A Foot in Three Countries

Sheldon (Sheli) Teitelbaum is a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report and a frequent contributor to Wired magazine. He is the recipient of Canada's first Northern Lights Award for Excellence in Travel Writing.

Agoura Hills, Calif. - The Decarie Expressway, I learn over CBC Montreal courtesy of the Internet, is totally socked in, most likely by people fleeing for the Townships and beyond in anticipation of a promised nuclear shellacking by North Korea.

First political storms, then ice storms, then fire storms. Good thing I got out when I did.

The phone rings. It's an army buddy in Tel Aviv who is heading for Jerusalem to fight the forces of darkness. He wants my name on a petition.

I suggest he leave his car at home and take the 405 bus. The roads, I have learned from one of the Hebrew-language morning shows broadcast by a Web site called IsraelLive, are going to be packed with ultra-Orthodox protesters hoping to use prayers to lift the Supreme Court into the air and out to sea. Compounding matters will be the lesser hordes of counter-protesters like my friend, who no doubt hope it tumbles back down on them.

Parking, in either event, will be murder.

My wife enters my office to tell me she's heading into the San Fernando Valley. Unfortunately for her, I don't listen to the local news affiliates.

If I did, I might have been able to spare her the monster traffic jam then congealing the Hollywood Freeway, the result, she tells me later, of a drug bust and shootout that closed down three lanes near Coldwater Canyon.

Living in Agoura Hills, a small town just north of Malibu, I tend not to dwell on the mayhem and chaos that occasionally erupt beyond the hills that ring our tiny, insular, terra-cotta-roofed suburb.

With one foot in Canada, Israel and the United States (a situation made possible more by the advent of digital virtuality than by advances in genetic engineering), it's so much easier, interesting and even exotic to monitor the mayhem in those places I have left behind.

Please don't think me unkind. During 13 years in Southern California, we've gone through riots, earthquakes, mudslides, wildfires, the collapse of the housing market and a kick-ass recession. We've been afflicted as well with such lesser plagues as the Menendez brothers, O.J., Heidi Fleiss, and sundry other distractions now too slight to recall.

I can't do much about the former and wouldn't want to mire myself in the latter. I simply no longer bother with any of them.

Friends in Montreal, where I grew up, and Israel, where I lived for a decade after leaving Quebec in '77, tell me they can't understand why we remain here.

Well, the weather is lovely, the scenery magnificent, the air surprisingly clean, the streets safe, the schools excellent, and our distance from the big city - we've got a 7-mile stretch of sheep- filled hills separating us from the western reaches of the increasingly dystopian San Fernando Valley - distinctively comforting.

I like my house. I like my yard. I like my pool and hot tub. I don't mind my neighbours.

My medical coverage is cheap and adequate, the mail arrives every day, and the sheriff's office snatches truants off the streets and enforces a 10 p.m. curfew.

People here speak whatever language they please, and no one makes faces when they do.

After Israel, moreover, where more than half my meagre earnings went to taxes, I've even come to appreciate the IRS.

Indeed, one of the things I like best here is that if you don't actually have to commute into the city - I work at home - it's easy to ignore most of those things that make so many people shudder when they think of Los Angeles.

No, my problem isn't California, and it certainly isn't Quebec or even Israel. The failing is entirely my own.

I have always maintained a perverse lack of interest in wherever I happen to be, preferring instead - and for reasons I am only now beginning to understand - to immerse myself in the daily minutiae of wherever I might have been living before.

It's the result, I think, of a syndrome that combines Groucho's proverbial distrust of any club that would have him as a member with a traditionally Jewish penchant for wandering and that most deadly of Canadian convictions that life must inevitably be more authentic somewhere else.

Growing up in Ville St. Laurent and, later, Sainte-Agathe-des- Monts, for instance, I found myself ultimately drawn to, of all things, the great experiment in nation-building taking place within the land of Israel.

No, it had nothing to do with my seven-year stint at the St. Laurent Talmud Torah, a profoundly nasty and demeaning experience that, by rights, should have put me off Jewish affairs for life. My passion was kindled, rather, by the feeling of helplessness and terror I felt at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

An uncle whose opinion I took seriously in those days told me that this was the end of Israel. He sent a telegram to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat protesting against the attack. I decided to join the Israeli army. But the local Israeli emissary said the war would be over before I got there. I'd be better off finishing my studies. It made sense to me. I would put in 18 months in uniform, maybe turn into a "mensch" in the process, and no one would ever dare try to hit me for a contribution to the United Jewish Appeal.

