Midstream- A Monthly Jewish Review

Fall 2009 Feature

  • Tel Aviv at 100: Forever Young by Haim Chertok
  • Pres and the Jewish Pushkin by Leo Haber

    Tel Aviv at 100: Forever Young

    by Haim Chertok

    Project Tel Aviv was launched in April 1909 as Ahuzat Bayit, a humble “homestead society.” Who could have dreamed that a century later it would have developed into the dynamic hub of the Jewish State’s economy, the nation’s vital zone for all forms of individuality, and an incubator for political dissent and, especially in the performance arts, cutting edge creativity? An iconic photograph depicts some 70 persons, nearly all men, clustered on terrain that, judging from appearances, could have been the heart of the Sahara. Today it is the site of chic Rothschild Boulevard. Incongruously, most of the Jewish homesteaders are formally attired in jackets and a variety of period headgear.

    The occasion? The auctioning of residential lots for a new “Hebrew neighborhood” to be erected on those very dunes, a short distance from the ancient, predominantly Arab port of Jaffa. Nine months later, by a vote of 35 to 20, the infant city was renamed Tel Aviv, literally “Hill of Spring,” the title Nahum Sokolow had chosen for his translation of Herzl's Altneuland from German into Hebrew. Sokolow's source was Ezekiel (3:15) which begins with exile and ends with a vision of Jewish redemption: "Then I came to them at Tel Aviv, that lived by the River Chebar, to where they lived; and I sat there overwhelmed among them seven days." That is to say that after the time of mourning (i.e., the seven days) is fulfilled, a new spring or rebirth of Jewish life will eventually come to fruition in the historic Jewish homeland. For the majority of these founding fathers, their suburb-to-be represented an actualization of the new Zionist homeland. It's worth noting, however, that had the minority of 20 somehow prevailed, 2009 would have been the centennial of Neve Yafo (New Jaffa), thereby occluding the symbolism of restoration.

    S. Y. Agnon fleshed out the tentative vision of these Jewish defectors from teeming Jaffa:

    This place that once was desolate and barren will be filled with large and good houses and pleasant trees and in the center of the quarter we will build a synagogue and a library, a town hall and schools, and the streets will be full of boys and girls. The Herzliya Gymnasium [high school] has already begun to build its home in our suburb and anyone wanting to give his sons and daughters a Jewish and general education will send them to us; with them he will send their mother and after them even he will come.

    The shaping idea behind the city’s Great Synagogue on Allenby Street—proposed in 1918, completed in 1926—was for its time innovative: it should serve all Jews irrespective of religious observance or communal identification. That it adopted the standard Orthodox service as a matter of course would, naturally, undermine its fondest expectations, but that is less significant for a grasp of the Tel Aviv spirit or gestalt than their having been expressed. Indeed, in the first decades of the city, it did seem natural for perhaps most residents to attend at least the Friday evening service either on Allenby or at one of scores of neighborhood synagogues (today Tel Aviv counts upwards of 500). Thereafter, when many young, growing families deserted the city for its suburbs, in their wake they left behind numerous elderly, congregations that had to struggle for a minyan, and, unless (not for the first time) I am deceived by Agnon’s subtlety, increasing numbers of residents were at increasing odds with our Nobel laureate’s seeming endorsement of middle-class conventionality. By the late 40s and early 50s, the city’s bourgeois origins had been decisively surpassed.

    Having recast itself as Manhattan-on-the-Med, an urban hive abuzz with intellectuality, enterprise, innovation, and beach paddle-ball (matkot) by day; awash with play, performance, and sensuality after dark descended. Not for nothing do devout Telavivians relish residing in “The City that Never Sleeps” and enthusiastically embrace the bustle, the hustle, the materialism and the in-your-face hedonism associated with living at the vortex of where, whatever it was, was happening.

    Now a seeming paradox: the latest demographic figures declare that the percentage of the Israeli population above the age of 65 runs at about 10%, yet in Tel Aviv it hovers around 15% which argues that the age of its population is well above the average. A moment’s thought reveals the cause: the two Israeli population segments with the largest families—the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox—scarcely register on the local scene. If that may be considered normal, then so should the percentage of Tel Aviv’s senior population. Statistics aside, however, Tel Aviv’s collective persona generally reflects the values and temperament of its younger element, a great many of whom have, as with Manhattan, migrated there from the sticks (i.e., anywhere else in the country) and some of whom will drift to the suburbs after they have married and started raising a family.

    As already clear, for a variety of reasons, when wandering about Tel Aviv’s 20 square miles, Manhattan, all 23 square miles of it, springs readily to mind. Both cities grew south to north, and to this day many of their most fascinating areas are found in the original, more jumbled and higgledy-piggledy quarters. Tel Aviv’s version of the Lower East Side is the lively, multi-ethnic district adjacent to its seven-story Central Bus Station. Billed when it opened in l993 as “the biggest bus terminal in the world,” as though such an oddball distinction would knock our eyes out, its planners mistook elephantine dimensions for architectural merit. Standing near the site of the former “terminal”—reeking with exhaust fumes, an amorphous, glorified parking lot for buses to everywhere that spread like an infection over nearby streets infested by prostitutes and petty criminals—its cavernous indoor replacement, while truly a boon for travelers, was from the very start a commercial flop.

    Yet today, within its chaotic lower reaches, what seem like hundreds of vendors cater to the taste and needs of thousands of Filipinos (the predominant foreign group), Nigerians, Sudanese, Zambians, Thais, and others, some holding temporary or (far fewer) permanent visas, possibly the greater number here irregularly. These provisional residents of Tel Aviv reside and congregate in the shadow of the great white elephant, shop there or at the nearby Carmel outdoor market where some food stalls serve up dishes to please their palate, send their children to the neighborhood school (where they become fluent Hebrew-speakers), amuse themselves at ethnic bars and discoteques, and on Sundays attend church services in Jaffa. No other Israeli city comes close to matching the municipal resources Tel Aviv devotes to the health and education of dislocated foreign nationals.

    Like a standing rebuke to Agnon, this exotic zone near the huge hodge-podge of a bus station cum souk feels like another country. On a recent visit, after a day of meandering around the city and standing for the light to change at a street corner across from the station entrance, I was accosted by attractive, polite, well-dressed young persons distributing glossy “Jews for Jesus” material. After disengaging, I paused to watch: over a period of five minutes, about one in four persons pocketed a brochure. (Serving those too fastidious to penetrate this multi-cultural arena is another inter-city bus terminus; out-of-doors, it stands adjacent to Arlozorov-Central Train Station.)

