Chapter 25 Honor’s Child #3
Walking with Anat from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, they sometimes took Muristan Road, entering the Jewish Quarter on David Street, where they turned left—then a right, on Jewish Quarter Street.
Less frequently, Anat would take him past the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Christian Quarter Road, where (once again) they turned left on David Street to Jewish Quarter Street—a longer walk past the bazaars on David Street.
Maybe these were the mornings when Anat had more to say—or she was more outspoken than usual.
Jimmy was just trying to learn what was what.
On Jewish Quarter Street, Anat took her time.
She felt more at home there; she made more eye contact with the people passing by.
There was a left turn on Lokhamei Ha-Rova Be Tashakh—“Street of the Fighters for the Quarter in 1948,” Anat had translated for him.
This brought them to what Anat called “the ruin square.” This was the ruin of the Hurva Synagogue.
“It was destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948,” Anat had told him.
(Sometimes she said “razed” or “bombed” instead of “destroyed.”) For reasons Anat didn’t explain to Jimmy, the synagogue had been left in ruins—even after the reunification of Jerusalem following the Six-Day War.
There was a narrow, almost hidden apartment building, where Yaakov Himmelman had a second-floor walk-up at the junction of two small streets off the ruin square.
HaUgav—“The Harp,” Anat told Jimmy. Bonei HaHoma—“Builders of the Wall,” Anat had said.
From Yaakov’s apartment, Anat explained, they were nearest to the Zion Gate in the Old City Wall, but Jimmy understood they would return to the American Colony the way they’d come—through the Jewish Quarter, to the Christian Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter, to the Damascus Gate in the Old City Wall.
The Jerusalem Jimmy saw seemed like such a peaceful place.
Jimmy admired his Hebrew translator’s diligent attention to detail; he also loved listening to the man’s Viennese accent, in German and in English.
Yaakov never laughed; yet he demonstrated an affection for those parts of Not an Egyptian that were funny.
Jimmy also grew fond of Yaakov’s Palestinian housekeeper, Naur, and her five-year-old son, Omar.
Nour always wore a hijab. She kept herself busy, cleaning Yaakov’s apartment or preparing food.
Jimmy assumed that his Hebrew translator had taught his housekeeper and her son some English.
After all, translating from English was Yaakov’s work.
Yet, even as Nour got used to Jimmy working with Yaakov at the kitchen table, there was no conversation between Nour and Jimmy.
Only a few words of English were exchanged between Jimmy and Omar.
The five-year-old liked to bring Jimmy an object—a spoon, a ballpoint pen, the case for Yaakov’s glasses.
Jimmy said the name for the object in English.
Omar was very excited to repeat the word.
The kitchen table, where Jimmy and Yaakov worked on the translation of Not an Egyptian, was very long.
There was no dining room in the apartment; this was Yaakov’s only table.
When Nour and Omar were in the kitchen, it was Jimmy’s impression that they were listening to his conversation with Yaakov—Nour certainly was.
When Jimmy and Yaakov were working, Nour and Omar were always there.
Yaakov Himmelman’s devotion to translating Not an Egyptian endeared him to Jimmy, but Yaakov wouldn’t be drawn into extraneous conversation, particularly not of a political kind.
James Winslow wondered if Yaakov’s silence was characteristic of concentration camp survivors, but Jimmy felt it would be incorrect of him to ask his European Jewish publishers or Anat.
Yet because Jimmy trusted Yaakov’s sensibilities, Jimmy kept asking Yaakov what he thought of something Jimmy had been told.
Matthias and Gabrielle were always saying something to Jimmy of a political nature, and Anat was very outspoken.
There were also things Jimmy’s interviewers asked him or said to him.
Jimmy was constantly seeking Yaakov’s opinion—to no avail.
This was the Yaakov who knew and understood Jimmy’s writing so well.
It was frustrating that this same Yaakov would not respond to Jimmy’s inquiries of a more contemporary kind.
Nour certainly overheard all these political questions.
Yet when Yaakov and Nour spoke to each other, it was in Arabic.
Yaakov had explained to Jimmy that he couldn’t be a good translator of Jimmy’s English into Hebrew without knowing Arabic, too.
