stated in blunt, ungrammatical fragments, conjured in me the same impression of madness as certain photographs of ultra-Orthodox Jews in skullcaps and side curls shouting at Palestinians whose fields they have just burned to the ground.

  I looked at Voss, whose face was blank. Eliav began a roll call of Jewish terrorists, starting with Yigal Amir, the fanatic who had murdered the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. He mentioned Baruch Goldstein, the right-wing zealot who had killed twenty-nine praying Muslims in a mosque in the Cave of the Patriarchs. He mentioned a left-leaning political scientist and professor named Zeev Sternhell who had been injured the year before by a pipe bomb delivered to his home. (In the months since my return from Israel, an American-born Jewish terrorist named Yaakov Teitel was arrested for this incident, as well as a string of attacks against “Arab, gay, and leftist targets.”)

  “The last time I spoke to my father was about three days before the murder,” Eliav said. “It was sometime in the afternoon. He was cooking at home, then going to a bar he liked, probably on Lilienblum Street.”

  He said that two or three times a month his father would take a woman to a restaurant or a bar in his neighborhood or farther north, on Rothschild Boulevard or Lilienblum Street, meeting these women either at the university where he taught or on a website on which Bellen made no effort to conceal anything about himself. Eliav said he thought the women might even have had something do with inciting the murder. He speculated that there was usually an element of sexual frustration in terrorism—“didn’t I think so?” Terrorism was sexual frustration blown up to a messianic scale. It was a puritanical impulse. To a person like this, Eliav said, maybe nothing could be uglier than a sixty-five-year-old man having a drink in a bar with an attractive young woman.

  Voss was staring down at his knee toward the end of this. He seemed impatient to say something, but was restraining himself.

  “He had habits, he was known in places, he wasn’t secretive,” I said. “Easy for someone to know where he’d be.”

  Eliav raised his eyebrow and sighed. “Tel Aviv is sleazy, it’s modern, it’s not picturesque like Jerusalem,” he said. “But it’s secular. You should spend more time in Tel Aviv. If there’s a future for Israel, it’s Tel Aviv, not Jerusalem.”

  “And do you think your father thought that?”

  “No, my father would say that’s wistful. My father thought everything was doomed.”

  “And you? Why did you leave Tel Aviv? Why did you come to Tsfat?”

  He looked at the paintings on the walls and extended his hands. “I’m just a peddler,” he said. “I’m not peddler enough for Tel Aviv.”

  Whether or not Eliav had fully given up drugs, I couldn’t know. Like Tsfat itself, I found him oppressive. When I asked him about the paintings, he went on to tell me that he believed in God—though the God he believed in was a figure of fear. In God’s eyes, he said, we were always a disappointment. We were disappointing because He had made us in His own image. He said that when intelligent people scoffed at the idea of God they were really only scoffing at a harmless cliché. Voss had gone outside for a cigarette. I could see his arm and the sole of his shoe, which he rested, his knee bent, on the edge of the open doorframe. The last thing Eliav told me was about an appearance his father had made on the campus of the University of Michigan when Eliav was a student there. At the back of the audience, there was a young man who started making strange sexual noises as soon as Bellen began his reading. The noises started out as a low hum or whine, then grew louder and louder until a few people turned around to locate their source. Suddenly, chairs were scattered at the back of the hall. A scrum of men stood above the boy, who was struggling on the floor, barking and screaming. It took eight people to subdue him, though he was only a bookish nineteen-year-old. In the midst of a psychotic break, the boy bit their hands, scratched their faces, kicked out in powerful bursts using both legs at the same time. Bellen had seen the boy at a tea beforehand, and, noticing his peculiar affect, he’d told Eliav that he had a feeling that something would go wrong once he began his reading.

  “What I’m saying,” Eliav went on, “is that my father identified the boy as a kind of fanatic just by looking at him. He was a magnet for that kind of thing.”

  “Even in America,” I said.

