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Life in the other Promised Land By Ghil'ad Zuckermann Tags: Nava Semel, Israel News  "An Australian Wedding," by Nava Semel, Am Oved (Hebrew), 158 pages, NIS 84 An Israeli applies for an Australian visa. When the immigration officer of the former penal colony asks if he has any prior convictions, the Israeli innocently responds: "Why, is that still a requirement for getting in?" I was reminded of this joke reading Nava Semel's travel diary, "Hatuna Australit" ("An Australian Wedding"), in which she focuses on the Israeli community in Australia's Byron Bay, where her son, Iyar, has chosen to live. Advertisement "[My husband and I] were adamantly against Iyar's decision to study in Australia, of all places," Semel writes candidly. "Harvard or Cambridge would have been just fine - some prestigious establishment, which Jewish parents could show off to the world. But [the SAE Institute in] Byron Bay? Why go to a young continent, which still lacks any time-honored culture - what can one learn there?" I, on the other hand, often find myself amused - in a sort of anachronistic, way - by the fact that the British sent robbers to this antipodean paradise instead of leaving them in gray Britain, and moving themselves to the Land of Milk and Honey Down Under. I refer to Brisbane as "Bris bein habesorim," which is Ashkenazi Hebrew for "covenant between the parts" (see Genesis 15, where God promises Abram/Abraham that the Holy Land will belong to his descendants). As for that other Promised Land, Israel - if I may be permitted to make a gross generalization, it's a sad place. Furthermore, Israelis are unfortunately sad no matter where they live. The main causes for this are past grievances ("too much history, too little geography," as the late philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953). In the psyche of the wandering Israeli who travels the world in search of himself, it does not matter whether those grievances are justified. Australia is "the lucky country," a place of broad expanses and fertile soil, which makes "desperation just a little bit more comfortable," to quote a phrase from Hanoch Levin's well-known song, performed by the exquisite Chava Alberstein. Still, Australia cannot make a sad and complex people happy and uncomplicated. There may be less corruption of the sort Israeli pop-rock band Tislam sings about in its hit "Face of a Nation" ("Wait, Gedaliah, maybe we'll make you our ambassador to Australia"), but how many Israelis can really sound natural when saying, "No worries, mate!"? How many restless Israelis will, like Kenneth, the surfer-brother of Iyar Semel's Aussie girlfriend, calmly state that "every wave is unique and is its own experience." For me, every wave carries a memory from home - to quote a phrase from a famous Russian-Israeli song. Most Israelis in Byron Bay, the antipodean New Age capital, also known simply as Byron, and in the less expensive communities in its vicinity (such as Ocean Shores, Mullumbimby and Lismore), are not the kind the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin once criticized for being "wimpy dropouts," but are rather the salt of the earth. They don't hate Israel. On the contrary: They love/loved her too much. Luckily, there are many good Israelis whose opinions aren't as extreme as those of Israel-basher George Steiner ("Israel has a great future - in New York!" he once told me at Churchill College, Cambridge, England) or of Diaspora-basher A.B. Yehoshua ("Judaism cannot exist outside of Israel"). These Israelis simultaneously love their homeland and the global shtetl, and are aware of the limitations of both. Is it easy being an Israeli in Israel? No! Is it easy being an Israeli in the Diaspora? No! Iyar Semel, the son of the author of "An Australian Wedding" is one of those latter Israelis. Antithesis of Israeliness "I vowed not to be judgmental and won't comment on anything," Nava Semel writes. "I will not lock horns. I promised not to fall into the trap of chanting slogans about the irreplaceable homeland, but what am I to do if I am suddenly struck by sadness? They're all young, kind and beautiful, exuding energy and the passion of youth. There's no anger or bitterness in them when they speak of Israel, just a sense of quiet acceptance. And that's what's so sad about it." It is indeed sad. But, ironically, in Australia, Semel's son can live in a commune more reminiscent of the old kibbutz than any locale in Israel, where socialist communities have been emptied of content thanks to the Americanized capitalistic environment. He also works the land like his pioneering grandparents did in Israel. "Mom, doesn't this orchard remind you of Grandma