SS United States

Shlomo was our guide, a fact I’d learned from the literature my
parents had handed me in a blue-and-white envelope, the tangible
evidence of my Hanukkah present. My mother had known someone
related to Shlomo, an aunt or something, at her synagogue when
she was growing up. I hadn’t met him yet. He was in his twen-
ties, scruffy in his short beard and hiking boots. A pair of girl-
ish leather sandals dangled from the straps of his carry-on—the
footwear he would don when we got off the plane in Tel Aviv and
would continue to wear until he saw us back to JFK again. He in-
troduced himself and instructed us to say our good-byes; we had to
get through security.
I got a window seat, jammed in next to an Orthodox rabbi and
his wife who didn’t seem to want anything to do with me. I don’t
know why I was surprised to hear the usual announcements not
just in English, but in Hebrew as well—maybe because this Hebrew
sounded nothing like the slow, methodical language recited by the
American teachers at my school. I didn’t understand one word of
it. It wasn’t until after takeoff that I realized there were two kids
from the tour seated right behind me: Jodi and some boy who had a
crocheted Yankees yarmulke attached to his head with a bobby pin.
I didn’t see much of them; I just heard them talking. Their conver-
sation primarily concerned Shlomo, who’d started circulating in the
aisles as soon as the seat-belt sign was off, just sort of nodding hello
to his charges where they were scattered about the aircraft. He was
apparently in transitional footwear mode; he’d unlaced his boots
and was padding around in socks.
“What’s with his name? Shlomo?” This was Jodi. “It sounds like
a clown or a pet ferret or something. Or a word my grandparents
would use for penis.”
It did sound like a dirty Yiddish word, though I knew it was
Hebrew for Solomon, and I figured the boy with the yarmulke knew
it too, but he wasn’t sharing that particular insight. He just giggled at
the word “penis.” It occurred to me, then, that there was an amazing
coincidence going on, what with Shlomo and Jodi and all—and I felt
a sudden urge to get up on my knees in my seat, lean over the head-
rest, and tell Jodi Lowenthal all about it. But as I’ve said, I wasn’t totally stupid. I didn’t do anything. I put my headphones on—they
were sort of tubular back then, the kind that just brought the sound
up in rubber tunnels, one for each ear. If you wanted, you could skip
the earphones, sit on the floor, and put your ear to the armrest, and
you’d hear the same thing you’d hear with the contraption on. The
music on the El Al channels was definitely not Madonna. I pretty
much slept through the entire flight, and for most of the bus ride
from Ben Gurion to Jerusalem, which was our home base. The bro-
chure called it our “birthright city.” It said going there would feel
like coming home. We’d been on the road for nearly an hour when
Shlomo woke everyone up with the bus’s built-in P.A. system and
made us pile out at a misty overlook. The wind was strong and there
was a light horizontal rain, though everything in the distance still
looked parched.
Shlomo led the group to a cluster of stone benches, shouting
“Keep up the end, keep up the end!”—a suggestion clearly intended
for Jodi, who lagged slightly behind everyone else, her ripped jeans
ballooning when she turned into the wind. She shuffled up and im-
mediately sat down, hugging her bare shoulders. I could hear her
muttering.
“Fuck, it’s cold. Isn’t Israel supposed to be a desert?”
Shlomo introduced us to Jerusalem: the new city with its glossy,
modern white buildings to the west, the Old City with its greasy-
looking white walls to the east. Even the hills were different shades
of dusty white. Shlomo’s arm jumped around as he talked about one
mount and then another. He taught us an Israeli army trick: when
you want to point out a faraway spot to your buddies, you determine
its relative distance from other faraway spots with a unit of measure
called “fingers.” He demonstrated this with a small Arab village that
squatted in a dry valley, holding up his hand and counting three
fingers to the village from the Old City’s sealed Messiah Gate. I held
up three fingers of my own, but when I set them against my view of
the gate, my hand didn’t reach the village, ending instead at a small
Arab girl riding a clumsy donkey down a winding path. The animal
was a whitish gray, the girl covered in dust, and I hadn’t noticed the
two until I focused on my hand. I inched my arm over to the right so I could reach the village Shlomo wanted us to see. The girl was
obliterated behind my fingers.
