Free Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks Page B

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 inthe 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 rightand 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, I scrawled a long, boring reply setting out the Zionist case. How could her Jewish friends have left her laboring under such a misapprehension? But at least Joannie had some Jewish friends. My prospects for finding any seemed dim. Sydney’s small Jewish community had settled far away in the affluent eastern suburbs, where Mitteleuropean matrons gathered at coffee shops to nibble Sacher torte and talk about opera. Our western suburbs neighbors were still overwhelmingly of my mother’s Irish stock—hard-worked housewives who relaxed over a “cuppa” at the neighbors’ or gathered at the local Returned Services League club (the Australian version of the American Legion) for a flutter on the poker machines or the Wednesday afternoon races.
    At school we had increasing numbers of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Lithuanians—but all of them were Catholic. Two of my best friends’ families were from the Middle East—Zita’s from Lebanon and Angela’s from Alexandria, Egypt. Another classmate, Monique, was a Palestinian whose father’s village was destroyed by Israelis after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Monique spoke Arabic and French before she’d learned English. Working in her third language, she was no match for me in history-class arguments. I remember her eyes, filled with tears, as she sat down in frustration after I’d delivered a passionate oration rebutting her account of her family’s forced flight at the hands of