My Promised Land - by Ari Shavit

 A review of My Promised Land by Ari Shavit

A thoroughly entertaining and informative trip through the history of Zionism and the state it created - coinciding, to a limited extent, with the author’s family history.  The story is framed by references to his distinguished ancestor, Herbert Bentwich. And the whole book feels personal.  Rather than the distant, clinical view of the historian, we get interviews with the men who made it happen. ( I can’t recall meeting a single woman)

As the title makes explicit - the author is a Zionist and he lives at the center of the world he observes..  There is no hidden agenda here - it’s all upfront. He acknowledges that Israel needs American support to survive - and this book follows the grand tour he made throughout American universities to pitch the case for the survival of a small Jewish state in the heart of the Arab Muslim Middle East. He is a passionate advocate - but he has not written propaganda.  He presents his case even handedly. He respects the intelligence of his readers - and his own as well.  He exemplifies the adage: "Two Jews, three opinions"

As an American, I have no greater, or lesser, responsibility than any other citizen to consider that case —- and that is how I will respond to this book.  Full disclosure:  I am one of those totally assimilated Jews who - as the author sees it - exemplify the tragic disappearance of secular Judaism outside of Israel.  My mother’s parents were Jewish.  My Jewish connection, however, goes further than that.  As a young man, my German/Norwegian father chanced to meet a Ukrainian born Jew who was teaching art at a small Midwestern college.   Milton Horn’s mission was the creation of Jewish liturgical figurative sculpture pretty much in the style of  the medieval Christian art he collected. That chance meeting transformed my father’s life — and eventually provided a path for mine as well. 

Antisemitism was a good reason for Jews to want  their own country - and the Holocaust was a good reason for other countries to get on board.  But the project looks even more impractical, if not reprehensible,  today than it was in 1948.  What was supposed to  happen to all the Muslim Arabs who were living there?  Why would Arabs elsewhere be any less eager to help their own kind than the Jewish diaspora has been to to help theirs?  Looking at a map of the Middle East, it’s so much easier, and almost unavoidable, for them to do so.  Israel is so very small and isolated.

So 75 years later ( I know the number because I was born the same year), what can be done now?  Shavit is optimistic because Israelis remain vigorous and inventive, regardless of the changes in their demographic (being now more oriental than European in background).  He is pessimistic, however, because their problem with Palestinians and the Arab/Muslim world has not gone away - while their support from other countries is growing ever weaker. 

Ten years after the book was published, the recent breakout from Gaza exemplifies both Arab intransigence and incompetent Israeli leadership. Their solution to the Gaza problem was to build a super-wall to lock the Arabs in.  When they failed to monitor it, 1200 Israelis were brutally murdered.  Then their response was to invade and kill the Palestinian leadership.  So far, more than 20,000 Palestinians have died.  Will this work any better than the violent responses that began with the Arab revolts in the 1930’s and continued through several international wars and popular uprisings ? 

Why couldn’t Israel just rebuild the Gaza wall and monitor it much more carefully? Probably because that would be unacceptable to the nationalist Israeli public - just as peace and reconciliation is a minority, if not extirpated, voice in Palestinian politics.

I can see America helping Israel fend off the neighboring autocratic Arab states.  We usually help small states resist invasion from larger ones - especially if they are democratic,

 But should America help Israel fight the residents of their own occupied territories ? Should America help them exact a revenge that’s not going to make anyone safer?  Why should Americans be more concerned with the destiny of the Jews who sought refuge in Israel -  than Israelis have shown concern for the Palestinian population trapped in the struggle between two belligerents ? Even Shavit, who interviewed leaders across Israel's diverse society, including a Palestinian attorney, gives no voice to anyone living in the occupied territories. 

So as much as I enjoyed this informative, passionate  book -- it did make me less sympathetic to the author’s cause.  Shavit asserts that secular Judaism will eventually disappear without Israel - but he hasn't even tried to convince me that this problem is serious enough to merit warfare, much less a century of it.  He regrets that Israeli policy is currently driven by right-wing nationalism - but he asks for American support regardless. 

Looking back, Shavit has documented Israel’s survival as an ethno-centric state - and it is indeed a remarkable, thrilling story.  Looking ahead, however - the next remarkable achievement might  be to transform itself into a pluralistic nation with a Jewish minority.  But Shavit, the Zionist, doesn’t really want to look ahead . The other  two possible scenarios are endless war or nuclear annihilation.

