A history of Israel : Song to Zion

/21591544-what-does-it-mean-be-israeli-m

  • A history of Israel: Song to Zion | The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21591544-what-does-it-mean-be-israeli-man-journeys-through-his-countrys-b

    What does it mean to be Israeli? A man journeys through his country’s brief history
    Dec 14th 2013 | From the print edition

    My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. By Ari Shavit. Spiegel & Grau; 445 pages; $28. Scribe; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

    THE lone voice of the cantor is often more haunting than the chorus. So it is with Ari Shavit in this spellbinding book. Rather than set out Israel’s story in a densely scored chronicle, he presents it in solos. The resulting song cycle in 17 episodic chapters leaps through time and space, from the arrival in Palestine in 1897 of Mr Shavit’s great-grandfather, a Victorian gentleman from London, to the hedonistic bustle of Tel Aviv’s waterfront today.

    Mr Shavit subtly builds his stories with a mix of individual portraits, historical detail and personal memoir. He tells of Jascha Heifetz playing his violin in 1926 to some early kibbutzniks in Ein Harod. He describes the citrus growers in the 1930s whose sweet Jaffa oranges found their way to Buckingham Palace. He writes about the tough Jewish pioneers who took up arms to protect themselves and later drove out their Arab neighbours; and the Zionists who assembled Israel’s nuclear arsenal in the Negev desert. He recalls the guile and bravado that went into building an early settlement in a deserted Jordanian military base.

    The music of this book is laced with mournful notes. There are stories of damaged Jews who fled a pitiless Europe yet never emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust. Then there are the Sephardic Jews who came from north Africa and the Middle East only to learn that they were second-class citizens next to the Ashkenazi Europeans, who came first. And there are the put-upon Israeli Arabs who discern ruins and loss where their Jewish compatriots see only a desert that blooms.