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.”