And  given my own proclivities, I am less pessimistic about the future of a secular Jewish identity without Israel.  I am never going to raise Jewish children or keep the Sabbath or any other Jewish holiday.  But the Jewish tradition in literature, sacred and otherwise, has always fascinated me - and the literary importance of this book may outlive its subject matter - along with books by other great secular Jewish writers of recent times.  (my favorite being Isaac Singer).  Every character that Shavit introduces is succinctly and passionately drawn.  And as amazing as many are, they all feel true to life.

All good things must come to an end - but as long as free inquiry is protected, Jewish intellectual life , from the Torah to the latest Shavit, will live on — whether waxing or waning.  The rule of law in a pluralistic democracy is worth fighting for.  Other stuff — not so much.

 

Chetan Bhagat : One Indian Girl

The protagonist in this pulp fiction is hardly just "one Indian girl"

She's brilliant, attractive, ambitious, and hardworking.  She gets a job with a multi-national financial firm and soon makes half a million USD a year. Her only problem is that she also  wants  to be loved and  wants to have children.

Can this "one Indian  girl" ever have it all?

Men find her attractive -- and here are her choices:

*a creative artist in  advertising,  He wants her to be a housewife.
*a wealthy, married, partner in a financial services business. He wants her to be a playmate
*a tech-nerd who was picked by her mother from a marriage website for desis

Min Jin Lee : Pachinko

Looks like the toy section in a Walmart, doesn't it ?    It's actually a pachinko hall in Japan - pachinko being a mechanical device that's  fun to play like a pinball machine, and gambles your money away like a slot machine.

For many Japanese, it's addictive to play --- but it's also low-class to operate,  so most of the industry is  run by  the shunned Korean  minority --- and that's how it fits into this melodramatic  novel about a Korean family living in Japan.

As demonstrated in WWII, the Japanese don't show much respect for Asian ethnicities other than their own   - and they are especially contemptuous of Koreans. So there is some degree of revengs as pachinko makes some Koreans rich and some Japanese poor

The author tells us that she was inspired to write this book by the story of a Korean boy who killed himself after his Japanese classmates wrote hateful messages in his yearbook.

Her novel is basically a melodrama of good, innocent, long suffering, hard working, family-devoted Koreans being abused by cruel, perverse, greedy Japanese.  The only good  Japanese are those at the bottom of society - those  whom other Japanese have rejected.  

That structure is a bit tedious and predictable -- as is the author's taste for heart wrenching sorrow.

It's a feel good story as people who were once poor, starving, and abused become affluent through honest hard work and dedication to each other.  But none of them becomes successful at anything other than the pachinko business.

There is zero social idealism, here, outside the firm boundary of the family.            

Ernest Satow : A Diplomat in Japan

This memoir would probably be fascinating

for those familiar with the Meiji Restoration and the characters involved.

For me - it was like listening to the obscure dinner table chatter

of the table next to yours.

(and many good dinners were described in some detail)

It would appear that young Satow,

then working as a translator as he learned the language,

was completely in the dark

regarding the Japanese politics of that time.

He keeps reassuring us that the British had no horses in this race.

But he also seems to favor the Emperor over the Shogun.

The main drama, for him, takes place on a very small scale:

Europeans being randomly murdered by sword-happy Samurai -

for  which the European diplomats would demand justice and restitution.

He is less concerned when the European and American gunboats fire 

on Japanese towns and fortifications. 

Regrettfully, there are no details of Satow's off-duty life.

Eventually he would take a Japanese woman as common-law wife,

so we may suspect that he may have been served by

courtesans as well as geishas.  

But we'll never know.

Tan Twan Eng: The Gift of Rain

Beginning with the Iliad, gay romance and martial art have shared a long history together. And the  mentor/lover relationship is found in  the warrior class of  Medieval Japan as well as Bronze Age Greece.

As with Tan's second novel, this first one centers around an aristocratic Japanese super-hero -- in this case  a direct disciple of Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of Aikido - presented here as both a peerless martial art and a sublime spiritual discipline.


As in  the second novel, that hero is described by a Straits Chinese senior citizen recalling a youthful romantic relationship.  (though in this story the narrator is only half Chinese - the other parent being British).  Apparently the author, himself Straits Chinese,  also has a passion for Samurai culture.

As in the second novel, this story is set in northwest Malaysia, and the main characters, like the author himself, grew up on the island of  Penang.  But in both novels, ethnic Malaysians - or any other south Asians - do not appear. These are stories about the upper class -- which is British and Chinese -- during the Japanese occupation.  And the main theme seems to be puzzlement:  how can aristocratic Japanese be so spiritual, sensitive and aesthetic -- while also being so monstrous and cruel.  A puzzlement that well reflects the narrator's mixed British-Chinese heritage.  As a Christian, the narrator would believe in a moral universe created for a spiritual drama in which every human soul plays an essential role.  Buddhism, Taoism, and just about every other religious practice, however, are beyond Good and Evil.  Outside specific social obligations, human are expected to behave no better or worse than insects in a forest. 

