INNOCENT ABROAD
Mordecai Richler came and saw Israel - but wasn't conquered by it
This Year in Jerusalem, by Mordecai Richler. Alfred A. Knopf; 293 pp.; $ 23.
The first time I interviewed Mordecai Richler, in 1984, I had a hard time getting him to discuss Israel. He had visited in 1962. But the country confounded him. He couldn't understand how one political leader could have asked him to move his base of operations from London to Israel. Mostly, Richler couldn't fathom why anyone could make such a big deal of the place.
Thirty years later, Richler returned to Zion for a second look around. The visit doesn't appear to have enhanced his appreciation of the country. After a two-month stay, he still doesn't quite know what to make of it. But this time, his befuddlement didn't leave him so reticent.
As travelogues go, "This Year in Jerusalem," Richler's account of his visit, has a wackier starting point than anything I've seen in the genre since Mark Twain showed up in Jerusalem in the 1860s looking for a 5-star hotel. It's a look at Israel through the eyes of a Canadian visiting other Canadians who gave up a berth by the mighty St. Lawrence River for another west of the trickling Jordan. And this makes it a bit of a sideshow of a sideshow, a search for insight among sources whose perspectives are unlikely to be representative.
As a teenager in the mid-1940s, Richler joined the socialist-Zionist Habonim youth movement. Its major attraction seems to have been the potential it held for the occasional feel copped from young women who might be counted on to take pity on a future kibbutz comrade. But, in 1952, when Richler dropped out of Sir George Williams University in Montreal, he headed not for Kfar Blum but for Paris. He ended up in England, soaking up sophistication for 20 years before returning to Canada.
Several of his Habonim mates, however, and some relatives, settled in Israel. On this trip, Richler decided to track them all down. Indeed, by the end of his stay, he appears to have located nearly every ex-Montrealer who ever left the Great White North for the Promised Land.
The only non-landsman types who do appear in this book are those intellectuals, cab drivers, bartenders and other background extras Richler chanced upon during his sojourn - these, and the people Richler culled mostly from the pages of The Jerusalem Post. The Post feeds Richler's penchant for the absurd while gleefully providing him with the almost pornographic descriptions of terror incidents he uses to frame the accounts of his encounters
and reminiscences. By doing this, Richler makes the not-so-subtle case that life back home is obviously more civilized, gracious and less taxing upon flesh and psyche. As he writes toward the book's end: "I was raised to proffer apologies because my ostensibly boring country was so short of history, but now, after five weeks in a land choked by the clinging vines of its past, a victim of its contrary mythologies, I considered the watery soup of my Canadian provenance a blessing."
Where the book soars, it is in Richler's comic portraits of a triumvirate of pals from his St. Urbain Street days in Montreal's Jewish ghetto circa World War II. One of them is a thief who not only rips off the Habonim pushke, la Woody Allen, but returns decades later to loot a friend's silverware too. It's vintage Richler territory, and no doubt contributed to the book's having become Canada's No. 1 best seller in recent weeks.
Unfortunately, Richler paints the ones who, like himself, stayed behind with more color than the ones who took the idea of aliyah seriously. The weary and seemingly humorless old socialists Richler visits in "This Year in Jerusalem" built their state according to the principle of "another goat, another dunam." Most admitted to him they never got the kind of country they had hoped for. And though most insisted they had something to show for the effort, Richler is largely incapable of seeing beyond the tacky furniture in their homes and the bad food on their kibbutz tables.
As a consequence, his book ends up offering as much insight into what life in Israel is really like as one might find in a portrait of Southern California as seen through the eyes of expatriate Newfoundland fishermen. As for its form, "This Year in Jerusalem" is a mess, really, a lumpy stew in which autobiographical tidbits rub up against jaded and surprisingly incoherent journalism.
When another Montreal native, Saul Bellow, undertook a similar stint in Israel, the result was the thoughtful memoir "To Jerusalem and Back." But when Richler piles his bits of reportorial cod on the racks to dry into something approaching a point of view, what we are left with in the end is the reek of fish turning nasty in the sun.
Reading a book I badly wanted to like, I began to understand why so many French Quebecois head for their bunkers every time Richler publishes a portrait of his native Quebec. In his Quebec essays, Richler poses as the insider whose Jewishness and caustic disposition render him outrageous enough to provide the straight goods about life in La Belle Province. But as you progress through the material, you begin to realize that Richler's idea of reporting is to sift through clippings from the Montreal Gazette, the Canadian Jewish News and the like. Or to hang out at the three or so bars he favors.
Unfortunately for Richler, whereas few of his U.S. readers may know or care enough about Quebec to notice his sloth, few places have been as extensively mapped out as Israel. And even when relying on previously published material, Richler sometimes gets it wrong. Not necessarily the big things. But when enough of the smaller ones run awry, you begin to suspect just how badly the entire portrait may be askew.
Referring, for example, to Israeli journalist Matti Golan's book, "With Friends Like You: What Israelis Really Think about American Jews," Richler bemoans Golan's "insatiable appetite for Diaspora funding." But Golan's thesis is the opposite: that any such funding is too much for Israel's own good.
And there's something irritating about reading a vignette of Hebron Rabbi Moshe Levinger, another example of the kind of Jewish nut cases Richler would have you believe Israel breeds or attracts to the exclusion of normal folks, when the author didn't even go to the trouble to meet Levinger, relying exclusively on journalistic descriptions of him.
"This Year in Jerusalem" has its moments. Mostly, though, it barrages the reader with a jumble of images reminiscent of the bizarre bar mitzvah movie Duddy Kravitz premiered to dumbfounded patrons in the 1974 film adaptation of Richler's early novel. Unlike Duddy, though, I don't think Richler will find many people pretentious enough to pronounce this particular venture a masterpiece.