31/5/99

From Alaska to Al-Aksa

    There isn't much demand in Jerusalem for Eric Knutsen's profession, harbormaster. He's also an experienced forester, in a country with no forestry. So he learned hairdressing, and he's very good at it, but he can't get work in a salon because he can't speak Hebrew. He can't learn it because of a severe learning disability.
    Somewhere in this city swarming with unusual people is a dyslexic Eskimo harbormaster.
    At times, Eric is on an emotional ice floe, seemingly detached from his Israeli environs, floating off the coast of Alaska.
    He's happiest when someone comes through his Beit Hakerem door with a head of unruly hair. He loves to work. (Perhaps hairdressing reminds him of forestry.) The rest of the time, he finds it difficult being a dyslexic Eskimo harbormaster in a landlocked Jewish city.
    Eric -- more precisely, he's an Aleut -- was born in a tiny fishing village off the Bering Straits, and here he is, in meshuga Jerusalem, which is too challenging even for many Israelis.
    Getting your hair cut in Eric's home is not like sitting in a salon, with the white stippled walls, mirrors, and posters of hairstyled models on one side and rabbinical gurus on the other.
    At Eric's, you're looking at a photo of him and his sisters posing in front of a sky-high snowdrift. All around are ivories and soapstones that Eric crafted. The decor includes moose and caribou antlers.
    The caribou was not killed for sport. "We ate it," says Eric's wife Joan, who for 15 years was the only Jewish woman living in Naknek (population 500, including 400 children).
    Joan is Jewishly loquacious, bubbly, expressive; Eric is serene. "There's native people who don't even talk," he says. "They don't feel the need to communicate much. If I call my sister, she won't say anything unless I ask questions." 
    It's a colorful household: a parakeet that talks, a cat that's mentally retarded and another that's so smart it opens doors by leaping upon the door handle, a dog, and oh yes, two winsome daughters. The house is a fascinating hodgepodge of knickknacks encompassing the Knutsen's multiple ethnic personalities: Alaskan, Israeli, Eskimo, Aleut, Christian, Jewish.
    Their daughters, Elena, 17, and Sarah, 21, have integrated well here, and are sometimes mistaken for sabras.
    Elena inherited her dad's dyslexia, but she says, half in jest, the condition is perfectly suited to backwards-written Hebrew.
    Sarah got a job in a bagel shop, natural work for an Aleutian girl who was already hunting caribou at the tender age of 13.
    Joan is a receptionist in a doctor's office. It's a good job for someone with a tender heart, like Joan. Patients pour out their miseries to her while they wait. Sometimes they leave her wiping away tears.
    Joan was a '60s radical hippy who wanted to get the hell out of New York; Eric drifted south, to Washington State and eventually California, where they met.
    "My parents loved Eric very much. He's a good man, and they were happy." She has a sister married to an Orthodox rabbi in Ohio.
    His family in Naknek accepted her -- but only after a test, Joan recalls. "They have these steam baths, like a sauna. I didn't realize they were making it hotter and hotter, to test me. I stayed in it, and I was accepted.
    "Eric had a very old aunt and uncle. They spoke Native and lived the old way. When we first went to meet them, we sat there, and after a few hours the aunt said, 'You're just like us. I like you.'  
    "His family said, 'we thought you guys died out 2,000 years ago, we didn't know there were still Jews today.' They talked to me like I was from the Bible, with respect."
    Lack of respect, she says, is difficult for Eric: in Naknek, as harbormaster, he was a man people looked up to; here, Joan says sadly, "he feels like an animal in a zoo. People look at him and say, 'who are you and where do you come from?!' "
    Eric smiles. "Arab women will really stare at me hard."
    He says that "You don't really belong anywhere until you get to know people." He has had difficulty getting to understand Israelis. "People push close together, there's no private space. The other day we were trying to leave a restaurant. People stopped and talked right in the doorway. We couldn't get through. It's something you don't do [in Alaska]."
    Joan didn't have it any easier here, after living on the resolute tundra. By now, she understands -- and forgives. "I used to think Israelis were pushy and rude, but now, after four years here, I see that that's the way society is organized, and people are generally kind inside. They don't mean to be rude and pushy, it's just that things are so intense here."
    Surprisingly, that's where Aleuts and Israelis are alike.
    "The intensity there was the same as here. Living in Alaska, as strange as it seems, was excellent preparation for living in Jerusalem. Alaska is extreme, intense. You went from a winter of nights to a summer of days. Either the caribou and the fish came and you worked intensely, or you played intensely, you rested intensely. It was, internally, a life of stresses."
    The boredom was intense. The silence, intense. The weather, intense: "The coldest we ever experienced in Naknek was 40 below (Fahrenheit) with 80-mile-an-hour winds; that's about 100 below with the wind-chill factor. In one day it could go up and down by 60 degrees." In the summer, it could reach 75. "Everybody sits out there and goes 'ahhh!'
    "We women would knit intensely. We wouldn't just knit: we'd knit! Winter came and when you were done you'd have 10 sweaters, 14 pairs of socks, mittens, fur hats." 
    And shopping?
    You have no idea.
    "We did shopping once a year," Joan says. "It would take a full day, sitting with a grocery book. We shopped about February, and got delivery by barge around June. The first time, I said, how do you do it? And Eric said, very rationally, 'just think of it this way: how many cans of tomato paste do you use in a year?'" Joan laughs. "The first year we ordered enough mustard to last us 12 years, but we ran out of a lot of stuff. It was mostly canned and boxed goods. We'd buy 500 pounds of flour, 500 pounds of sugar."
    The folks back home in Naknek think Eric's crazy for living in Israel, where it's "dangerous." But don't laugh; we're prone to misconceptions too. The Knutsens did not live in igloos, as many people here think. There are no penguins or polar bears -- but there are moose, caribou, and grizzlies. (The bears can be a bit of a problem. "One guy, we only found his feet in his shoes." A bear took the rest.)
    And you'd be wrong to think Eric suffers from the sweltering temperatures here. On the contrary. "In Alaska it could be 35 below but it's going to be 72 indoors. Here, in the winter, the houses are not well heated.
    "It's cold here," says the Eskimo.