  “My father was attuned to the violence inside people.”

  13) THE CYCLE

  The child David conceives with Bathsheba dies. As he’s mourning the loss, one of his sons, Amnon, seduces and rapes one of David’s daughters, Tamar. “And Amnon hated her with a very great hatred, for greater was the hatred with which he hated her than the love with which he loved her.” Amnon sends Tamar away and she “put ashes on her head, and the ornamented tunic that she had on she tore, and she put her hand on her head and walked away screaming.” David does nothing about this violation. It’s as if he recognizes his own sin against Uriah in his son Amnon’s sin. It is left to another of his sons, Absalom, to avenge Tamar. “And there was no man so highly praised for beauty as Absalom in all Israel—from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him.”

  Before long, the beautiful Absalom will be leading a popular uprising against his father, who no longer looks like the boy with the slingshot but more like the monster Goliath.

  14) LILIENBLUM ST.

  I saw a little of Tel Aviv over the next few days. I was alone, because Voss had to work in Jerusalem. He had barely been able to contain his loathing for Eliav Bellen, and when I asked him why, he told me that practically everything Eliav had said during the interview was a lie. He said that he’d interviewed a few of David Bellen’s friends—Bellen did not have many, Voss said—and by all accounts the poet was something of a recluse. It had been years since he’d made a habit of going for a drink on Rothschild Boulevard or Lilienblum Street. He was more likely to stay in his apartment, where he hoarded newspapers, books, records, and DVDs. His decades-long work with a peace group that had brought together Jewish and Arab writers was over. The Arab writers had left the group in protest of the Gaza blockade. Eliav was a junkie, a thief, a heartbreak—they had been more or less estranged ever since his son’s late twenties. If they’d patched things up in recent years, none of Bellen’s friends had heard of it.

  Heavy curtains blacked out the sun. We were in Caesarea after seeing Eliav, at the branch of the Dan Hotel there, a few hours’ drive from Tsfat. When I came back out of the shower, Voss was watching the news in bed, the sheet pulled up to his waist. There was a fight at the Knesset—he hardly looked at me. I sat reading in the lobby that night. It could have been 1972. There were ashtrays by the elevator with clean white gravel inside, an abandoned bar in gloomy shadow, a bright foyer leading to an empty health club and pool.

  In Tel Aviv, I thought about Voss more than I wanted to. He was my guide and my interpreter, and I was waiting for him. On my second day, I went down to the hotel lobby to check my e-mail and again there was nothing from him. He had not left any messages at the front desk. I did a search on “Oded Voss.” I brought up images of his face and I clicked through some of his articles. I looked up “oded voss first lebanon war” and retrieved an article called “Ten Years After, IDF Veterans Remember” in which he was quoted: “We kept living. We even started to enjoy ourselves. I used to wonder, was it the same as forgiving myself? Now I wonder if it matters. I think, to whom cou
ld it matter?”

  I didn’t call or e-mail him. In my hotel room, I looked down at the sunbathers and watched generic VH1-style Israeli pop. Tel Aviv was New York, Miami, anywhere. It made me nostalgic for Jerusalem and its impassioned historical people who wanted to kill each other.

  On that second night, I went out in the dark and walked up Frishman Street to Ben Yehuda, Dizengoff, then over to Allenby. Beyond the glass towers along the beach, the buildings seemed to erode beneath graffiti and Xeroxed ads for nightclubs. It took me a long time, but I walked all the way to Lilienblum, a street in a quiet neighborhood with a few discreet bars, some without signs, the kind of places journalists and writers tend to gather—chintz couches, dim lighting, music just abrasive enough to conjure youth. I asked some customers if they knew anything about David Bellen. I asked the bartenders. I showed them Bellen’s picture—the glasses, the stark bald head—and none of them remembered seeing him anywhere but in the newspapers or on TV. On my way back home, a drunk came out of nowhere and started shouting that I was a whore.

