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PREFACE TO THE 2025 EDITION
This book is a about a young man’s journey from “specious clarity to obscure groping,” to quote Arthur Koestler, the intellectual companion of the young man for most of his life. As Koestler had journeyed from the all-too-clarified springs of communism to “a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned,” so the young man would travel from the all-captivating promises of the emerging state of Israel in the early 1960s, to the fabricated histories, deceptive myths, and buried villages that he would discover in its wake. And like Koestler (no further comparisons), he would find it necessary to understand what had happened to him, both the enticement and the deception, both the clarity and the obscurity.
The young man is me a lifetime ago, and this book is my attempt later in life at understanding a movement called Zionism, which brought about the creation of a Jewish state called Israel, which would play such a formative role in my life. In this I have endeavored to weave together my own personal journey with an intellectual exploration of the ideas and historical events that came to shape it.
Although this is a book that reflects travels, memories, experiences, encounters, and readings over a longer period of time, the ideas, people, and events that it brings to life remain as central as ever to the understanding of what the State of Israel is and has become. In this, it also remains a book taking its color and tone, and hopefully some of its value, from the time and the atmosphere in which it was conceived.
Nevertheless, the course of events after October 7, 2023, has prompted a revisit of the book, and of people and places of importance to it, in the hope that this will shed some further light on my “obscure groping” with what I see as a turning point not only for Israel, but also for Jewish existence as a whole. In this edition of the book I have thus replaced the original final chapter with two revisits—fully aware that the final chapter of this story is yet to be written.
ASCENT
The wandering Jew has come to a crossroads, and the consequences of his choice will be felt for centuries to come. —Arthur Koestler, 1950
We ascended to Israel at the end of April 1962, my mother, my sister, and I. Ascension, aliyah, is the figurative expression for the emigration of Jews to the Promised Land. In our case, it meant not only that we were heading for a loftier place but also that we were departing from a low point in our life. My father had left us two summers earlier at the age of thirty-seven, overtaken by the disaster he had spent fifteen years trying to survive. On the outside he was handsome and cheerful, with fine features and a warm smile, but inside he was as fragile as glass. Just a few knocks, a disappointment or two, and everything would break. Dad was ill, they said, very ill. He tried hard not to show it, but at night I could hear him calling out unfamiliar names. A few months before he died, during a temporary release from a psychiatric hospital in Strängnäs, we stayed with good friends in a beautifully situated summer cottage on a bay of the Baltic Sea south of Södertälje. Perhaps the doctors had hoped that a hearty dose of bright spring would dispel the darkness. Early in the morning, while the rest of us were still asleep, he would quietly get up and row out on the bay. I asked to join him, but he never woke me up. After the third or fourth time, he returned with a large pike perch that was left to swim in a bucket all morning—as the rapidly fading memory of a morning’s forgetfulness. After lunch the pike perch turned belly-up and a few days later Dad was taken back to the hospital. We never saw each other again.
I was thirteen years old when we left Södertälje, where fragments had begun to heal and roots had begun to search for soil. With desperate determination two survivors had decided to hold on to anything that seemed to give support, and to hold back anything that seemed to open the abyss again. My parents gave me a name they would never learn to pronounce and addressed me in a language neither of them had yet mastered. At the age of two, I was put in one of the first daycare centers of the Swedish welfare state. I learned to cheer for the local ice hockey team and to steal apples from the villa gardens of our white-collar neighbors, and I began to long for the Saint Lucia festival in the assembly hall of the big truck factory, for the midsummer holidays in the small boardinghouse at Näset, and for the walks to the still-fashionable seaside hotel beyond the forest. I saw my father do his military service in a quartermaster’s uniform and watched my mother rush off to her job as a seamstress at Tornvalls. Slowly but surely a place that could have been anywhere, and by any realistic calculation should not have been at all, was being twisted and bent and straightened into something that at times was reminiscent of a home.
One summer I found a dead swift in one of the villa gardens, and learned that swifts cannot get off the ground on their own. A cold winter day some kids in the neighborhood threw snowballs at our window and shouted “Jews,” wherever they had gotten that word from. Jews were about as common in Södertälje as Blacks, and I was almost as ignorant as they, but my mother’s face turned white. For a few years, my parents would sometimes laugh as if the world had begun anew and Södertälje was their home on earth, so how was I to know that what looked like a home was a permanent state of shock?
With my father’s death, the fiction dissolved. The footpath through the forest to the seashore, where I knew every blueberry shrub and patch of cowslip like the back of my hand, became a trail of fading memories. The salt-and tar-smelling sea bath, with its ten-meter trampoline and its creaking bridges and its separate pools for naked men and women, was set on fire by LångErik, who used to live at the other end of the rowan-tree alley until they locked him up in an institution for juvenile delinquents a few miles away. By this time the water in the bay was polluted by sewage, and swimming was at own your risk. The dancing pavilion fell into disrepair, the miniature golf course was closed, the beach went silent. For the remainder, the local community had an oil harbor in store, while the forest gave way to warehouses and a large shopping center.
Father was our link to the world, to friends and colleagues, to big dreams and wild plans, but it was a link with the most fragile of attachments. And when the attachment broke, our links broke with it. A few months later, the remainder of the family—my mother, my sister, and I—left Södertälje for Stockholm, and after another year, with our luggage barely unpacked, we moved on.