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TWO

Walking in Jerusalem

Jerusalem was a place where history is not a one-way street; here the resurrection of old glories still seemed possible.

—SAMUEL HEILMAN, A Walker in Jerusalem

Friday morning, Wendy was walking around her apartment, getting ready for her day’s task, to go to the shuk, open-air market, and buy things she’d need this year for her place. Wendy picked up the metal grogger on a shelf in the living room. It was a small, cheap thing with its caricatured pictures of the dense Persian king, his heinously evil advisor and rapturously beautiful Jewish queen portrayed in clashing tones of turquoise blue, hot pink, and neon orange. Was it a sacrilege to throw it away? She had misgivings about whether it was worth saving; yet it made a slight mewl of protest as it was being tossed to the garbage pile, the plastic cogs grinding angrily in complaint. Would its made-in-Taiwan apparatus be strong enough to hold up to repeated ritual protests against the evil Haman? It seemed to personify uncertainty, which was what led to her desire to keep it, unnecessary and ugly though it was.

The prohibitive cost of overseas shipping meant that each item from her Princeton apartment took on a larger significance. When she was packing that place up, she felt like, with each piece of her apartment she took apart or discarded, a bit of her identity was being obliterated, rubbed away—a bit of finger gone here, a brown eye there, now some locks of her black shoulder-length curly hair. If her stuff defined her, with less of it, she was lesser too. She remembered seeing a billboard for a real estate agency: “Nothing defines you more than the home in which you live.” Despite her graduate student status and lack of both cash and the ability to reside in this place longer than an academic year, she wanted the things in her apartment to be part of her self-definition. She hoped it was a scintillating agglomeration of things. She wanted a visitor to her apartment to pick up any random item—book, poster, vase—and know there would be a captivating story behind it. It all added up, she hoped, to a picture of herself that was appealing—as a friend, or as a love interest.

She replaced the grogger on the shelf and tried to list what she needed. Extra kitchen items. She would use the pots for whatever she wanted so she wouldn’t have to worry about using the kosher pots in the apartment the wrong way. In her apartment in Princeton, Wendy didn’t cook much beyond spaghetti, eggs, and soy hot dogs. Cooking was a skill graduate students at Princeton did not hone. Friendships and parties were not focused on food—if people wanted to be in a group they went out to a bar or restaurant. If the department had a potluck gathering, people brought things from a takeout store. Cooking was not part of the life of the mind, and it brought no one closer to tenure, the scale by which all was rated in the world of graduate student priorities. As they frequently reminded themselves, mantra-like, the work is all that matters.

Wendy wandered around, getting ready to leave her apartment, looking for her sunglasses, keys, and wallet. She hoped, looking at the sunny space where her still-unpurchased desk would go, this would be where she’d begin her dissertation. There was something magical about the thought—this is where it would begin. How do I really know where I came from? Hadn’t Freud written that the mystery of origin is one of the greatest to humans? Enmeshed within this city, woven tightly into this place that is the omphalos mundi, the absolute center of the religious world, source and foundation of three religions, would be the beginnings of the lifetime opus of Wendy Dora Goldberg, sure to be of field-changing, paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering proportions. She laughed aloud at her own grandiosity.

Before leaving, she put a small notebook in her purse, remembering the admonition of Violet Dohrmann, the anthropologist on her dissertation committee: “An anthropologist doesn’t know what she thinks of a situation until she goes home and writes about it.”

After going over her list of needed items, she left her apartment and walked down Mishael Street to Yehoshua ben Nun, a quiet residential street with bougainvillea framing the stone gates of the apartment houses. She admired the trees. Eucalyptus? Hopefully, she’d learn the names of the Middle Eastern flora. She noticed the cats trawling the green garbage containers for sustenance; they were beginning to have a certain charm, scrawny and disorderly though they were. The quality of the sunlight attracted her notice. Did the light somehow pierce things that normally didn’t respond to its rays? But not knowing the names of the things that surrounded her, or even why she noticed the light, made her feel alien, appreciative as she was growing of Jerusalem’s beauty.

There was a meow from a feral cat somewhere in the alley, and a scurrying of paws. Wendy remembered the note of caution her friend Leora Lerner gave her when she came to pick up Wendy’s cat and care for him for the year. Leora had spent time studying in Jerusalem before college, and visited relatives here frequently.