Rivka's?" Iyar asks his mother in Australia. Moreover, with an overbearing lineage - singer Shlomo Artzi is his uncle, and his father is theater director Noam Semel - no wonder Iyar has a much easier time expressing himself and working on his music on the other side of the world. Iyar Semel lives in Lismore with his girlfriend Lucy, who symbolizes all that is good in Australians: purity, kindness, wholesomeness, innocence, happiness, joy, virginity, a fair complexion - the antithesis of Israeliness. Even on the cover of the book, Iyar evokes an aura of familiarity with the woes of the world, in comparison to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds standing beside him. "Arrogant and blunt - that's how Israelis are perceived here," Semel writes. "Lucy has learned to understand them. She likes their bluntness. Israelis tell it to your face and don't beat about the bush ... "Even though he told her the meaning of it, she wanted to know why we chose to name him Iyar. I told her he was born on the eve of Israel's Independence Day, which is also our Israel Defense Forces memorial day. We wanted a pure Hebrew name for our firstborn - a 'pre-Israeli' name, a pedantic person might say. A name that meant 'light' in ancient times. I tried to explain to Lucy our aversion toward anything tainted by the Diaspora experience and our obsessive yearning to recreate ourselves as 'new Jews.'" But Zionism's rejection of the Diaspora failed and the Canaanist movement fell to pieces. Iyar is, in fact, the direct descendant of the wandering Jew, a peripatetic, not to say pathetic, traveler, who yearns to roam endlessly in the "Go forth from your land" tradition of the Bible, which is encoded in our genes. Nevertheless, few will be able to escape their Israeli shackles, the excess baggage. An Israeli will always remain an Israeli no matter how much he tries to repress his identity. A part of him will remain Israeli abroad - the same way Israelis have not been able to rid themselves of the Diaspora experience within themselves, even though they have tried hard to do so; the same way Yiddish has survived hidden beneath Israeli "revitalized" Hebrew. Israeliness is a palimpsest embodying many different influences from the Diaspora. That is not to say it hasn't introduced anything new, only that we must recognize its complexity and try not to whitewash it with one-dimensionalism. Lux et veritas Nava Semel is an informed Israeli, who cares about and conducts a dialogue with Jewish history, admitting that "the backpack I'm carrying contains a novel by Spanish author Adolfo Garcia Ortega's [whose hero is] 3-year-old Hurbinek, who died at Auschwitz." At the same time her language is up-to-date, contemporary. Indeed, her love of the beautiful, multilayered Israeli language is apparent, and she is interested in a broad range of linguistic issues. Too bad Nava didn't tell Lucy that her name means the same thing as Iyar's: Lux in Latin is "light," and the Hebrew biblical phrase "urim ve tummim" ("light and truth") is translated as "Lux et veritas," which happens to be the motto of Yale University. As Yale students tell their Harvard peers: "Your veritas sucks if it ain't got no lux!" Thus, Iyar and Lucy are a match made in heaven. But will they stay together, or will Iyar end up marrying someone just a little bit more Israeli? "I've seen such couples before who come from different worlds," Semel writes , "and I've realized that a mental gap exists between Israelis and foreign partners. Can it be bridged? After all, two partners are never perfectly matched even if they do come from the same background. Will there not come a point where Lucy and Iyar will be inevitably torn apart by some basic misunderstanding arising from their different cultural backgrounds?" Iyar asks a more universal question, in a song he writes for Lucy: "Which is the greatest gift: freedom or me?" Iyar's grandmother hopes his relationship with the shiksa won't last. "Did I survive Auschwitz so that my great-grandchildren will not be Jewish?" she asks. My blunt, arrogant and impertinent answer is, first, that the reason she survived Auschwitz is to have great-grandchildren, whether Jewish or not. Period. Second, she survived so that she can accept people as they are - regardless of their race - and she should thus be happy if Iyar should marry an Australian, Chinese, Argentinean or, God forbid, a German or Palestinian. Imagine! "The drum circle, a microcosm of the world's races, routinely meets at 3 o'clock. Iyar blends in among two Native Americans, an Aborigine, four Japanese, a Chinese couple and three Africans. Everyone plays the same beat with no conductor or plan," Nava writes. "The drum beat is a dazzling sound," Iyar tells