    Though somewhat faded, not far north of “another country,” the cafés, shops, and ambiance of legendary Rehov Sheinkin and its immediate environs are still Tel Aviv’s closest counterpart to Greenwich Village and Soho. Stretching north of Sheinkin, like Manhattan north of West 4th Street, the city’s Topsyish origins succumb to the almighty grid, brainchild of Patrick Geddes, a brilliant city planner who before taking notice of Tel Aviv had earlier designed the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University. Like my wife, he was a native of a land renowned for order and rationality—Scotland. Invited by Meir Dizengoff, Tel Aviv's first and longest ever serving mayor, to draw up a master plan for the growing city, the 71-year old city planner lost little time. He projected major lines of transportation to run north and south along what would become the city’s five major boulevards. These were intersected at regular intervals by major east-to-west arteries (today’s Frischman, Gordon, Ben-Gurion, Arlosoroff, Jabotiinsky, and Nordau Streets where traffic lights hold sway). In the quieter, densely interstitial, residential streets, the Scotsman confirmed Tel Aviv’s founding fathers commitment to pleasant, family homes surrounded by grape vines and almond and fig trees.

    Submitted in 1926, Geddes’s comprehensive master plan won general approval and, at first anyway, earned respectful adherence. His orderly scheme would prove invaluable in making Tel Aviv, far more than Israel’s other major cities, a paradise for pedestrians. True, this is partially due to the accident of topography. Nevertheless, both for pleasant, capacious boulevards so well suited to ambling, cycling, and the culture of the sidewalk café and for direct and easy access to Mediterranean beaches from almost anywhere in the city, to this day Tel Aviv remains infinitely indebted to the Scotsman’s foresight.

    Geddes also designated an industrial zone and a central area for Tel Aviv’s cultural center. Today it still accommodates the Habima National Theater and, the Mann Auditorium, the home of the Israel Philharmonic, both of which are currently being refurbished. Opened a few blocks to the east in 1994 is the newer, much grander Performing Arts Center, home to the New Israeli Opera and the Israeli Ballet.

    Tel Aviv’s official centenary celebration kicked off on April 4, 2009 in Rabin Square, the broad plaza that fronts its unadorned City Hall. This, alas, is a dreary fortress of functionalism totally at variance with the baroque, Middle European rathaus Agnon surely had in mind. More than 300,000 persons gathered to enjoy a predictably splendiferous sound & light show, pop and classical musical performances (featuring Zubin Mehta leading the Philharmonic performing Tschaikowsky) and capped by a fireworks show of shows. But hey, how often does one celebrate a centenary, and since April Altneuland’s “first Hebrew city” has been gorging at a non-stop cultural and sporting smorgasbord consisting of hundreds of special appearances and events. Consider, for example, visiting performances by the Berliner Ensemble and the National Theaters of Norway and the Czech Republic; Milan’s La Scala Opera Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, performing Verdi’s Requiem (out of doors and free to all comers); and Aida, directed by Zefferelli, at the Performing Arts Center. At Rosh Hashanah, the City of Brussels will be carpeting this same Rabin Square with 800,000 blossoms to celebrate not Tel Aviv alone but, more universally, nature conservancy and environmental protection. Let these stand as a sampling of scores of splendid displays and performances that, taken together, are marking the onset of a new millennium for what may be viewed, perhaps, as much as the State itself, as the most successful Zionist undertaking of all.

    Tel Aviv’s intimidating self-confidence may be underscored by an instructive coincidence. In the selfsame year of 1909, a competing image of the Herzliyan vision first saw the light of day: the establishment on the shores of Lake Kinneret of Degania, mother of all kibbutzim. Although the kibbutz movement, by its very nature elitist, never aimed to compete directly with the massive coastal network of urban communities, for the better part of three generations, in vital ways, the collectivist, self-denying, land-and-toil centered spirit of Degania became the standard bearer of Zionism. Since the 1980s, however, the kibbutz movement, now numbering only 120,000 members, has been undergoing a high profile crisis of confidence. Although quite recently experiencing a modest revival, for good cause, the media have been mute about how, if at all, it has been commemorating its centennial.

    From the start, the only urban rival to Tel Aviv’s commercial and cultural hegemony and its aggressively anti-establishmentarian élan has been Jerusalem, Israel’s spiritual magnet, historic capital, and, at least technically, its largest city. With over 800,000 residents, Jerusalem more than doubles the official headcount for Tel Aviv-Jaffa. On the other hand, Tel Aviv’s metropolitan area embraces nine substantial cities, four of them numbering over 100,000 persons. Spreading north to south 15 kilometers along the coast and another 15 kilometers inland, this so-called “Dan Bloc,” embraces some one-and-a-quarter million inhabitants, or 20% of the country. Since to all extents and purposes, there is no “Greater Jerusalem,” the capital’s ascendancy based upon numbers may be viewed as questionable.

    The contrast in temperaments between these antithetical centers may be exemplified by a telling juxtaposition. For the eleventh year running, in June, as the centerpiece of Gay Pride Month, Tel Aviv hosted its festive Gay Pride Parade as an integral component of its centennial celebration. Under the benign aegis of Mayor Ron Huldai, around 20,000 celebrants cavorted for hours along central arteries of the city, culminating their procession with a massive beach party (and the “marriage,” not officially recognized by clerical authorities, of course, of four gay couples). All this good-natured boisterousness is standard operation procedure in the undisputed capital of Israeli laissez faire.

    By chance, at the same time over in Jerusalem a cantankerous inversion of the above Parable of Good Will and Good Times played out with a display of rancor and discord. (No, this year the issue was not gay rights; in 2009, about 2,000 gays of Jerusalem paraded peacefully.) The bone of contention was, as usual, the sanctity of Shabbat. Jerusalem’s recently elected secular mayor was constrained to close a parking lot he had authorized in order to accommodate secular visitors on Shabbat. Eidah Haredit, a militant, anti-Zionist slice of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox population, orchestrated violence. In the following weeks, secular activists protested their mayor’s pusillanimity. With the re-opening of the parking lot, once again Eidah Haredit reacted violently. As of this writing, there is no denouement, and given the governing temper of the holy city, where compromise is the equivalent of defeat and this sort of nasty business is endemic, it’s difficult even to imagine one.

    However, neither do things always run smoothly in the first Hebrew City. As in Jerusalem, the parking problem can also serve as a flash point for social pathology. Why? Well, unanticipated by Geddes, the metastasis of the automobile cancer has become the city’s most intractable distraction. Tel Aviv is reported to lack an astonishing 300,000 necessary public parking places. Under these dire conditions, parking lot lessees freely behave as laws unto themselves. In June, for example, after ten years, residents of a neighborhood desperately short of green space received approval from the Planning Commission to create a park on two unused acres. Jubilant residents then planted trees and installed benches and an environmental structure. Soon afterwards, out of nowhere, a bulldozer materialized that proceeded to demolish all their work. The villain was a parking lot czar with connections in the City Hall. Neighborhood activists were furious, but now months later, the planning commissioners seem impotent to intervene effectively.

    In retrospect, it seems obvious that, over the long haul, the “Hebrew” values embodied by laissez-faire Tel Aviv, capital of “normalcy of the Jewish People,” are more consonant with Herzlyian Zionism than the doctrinaire, irreligious, internationalist orientation of mainstream kibbutz movements. All the more is this so for Jerusalem, at least one-third of whose Jewish residents lead lives oblivious of or inimical to Zionist values. Instead of Hebrew, the casual walker on the streets of the nation’s capital will be as likely to overhear Yiddish or English. The Jerusalem Post remains an organ pre-eminently designed for English-language readership. Over in Tel Aviv, however, it is difficult even to find copies for sale. As for spoken English, of course many Tel Aviv residents know it well, but once beyond the orbit of the tourist hotels and the city’s motley “Lower East Side,” Hebrew is universally spoken. Who can doubt which model of Zionism would win Herzl’s approbation as a better reflection of his own?