I studied Hebrew and Mideastern politics at Concordia and McGill Universities, I read the Jerusalem Post every week, I researched an impractical thesis on (then largely classified) Chinese-Israeli relations, and I defended the Jewish state against those of its detractors I encountered. Upon graduation three years later, there was ultimately nothing for it but to make good my pledge.

I had never been to Israel before, but I was not going to spend a lot of time checking the place out, because I knew I would eventually find folly in my decision. I needed to place myself in a position of "ein breira," no choice. And so, within six months of arriving, I found myself in uniform, panting under a stretcher atop which lay the massive Ed Moshiach, an Australian ringer for Popeye's arch-nemesis Brutus (who, by the way, was portrayed in the movie adaptation by another Israeli, the hilariously named Paul Smith).

Yet once safely ensconced in the Nahal Infantry Brigade with a company of similarly motivated (many would have said deluded) expatriate Canadians, Americans, Kiwis, South Africans and Argentinians (there was also a red-headed gentile from Amsterdam named Klaus, but no one knew what he was doing there) - I found myself suddenly pining for the frozen familiarity of the Old Country. Indeed, sometimes the only thing that kept me from deserting - I suppose I could have asked my folks to call me home on a family emergency - was that another Montrealer in my squad had already pulled that stunt.

Patrolling the northern border on the back of a half-track, I'd keep awake by humming my way through Lightfoot's massive oeuvre while reliving past meals at Moishe's, Schwartz's, the House of Wong and Tasty Foods. When that grew tired, I'd count Fairmount bagels. Speaking French to Lebanese nationals, I discovered a facility for the language I never manifested while living in Quebec and taking after-school and summer joe-jobs at St. Hubert BBQ. It was a hoot.

A few years later, as an officer in the paratroops corps, I would crawl home from Lebanon, peel off my boots, scrape off my "gatkes," toss my mini-Galil assault rifle under the bed and, shaking myself out of a stupor at 2 a.m. with almost lemming-like aplomb, pull a Coffee Crisp out of the freezer and tune in to the CBC Northern Service on shortwave. One night, I even heard Rick Diubaldo, who had taught me Canadian history at Concordia, expounding on Arctic exploration. He later told me he couldn't believe it either.

Sometimes, I'd even (when I ran into them) chat up the Canadians serving in the UN. That is, until a disgruntled corporal told me, over a Maccabee beer in Metulla, that Hitler had obviously not done an adequate job of ridding the world of my ilk. Maddened by this encounter with garden-variety Canadian anti-Semitism in a Jewish state, no less, I bopped him on the head with the butt of my 9mm Beretta, and took off before starting an international incident.

After serving as pallbearer for a dozen or so 19- and 20-year- old kids, I guess I was simply burning out on the novelty of combat. News of failing cod stocks in Newfoundland, or whatever passed for tragedy in Canada then, proved oddly comforting. And who could resist the first half-hour of As It Happens? I fantasized about returning to Canada as the conquering hero, and taking up the dream job of writing the "radio that knows the difference between falafel and baba ghanouj" tags that began each show.

But there may also have been an element of studied defiance - we called it "davka," Hebrew for "just like that!" - in this unseemly, ahem, renewal of neurotic affiliations.

Because it is so small, nearly everything that happens in Israel affects you, or people you know. In time, every newscast becomes a personal affront, every dollop of bad news, cause for despair. A bomb explodes. A new tax is imposed. One Israeli calls another one a Nazi. The government is deadlocked, inflation hits new heights, Knesset members behave rudely, the United States is putting its foot down, this one's a Jew, this one isn't, the whole world's against us, and let's not even talk about Arafat, Assad, and the rest of them.

There was simply no escaping the abrasive smog of "aktualia" - the daily grind and drama of life in a cramped and tiny pressure- cooker of a country nestled in one of the nastier parts of the world. I liked the country well enough, but I grew to resent being unable to tune any of it out. Listening to the CBC at odd hours might have been a bid to refocus my commandeered attention.

Leaving the army after the Lebanon War for a career in journalism didn't resolve matters. A week out of Lebanon and uniform, I was asked to return as a military correspondent for a local magazine. Now required to read four or five Hebrew newspapers each day on top of everything else, I became a news junkie even as I found myself contemplating taking a hockey stick to my TV.

Later still, as a feature writer with a wife, child and apartment near Tel Aviv, a day job at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, and a seat at the night desk of Jerusalem Post, I would crash two or three times a week at the Jerusalem apartment of fellow Post employee "Scrabble" Sam Orbaum.