And as in the second novel, the old narrator has led a productive but lonely existence in the four or five decades that followed the death or disappearance of the Japanese hero. No lovers, no close friends, no children, no family.

There's a lot of silliness in this story - especially regarding lost shrines in the jungle and flashbacks to a previous life. But perhaps that is appropriate for teenage romance - and for a narrator who has apparently been damaged by his experience.  I can't imagine being forced to watch as anyone, especially a close relative, was being tortured to death.  I would never recover either - except, perhaps, by becoming a reclusive monk.

The mood throughout both of Tan's novels is the melancholy that accompanies a sense of loss. Every good - and every really bad -  thing happened in the past

Tan Twan Eng : Garden of Evening Mists

This story primarily serves as a vehicle for the author, a business-class Straits Chinese,  to express his admiration, and perhaps even sexual attraction,  for aristocratic Japanese culture.

The principal protagonist is a well-born Chinese woman from Penang, Ling,  who is the only survivor of a  remote slave labor camp run by the Japanese military in WWII.  Upon release, she graduates law school and soon is prosecuting Japanese war criminals. She is unhappy, bitter, and guilty that her sister, an artist, was left behind to die in the horrific conditions of the camp.  Her terminally bad attitude gets her fired, after which she visits a former business associate of her father, a Dutchman who owns a tea plantation in the Cameron highlands, a scenic area not far from Kuala Lumpur.  She then visits his neighbor, Aritomo, who is building an elaborate Japanese garden .  He's not just any gardener.  He used to be the chief gardener for Hirohito, the  Emperor of Japan.

As it turns out, he's also a master of  Zen archery, martial art, woodblock printing, and full-body, horimono tattoos.  Ling asks Aritomo to design a formal Japanese garden in memory of her sister. He declines, but offers to apprentice her so she can learn to design such a garden herself. She accepts. He also teachers her  Zen archery and inks a horitomo on her back. Eventually they share a bed -- though they both seem too cold to be called 'lovers'.

Soon after being visited by a\ Japanese delegation who bear the emperor's invitation to return to the imperial  gardens, he is seen walking into the rainforest - from which he never returns. Forty years later, Ling, who subsequently was appointed to the Supreme Court of Malaysia, returns to what remains of the garden, which had been deeded to her.  She allows an enthusiast of woodblock prints to see her collection of Aritomo's work, and he reveals that when a schematic plan of the garden is combined with the tattoo on her back, the location where hidden slave labor camp can be found. That might also suggest that Aritomo may well have been one of the many Japanese agents sent into southeast Asia to gather intelligence and make preparations for the Japanese military invasion that would follow.  Other details dropped along the way, suggest that the purpose of that labor camp was to excvate a cave in a mountainside into which wartime plunder could be hidden until the imperial family was finally in a position to retrieve it. Ling's sister, as well as all the prisoners and their guards, had been buried alive to keep that location a secret.

Ouch.

Aritomo is something of a war criminal himself.

And as Ling reveals to him, she survived the death camp by consistently betraying her fellow prisoners.

There no happy-ever-afters for these two sexual partners. Ling even rejects a creepy offer to purchase her tattoo post-mortem ---- so it will vanish when she does.

What will not vanish, however, is the voice that the author has given her -- the persistently calm and rational voice that tells this story.  It's both tough and gentle, with a taste for selected fine detail.   

She is recognized, by those who have read her legal opinions, as a concise, perceptive writer. There's no small irony in the fact that this woman, professionally dedicated to delivering justice to the Japanese who killed, raped, and abused so many Chinese--- has eventually come to allow a Japanese agent to fuck and tattoo her after having her labor in his garden.

Hari Kunzru : Gods Without Men

Centered around an eye-catching rock formation in the Mojave Desert,  a British Kashmiri Pandit offers a rather contemptuous  examination of the past 250 years of Euro-American consciousness.

From ethno-centric Spanish priests to renegade Mormons to bloodthirsty lawmen to UFO cultists to drug crazed hippies --to vacationing British rock stars or American hedge fund savants-- he depicts it as shallow, cruel, wacky, and destructive.  There's even a PTSD anthropologist who scorns his young wife as well as the native Americans they study. Appropriately enough, he ends up living alone in a hole in ground where he is blown up by a tear gas grenade. Ouch!  The one character who is least demented is the least  European: a Punjabi-American Sikh.  But ever he loses his mind in the end.

I suppose that every country -- like every creature -- has an ass-hole. Hari Kunzru is a rather articulate and imaginative proctologist.