Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life

I just read Aahron Appelfeld's biographical book The Story of a Life, published in Hebrew in 1999. It's an interesting book, in some ways a very moving book - but it's not, in any obvious way, the story of a life. Or at least, not in the way a historian such as myself would recognize it.

For me, the story of a ilfe starts with dates (birth, for example), place, key events in a chronological order, and some biographical principle of organization. I once read a biography of Sigmund Freud, and the biographer had two or three pages about events when Sigi was 3 years old hand had problems with wetting his pants. Most biographers wouldn't include that sort of data, but you can see what organizing principle had that biographer include that data in that particular biography. (Or not. It actually added nothing to the story, But it could have, I suppose).

I digress.

Appelfeld has a different organizing principle than you'd normally expect in a biography. The central event of his story is the Shoah, which began for him when he was seven years old and ended six years later. He was a child throughout, and a pretty young one when it began. He didn't have biographical concepts as it was happening: he didn't know dates, he probably had only a childish concept of time, and no intellectual tools whatsoever to make sense of the events. (Adults don't have the intellectual tool to make sense of the Shoah, either, not even today, if they're honest with themselves). His mother was murdered at the beginning of the war, in an event he didn't see but did hear. He was with his father for a while (we aren't told how long the while was, and at the time he must not have known it himself) then he was alone. He was in forests and villages, but there's no reason to believe he could have named them at the time - or later. After the war he made it to Italy and from there to Israel, but having a clear conceptual or historical grasp of the events he was living through may not have been the most urgent need even then.

What he did have were memories which settled in his very bones. At one point a Ukrainian peasant woman started beating him and he needed to escape: the memory of this, he tells us, has remained in his ankles till this very day, more than 50 years later. Other physical sensations cause other memories to rise. Sometimes it's not even physical sensations, it's social ones, such as the dread before the Six Days War in 1967 calling forth physical dread from 25 years earlier.

So it's not a chronological story, it's the piecing together of many sensations and snippets of memory which are attached to them, eventually giving us what he promised in the title: the story of a life. But the story of a life felt, more than of a life remembered. Or perhaps, the story remembered through the sensations of feeling it.

An unusual book, but compelling. Different, perhaps, but in its way, very convincingly true.

Robert Caro on Lyndon B Johnson

I recently summed up my reading over the past few months, and signed off by mentioning I'd write separately about Robert Caro's magnificent biography of LBJ. So here we go.

A publishing-world fellow once told me there are two kinds of biographies. There's the kind where the author spends a decade immersing himself (or herself) in the life of their subject, reading everything they can find, listening to every recording and so on, and then tries to tell the full story of a life. The other way to write a biography is to single out an interesting aspect and write a short book focusing on that.

Robert Caro has taken a third track. He has dedicated a lifetime to telling about a life.

His first volume of what he then intended to be a 3-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson,   The Path to Power, was first published in 1981. I assume Caro had already been working on it at the very least five or six years, so he was no more than 40 when he started. 34 years later, approaching 80, he is still working on the fifth and final volume; so far, he's been publishing a volume each decade: Means of Ascent in 1990, Master Of The Senate in 2002, and The Passage of Power in 2012. (He wrote an earlier biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I'm told is excellent, but I haven't yet read).

I fervently wish Caro many years of fine health and additional creativity, and I admit I admit I hope he's got a plan for the plausible case that as he enters his 9th decade his output slows down, but no matter what happens next, he has already spent about 40 years learning and telling about Johnson - which is about the time-span between Johnson's early adulthood and the end of his presidency. In other words, Caro is spending almost as many years on Johnson's life, as Johnson spent living it. To the best of my knowledge, this is unprecedented.

Fortunately, the result is well worth the effort.

Those of us who remember as children or teenagers how utterly reviled Lydon Bains Johnson was, may have had a sneaking suspicion over the years that President Johnson was actually a more important, and more positive president than our early memories indicate. Kennedy was Camelot and all that, and his sudden death was a trauma we can personally remember as an emotional peak of our childhood, but seen from the growing distance, the drab successor who derailed America into Vietnam may have been considerably more important. While Caro has not yet published the volume on the presidency, it's clear from the story so far that Johnson was not only more important than Kennedy, he has one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.

And, perhaps, also one of the worst. The glory of Caro's biography is that he convincingly tells the story of one of America's greatest and most deeply flawed leaders; that he brings to life a giant of a man who combined unusual size ( almost 6ft 4), unusual intelligence, unusual cunning, unusual callousness, unusual political brutality, and a very unusual ability to wield the power of government for the benefit of society's downtrodden and weak. Ah, and corruption, cheating, cussedness, meanness, dishonesty and greatness of spirit. Those too.

Caro does all this with a style of writing which is breathtaking. There are sections of the books which are gripping page-turners of the highest order. The 100-pages or so in which he describes the machinations by which Johnson stole his election to the Senate in 1948 are easily as good as any legal yarn I've ever read. The description of LBJ taking control of the government in the hours and days after the assassination of JFK, even as the entire world was engrossed in the pageantry of the mourning and funeral, is riveting.

The title of the full biography is "The Years of Lyndon Johnson", and Caro often spends big chunks of his books to tell tangential stories. The first volume has a potted history of Texas, but a poignant detailed story of the Hill Country, the area which lured Johnson's forbears and then trapped them in back-breaking poverty. It also has a long and loving chapter about Sam Rayburn, the Texan who enabled Johnson's rise more than any other. The section about Johnson's earliest years in Washington, as the secretary of newly-elected Congressman Richard Kleberg, offer an understanding of the mechanics of the capitol which is both fascinating, essential to a political biography, and starts a strand of the tale which then explodes into view with the story of how in January 1964 LBJ knew how to pass legislation from the White House as none of his predecessors ever had.

There's an almost hagiographic chapter about Coke Stevenson, the governor of Texas who won the election to the Senate in 1948 which Johnson then stole; Caro contrasts the white knight from the past, with the dark political operator who portends the future in ways far greater than either of the two men personally. Senator Richard Russel of Georgia gets a biographical section of his own. There's a long section with a history of the Senate which needs to be mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand American politics. Actually, the entire third volume, the Master of the Senate, needs to be mandatory reading.

All of it leads to the cliff-hanging tension of the fourth volume. Johnson's weaknesses block him from doing his best to become president, and as Kennedy's vice president he slips ever deeper into irrelevance; in November 1963 the uglier aspects of his public life are combining to burst into public view in a manner which will certainly destroy him politically forever. Then, with a single fatal gunshot, his decades of preparations enable him to forge the presidency in the shape of his greatness with seven short weeks.

Read it. It may be the best political biography you'll read.

Recent readings of various value

Last April I told here about the effort I was making to re-learn to read books. I have been more successful than I feared, and less successful than I'd hoped - sort of like most things in life.

Here and in the the posts below are comments about the books I've read since then. Feel free to tell me about important books I"m missing!

The single most important and rewarding read of the year has been... the Bible. Last year I completed one complete 7.5-year round of Daf Yomi, and decided to dedicate the daily time slot to other traditional Jewish stuff. I read Menachem Elon's magisterial "Jewish Law" and reviewed it here, Then I read volumes 1,2 & 3 of Rav Benny Lau's "Sages" series (here's the 1st volume in English). Lau writes a light and entertaining introduction to the men (and rare women) who created the Talmud. I don't know how the English translations are; the Hebrew original is informative but not deeply scholarly. Elon and Lau, to mention the two scholars cited in this paragraph, are not similar. Elon is a serious slow read, but richly rewarding. Lau is a quick read, full of interesting anecdotes and sketches of the sages, but not deep.

