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Talansky tries to hide pain in final day under fire By Anshel Pfeffer American Jewish fund-raiser Morris Talansky tried hard to maintain his usual smiling appearance as he entered the Jerusalem District Court yesterday for his fourth day of cross-examination by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's lawyers. "I know all of you already," he joked to the horde of photographers besieging him. Once in the courtroom, he used the brief wait for the judges to explain the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, which was observed on Sunday, to those secular Jews present. Advertisement But his true feelings could be glimpsed in a quiet aside to an American journalist during a break in the proceedings: "For what they've done to me and members of my family, I hope God pays them." By "they," it is not clear whether he meant Olmert, the prime minister's lawyers, the police, the prosecution, the media or perhaps all of them together. "And after all I gave to this country, and the institutions I helped to build," he added. Talansky is not one of America's wealthiest Jews, but he is certainly part of that group that comes to Israel twice or thrice a year and stays either in Jerusalem's best hotels or in luxury apartments in the capital. All are devoted Zionists who give large amounts of money to Israel themselves and solicit large contributions from others. Often, they have children living here. Yet they themselves remain observers, protected from the country's troubles by their money and their American citizenship. But for Talansky, that protection has evaporated in recent months. He has suffered exhausting and intrusive attention from law enforcement agencies, the media and, to a large extent, the entire Israeli public. And it reached its peak during his cross-examination. Though he tried hard to hide his searing hurt, it occasionally broke through - as when attorney Navot Telzur questioned him repeatedly about his purchase of an apartment for himself on Jerusalem's Diskin St. "I'm trying to remember as best as I can!" he finally shouted in exasperation. When confronted with the harsh comments he made during his police interrogations about attorney Uri Messer, a long-time friend of Olmert's who handled Talansky's purchase of the Diskin St. apartment, he was clearly appalled, and responded immediately: "I didn't really say anything like that." He referred to one of his interrogators as "one of the shouters." Though Talansky speaks decent Hebrew, he used an interpreter in court. Sometimes, the interpreter took pity on him and declined to translate the cynical comments with which Telzur often prefaced his questions. But Talansky may well have understood anyway: Often, he did not wait for the translation before starting to answer. Toward the end of the day, he looked utterly spent. Over and over, he repeated the mantra: "I just don't remember." His bowed head rested on his hands; sometimes, he did not even bother raising it to answer. Only once, however, did he let his feelings show openly - when he answered one question by saying: "If you only knew what has happened to me over the last three months." He could not even drink a cup of coffee, he said, without "the tensions of family and all the rest." Olmert's cronies have been saying they destroyed Talansky's testimony. Prosecutors deny this, but add that in any case, they have plenty of other evidence. During one of the court's recesses, State Prosecutor Moshe Lador and another of Olmert's lawyers, Roy Blecher, held a heated argument over who was to blame for all these leaks to the media. As for Talansky, though his cross-examination had still not ended, he was almost forgotten, left alone on the sidelines. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Baptism by fire Bradley Burston offers 10 Mideast traps for Barack Obama to avoid. A second life 'Exodus' passenger makes aliyah six decades after being turned away.

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