Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Read online

  Zita and Angela were easier converts to my point of view. The two of them helped me write and perform a one-act Holocaust play for English class. (SCENE: WARSAW GHETTO 1942. A DIMLY LIT CELLAR.) They played Ruth and Eva, two Jewish sisters hiding from Nazis. The centerpiece was a long monologue by Ruth, ostensibly read from her diary, cataloguing Nazi crimes against Jews in Poland, including the horrors of a death camp identified in the script as Austwich.

  Speech delivered, Ruth becomes expendable. Two Nazis break into the cellar. (We enlisted a Lithuanian classmate who had the right tall blond looks for one of these parts; for the other we had to make do with an Italian.) The first Nazi, Helmet Fitzbrak, summarily executes Ruth. The other Nazi berates him: “You mad man—you ruined our sport. The men would have loved her.” Eva then swallows a cyanide pill.

  At this point I make my entrance as the girls’ brother Baraak, a brave resistance fighter. Baraak shoots Helmet, stabs Wilfred. Alone on the corpse-strewn stage, he delivers a stirring monologue to the effect that resistance is the secret of joy. (CURTAIN).

  Incredibly, this was well received by our English teacher, and we got an excellent mark for it. Emboldened, I asked her to add Leon Uris to the class reading list. When she explained that she thought his books were execrably written propaganda, I was completely baffled by her sudden failure of discernment.

  I decided that there was only one way around the lack of Jews in my circumscribed orbit: I would have to find an Israeli pen pal. It seemed unlikely that I would find such a person in the Spock fan-club newsletter. Israelis were surely too busy tilling the soil and fighting guerrillas to watch TV. I imagined them huddled around crackly radios, listening to the news and an occasional Holocaust documentary.

  I was considering writing to the Israeli Embassy in Canberra when I noticed a small advertisement in the children’s pages of the Sydney newspaper for the International Youth Service, an organization a world away, in Finland, that arranged pen-pal correspondences. For a small fee, they would pair Australians with would-be correspondents elsewhere in the world.

  Obviously, my plan called for my correspondent to be a boy, so I could eventually marry him. For the same reason, he needed to be at least a year older than I. Listing these requirements in my request to Finland’s International Youth Service, I pondered what to write under “interests.” I put down “Zionism, agriculture” and then, to make myself sound a little broader, since I had read that kibbutzniks valued learning and culture as well as the skills of farmer and warrior, I added “science, art, reading, flute and pets.” I mulled the inclusion of “pets” for a while before opting for honesty over strategy. I hoped that my Israeli—no doubt laboring long hours in the cow sheds and turkey coops—wouldn’t think pets were too bourgeois.

  After a long wait, the reply finally came. I returned home from school to find it sitting in the silver dish on the side table where my mother put the sorted mail. She took care of the bills. What was left, most days, were the letters in answer to my father’s eclectic correspondence. But since I’d started writing to Sonny and Joannie, often there would also be a letter in the dish for me.

  The Hebrew postmark and the stamp picturing Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate thrilled me. His name was Mishal, and as I tore the letter open, I was prepared to fall in love with my young sabra correspondent, right there where I stood on the pale green carpet of our dining room.

  From the first paragraph, the letter was a litany of tiny disappointments. Mishal wrote that he didn’t live on a kibbutz. However, it could have been worse; he wrote that he had worked on one “in the summer for a few days.”

  It seemed that Mishal’s family wasn’t exactly pioneer stock. His father, rather than draining the Hula Swamp, worked as a French-polisher. Somehow, French-polished furniture hadn’t figured in my mental image of Israeli interiors. Hand-hewn cypress logs propped on spent shell casings was more the kind of décor I’d pictured.

  But the worst blow of all came in paragraph four, where Mishal listed the languages he knew. “I also know Arabic, because I am an Arabian fellow.”

  Yech. I stuffed the letter back in its envelope, picked up my school case and trudged dejectedly to my room. It hadn’t occurred to me that in asking for an Israeli pen pal I might get a reply from an Israeli Arab—a descendant of one of the 156,000 Arabs who had stayed and not fled during the 1948 war, and so became Israeli citizens. I needed an Arab boy for a pen pal like I needed an outbreak of acne. I wasn’t too impressed by the males in my Arab girlfriends’ families. Their brothers seemed spoiled to me. And I preferred my own father’s benign detachment to the stifling presence of their fathers, always hovering and anxious, outside the most staid of parties or school functions.