Having spent time reading "about", I turned back to reading an original source - and nothing is more original than the Bible. So far I've read Judges, the 1st Book of Samuel, and the first quarter of the 2nd Book of Samuel. I'm using the Daat Mikra interpretation, which is a combination of modern and also a compendium of the main traditional interpretations. I aim to do a chapter each day - sometime this works, sometimes it's too much - which means a quick read of the entire chapter, then a careful, sentence by sentence, study of the text.

I've read this part of the Bible repeatedly in the past, but this is the first time since high school where I've studied it, and the first time ever that I've done so on my own volition, simply to learn. It is, how to put this, as rewarding as can be. The Hebrew is so packed and powerful; so many everyday word combinations turn out to be Biblical; there is so much in there. Fortunately there are lots of books left (30  of them), so I'll be busy at this great task for a while, I hope.

OK, so that's the top of the list.

Then there are books I ran past and will merely mention here. Greame Simson's The Rosie Project: A Novel was a very enjoyable quick read, which gives what seemed to me a convincing look into the mind a highly functioning man with Aspergers.

Gary Shteyngart''s Little Failure: A Memoir came highly recommended, perhaps too highly recommended, as my expectations were accordingly high. Shteyngart tells the story of how his Russian Jewish parents and he moved from Leningrad to New York in the 1970s, and the twisted path he then followed before becoming a successful New York author. Interesting, but a bit too harsh on his parents for my taste, and the self censure became a bit tedious after a while. Which proves, I suppose, that I wouldn't fit comfortably into New York literary intellectual circles. (I never read a full Phillip Roth book, either, nor even Saul Bellow. We all have our defects).

Daniel Gordis' Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul is interesting, but not, I suspect, really directed at someone like myself who grew up as an Israeli teenager convinced of Begin's infallibility, then a young adult gearing up to vote against him. But if you were further from the man than that, and you're interested in a readable biography of one of Israel's more important leaders, this one may well work for you.

I read Haim Be'er's newest novel, Their New Dreams (I read it in Hebrew and can't tell about the quality of the translation), which I liked. Be'er, now in his early 70s, tells the story of an Israeli man in his early 70s who is trying to write his first novel. Be'er himself has written 6 or 7 or 8 of them so that part isn't autobiographical; on the other hand, some of the mechanics of inventing a story and writing a novel may well be.

Then there are the books I reviewed in separate posts, below:

Kate Atkinson in Life After Life: A Novel and Jenny Erpeneck in The End of Days both wrote the same story from very different perspectives, and ended up with two various different books: see my review here.

Thomas Carlyle wrote one book twice, and the result is the astonishing The French Revolution: A History which I reviewed here.

And finally, I read all four volumes of Robert Caro's simply magnificent biography of Lyndon Johnson, which I will review when I find the time. Don't wait for me to do so, however, by any means: go and read them! Now! Robert A. Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; Master of the Senate; The Passage of Power

Thomas Carlyle on the French Revolution

In 1834, 39-year-old Thomas Carlyle sat down to write the history of the French Revolution. Eventually he had a a single full copy of the entire book, which he lent to his friend John Stewart Mill for comments. Someone in Mill's household, apparently an uneducated boor, mistook the manuscript for trash and put the whole thing into an oven, where it gave off a few minutes of heat. At which point Carlyle re-wrote the entire book. It has been in print ever since: Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History

I admit I've never read a book anything like this one. More's the pity.

The language is, well, different. It's English, it's early 19th century, and English is a rapidly transforming language (remember the word "gay"?). I haven't read much early-19th century English, but I have read enough to think that Carlyle's language was his own even at the time. There are almost 800 pages in the edition I read, and I easily needed the first 100 if not more to figure out what he was doing and how: slow reading, since there were so many words I'd either never seen before or had never seen them in the way he was using.

Once I'd figured it out, however, and began to get the hang of his vocabulary, I began to figure out his unique method. Basically, he tells the story in present tense, and changes the perspective whenever the whim takes him. At one moment it's the perspective of a young Parisian woman who is about to be lynched by a mob. Or it can be the perspective of a hapless prime minister trying to balance the French budget before the revolution. The pensive populace of Paris in the tense few days before the storming of the Bastille. The Royal soldier waiting in vain for the enormous yellow Royal carriage trying to escape revolutionary Paris to loyalist Metz. No historian today would dare do anything remotely like this - but once you've got the hand of it, it's very compelling. The figures leap to life!

Which of these six Hundred individuals in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have: be their work what it may be, there is one man who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? with the hure, as he himself calls it, or black boar's head, fit it be shaken as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy - and burning fire of genious, like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkier confusions? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along,though looked at askance here; and shakes his black chevelure, of lion's-mane, as if prophetic of great deeds. (p.116)

I admit I referred often to Google to figure out who various actors were: writing 30 years after the events, Carlyle assumed his readers would recognize folks I had never heard of 150 years later. The challenge of the language and vocabulary, the slippery perspective which is never announced, merely is, and the wealth of information made this book a striking read. Compelling, memorable - wonderful. Immortal, too, at least as of 180 years later.

And so here, O Reader, has come the time for us to part. Toilsome was our journeying together, not without offense; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred thing, doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargon, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacredness sprang, and will yet spring? man, by nature of him, is definable as "an incarnated word". Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. farewell. (p.775).

Living again and again: Kate Atkinson and Jenny Erpenbeck

Imagine a novel about a woman who is reborn each time she dies, until eventually she manages to live a long and "correct" life. That's the premise of two recent novels, Kate Atkinson's Life After Life: A Novel, and Jenny Erpenbeck The End of Days. (I read Erpenbeck in it's original German, but Amazon tells me it's available also in English).

Atkinson's is the more famous and popular of the two. It tells the story of Ursula, born in 1910 to a comfortable upper middle class English family, who dies at birth, is straightaway reborn, and keeps at it for decades. The first few times are accidents which are then corrected next time round; along the way there's a growing awareness. Among the mishaps which are corrected in repeat versions of her life are various accidents, a couple of rapes, a couple of badly mismatched marriages - one of which can't be terminated until her daughter dies in Berlin in 1945 thus freeing her to start again - and as time goes on, eventually also the lives of others. There are parts of the story which are constant in all versions, and characters with immutable traits which overcome all repeat versions of Ursula's life, while others change from version to version.

The heart of the book, and by far its most powerful section, deals with the London Blitz, which she sometimes survives and other times doesn't; there's one dramatic night which she lives through (or not) again and again, from three or four different vantage points.

Imperceptibly there's the encroaching understanding of how to operate her unique ability, to keep at it until the story is lined up "correctly"; at the very end we understand that perhaps she's not even the only character in the story who knows about her ability and appreciates it.

I expect this is a book one might wish to read a second time, to pick apart the strands of the story and see its twists and turns.

Erpenbeck's book is by far the deeper of the two. It tells the story of an unnamed woman born in a Polish shtetl before World War One, who eventually lives to be 90 in post-unification Germany. Each section of the book tells the story of her family up to or a bit beyond her death; the next section then assumes she didn't die and tells the story of how things worked out in that case. She dies as an infant, or doesn't, in Poland. As a teenager, or not, in Vienna. As a German communist in Moscow, or not, under Stalin. As a famous poet, or not, in East Germany. As an old woman, in unified Germany.

We meet 7 generations of her family, from her great-grandparents, orthodox Jews in the shtetl, to the rumour of her grandchildren, German teenagers ignorant of any family history in the present, There's a motif of a set of volumes of German poetry which bump into the story throughout the generations; but the thing is that we're the only ones who know it. The profound irony of the book is the inability of the family to maintain its memory. Those contemporary German teenagers don't have the foggiest notion of their Jewish forbears; the woman herself never knows significant parts of her own story. At one point, the only way to transmit a very important piece of identity is by having her die so her son can bump into it; when she doesn't, he doesn't, and so it is lost.