  You had to like modern Tel Aviv better than Jerusalem with its ancient strife. Either that, or you had to stop thinking about it.

  15) VOSS

  We met for lunch the next day. He said there were reasons he hadn’t called but he didn’t want to get into them now. He apologized for disappearing—it was inconsiderate, but perhaps I understood, perhaps in the past I’d been inconsiderate to someone myself. I assumed he meant he’d been with another woman. We ate at a café up the beach from the Dan Hotel, rows of tables and wicker chairs, oil lamps in glass boxes. He wore black jeans and an olive-colored leather jacket over a black T-shirt. He was watching me eat, sitting back a little from the table, smoking. He said he’d had to think a long time about whether he should show me the part of the city he was going to show me. He said that the reason he was going to show me was his belief in my respect for David Bellen.

  “I respect him, but I don’t like that word,” I said. “It has a pious ring.”

  “It’s actually very simple.”

  “Respect for the dead.”

  “Simpler than that.”

  “I don’t know how you get any simpler than that.”

  He looked out at the beach. When the bill came, he put his fingers down over the leather folder and said something to the waiter in Hebrew.

  16) GANGSTERS

  Like a Legend from My Youth

  How the mighty have fallen

  in the midst of battle!

  Call the old steakhouse on

  Etzel Street

  and tell them

  Aslan the King is dead

  Tell the widow

  and the Alperon gang

  the Three Clans

  and the Mayor of Tel Aviv

  Tell the orphan and the starlet that

  Aslan the King is dead

  In what distant deeps or skies

  burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  Ze’ev Rosenstein,

  the Wolf with Seven Lives,

  you hit the King

  who nine bullets before had survived

  Aslan the King is dead

  17) ORIGINS

  We drove to Bellen’s childhood neighborhood, a working-class district called Hatikvah on the other side of Tel Aviv’s main highway where the streets get narrower and closer together. Low rectangular buildings of gray concrete led into empty lanes. Shop fronts, faded awnings, dumpsters, trees like thin misplaced weeds. In Hatikvah, Voss told me, Bellen’s father had sold produce in the market stalls, a Galician refugee in a district largely populated by dark-skinned Jews from Arab countries, Mizrahim. More to the point, Voss explained, Hatikvah was a center of organized crime, as it still is. I was relieved to learn that this was what Voss had been afraid to show me, why he had disappeared. Israel has already had its share of bad press. He was trusting me not to senselessly add to the noise.

  We parked off Etzel Street, the setting of Bellen’s poem about the famous gangster Yehezkel Aslan, the one “who nine bullets before had survived.” Two old men sat outside at a plastic table with coffee and cigarettes as if they’d been sitting there all morning and would sit there tomorrow and every day thereafter. One was toothless and wore a stocking cap. The other was robust, potbellied, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal a white undershirt beneath. They looked like figures in an Ivan Schwebel painting, except they had dark skin—I thought they were Arabs but Voss made it clear to me that they were Jews. He did this by translating some graffiti on a phone booth nearby. There will be peace when the last Arab is dead.

  We met a man whose name I can’t give. What I can say is that he was in his midsixties, a white-haired man with thick eyebrows and dark skin, an Iraqi Jew, like the famous Aslan. It struck me that, like Bellen’s son, Eliav, this man had an affection for the hand-shaped amulets called hamsas. They were all over the walls of his office, along with portraits of a Sephardic holy man with a narrow wizened face, a gray beard, a scarf covering his head like a shawl—a man whose beatific strangeness reminded me of a Sufi mystic or a fundamentalist mullah. Voss introduced me as the American journalist writing about David Bellen. The man nodded his understanding. We sat down and a boy in a green Adidas tracksuit served us pastries and black coffee. He stood in the corner of the room and watched me mostly, his hands balled in front of his waist, a gold rope chain around his neck. Moroccan-sounding music played from a radio. The room was hot and flies alighted on the sticky plastic tablecloth. The coffee came in tiny gilt-edged cups rich with Arabic-looking ornament. I understood that whatever I thought of as a “Jew” was now so broad a concept as to be meaningless.