  When my father talked of the Arabs he’d met in the Middle East, it was mainly as figures of fun. His imitation of an Egyptian pimp’s sales pitch—“Nice girls, very cleeeen, very hygieeeen”—was delivered with the stooped, cringing posture that is a classic of the better-recognized brand of anti-Semitism. He had taught me some Arabic he picked up in Egypt: I knew how to say “Ana miskeen [I’m poor]” when I wanted to weasel out of paying for something, and “Malesh [It doesn’t matter]” when I’d botched a task or made a mess.

  Leon Uris’s prose on the subject, meanwhile, took ethnic slurs to lofty heights. Mishal lived in Nazareth, a place described in some detail in Exodus when the Zionist hero Ari Ben Canaan takes the American nurse, Kitty Fremont, on a road trip:

  They drove through the timeless Arab villages into the fertile carpet of the Jezreel Valley, which the Jews had turned from swamp into the finest farmland in the Middle East. As the road wound out of the Jezreel towards Nazareth again they moved backwards in time. On one side of the hill the lush lands of the Jezreel and on the other, the sun-baked, dried-out, barren fields of the Arabs.… Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars made wretched noises and barefoot, ragged, filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere. Kitty held Ari’s arm tightly as they wound through the bazaar and to a place alleged to be Mary’s kitchen and Joseph’s carpenter shop.

  Kitty was baffled as they drove from Nazareth: it was a dreadful place.

  “At least the Arabs are friendly,” Ari said. “They are Christians.”

  “They are Christians who need a bath.”

  I didn’t think any of this would be much help in constructing an appropriate reply to Mishal: “Had any baths lately? I hear you have a lot of dung in Nazareth.” Still, there had to be a reply; pen-pal etiquette demanded it. This went beyond manners into the realm of superstition. To fail to answer a pen-pal letter was to invite the same dose of bad luck as walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella indoors. The only way out of an unwanted correspondence was to keep replies cool, dull and brief, and to delay sending them in the hope that in the long interregnum the other party would lose interest. I crafted something suitable, and let it sit on my desk for weeks.

  Meanwhile, I wrote away again to the pen-pal service, asking for another Israeli. I resisted the impulse to scrawl “Send me a goddamn Jew!” across my application. Instead, to make myself perfectly clear, I added “Judaism” to my list of interests.

  Mishal’s next letter arrived in no time. Undaunted by my brief note, he’d responded with a lengthy three and a half closely written pages. This was almost unheard of in the early stages of pen-friendship, especially from a correspondent writing in his third language. (Like all Israeli Arabs, Mishal was fluent in Hebrew as well as Arabic.) Also, he’d enclosed a one-shekel coin, which thrilled me, and a postcard of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, which looked depressingly like St. Mary’s Concord. Mishal wrote of Nazareth’s pilgrims and ancient churches. Living in a Jewish state and on top of a Christian pilgrimage site made religion a defining part of his life.

  My father’s stubborn failure to convert to Catholicism had hastened the unraveling of my own faith. As time passed and no conversion appeared to be in the offing, it came to seem extremely unfai
r to me that a decent bloke like Daddy was doomed to eternal torment. By the time I reached high school, I’d just about had it with the arrogant local priests who were so sure about who God had time for. Darleen, my role model in all matters, had already begun to have Doubts.

  When Pope Paul issued the encyclical banning birth control, it was my casus belli. I leaped to my feet in religion class and delivered myself of a Martin Lutheresque denunciation of the Church. A wise and humorous woman named Sister Gabriella taught the class. She also coached me in the debating team, and had befriended me in a way I’d never expected from a teacher, much less a nun. She handled my apostasy as she did a poorly prepared debate speech, astutely critiquing the flaws in the development of my argument and pointing out obvious openings for rebuttal. Then, to my surprise, she moved smoothly on with the day’s class topic, the Catholic concept of reincarnation, as if the whole edifice of Rome hadn’t just been shaken to its foundations.

