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- [00:00]
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- [01:23]
Dan Kennedy
Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories told live without notes. All stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series in New York and Los Angeles and from our tour shows across the country. Visit themoth.org the story you're about to hear by Nathan Englander was recorded live at the Moth main stage last year. The show was a collaboration with the World Science Festival and the theme of the night was Toil and stories of experiments gone Wrong.
- [01:56]
Nathan Englander
I'm going to put this at official Jewish Upper west side height. It's my neighborhood. I was moving to Jerusalem to make peace. It was 1996 and I was living in Iowa City, Iowa, and peace was breaking out. There was going to be a new world order, basically. I was sure everyone was going to be holding hands from Baghdad to Tel Aviv. And my friends were already there. And honestly, you know, Israel had peace with Egypt, they had peace with Jordan. The Palestinian Authority had the west bank and a casino. And you know, I just. The state was happening, it was going to be over. And I was desperately afraid that year that I was going to miss out. Now I wasn't just moving. I'm radically secular now, but I was raised religious. I have this concept of aliyah in my head. I'm making aliyah, literally. The root lalot is to go up, to go up in holiness. It's a forever thing. When you move to Jerusalem, you don't come back from that. So I am going there forever. You know, I had a friend, Jesus, called me, got a job in Denver. And he didn't say to me, you know, I'm moving to Denver and I will die in Denver and Denver will drink my blood. But this is the way I'm thinking for Jerusalem. School ends two weeks later, I'm on a plane. I wake up in Tel Aviv. I walk into the airport and I look for the first official Jew I can find. And I say to him, you know, where's the office for new immigrants? And he looks at me and he says, did you come on the plane from Manhattan? You know, not New York, not America. Manhattan, like we have our own fucking airstrip on Broadway. And I tell him, in fact, I have. And he says to me, it's not too late. Go back. Two days later, you know, I met this fancy. I've been there a million times and I've lived there. I met this fancy lefty, you know, in the American neighborhood, this professor's house, the academics, all the brilliant lefties. And I think, because it's not just I want to be part of peace, I piece needs me, it needs short story writers. I'm also convinced. And you know, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords is there. It's this fancy dinner and I'm just excited, you know, I can see it happening as she raises her glass and I'm going to get my toast, and she says to me, welcome to the Titanic. But again, there have been setbacks. Buses are blowing up, the Prime Minister has been assassinated. But all I can tell you, and I so feel this, it felt so good on the street, you know, we'd go to East Jerusalem on Saturday to the Arab party and eat lunch. And it was just a beautiful time. And I didn't want to live with those Americans. I wanted to be. I was becoming Israeli, you know, and there was this neighborhood in the center of town, you know, all twisty alleyways and houses piled on top of each other, and we're all living in a pile. There's like the artists and the freaks and the stone messianists and, you know, everything's happening. We've got. It is the birth then of Hebrew rap, which I recommend to all of you. You know, so much good stuff is going on and we're all so poor and living in this crazy place, literally. My house is patched with tin and chicken wire. And when it rains, my roommate and I would sit there and watch our one light bulb on a wire just Watch the water pour off. And it would pour in under the doors and like a horror movie, just water would run black down the walls. It was just downright dangerous to live that way. And it's my buddy's story that sums it up best. Lovely guy, lovely girlfriend wakes up and has a terrible venereal disease. You know, he wakes up and his penis, he's peeing, it's on fire. His body's shaking, his toes are curling, his eyes are bugging out. It's horrible. And to give you all the gory details, there's a weird non complication. When he poops and pees, he feels fine. When he pees again, the fire, the eyes, his body shaking, he can't figure out what's happening. Poops and pees fine. This is for my science friends. When he's sitting, he is peeing against porcelain. When he is standing up, his landlord has not grounded electricity. He is closing the circuit and being electrocuted through his wiener. And this is honestly, this is the least, the least of Jerusalem life. You know, being in the heart of the city. We also have the open air market Again, Upper west side. There's scientists here and Jews. I know Machine Yehuda, you know, like, it's just this really simple life. You need a cucumber, you go get a cucumber. You need a tomato, you go get a tomato. That's such a nice way to live. And I'm in the market with my Israeli girlfriend and my buddy