It's an elegiac book, and it stays with you, even as it shows how the history doesn't stay in the family.

I have no reason to think Atkinson and Erpenbeck knew of each other as they wrote to so very different novels based on the same impossible premise.

Review: Undaunted Courage and a Timeline of Hypocricy

The United States is by now one of the oldest democracies in the world, and still using its original constitution. Yet it actually hasn't been around very long. This point was impressed upon me recently while reading Stephen Ambrose's last book, the excellent Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. In the tone of a master storyteller, Ambrose relates a story everyone knows something about, and makes of it a page-turner. It's the story of how President Jefferson prepared his aide Meriwether Lewis to go and find out what lay to the west of the Mississippi River, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and to bring back as much diverse knowledge as possible: about geography, botany, zoology, about the Indians, about the English, the French and Spanish presence in the area if there was any, and anything else of interest. Since no white man had ever been in the area and reported back, everything was interesting. So Lewis recruited his friend William Clark, and together they created a unit of soldiers and others, never more than a few dozen in all, and off they went.

They set out in May 1804, and got back in September 1806. Ambrose wrote his book a few years before the bicentennial anniversary, and even today we're only 210 years behind them. And that's the first startling thing about the story. As recently as 200 years ago, if you floated down the Ohio River west towards the Mississippi, you were surrounded by hundreds of miles of pristine forest, with, here and there and at great distance from one another, a rough stockade or a one-street trading station with maybe a few hundred locals, all of whom had arrived there in recent years. Cincinnati was a really big city (but did it have more than a thousand people? The book doesn't tell), and it had been founded 15 years earlier.

And the area east of the Mississippi was mapped, known, and part of the United States. Seen from the perspective of where Lewis and Clark were going, it was civilised and tamed. Pretty soon it would even be boring and unattractive for the pioneering spirits who were escaping the stifling civilization of the Eastern seaboard into the unknown and untamed frontier.

They didn't have Whatsapp in those days, and Facebook was unreliable. As a matter of fact, as Ambrose reminds us early on, the the only type of communication anyone had ever dreamed of which was faster than a man's pace of walking, was if he was on horseback. Which means that from the day in May 1804 when Lewis and Clark started upstream from St. Louis (pop. 1000), they were out of contact. Once or twice in the coming years they sent back a few messengers, whom they never saw again and could only hope would arrive back in civilization; they themselves heard nothing from civilization until they appeared one fine September day back in St. Louis, two and a half years later.

In the interval they lived off the provisions they'd acquired in advance, and mostly, they lived off their wits and off the land, essentially reverting to hunter-gatherers. They were very good at being hunter-gatherers, but they'd also chosen a good place. The descriptions of the bountiful land they were moving through are, simply, astonishing. Much of the area is still bountiful, indeed, it's the breadbasket of the world, but it's tamed and controlled by humans. It was different 200 years ago.

So they made their way all the way to Oregon (which wasn't yet called Oregon), took a selfie on the coast of the Pacific, and walked back, proving that it was all there, that area, that there wasn't a combination of big navigable rivers that crossed it, and discovered a few hundred species of plants and critters previously unknown to the taxonomists.

Not part of mapped civilization, perhaps, but not empty of people. There were various tribes of Indians (that was the word used then, and until recently). Each time Lewis and Clark encountered a new group, they gave them a version of their standard stump speech, which needed to be translated through six or eight people, in the probably vain hope that the original English version would come out at the other end in some vaguely recognizable form. Here's the description of the first time Lewis gave it:

Lewis opened by advising the warriors to be wise and look to the true interests of their people. "Children", he continued, as Clark recorded his speech, "we have been sent by the Great Chief of the Seventeen great nations of America to inform you... that a great council was lately held between the great chief and your old fathers, the French and Spaniards". There it was decided that the Missouri River country now belonged to the United States, so that all those who lived in that country, whether white or red "are bound to obey the commands of their Great Chief the President who is now your only great father". (P. 156).

And from there on the speech got worse.

That passage made me stop and think for a moment. In 1804, more than 90% of recorded Jewish history (so far) had already happened. More than 1,500 years of the interval between the collapse of the (western) Roman Empire and the rise of United Europe (such as it is) had already happened. The French Revolution was already history, and Napoleon was wandering around Europe causing uproar. Shakespeare had been dead almost 200 years. Jerusalem, considerably older than Cincinnati or even Virginia, was at one of its many lowest points, but had only a few decades left before it would begin growing beyond its walls, and with a Jewish majority.

210  years is a long time if you're building a family tree, but in terms of history, it's just yesterday. And just yesterday, the first organized white man ever to reach Iowa was preaching at the locals in terms that no kindergarten teacher would use today without blushing. All he was doing was preaching; the really bad stuff was yet to come. As Ambrose notes later in the book, the entire process of the western-moving pioneers regarding the Indians was simple: move out of our way or be killed. Since being in the way meant being on the continent, that left only the option of being killed - and indeed, they're effectively all gone.

Everything I read, I read with an Israeli perspective. Sorry, that's just who I am. The earliest proto-Zionist settlements were started in 1878, and they picked up speed in 1882. The distance in time between Lewis and Clark, first explorers of the western half of the United States, and the advent of Zionism, was 80 years. The final subduing of the American West (sometimes called the Closing of the Frontier) and early Zionism were, quite literally, simultaneous events. The original population of the United States are gone - gone from Massachusetts these past four centuries, but gone from the western half of the country all of, what, 150 years? Less even than that? Meanwhile, in Israel alone there are more Arabs today than there were in the whole country in the late 19th century.

Next time you hear an American enemy of Israel speechifying about the evils of invading someones land and then stealing it, too, ask them what their opinion is of Missouri. Or Oregon. Because it's the same time frame.

Or, if you'd prefer to simply read a book with a great yarn about a world that's gone, read this book.

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Here's a quick non-review of Vasily Grossman's magnificent Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics). Non-review, since I don't read enough literature to be able to write a literary review, but I do wish to bring this book to the attention of potential readers.

Grossman (1905-1964) was a Soviet writer and an important war correspondent during the 2nd World War.  He was at Stalingrad, and at the liberation of Nazi camps. His mother was murdered by the Nazis; he himself was later castigated for not being patriotic enough. All of these themes are woven into Life and Fate, a story of the Soviet Union during the battle of Stalingrad which is clearly modeled on War and Peace. Like War and Peace, its multi-stranded story presents the entire society - generals and prisoners, intellectuals and combat pilots, old women and young men, heroes and knaves.

Last year I reviewed Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, and in doing so I mentioned a series of previous books I had read comparing the Soviets and the Nazis. I recommended Snyder's book and still do, but Grossman's is much better. Snyder's has far more historical facts; Grossman's gives the historical truth. He was there, watching and understanding, and he tells it as it was. The oddest part of his book is that he ever thought it could be published in the Soviet Union, even in the relatively benign Khruschev years. Such a damning portrait of Soviet society could only be published outside the system, as it eventually was in 1980, 16 years after the author's death and after the manuscript had been smuggled out of the country.

In an otherwise powerful book, a number of sections stood out in particular in my reading. The first is a farewell letter of a doomed Jewish mother, on the eve of the liquidation of her ghetto. I have to assume Grossman was writing about his own mother. There's a description of how scientific discoveries are made which could have been lifted directly out of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition were it not for the fact that Grossman wrote before Kuhn, and had no way of being influenced by him. There are descriptions of the battle of Stalingrad, and especially the fighters of a surrounded and doomed Soviet outpost which contradict the entire sense of Soviet society for their raw sense of freedom. There is a description of a Nazi death installation which isn't accurate, but the power of Grossman's words about how "life is tuned into inanimate material" makes it more potent than most of what has been written about Nazism. There are descriptions of how individuals coped with life under totalitarianism, how they adapted, and how by doing so they bolstered the regime.

