“The problem is especially severe for Israeli Orientalists, who are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, they are suspected by both the world and themselves of being unduly pessimistic about the Arab world because of Israel’s conflict with it. And on the other hand, they are accused of unrealistic optimism because of their deep craving for peace. For the Israeli scholar, whether he likes or admits it or not, Orientalism is not just a field of research. It is a vocation involving life-and-death questions affecting our own and our children’s future. This is why we have a greater responsibility to be accurate in our work. Just as we must refrain from all condescension toward the Arabs, so must we avoid all romanticization of them. We are not German philologists, retired British intelligence officers, or literary French tourists, who can afford to be deluded about who the Arabs are or should be. We are the Arabs’ neighbors and even their hostages — participants in their destiny who are unavoidably part of what we study. We are the old and yet new stranger in their midst, the constant shadow of the Other that, by their own testimony, has become their twentieth-century obsession. The problematic indeterminacy of Jewish identity undermines the old stability of the Arab world that slumbered peacefully for centuries in the desert.”
From the throes of Israeli Orientalism’s double bind, the eulogist gave his worried audience a sorrowful, we-must-carry-on-nonetheless smile. Even the Italians who did not understand him nodded trustingly at his impeccable logic.
“And here,” Rivlin continued, pointing to the photograph of the Jerusalem polymath in the desert, “lies another of Tedeschi’s unique contributions. Growing aware many years ago of the dangers posed to Israeli Orientalism by this symbiotic relationship with the Arabs, he decided to draw a clear boundary. ‘Let us,’ he declared, drawing on his fund of knowledge, ‘learn from the Turks how to belong and not belong to this region at one and the same time.’ And so turning away from Iraq, putting Sudan aside, and even abandoning great Egypt, he traveled northward to Turkey, in whose relations with the Arab world he saw a paradigm for our own.”
The eulogist regarded his audience. It suddenly struck him that the elegant young woman seated several rows behind the eternal fedora of Mr. Suissa, her eyes riveted on him in the dim auditorium, was not an Italian consular worker but Mrs. Suissa junior, who had come to express her sympathy for a colleague of her murdered husband and for a newer widow than herself. The sight of this restless soul, looking calm and pretty with her hair pinned up, a new life ahead of her now that she had freed herself from the clutches of her in-laws, should have gladdened him. Instead, however, he was flooded with such sorrow for his own son that an involuntary groan escaped him. Seeking to obey his wife’s bidding, he fought to concentrate on his feelings for Tedeschi. The dead man deserved no less.
“Nevertheless,” he continued, “though the Turks, ancient and modern, became Professor Tedeschi’s main concern, he did not neglect the Arabs completely. Indeed, having reached a stage in his career in which he could afford to take a panoramic view, he grew increasingly worried by our inability to understand the Arab mind. While he did his best to conceal it, he was fearful that we Jews, having failed catastrophically in Europe, were about to fail again in the Middle East — that the new homeland meant to be our final destination could become another bloody trap. Despite the natural optimism of a man who had taken his fate in his hands and saved his own life by coming to this country, he felt torn, as Israel’s leading Orientalist, between his responsibility to warn his colleagues of the pitfalls of wishful thinking and his reluctance to sow despair by declaring — he, who had educated generations of Arabists! — ’It is hopeless to try to understand the Arabs rationally. Back to their poetry, then, for that is all we have to go on!’
“Ladies and gentlemen, from this inner rupture came Tedeschi’s many imaginary illnesses, whether they were an escape from the harsh truth of reality or a cry for help to his friends, asked to come still his fears.”
The profound silence told him that he had said something unexpected and true. Reaching for the glass of water on the lectern, he took a slow sip while summoning his strength for the love and compassion he had promised his wife. It surprised him that no one had turned on the lights to dispel the darkness that had become almost palpable. Perhaps this was because Rashid, an anguished look on his face as he strained to hear the eulogist’s painful words from the back of the hall, was standing in the way of the light switch.
14.
DESPITE THE PATCHES ON her eyes, she knew it was her younger brother even before he opened his mouth. The intimacy of a childhood shared in one room in their parents’ small Jerusalem apartment had taught her to sense him from afar.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I told Hagit it was too much for you.”
“It’s all right. It was on my way.”
“Did that Arab at least drive you?”
“Yes. I’m lucky he sticks by me.”
“But why does he? I’ve heard you don’t even pay him.”
“Don’t ask me. It’s he who doesn’t want to take anything.”
She lay, small and thin, on a couch in the head eye doctor’s office, a black patch on each eye, waiting for the doctor to finish an operation and determine whether the low-temperature laser suture performed that afternoon had repaired her retina and made surgery unnecessary.
“In which eye did it happen to our father?” he asked.
“The same one. The left one.”
“Couldn’t you think of a better way to take after him?” He couldn’t resist teasing his sister, even while she lay dismally in the dark, with her good eye covered too — a precaution taken, she told him, not on orders from the doctor, but on the suggestion of a nurse. Although her son’s kindhearted wife had spent the afternoon with her, she had only made Raya’s fears worse by overidentifying with her condition. Now Rivlin’s sister lay waiting for her son to appear with his calming presence. Her brother, glum and tired, was not having a reassuring effect. On the contrary, he soon lapsed into a listless silence, from which she tried to arouse him by changing the subject to the snow in Jerusalem.
“That old bitch!” she declared of their mother, as angry at the age of sixty as if she were still a teenager. “All the kids were outside having fun while we were protected from pneumonia by having to ski a doll in a bowl of snow in the bathtub.”
“What doll are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t remember!” Just because she couldn’t see she was not about to give up on her never ending struggle to keep her childhood memories alive in him. “That little black doll you went with everywhere…”