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The long goodbye By Aviva Lori , By Aviva Lori / Photo by Shai Ignatz Tags: Gideon Samet Gideon Samet says he didn't want to die on the job, as he expects will happen to some of his elderly former colleagues on the editorial board of Haaretz and on other newspapers. Last year he took the initiative, and as a diversionary tactic in the face of the inevitable, retired from the newspaper with which he was identified for 36 years and which he loved almost as much as his own home. He left in order to devote himself to other loves. Samet is altogether a man of loves. Big loves and small ones, and mostly ones that shatter. This week he took the lid off one of them by publishing his first novel, "Destroying Nadav" (Carmel Publishing House; Hebrew). This is a roman ? clef, using thinly disguised material from Samet's own life. Entranced, if not enthralled, by the writing process, Samet devised a plot with a large cast and multiple twists, turns and subplots. It's as though he felt an uncontrollable urge to tell everything that has accumulated within him in his 67 years on the planet and shout out: "I am not what you thought - not only the bland and devoted editor, not only a columnist on the paper's left wing. I lived, I loved, I sometimes went off the wall and did crazy things." Samet's novel has four main characters: two men and two women. The death of one of the women at the outset is the engine that sets the plot in motion, and it develops into a detective story and a journey of destruction. Dedi Schwartz, the narrator and the representation of Samet, is obsessed with exposing the truth and ruining his best friend, Nadav, who has certain things in common with the journalist Yaron London, Samet's real-life best friend. But it is not only Nadav whom the narrator destroys in the labyrinthine and not always comprehensible plot. He destroys himself as well, while bemoaning his inauthentic life, and also settles accounts with his many friends, both real and imaginary, and the false lives they lead. Advertisement On a broader plane, he is disappointed in the country's leaders and grieved at its impending demise. And as though unable to shake off the habits of a columnist, Samet takes a moralizing tone to lament the evil that lurks in human relationships. He finds reinforcement for his viewpoint in the sentiment expressed by the poet Haim Gouri: "And evil shall return to dwell among us, as always" - in place of comradeship that is sanctified in blood - which is the novel's epigraph. "Haim Gouri is right," Samet says. "I didn't think of him when I wrote the book, but among the many changes in Israeli society there is one thing we do not talk about: what happened to interpersonal relations." Nili Lavie, Dedi Schwartz's former love and the representation of the late writer Batya Gur - Samet's love - plays a femme fatale role in the novel. Alluring, opinionated and sophisticated, she sets men aflame with passion. The novel is set in Tel Aviv, from north Frishman Street, the section where Samet lives. He leads his protagonist through the city's streets and lanes with the precision of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe and the obsession of the novelist Yaakov Shabtai. ("I was born opposite the apartment of Yankele [Yaakob] Shabtai, I was the same age as his brother, [the poet] Aharon, I saw him playing downstairs, and I knew exactly where he went in his wanderings.") In the course of endlessly cruising the streets and weaving scraps of information into an emerging pattern, Samet redeems himself from a nightmarish reality and fashions an alternative reality for himself. A time to be healed, perhaps. Iconic schools Gideon Samet was born in Tel Aviv, on Frug Street, in the "workers residences" compound, to parents who immigrated to Palestine from Poland in the 1920s and 1930s. His father, Shimon, was a journalist at Davar, the long-defunct newspaper that was the organ of the Histadrut labor federation, and afterward with Haaretz; his mother, Anda, was a cosmetician. Samet attended iconic schools - Beit Hinuch, A.D. Gordon and afterward, Ironi Heh High School. He met Yaron London when the two were in third grade, and they have been close friends ever since. "We actually met when we were five, in a kindergarten on Ben Yehuda Street," London says. "Afterward I attended Dugma Elementary School, and it was only in third grade, when I was transferred to Beit Hinuch, that we became friends." "Not just friends, soul mates," Samet adds. "That school, which taught us the importance of truth, was full of lies," Samet says, looking back in anger. "This was the period of the mass immigrations of the 1950s, but we did not know a thing about them. We were never taken there and we never met the immigrant children." He belonged to a left-of-center youth movement, but did not