    Returning to times when camels were loaded with buckets of sand in order to level sites for new homesteads or, a decade later, when Mayor Dizengoff rode about astride a white mare, I again return to Agnon’s evocation of the city’s origins for my cue. The celebrated Herzliya Gymnasium (whose first valedictorian was my father’s cousin), was razed in 1962 to make room for the Shalom Meir Tower, a 34-story office building. Occurring four years before Shmuel Yosef Agnon was awarded his Nobel Prize for Literature, this mindless demolition, apparently unrecorded by any photographer, must have grieved his sensibility.

    When I came on aliyah in 1976, Shalom Tower was touted as the tallest building in the Middle East. Today it still soars in solitary ascendancy over the more unassuming structures on shop-lined Herzl Street, still is a vital commercial artery of the original core of the city.

    Shalom Tower harbors not a ghost in the attic but yet another startling skeleton in the cellar: a station for Tel Aviv’s much needed subway system. Planned in the 60s, the project was abandoned as too costly, but because of the stranglehold of the automobile on the city’s development, it was resurrected in modified form in 2000. The first of four proposed lines, running for fourteen miles (six of them underground constituting ten of its 33 stops) have been approved. Excavation is supposed to begin later this year (but no one is holding his breath). Ironically, it is uncertain whether the ready-made station under Shalom Tower will actually be exploited for its original purpose.

    In today’s Tel Aviv, whose sky has now been breached by several dozen towers, Meir Shalom seems rather unassuming. Moreover, since the eye encounters high-rise luxury excrescences such as the three Akirov Towers mainly in the city’s northern reaches or eastern fringes, thus far their aesthetic impact has been modest. (A sign of the times: Akirov’s best known tenant, the Defense Minister, has recently put his humble pad up for sale for 40 million shekels.) A brilliant exception to the general run of uninspired spires are three that are geometrically poised and stunningly conceived, each dramatically rising between 40 and 50 stories on land that formerly had been a dump. Like fabulous sisters in a fairy fable, one is triangular, the second rectangular, and, tallest of them all, the third is circular. Together they comprise the Azrieli Center to which Shalom Station, one of Tel Aviv’s four intercity train stops, offers direct access. The circular, most graceful sister is a lady bountiful who displays her goodies in the largest shopping mall of the city.

    One stop north of Shalom brings the rider to Alozoroff, Tel Aviv’s Central Station. Unabashedly utilitarian, Alozoroff evokes none of the stateliness of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station or any of the palatial European terminals. Yet, upon detraining here, one joins an uncharacteristically disciplined line of Israeli passengers who rarely surrender to the temptation of edging forward aggressively or queue-jumping at the escalator. Inexplicably, arrival in Tel Aviv’s Central Station is a civil experience. Stepping off the escalator, rather than to the inauspicious right, this out-of-towner’s primal urge is to join the throng striding leftwards towards a mighty wall of skyscrapers.

    Turn right, I command my disbelieving feet. Right!

    Why the dissonance? Well, even after many Alozoroff arrivals, I still must consciously call to mind that Tel Aviv, “The Big Orange,” lies supine to the right. Leftwards rises downtown Ramat Gan, a separate city of 135,000 where a bloc of skyscrapers, starring 240-meter Moshe Aviv Tower, Israel’s tallest structure and home to the world’s largest diamond exchange, reigns supreme.

    As with Paris or London, the central core of Tel Aviv feels human in scale, down-to-earth, almost Mittel-European. The central swath of the city still consists of block after block of four- and five-story residential buildings. Their signature is a most particular architectural era, style, and even hue, one much vaunted by current city fathers. In 2003 UNESCO proclaimed Tel Aviv’s legacy of over 4,000 structures conceived in the Bauhaus idiom—the International Style that flourished in the 1920s and 30s—a World Cultural Heritage site. Tel Aviv, which boasts the highest concentration in the world of buildings of this style, was credited for “its unique adaptation of modern international architectural trends to the cultural, climatic, and local traditions of the city.” This distinction also endorses yet another of Tel Aviv’s sobriquets—The White City.

    There is no small irony in all this architectural hoopla. It has little to do with the original mandate of creating “a garden suburb” of Jaffa, i.e., last century’s model of a “Green City.” Its source lay mainly in historical accident: the flight from Germany of a fairly homogenous clique of talented Jewish architects who arrived at the propitious moment to impress their stylized, unified vision on the rapidly expanding urban center. It’s a bit of a stretch to attribute a priori cultural or local traditions to the rounded corners and balconies of the humanistic Bauhous style. As for climatic adaptations, one must search assiduously to spot even a few commodious terraces that, over the decades, have not given way to indecorous, often hideous varieties of plastic siding installed in order to endow their inhabitants with privacy or an additional room. Beyond all that, the original white plaster, long ago succumbing to damp, salty conditions, has shed its smooth white skin, peeling most unappealingly into strips and cracks. What once was pale, exemplary, and fine is now grimy, gritty, and gray.

    And yet, wherever renovations have proceeded successfully, whenever one glimpses the fully restored vision of the Bauhaus architects, moments of architectural grace shine forth, and one appreciates the honorable intent of UNESCO. However modest, its bestowal seems, at least thus far, to have exercised a modicum of constraint upon the city’s architects and planners. Though most of the buildings themselves are now flawed through time and circumstance, the original flow and rhythm of the Bauhaus lines still lend unity to parts of the older, poorer, southern half of Tel Aviv. If only as a flawed idea, this virginal White City can still be very moving.

    Ah, but how will Tel Aviv look at 125? If current trends of cost, profit, and demand prevail, much, much different. It will probably come as a surprise to most that, although housing prices retreated almost everywhere during the first quarter of this year, Israel is one of just five markets where, even in inflation adjusted terms, prices rose. (The others? Switzerland, Austria, Thailand, and Shanghai. In contrast, American prices, declined by a whopping 19%.) Given the limited space, the pressures of demography, and the clout developers exert at Tel Aviv’s City Hall, additional skyscrapers will inevitably finesse their way to approval by the city’s Planning and Building Committee, overcoming the objections of well-intentioned citizenry, conservationists, and sentimental journalists who justly despair of the devastating effect on the Bauhaus base of an epidemic of ziggurats.

    Of course precisely where skyscrapers get situated can make a great difference. The signs, however, are not promising. One 38-story tower already lords it over the low density, gentrified houses, shops, and narrow streets of the seaside Neve Tsedeq district, home ground of the Suzanne Dellal Dance Center. Together with adjacent Florentin, these two southern districts rank as the oldest, most charming in the city. The 38-story slab, however, is just a portent. Earlier this year, while awarding “protected” status to 30 period buildings as a sop to preservationists, not one, not two but five additional 30-to-40-story buildings wangled their path to approval for construction on the north-south thoroughfare separating these two vulnerable neighborhoods. Like half-a-dozen Chrysler Buildings penetrating the fabric of Greenwich Village, they would comprise half-a-dozen lethal spikes driven into the living flesh of this unique area. Further proliferation of high-risers will surely destroy the human-scale ambiance that makes for so much of the appeal of Tel Aviv.

