Someone making a film of Kitty’s life could well call it “The
Birds.” They give her no peace. Mainly at early morning or at dusk,
when they make an agitated din from the trees in the courtyard, but
at other times of day too when there are likely to be a few
flitting around out there, they give her a spectacle from her
window-ledge seat that fascinates, frustrates, and addicts her.
It has to do — I infer from her expression and body language —
with the chutzpah of these small creatures who presume to exist,
and even to move rapidly, outside the range of her fangs and claws.
Sometimes one of the big wagtails even seems to shout at her from a
safe perch, and Kitty answers with a strange, harsh sound she makes
by quivering her jaw. It’s an ongoing “dialogue” and it has no
resolution.
So I cannot say the scene in the apartment, even at earliest
morning, is one of peace, with the birds in their uproar and Kitty
watching them in her predatory derision. That includes me. An early
riser, I’m likely to be awake at this hour too, but no more in
peaceful reverie than Kitty is. Instead I’m likely to be a few
meters away from her on the sofa, bent over the morning paper. It
arrives all too early, around the time the first bird starts
peeping, and I can’t ignore its presence down there in the mailbox
any more than Kitty can ignore that sparrow flitting from branch to
branch.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I was very
attentive to the peace of morning and perceived much serenity in
the world. Though already interested in politics, I was more into
poetry and loved the nature passages in Wordsworth and Whitman. I
would have considered it blasphemy to read a newspaper at such an
hour, at least deferring all that grayness to the profane time of
the workday.
But politics came after me. There was too much news from Israel
for me to live peacefully in upstate New York. What was I doing,
reading Faulkner, writing short stories that seemed to be in an
American tradition, while “my people” were under siege over there?
It seemed I was living in two worlds. One I associated more with
land, greenery, and artistic creativity, the other more with moral
intensity. But if I opted for the latter, what would happen to the
former? What would happen to me as a writer if I left my linguistic
and cultural roots behind for a little, distant place that called
to me mainly from the pages of newspapers and political
magazines?
My fears were, of course, exactly right. I began, in the Holy
Land, to lose touch with my old mainstays, that endlessly spreading
land that evoked such lovely words from its poets and fiction
writers. In Israel too, of course, there’s a land and beauty and
poets and fiction writers, but unless you know Hebrew from a young
age you can’t connect with it in the same way. It was a gradual
process; for years I kept writing my short stories in English, but
they became more abstract and symbolic and weren’t getting much
attention, and meanwhile I was doing more and more of a different
kind of writing, a kind that’s mired in political and moral
urgencies, more likely to come from agitation than from “emotion
recollected in tranquility.”
“No no no, no peace I find” — it was an American artist, Ray
Charles, who used to sing that, swinging his head down fiercely to
the right as if to hammer home the words. You can come to Israel
for many things, but peace isn’t likely to be one of them. Yet
we’re doing fine, Kitty and me; she with her birds, I with my
morning paper, we’re incorrigibly engaged with the world, in no
danger at all of apathy and malaise. You can already see, in the
morning scene, that our respective obsessions will get us through
this day and many other days. Instead of all that burden of the
past, we live — though for her it’s less of an achievement — in
the intensities of the present.
