Tuesday, July 19, 2016

I Want to Invent It

A child passed me on the banks of the Seine. He looked back, retraced his steps, and threw his arms around me. His grin triggered mine. He shouldn’t have been there; a Colombian kid has no business being in Paris. Nor interrupting his teacher’s summer vacation.

I can’t lie; I didn’t want to see anybody I knew. I was exhausted after a sleepless night on a plane, in deep pain from sitting with my back scrunched up against the hard AirFrance seat, and not overly impressed with Paris’ massive buildings that stretched on for blocks without any of the self-conscious delicacy of a smaller, younger, or uglier city—and yet, seeing my student made Paris suddenly bloom.

“Can we take a selfie?” Of course. I’ll even smile.

He moved on, to join the cheers for France that were ricocheting off the arabesque-laden facades around us (this was still hours before France lost the Euro cup) and I moved off to see Paris through new eyes; an exquisitely beautiful, eternally posturing city that is meant to be not merely seen, but looked at.

The next morning, I lay on my back in the Tuileries, staring up at the sky and the clouds that I have so yearned for this past year. For a moment, all I could see was the sky—the Louvre, the Champs Elysees, the Quai d’Orsay were all hidden past the edges of my vision—and I had that sudden dissociative moment that hits travelers. All I could see was the sky—where was I? Which city? I panicked quietly, breathed in deeply, smelled Paris, and placed myself on a mental map.

On Shabbat, people kept asking me: “You’re Canadian? American? Israeli?” Yes, yes, yes. Right now, recognizing only your Yiddishisms in the midst of French, your bentching at the ends of meals, your hiding of your kippah beneath a hat (and the pause in the middle of lunch: is that a “manifestation”? Should we stay inside? No, just a local sports game cheer—the fear of anti-Semitism takes a deep breath, swallows, lies down), your concern that I pack a sandwich in case the kosher food on the flight is bland, I am more Jewish than any of the above.

But this summer, I am also more American. Always before, in America, Canada, Norway, I opened the news and tried to hide the stabbing pain that hits when there’s a terrorist attack in Israel. Nobody will get it. Perhaps I have an obligation to explain to those who haven’t even heard it happened? But why should my people’s pain matter to them? Surely they have their own.

And then, this summer, the opposite: death after death, of Black Americans, of police officers, and the old rootless sense that the world is ending, once again, on a continent far away from me, once again, a place that I belong to, and that nobody around me has even noticed, and that if I try to tell them, they’ll say the same things that somehow seem to justify death, or to disqualify the fact that people are being murdered for their identity.

We sat on the rooftop of my friend’s friend’s apartment, watching the Eiffel Tower glow in sprays of fireworks for la fete nationale. Tchaikovsky played behind us. The fireworks were the best I’ve ever seen, the best of every July 4th, every baseball game, every Disney World spectacular or Yom Haatzmaut celebration. It matched Paris’ general splendor. As the last spiral dissolved into smoke, we checked our phones. Nice. What happened in Nice?

One of the girls said that France is changing. She’s scared; what if this happens often? Every six months? I cringe and stifle my cavalier reaction; six months is not often. I live in Israel. But these deaths, on their national holiday, these deaths are horrible. Everyone wants to know: is it a terrorist attack? Is it indoctrination? Lack of education? Perhaps a book the murderer read.

In the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the left bank of the Seine, I pick an Amos Oz off the shelves. How to Cure a Fanatic. I need to buy this. I need to teach this. My students will read:

Rivers of coffee drunk together cannot extinguish the tragedy of two peoples claiming, and I think rightly claiming, the same small country as their one and only national homeland in the whole world. So, drinking coffee together is wonderful and I'm all for it, especially if it is Arabic coffee, which is infinitely better than Israeli coffee. But drinking coffee cannot do away with the trouble.”

Neither will simply sitting in class and practicing arithmetic together. And so, I think, I will take the plunge. They will also read Mahmoud Darwish and Rahel. They will consider that perhaps both peoples have a claim to the land, an idea that many people on either side find difficult to entertain. I feel freshly burdened by the Nice attacks, by the need for a BlackLivesMatter movement, by Hemingway’s Montmartre and Wilde’s tomb, even by the Da Vinci painting in the Grand Gallery that so snidely points towards the Mona Lisa with a mocking smile that says he knows what you’ve come for but after all, he’s ever so much cleverer than she, and has more that he won’t say, if anybody would pause to listen. The Enlightenment dreams of my youth reawaken to remind me that if I will do anything, will read, write, teach, I must do it with exultation, must pursue it like Pater’s hard, gemlike flame.

And so I get tremendously excited when I see tourists playing Pokemon Go in the Jardin de Luxembourg, because a year from now my students will be playing Literature Go and chasing after their favorite characters in real life.

On a rooftop in Paris, in the middle of a conversation about feminism and woman’s role, on which I am thrilled to eavesdrop in this land of Simone de Beauvoir, a philosophy student said, “I don’t want to do things out of tradition. If I fall in love, I want it to be like I invented it.”

I am more attached to tradition than she. And yet the words call to me. In this world, which seems to shift under my feet so relentlessly and often, with neither certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, I ponder how, next year, I’ve got to teach kids literature and psychology and also, teach them how to live in a humanity where people kill each other for difference without becoming cold, cruel, or ruthlessly chauvinist. And to always, with the shocked newness which travel brings upon me, continue inventing myself.

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