  “He and Bellen were boyhood friends,” Voss explained to me. “Friends until they were about nine or ten, then there was a drifting apart.”

  The man told an odd story about a birthday party Bellen’s parents had given for their son when the man and Bellen were growing up. It wouldn’t have been much, the man said—maybe a small cake, maybe just some watermelon. It wouldn’t have been much, but for the man’s parents it was “like they were inviting me to a brothel.” I couldn’t quite understand what this meant—it had something to do with his parents’ indigence, their pride in the face of what they perceived as the Bellens’ softness. The man left school to sell laundry soap in the market. He made his money now as a loan shark.

  “When was the last time you saw Bellen?” I asked.

  Voss translated and the man shook his head briefly and didn’t answer. I asked him if he had read Bellen’s poetry and instead of answering the man spat on the floor. It was not easy as a woman or an American to press him further and I began to resent Voss a little, for though he was helping me he was also inevitably policing the conversation.

  “I felt very bad about what happened to him,” the man said. “He was like a child—even as a sixty-five-year-old man he was like a child. To go as far away from this place as he did and then to write that book. Writing nonsense about this world he knew nothing about. Only a child would do something like that.”

  18) THE FIRST LEBANON WAR

  After this meeting, I asked Voss a question I shouldn’t have asked, a question that emerged spontaneously in a larger conversation about the history of violence that seemed to surround us everywhere. We were at a restaurant on Etzel Street, the famous steakhouse that had been owned by Yehezkel Aslan, the “King” in Bellen’s poems. On the walls were signed photographs of Israeli actors and politicians, athletes, journalists. Yehezkel Aslan had run an international gambling empire worth millions of dollars, financed by loan sharking and heroin. In 1993, he was murdered outside the Pisces restaurant after surviving nine bullets to the face some years earlier. A thousand people came to his funeral. He was a folk hero, a supporter of youth athletic teams and the builder of a drug rehab center for the very addicts he had helped supply. A figure out of mythology, like King David or Tony Montana, only real.

  I asked the question I shouldn’t have asked, and Voss said yes, he had killed so
meone, he had been in a war. When I asked him to tell me the circumstances, he shook his head.

  “I don’t talk about that,” he said. “Why would you want to talk about it?”

  “Eliav Bellen said that his father thought everything was doomed. I wonder what you think about that.”

  “Eliav was talking about himself. Not his father.”

  “I’m asking about you.”

  “David Bellen didn’t write poems because he thought everything was doomed.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I live here. I don’t think everything is doomed either.”

  We asked our waiter if he had ever heard of David Bellen. The waiter told us yes, David Bellen had eaten here every few weeks right up to his death.

  “He liked to have lunch here and then he would walk around the neighborhood, the market,” he said. “Most people didn’t know who he was. He was very quiet, almost invisible. He didn’t want us to put his picture on the wall.”

  19) A SUICIDE

  Voss had brought a small suitcase this time with a few changes of clothes. We went swimming in the Mediterranean and then sat beneath an orange umbrella on rented chairs and I drank a Gold Star beer and Voss drank a club soda with a certain amount of rue. He told me about an Arab friend he’d had during his twenties when he’d lived here in Tel Aviv. It was after the war, and he and the friend had shared a bright cynicism toward anything more serious than what we saw before us now—people swimming, people laughing and smoking and having picnics on the sand. Lots of drinking, lots of drugs, lots of girls. The friend owned horses now, which he kept stabled in the Galilee. He drove a cab and had a wife and three kids, and he and his brother bred Arabian stallions for the track. He and Voss both lived in Jerusalem now, but they never saw each other. They hadn’t spoken in years. It was not because of politics, but because “Ali is still married and I’m not.”