Leora had cautioned her, “Do not adopt a cat from the streets of Jerusalem. Once they’ve lived wild, they can’t be tamed. They don’t change.”

Wendy remembered asking curiously, “Why can’t they change? People do. Or say they do—that’s the whole point of my study.”

Leora had planted her hands firmly on her hips. Wendy recalled the gesture and intonation, as Leora opined, “Animals don’t.”

Wendy moved away from the cat noises to see Rail’s Felafel across the street. She turned left, following the directions from her landlady how to exchange her American dollars for shekalim. She saw the money-exchange kiosk and entered a space with enough room for three or possibly four people to stand sideways and a window with a teller in front of her. Behind the teller was a blackboard with flags for different countries and the exchange rate for each currency posted. Wendy felt like she was engaging in some kind of illegal activity when she slid her hundred dollars in cash under the glass window. She felt furtive, pulling the cash out, glancing around, not wanting anyone to know where it came from or how much she had. She thought of the Off Track Betting windows she passed when she went through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal on the way from visiting her brother Joel and his family in New Jersey back to college at Columbia. At OTB, people slid things back and forth under the glass, hoping for profit and gain. As she took her four hundred shekel notes and some assorted change, she hoped she was not being cheated because it seemed like there were fewer shekalim than she’d thought there would be. Of course, she could look at the rate and do the math, but her concern was more that she didn’t quite know how things work in a new country.

Walking out the door, she decided the OTB analogy wasn’t completely farfetched; this year was a bet. If she stayed here, hung around with religious people, listened, took notes, wrote it all up, she’d get material for a dissertation. Then she could get some articles out of it, get published and on conference panels, and get a job. But maybe not. She could be stuck in a series of one-year visiting positions—or none at all. Or, become so mired in the research that she’d never begin to actually write the thing. Or, worst of all, get so frustrated by the enormity and scope of the project that she’d just give up, and run straight to law school, screaming at the stupidity of having wasted four years as a graduate student with nothing to show for herself.

For now, she would just enjoy getting to know a new place, discovering the small things that pleased her in the neighborhood. There was a movie theater on nearby Lloyd Cremieux Street, and bars and cafés lining Emek Refaim, the main drag. Every other store seemed to be either a hair salon or a store offering some kind of arty accessory: clothing or jewelry or housewares. There was a grocery store, a video store, and quite a few felafel and pizza places. At all times, there were people on the street, going to the stores, hanging out at cafés and restaurants. More than either New Bay or Princeton, there was street life. At all hours, people strolled the main boulevard, sat in outdoor cafés, and enjoyed being on the street.

She noticed the street sign, Rahel Emainu, Rachel our mother. Streets named for biblical characters were so different from those in her parents’ neighborhood in New York, where streets were named for cities in North Carolina: Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Wilmington, Greensboro, Goldsboro, Asheville, Fayetteville. Wendy had always felt vaguely dislocated by living in a place that was planned to evoke vistas of elsewhere.

She found the bus stop for Mahane Yehuda, the open-air market on Jaffa Road. She asked the driver to indicate to her where she should get off. The other passengers overheard. At her stop, Jewish grandmothers were gesturing to her in Hebrew, Russian, French, Spanish, and English that it was time for her to descend. She followed the others off the bus and watched as they fanned out through both the narrow covered stalls entirely full of shoppers and the wider outdoor area separating the two sections. She smelled fresh bread and saw a young Arab boy carrying stacks of pita on a wooden tray on his head, selling them ten in a plastic bag, which had condensation on it from the warmth of their freshness. She saw a booth that sold only spices, all with gorgeous colors: the deep rust of paprika, the bright yellow of turmeric, the fragrant green of basil and oregano, arrayed in large conical piles which the merchant scooped and weighed. There was one kiosk with just halvah, a sesame seed candy that came in a dazzling assortment of flavors: espresso, peanut butter, pistachio, and chocolate. She saw every kind of kosher fish available in Israel, arranged carefully on ice to keep it fresh. Other stalls had dried rice and beans, or all kinds of teas, salads, and meats.