A Chomedey bocher who, on special occasions, could be counted on to dole out mono-filament-thick slivers of frozen Schwartz's smoked meat with dollops of mustard in pita, "Scrab" would hurl Harmonium onto the turntable, toss me a tuque (in winter his bachelor digs were damp and drafty) and regale me with a play-by-play re-creation of the 1972 Canada-Soviet series, which he was appalled to learn I had slept through because of mono.

Although I was fluent in Hebrew, married to an Israeli girl and assigned to an interesting reserve unit and I retained several of my mates from officer school as close friends, I couldn't write Hebrew well enough to be published in the major papers, and never really would.

English-language journalism clearly was not a growth industry in the Jewish state, and worse, having been assigned interviews with visiting celebs like Elliott Gould and Jean Beliveau, I wanted to write about show biz. By this time, though, my parents, my brother and sister had all moved to Los Angeles. I thought about settling down in Toronto or Vancouver. But having seen McKenna of the Mounties, my wife didn't fancy hitting the Caribou Trail and playing the sabra Jeanette MacDonald to my Nelson Eddy.

Pregnant with our second child, she insisted we move near family and preferably somewhere warm. My father had undergone naturalization, so we headed for Hollywood.

The irony, I suppose, is that having departed Israel for more lucrative and substantial writing markets, I now spend a good chunk of my time writing about things Israeli and Jewish for the Israeli media. I do, however, get to pick the brains of famous people, and have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Premiere and Entertainment Weekly. And I have managed to fit this entire gamut of activity into a uniquely hybrid CalCan/Canaanite lifestyle - one happily bereft, I might add, of many of the downsides of having actually to dwell in just one of these places.

There are about 600,000 Canadians living in Southern California, and maybe 200,000 Israelis. On those rare occasions when I decide to get out of the house, there is no lack of "lansmen" from either country (although sometimes I've been known to go slumming - "oy" - with Yanks).

On Israeli Independence Day, I can head for the buffet line at the consular reception in Westwood, catch Hava Albersterstein or Matti Caspi at the Veterans Wadsworth Theatre, or attend a bash thrown by one of my Israeli friends. On Canada Day, I can check out a Highland band at the annual picnic held near the Police Academy, scoff a smoked meat sandwich at Weiller's Deli, quaff a couple of bottles of Moosehead from Trader Joe's, and maybe sit in the Right Honourable Kim Campbell's always "haimish" kitchen noshing on dainties and kvetching to her man Hershey Felder about the heat.

The rest of the year, I lead a virtual multicultural life as a proud and patriotic Canuck Hebe with a maxed-out credit card and a fast modem.

I subscribe to Maclean's and Saturday Night, Ha'aretz and Yediot and Actualite. I order the latest Beauchemin or Oz, Richler or Yehoshua over the Net. I monitor Webcasts from Israel and Iqaluit, Jordan and Saint-Jerome, Syria and Saint-Sauveur. And my daily regimen of newspapers now includes The Gazette, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, not to mention the New York Times, L.A. Times, the Times of London and, of course, Variety.

If I feel a need to press the flesh, moreover, I can catch Celine and Sarah and Gord, or Kate and Anna and Bruce at the Greek or Universal or House of Blues; schmooze Norm and Allan or Jim and Bill while starstruck valets bring our cars to us outside the Grill or Spago's or Le Dome (none of them are ever impressed by my 10-year- old Accord); write the infrequent op-ed piece on whither Canada or Israel or Hollywood for the L.A. Times; travel to the Arctic or the West Bank or Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and Germany courtesy of Wired and some of the other magazines that buy my writing, and manage to get on the wrong side of world figures like Franjo Tudjman, Slobodan Milosevic, Leah Rabin and a few others I'm now afraid to mention.

Of course, I never ever lend my passports, or even my green card, to anyone. When editing a U.S. government newsletter, as I do to subsidize my other activities, I even take a fair amount of flak for having not yet naturalized, thereby trading in my alarmingly red "Foreign National" badge for a more sedate green one.

I certainly haven't made a big deal of the fact that I used to know Victor Ostrovsky when he was in the navy and I was a foot soldier and we both worked on the same sci-fi magazine in our spare time. In fact, I've been advised not to advertise my Israeli background at all. It's bad enough I have to cop to being a Canadian.

I do, of course, still try to keep my hand on the pulse of traffic in as many places as I can. And when nothing else delivers that warm, fuzzy feeling I get living with one foot in three different countries - or when tectonic plates begin to shift underfoot and threaten to bring this complex meta-universe I have created down about my ears - well, there's always the hot tub.