Questioning Return. Beth Kissileff

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СКАЧАТЬ in an unlovely clump like an overweight older woman with a headscarf and heavy calves in orthopedic shoes.

      “Professor Zakh?” she held out her hand in greeting.

      He nodded at her without taking her hand. “Nice to meet. Shall we get some coffee?”

      They went to the small counter in the back of the store and gave their orders: lemonade for Wendy, espresso for Zakh. They found a table by the window and sat across from each other. “I apologize in advance. I don’t have much time today. I’m attending the parsha class at the Van Leer. I’d invite you to come, but I understand you don’t have enough Hebrew to follow a lecture.”

      “Not yet. Today was my first day of ulpan.”

      “We have an excellent ulpan here. It went well?”

      “Yes.”

      “Good. I want you to tell you, I find your dissertation project very interesting. We’ve never had faculty in American religion, but we are now cultivating a donor in American studies. They want a . . . how do you say . . . department? Not that, a . . .”

      “Program?”

      “Right. Americanists in all departments—history, literature, political science—to make a program for students who are interested. We’ll see; these things always take time. Anyway, here’s my home number.” He took a small notepad out of his pocket, wrote his name in Hebrew and English with his number and address below it, and said, “Call with any questions. The bus lines, where to get good felafel, whatever. I’ve been Fulbright advisor for a few years. Can I guess what you need? E-mail, library privileges, pizza?”

      She nodded.

      “E-mail and library, go to the overseas student office, the Rothberg building. Ask for Donna. Tell her you’re with me and she’ll take care of you. Pizza. Where are you living?”

      “Rehov Mishael, near Rahel Emainu.”

      “Pizza Sababa; they deliver. Burger Bar, right on Emek Refaim, has the best hamburgers, students say. Tov?” he asked.

      “Are other students here?”

      “Not yet. No one else is taking ulpan. Our first formal meeting is not till September, when they all arrive. I’ll have my secretary send a letter. We’ll be in touch.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t want to be late.”

      Wendy saved the most important question for the end. “The thing I need most help with is how to interview people. Where should I start? How should I find places to find interview subjects?”

      He looked at her, puzzled. “Go to the Kotel. The recruiters pick you up; you’ll see where they send people. Yerushalayim is a small town. You’ll meet plenty of your hozrei b’teshuvah.”

      “My what?”

      “Hozrei b’teshuvah, returnees.”

      “What’s the difference between that and baalei teshuvah?”

      He laughed. “Hozer is return, and teshuvah is answer, so they are returning to the answer. If someone is dati and stops being dati, we say they are hozer b’sh’ailah, returning to the question. You, Wundy, are questioning the returners.” He got up to go. Standing, he said, “I’ll look forward to working with you this year. Naim meod. You’ll do fine.”

      She watched him walk out of the café with that spry lift in his step, and wasn’t sure whether he’d helped her or not. Was he a jerk for cutting the meeting short or a good guy for making time for her? Funny, male academics, with their vanity about their time and how busy they were, did not change over oceans, she thought. The level of self-importance was a constant. Zakh did give her some advice; she’d just been hoping for more. She needed more direction: which schools would be good places to try, how to approach the administrators. What if she couldn’t get into any of these places to talk to students? What if after getting this fellowship and settling in a new place she couldn’t do her project? She’d have to try to get help, from him or someone else. No matter what, she just had to keep going. It was what everyone said about a dissertation: persistence was the most important factor. Not talent or ideas, just stubborn refusal to give up. As she finished her lemonade she opened up her notebook to study the Hebrew verb lebanot, to build, that she had started learning in ulpan that morning.

      Wendy followed Zakh’s advice to go to the Kotel, the Western Wall, on her third Friday night in Israel. The prior week, she lay down for a nap Friday afternoon and woke up long after dark, exhausted from six intensive hours of studying Hebrew verb forms each day.

      If Mahane Yehuda was a collision with all manner of foodstuff and produce, the Kotel on Friday evening was a confrontation with every species of humanity. Wendy was overwhelmed by the mass spectacle as she stood where the cab dropped her off by the Zion Gate, so many others thronging towards the spot. Once she arrived at the stairwell that overlooked the Kotel Plaza, she went through the security check and leaned over the railing to gaze out at the crowd. She wished she had more anthropological training. How to categorize each group? There were Japanese or Korean tourists, snapping photo after photo, all in matching white polo shirts with carnelian red trim and red skorts for women, red shorts for men, and matching white baseball hats for their tour group, so the leader could find strays easily. On the men’s side, she could see from her aerial position, there were various groups massed together, some dancing in a circle. By contrast the women’s side consisted of discrete individuals, each with her own liturgy, no attempt at unison.

      There was nothing moving about any of the particulars of the scene; if anything, Wendy felt sad that the women praying at the Kotel seemed so singular, so without the protection of a mass, but each sobbing, alone against the wall. Yet, the entirety of the spectacle moved her. People came to connect with something beyond themselves. This was the place Jews had been pulled and drawn to for so many thousands of years.

      As she watched women praying by themselves, leaderless, each woman separate, the voice of the mysterious harmonizer at Shir Tzion came into her mind. How did he sing with the melody of the group, yet improvise his own sound beyond it, totally individuated? Could she find a way to do that, to feel herself part of the group, not an outsider alone and detached, yet still able to sing independently?

      She listened to the group of men singing joyfully on their side of the Kotel, and thought back to an undergraduate party she had been to for members of a Columbia singing group and a visiting group from another college. It was at the alumni club, a space unlike any she’d been in at Columbia, with old wooden beams in the ceiling and leaded glass windows. It exuded the solidity of a Tudor style house. She hadn’t known a building like this existed on the mostly urban campus, sandwiched among much higher structures to either side on Riverside Drive. Either the singing group’s CDs were selling really well, or there was an incredibly generous alumnus out there. The guests were drinking from an open bar and nibbling copious hors d’oeuvres. Suddenly, someone in the middle of the room started singing. People spontaneously gravitated—a powerful current of force propelling them—to the spot where the singing had started. Without choreography or staging, a natural grouping occurred, as though they were a flock of birds, a collusion of singers banding together, jamming. Wendy stood at their periphery. She wasn’t sure what exactly was so moving about the experience, whether the talent and youth of the singers, or the way she heard individual parts but also the totality, different from what each individual brought alone. Not a singer herself, Wendy was glad to be in their presence, absorbing the СКАЧАТЬ