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

stayed and not fled during the 1948 war, and so became Israeli citizens. I needed an Arab boy for a pen pal like I needed an outbreak of acne. I wasn’t too impressed by the males in my Arab girlfriends’ families. Their brothers seemed spoiled to me. And I preferred my own father’s benign detachment to the stifling presence of their fathers, always hovering and anxious, outside the most staid of parties or school functions.

When my father talked of the Arabs he’d met in the Middle East, it was mainly as figures of fun. His imitation of an Egyptian pimp’s sales pitch—“Nice girls, very cleeeen, very hygieeeen”—was delivered with the stooped, cringing posture that is a classic of the better-recognized brand of anti-Semitism. He had taught me some Arabic he picked up in Egypt: I knew how to say “Ana miskeen [I’m poor]” when I wanted to weasel out of paying for something, and “Malesh [It doesn’t matter]” when I’d botched a task or made a mess.

Leon Uris’s prose on the subject, meanwhile, took ethnic slurs to lofty heights. Mishal lived in Nazareth, a place described in some detail in Exodus when the Zionist hero Ari Ben Canaan takes the American nurse, Kitty Fremont, on a road trip:

They drove through the timeless Arab villages into the fertile carpet of the Jezreel Valley, which the Jews had turned from swamp into the finest farmland in the Middle East. As the road wound out of the Jezreel towards Nazareth again they moved backwards in time. On one side of the hill the lush lands of the Jezreel and on the other, the sun-baked, dried-out, barren fields of the Arabs.… Nazareth stank. The streets were littered with dung and blind beggars made wretched noises and barefoot, ragged, filthy children were underfoot. Flies were everywhere. Kitty held Ari’s arm tightly as they wound through the bazaar and to a place alleged to be Mary’s kitchen and Joseph’s carpenter shop.

Kitty was baffled as they drove from Nazareth: it was a dreadful place.

“At least the Arabs are friendly,” Ari said. “They are Christians.”

“They are Christians who need a bath.”

I didn’t think any of this would be much help in constructing an appropriate reply to Mishal: “Had any baths lately? I hear you have a lot of dung in Nazareth.” Still, there had to be a reply; pen-pal etiquette demanded it. This went beyond manners into the realm of superstition. To fail to answer a pen-pal letter was to invite the same dose of bad luck as walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella indoors. The only way out of an unwanted correspondence was to keep replies cool, dull and brief, and to delay sending them in the hope that in the long interregnum the other party would lose interest. I crafted something suitable, and let it sit on my desk for weeks.

Meanwhile, I wrote away again to the pen-pal service, asking for another Israeli. I resisted the impulse to scrawl “Send me a goddamn Jew!” across my application. Instead, to make myself perfectly clear, I added “Judaism” to my list of interests.

Mishal’s next letter arrived in no time. Undaunted by my brief note, he’d responded with a lengthy three and a half closely written pages. This was almost unheard of in the early stages of pen-friendship, especially from a correspondent writing in his third language. (Like all Israeli Arabs, Mishal was fluent in Hebrew as well as Arabic.) Also, he’d enclosed a one-shekel coin, which thrilled me, and a postcard of the Cathedral of the Annunciation, which looked depressingly like St. Mary’s Concord. Mishal wrote of Nazareth’s pilgrims and ancient churches. Living in a Jewish state and on top of a Christian pilgrimage site made religion a defining part of his life.

My father’s stubborn failure to convert to Catholicism had hastened the unraveling of my own faith. As time passed and no conversion appeared to be in the offing, it came to seem extremely unfair to me that a decent bloke like Daddy was doomed to eternal torment. By the time I reached high school, I’d just about had it with the arrogant local priests who were so sure about who God had time for. Darleen, my role model in all matters, had already begun to have Doubts.

When Pope Paul issued the encyclical banning birth control, it was my casus belli. I leaped to my feet in religion class and delivered myself of a Martin Lutheresque denunciation of the Church. A wise and humorous woman named Sister Gabriella taught the class. She also coached me in the debating team, and had befriended me in a way I’d never expected from a teacher, much less a nun. She handled my apostasy as she did a poorly prepared debate speech, astutely critiquing the flaws in the development of my argument and pointing out obvious openings for rebuttal. Then, to my surprise, she moved smoothly on with the day’s class topic, the Catholic concept of reincarnation, as if the whole edifice of Rome hadn’t just been shaken to its foundations.

Mishal lived in a place where religion couldn’t be given away like an outgrown suit. In Israel, to be a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim permanently defined both status and prospects. As a Christian, he was part of the majority in Nazareth, but he became a minority every time he left the city.

Yet he seemed at home in the Jewish state. Despite his shaky grammar, he wrote of the beauty of Jerusalem’s Old City, the constant flow of pilgrims in Nazareth, the modern vitality of Tel Aviv. “I know that you like the life in the kibbutz, and indeed the life in the kibbutz is very nice. There are a big hall to eat in and it is like the socialist life. Everyone works on the farm and in the fields.” He added glimpses of his own life—his flute and guitar lessons, his large family—“I have five brothers and one sister. The number of sisters is equal in