Behind me on the bench, the boy from the plane had seated himself
next to Jodi again. Apparently he had offered her the warmth of his
coat, if she was willing to cuddle up under his arm while he contin-
ued to wear it. Jodi was willing. The boy’s skullcap rose periodically
from his head, flapping in the breeze. This boy, I later learned, was
one of the most religious in our group. He refused to light a match
on the Sabbath due to the rabbinical prohibition against fire, but
would smoke pot on that day if someone else got the joint started.
In the days that followed, the boys of the teen tour would seat them-
selves next to Jodi, shuffle with her behind the others, press their
thumbs into her back for a quick massage, and offer her the warmth
of their coats while Shlomo pointed out hills of dirt and walls of
stone. I wasn’t sure how much of Israel my traveling companions
actually noticed. But I wasn’t sure how much of it I was getting,
either: Jerusalem, where we spent the first week, was nothing like
I’d imagined, though I gathered that was because we hadn’t been to
the Old City yet. There’d been a fatal stabbing of a Yeshiva student
near the Temple Mount just before we’d arrived, and Shlomo said
we’d have to wait to visit that part of town; we would be taken to
the Western Wall as a very special finale. The new city, the only place
we were allowed to explore, seemed to me full of shabby gloom, its
downtown streets lined with squat, dark storefronts featuring the
kind of merchandise I’d seen in the most forsaken parts of North
Jersey, decrepit housewares and dusty books and bewildered-looking
mannequins lost in indeterminate fashion eras. Each morning, our
bus would trundle out of the city center to open, manicured, chalky-
white spaces where we’d visit the Holocaust museum or the Knesset
or the Great Synagogue or the miniature model of ancient Jerusalem
at the Holy Land Hotel, and then, when visiting hours were over, we
were trundled back to the center and set loose—to mingle, presum-
ably, with our Israeli counterparts, noisy, aggressive, lively kids who
spewed the impenetrable language I’d heard on the airplane, who
passed us on the shopping strips or sat one table over in a slightly-off-
looking pizza joint, accustomed, it seemed, to a presence like ours, and therefore oblivious to it. I tagged along as the kids from the bus
searched for something to do, something to recognize; when they’d
given up on that, the girls turned their sights on something to buy,
the boys on someone to torment. They’d lead us into the McDa-
vid’s—oddly decorated in red, white, and blue—and complain to the
management that the ketchup was seasoned incorrectly or attempt,
repeatedly, to order a bacon double cheeseburger. Or, when we’d
crowded into a corner falafel stand, where the old men behind the
counter handed us heaping portions in soft, warm bread pockets, the
boys would shout “Coke? Coke?” and the men, responding “Coca
Cola, yes,” would head for the refrigerator until the boys appeared to
change their minds, yelling “Pepsi? Pepsi?”—knowing quite well that
there was no Pepsi to be found here, since Pepsi, we’d been told, had
chosen to maintain its vast Arab market by shunning the tiny Israeli
one. When the falafel men hesitated, uncertain how to respond, the
boys would ramp it up: “Dr. Pepper? Mountain Dew? Orange Shasta?
Mello Yello? Fizzy Jism?” until the old men, clean-shaven and brown
in their faces, swift and guttural in their speech, nothing like our
German and Russian grandfathers, finally gave up, flustered.
At night, we stayed in youth-hostel rooms, girls on one hall, boys
on another. I was always first in bed, the bottom of a corner bunk.
