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Books: The Writer after 9/11
Netty C. Gross
American novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet came to Israel to teach -- and learned what�s different about writers here, and how to admire Israelis� �erotic awareness of death�
From his swivel chair in the center of a gray-walled classroom, novelist Melvin Jules Bukiet asks Ruth Sorrell to read selections from her short story. Sorrell, 31 and South-African born, with pale complexion, black hair, and panicked expression, is enrolled in the graduate-level creative-writing program at Bar-Ilan University, billed as the world�s only master of arts program in Jewish creative writing.
Thin, balding, clad in white shirt and loose tie, eyeglasses worn low on the nose, Bukiet, 45, is an essayist, critic, author of five works of fiction -- the last, "Strange Fire," is a satirical thriller set in Israel -- and editor of two anthologies. Though not quite a Jewish literary household name, Bukiet, son of a Holocaust survivor, has sufficient celebrity to get his views (passionately Jewish, secular, left-wing on Israel) published on The New York Times op-ed page; his novels are widely reviewed and have won prizes. He is the program�s first visiting professor, on leave from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where he teaches creative writing.
As it happens, there is no Jewish content in Sorrell�s quirky but straight-faced tale about a 7-foot 3-inch, 12-year-old girl and her nudniky mother, who, distraught over her gigantic daughter�s disastrous social life, steals to pay for custom-made clothes. By contrast, the next story, by Briana Simon, a commercial writer in her 50s from a moshav in central Israel, with flushed cheeks and black head covering, is a passionately Jewish-Israeli saga. Brooding chemist and Talmudic scholar Eli wants to rid his moshav of its elderly and too-Orthodox rabbi and shut down his illegally built yeshivah. Instead he wants the snazzier Jonathan to be rabbi. Eli�s agitation splits the moshav, contributes to his divorce from Rivkah, and forces his best friend, Yisrael, to relocate to a socially tranquil West Bank settlement. And all that is before the story really gets going.
The Bar-Ilan program was born in the summer of 2000, during a chance conversation between Dr. Shaindy Rudoff, who teaches literature at the university, and a former dean of humanities, Ranon Katzoff. Rudoff says the original concept envisioned attracting overseas Jews who enjoy writing fiction or poetry and who wanted to do so in an environment where "their Jewishness" could be expressed freely. But none came. Instead 18 immigrants (all from English-speaking countries) and one native Israeli, enrolled -- 11 in the fiction-writing track; eight in poetry. Each paid $4,000 in tuition for the one-year program, which offers an MA in English.
Requirements include three writing workshops, in which students must produce a "body" of poems or short stories, or a short novel; three literature seminars; and (it being Bar-Ilan) a Jewish arts seminar consisting of lectures by visiting Israeli artists (writers Aharon Appelfeld and Michal Govrin were particularly popular).
The program marked the end of a successful first year by holding a mid-May conference, "Creative Texts, Jewish Contexts," that also was intended to attract a fresh crop of students. The three-day event drew standing-room-only audiences to lectures by such writers as Rebecca Goldstein, Aryeh Lev Stollman and Pearl Abrahams (see box, page 42).
Back in the classroom, Bukiet asks for comments on the stories. Sorrell nervously takes notes as her fellow students gently critique the piece. Opinions on the giant-child motif are divided. Julie, munching a cucumber, thinks the mother "is in denial" about her daughter�s freakish height. "Why aren�t basketball coaches knocking on her door?" asks Jonathan. "Or modeling agencies?" For Chana, however, "it all flowed beautifully. "
Bukiet shapes their comments into a coherent literary critique. He also tries to tease out some buried complexity from the characters. The giant girl, for example, he suggests, undergoes a "scarily dehumanizing and de-feminizing" process.
The class is tougher on Simon�s second story. Once again, she has written about her moshav. Chana acknowledges that Eli is a complex character, but says there are "too many conflicts"; Temimah thinks Rivkah "needs more of a voice"; Ruth wonders if something isn�t wrong with the "motion of the story." Bukiet: The "narrative links may be missing," and the plot may be moving too quickly, but he rather likes the combination of the "external political drama and the internal romantic drama." Simon, for her part, beams.
At the break, a chain-smoking Bukiet tells me that his students -- "young writers" he calls them, with affection, even though several are older than he is -- are, perhaps with the exception of Sorrell, churning out stories "anchored in this place." (Earlier, Julie Baretz, 41, an out-of-work tour guide living in Jerusalem, formerly of Nyack, New York, told me that she�s writing an intifada novel about an out-of-work tour guide who brokers a deal to sell Palestinian sperm to a Jew; Jonathan Elkins, 35, a single man who moved here from Rochester a decade ago, and who is a news broadcaster on Israel TV�s English-language service, is writing about three Canadian Jewish immigrants and their adventures with "Palestinian babes.")
Bukiet says he understands this perfectly. His Bar-Ilan immigrant students "transformed their lives by an act of will and are amazed by their own presence here. �Place� is at the forefront." By contrast, his Sarah Lawrence students "take �place� for granted; it tends to be the backdrop." Another striking difference: His U.S. students last year didn�t turn in a single story about 9/11, which happened to be the first day of class in 2001.
"Fiction is a refuge for my American students," says Bukiet. "Here? Suicide bombs come up constantly. Sometimes it�s used as a plot pivot, sometimes as a shorthand way of communicating despair. The unrealistic has become quite realistic." In fact, he adds, his Israeli students gave him the inspiration that enabled him to achieve a breakthrough on his own new epic novel, in which the island of Manhattan is the narrator, a voice that "loves its people." Before he came here, Bukiet says, he couldn�t get the island to "talk" about 9/11; now it has. He�s also working on his first non-fiction book, based on his semester here.