About a hundred pages before the end there's a description of the interrogation of Krymov, a life-long communist who is now in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. This section was one of the most important I've read, ever. It shows how the interrogator takes decades of loyal activity for the Party, and convincingly makes it sound like decades of subterfuge and treason. Krymov knows it's all a lie, but as the interrogation continues, he sees the sense of the allegations, how useless it will be to cling to his version, and how hopeless it will be to continue to believe in his life-long convictions and his own memory at the same time. His cell-mates, all veterans of the party and interrogations, demonstrate that in order not to reject everything he has ever believed in, he must accept that he has been wrong all along - or vice versa. Either way, the Party will remain untouched, while he, the life-long party activist, will be destroyed.

Much of the book is fascinating for a history buff such as I. The section about how the interrogator has collected all possible information about Krymov's entire life, so as to arrange it in the most damning version conceivable, however, is of urgent importance not only for the dwindling number of us who still remember the history of the 20th century. This is how the purveyors of systematic lies operate today, in 2013, and will still be operating in 2113.  Read Mondoweiss any day of the week, or preferably, every day for a few weeks, and you'll see the NKVD in its full glory.

Reviewing a Book About Settlements

It's very hard to write with any real accuracy about the settlement project, or at least about Israel's intentions, policies and actions, unless you've seen the archival material - which no-one has, because most of it has yet to be declassified. Gershon Gorenberg, however, has done a valiant job, in his book The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. Since I no longer blog on politically charged topics, I've posted my review in the lion's mouth: on the blog of the Israel State Archives, of all places.

Joseph Brodsky, Watermark

I recently read Joseph Brodsky's little book Watermark. I enjoyed it thoroughly, though I can't tell you what it's about. I mean, well, of course I can: it's about Venice, and Brodsky's annual visits to the city over many years, always in the middle of winter. So it's sort of a memoir, and a bit of a travel book, and of course it's a reflection on life and beauty , but having said all that, I still can't tell you what it's about. Since it's only 135 pages long, and the typeset is large with big spaces, you could probably read the whole thing in an hour or two at the most - but that would be a shame. Better to read a few pages each time, then set it aside and come back later. That way you'll enjoy it over a few weeks, if you pace yourself well enough.

Some wonderful friends sent me the book when they heard we were going to Venice, but by the time it arrived we'd already been there and were back. That was, oh, three years ago I think, and it was pure coincidence that I noticed it on the shelf last month. Reading it wasn't as good as being there, but as memory lanes go, it was surprisingly effective. So I'd say, if you're planning to go to Venice, read the book first. If you've already been, read it now. If you don't know why you might wish to go there, read it and you'll know. And if you're determined never to go to Venice (why would anybody do that?), read Brodsky's strange but compelling book and regret your decision.

At sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne. In the streets it gets dark, but it is still daytime for the Fondamenta and that gigantic liquid mirror where motorboats, vaporetti, gondolas, dinghies, and barges "like scattered old shoes" zealously trample Baroque and Gothic facades, not sparing your own or a passing cloud's reflection either. "Depict it", whispers the winter light, stopped flat by the brick wall of a hospital, or arriving home at the paradise of San Zaccaria's frontone after its long passage through the cosmos. And you sense this light's fatigue as it rests in Zaccaria's marble shells for another hour or so, while the earth is turning its other cheek to the luminary. This is the winter light at its purest. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe, or in the nearby cumulus. Its particles' only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. It's a private light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tiepolo or Tintoretto. And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private. (p.80)

Review: The Better Angels of our Nature

In spite of the fact that this blog is mostly dormant and its once thriving comments section is dry, not long ago a reader responded to something I wrote with a warm recommendation that I read Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. You keep on wondering about violence in military contexts, Yaacov, and about Israel's wielding of it; you really need to read Pinker, who'll tell you lots and lots of really pertinent stuff. So I did. And yes, it is a very interesting book; and yes, it is very very well written; and yes, it is very informative in that once you finish reading it you'll know lots of things you didn't know before.

Sadly, however, it didn't do for me what it apparently did for that reader. It wasn't much of an eye opener; in some ways, it wasn't even particularly convincing.

Before I explain, however, a short diversion. A year or two ago I read Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Vintage), and even referred to it once or twice here on the blog, but then I never got around to reviewing it, the new job came along, I stopped blogging, and then Pinker's book offered a way of reading Sebag Montefiore's book which I hadn't noticed - so here goes. A three-sentence review within a review.

Jerusalem's story, in Sebag Montefiore's telling, is one of ancient and unrelenting violence and horror. Mass crucifixions, eye-gouging, beheadings, disembowlings, assassinations: century after century, millennium after millennium (Jerusalem really is a very old place). Only quite recently, in the 17th or 18th century, did things calm down, and while the wars went on and still go on, much of the gore was toned down. And that, says Pinker, is the story of humanity. Had he read Sebag Montefiore's book, he would simply have noted that it's a typical instance of the general rule. The history of human violence is the tale of a steep and mostly consistent decline of violence, from all pervasive in pre-history, through pervasive in early history, common and repulsive until a few centuries ago, ever more tamed in recent centuries, mostly tamed and perhaps even an endangered phenomenon in our day and age. And yes, he's heard of Nazism and Communism, thank you for mentioning them.

To sum up his historical presentation, the first 500-odd pages of the book, humans in the wild were violent by nature; civilization enabled ever larger groups to work together while being violent towards other groups and anyone who peeved them; Leviathan reduced the violence within society without ever reducing it between groups or from the hegemon to the individual; the Civilizing Process (he capitalizes it) created an ever growing sphere in which violence was forced aside; there was a Humanitarian Revolution in the 18th century which abolished torture and vicious executions; and then in the latter 19th century, and in full force in the second half of the 20th, individual homicides and communal and international wars took a nosedive; today, even rough games among boys are forbidden by boards of educational curmudgeons.

He demonstrates this all with dozens and dozens of charts, all of which show lines of violence which begin in the upper left corner and end in the lower right corner.

Charts are a good thing, by the way. Historians don't use enough of them, and literature professors probably never use them. They demonstrate an ability and willingness to bring quantifying discipline to prose narratives which is refreshing and useful. Pinker even has a section on this near the end of the book, when he tells that people are vastly more intelligent today than they used to be, which is of course nonsense unless you qualify the statement to mean that contemporary folks are much better, in general, at scientific and numeric argumentation. That's probably true.

Having spent 500-odd pages doing the history, his final 200 look at the science. If nothing else, here he displays an impressive cross-disciplinary erudition. Not only has he read a lot about violence, he also knows about diverse fields of scientific scholarship, from philosophy (which is what science used to be) through lots of psychology, statistics, neurology and more. Not only does he write better than almost all academics, he's also got much broader horizons. So in this section he tells all about how scientists like to watch people's brain scans while provoking them into all sorts of behaviour, so as to identify the parts of the brain that light up when we do natural things such as be angry, sad or bad. Then, having demonstrated that being bad has neurological existence, he tells how other social behaviours - or shall we call them conditions? - also have neurological existence. The idea being that if we could strengthen the positive urges we could change our individual and communal chemistry, and reinforce us in being gentle and reasonable.

