Just As I Thought (7 page)

*   *   *

One of the things I did want to talk about is the moment at which in one’s youth, or one’s childhood even, one develops a kind of fidelity, or one is so struck by some event that one is changed by it. I think of this particularly when we talk of the Holocaust and its meaning to us all.

We seem to forget that our people really lived before the Holocaust and that they were also in a lot of hot water even before that. And I understood this first in a way that has never left me. This happened when I was about—well, what I remember is the size of the kitchen table. The table was just below eye level for me at the time. My mother was reading the newspaper, and she turned to my father—my father’s name was Zenya (my parents were Russian Jews, like a lot of people)—she turned to my father and said, “Zenya, it’s coming again.”

Now, they had come to America in about 1905, and she said, “It’s coming again.” That’s all I remember her saying. But I must have heard lots of other conversations. Because that was in the very beginning of the thirties, maybe earlier, and what she was talking about, of course, was the coming of Hitler. And she said, “It’s coming
again.
”

I think Marge Piercy has a poem about sleeping with your shoes under your pillow. Well, from that time on, in the middle of an extraordinarily happy childhood in a perfectly wonderful Jewish neighborhood with thousands of children and a first-class family quite friendly to my interests, and despite all the goodness, that incident at the kitchen table was so powerful that when I began to write, I thought, Should I really write in English? But since I didn’t know any other language, there really was no choice.

The general feeling I had was that I might be forced to live somewhere else; and as a matter of fact, when my parents came to the United States, a lot of my mother’s friends went to Argentina, and to Palestine, and to Brazil. So they had become Spanish or Portuguese speakers and writers. It didn’t seem strange to me that I might live out my life in another country, and I think a lot of us must feel that way sometimes.

That moment at the kitchen table was one of the most striking events in my life. And who knows how I might have felt about things if that hadn’t happened, because actually my family was a rather typical Socialist Jewish family. My father refused to go anywhere near a synagogue, although he allowed me to take my grandmother on holidays. On the other hand, we were clearly and peacefully Jewish, so there we were. I don’t know in what direction my Judaism would have gone were it not for that moment.

I move from that to tell another story, or midrash, which I have talked about on various occasions. For those who grew up within that family there was, I suppose, a certain amount of feeling about being Jewish. I had a certain vanity about being Jewish. I thought it was really a great thing, and I thought this without any religious education. But I also really felt that to be Jewish was to be a socialist. I mean, that was my idea as a kid—that’s what it meant to be Jewish. I got over that at a certain point, and so did a great many of my family members who were my age. But all this brought me to the story that I think of again and again. I don’t understand why this story isn’t told more often, especially in Israel. Or maybe it should be thrown away.

The story I’m referring to is about the judge and prophet Samuel (I think it’s in Kings I). Samuel goes to speak to God and he says that the people want a king.

God says, “No no, that’s wrong, it will be terrible for them if they have a king. They’ll have this king, and they’ll have to give up their vineyards and their concubines. They’ll have a lot of trouble with this king, and they’ll lose a great deal more than they’ll gain.”

So Samuel goes back, and he talks to the people. He tells them what God has said. But the people say, “No, we already told you what we want. We want a king.”

So Samuel goes back to God and he says, “You know, they really want a king, but I think it’s partly because they don’t like me.”

And God says, “No, that’s not true; it’s
me
they don’t like.”

Well, Samuel goes back to the people and tells them again that they really don’t want a king. This time the people say, “Look, we want to tell you something. This is what we want. Listen: we want to be like all the other nations and have a king.”

God hears this, and He understands they really mean it. And He sends Samuel on his way to look for Saul. So that’s who they get: they get Saul.

I think of those lines again and again: “We want to be like all the other nations and have a king.” And I think: We want to be like all the other nations and have great armies; we want to be like all the other nations and have nuclear bombs. I’ve told this story to other people, and asked them, What does that mean? We want to be like all the other nations and have these things—what does that mean? They say, “Why should Jews be better?”

I keep going back again to an idea, and it’s a somewhat sentimental idea, but I’m stuck with it. And I’m entitled to be sentimental, since I’m already old, which you can tell because I’m up here. I had this idea that Jews
were
supposed to be better. I’m not saying they were, but they were
supposed
to be; and it seemed to me on my block that they often were. I don’t see any reason in being in this world actually if you can’t in some way be better, repair it somehow, and I think most of the people here feel something like that. So to be like all the other nations seems to me a waste of nationhood, a waste of statehood, a waste of energy, and a waste of life.

I want to say just two more things. First, I want to describe an experience I had in Israel about a year and a half ago. We visited a kibbutz, and we stayed a couple of nights with people there. All the members of this kibbutz were South African. They had come to this very kibbutz about thirty years ago. We found them interesting because they had come from South Africa. At one point I was talking with our hosts about what was happening in Israel, and this was a year and a half ago, not last week. Having lived on this kibbutz all these years, having raised their children there—their daughters now in the working world, their son in the army—the husband said to me, “I think we should talk to the PLO, and I really think we should get out of the territories.”

I said, “Oh?” (I’m in another person’s country, after all.)

And he said, “I never would have said anything like this two years ago, but I say it now because I don’t like what’s happening to my son and his friends. That’s the main thing. Not just that they’re in danger, but I don’t like
what’s happening
to them.”