The dialogue between Jimmy’s characters was often profane—or vulgar, or sexually explicit.
There were no Hebrew words for what Yaakov called “these unmentionable things.” In a Hebrew translation, the words for such things were Arabic, Yaakov told Jimmy.
That Yaakov must have taught Nour and Omar some words in English was most imaginable to Jimmy, but he had no grounds for thinking Nour could understand English—much less that she could speak it.
From the translation trips he’d taken as an author, James Winslow had learned to write down what people said in a small notebook.
In Israel, he’d written down those things Matthias and Gabrielle had said—and what Anat told him.
When he repeated them to Yaakov Himmelman, he read them verbatim from his small notebook.
This was an excessively fastidious thing to do, but Jimmy was a writer, after all—he wanted to be literal in what he quoted to his esteemed Hebrew translator.
“When people talk about the Israelis displacing the Palestinians, they make it sound as if this was always and only the land of the Palestinian people,” Gabrielle had said to him.
“As if the Land of Israel never previously existed, as if the Jews hadn’t been murdered here, and exiled from here—for centuries before there was a Mandatory Palestine,” Gabrielle had added.
“When people speak this way, they’re taking a very short view of the long history of the Jews in the Land of Israel—long before the twentieth century,” Matthias had pointed out.
He was the one who’d escaped with his family from Germany to Sweden.
Of Jimmy’s two European Jewish publishers, Matthias was the one who insisted on the importance of peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people; what he called “the ominous consequences of the settlements” weighed on him.
Yet Jimmy had heard even Matthias say, “If the Palestinians insist on killing us—on eliminating us—we will have to kill more of them than they kill of us, or they will kill us all.”
“We Jews just went back where we came from,” Gabrielle repeated.
“The Jewish Diaspora began in the eighth and six centuries B.C.—and if you’ve read Exodus, you might remember Moses leading the Israelites from slavery in Egypt long before then,” Matthias said, as if reciting in school. (He was a student when he’d fled to Sweden from Germany.)
“A basic premise of anti-Zionism is false,” Anat told Jimmy; she didn’t beat around the bush. “Those Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews—those Jews from the Middle East, and from Europe—were going home. Once upon a time, the Land of Israel was their homeland. Now it’s ours,” Anat had said.
Matthias reminded them of the intractable pain to both sides caused by the eternal conflict.
“Reconciliation with the Palestinian people is the only path to peace,” Matthias said.
With Matthias, there was always a long pause.
Then he said: “We share this little land with the Palestinians, but if we don’t maintain some measure of control over them, they will kill us all. ”
This was the refrain Jimmy kept hearing. “If we don’t… they will…”
Was this Israel’s constant echo? James Winslow wondered.
He knew his European Jewish publishers were leftists.
He was aware they’d criticized Begin’s right-wing Likud government for accelerating the settlements in the West Bank.
The Likud government had declared “the right of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael.” Did this mean the entire historic Land of Israel was the inalienable heritage of the Jewish people?
As Jimmy’s leftist publishers explained to him, there might already be such a Jewish presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that Palestinian self-determination could be more difficult to achieve.
“A two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could slip away,” Gabrielle had said in her measured way.
Jimmy was confused. He grew up with great empathy for the Zionists who’d led the persecuted Jews from Europe (and elsewhere) back to the Land of Israel.
Now the Jews called Zionists were linked to the settlements—to the Israeli-occupied territories.
This sounded a little like racial segregation to Jimmy, who was reminded of the civil rights struggle in the United States.
His European Jewish publishers and Anat dismissed this analogy.
Yet Anat didn’t hold herself back about the “settler vigilantism in Hebron,” and what she called “illegal activities” perpetrated by settlers against local Palestinians in the West Bank—not to mention the “overly harsh suppression” of any Palestinian pushback.
This still sounded a little like a segregation issue to Jimmy, but what did a New Hampshire boy know about politics in Israel?
Then there was the interview Jimmy did with an Israeli journalist at the King David Hotel. “Why would James Winslow ever come to Israel?” the reporter challenged him. You’re not even Jewish, the guy seemed to be saying, or so Jimmy imagined; he was having second thoughts about why he’d come.