One of the notable sections in this part of the book, for me, was his discussion of empathy. Those of you who were boys roughly at the time Pinker and I were (he's a few years older than me but we both grew up on Tom Lehrer satires), must have read and remember Clifford D. Simak's magnificent City (Sf Masterworks), published in 1952 and still in print. In that book Simak has an invention which enables people effortlessly to understand the perspective of other people - and it's the end of squabbling humankind as we know it. Well, 60 years later, according to Pinker and the researchers he cites, the Age of Empathy is upon us, and it isn't the end of history, it's the beginning of a better one.

Near the very end he talks about rationalism as a force for improvement of the human story, and his discussion also passes the topic of classical liberalism versus contemporary American-style liberalism. It was around then that it became clear to me that Pinker seems to be arguing with a type of left-wing American liberalism which would have us accept that human history was mostly benign until the Europeans came along and screwed up, the Enlightenment spawned Communism and Fascism, and the US was horrendous to lots of colored folks abroad while its white elites were nasty to the minorities at home. (My formulation). The whole enterprise of his book, in an over-simplification, was to show those believers that actually, no. It was always a lot worse, it has gotten much better, and rationalism is the keystone to making it ever better. And the funny thing is that that's the thesis, more or less, of J.B. Bury's 1920 classic The Idea of Progress (which is also still in print, I'm pleasantly surprised to report). (Or anyway, I think that's the thesis of the book. I read it when I was much younger and foolish).

So that's the first reason I was disappointed by the book: it states the obvious, even if many people today would prefer not to accept the obvious because of all sorts of political fashions. The cumulative actions of centuries of dead white European men, most of them Christians though with a strong influence of Jewish ideas and a smattering of Jewish men among them, have made the human story vastly better than it was. They didn't do it alone, and in the past few generations they have been joined by lots of all the rest - women, non-whites, non-Christians - but the facts remain, and accepting them is no shame. (And yes; there are facts. Really. They aren't constructs of confused thinking. But that's a different book).

The second reason I was disappointed is Pinker's preference for scientific universalism over historical specific knowledge. Scientist seek overarching laws of nature, and they think in categories of replicable demonstrations of phenomena. Historians (or at least the good ones) know that in the human story, unlike in the world of physics, nothing can ever be replicated, because each specific situation, event and condition is the result of a fiendishly complicated chain of unique vectors and actors. The task of the historian isn't to identify universal rules; at its most daring, the best it can hope to do is demonstrate viable potentials. If it can even do that, since the conditions which brought about the earlier results aren't replicable.

Pinker's eagerness to find the laws irked most when he dealt with the single biggest problem with the theory of consistent decline of violence: Nazism and Communism and their many dozens of millions of dead. If the inertia of history is so strongly active in one direction, how to explain the first half of the 20th century, even if things went back on track thereafter. (Assuming they did). His explanation, which boils down to a statistical fluke, is simply too silly to argue with, even if he spends an entire section on it, replete with more charts and an otherwise interesting disquisition on the nature of statistics and flukes.

Then there was the annoying underlying political agenda. It was underlying, in that Pinker pokes fun at political spinmeisters of all stripes; but his own preferences, of a mildly-left-leaning Liberal Democrat such as densely populates the Boston area where he lives, were woven into the text as if they are obviously true - when they're not. They're merely one political persuasion amongst many. To cite one random example from dozens: The American reaction to 9/11 to go to war in Afghanistan could perhaps have been an emotional response motivated by fear or revenge or whatever; then again, it could have been the cool and calculating result of a reading of the facts. There a big difference between the two, and someday the historians may reach agreement which it was (or what the combination was), but then again, they may not, because too many of the relevant facts are hard to get at, such as the internal frame of mind of many of the individuals who formulated the response.

Did I mention that I was wearied by the insistence on explaining every form of human behaviour in terms of its Darwinian justification? As in, people do this sort of thing because their ur-ancient ancestors found it useful for survival in those caves? Enough already! It's all speculation, I don't see how it could be seriously proven (or disproven, which is a requirement for proof), and why should those speculations be so important anyways? Might not the immediate, historical, motivations and explanations be more important? Similarly, I'm unimpressed by all those lightings sighted in folks' brains. Clearly, humans have a very wide range of emotional and cognitive options; the fact that some of them light up this section of the brain while others light up a different section, while it may well be true, doesn't seem to explain why some unique individuals have this section light up one way while other nearby unique individuals set off different sections. And is it irrevocably proven that the lighting up of some switches causes the behaviour, and not the other way around?

Finally, I had my problems as a Jewish reader, and as an Israeli. The Talmud has repeated discussions about the sanctity of human life, the eternal unacceptability of torture, and the abolishment of capital punishment, more than a thousand years before those great enlightened Christian white men stumbled across the ideas (and some of them were antisemites even as they enlightened the world). The talmudists - thousands of men over a span of some four or five centuries, and their followers in later centuries - had a power of reasoning, some of it abstract, which is non-existent today. They even seem to have lived according to their ideals, more or less. None of this fits into those charts, and it didn't much influence them either, but if the sentiments are so modern, where did they come from ten centuries before modernity?

Then there's Pinker's need to overstate his case. At one point he goes out onto a branch: "Oh all right. How likely is it that there will be a massacre of 100,000 people in a year, or a war with a million casualties? 9.7%. Why that number? Because it is conceivable, but it's highly unlikely." (I'm paraphrasing, but that's what he wrote). Well, in spite of the media's insistence these past three months that there have been 70,000 casualties in Syria over the past two years, a stable and unmoving number even as hundreds are killed daily, we all know that Syria is quite close to 100,000 casualties in little more than a year. And getting worse. My point being that all the talk about the disappearance of war, and the dwindling of violence, and the disappearance of torture, and the acceptance of rationality and universal norms and so on and on and on: well, seen from Jerusalem they look like a wistful pipe dream. Something you'd love to have, and some other folks maybe even do have so long as they don't look around them, but a pipe dream nonetheless. Hatred of the Jews in civilized cultivated gentle Europe is alive and growing, it's roaring across the Muslim world, the Arab Spring is getting colder by the week as some of us expected it would even as it was being feted by fools worldwide - Sorry. The end of warfare and violence and torture and pain and man-inflicted pain and suffering is not here, and it's not near, either.

Which brings me back to that history of Jerusalem with which I started. In the long history of this ancient city there have repeatedly been permanent, multi-century-long chapters of stability, in which the order of things was clear and immutable and seemingly final. And then there was another, different one. And then another. And another. And another....

Book Review: The Allepo Codex

In my capacity as Israel's State Archivist, late last year I wrote and published a quasi-legal decision in the matter of the archives of the pre-Shoah Jewish community of Vienna. The pre-war Jewish community of Vienna was Europe's second largest (after Warsaw); after the war it was only a shadow of its former self, and in the early 1950s its leaders began shipping various cultural possessions to Israel; among them was the 250-year archives of the community.

A few years ago the current community leaders demanded it be sent back. The case wandered through the legal system for a while, and eventually it was sent to the state archivist. Having done my best to study the matter in a dispassionate and professional manner, my eventual decision was that the collection should remain in Jerusalem. (We blogged on this at the ISA blog here, here, here and here; the decision itself is online here, in Hebrew). The case is currently pending at the Supreme Court.

Shortly after I had completed my part of the story, my wife bought me a copy of The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible by Matti Friedman. The story of the Codex itself is one of those fantastic-yet-true stories that Jewish history sometimes throws up. Written in Tiberias more than a thousand years ago to be the definitive copy of the Bible, it was captured in 1099 in Jerusalem by the Crusaders, ransomed by the Jews of Cairo, and then came into the possission of the most famous Jew ever to live in Cairo, the Rambam (Maimonides). A couple centuries later a direct descendant of his (a great-great-grandson, if I'm not mistaken) moved to Aleppo and took the Codex with him. Ever since, from the 14th to the 20th centuries, it remained in Aleppo, the most prized possession of the ancient Aleppo community. For the entire time since its creation, it has always been the single most acurate copy of the Hebrew Bible.