    As for the original behemoth, Migdal Shalom’s principal legacy will likely be that it occupies the site of the historic gymnasium that Tel Aviv was too ravenous to preserve but whose absentminded destruction served to elevate public consciousness of the value of its irreplaceable historic landmarks. On a walk westwards from Azrieli Center along Rehov Kaplan, for example, one soon passes Hakirya, the large campus occupied by the Defense Ministry. It was the original site of Sarona, a tidy, 19th century agricultural community of German Protestant Templars who moved to Palestine in anticipation of the imminence of the Second Coming. In the 1930s, however, most Templars shifted their primary allegiance from Jesus to Hitler; the British shipped them off to a camp for enemy aliens in Australia.

    During the past year, on a site just across from Hakirya, Tel Aviv installed eighteen meticulously restored, two-story Templar houses. In the shadow of the Azrieli towers, across from the original settlement site, restored Sarona is visually elegant, a triumph of historical preservation. It also raises a number of auxiliary issues, not the least of which is how much sense does it make for one of the principal strategic targets in the entire country to continue to occupy forty acres of prime Tel Aviv real estate?

    By now, the astute reader may have remarked that I have said preciously little about miles of Tel Aviv beachfront which, even though nearly monopolized by look-alike hotels, are one of the glories of the city. Is it because I have an aversion to the sea? Not at all. The cause is akin to why in years of yore I never bothered taking the D train from the Bronx to Manhattan to visit a zoo or to see a ballgame. Simply, there are nicer, less crowded beaches elsewhere in Israel, so I’ve no reason to have recourse for a splash in Tel Aviv’s surf.

    On our most recent wedding anniversary, my children installed my wife and me for several days in the Grand Beach Hotel located in Tel Aviv’s northernmost seafront salient. (Including the protrusion of a small thrust of land, it is the precise geographical counterpart of Manhattan’s Inward district. Similarly, just as the Harlem River divides Manhattan from the Bronx, in its meandering to the sea, Tel Aviv’s Yarkon divides Geddes-planned city proper from its newer Ramat Aviv neighborhood to the north.) One afternoon, we strolled down Rehov Hayarkon to Herbert Samuel Promenade and then all the way to Jaffa, hardly ever losing sight of waves, swimmers, bikinis, and seekers after the perfect tan. Most fascinating was a curious jumble of muscle-building apparatus for the exclusive use of guys who enjoy pull-ups and lifting weights in sight and sound of the pounding surf.

    Of the 66 original Tel Aviv freeholders of 1909, reportedly all but nine were Ashkenazim. In the 1920s, an influx of Sephardi newcomers crowded into the poorer, low profile Shapira district of South Tel Aviv, so the proportions shifted somewhat. What are they today? Since the critical definitions are self-referential and fluid, and since inquiry into the question is sensitive and politically incorrect, it is difficult to ascertain the percentage of Sephardi Jews among Tel Aviv’s population of Israelis, 98% of whom (exclusive of Jaffa) reportedly are Jewish. Nevertheless, no one questions or would dispute the proposition that secular, Ashkenazi elements set the general tone in the city. And yet, as is almost always the case at Israeli hotels on Shabbat, the minyan at the Grand Beach was predominantly Sephardi.

    Well, if not to acquire a tan, what do I, or rather we do on the day on the town? In fact, nothing more mysterious than what this Bronxite used to do in Manhattan. A visit to Tel Aviv usually embraces a bit of niche shopping; a show, concert, or offbeat film (one of the two multiplexes at the Dizengoff Mall is almost certain to feature something of interest); a café stop and a meal out. That particular mall, by the way, set in the very heart of Tel Aviv, is both the city’s oldest and, in its interior design, most architecturally distinctive. To catch my drift, think, if you would, of the special pleasures afforded by Manhattan’s Guggenheim.

    There is one notable exception to the usual bill of fare in Tel Aviv: attendance at a conference or lecture in Ramat Aviv, the academic stronghold on the nether side of the River Yarkon that serves as the seat of Tel Aviv University, which has Israel’s largest student body. In its way, it is the legatee of the hopes Agnon had invested in the Herzlyia Gymnasium. And sure enough, as he curiously prophesied, after the children have grown and gone, some of their more interesting mothers indeed do come there to pursue studies of their own.

    Of course Tel Aviv has dozens of good, relatively inexpensive restaurants, especially in and around the Carmel Market, but we currently have just two favorite cafés: in North Tel Aviv there is Café Henrietta located, naturally, close to the entrance of Rehov Henrietta Szold; in South Tel Aviv we enjoy Café Ginzburg on Rehov Ahad Ha’am. (If you don’t immediately grasp the connection, go back five spaces, 87 years, and lose a turn while you google Ahad Ha’am.)

    Now nearing the end, I come to what seems to me the unique, vital transactional role Tel Aviv plays in leveraging the national psyche. Here’s a story relayed to me some years ago by an American-born friend about his father who was born in Jerusalem to a large, ultra-Orthodox family. As a teenager, he realized that the Haredi life style did not suit him, so one day, he removed himself to Tel Aviv, removed his Hasidic garb, and joined pre-State Lehi, an illegal, underground organization that violently opposed negotiations with the British. Faced in 1948 probably with imprisonment by the new Israeli government for some of his past activities, the young man fled to America where he would earn his living as a congregational rabbi.

    Here’s a parallel narrative: in Arad, the small, pleasant, Negev city where I now reside. I have befriended a member of a Hasidic dynasty. He has recounted how, as a young man, his grandfather, defecting from his family and his close-knit community in Jerusalem, escaped to Tel Aviv, stripped off his black costume, and thereafter led a wholly secular life. In broad outline, a similar tale informs much of the fiction of now secular Israeli novelist Haim Be’er; it surely echoes the pilgrimage of hundreds, if not thousands of Israelis for whom Tel Aviv for much of the century has served as a contemporary incarnation of the Biblical “city of refuge.” (Simultaneously, of course, has there been a constant, if indeterminate, counter-flow of spiritual seekers from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, B’nei Brak, Tsefat, India, and, in more recent times, yeshivot on the militant West Bank. (I could not even hazard a guess as to the volume of these respective streams, but I surmise that, at times, it’s heavier headed downstream, at other times, upstream.)

    In addition, Darfurians, Sudanese, and other foreign aliens now clustering in South Tel Aviv are far from the first refugees to have sought and gained asylum in this city of freedom and self-actualization. The influx of escapees from the constraints of ultra-Orthodoxy, Modern Orthodoxy, kibbutz orthodoxy, small town small-mindedness, sexual orthodoxy, and family repressiveness has been ceaseless. Tel Aviv is the California of the Israeli imagination, a zone of liberation from doctrinaire ideas, systems, and practices where all kinds of Israelis arrive daily to reinvent themselves as they please and begin their lives afresh.