Though Rudoff says it wasn�t a criterion for inviting him, Bukiet is one of only a handful of American Jewish writers whose fiction includes references to Israel or Israeli characters. His last novel, "Strange Fire," is about a blind, gay, Russian immigrant speech writer who is injured in an assassination attempt on the Israeli prime minister and then becomes embroiled in a wacky international intrigue.
Bukiet has an explanation: In the past, American Jewish writers (he excludes such "one-dimensional" figures as Leon Uris) were "outsiders," preoccupied with issues of "acculturation" into American life. The empowered, brawny, sovereign Jew, he says, was not part of the local landscape: "There was no room for Moshe Dayan." New Jewish writers such as himself are "freed of these social obligations," and can be more open about Jewishness. "Israel has also come off the pedestal."
ONE PUSH FOR BUKIET TO ACcept Bar-Ilan�s invitation was provided by the "personal stuff." Born and raised in New York City, Bukiet grew up knowing that his father and uncle were the sole survivors of a large Orthodox family from Krakow; his father lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald; his uncle, the Plaszow and Mauthausen camps. Bukiet is mesmerized by the brothers� passion for one another. "If my primary identity relationship is being a �father,� theirs is being �brothers.�"
He says that the two even share a checking account.
Six years ago, he tells me, 27 members of the Bukiet clan traveled on "a magical misery tour" to Poland, adding sarcastically that "one terrible consequence of that trip was that my wife, Jill, turned kosher. She felt the weight of Jewish history on her shoulders and started requesting fish."
The couple belong to a Conservative synagogue but Bukiet describes himself as "very far from observance." Israel however is another story. Bukiet has sharp criticism for American Jews who express support for Israel but won�t visit. "It�s a very patronizing attitude, frankly." (He admits however to "banning" Jill, a lawyer, from visiting him in Tel Aviv during the semester because he didn�t think a couple with three children should "be here at the same time." He threatened to leave for Greece if she showed up; she did; he stayed.)
Bukiet was also drawn to Israel in part because of 9/11, because Israel is, "after all, the cosmic flash point." Bukiet says September 11 was the "single worst day of my life." The event moved him sharply to the political right on world politics. Unlike most of his colleagues in academe, he says, he supported the war in Iraq.
According to Bukiet, "what�s going on isn�t a battle between Islam and the West but a human conflict between what Freud describes as a battle between the forces toward life, eros, versus the forces toward death." Islam, he goes on, provided the context, "but in his soul, Osama Bin Laden is a deeply nihilistic, death-loving guy." And whereas there have always been, he says, "Jack the Rippers killing teenagers in garages," the new danger is posed by the extraordinary access which the death-seekers have to weapons of mass destruction. "There�s a sense that Los Alamos can be found in the family attic these days, everyone has it; everyone�s doing it." He adds, with resignation, "This is the war of the rest of our lives. The death forces won 9/11; we won Iraq. So far we�re tied."
Hawkish as he may be on world politics, Bukiet says he has moved "sharply left" on Israel. He feels the semester here has liberated him from the constraints felt by most American Jews in espousing political opinions. "Maybe the Palestinians will only be content when they have all of Israel," he muses, "maybe the rules have unfairly changed on Israel, but there�s no choice: The settlements, which are the source of irritation, have to go." Despite the suicide bombers, Bukiet is convinced the average Palestinian is not Mohammed Atta, "not yet. Genuine peace depends on their prosperity. The Palestinians need to have all those stupid modern icons of culture that the Israelis have and love, the multiplexes, water parks. Israel needs to be Hong Kong, the funnel point for the erotic, life-force impulses to counter the culture of death."
Isn�t it hypocritical, I ask, to be a hawk when it comes to your own security but a dove on Israel�s? "No, because Israel�s problem has a concrete political solution. America�s doesn�t."
"People here," he observes admiringly, "their coping mechanism, it�s just... well, miraculous." He describes how one morning during the Iraq war he noticed a pigtailed schoolgirl carrying a gas-mask box decorated with pink glitter and magic-markered hearts and ponies. "She had made her f---ing gas-mask box pretty, she was taming the horrible. It was the bluntest, most erotic awareness of death." The edginess, he goes on, the "life-death thing, the Israeli habit to reach for the cell phone and call a child seconds after a
bomb goes off, to ask, �Are you alive?� -- it�s terrible, but it�s incredibly life-affirming. There�s an intensity here, a passion to make every second worth it." (The thousands of missing-people flyers that blanketed New York after the Towers came down, were, he says, oddly life-affirming too. "Everyone knew these people were dead. Three thousand people weren�t walking around with amnesia. The flyers were little fictions hoping to inscribe loved ones into life, to keep them alive just a little longer.")
Can an Israeli creative-writing program in English survive? Rudoff says the university is committed; enrollment is "slightly down" for next year, she says, but the conference has succeeded in attracting additional applicants.
Bukiet wonders aloud if the concept isn�t too narrow, if the program ought to drop the vague "Jewish" bit (Israeli writers, for example, aren�t even writing Jewish fiction but are "completely obsessed with daily domesticity," he says). Still, he believes, "there is a place for good fiction written by the immigrant American voice living in Israel," and says that Rudoff deserves credit for launching the program amid war and cutbacks. "The message is that we can still make sentences. We still care to give pleasure to each other, through words."
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