follow the usual track of serving in the Nahal paramilitary brigade. "Apparently that was where the seeds of doubt were planted in me about Israeli camaraderie, a phenomenon which also had extraordinary manifestations: volunteering, pioneering, farming, land-settlement groups. But at the same time, I have for years looked with apprehension and a certain shock at the buddy-buddy attitude, the mutual back slapping, the bro' stuff and the ahalan vasahalan." He did his army service in the Artillery Corps until he was injured and had his physical profile lowered. "Someone was making soup and filling up the primus stove with fuel while the stove was lit. A column of smoke came out of it and caught me with my mess kit in hand. I was badly burned, but saved my life by immediately rolling in the sand - otherwise I might have caught fire. I was hospitalized with very serious burns. After my profile was lowered I was posted to the Nahal Brigade magazine and there I started to write." Following his discharge, he studied English literature and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he met Naomi, his wife, and the future composer Ehud Manor, who would become a close friend. "Naomi was a dancer in the student troupe, the star of the troupe," Samet recalls. "Yaakov Perry [the future Shin Bet security service head] played the trumpet there, and Dan Biron [later a television director] was an accordionist. Ehud Manor was a close friend of hers." After graduating, Samet returned to Tel Aviv. He and Naomi married and had two sons: Yoav, who works in high-tech, and Uri, a jewelry designer who also teaches at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan. Samet was hired as the deputy to Yitzhak Livni, who was the commander of Army Radio and the editor of the Israel Defense Forces' weekly Bamahane. In 1971, in a move that took many in the industry by surprise, Haaretz publisher and editor-in-chief Gershom Schocken offered him the job of assistant editor of the paper, a post he held for 10 years. He was a member of the paper's board, a columnist and its correspondent in Washington. In the mid-1980s he edited Politika, a monthly published by the dovish Meretz party, for eight years. Wasn't that a conflict of interest with your work on Haaretz? "No. Gershom Schocken was very much in favor. He often published articles from the magazine in Haaretz. Hanoch Marmari, the editor who succeeded Schocken, took what in my opinion was an approach that went too far. He prevented employees of the paper from appearing on television or doing other things. He would say, 'Who will want to read [military analyst] Ze'ev Schiff after he is on television?' Some people left the paper because of that." Samet left Politika after the 1992 elections, and the magazine folded a few months later. "Because of a budget shortfall, no money was transferred to support the magazine after the election victory [by Labor and Meretz]. Meretz was unable to raise money for these kinds of projects the way Shas did." Open secret Samet first met Batya Gur at the end of the 1980s, when he was editing Politika. The relationship was initially professional but quickly turned intimate; the affair lasted four and a half years. Gur, a teacher, lecturer, literary critic and author of a series of detective novels, started out as a writer. "I commissioned an article from her for our issue on women and she turned in an exceptional piece," Samet says. She then continued to write for the magazine. "One of the most memorable issues she did, at my initiative, was about [the remote southern town of] Ofakim, where she had been a soldier-teacher. We titled it 'Hunger Road Left.' It came out later as a book. It is one of the most fascinating documents on the periphery and the experience of life there." Nili Lavie, the Batya Gur character in the novel, is a talented clarinetist who demonstrates great knowledge about literature, which soars far above the average reader. "Anyone who didn't know her might think she was condescending," Samet says, "but it wasn't like that. She was overflowing, like a fountainhead, and had an absolutely retentive memory." The affair did not remain a secret for very long. Samet and Gur's close friends and their colleagues at work all knew and kept quiet. Everyone knew except Naomi, Samet's wife. Until one day, as these things usually happen, she overheard a telephone conversation on a phone in the next room. "She probably knew that something was going on," says a close friend. "But couples very often deny things to themselves until they are confronted with them in all their severity." Samet had to cope with the truth. He admitted the existence of the relationship, but played down its meaning and deeper levels as much as possible, "in order to soften the blow to Naomi," the close friend says. It was inevitable for Samet and Gur to break up, and