  Mishal lived in a place where religion couldn’t be given away like an outgrown suit. In Israel, to be a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim permanently defined both status and prospects. As a Christian, he was part of the majority in Nazareth, but he became a minority every time he left the city.

  Yet he seemed at home in the Jewish state. Despite his shaky grammar, he wrote of the beauty of Jerusalem’s Old City, the constant flow of pilgrims in Nazareth, the modern vitality of Tel Aviv. “I know that you like the life in the kibbutz, and indeed the life in the kibbutz is very nice. There are a big hall to eat in and it is like the socialist life. Everyone works on the farm and in the fields.” He added glimpses of his own life—his flute and guitar lessons, his large family—“I have five brothers and one sister. The number of sisters is equal in our families.” He seemed genuinely curious about my life in Sydney, and as I sat down to reply, I found my resolution to shed him as a correspondent weakening.

  “Is there Arabs in Australia? And did you know some of them?” he asked. You bet, I wrote, proudly telling him about my girlfriends. As I wrote about making stuffed vine leaves at Zita’s house, the spicy smells of her mother’s kitchen flooded back to me. I’d enjoyed being part of her boisterous extended family and the female food-assembly line of aunt, grandmother, mother and sisters. I loved it when her grandmother, who spoke little English, covered my hands with her work-worn, callused ones, showing me how to shape the rice and tuck the leaves, all the time burbling encouragement in gentle Levantine Arabic. I wrote of their tiny but productive garden, its neatly staked tomato plants and grape arbor groaning with fruit. Before I knew it, I’d filled several pages myself.

  Eventually, the pen-pal service sent me another name. The tiny slip read: E boy 7/54, meaning an English-speaking male whose July birthday in 1954 made him an ideal fourteen months older than I. But the really good news came on the next line, with the surname. Cohen!

  Even I, who a decade later would fall in love with a man named Horwitz without realizing he was Jewish, recognized Cohen as an unmistakably Jewish name. But then I knew why I recognized it, and my heart sank. Somewhere in my obsessive reading, I’d discovered that the cohains—the priestly class of ancient Israel—weren’t allowed to marry converts. My plan had gone awry again.

  Within a couple of pale mauve aerograms, it became clear that my correspondent’s priestly status wasn’t the only impediment to a romance. Cohen was a Jew; Israeli-born, he was even a genuine sabra. But he was also dull. A dull Israeli, just like an Arab Israeli, was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to me.

  His brief letters were full of football, basketball and the beach—the same dreary subjects that obsessed the Aussie youths to whom I wouldn’t give the time of day. All he knew about Sydney was that the Israeli soccer team had recently played there, and all he wanted to know about me was whether I’d seen the game. Actually, if I’d known, I might well have persuaded my father to take me, in the hope of meeting some Jews. But I still hated sports. I resented the way the Australian sports obsession sapped attention from intellectual achievement. I associated sports with the beer-puking louts who spilled out of the local pub after the games finished on Saturdays, making the footpath into a gantlet to be run by any women who wanted to pass.

  It proved difficult to engage Cohen on anything else. He was almost sixteen—just two years from compulsory army service, but my questions on his feelings about this, the kind of unit he would apply for, his vision of life afterward, were lost either in his unwillingness to discuss big issues or his inability to frame adequate responses in his limited English.

  A year later, I was surprised to find myself writing a Christmas card to Mishal. But when I thought of sending Cohen a Hanukkah wish, I realized it had been months since we’d last corresponded.

  6

  French Letters

  I was four when I first heard French.

  My mother and I were at the railway station on a chilly winter’s day. She had bundled me up in red tights and a matching red corduroy hood that tied in a bow under my chin. I remember a handsome woman leaning down to me and smiling, saying something I didn’t understand. She was complimenting me on my beautiful chapeau. My mother latched onto the word and carried it home with us. In the garden, she devised a game named Shop de Chapeau. A large crimson leaf was a flamboyant Easter bonnet, a small sepia and gold one a sophisticated pillbox hat. Packed in old shoeboxes and stacked on tree-branch shelves, they became the stock of the store’s proprietress, Mademoiselle Poohbarre.

