Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

There was no way to short-circuit one of these diatribes. To interrupt was simply to refocus his anger on oneself. By the day after, he would have forgotten everything he’d said. The positive side to his amnesia was that it taught us not to take his abuse to heart. The negative side was that the whole argument could be rerun dozens of times, often word for word. That was how it was with the “Star Trek” introduction. If my father had been drinking, the words “The final frontier” would be like the bell to Pavlov’s dog. He would thunder, “It isn’t, you know!” And off he would go again on his tirade. Eventually, we made a joke out of it, competing to see who could be quickest to get out the words “It isn’t, you know.” My father would look at us with a puzzled expression, murmur, “Too bloody right,” and wander off to find a mis-hung tea towel to complain about.

These alcohol-induced tempers were the unscourable residue of my father’s earlier self, a small untidy corner in what had become an otherwise orderly life. One or two of them were the blight on each otherwise tranquil week.

But for six days in June 1967, the belligerent stranger didn’t appear at the door at all. Instead, my father arrived home early every night, anxious to catch the headlines on the six o’clock news. Afterward, he spread the evening papers on his bed and pored over the maps inside. Tiny Israel was at war, and he cared passionately.

That meant I cared too. Unlike my mother, who could enter a child’s world with ease and spend comfortable hours there, my father could only deal with us as miniature adults. His strange, sad childhood had left him with no detailed pattern of fatherhood to follow. I learned that if I wanted to talk to him it was easier to follow his adult interests wherever they might lead. Sometimes it was the shade of a sprawling fig tree by the cricket pitch where he managed the local under-sixteen team. Gritting my teeth to keep from yawning through the interminable games, I learned to mark the score card and toss off phrases like “caught at deep fine leg” and “bowled a maiden over.”

Those odd, colorful expressions were all I really liked about the game. I hated sports. Being sick for so long had left me unathletic and poorly coordinated. All through primary school I was the second slowest runner in every race, able to beat only the little girl in my class who had Down syndrome.

So, when my father’s attention wandered from the crease at the cricket ground to a volcanic plateau called the Golan Heights, I was only too happy to follow him there.

He was a convert to the Zionist dream. Serving in Palestine in World War II, the socialist in him had fallen in love with the idea of the kibbutz. His California family, transplanted East Coast WASPs named Ithamar and Winthrop, with roots going back to the American Revolutionary War, had been garden-variety anti-Semites. His own experience in Hollywood had exposed him to all the conspiracy theories of Jews controlling press, pictures, radio and finance. But the unexamined prejudices with which he grew up couldn’t long survive his encounters with the swamp-draining, poverty-embracing Jewish pioneers. These Jews were underdogs, and my father naturally gravitated to their cause.

“What did we see in Palestine?” he wrote in a wartime letter to an Australian friend. “We saw acres of barren, badly cultivated land, suddenly studded with some glorious green oasis rife with all manner of growing things, a jewel of productiveness in the midst of a wasteland. This would be a Jewish community farm, inhabited by Jews from every part of the world, living, working together happily, harmoniously; generous and friendly to outsiders, and in very few ways resembling the palm-rubbing, money-grubbing, successful Jew we know and so often despise in our own setting.”

During that week in 1967, I peered over his shoulder at the newspaper maps as he traced the progress of the fighting for me, describing the geography of the Sinai Peninsula and the Jordan Valley. It was the first time I had paid attention to anything in the newspapers beyond the comics. For six days my head was full of the kibbutznik children huddled in shelters as the Syrian mortars rained down. When Israel won, we celebrated.

From then on, I read Leon Uris and Anne Frank, learned Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” by heart and ostentatiously hauled around a dog-eared copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Eventually I took to wearing a Star of David to school, much to the consternation of the nuns.

With the same intensity I had expended on becoming Mr. Spock and recreating the bridge of the Enterprise in the school playground, I decided I would become a Jew and move to Israel. To practice for my new life on the kibbutz, I cultivated my mother’s modest vegetable garden to the point of soil erosion and designed an ambitious tree-planting campaign to drain our desiccated backyard’s nonexistent swamp.

One problem in my scheme seemed insurmountable, though. I had never met a Jew. I had hoped that Joannie might be Jewish, but when I wrote to her about my growing Israel obsession, her reply had been disappointing. “I have read both ‘Mila 18’ and ‘Exodus’. I enjoyed (if that’s the word) them both, even though my last year’s history teacher insists that if anyone can’t write it’s Leon Uris. As for support of either Arab or Israelis, I suppose that I support Israel, although there’s right and wrong on both sides. I don’t have any allegiance to Israel because I’m not Jewish, but many of my friends who are consider Israel rather than the USA to be their true homeland. I don’t really blame them; I’d rather be almost anything than an American.…”

Right and wrong on both sides! Stunned by my pen pal’s victimization by Arab propaganda,