A quick story: Chris Radtke bumps into me as I am ordering lunch at Le Basket. “What are you having?” he asks. “A ham sandwich.” “That’s not kosher. What are you reading?” I hold up To Jerusalem and Back. “But that is.” (Maybe you had to be there.)
There’s nothing I find more fascinating then out-of-date current events. I probably know more politics about the 60s and 70s then I do about today. I don’t know why that is. Anyhow, 70s politics and Israel are both fascinating topics for me. When the Nobel Prize winning Jewish novelist Saul Bellow decided to go to Jerusalem in 1975 he took a lot of notes and then shat out a book. It is partial travelogue, partial dated wonkishness, partial history, partial screed against his enemies, mostly Jean-Paul Sartre. Bellow is, to paraphrase the Great Ed Koch, a Zionist with Sanity.
What I find most interesting about this book (other than Bellows’ writerly description of antiquities) is how similar the issues of 1975 are to today. There is one key factor missing, though: the good ol’ CCCP. It is amazing how much of a factor Marxist-Leninist thought was in the mideast back then. Bellow kinda sees through this (as the closest thing to Marxism you’d’ve found anywhere in the area was an Israeli kibbutz) but the spectre of Communism looms large and there is very little talk of fundamentalism or Wahabbism or any of that 72 virgins crap. In 2007 the Berlin Wall is down, and the Kabaa is King. Other than that, everything is basically the same.
This is hardly the most scholarly book about Israel. Nor is it the most fun (that will always be Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, but this is certainly worth your time if you are into this sort of thing.