    What began a century ago under conventional bourgeois auspices has long since morphed into a borough of individuality, creativity, liberty, and yes, in its own fashion, of “Jewish normalcy.” Not really designed for tourists, this Hebrew city is an exhilarating locus of regeneration, a city-state of its own devices, a perpetual spring by the sea. As it enters its second century, may dynamic, hospitable Tel Aviv persevere in transcending the exhausted rhetoric of Left versus Right and, in the original spirit of its Great Synagogue, carry on with its experiment of inclusiveness, continue to shine forth its beacon of freedom, and, in echoing the sentiments of Robert Allen Zimmerman (a.k.a. Bob Dylan), who has from time to time exhibited suggestively Zionist proclivities, may it stay, may it stay, may it stay, forever young. •

    About the author
    Haim Chertok, who made aliya in 1976, has since published hundreds of articles on literary, Jewish and political matters. In addition to Midstream, they have appeared in journals as various as Commentary, Tikkun, Granta, The New York Times, Moment, Jerusalem Post, Congress Monthly, Hadassah, and Judaism. He has also published five books, one of which, Stealing Home, won a National Jewish Book Award in 1989. His most recent book, He Also Spoke as a Jew (2006), is a full-length biography of James Parkes (1896-1981), a historian and Anglican cleric who devoted his life to the service of the Jewish people. Since 1986 Chertok has been teaching at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva. Prof. Chertok’s most recent article for Midstream was on a three-day conference in Israel on its 60th anniversary arranged by President Shimon Peres. The article appeared in our Winter 2009 issue.

    Pres and the Jewish Pushkin

    by Leo Haber

    (“Muslims must make the Haj to Mecca, Hindus journey to Benares, Jews and Christians to Jerusalem, theosophists to Walden Pond. In Russia, literary pilgrims visit Pushkin’s grave on his birthday to hear each other recite his poetry. But pop culture has taken the pilgrimage and remade it to fit its particular sensibilities.. . . Children alarm their parents by announcing they are going to take off sophomore years of college to tour with the Grateful Dead. . . .The hunger is for meaning,...” [ “For Today’s Pilgrims There Is No End of Holy Grails” by Douglas Martin in The New York Times, Sunday, August 21, 1994, Section 4, page 5])

    So I became a poet while working in my father’s candy store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Where does my story go from there? Why does a story have to go anywhere? This implies that every life has a neat story line that rises to some fantastic climax before it slowly subsides into eternal bliss. The prose writers of the world—not the poets—are to blame for this romanticized nonsense. A life just doesn’t usually have that kind of logic or luck.

    Even Pushkin’s life was a series of fits and starts that hit up against dead-ends in spite of all the built-in advantages he had—noble birth, snooty education, instantaneous success, national recognition, and a talent that didn’t have time to peter out. His life went in zigzags, this way and that, incomprehensible sudden detours that could make a reader of his life story dizzy, if it didn’t drive both Pushhkin and the reader crazy. Now he was womanizing, now he was writing, now he was being a revolutionary, now he was moping in the woods, now he was writing again, now he was watching his friends make a revolt with him left out in the cold, now he was messing around again, now he was trying to be Lord Byron, now he was kneeling to the Czar in abject fealty, now he was writing some more, and now he was watching his wife mess around behind his back in ridiculous imitation of his own behavior. Bang!—suddenly he gets killed in a duel over his wife who was doing just what he did, and there you have a perfect example of an irrelevant end to what should have been a purposeful life. Only stories have purposes and logical development. Lives don’t.

    How much more so for one who didn’t have Pushkin’s built-in advantages. My father said to me more than once, maybe a thousand times, “What are you a Pushkin with all your high-class poems? You just make egg creams and malteds in a candy store for plain people. So get to work!” My father grew up in a small town in Russia, never went to school there, and only read Yiddish newspapers. But he adored Pushkin.

    But he was right. I was no Pushkin. I hadn’t even participated in the most overwhelming event of my century—the war against Hitler and the Nazi insanity. I got rejected from army service because of my miserable eyesight and slogged sodas while that evil juggernaut conquered almost all of Europe and murdered Jews by the millions in concentration camps, including all my uncles, aunts, and little cousins on my father’s side. I fought with my father at every turn while working in his candy store, lived with a woman who gave me no love, wrote private little poems of no consequence, and did nothing memorable, nothing passionate.

    I buried my mother before her time. My father had suffered a stroke two years prior to the end of the war that left him paralyzed on the right side of his body. I thought he would die, but he managed to learn to walk again and even to talk in just a few months and to scowl again at his New York Pushkin whenever I screwed up in the store. He sat more frequently on the wooden crate outside the store to catch his breath and to lighten the strain on his feisty heart. My mother spent her latter years worrying day and night about his health, but it was she who died long before he did. I think my brother’s death was the cause.

    My brother was five years older than I, and the last time I saw him was when I was about twelve. I don’t really know his life story. Did he run away from home? Did he get into trouble with mobsters that infested the Lower East Side in those days even after prohibition? Did he join a Chasidic sect maybe? Or did he just set out to be a hobo of the depression 30’s, riding the rails to nowhere in particular? I dream of him. I see him more often than I do my own children, even my dead baby daughter. I yearn to talk to him man to man, to ask him about our father, to find out who was right, who was wrong, what is right. I yearn to see him caress my mother’s face before she died of grief.

    It was not to be. The army notified us that he was killed in Normandy, I think in the Battle of the Bulge, when I hadn’t even known that he was in the service. Perhaps my mother knew. Perhaps she knew more than all of us about the death of Jews. Her family in Poland never got to a concentration camp. There are other ways to die. Her elderly parents, my grandparents, we found out, were forced by Nazi storm troopers to dig a long ditch, to get into it with other Jewish town folk, amd then they were shot in their newly-dug graves. My mother wasted away very quickly in the last years of the war after learning about the death of her soldier boy and of her parents at almost opposite ends of enlightened Europe.

    We buried her a few weeks before V-E Day. My father would not go to the cemetery. He was fearful of such places, and anyway, the store could not be forsaken by the whole family at one time. Maybe my brother’s life had a beginning, middle, and worthy end. I don’t know who he was, but he died for something. What did my mother die for?

    I lived aimlessly. Can I count up all the idiotic things I did in my life? Without putting them into any time sequence, let me describe a few.

    I suddenly got the idea into my head that I could be a handball champion. I was never very athletic. I had strong forearms and wrists from all the work I did in the store, including picking up product deliveries and storing them down in the sidewalk cellar in front of the candy store. But I punched a ball with a girl’s swing, sort of stiff-armed and straight up and down. I couldn’t reach the first sewer on the street in punchball when I was a kid. I was too short for basketball and a miserable fielder in softball which we called indoor baseball even though we played it outdoors in the neighborhood park. Why the silly name “softball”? I don’t know. The ball was too big and hard enough for me. I studied the professional baseball averages in the newspapers every day during the summer season to show off and score some points of pride with the poolroom bettors and with the street athletes in conversation, but I really didn’t care very much for the whole sports scene. Everybody was a Yankee fan in the 30’s. Ruth, Gehrig, Dimaggio, Dickey and the pitchers Ruffing and the nutty Lefty Gomez—they were the gods. I chose the St. Louis Browns because they never won anything. It didn’t get me anywhere—a little notoriety on the block, a few derisive laughs, but not much more. That was okay with me.