Given what's been happening in Aleppo the past year, it's very fortunate the book isn't there anymore, but rather in Jerusalem. Yet as Friedman's story shows, that last chapter wasn't as straightforward as one might wish. The story that was given to be understood from its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958 was heroic and satisfying: The day after the UN adopted the plan to partition mandatory Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in November 1947, there were riots in Aleppo, the central synagogue was attacked, and part of the Codex was burned. The rest was saved, smuggled to Jerusalem, and now resides in a very safe vault at the Israel Museum (I've seen it there); part of it is on public display in the Shrine of the Book.

Friedman's story is murkier. He suggests that the Codex was smuggled out of Syria with the help of the Mossad, and was brought to Yitzchak Ben Zvi, then President of Israel. Once the remnants of the Aleppo community in Israel heard it had been saved, they demanded it be returned to their possession. The State of Israel, however, had no intention of handing it over, and the case went to court, where it was decided that it belonged to the State but with Aleppo representatives on the board of a steering committee to determine its treatment. After Ben Zvi died, however, no-one was particularly interested in it anymore, and it spent the next years in a cabinet at the Hebrew University. Only in the 1980s was public interest re-kindled, the Codex was sent for a six-year treatment in the laboratories of the Israel Museum, and later also scanned and made public.

Ah - and there was the matter of the missing 40 percent, which includes the entire Pentatuch and other parts. Friedman shows that it wasn't burned in 1947, and that it was probably saved almost in its entirety; the 40% went missing sometime between 1957 and the end of the 1970s - which is a glum thing to reflect on, since it means Jews who should have appreciated it better did the destruction, not a Syrian lynch-mob.

While Friedman doesn't have full proof for this, he does tell a compelling tale. I recommend it.

Free books

Barry Rubin has put 13 of his books online, and you can download them for free, right here.

FRUS, which means Foreign Relations of the United States, has put dozens and dozens of its books online for e-book downloading - also for free. Here.

So go yee, and partake. Honest: I get no cut from the profits.

Review: Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?

I do hope to get more reading done in 2013 than in 2012. The best way to do this would be to stop wasting time on the Internet, of course: so here's a book review on the Internet.

Last night, a few hours before the end of 2012, I finished reading Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe by James J. Sheehan. Sheehan looks at the disappearance of armies and soldiers from the lives of Europeans, and wonders where they all went. Indeed an important and intriguing question, along with its cousin: are other nations following suit? Is Europe, in other words, a harbinger or an outlier?

Unfortunately, the book demonstrates all too well the reasons historians need to stay away from journalism. Their tools need perspective to work correctly, and without it they (we) are little better than journalists but without the flair for vivid descriptions. His book is divided inot three sections: 19th century until 1914; the interwar period, and post 1945. The first is easily the best.

Sheehan's thesis in the first section of his book is that the modern nation-state was based on the military. Some nations were forged in war, quite simply, but even those that weren't had strong military strains embedded in their basic structure, from the ubiquitious memorial to the fallen soldiers in the center of each town or village, to the enormous expenditure neccessary for the upkeep of an army, to the logistical, administrative and legal structures developed by society to be able to field their military machines. These capabilities were what made a modern nation state.

Yet parallel to the rise of the militarized nation, there was also a rise of political pacifism. This did not include the relations to imperially-controlled colonial populations, but within the polite society of Europe pacifism was a growing trend around the turn of the century; the Hague Conventions are a creation of this seemingly universal wish for peace.

The pacifism didn't survive the beginning of war in 1914 - if it had lasted even until then, given the series of skirmishes which preceeded the Great War.

My main reflection upon reading this section was that even then it was a mostly European phenomenon. Europeans of the time speaking different languages, indeed, but sharing Christianity and a broad cultural similarity. A farmer in Ohio and a farmer in Afghanistan have precious little in common; Europeans of the early 20th century, for all their differences, had quite a bit. Unremarked, perhaps, the pacifism was already then predicated on a broad cultural and political and religious commonality.

The second section deals with two world wars, though in brief - about 60 pages in total. Not enough to learn much about the wars, and rather a bit too long for to say that the wars were ghastly, the first much so, the second very much so.

At the begining of the third section Sheehan makes an interesting point. Post-war Europe was divided between the domination of two external systems, Soviet inspired (and often directed and ruled) Eastern Europe, and American subsidised West Europe. Improbably perhaps, the European nation states, having been intermittanly at war since their inception, were now unable to wage war or even to prepare for it in an independant way. So they unlearned the art and let the super-powers get on with it; the super-powers, however, now having both acquired the capability of destroying the world, eventually began to unlearn the habit themselves.

Personally I had expected to read more about European exhaustion after the 20th century's 30-Year-War, and perhaps how it has played out in other spheres of life, too. Yet as I said, this section lacks a broad perspective, and instead focuses on specific negotiations within the EU, which resulted in documents which may be held to highest esteeem in 500 years, and may be forgotten forever by next week. It's too soon to know.

Inevitably, I won't finish this review without mentioning Israel (which seems never to be mentoned in the book). Sheehan shows how first Western Europeans relinquished their colonial empires because they were no longer worth the hassle, and then later the Soviets did the same. Which suggested to me how very odd, then, in the eyes of such populaces, must the warring societies of the Middle East seem, and how totally outlandish; this said in a derisory tone, not in curiosity, say. Arabs are one thing, not ever having been part of the European world; but the Jews? What do they possibly think they're doing, what with all that determination to use force to defend goals. Such old-fashioned behavior, don't you think? No self respecting European would behave that way.

Update: then again, maybe I'm being churlish about the Europeans.

On the History of Jerusalem

Back in the days when I still blogged with regularity, and wasn't yet a civil servant who needs to keep his opinions to himself, I began to research a book about Jerusalem. A year or two later, I've begun to take advantage of the perks of the job, such as access to mountains of classified materials, coupled with the ability to get them de-clasified when possible. I've been posting some of my findings on the ISA English-language blog, so everyone can see what I"m seeing. At the present rate of research I expect the book will be easily completed by, oh, 2030.

Anyway, at one point I read a small pile of books about Jerusalem, but never got around to posting about them. So here goes.

The most famous book about Jerusalem is of course the Bible (both the Jewish and the Christian versions). A couple lightyears behind however, probably the best known book of the past half century is O Jerusalem by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Written in the aftermath of the Six Day War, it tells the story of the war of 1947-48 in and around Jerusalem. It's a cracking tale, and the authors invested lots of effort in meeting and interviewing a whole range of people who had been involved in the events from all sides. So far as I could tell, however, they saw no documentary evidence at all, and didn't do much reading, either. The result has the immediacy and excitement of personal memory, and also all its many drawbacks. Lots of compelling drama, not much in the way of historical clarity or depth.

James Carroll's Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World is the work of a scholar, but not exactly a historian. Carroll, a lapsed priest, has written extensively about Christian and Jewish matters. This book however, despite its title, is actually more about America than about Jerusalem. It's essentially a description of ways in which the concept of Jerusalem has been and remains central to Western Civilisation and especially the story of the United States. A plausible idea, almost banal though worthy of description, but there's not much in there to tell about the history of Jerusalem the specific place, in contrast to Jerusalem the concept.