her, and rightfully so. There are moments in life which make an Israeli - even if he is an officer in a commando unit or an enthusiastic supporter of the hawkish Avigdor Lieberman - feel like "nobody has ownership over land" and want to lash out against the idea of "nationality." I personally experienced that feeling at the drum circle at the Sunday market in Byron, as well as on the majestic Tioman Island in Malaysia. "I, too, was filled with awe and amazement in the face of the majestic panorama, which constantly changed colors and shapes," Semel writes. Such moments of "hypnotic beauty" remind us of the wastefulness of focusing on the negative. What, then, is the key characteristic of the Israeli community in Byron Bay, which differentiates it from most other expatriate communities, including Israeli ones? Unlike their compatriots who settle in cities (say, Los Angeles and Melbourne), Byron-based Israelis are spiritualists seeking peace, calm and serenity. I know of many Israelis who moved there even though they made more money back home. Some suffer from war-related trauma or post-traumatic stress disorder, either personal or collective: "He left following [the Lebanon war], which he considered to be miserable and futile. He left confused and heartbroken, but did not slam the door behind him," Semel describes Avshalom, an Israeli living in Byron. Elsewhere, she comes across Odayah, who split her time between Israel and Australia. After a year's absence, she returned to Byron, where "she can leave a package on a bench without it being blown up because it looks like a bomb." But, like the author and her mother-in-law ("who, despite living in Israel's coastal area for 70 years until the day she died, continued to insist she was from Jerusalem in spirit"), most people can never detach themselves from their motherland. "Michal keeps in touch with Israel over the Internet and is engrossed in Israeli culture day and night in real time," Semel writes, and she also quotes Yariv, in Byron, as saying: "I'll return to Israel only if a war breaks out. I'll catch the first flight back and enlist. I will not abandon my friends." Iyar Semel came to Australia in search of himself. His mother visits him to learn about the world, as well as about herself. "During my travels I've learned to love foreign places. Their strangeness frightens and attracts me at the same time. Everything is a contradiction: the fear of loneliness and the fascination of discovering an unknown world ... Perhaps that's why my soul is so tied down, shackled, to corrupt, normalized, and not necessarily in the positive sense toward Israel. I have within me a desire to cut myself off from it and go to foreign lands." But, again, it is very hard for someone who is an Israeli through and through to separate from their country. "I sink into a book that I took off a shelf," Semel writes, "which tells the history of Lismore, the city founded by Scottish settler William Wilson in 1845, the very same year Iyar's great-grandfather, Azriel-Zelig Hoizdorf, immigrated from Germany to Jerusalem." And elsewhere: "There are no security guards here,' I comment. 'There's hardly a police patrol to keep an eye on the flow of traffic. Nobody to rummage through your bags with bomb detectors.'" And she naively asks three young Germans from Munich: "Have you learned about the Holocaust?" I have yet to come across a German who has not learned about the Holocaust. Usually he even has a Holocaust "complex," as though it were his fault that his grandfather cold-bloodedly massacred innocent Jews. There are some inaccuracies in Semel's book that should be corrected. The name is Mount Warning, not Warning Mountain. The local festival is Mardi Grass, not Mardi Gras (named thus because it supports legalization of marijuana). The Kookaburra, whose call resembles human laughter, is not a "rare" bird in Australia. In regard to: "the possum has great acting skills and can sometimes play dead. They cunningly escape trouble by pretending indifference, anything to avoid a fight. Some say they're cowards, while others say they have advanced strategic skills" - this would be correct if Semel were talking about the North American Opossum (Didelphis virginiana), rather than the Australian species. No Australian marsupial feigns death (thanatosis). The bottom line: "An Australian Wedding" is an enjoyable, intimate travel diary documenting the Israeli experience in Byron Bay and its environs. May there be more like it. Prof. Ghil'ad Zuckermann, a linguist, splits his time between Israel and Australia. His most recent book, "Israeli - A Beautiful Language: Hebrew as Myth," was published by Am Oved (Hebrew). 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