the process was long and unbearable. It went on for months and was punctuated by the continual slamming of telephone receivers and doors - which would be opened again the next day in a seemingly endless cycle. "I have to put him and the relationship to death, otherwise I will die," Nili Lavie says in the novel. Yet, Samet's friend notes, "It was precisely during the rough breakup that some of the deepest developments between them occurred." The bottom line is that you cheated on your wife. Samet: "Every friendship, every love relationship contains the core of its end. That is usually the nature of things. The beginning of the end is foreshadowed after a time. Very often it does not appear in its full force because the parties involved do not allow it to burst out, but the current of the beginning of the end is flowing there." In 1996, at the height of trying to deal with the pain of parting from Batya, Samet wanted to get as far away as possible. He reached an agreement with Prime Minister Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Ehud Barak under which he would be appointed Israeli consul general in Philadelphia. "I did what many journalists do. I thought it would be right to accede to the possibility of going abroad for the Foreign Ministry on the basis of an existing quota for non-ministry people. There was talk of my becoming consul general in New York, but I rejected that out of hand, because it is a political post." Everything was set: The apartment was rented and Naomi had taken a leave of absence from her job. And then Peres lost the elections to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud. David Levy took over as foreign minister and Samet's mission abroad began to look like a fading dream. "David Levy, a marginal politician in terms of his ability, as I wrote more than once," Samet says, "did not have enough self-confidence to do what he wanted others to do for the people he brought in during his previous tenure as minister - in other words, for the new minister not to touch them." The word is that you toadied to him in order to get the appointment. "There was no toadying or anything else. He tried to delay it, he pulled a few maneuvers, and then he wanted satisfaction, to receive me, as the protocol calls for: the candidates for the post come to a formal meeting with the president, the prime minister and the foreign minister. And then all kinds of spin people and lackeys said that I told him, 'Mr. Levy, I will be fine,' or 'I will behave nicely.' Well, I am certainly capable of coping with David Levy, finding the right formula and not falling into the very large trap of his sarcasm. All I told him was that I would act as required." Samet's friends tried to talk him out of going and not demean himself by working for David Levy. "They told me it didn't look good," Samet says. "I told them that it was all very unpleasant for me, but that there are decisions - and this was one of them, which I am not proud of - that are not 100 percent good. I told only one person at Haaretz and my two best friends the real reason that it was so important for me to go." Could Levy have canceled the appointment? "If he had done that, a can would have opened and all his worms would have crawled out - all the lobbying and all his political appointments. It was not likely that he would take that risk." Samet returned to Israel a year later, the family tangles only partly resolved. "There are many adages that have no foundation in reality," he says, "such as 'Will power is irresistible.' Well, it's not. But 'Time heals all,' that yes. Though it's not a 100 percent cure." Naomi Samet, an adored teacher and educational adviser, died suddenly on Rosh Hashanah in 1999, from salmonella poisoning and complications arising from diabetes. "It was genetic in her," Samet says. "Her father also died from diabetes. We ate at a restaurant on the Herzliya beach - we were celebrating a friend's birthday - and no one felt poorly afterward. But her self-immunizing mechanism was damaged from long years of diabetes. The next morning she had a high fever, but we didn't give it much thought, because since childhood she always ran a high fever once a year, at the beginning of autumn, and after a night of much perspiration, it would disappear as though it had never happened. "She thought the fever was the yearly event. When the fever did not abate like it always did, I took her to the hospital. She was looked after by the finest physicians at Tel Hashomer [Sheba Medical Center]. They said, 'It is showing off before we kill it with antibiotics, but kill it we will.' She was there about two weeks, and they did not notice internal damage done by the bacterium, because it left no signs, and did not diagnose internal hemorrhaging until it was too late. She died at the age of 60." Samet says he was totally derailed for months. "It