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

Living in Israel, she was part of what was perhaps the most plugged-in community on earth. To Israelis, world news was like oxygen. From dangerous neighbors to foreign patrons, there was barely a corner of the planet whose doings were irrelevant.

But, for me, Sydney felt much more globally connected than most American cities. The United States can afford to be insular. It’s so big that what happens elsewhere hardly ever matters much. How else to explain the lack of foreign stories on the nightly network news, or the certain social death of being introduced at a cocktail party as someone “just back from Bosnia” or Somalia or, God help you, Eritrea? Suddenly you’re trying to converse with someone who appears to be in a stand-up, eyes-open form of deep REM sleep. The mouth gapes soundlessly while the eyeballs dart and spin in search of someone else—anyone else—to talk to.

In Sydney, immigration has been so recent, so diverse, and so extensive that a person you meet at a party may well be from Bosnia or Eritrea, or their next-door neighbor might be. In the 1991 census, Sydney people listed 271 places of birth outside Australia, or 86 more places than have seats in the United Nations. More than a quarter of the population still speaks a language other than English at home. Israel now is the only country whose population is more culturally diverse, measured by inhabitants’ countries of origin.

Cohen called my room promptly at two. I hurried downstairs but couldn’t find him by the desk or in the plush lobby. I noticed a man outside on the step, fidgeting. He looked like a taxi driver waiting for a fare. It took awhile until I realized there was no one else who could possibly be Cohen.

He was medium height, thick-set, olive-skinned, with dark curly hair and Ray-Bans. Not Mossad, I decided. Maybe more the shadowy furtive style of a Shin Bet internal security agent. When I greeted him, he seemed edgy. He wouldn’t come into the hotel; refused my offer of lunch or a drink. “Let’s walk,” he said, and so we wandered off down the hotel-lined promenade.

He pointed out his car, a battered blue sedan, parked a few blocks from the hotel. He opened the door and we sat inside, and tried to fill a gap that for me was twenty-four years wide, and that for him, with no memory of having ever written to me, spanned a whole lifetime.

“My mother was very confused when you called her,” he said. “I’m confused, too.” He remembered nothing of our correspondence, and was stunned when I put his old letters in his hands. “I can’t write English so good anymore,” he said. He chuckled as he skimmed through the letters with their relentless talk of football. He still played, he said, one night each week.

We picked up his story where the correspondence left off. Cohen had left school and joined the army the year after we stopped writing. He was in an artillery unit when the Yom Kippur War broke out. During the war’s swift and brutal course, he crossed the Sinai. It was all the risk or adventure he ever craved. Forget Mossad and Shin Bet. After the army, he went to work as a teller in a bank, and he had been there ever since.

As the afternoon sun beat on the car, I felt sweat running down my face in tiny rivulets. But gradually, in his halting English, Cohen began to tell me the things he’d never put in his letters.

He was the son of parents who had been part of one of Israel’s most dramatic immigrations. They were Yemenite Jews, descendants of the community thought to have arrived in the mountainous toe of the Arabian Peninsula around the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Cohen’s parents were brought to Israel in the emergency airlift after the 1948 Independence War. In 1949, Yemen was still a medieval society of mud-brick houses ruled by an imam who wanted to protect his people from the corruption of modern life. There were no cars, no hospitals or phones, and the gates of the walled towns closed at sunset.

Yemen’s Jews had suffered discrimination. One law said they couldn’t ride camels in case a mounted posture raised their heads higher than a Muslim’s. But they also had been esteemed for their craftsmanship and learning in a culture that was still largely illiterate. In Israel in 1949, no one needed silversmiths and bookbinders, so the Yemenites became peasants. For years, the people of the airlift were the underclass of Israeli society, more similar in their customs to the Arabs they had lived among for centuries than to Israel’s secular European Jews and native-born sabras.

Cohen’s father had been only sixteen when he arrived with his bride and was placed in a camp for new immigrants. They were put to work picking oranges. Eventually they scraped together enough money to start their own business and now had a poultry farm with two hundred chickens and a small grocery store.

“It was a very hard life, but you have to understand that my parents believed it was kodesh—holy—to come to Israel.” Isolated from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries, Yemenite Jews took their faith literally from the pages of the Bible. Before the airlift, they had never seen a plane. But when one arrived to take them, they believed it was a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

As we talked, Cohen became more relaxed and even began to seem pleased that I’d reminded him of a forgotten part of his youth. Before we parted, I asked if he would like to bring his wife to dinner with me at the hotel the following evening. He said he would check with her and give me a call. It was his wife who phoned later that