Review of “Eskimos of Jerusalem”, by Jack Riemer (Florida)

December, 2001

Everybody Has a Story

By: Rabbi Jack Riemer

Eskimos of Jerusalem and Other Extraordinary Israelis by Sam Orbaum, The Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem, Israel, 2001, 396 pages.

   Sam Orbaum has what I think must be one of the hardest jobs of anybody I know these days. He is responsible for the humor column of the Jerusalem Post. How anyone can turn out funny columns with what is going on in Israel these days is beyond me, but he somehow manages to do it consistently and well.

   In this book he has collected over a hundred of his columns, that deal not so much with humor as with the incredible variety of people who somehow find their way to Israel. Orbaum has made his way around the country interviewing offbeat people who each have a story to tell. You won't find the celebrities, the politicians, the people who make page one of the papers in this collection. But you will find some remarkable human beings in it, and Orbaum has listened to what they have to say and written their stories down for us to enjoy and to think about.

Space does not allow me to tell all the stories that he has collected, and it is hard to choose between them. I can feel each story tugging on my sleeve and saying: you're not going to talk about me? How can you skip me? And I feel the pull of every one. I was fascinated, for example, by the story of the Eskimos who moved to Jerusalem, and by the story of the Gett Getter who goes up and down the Soviet Union, like a bounty hunter, finding recalcitrant husbands and persuading them to give their wives a get. And I was impressed with the story of the Japanese woman who runs a tea house in the middle of the Galilee. And I was moved by the story of Gustav Scheller, the Christian, who went into the Soviet Union and knocked on the doors of thousands of Jews, in places likeKizakhastan and Ubekitsan, and persuaded many of them to come home to Israel. And I was delighted by Orbaum's story of what happened when he tried to interview some prostitutes on the beach and found out that they do nothing for nothing. And so it is hard to choose which one of his stories is my favorite. Let me focus on just two:

   Jonny Morris was just a beggar. When he died, there was one less beggar on the streets of Jerusalem. Who cared?

   Or so you would think. But two hundred people came to his funeral service in New York and two hundred more came to his burial on the Mount of Olives. For he was a schizophrenic, manic depressive, lunatic from one point of view, but he was a person who spread joy wherever he went from another point of view. He taught tolerance towards all people, Orthodox Jews, Arabs -- he was kind to all of them. He radiated an almost biblical aura of goodness. Through his scraggly beard a crackling humor shone. He was mad, yes, mad about people, kissing, blessing, hugging strangers. People shrank from him because in our culture, unrestrained love is scary. We are evidently more comfortable with, more accustomed to, hatred than we are to love. But love he did, despite the demons inside him that eventually consumed him. And it is good that he is remembered in a book, for he deserves it.

   Haim Markowitz has a story that is just as impressive. He gets up every morning, during his three week visit to Jerusalem, and walks from Bet Shmuel, the hostel where he lives, to the Moreshet Yisrael synagogue on Agron Street. He takes a seat there and joins in the service, just one tenth of one minyan in a city that has many many minyanim. And when the service is over, he walks back to Bet Shmuel.

   Lots of people do that in Jerusalem every day. What is special about Haim Markowitz is that he does it, even though he is completely blind. It is a privilege to pray in Jerusalem if you come from Kansas. It is a hard wrought privilege if you have travelled all the way from Kansas and you are 87 years old. It is mind boggling to be that old, and to have come from so far, if you are blind.

   This is Haim Markowitz's fourth visit to Jerusalem in the last eight years, the fourth time he has packed a suitcase, arranged a ride from his farm in Leavenworth to the airport in Kansas City, flown to Chicago, navigated through the vast expanse of O'Hare airport to find his connecting flight to Tel Aviv, endured the exhausting procedures that air travel entails, been jolted about in the mayhem of Ben Gurion Airport, located his luggage and lugged it to a taxi, survived the careening journey to Jerusalem and found a hotel room.
When Sam Orbaum asks him how he does it, he says:

"I don't look at the dark side; I look at the bright side. Yeah. But I'd like to go to a kibbutz, see how they live, an' Massada, I heard about it. I walk in the morning, then I go back and rest awhile, an' I go walk again. Been up 'n down King David Street, been up 'n down the street where the synagogue is, been the other direction, whatsit called, King George Street, I go slow, I manage.

People here are very helpful to me, oh year, no question 'bout it. 'Specially when I'm ready to cross the street and I hesitate. Some of 'em start talkin' Hebrew, and I can't understand 'em, but when they get me by th' arm, that I understand."

He has taken his bumps, but "ya stumble, ya fall, you pick yourself up, you learn." He wanted to visit Ilan, a workshop for the disabled, to leave a donation there and buy a few trinkets. Orbaum drove him, and on the way, he kept asking: "what street we on now?"

On the way back, they returned to Bet Shmuel but the street was one-way, the wrong way, so Orbaum circled the block. "Are we lost?" Haim asked.

"Uh, no, not exactly," Orbaum replied.

"Awright," he said. You want the YMCA on the left side, then ya gotta make the first right turn, alla way down, then left alla way up. That'll git you to Bet Shmool."

And Orbaum says: "I'll be danged, he was right."

These are just two small samples of the many people that Sam Orbaum introduces us to in this book. He reminds us that Israelis are an exasperating, exhilarating, absolutely extraordinary collection of people, who come from the four corners of the world, and who are endlessly interesting.

It is good to read a whole book about Israel without groaning or wincing once, the way we do when we read the stories about Israel that appear in the daily newspapers. There are no stories about suicide bombers or sudden acts of violence in this book, no stories about strikes or disputes between the political parties or between labor and management. There are just stories about the extraordinary lives of the ordinary people who make up the population of this country, the ones who make Israel such a vital and vibrant place, the ones who have come from Alaska and Antartica, from the Congo and from California, and who each have their own story to tell.

In this time when the stories that come out of Israel are so often grim, it is good to have this collection of stories that are humorous, poignant, and very moving.

(Rabbi Jack Riemer is the co editor of So That Your Values Live On, published by Jewish Lights of Woodstock, Vt. He writes frequently for journals in America and abroad.)