Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #512898 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-24
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
You sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. Yet you know that your hostess has lost a son and that her sister lost children in the 1973 war. A fact of Jewish life left unchanged by the creation of a Jewish State is that, "You cannot take your right to love for granted".

Customer Reviews

A reading of Israel and the world in 1975
Well known , Nobel prize winning author , put his pen to the service of recording his 1975 visit to the Land of Israel and his thoughts on the dillemas faced by Israel at the time , and on world politics at large in the mid 1970's.
The author puts down his observations , from his thoughts about Hassidim on a plane from Heathrow to Ben Gurion airport to a secular kibbutz near Ceasarea, and his meetings with leaders and thinkers in Israel such as former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban , Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck , poet and journalist Chaim Gouri and professor Yehoshafat Harkabi as well as Arab figures like Mahmoud Abu Zuluf , editor of the al Kuds , at the time the largest Arab language newspaper in Jerusalem , who'se life , and the life of his children , the author reports where threatened for his relatively 'moderate and conciliatory' line.

Although Abu Zuluf later became a stooge of Arafat and the PLO.
Bellow observes the Israeli people as lacking in rancour or bitterness against the Arabs , despite being constantly under the threat of anihilation and targeted by terrorism.
The threat of anihilation , of a second holocaust , looms permanently in the Israeli mind , leading one of Bellow's aquaintances to observe that it would be a horrible irony if the Jews being gathered in one place enabled a second holocaust to become a reality.
since before the State of Israel was established the Jews of Israel have had to live with terror , an example in this book being a homicide attack ""on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents-two on a break from school-stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died."

It is because of his relatively sympathetic portrait of the Israeli people in this volume , that Bellow came under attack from anti-Israel high priest of the ultra-left , Noam Chomsky.
Bellow muses on the attempts made by Jean Paul Sartre to balance his understanding of Israel, with his sympathy of the Arabs and his anti-American stance.

This book was written in the embryonic stages of anti-Israel hatemongering from leftwing academics in the West , alhtough it must be noted that all their propaganda was created in the old Soviet Union , where the 'Zionism is racism' canard was created .
In a heartfelt plea the author writes: 'I sometimes wonder why it is impossible for Western intellectuals...to say to the Arabs " We have to demmand also more from you. You too-the Marxists among you in particular- must try to do something for brotherhood and make peace with the Jews , for they have suffered monstrously in Christian Europe and under Islam. Israel occupies under one sixth of one percent of the lands you call Arab. Isn't it possible to adjust the traditions of Islam , to reinterpret , to change , to change emphasis , so as to accept the trifling occupancy? A great civilization should be capable of humane and generous flexibility. The destruction of Israel will do you no good, let the Jews live in their small state".
In reporting on a converstaion with Professor Jacob Leib Talmon , Bellow reports Talmon's warnings that 'the fate of Jewry in Israel and the Diaspora , is so closely linked he says , that the destruction of Israel would bring with it 'the destruction of corporate Jewish existance all over the world , and a catastrophy that might overtake US Jewry"
Alas , in the 30 years since this was written , leftwing academics (and the media) around the world have been the main force in hardening Arab attitudes , by taking up anti-Israel hatred to Nazi-like levels.

While the author has an overall understanding attitude of the Israeli people , he is rather less so of the Jewish residents of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, not quite seeming to understand the depth of the Jewish right to and connection with this part of the Land of Israel.

Disappointing
Very disappointing book. I expected much more from a writer with Bellow's talents, but found a rather tame, and very American, justification of Zionism laced with some trite observations about the European left. None of the conclusions about the human condition we might expect from a Nobel prize winner, as the hapless Arabs are even less a presence in the book than the European left.
Once or twice something memorable emerges, like a young Jewish mathematician who solved several important maths problems while in a Soviet gulag, but nothing that sustains the book.
Read Sami Michael's novel 'Victoria' instead.

Disturbing look into the thoughts & lives of Jews and Israel
If one were supposed to read a personal account by someone who hobnobbed with heads of states, was received by religious leaders and counted famous poets amongst his list of friends, one might be granted leave to not do so. Not for this book. The Nobel Laureate moves easily and, importantly, humanly amongst personalities in the Jerusalem of the mid 70s. It is not important WHO he meets.. its the thoughts that the meetings foment in his head that count. The situation in Jerusalem; the situation of the state of Israel as a whole, is brought forth. And to someone like me, from a tamer society, born in times of peace, it is tremendously disturbing. Disturbing not because I get a glimpse into the tension that prevails in an otherwise mundane, daily life, but because of the timelessness of the situation. Now, a quarter of century later, perhaps, things are different. What is frightening is that the sentiments linger. They have changed shape and form, but you will recognise fragments of the elements that make this book memorable and worrying.