  “But Madame looks très chic in ze green beret!”

  “No, I think I prefer something with a brim.”

  “Well, in that case, may I show Madame the maroon felt?” I presented my mother with a shoe box containing a fallen camphor-laurel leaf. “Oh là là! Magnifique, non?”

  My mother had never had a chance to learn French, but she loved the sound of the language. We augmented our vocabulary from the television: Maurice Chevalier midday movies, Morticia and her besotted husband Gomez in “The Addams Family” and Pepe-le-Pew, the amorous French skunk in the Warner Brothers cartoons.

  I longed to learn French before I knew where France was. I yearned for high school, when foreign-language classes would begin. I was sure that acquiring another language would allow me to break the code of all those older and better cultures that I imagined elsewhere.

  If I had opened my ears, I might have realized that I could have learned any number of languages just by listening to the neighbors.

  While I was so busy writing away in search of foreigners, the world was arriving on my street. Every time a FOR SALE sign sprouted in a front yard, my mother’s friends—Edna and the other Irish Catholic “old-timers”—would gather to gossip over cups of tea and wonder apprehensively whether the place would be bought by “New Australians.” Almost always, it was. Soon we were surrounded: we had a Turk over the back fence, Serbs next door, Greeks across the road, Italians, Russians, Lebanese and Chinese in the next block.

  I was too young to give the changes much thought. But to people of Edna’s generation the sudden diversity was shocking in a country built on racist exclusion. Migrants were supposed to be British, or Europeans who could pass for British. Australia feared Jews, blacks and especially the “Yellow Peril” from nearby Asia. For years, the nation’s best weekly magazine, the Bulletin, had carried the slogan “Australia for the White Man” under its masthead. The atmosphere had been so racist that the immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, could summarize his opposition to Asian migrants with quips such as “Two Wongs don’t make a white.”

  The exclusion was enforced by a “dictation test” administered to any nonwhite migrant who somehow made it to Australia’s shores. The test wasn’t, as might seem likely, to measure a would-be migrant’s proficiency in English. If the immigration officer didn’t think the migrants looked white enough, the test could be administered in Gaelic, Latin or Icelandic—any language that would doom them to failure and deportation.

  But by wartime there weren’t enough British or
Irish migrants to satisfy the labor needs of the growing country, and so a few more exotic people began to slip through the net. Immigration officers were told to select those who were “sixty percent European in appearance and outlook”—whatever that meant.

  We called these first non-Anglo-Celtic migrants “Balts” no matter where in northern or eastern Europe they actually came from. Blond, blue-eyed, they were easy enough to get used to, once one got over the annoyance of their funny accents. The “Eye-Ties”—the large wave of Italians, Greeks and other southern European immigrants that followed the Balts—were more conspicuous with their dark complexions and pungent foods, and were met with more racism. It wasn’t until 1965 that the “White Australia” policy was abandoned. Most Australians came to accept, sometimes grudgingly, that diversity was actually making the place more interesting. Now, racism expresses itself in debates over the number of immigrants wanted, rather than what color they should be.

  My mother embraced the newcomers much sooner than the rest of the neighbors did. She befriended the lonely migrant women and worked on their English, and when she found they were being ripped off doing piecework for a pittance, she helped them use Australian labor laws to get a fairer deal. She became the children’s advocate in their inevitable clashes between the ways of the adopted country and the abandoned one. When the Greek across the road lost his job at a car plant because his flight home from a family funeral had been delayed a day, my mother got on the phone and badgered the foreman into rehiring him. When the bachelor who lived over the back fence talked of returning to Turkey to find a suitable bride, my mother tried to figure ways to introduce him to “a nice Australian girl.”

  I loved the new world that these people opened up for me: the decadence of being offered a tiny glass of slivovitz by the Serbs on Sunday mornings, the gothic grieving of the Greeks when a distant cousin died, sipping tea in ornate cups from the Russian spinster’s samovar, the strong tastes of black beans and chili oil brought by the Chinese and the arias that would burst unexpectedly from the Italian.