destroyed me," he says. "I would leave the house in throw-away, unsuitable clothes. I was completely out of it. Life passed by next to me. Later, very slowly, I drew close to it again." Half a year later, a woman friend introduced him to Ziva Shemtov, the owner of Hagalil Pharmacy, a well-known homeopathic institution in Tel Aviv, and the two were married. What unhinged him most was the silence of Batya Gur. She simply ignored him. "She did not send a note or phone me," he says. "More than that, she passed within centimeters of me at a concert, looked at me and did not say a word. That was her way of killing me. I did not try and was unable to kill [my love], and I don't know whether she succeeded, but she tried in every way." In the novel, too, the love story is unfinished and far from resolved. "Nadav Medan will never extricate himself from the story of Tamar Berkowitz," Samet writes, meaning that he will never extricate himself from the story of Batya Gur. Gur died three years ago, of cancer. Samet was at the funeral. It was utterly unbearable, he says. Hallucinatory thoughts raced through his mind. She, who had wanted to kill him, had herself died. Why didn't you pursue the love? "I have not fully resolved that question for myself." Did you suffer? "Very much." Maybe it wasn't true love? "It was true love, the truest possible, and it did not end the way it perhaps should have ended, but there is a certain correction in the fictional version." Why did you need this self-exposure? "For years I looked at couples who are my friends - that is a model I am very familiar with - and I saw what everyone sees: disintegration. But I attributed greater weight to it. Few of our friends' marriages survived. It's not that they all got divorced. Sometimes they are hanging on by fudging their problems and sweeping them under the rug. It was very important for me to handle the subject courageously and honestly. My personal story was undoubtedly one of the elements that pushed these materials out into the open." Other materials that were pushed out involve Samet's relations, at different levels, with his many friends and the waning of his belief in the sense of togetherness and in the pretense that anything of the "campfire spirit" is left. Samet is not only a person of great loves; he is also a person of regular cafe tables and musical chairs. Over the course of his life he was a regular at many tables of longstanding friends, groups that have fallen apart in recent years. There is an expiry date, he says. "These groups have a certain lifespan and their destiny is to be destroyed. That is the genetics of groups of buddies, unless they continue ad nauseam, pathetically, even though there is nothing holding them together and no reason for them to go on existing." One such group consisted of four couples: the Samets, the Londons, former MK and cabinet minister Yossi Sarid and his wife, and Ehud Manor and his wife. Occasionally Amnon Dankner - the journalist, writer and until recently chief editor of the newspaper Maariv - would join with his wife. "We met almost every week, each time in someone else's home, for a lot of years," Samet says. "It was very amusing, but little by little it came to an end. Nothing dramatic. I think we got tired of Yossi Sarid dominating things, even though it was not the Knesset. He is also a very funny raconteur who can be absolutely vicious. Every so often someone would tell him, 'Yosef shut up - I am talking now.' Once we all ganged up on him, so he put on an act, folded his arms and said, 'I will be quiet and you will come to me on your knees and beg me to talk.' But he couldn't keep quiet, because Yossi's thing in the world is not to be quiet but to talk. Then Ehud died, and the group broke up." Sarid, who became a Haaretz columnist just when Samet left, doesn't quite know what his pal is talking about. "That's a very nice story," he says, "and I even like it, but I have no recollection of it. I remember that every evening there was a big demand for my stand-up act. I would make them laugh, and they listened with interest to what I had to say. That particular story just never happened. As a matter of fact, I called him a few weeks ago, when I heard about his book, and I was delighted, and someone even said something good about him, which I wanted to tell him, but he was so icy that I haven't thawed out since." Another table that disintegrated recently was the one habituated by the late journalist and former cabinet minister Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, former chairman of the Israel Broadcasting Authority Yitzhak Livni and the journalists Dan Margalit, Amnon Dankner and Ari Shavit, along with occasional guests. They met once every two weeks at Manta Ray Restaurant on the Tel Aviv beach. That table started to wobble when Dan Margalit, a former friend of Ehud