Everywhere she could hear vendors hawking their wares, screaming loudly, “Avatiach, hamesh shekel! Avatiach le’kvod shabbat.” She paused to look around, and one of the merchants beckoned to her and offered a taste of watermelon, avatiach. She bought half a melon to satisfy him, placed it in her backpack, and immediately regretted having bought the heaviest item first. She passed a store with delicious-looking salads of all kinds in a freestanding refrigerated display case and ordered a number of them. When she finished ordering, she handed over her money, holding up fingers for the number of bills the vendor requested. Walking away, she did the monetary conversion and realized she had spent almost forty bucks, a large sum for her student budget. She turned to the right to one of the many alleyways inside the shuk and found a group of stores all selling housewares. She purchased a spaghetti pot, a soup pot, a frying pan, and two plates, two cups, and silverware for less money than she paid for the salads.

She went back outside, somehow finding the way through the winding alleys of the narrow shuk, all leading to the wide area between the two sides of the market, and looked for a bakery to get something to bring to dinner tonight with the cousin of her friend Leora from Princeton. She spotted the bakery with the longest line and figured it must be the best. She was usually impatient waiting in line, but somehow the smells emanating from inside the store, and the anticipation she felt seeing customers exit with looks of pronounced satisfaction on their faces, relaxed her. Her usual frustration with waiting in line was her feeling that she was doing nothing; now she was listening to the Hebrew around her, absorbing the atmosphere. On her turn to order, she chose entirely by visual cues, pointing at the items she wanted and holding up her fingers to indicate the amount.

Walking back to the bus stop on Rehov Yaffo, Wendy reflected on how much more satisfying this experience was than a trip to an ordinary American grocery store. At the shuk, all the food is on display; there is no layer of artificiality, plastic wrap or anything else, between seller and consumer. She remembered her grandmother Essie saying that when the A and P supermarket first opened, she was positive it would be a huge financial flop because no one would be willing to pay more for lettuce with plastic on it. Maybe that was the difference between America and Israel—people were willing to pay for barriers between themselves and their food, to obstruct their encounter with sources of nourishment.

At Mahane Yehuda, the smells of the fresh pita and spices and the alluring look of all the fresh foods enticed Wendy to spend much more than she had planned. Would this too be a metaphor for the rest of her year, becoming sucked in to something she hadn’t known about, released from her usual level of detachment from ordinary things of life like food? Would she be pulled in unexpected ways to things she hadn’t anticipated?

She liked the lack of pretense in the market, the obviousness of vendors yelling for customers, the pushing and shoving of the crowds of Friday morning shoppers trying to get the best bargains. Even if she didn’t celebrate Sabbath, it was her Jewish culture, not Sunday, emphasized as a day of rest here. She’d never thought about being excluded by Sunday, but now that she was here, she liked this activity filled, errand-doing Friday. Wendy found her bus stop and successfully navigated her bags and bundles aboard the bus for the return trip, excited that she was able to recognize the corner stop of Rahel Emeinu and Emek Refaim.

Wendy now had a bit of time before she and her landlady, Amalia Hausman, would share a cab to Amalia’s granddaughter’s new apartment for a Shabbat evening meal. Wendy had heard about this apartment because Amalia was the great-aunt of her Princeton friend Leora, who facilitated the arrangement when Wendy wasn’t sure how to find a place to live. Amalia was in her seventies and had lived in Israel most of her life; she was fortunate in her birth to a German Jewish family astute enough to leave their fatherland for Israel in the early 1930s. Leora’s grandfather, Amalia’s brother, had lit out for the States as a young man, met an American woman, and raised his family there. Leora had told Wendy the story about her great-grandfather, Amalia’s father, who owned a silver factory. One day, he was asked to put a Nazi flag up over his property. He told his wife the time had come to leave, and they did, in 1933. Neither Amalia’s father nor her mother had other close relatives who survived. Wendy and Leora were both fascinated with alternate possibilities and spent hours discussing what if: Would either of them have known when to leave? What if Leora’s grandfather had remained in Israel? What if Wendy’s great-grandparents had stayed in Poland, not come to America? The speculation made Wendy realize that there are so many plausible ways in which anyone’s life could be completely different, something that she wanted to get her subjects to admit, but that many, with their belief that God was guiding them constantly, refused to.

