CHAPTER 1
I am writing this book after my death. Most people write nothing after they die, but I am not most people.
Or maybe I am. My biography is so full of contradictions that sometimes I used to think—and not only I—that I contain everyone I ever knew. At birth I was named Joseph after a grandfather I never met and Tommy after a Hungarian prince from a long-forgotten dynasty, and I held on to both names throughout my life. I was the most famous atheist in Israel, the public and bitter enemy of Orthodoxy, but I represented (faithfully, I hope) the entirety of Jewish fate. I was despised, but remarkably popular, a polite and educated European intellectual and a red-cheeked defender of the rights of the people whose outbursts were legendary. A conservative chauvinist who knew how to appreciate the figure of a beautiful woman and loved Rembrandt, Mozart and Brecht, and a folksy speaker who could fire up a crowd with pithy one-liners. A leftist who supported partitioning Israel and a rightist whom Prime Minister Menahem Begin chose to run the country’s lone television station. I was an orphan who stepped off the boat with only the clothes on his body, and an affluent member of the upper middle class who stained his neckties at the best restaurants across Europe.
I entertained SS officers at the train station in the city of my birth, smuggled frozen horsemeat into a cellar in the ghetto, was sent at the age of seventeen to serve in the army of a country I was not familiar with under the command of officers who spoke a language I understood not a word of. In the service of said country, I was invited to the White House, 10 Downing Street, the Élysée Palace, Beijing’s Forbidden City and Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. I lunched with Barack Obama, drank coffee with Yassir Arafat, raised a glass with Nicolas Sarkozy, marched in Winston Churchill’s funeral procession, toured the Third World with David Ben Gurion, and yet my mother thought I had not amounted to much.
I lived my life with guilt-free passion the way only a person who has been spared certain death can. Long-legged girls shook their shapely bottoms for me from the Lido in Paris to the Mirage in Las Vegas. Louis Armstrong played for me, Ella Fitzgerald and Israeli singer Rita Yahan-Farouz sang for me, I presented an award at the German “Oscars” along with a dead-drunk Jack Nicholson, Danny Kaye was an usher at my wedding, I helped Jackie Mason with his gas mask during a rocket attack on Tel Aviv at the height of the Gulf War. I was an auto mechanic, a lawyer, a journalist, a businessman, a politician and once again a journalist. I wrote successful books of humor and travel guides, my collected essays were bestsellers just like my cookbook, and my comedies were big hits in the national theater, though everyone—including me—agreed that my wife was a better writer than me.
I disappointed Menahem Begin, I had a complex father-son relationship with Ariel Sharon, I shouted at Ehud Barak, Binyamin Netanyahu claims to this very day that without me he would not have been able to carry out the financial revolution that saved the country, and Ehud Olmert—one of my two best friends in the world—sat at my bedside and watched me die. Watched and bawled.
And I ate endlessly: Hungarian sausages, flaky French baguettes fresh from the boulangerie oven, pungent Dutch cheeses, steaming bowls of hummus with beans in Abu Ghosh, thick beef stews in North America, cream cakes in Vienna, wieners as thick as the arms of whichever Gretchen made them in Berlin, sushi in Japan, chicken tikka in Bombay; once I drank a frightful wine in Burma only to discover, too late, that it had been fermented in pitchers in which monkey fetuses had been placed in order to improve the taste. I ate everything, I ate more than everyone, and I always remained hungry.
But still I need to explain this strange act—by no means the strangest thing I have ever been involved in—that allows a man to write his autobiography after his death. Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century Italian playwright whose most famous work is Servant of Two Masters, once wrote, “He only half dies who leaves an image of himself in his sons.”
I am writing now through my son, Yair, but my voice has commandeered his own, just as it did more than once during my lifetime. Is this unfair to him, an injustice? I suppose so. But it is not the first injustice I have committed against him and yet he still loves me in that unswerving and occasionally undiscerning way of children who are willing to accept the image we have created for them.
Without his knowing it, I had been preparing Yair for this moment from the day he was born. I told him the story of my life again and again. As with every good storyteller (and what Hungarian Jew is not a good storyteller?) I studded my stories with anecdotes, ridiculous characters, good guys and bad guys, eternal winners and losers, vistas and flavors and scents, and clever and sometimes cruel observations about human nature and its weaknesses.
