Novelist questions the need for the Jewish state
“That essay was pretty controversial,” novelist Ayelet Waldman says as she pours some cream into her Earl Grey tea.
For once, she is not referring to her infamous New York Times Modern Love column that included the following sentence:
“I love my husband more than my children.”
Those words unleashed such intense vitriol that even now, two years later, people can’t stop asking her about it.
If the essay she is discussing today — “Land of My Father,” which is included in “The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt” — provokes a certain level of prickliness, is it probably because of its subject: Israel.
Or more specifically, it is because of what Waldman says about Israel and her experience living there.
“Has the end of exile made the Jews happy, has it solved our pain? Has asserting dominion over this land given us comfort and belonging, a sense of home?”
For Waldman — who spoke with The Chronicle last week before an appearance at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshop in support of her newest novel, “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits” — the answer is a resounding no.
“My feelings for Israel are complicated,” she says quietly. “I was raised on this diet of Zionism and embraced it completely.”
Waldman was born in Israel to a Canadian father who fought in the War of Independence. It was her mother, an American, who wanted to move back to Montreal. The family left Israel shortly after the 1967 war, when Waldman was two years old. A few years later, they relocated to New Jersey.
“We always knew we were going back to Israel at the end of the year.” She laughs. “Whenever it was, we were going back.”
No heaven
In the meantime, Waldman grew up attending Hebrew school and Jewish summer camps, the latter of which she absolutely adored. But despite being immersed in so many Jewish activities, she didn’t celebrate becoming a bat mitzvah.
And her family’s version of the Passover seder “was this incredibly abbreviated thing that talked about [Karl] Marx … and slavery. There was no actual praying in it.”
“This is the contradiction in my family,” Waldman explains. “My parents were very aggressively atheist. When I was a little kid and my dog died, my father said ‘The dog isn’t in heaven, there’s no such thing as heaven.’ My whole life was very immersed in Judaism, but in a very specific kind of Labor-Zionist Judaism.”
When she was in the tenth grade, Waldman began spending her summers at an Israeli kibbutz. “On the kibbutz you’re totally independent by the time you’re an adolescent. It was fabulous. We worked and then in the afternoons we were by ourselves smoking cigarettes and dancing in the bomb shelter.”
By the time college approached, Waldman was smitten. “I flirted with the idea of not going to Wesleyan [University] at all, but canceling my acceptance and going to Hebrew University or Tel Aviv University.” In the end, she settled for a junior year abroad, during which time she acquired an Israeli boyfriend.
“As soon as I finished college, I moved back [to Israel] and thought I would live on the kibbutz with him. It was this ideal … perfect, bucolic, socialist [place]. It matched politically with what I believed, and I was going to go to the army.”
But then, as she describes in her essay, her dream “went sour.” She writes, “Moving to the kibbutz revealed to me the pernicious and unpleasant truths underlying the glorious mythological tales of socialism my father has been telling me my whole life.”
“I think it had a lot to do with sexism,” she says. “The kibbutz, bizarrely, is the most sexually stereotypical place in the world, or used to be. Back in those days, the women, with very few exceptions, worked in the dining room, worked in the kitchen, and worked in the laundry. It was maddening for someone who had just graduated from Wesleyan University.”
And it wasn’t just the kibbutz. As she listened to her Israeli friends make disparaging remarks about America, she recalled having felt and said many of the same things herself at one time. But she was discovering, to her surprise, that “there really was this patriotic side to me. I really did suddenly feel like I wanted to go home.”
‘Cut and run’
Now, years after her attempt to make aliyah, Waldman’s views on Israel cause such a fuss precisely because they are not easy to categorize.
Waldman does not, for example, think that peace is possible. “I’m a Berkeley liberal, but I’m not a Berkeley liberal who thinks there’s a workable two-state solution,” says Waldman, who lives in that Northern California city with her husband, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon, and their four children.
“I really do believe that the only thing Palestinians want is for us to be gone. I think if you feel this way your response is to be Ariel Sharon. I guess my response is kind of more … to cut and run.”
Does she mean that Jews would be better off without Israel? “I fear that’s the case,” she answers slowly. “We’re so afraid to even ponder that we might be wrong, because the whole house of cards collapses.
“But I feel hopelessness about Israel and Judaism if it [Israel] continues to be the defining experience of American Jews. We have such a rich, cultural heritage, and we spend too much time not just ignoring it, but outright denigrating it.”
This heritage, to which Waldman frequently refers, is the pre-Holocaust Eastern European culture of exile from which Yiddish emerged. Before the rise of the Nazis, she says, the cultural life of Jews was in places like Vilna, with its “unbelievably gorgeous synagogues … and every writer in the city was Jewish.”
“When I long for something, it’s not next year in Jerusalem. I have this kind of nostalgic longing for those almost halcyon days. I mean there were horrible pogroms and all that too … but the other side of it….” Her voice trails off a bit and she takes another sip of tea.
When asked about that idealistic, intellectual vision of Israel that her father and so many other early Zionists clung to, Waldman sighs.
“I think we fooled ourselves from the very beginning. I think that is legitimately what my father’s generation felt. The lie we’ve been telling ourselves that my father had taught me — that everyone [the Palestinians] left [Israel] willingly — I don’t know how we all believed it.
“In Israel now, people have confronted the truth and accepted it. America is like generations behind Israel in that way.”
It is comments like those that may verge on heretical for many in the Jewish community. But Waldman’s affection for Jewish culture weaves its way into much of her work, including her new novel, which revolves around a Jewish character and the idea that everyone has a bashert (soulmate).
“In my books, everybody is Jewish. That’s who I am. I would have to have a really good reason to make a character that wasn’t Jewish. My resting gear, my neutral mode, is Jew.”
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