    About every Sunday in the summers of the early 40’s during the war, maybe the late 40’s, I took the kids to Coney Island or Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, especially when the weather was very hot. Mrs. Grumbacher, an elderly lady and a friend of my mother’s, looked after the kids at the shore, and I somehow gravitated to the handball courts near the beach boardwalk. I couldn’t punch a ball years before in the improvised baseball street game, but this slap game suddenly came easy to me. I moved well, swung fast, and hit very hard with my candy-store arms and wrists, my palms toughened, I suppose, from years of lifting those heavy boxes laden with store supplies and carrying them up from the sidewalk cellar to the store. I mentioned that before, but I neglected to say that I never kept the two cellar doors constantly open that flipped apart and folded together at street level. Other business guys did keep their cellar doors open and didn’t even put some kind of warning sign alongside to make sure that nobody tripped over the open doors and fell over them down the stairs going below. I was terrified of that possibility, especially because of the neighborhood kids and the elederly. So every time I went out to get something from the cellar, I opened those doors pulling them apart, got the stuff I needed, in a hurry, climbed back up the stairs and out to the sidewalk with my boxes. Then I closed the doors. So my point is that I really developed upper body strength, arm strength, and rough hands.

    Before long, I was playing in handball tournaments at the beach to sizable crowds. The bettors congregated at all the crevices in the fence opposite the boardwalk overlooking the beach on the other side, and the money changed hands as if blown by a seaside wind. It was heady stuff. They were betting on me! Meshuga people!

    It didn’t last very long. I raced back very late one afternoon from the handball courts across the vast tract of sand under the boardwalk on the beach to the water’s edge looking wildly for my kids and their elderly Jewish nanny, terrified that I had stayed away too long and one of my kids had wandered off into the swirling surf. But, thank God, I found the kids and Mrs. Grumbacher, but I stumbled over a hole dug into the sand and sprained my leg so that I could hardly get up and walk back with my brood to the nearby elevated subway line. Maybe I broke my ankle. I made it a practice to stay away from doctors. I had stumbled, of all things, on soft watery sand close to the dying ocean tide! It made no sense, but it took me months to heal.

    By the time I could run again, the swimming season and the handball season were over, but I gave up on swimming and handball for other reasons. My world, however burdensome, suddenly collapsed. My youngest child caught the flu, then developed pneumonia—I think they called it double pneumonia, a cursed double dose—and died, when the poor kid had not even lived. My young wife, who had moved her career in art elsewhere long before this tragedy, disappeared from our lives completely without a trace, maybe because of the kid’s death that must have killed her too. All this was not much before my brother was reported killed in action a month or two before the war against that sonofabitch Hitler was declared over. If my brother had made it through the Battle of the Bulge, he would have survived the war which ended just a few months later. This too drove me nuts. It was no consolation to me that reports in the press came at almost the same time that the Nazi fuhrer had committed suicide in Berlin just before the end of the war. He should have been strung up on a tree long before—before the first concentration camp and the first gas chamber could do their ugly work. My father had suffered his paralyzing stroke at this time that left him speechless, and my mother died soon enough from unknown causes that I felt I knew all too well, and I—I wasn’t interested anymore in anything. I wasn’t Job complaining or questioning God. I didn’t praise Him either.

    For my father’s sake, I acted as if I went to synagogue and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish daily, but I really didn’t. I couldn’t magnify and sanctify with the sudden death of a child, a brother, a mother, the living death of a father, and the total disappearance of a dozen relatives and of a woman I once loved.

    The momentary high I got from my handball achievement was short-lived and of no importance. I could never stick to one thing for too long anyway even though I worked for my father for twenty-nine years. After he learned to walk again with a cane and to speak again, even to yell at me, as usual, for messing up the business in the store, I became speechless. Even in poetry. Pushkin in me was dying.

    Long after the war—I don’t remember exactly when—something changed in me. I actually went back to school. I enrolled in The City College and took a few courses in sociology, psychology, and things like that, maybe to learn what was bugging me. I couldn’t continue blaming my wounded father for the rest of my life. He was hard, he was tough, he never encouraged me, but he never neglected me. I had no mrketable skills, and he employed me for twenty-nine years and made sure that I and my kids wouldn’t starve. It was time for me to give up this stupid blaming that kept me paralyzed. I wanted my father to live and even to see me come to something.

    College didn’t work out. I had no patience anymore for being a student. I slept a lot in class, and when I didn’t, I looked at the girls seated nearby and did very little listening to the professors. I wrote a paper on ethnocentrism for the sociology class that I wasn’t proud of. In fact, the stuff I wrote even nauseated me with the highfalutin terms I had learned to use and the baloney I was throwing around. The truth is that I felt this way about all the courses I took and the papers I had to write. I flunked more than one of them.

    The competition was rough. Most of the guys were returning veterans, and they got all the breaks. They also got all the women. I didn’t try very hard, naturally, for marks or for the broads. (That’s what we called them in those days in New York. It’s embarrassing now, and I’m ashamed to use it, but I did then.) I was a father, and I worked nights in the candy store. It didn’t leave too much time or give me energy for studying or for messing around. I wasn’t Pushkin, after all.

    Even English courses didn’t move me an inch. I took a poetry course, and the professor was a hefty guy who groaned over Shelley and read Keats with a bleating voice like a lost lamb in a forest of wolves. Thank God he didn’t spend too much time on the Romantics. He wanted to get as fast as he could to proletarian poems like Edwin Markham’s “The Man With the Hoe” or some oddball stuff by that lady Marxist, Rosa Luxembourg. Marxism was not for me. I had a hard enough time running the candy store under the lash of the owner, my own father. But if it was under government control, I’d be dreaming of the glory days when I worked under my old man. But Rosa Luxembourg was a nice lady, very smart. I saw a photo of her, and she was not bad-looking. Smart, good-looking, and a Marxist—just like my wife who ditched me. But I didn’t know that Rosa Luxembourg wrote poetry. I think the professor read her ranting speeches like poems, but they were really prose and not my style. I wanted to read Cummings and Stevens and Carlos Williams and Eliot and Pound. Yep, even Ezra Pound, even though I read somewhere that he had been a fascist sympathizer during the war and an antisemite before, during, and after. I wanted somebody to explain all that modern stuff to me and show me a new way. But I must have taken the wrong courses. I flunked this one too and dropped out of school. Most of those modern poets turned out to be antisemites anyway, just like Ezra Pound. So what good would it have done me to follow in their path.