Mike's in from Haifa and we're shopping and it's a Friday and it's always a beautiful day. And we're thinking, should we do a real shopping? And we decide, as we always do, let's just be lazy and go home and eat. And we walk the couple of blocks and get to the balcony and then there is a low boom and another low boom and we absorb it. And the market has just blown up. And I'm thinking, I want to freak out. I'm a kid from Strong Island. Like, this is not for me. I just want to freak. And my girlfriend says she's going to make a man out of me. This is it. When your number's up, your number's up. And I sort of understand it. We don't do chaos theory there. You did not survive September 11th in Minnesota. You didn't survive it in the Bronx. You know, those are the rules of Jerusalem. If you're close enough to claim it, you're dead. And that's how we're going to do it now. I'm a coward, you know, why aren't I afraid? And also because at this time, I'm an idealist. And I honestly believe you have to be willing to die for something. We're making peace, and there is a cost and there are enemies. And I was really ready to die for that. I would never say such a thing now, but then I really believed, you know? And not long after, I'm sitting in my cafe writing, you know, downtown, and I'm thinking, I'm going to walk home. And I decide to just do another few. Few more lines of writing. And I sit for a minute and then it comes again. The giant, giant boom. And I tell you I wrote a short story about this. And I deny any link. And I feel like I am raping the memory to share it with you. But it's my memory and I just don't like to talk about it. But I will. Here. But this is not the first bombing. Now this is the second. So there's a second blast and a third, and it is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life. The second blast and the third, you are listening to, to people get dead. It is a horror. And just. You turn into an animal. You can't think. You just want to run into the fire. But there's nothing to do. I'm not a paramedic or a policeman. You know, there's a paratrooper. There's my last pee. But there's just nothing to do. So I walk up to that corner and I make my first non Jerusalemite decision. I think, I don't need these memories. I don't need to see this. And I take another block and walk home. But the next day I'm back. Cause that's what we do. It's not about. I'm a lefty. I want two states. I want East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital. This is not about Zion or colonialism or territory. Is about my fucking neighborhood. You know, like, the next day it's cleaned up. That's the way they do it. No blood. Some broken windows, but they're gone. No glass, no nothing. I am back there in the middle of the bomb, just right where it happened. And I'm eating a slice. I'm gonna have a slice of pizza because it's my town and my block. And if I don't go back the next day, I'm not gonna go the day after that or the day after that. And that's how we do it. But at this point, again, I'm still not afraid. But I'M thinking and. And sort of a Chekhovian Ward 6 idea, like maybe we should all be going crazy. Maybe this not going crazy is the crazy part. I think we should all be curled up in a corner drooling. But again, honestly, it just can't be stopped. The piece, I just think this can't be stopped. And setbacks, and setbacks. But this is how things happen. And the metaphor I used, the thing that kept me going all this time was I just would always think of the moon. Like we've looked at the moon since the dawn of time and people wanted to go there. And I thought, that's impossible. It's literally impossible to send a man to the moon. But we sent a man to the moon and we brought him back. And to me, that's how I feel. Peace is impossible. We'll still do it, you know, and this is also. It's the time. It's the new millennium, you know, Close your eyes and think back. We still had Bill Clinton. You know, there's a surplus, but we also had friends in the world. We are one signature away from peace. We need one more Sharm El Sheikh. And it's over. It's really finally here after all these years, you know, And I remember it's New Year's in Jerusalem, Jewish New Year's. And I throw a big dinner party and everything feels great. We have a super time. And I wake up the next morning and the country is on fire. We are having a war, you know, just mutually assured self destruction. It is, you know, it is over. The hope is gone. And I call my friend Debbie and she's a war photographer. She answers the phone and I can hear she's in the middle of a firefight. I hear the bullets flying and the shot grenades and the tear gas. She's really in the middle. And I ask her from the, you know, really from the depths of myself, I want to know, at dinner last night, do you think Shelly had a good time? But this is it, because we're going to be normal. This is the point. Debbie still tortures me about this. She doesn't hang up the phone. She gets behind one of those big cement things that you see on the news, you know, one of the blockade things. And she just, you know, squats down back there and we go over dinner, like, do you think it's okay that Kathy and Kobe