One interesting tidbit I'd never noticed before reading Carroll's book is that England's almost-national-anthem is a song called Jerusalem, sung at events such as this:


Which must go a way towards explaining the complexes of all those English intellectual types who so detest Israel. There is no way that people who grow up with that song can then regard today's Jewish presence in Jerusalem with the indifference they have towards, say, the Rohingya (Google it).

This evidentially apllies also to Karen Armstrong, another lapsed Catholic clergyperson (an English nun, in her case), and author of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. Armstrong looks at the religious history of Jerusalem, or the way religion expressed itself in the city's long history; she is especially interested in which religious rulers were most tolerant or not (the Crusaders were the worst in her telling). It's an interesting and informative book, though the earlier arts of the story, about which historians can know less, are the most interesting; by and by her tale slips out of religious reflection and ever closer to politics, where here analytical tools are less useful. By the time she reaches Israel's control of the city it's quite clear she doesn't like it.

I also must say that 18 months after having read her book,very little of it remains fresh in my mind. A weakness of mine, I suppose.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem - The Biography does remain in my mind, however, though I read it at about the same time; as a matter of fact, I recommended it a number of times here, on this blog, though I didn't review it. It's main weakness was that it isn't quite a history of Jerusalem, rather of Jerusalem's leaders. In most of the chapters we hear next to nothing about the Jerusalemites, and lots about their rulers. This is probably mostly the result of the documentation which has survived, but had Sebag-Montefiore wished, there's enough that has survived to enable him to balance the story. This focus of his also caused a second problem with his story: it's a horrifyingly violent tale. Thousands of years of mostly uninterrupted bloodshed, often applied in the most gruesome ways. Eventually I had to wonder why he was doing this; it seemed a bit odd for a city whose townspeople have repeatedly produced some of the most durable ideas and powerful texts in the history of mankind.

Back in March 2011 I once counted all the times Jerusalem was conquered, according to Sebag, and reached 60 or 61. I doubt Rome can hold a candle to that. Damascus, perhaps.

One overarching impression the book left me with was the sheer weight of time. Jerusalem was old when Babylonians Egyptians and Persians used to swap it back and forth. When the Helenic Greeks were having a spot of bother with it, it was ancient, probably older than Paris and London are now. The Romans obliberated it a couple of times before disappearing under the sands of time. The Byzantines permanently formed it into a Christian city, and it stayed that way for centuries (Armstrong makes the point that it remained mostly Christian for a few centuries after the Muslim conquest). That permanence, however, though it lasted far far beyond human memory, turned out not to be very permanent after all, as didn't what replaced it, and what replaced it, and it. The contemporary conceit that there is an end to history, and that we need to make one more effort and create one more reality in Jerusalem, and then it will remain "fixed" forever is merely that. A conceit.

Another point that Sebag-Montefiore makes without ever mentioning is that there's no justice. History washes back and forth, and either might makes right, or right is irrelevant and might prevails. As a Jew and a Zionist I can see the profundity of renewed Jewish control of the city, just as I can see why this control angers Mslims and Palestinians; and I can choose to rejoice in the Jewish return while hoping for better services and quality of life for the Palestinians; but it doesn't make any sense to think we're in some final chapter. Life will go on, and if in 500 years, or better, 1,000, Jerusalem will still be the capital of Israel, well, that will be a fine thing but it still won't be the end of the story. Anyway, I doubt I'll be around to see it.

At the very end of his book, starting at page 517, Sebag Montefiore veers away from history, and sums it all up through the story of the men of various religions who start each day before the crack of dawn, at 4 or 4:30 AM, each with their respective ritual. Each ritual has been going on for centuries, and each of them relates to the religious identity of the city they live in, and somehow they all live here together. It's a powerful, and beautiful, description.

A Land of Brutal Beauty, Humanity and Brutality

The other day the Guardian published a long, wandering, and not particularly interesting article about what they call "non-monogamus marriage", or what used to be called "open marriage". You know the Guardian approves of something when it doesn't lace its paragraphs with spurious references to "observers say this is an awful thing", as they always do when writing about Israel - so clearly the editorial line is that non-monogamus-thingies are Good Things.

When writing about faraway places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, the Guardian generally prefers the noble savages to the soldiers from America (or Britain). Which is a bit odd, if you ever ask yourself what the noble savages might have to say about a culture which spawns open partnerships. If you're having trouble with your pondering, I warmly recommend a short and powerful new book, The Wandering Falcon, by Jamil Ahmad.


It's actually not such a new book. Mr. Ahmad, born in 1930, was a high-ish Pakistani civil servant who spent much of his time in the less tamed parts of Pakistan, before ending up at the Pakistani embassy in Kabul. At some point he wrote a series of short stories about the people among whom he was spending his life, and put them in his drawer. Only recently someone convinced him they were worthy of being published - and how very right they were.

Have you ever read Frank Herbert's  Dune books? Well, Ahmad's is a book about the real, original. A society which ekes out a subsistence existence in a harsh desert world. Its members live by a harsh code of honor, which for all I know may help them cope with the severity of life, though I rather doubt it. You read the codes of the Torah, writen thousands of years ago for a society which also had its harsh elements, and you understand that violence is something which needs to be tamed, not only channelled. Still, the power of Ahmad's book is that he describes his wandering tribespeople, without judging them, and he does so from their own persepctive or something close to it. Some parts of his book, the first chapter in particular, are very poignant, and they're all deeply human.

Read it, and see if you can find any connection to the world of the Guardian. I wasn't able to.

Book Review: The Hustle

Crisscrossing Germany by train last week gave me more time than I usually have to read. So I read Doug Merlino's new book, The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White. It's a wonderful book, and I warmly recommend it, even though it has totally nothing to do with the usual topics of this blog - actually, that's an additional reason to read it.

The book is presented as the story of a black and white basketball team: a black basketball coach and a wealthy white businessman came together to create a team of 8th-graders half of whom can from wealthy families in white Seattle in the mid 1980s, and the other half came from the black parts of town. They learned to play ball together, they became friends, they eventually even won a championship, and then they got on with life. 20 years later Doug Merlino, one of the white boys, set out to find what had happened to them all and if playing ball together had changed anything, and he found precious little to celebrate. The cultural conditioning on each side was too strong, playing basketball never dented it, the white boys grew into successful white professionals, and the black boys went back to their neighborhoods to be stunted. Sad.

This description doesn't do justice to the book, nor to the reality, for that matter. First, because the racial divide isn't so clear-cut. At least one of the white boys has grappled with serious emotional issues and lives on the edge of society, holding his own but far from being a pillar of anyone's community; meanwhile, a number of the black men have climbed out of their childhood circumstances, by dint of the strength of their character, while one or two others, having lived long enough to survive the drug wars and gain perspective on the potential of life, are on the path to offer their children more than their parents offered them.

Moreover the description doesn't do justice to the book because it's actually not about a baseball team at all. It's a cultural cross-cut of American society as seen by the men of Doug's generation. He has sections about hi-tech (Seattle!) and drug wars; prep-schools and ghetto schools, churches and welfare policies. He repeatedly talks about the power of movies to depict American society and also inform it. He discusses trends in music.While perched mostly in Seattle, he watches the ebbs and flows of American migration over the past half century. Immigration, too: not all the white boys came over on the Mayflower; some are newcomers finding acceptance. He tells how once black neighborhoods are being gentrified, and how that's playing out, and who's moving where. Even the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc make a couple of appearances, once as the backdrop for the murder of one of the boys, once as a place to escape to. America is a gigantic and complicated place, not to be encapsulated in any single short description, but Merlino does an admirable job of depicting its complexity and diversity. Some of the diversity isn't even remotely regrettable: society needs money managers, wine technicians, grade school teachers, attorneys, journalists, janitors and church laypeople. All of them.