    I wondered if Pushkin was an antisemite like so many other Russian intellectuals. I once gave up on Tchaikovsky because I heard that he hated Jews. A guy who used to come into the candy store occasionally to argue about music said to me, “You hate Tchaikovsky for that? You should hate him because he was a fag.” I told him that sex was a man’s personal business, and a woman’s too, but if he hated Jews, that meant that he hated me, and that meant that I had no use for him. The guy never came back to the store.

    My father said, “You argue with everybody, and we lose customers. What can I do with you? We’ll soon be on home relief.”

    I got a part-time job in the morning selling a phone amplification device from door-to-door in business establishments. A two-bit company staked me out to a territory in downtown Brooklyn opposite the courts where lawyers’ offices seemed to be on every floor in the professional apartment buildings nearby, and I tried to persuade the big-time lawyers of the advantages in being able to amplify a crucial phone conversation for a roomful of cronies. It didn’t work. I convinced nobody, and after three months of this crap, I went back to going to sleep every morning instead of traveling out to Brooklyn. I kept the model device I had been using to illustrate my points to half of the legal profession in Brooklyn—I never returned it to the company. I have it with me to this very day, but these days, I have nothing to amplify.

    I sometimes call up the weather bureau and amplify it all over my room. “Northeasterly winds, precipitation 20 per cent, temperature-humidity index 68.” It makes a large, engrossing, but intimate sound. Calling up for the time is the best. “It is 5:01 p.m.” The whole room knows it. The world knows it. There’s no escape.

    Occasionally, I called the Jazzline that listed all the jazz gigs for the day, and I amplified Buddy Rich’s whereabouts in New York with his new band, or I let the room know where Basie was playing that night. I used to sneak into clubs on 52nd Street in the early morning hours after I had slurped the last egg cream or milkshake and had gotten my paralyzed father off my back by talking several regular customers into taking a healthy milkshake or two home to their kids for a morning treat. I didn’t want to go home to see my own children. One beautiful kid irrevocably gone, two kids left. They also would have liked the milkshakes. My wife had disappeared and wouldn’t have been around to protest a sweet treat in the morning for breakfast. Mrs. Grumbacher would have been delighted. She had the old-country attitude of my own mother honed by penury—any food or drink that wasn’t treyf or whiskey was good for the kids, would make them big and strong and good husbands. My father called me a shlemiel early that morning even after I had increased the night’s business. “My flesh-and-blood Pushkin,” he would add in his newly-found voice though hoarse and a bit slurred from the lingering paralysis that had eased up a little.

    “My son the poet, where do you go in the early morning after work? To shul maybe, to say another kaddish for my dear wife, my older son, the war hero, who died in the final big battle that defeated Hitler, yemach shemo, once and for all, and for the baby my grandchild? Or to look for girls, shiksas, now that my crazy daughter-in-law flew away from the coop and won’t never come back to you since you never got married according to Jewish or English law or anything? Don’t run after somebody else’s wife like Pushkin did. You’re not an aristocrat who can do things like that. You’re a shlemazl that’s worse than a shlemiel. You got no luck. You, they’ll shoot on the spot if you fool around with another man’s woman even if he hates her and wants to get rid of her any way possible. Stay away from trouble and come back to work tonight if you want me to have some money to leave to you when I die. My brother and his wife and his children got murdered in a camp in Poland, and they couldn’t leave you a cent which they didn’t have anyways. The Nazis, yemach shemum, took everything, not only their life. So you’ll have to depend on me. Come early tonight to work. Don’t go runnin’ around now. Write a poem better, and go to sleep. Get back to work early before that Big Red fella, your substitute in the daytime, robs me of your yerishe.”

    So once again, I let Mrs. Grumbacher take care of the children in the early morning without any help from me, and I went to hear Lester Young.

    Lester Young wasn’t Coleman Hawkins or Charlie Parker. He didn’t push the saxophone into the limelight though he held it up at a crazy angle. He didn’t hurl a hundred notes a second into the farthest corners of every room like Coltrane did years later. He didn’t growl, hoot, rasp, or scream through his instrument. His musical tone was almost always gentle, pure, and wistfully sad. He wasn’t loud and menacing or even big-toned and fat and buttery and all-embracing. He had a thin, lean sound, and he meandered almost aimlessly into sudden byways that seemed to lead nowhere or everywhere. At five or six in the morning, he sat in a corner of an empty performance space and played to dead ends.

    They called him “Pres.” Another guy with a sax named Quinichette was called “Vice-Pres” by critics and the public, but I think it was all baloney thought up by publicity guys working for the record company that recorded the two men. Could be the jazz critics who like to give titles and nicknames because it sounds knowledgeable, and the club owners latch on to a title because they hope it means more business. Lester Young wasn’t a president. He wasn’t even a lackey in the White House serving dinner to the president and some foreign dignitaries. When Lester Young went on the road to play the hotel clubs, he couldn’t even eat a meal in the hotel restaurant. He was a black man and a total outsider.

    Some say that Billie Holiday gave him his nickname and that he called her “Lady” as a sign of royalty in respect of her talent. He played behind her fairly often, but I liked him best on his own. I didn’t even like the big Basie band where I first heard him at the Famous Door on 52nd Street in Manhattan. I had come to hear Art Tatum at the Onyx where he sat in a corner and ran all over the black upright piano without moving his heavy body a smidgin. It was a splash of wild stars in a dark room. I loved the stripes of black and gray all over the room. I even liked the black-and-white photographs hung all over the place. Tatum was blind. His hands saw everything; his mind heard it all. Occasionally, Tatum moved his heavy frame to grab a cigarette or a drink. Sometimes I was close enough to help him find his way.

    Once I left the Onyx and wandered into the Famous Door nearby, and there was Basie and there was Lester Young. I never liked the clatter of big bands in those days. I couldn’t hear the poems in my head through all that noise. But when Pres got up to solo on the tenor saxophone, the Basie band quieted down a little to let his gentle saxophone sound come through. I followed his gigs in the newspapers, tracking wherever Pres played in the city. But I was free to get to hear him only rarely.

    If Pres was playing and I was lucky to get Reb Nachman to take over for me at the store on a Sunday night, it was a done deal because he was a young rabbinical student who lived down the block and in need of a buck, and my father trusted him. Sunday nights also meant Monday mornings so that I could zip up to Harlem or to midtown a little earlier than usual, sometimes at ten at night and stay out even until the morning hours. My father wasn’t relieving me anymore on the job. By this time, the old man couldn’t serve worth a damn. He sat inside or outside the store day and night and just gave orders. “Get the flies away from the candy, dummy. Mix the chocolate. Count the newspapers. Call the pinball machine man. Don’t trip over the boxes, klutz.” He counted the receipts himself. Over and over again. His withered right arm hanging limply, he let his left hand grope through the cash register ten times a day. He never took out an extra penny for himself, but he counted. Then he sat on a crate, a piece of blank paper on his knees, and he added columns of figures. If they didn’t come out right, he screamed. But he didn’t carry on like this when the budding rabbi was behind the counter. He had respect for him.