Olmert's, started to attack him, much to the distaste, to put it mildly, of the prime minister's two buddies, Dankner and Lapid. Now, after Lapid's death, the table's future is not clear. "Many of these groups seethe with unease," says Samet. "You are there by compulsion. You often ask yourself, Why am I still here? And why do these people hold any interest for me? But you don't leave, because what will they say? So we are stuck and imprisoned in the same formats, because the price of being different is too high." A few years ago, Samet edited a series of books under the overall rubric "The Israeli Situation." The series did not take off; it failed to generate the kind of public debate the publisher had hoped it would. A different publisher took over the series, still under Samet's editorship, but again without success, and the project was dropped. Samet does not have a high opinion of the contemporary fictional mainstream in Israel. It is too soft, idyllic and does not reflect true reality, he says. His novel, in contrast, is a sharp-fanged bulldog, he believes. Its imaginary protagonists, who destroy one another, are meant to serve as an allegory for the reader, and as a warning sign for society. "The books that have been published in recent years are nourishing the Israeli lie," he says. "They pander to the readers in the belief that this is what they want." What is the Israeli lie? "The black hole that has opened up and is continuing to expand in the realm of relations at the personal level as at the national level. This literature still fawns over the 'togetherness' idea, which is a lie, and over the supposed 'way of pleasantness' here. But the moment the picture expands, the cracks become visible. No one talks about them, but there is immediately an unconscious mobilization to heal the rifts. That is not the picture I chose for my book." Samet's manuscript went through a number of revisions and quite a few publishers. He gave the first draft to several friends and acquaintances, some of them editors and publishers, as a trial balloon - not for publication, he emphasizes, only to read. The responses were lukewarm to cold. Some advised him to rewrite the book, others did not get back to him at all. "I told him with all due courtesy that the book was not good enough for us," says Menahem Peri, the editor-in-chief of the New Library. "I publish only a few books a year, so I have the privilege of deciding which books to accept." In the second stage, after half a year in which he put the text aside, Samet went back to it and sought professional help from the novelist Amnon Jackont. "When I read it, it was not edible," Jackont says. "He had problems mainly in the area of literary excess. I suggested that he make large sections simpler. There was an element of tension, but it was lost between too many ideas and theses, and the whole thing was very programmatic. I deleted much of that and energized the action. I told him all this frankly, and he corrected and corrected, and at one point he called me and said he was going to a publisher. I haven't heard from him since." After correcting and reediting the book, Samet offered it to Bavel Publishers, a small house. The editor was very enthusiastic, he says, but it didn't pan out. The negotiations with Bavel became oppressive, Samet says, and he sent the manuscript to Carmel, a small Jerusalem publishing house that specializes in translations. For publishing an original work in Hebrew, Carmel usually asks for payment. Samet says he was not asked to pay, and that he promised the owner, Yisrael Carmel, a profit on the novel. "Carmel was my preference from the start," he says. "It is a small, high-quality house, which promised I would be involved in the editing process." Carmel printed a limited edition of "Destroying Nadav." This is not the first time Yaron London has been fictionalized. In the distant past, he was the inspiration for Yaron Zahavi in Igal Mossinsohn's bestselling "Hasamba" children's adventure series, beginning in 1950. (Mossinsohn was a tenant in the home of London's parents in Tel Aviv.) London does not appear by name in Samet's novel, but details of his biography are there. "Every writer, to one degree or another of his artistic freedom, borrows sketches from his surroundings," London notes. "There is nothing special about that." What is your opinion of the book? London: "It's interesting. It is written in a fury and touches on social questions such as a feeling that friendship is disintegrating, and all this is set against a detective-story background of who murdered a certain woman."W Bookmark to del.icio.us   By the numbers A study shows Jewish Israeli men live almost four years longer than Israeli Arabs. Local threat The Shin Bet arrests two Bedouin, accused of supplying information to al-Qaida.

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