And Yair always listened. He was a sad and serious boy, nearly friendless, and I filled the emptiness in his life with exhilaration without ever asking myself whether I was the one who had created that emptiness in the first place. I can picture a scene, toward the end of the 1960s, when we had returned to Israel from London with a new record collection and I sat in my small study in Yad Eliyahu listening to Mozart’s Magic Flute and enthusiastically conducting my battered stereo system with my chubby, white fingers (a part of my body I always hated). It took me a few minutes to notice that he was there, sitting on the floor and imitating me, conducting a piece he had never heard with the fingers of a child. At that moment I suspected—and continued to suspect for years—that that imitation would perpetuate itself and, like many children of successful people, he would become the Sancho Panza of my memories without bothering to develop an identity of his own. I was wrong, of course, but let it be said to my credit that I was happy to be wrong.
Death is a very centering moment. It places before you only the most important matters: parenting, family, love. When I look back on these things I have no regrets. Regret is not circumstantial, it is a character trait, and I admit that it does not exist in me. Time and again I said to my kids, “The proof of the cooking is in the pudding.” If the pudding does not turn out well, no amount of talking about it is going to improve it. And if it does turn out well then the chef deserves an ovation. I had three successful children, and two of them have outlived me. Something was apparently working well in my kitchen.
* * *
I did not suffer from a surplus of modesty but I must admit that I would not have bothered to work on this book if my funeral had not been so impressive. It was without doubt a stunning success. The prime minister cried over my grave, many hundreds of people jammed the walkways, the press was there in all its glory, and of course I managed to cause one last scandal by becoming the first person to be buried in secular fashion in an Orthodox cemetery.
It was cause for celebration in the Orthodox press when word first got out that I was to be buried at Kiryat Shaul. Those are precisely the moments when religion pushes its way into our lives—at the beginning and at the end, when we have no possibility of refusing. Imagine how great their disappointment was when they discovered that instead of a recitation of the traditional Kaddish prayer, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” would be played. Truth be told, we very nearly failed: just before I was lowered into my grave, Chabad Rabbi Gloiberman appeared on the scene—one of God’s wretched makhers, the kind of fixer I hated my entire life—and started mumbling some incomprehensible verses from the Bible, positioning himself quite naturally in front of the television cameras. Yair put his hand none too gently on Gloiberman’s arm and told him to take a hike. Maybe I shouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did in my present state, but I never missed a good fight or a good meal and there’s certainly no point in starting now.
* * *
On her way out of the funeral, my wife, Shula, muttered to Alush (Aliza Olmert, Ehud’s wife), “I’m so embarrassed.” Aliza asked her why. “I always knew he was important,” Shula said, “but I only just understood how important.”
Don’t be mad at yourself, Shulinka. I didn’t understand either. People asked me time and again to write this autobiography but I always figured they wanted me to write their own biographies and took me for a suitable vessel. There are a few attempts at writing my life story still on my computer but I never got past the first few pages. After all, I was never good at distinguishing what is important from what is not. Everything I ever dealt with seemed, at that time, to be the most important thing. On the Internet site where I played Blitz Chess against opponents from around the world, I racked up 31,731 games, and every one of them, while I was playing, was like a matter of life or death to me. I guess it’s no wonder that I wasn’t able to take life or death themselves too seriously. In a letter I wrote to Barran, a friend from the ghetto, on his seventieth birthday, I noted that “in our case, it was a lot tougher to reach our fifteenth birthdays than our seventieth.”
In fact, it was only after my death that I realized—or acknowledged—that I was the last one.
There is nothing remarkable about being the last of one’s kind. In my case it is merely proof that apostasy and stuffed cabbage are a life-lengthening combination. Being the last is not an honor, it is a job. I was the last Holocaust survivor to be a member of the Knesset and serve in the government. After my death there will be no one else to sit on one of those buckskin armchairs who can recall the most horrific event in the history of the world’s nations. I was also the last to remember pre-war Europe, an antique world of crystal chandeliers and women in satin ballgowns leaning gracefully against the shoulders of elegant men. I was the last of Israel’s leaders to watch Churchill orate in Parliament, be present for the creation—and later the fall of—the Iron Curtain, make aliyah to Israel on a rickety boat, listen to the United Nations vote on the establishment of Israel over shortwave radio, serve in the army during the War of Independence in 1948, and to have been on hand, personally, to witness the death of God.
My good friend, the Nobel Laureate Eli Wiesel, once said that memory is his principal occupation. But with me, memory is only a hobby. I was always too busy, too lustful for life, to spend my present on my past. Only now do I understand—with surprise and no small measure of pride—that I was the last in precisely the same things in which I was once first.
Copyright © 2011 by Yair Lapid