    My father still read the newspaper and knew everything. “Worse than Hoomin and Attila the Hun—that’s what Hitler is. Why don’t Roosevelt, that big shot, bomb the tracks that go to the concentration camps?” Years later, this became a public issue long after the fact, but my father knew it at the very time it was all happening. “The Soviets will come out of all this destruction the strongest in the whole world.” He knew that too. But he didn’t like Stalin. I think my father was a Trotskyite, but I’m not sure. He liked Pushkin best of all the Russians, and Pushkin had a black ancestor. My father hated blacks, and I used to sneak off to Harlem to listen to a black saxophonist nicknamed Pres.

    In a small after-hours club on St. Nicholas Avenue, I heard Ben Webster and Don Byas and Coleman Hawkins and Herschel Evans and Lester Young. All of them except Pres blew the lid off the joint. He took five frail choruses to warm up. Then he cut them all with sadness, all his competitors on the saxophone. They looked at him unsmiling, forlorn. Maybe because they finally knew they could not beat him. I think because he had made them sad too.

    One early Monday morning, Dicky Wells opened on “Four O’Clock Drag.” Joe Bushkin followed on the piano. Then Pres. It was soft, bleating, not very long in duration before a trumpeter whose name I forget belted away. They dragged “Four O’clock Drag” into five and into six and into all the hours of all my days. But Pres was something special. He was the only man I ever heard who could ask a question with a musical instrument.

    Sometimes he goofed around on the clarinet. One other Monday morning, either at Puss Johnson’s on St. Nicholas or at Minton’s or maybe at Monroe’s—my mind is a jumble—I heard Pres open on “I Want a Little Girl” with his clarinet. Buck Clayton took up the theme with a muted trumpet, and Pres wouldn’t let him diddle with it too long. He came back on clarinet and asked his damned questions and sighed his unbeliever’s sighs before Clayton returned to end on a high note that made me retch. I didn’t want phoney answers. The right questions were good enough for me. I stumbled out of the place and wandered around Harlem for hours, which was possible in those days. I was a stranger. Nobody paid any attention to me. The sun was up already and the streets were crowded. People were running off to work in all directions, but even at this early hour, many others were still jivin’ around. The drunks were alive—gurgling, bellowing, laughing, some crying. The children were the loudest. Did they ever go to sleep? I thought of Masha (née Maxine) at one of her secret artsy studios shacked up with a new lover. I thought of my two remaining children who had no mother and an occasional father. I thought of my dead brother lying in a bloody trench, and then of piles of dead in a mass grave they had been forced to dig for themselves at the point of a hundred guns.

    I wandered back into the same club, expecting it to be an empty refuge with no music, no creation, no questions on a horn, certainly no answers. But Pres was sitting in a corner near the back entrance polishing his instrument, the golden tenor sax, not the clarinet. I think I sensed from past experience that I might find him there. A pianist and a bass player were still jamming at the opposite end on stage without drums to propel them along. They were showing each other some far-out chords, and they were really diggin’ each other, as the musicians would call it. It was not my language, but it fit. Like lovers. I slunk along the side wall just past the stage in front of the club bar. A bartender was still there polishing the glasses and the silverware. I took a chance and asked for a drink, and the guy behind the bar, wordlessly, offered it up to me. I put down some bills on an empty plate on the bar and strolled on toward Pres and his shiny instrument in the rear.

    He didn’t talk much. He was on the quiet side. I sat down next to him and offered him the drink. The bar shouldn’t have been open, but it was. I had carried the drink with me without sipping a drop. It was for him.

    “Gray boy don’t drink?” he suddenly asked. I shook my head side to side. “You a critic like Ulanov or Feather? English smart-ass zoomer visitin’ the zoo?” I shook my head again. He continued working on his instrument. “Gray boy pound cake rich like Hammond-Mammond? Tommy Tucker gonna stake me to somethin’?” He was wearing a double-breasted pin-striped suit and pointed black shoes polished to a turn like his golden horn. I was wearing torn sneakers.

    I shook my head for the third time. “I got no ulterior purpose,” I said. “I’m ready for the booby hatch myself. Man, I don’t know where I’m goin’.”

    He laughed and sipped on the drink that I gave him. “Gray boy’s gotta be kiddin’. Where you gotta go? Man, you there already. My ma disappeared when I was ten. I left my pa on a friggin’ carnival circuit when I was eighteen. I din’t wanna gig the southland again with him and scuffle for every friggin’ meal a million miles away from the scene and get beat up on and busted every Lord’s Day. Once I said ‘yes’ to Bing and Bob at the carnival and I din’t say ‘sir’ after it. The cop broke my chops. Man, was I bruised. I couldn’t play for six months. That’s the booby hatch, the real draft.”

    “I’m a Jew,” I said. “All my people are gettin’ murdered right now by the thousands, maybe milions. And I’m jackin’ off, doin’ nothing to help. My mother and my brother and my baby child are dead, and my old father is crippled beyond help.”

    Pres was about to put his horn away. Instead he put it to his mouth and began blowing a kind of cadenza like the soloist does near the end of a concerto in classical music. The pianist seated near the bassist in the background at the other end of the stage stopped fooling around with weird sounds. A kid who was mopping up the floor in front of the stage froze in his wet tracks. It was almost ten in the morning. Pres pushed his porkpie hat to one side of his head and bent low enough for the brim to meet his horn before bringing the sax up high. The sound flowed easily through the room, arched up and down bashfully, skipped over a heavy hurdle, hesitated, rose with a meek defiance and an inward cry. I didn’t recognize the tune, and I didn’t know enough music to identify the changes he was running, the chord structure. But I could almost hear Billie’s voice in the background on the bridge of the song. “Maybe some day, maybe Monday, maybe now...” He was playing me a prayer. It was his kaddish for all our dead, for all our brothers and mothers and little children, and it twisted and turned and challenged and screamed softly to inward heights and upward to God in heaven, and wept and fell slowly toward silence.

    Then he packed his horn away. The last notes were lingering in the rafters. Nobody had moved. He wore a small bizarre Hitler- mustache, but he didn’t look like Hitler at all. There was a faint smile on his face, and his porkpie hat slid to a rakish tilt. There was a sweetness in him that I never found in Pushkin. It was a wisp in the air beyond his scented body and beyond his suffering.

    “They can’t beat us both together,” he said. “Man, we are the soul of this friggin’ world.”

    To this day, the tenor sax is still my favorite jazz instrument even though the young rock punks have given it up for the guitar. I move around in my dark room and sag slightly under the weight of my imaginary horn. I run marvelous changes on it, my fingers climbing stairs and hurtling down with a purpose. The music is in my head, a wordless poem. I don’t sing it out or scat it out or even hum because I have a rotten singing voice. It would spoil the purity of the question. Pres is dead, and I am the only one left of the two of us to challenge the world’s indifference. •

    About the author
    Leo Haber is editor of Midstream. His novel The Red Heifer (Syracuse University Press) was published in 2001 and reissued in paperback in 2005. (See the ad on the front side of the back cover of Midstream.) The story above, “Pres and the Jewish Pushkin” is part of an unpublished story collection by Haber called, Jewish Tales of Love and Loss.