I’d pull the blanket up past my nose, nearly but not completely cover-
ing my eyes, so that I could feel my lashes against the top sheet when
I blinked. I was an only child, and had never slept in a room with
anyone else before, as far as I could recall. I wasn’t in the habit of
looking at people in those days, either, at least not when they could
look back at me, so this method of hiding myself behind the covers
had freed me up, without my actually intending it, to take a nightly
inventory of my roommates. No one paid me any notice, but even
then I avoided faces, scanning instead from the necks down: round
bodies with heavy breasts that filled extra-large Benetton T-shirts
doubling as pajamas, tall bodies stretched taut and thin over sturdy
frames, with long, muscular legs that reminded me of frogs splayed
out on dissecting pans. Nothing I could find on myself was either as
pronounced or as defined. My own hand searched in vain for the hip
bones I saw protruding beneath exposed skin when someone reached up to grab the ladder to an upper bunk. I could not see, when I at-
tempted to consider myself in that mix, what it was that supposedly
made us all alike; all I saw, when I peered out from under the starched
and stamped youth-hostel bedding, was what I was certain I did not
have in common with the rest of them, what I was supposed to be
but felt certain I was not, something soft but burgeoning, something
gleefully awakened—to what, I hadn’t a clue. Each night the girls
primped for bed as if sleeping were a party, until Shlomo popped his
head in, never bothering to knock, and declared we’d reached “The
We-Bitching Hour”—a term he used nightly, to no one’s particular
amusement, or, I suspect, comprehension, except that it meant lights
out. Most nights, he’d use the opportunity to usher Jodi through the
door from wherever he’d found her. She’d plop into her bottom bunk
just as the room went dark.
I was fully aware of the fact that my parents were hoping that, in ad-
dition to connecting with the homeland, I’d come back from the tour
with new friends—with any friends, actually, since my loss column
had pretty much overtaken the gains in the friendship department
from the start of high school. It seemed they’d decided to blame it
on the fact that my options were limited to my small private school,
to our little cul-de-sac community. They’d already made me try all
kinds of clubs, stuff for smart kids, stuff for artists, stuff that tried
to turn what you did in your room at home into who you were. I’d
tried a whole lot of things, but then I finally refused to try anymore. I
didn’t really belong to anything. Once I’d overheard my father, when
he thought I was asleep in my room, tell my mother he was worried
because everyone else my age seemed to have a “thing.” I knew what
he was talking about: He always said my generation needed a thing
if they wanted to get into a good college, have a good career. My
mother laughed and said, “Oh, one of these days she’ll fall in love,
and then she’ll find her thing soon enough.” Sometimes I felt like she
was speaking a dead language. Still, I harbored a constant, nagging
sense that I owed my parents something, so I didn’t complain about
the Israel trip. And I was, I suppose, kind of curious, if you could call
it that. Israel was so far away, so very old; I figured something really
different couldn’t hurt. Once I was there, it struck me as kind of cute that their good intentions were so pathetically misplaced, consider-
ing how the kids on the teen tour were exactly the same as the ones
at home—only amplified, what with the whirlwind intensity of our
Israel adventure. But in retrospect, I understood that my mom and
dad weren’t really willing to grant me a true change of scenery. They
wanted desperately for me to find my place anywhere in the world, in
any little community, as long as it was just like theirs at home.
About a week into the tour, we were told to pack for a few days’
excursion: we were going to mock-military boot camp. This was a
place Israeli high-school students went for an entire week, to prepare
for the real thing—army service—when they graduated. For us, the
youth of the Diaspora, they offered the three-day version. I’d known
from the brochure that they were going to give us guns. Not for
keeps, of course, just for a session on a shooting range, and a few en-
counters before that, for the sake of getting acquainted. We arrived at
night, in another light rain, and were greeted by uniformed soldiers,
who, barking at us in accented English, made us line up right outside
the bus and stand at attention, our bags on the damp ground beside
us. We were separated—not just for sleeping this time—into platoons
of boys and girls, but the soldiers bossing us around were all female,
which everyone took as a pretty clear sign of how phony the whole
boot camp thing was. After some shouting and leering and warnings
about how hard we’d work for the next few days, they gave us each a
little stack of army-green shirts and pants and sent us off to our bar-
racks, which looked just like another youth hostel.
I was brushing my teeth in the dorm-style bathroom, jockeying
for position at the sink, when Jodi marched in, taking the stall just
behind me. A moment later she screamed.