drove from Tel Aviv? Like, how was dessert? We go over that dinner because that's it. We don't give up, you know, and then this is my life now. You know, just. I don't complain about my neighbor's bad piano anymore. You know, like, if tank fire is shaking the window, you put in your earplugs and you write your novel. You know, I remember watching Die Hard one night, and I just. I pause and open the balcony door to see that the machine gun fire is also coming from outside. You know, that's my Jerusalem surround sound. And it just. It just becomes guns on the corner copters. It's just never ending violence. But that's kind of what I get used to. But this is also when I get afraid, because this is when I recognize I just thought people were playing. I see that Sharon sucks and Arafat sucks, and they're just. Nobody is really trying. And that's when I see it's for nothing, you know, that's when I start to see, you know, the tourists are gone. It's Jerusalem. There's no tourists. There's no buses flying back from abroad on empty planes. It's just nobody wants to come to our country, and nobody in Israel wants to come to Jerusalem, and nobody in Jerusalem wants to come to my neighborhood. You know, I'm sitting there in the Shook on Agrippa street, eating my hummus, you know, looking at the hummus guy and the other regular customers, because we have to be there. This is what we do. If we die from it, we die from hummus, you know? But I just. I feel it's my obligation. And I just can't understand how I inherited this block, you know, how did it become mine? And about that time, I get a call from a friend in New York, and she's weeping. She did not get invited to the Oscar party of her choice. And this hurts me. It does. And I calm her down and I hang up the phone and I have an epiphany because I want those fucking concerns. You know, I want to worry about the Oscar parties. I want to weep deeply because I miss the Steve Allen sample sale. You know, These are the things I want to worry about. And I've got this aliyah head, you know, this is my head. Like, I think being an individual is weak, or wanting to drink your coffee and not get blown up is weak. I just think any concerns that are basically what you would call a happy, normal life are somehow wrong. But I'm starting to think otherwise. I'm starting to think I missed that. So I'm in New York, giving a reading, and I'm walking around and I'm thinking, you know what? I really like it here. It's Such a, you know, another betrayal. It's so hard to admit once you become a Jerusalemite, I'm thriving. I am thriving in New York. I like it. I like my New York friends. I like it here. And that's when I bump into an example, expat, you know, a New Yorker to Jerusalem and back. You know, everyone's already here. I see more people from Jerusalem, you know, in this neighborhood than I, you know, if I'd go back there. And she's sort of. She's left a year before me. And there's sort of this halfway house that they have this apartment, you know, sort of. You take a Jerusalemite and it's like coming up so you don't get the bends. It's this place where they can acclimate before you re. Release them into the wild. You know, that's what we've got. And there's a room empty, you know, I know the girl who's left it. She left two years before, you know, and she offers me the room and I look at it and I think, it's. I know this thing because, Aliyah, it is forever. I'm supposed to die there. And I know how everyone does it. It's extended vacation. You know, my parents came for two weeks from Israel to New York in 1964, and they're still headed back. You know, that's how we all do it. So I'm like, I could just use a little more time here. It's peaceful, it's quiet. I'll do my writing. I deserve this life. It's okay. Look at the room. I like it. I look at the lease and I sign it. I put down my name Nathan Englander, and I put down the date September 1, 2001. Thanks.
- [13:50]
Dan Kennedy
Nathan Englander is the author of the novel the Ministry of Special Cases and the internationally bestselling story collection for the Relief of Unbearable Urges. He was included in the New Yorker's list of 20 writers for the 21st century. This year's World Science Festival will take place June 10th through 14th in New York City with hundreds of events planned, including a moth main stage on June 12th. For more information, go to worldsciencefestival.com Our podcast host, Dan Kennedy, is the author of the recently published book Rock An Office Power Ballad. Learn more at Rock on the Book. He is also the author of Loser Goes First. The Moth is a non profit organization. Consider supporting our free podcast by going to our podcast contribution page or by becoming a moth member@themost.org thanks to Maz Swift for our podcast Music. For more information about Maz, visit mazmusic.com that's M A Z Z M U Z I K.com and please tell us what you thought of today's episode. What would you like to hear more of or less of? Email us atpodcast the moth.org thanks to all of you for listening. We hope you have a story worthy week. Podcast audio production by Paul Rueest at the Argo Network Podcast hosting by PRX Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.