Well, we spoke a little further, and I was saying to him, “You’re in danger, Israel is in great danger, and maybe the Diaspora is a kind of backup world for Jews,” and so forth. And he looked at me and he said, “Ah, but who said that the Jews have to continue?”

Well, I was hit, stunned by that remark. And I was brought back to that day in my childhood when my mother spoke to my father at the kitchen table. Although it was a totally different sentence, it was one that I would not forget. He said to me, “Who says that we have to continue?” And such an idea had never occurred to me.

So I said to this man in Israel, this Israeli, and I spoke from the Diaspora, I said, “We
have
to.” And now, two years later, I wonder, Yes, but how …

Now I just want to end with a short poem, which is about generations:

In my family

people who are 82 are very different

from people who are 92.

The 82-year-old people grew up

The year was 1914

This is what they knew
     
World War I

War
     
World War
     
War

That’s why when they speak to the grandchild

they say
     
poor little one

The 92-year-old people grew up

The year was 1905

They went to prison

They went into exile

They said ah
     
soon

That’s why when they speak to the grandchild

they say
     
first there will be revolution

then there will be revolution
     
then once more

then the earth itself will turn and turn

and cry out
     
Oh I have been made sick

Then you my little buds

will flower and save it.

—December 1988

II / Continuing

People, students particularly, tell me that Vietnam happened a long time ago. In the meantime, I have become old myself. Therefore it doesn’t seem as long ago as some fairly recent events.

Unless one is a journalist or a soldier or a battered civilian, an American doesn’t often have the opportunity to be present at a war. Of course, in the last couple of years interested men and women have visited, reported, and even entertained the wars in the Balkans. Several writers went to Hanoi before I did. A couple of them wrote books. Some were surprised later on that the Vietnamese did not turn out to be the absolutely intelligent reasonable people they seemed to be while being bombed.

But certainly the Vietnamese were naïve. They really believed—having fought beside the Allies as guerrillas during the Second World War, against the Vichy French; having witnessed in their Socialist youth the way the American Marshall Plan raised up defeated Germany—and having seen the financial if bossy way the Japanese were helped after
their
defeat—well, the Vietnamese assumed that the United States, once the war was over, would surely want to offer a little restitution, at least maybe make a few repairs to a hospital or a school, or send over some prostheses for the broken kids they didn’t adopt.

Instead, an embargo was begun. The war continued with economic assaults. If some early friends of Vietnam at war became disillusioned with Vietnam after the war, I want to suggest that the Vietnamese became embittered first.

In any event, I could hardly believe my extraordinary fortune in having been asked in 1969 to go to North Vietnam. I had been working against the war for about eight years by then. To see for myself! To understand! Of course, when you go to a foreign country where you don’t know the language, you certainly can’t see or hear too much “for yourself.” On the long, long, twenty-six-hour flight I happened to notice a Diner’s Club magazine in the seat pocket. In it I saw to my amazement a wonderful map of Vietnam—kind of skinny with a fat little Mekong Delta bottom. Along the coasts there were stars—or were they tiny hotels where mountain resorts with stunning views of the sea would be planted by American hotel companies once the war was over? This was in 1969.

So if my understanding of Vietnam was imperfect, my understanding of my own country was growing daily.

In the following articles, two of which were originally talks, I have described the nature and the disposition of our tasks. We were seven—five men and two women. We had not come to sightsee, but we did see the terrible topography of war from Hanoi to the Ben Hai River, the Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. Three of us were filmmakers and made a film (impounded on our return). Four of us had the task of accompanying three POWs back home. The Vietnamese had agreed to return these men through the offices of the antiwar movement. But all this is described in the next few pages.

I should say that there are certain problems of what I’d call overlapping in the following reports—that is, repeated information, since I spoke these stories to different audiences. I have cut much of that kind of repetition out, but here and there kept some descriptions for emphasis. For instance, the greenness of Hanoi was described nostalgically by a Vietnamese woman I’d met in an airplane who had been sent south in 1954 along with her entire Catholic school. It was what she dreamed of, that green, she said. And then the women who met me at the small Hanoi airport wanted to know if I had seen Hanoi’s greenness. I thought it must be the way the New Yorker stumbling through slum side streets, truck-jammed avenues holds in her head the picture of the fish-shaped island city heavy with skyline at its gasping mouth. (
My
exiled city-loving head, anyway.)

A story that I’ve told many times, but didn’t get to in immediate spoken reports: One does meet a few important people on journeys of this sort. You are assumed by your hosts to be an important person in your country, whereas you are really a kind of medium-level worker in one tendency in the nonviolent direct-action left wing of the antiwar movement. So it was that we seven met with Pham Van Dong, the second or third in power and authority in North Vietnam.

This is the way these meetings usually progressed: After people are seated in some order we are welcomed in the kindest way. Then one of us (we are also drinking tea) expresses our happiness to be here in the country of our imagination, at last. One of the young Vietnamese men says how happy
they
are to see us here. One of us remarks on the great courageous Vietnamese people and our shame at their suffering, for which we are responsible. No no, one or maybe two of them say, it is not your personal fault, we know the great American people would not permit it if they had the power. One of the young Vietnamese continues: Soon the war will be over and we will meet here or in the United States and our families will know one another. My own heart is quite full by then, and I assure them our children will certainly know one another, and we will dine in one another’s houses—I see myself cooking up one of my good soups for Nhan and Phan (our translators), and so on and actually on.