After putting her groceries in the fridge and her pots on the shelves, Wendy had two hours before dinner at Shani’s. She decided to try to do some reading. She gazed at her bookshelf. Textual Soulmates: Professors on the Texts They Love, was an anthology purchased out of voyeurism and curiosity, to see whether there was still ardor and enthusiasm in the ranks of the tenured. That was something that worried her—would she retain her zest for a subject, any subject, over time, or would what started as passionate interest devolve into the chore of necessary deadlines and obligations, devoid of joy or thrill? Wendy had read a few of the essays by professors she knew and knew of, but, still, it was nice to be reminded that many professors do their work out of interest and love. Holding the volume, knowing it existed and was full of excitement for its topic, reassured her somehow. She wanted to love her work and to interest others in it, get them to love it as well.

She pulled her main dissertation advisor Cliff Conrad’s first book off the shelf. She had read it for a senior seminar at Columbia, and it inspired her to go to Princeton as his grad student. Legible Promises: American Transformations in Puritan Diaries and Sermons, 1636–1740 had won numerous awards and established Conrad’s career. Its title was a quote from Cotton Mather: “America is legible in [God’s] promises.” New England preachers saw America as a place to re-create the narrative of an errand into the wilderness of Israel by a chosen people. Her research, in the actual country of Israel, was studying members of the original elect people, also going voluntarily on their own mission of return. She felt both anxiety and excitement to know that Conrad was interested in her work for its extension of the lineage of his own, and hoped she was up to the responsibility of upholding his high standards of scholarship and writing.

Conrad’s serious work on American religion at the beginning of his career had marked him as a maverick. His advisors had encouraged him, but they didn’t share his interest in American religion as a subject worth a major study, particularly for a dissertation and first book. It was thought at Yale’s religion department in the sixties, the time he was working on his dissertation, that to develop a body of work of any stature one must work with some kind of philosophical phenomenon, preferably something involving lots of German, which would lend an imprimatur of heft and gravity to even the most trivial of subjects. There was still the attitude that American religious thinkers were less important subjects for study than their European counterparts. Conrad had persisted, his career ascending with that of his advisor, Sydney Ahlstrom, one of the first to examine a trajectory of American religion as a central part of American culture. In the course of his career, Conrad had worked with documents ranging from Puritan diaries in his own dissertation, to New Age religious narratives in which people experience some kind of sudden revelation that enables them to change their lives and, in the process, earn gobs of money with a bestseller about the experience. Conrad’s interest in these New Age narratives stemmed from his sense of them as part of the continuity of American religious expression and ideology of selfhood that has made America unique. Conrad had never looked at any non-Christian narratives; he was excited about Wendy’s project because it built on his own work and extended its reach by venturing forth to unknown Jewish territory. It didn’t hurt Wendy’s chances for future academic success that Conrad was known across the country. Her primary advisor had even reached the pinnacle of success for a public intellectual—he had been a guest on daytime television talk shows that he and his peers in the academy are aware of but never admit to watching.

Wendy lifted a third book from her shelf. Entitled, primly, Meaning in the Field, she had been told it was required reading by her anthropologist adviser, Violet Dohrmann. It was about the trickiness of the researcher adjusting her or his relations with subjects to a comfortable and appropriate level. One wants to be absorbed with a culture, but not to the dreaded extent of going native. Dohrmann had told her, “Immerse yourself in your host culture; you will be changed by it too, if you do your fieldwork properly. Yet, your hosts, particularly the community of Israeli returnees, may not always recognize your outsider status. They are always on the lookout for another recruit.” Then Dohrmann had told Wendy about her niece Ellen, raised in a good secular Jewish household and educated at Smith like Violet and her sister. Her niece went around the world on a spiritual sojourn in the early seventies, arrived in Israel, and became a religious Jew. It was the first personal information Dohrmann had ever volunteered to Wendy. That was the funny thing about this line of research, Wendy mused: it always seemed to elicit much more personal reactions, from questioner and respondent, than the average discussion of academic research.

Wendy started reading, figuring it would be good preparation for her first Sabbath, learning to immerse herself in the lives of religious people, at least for one Friday night dinner.