Most profoundly, however, it isn't a book about a black and white basketball team, because it's a story about universal growth. Doug's voice is what makes this happen. He's got an unusually strong sense of self-deprecation, though without any apologies or cringing. Simply: he wasn't a very good basketball player (neither was Myron, though); he wasn't that good at school, and didn't manage to hold out at the top-notch prep-school (neither did Eric or Damian, though), as a young adult it took him time to find his place (the same went for Maitland, and JT). He set off on the journey that eventually led to writing this book because he missed the old team, and was searching for some sort of closure for Tyler's death. The story begins with a pile of rambunctious pre-teens, then describes a game; after a few hundreds of pages with essentially no group scenes or sport descriptions, it ends with a reunion of thoughtful early mid-aged adults who get together once again and play basketball. When we first met them it was impossible to follow the characters; by the time we leave them, we not only can, we have. Each of them has made his own way through the same moment in history, bolstered or hampered by his own relations to it - which means, its a deeply human story.

Final note: English is a rich language. There are more than one way to say things. I was tickled by the extent to which Merlino uses a vocabulary I'm not familiar with, and not only because some of it comes from the black parts of town. He's got capping and peanut galleries, beat-boxing, cutting a line through fog, "I'll hit you" as an invitation to talk, and so on and on. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, so far as I could tell, the entire cast of the book, heroes supporters and one-line interlopers, doesn't contain one single Jew. Not surprising, of course, given how few of them there really are in America, but quite refreshing for me.

Anyway, it's May. Order the book and take it with you to the beach this summer.

Early Summer Reading List

Here are some books I've heard good things about, in no particular order.

Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has written a memoir. Apparently he really doesn't like the other co-founder, watzizname, but other than that it's a fine book. Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft.

Michael Korda has written a very good biography of Lawrence of Arabia, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. Given that the things Lawrence dealt with are very much still with us, it's probably worth the time.

Having mentioned those two books, it occurs to me that a while ago a reader asked what sort of books are on my wish list. Well, it's a long list, it continually gets longer, and life is not going to be long enough for all of it, so there's no actual danger that by sharing it will disappear, is there. So here are a handful of the specimens:

Norman Geras, Crimes against Humanity: Birth of a Concept

Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, by Charles King

The Koran: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Michael Cook

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles by Thomas Sowell

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (Columbia/Hurst) by John Calvert

The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's dad)

As Meat Loves Salt (Harvest Original) by Maria McCann

I dare anyone to come up with a common thread, except for the fact that they're all available on Amazon.

Review of Michael Totten's "The Road to Fatima Gate"

It's April 5th, and Michael Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel is hitting the bookstores. Since Michael and I are friends, I managed to read the book before it was published, and warmly recommend it.

The book is the story of Lebanon between the Beirut Spring of 2005 and the aftermath of Hizballah's takeover of Beirut in 2008. Michael tells it with his unique voice and perspective, which have already made his blog into one of the best on the blogosphere. First and foremost, he travels to the places he writes about, and lives there. Rather than hanging out in the hotel where all the journalists converge and reinforce their prejudices, he rents an apartment and goes talking to ordinary people. He listens to them, and respects their narratives even when not agreeing. Then he listens to other people, well informed by what he has already heard.

It's depressing how unusual this is.

Yet the book isn't like the blog. The book looks back and sums up. Blogs respond with immediacy to ongoing events; their authors can hope to report on events through a prism of informed context, but they don't know what will happen the day after they respond. A book can take a series of events and fashion a story out of them with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or at least an arbitrary end which can be justified in the context of the specific story being told. When the story is about recent events there's always the chance that future events will upend it. The story of Israel's peace with Egypt, signed in 1979, may prove to be dramatically upended if in 2012 or 2015 Egypt undergoes anything remotely similar to Lebanon; in that case it will turn out that four decades were not long enough to have a stable perspective. In addition, Michael - obviously - had no access to the documents created by the actors, nor to any reports by others who have had such access. No one has yet seen the correspondence between Hizballah and Iranian leaders or officers; between Maronite politicians and Syrian officials; or the deliberations of Israeli officials managing the war with Hisballah in 2006. Michael has written a first draft of history, not a definitive summary or interpretation.

It's a valuable first draft, however. Given the cautious euphoria surrounding the Arab Spring of 2011, it's sadly a very necessary and timely first draft, because the Arab Spring could be impacted by some of the same phenomena. Lebanon is, after all, part of the Arab world.

In March 2005 it looked like democracy was coming to Lebanon. In a dizzying sequence of events, Rafik Hariri was assassinated to prevent his re-election to prime minister, Hisballah sent half a million demonstrators to support the Syrian occupation of the country, a new coalition of all the other Lebanese responded with a demonstration more than twice as big, and international pressure forced the Syrians out of the country. It looked as if decades of strife were over, and Lebanon was poised to become a liberal democracy with a vibrant economy. What could be better? Just then Michael flew in and set up camp in Beirut, to report on the wonderful transition.

A transition which never happened. The short explanation being that Iran and Hisballah didn't want it to happen, and had the power to thwart it. The longer explanation being that the forces against liberal democracy were far stronger than the ones in favor, and included, as Michael demonstrates repeatedly, many of the very people and groups who demonstrated in favor of it on March 14th 2005.

This was the main insight I gleaned from Michael's book: that the hard men and their cold calculations purposefully aborted the naive, idealistic but unrealistic aspirations of the nice folks we were all cheering.

It wasn't only the hard men of Hisballah or their overlords in Teheran. Actually, in some of the best sections of the book Michael wanders around in Hisballah territory and talks to regular folks, who turn out to be, well, regular. At one point he joins a pack of teenagers in a Hisballah camp in central Beirut, and learns that their jumbled understanding of the world includes, alongside other emotions, some rather positive feelings towards the United States. Yet this is ultimately immaterial to the developing events. Hisballah runs its areas with harsh police-state measures, brooks no opposition, allows no independent thought, and achieves whatever goals it sets for itself -and they aren't liberal or democratic.

Hisballah has allies, other hard men with cold calculations. In a chilling section Michael has coffee with a couple of Maronite supporters of Michel Auon, a Hisballah ally, and they calmly explain their position. Then he interviews powerful leaders of what had once been the March 14th camp, and they explain why they've jettisoned their aspirations for liberal democracy in the face of Hisballah reactionary moves, preferring a lack of bloodshed over a lack of freedom. By the end of the book it's clear there's no-one who will stand up for liberal democracy, and given the implacability of its enemies and the proven horror of civil war, who's to blame them?

The thing is, hard men who fear liberal democracy, detest America and hate Jews and Israel, are thick on the ground in the Middle East. An exuberant moment of popular expression of freedom is all very well and nice, but unless they've got their own hard men and are willing to confront their adversaries with cold determination, including a willingness to fight for the society they aspire to, it's hard to see how they'll get what they wish.

In a deeply ironic twist, that seems to be the role of Israel in Michael's book. A thriving country and liberal democracy, surrounded by many thugs, and imbued with the cold calculating hardness necessary to protect itself. I'm not certain that's what Michael intended to be saying, but it's what I read: the only way to live the aspirations for freedom and democracy is by being hard enough to achieve them and then maintain them. The Lebanese forces who had the right aspirations lacked the determination; the forces with a different set of aspirations never lacked the determination, so they won, and will continue to win until forced down. They won't go away of their own accord, and they won't go away because of exuberant demonstrations in public squares cheered on by the rest of the world's media. They won't.

As I said, however, that's my reading of Michael's book, and he may not have intended that to be its thesis at all. So I encourage you to read it and decide for yourself.