Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (finding audrey .TXT) 📗

I scrawled a long, boring reply setting out the Zionist case. How could her Jewish friends have left her laboring under such a misapprehension? But at least Joannie had some Jewish friends. My prospects for finding any seemed dim. Sydney’s small Jewish community had settled far away in the affluent eastern suburbs, where Mitteleuropean matrons gathered at coffee shops to nibble Sacher torte and talk about opera. Our western suburbs neighbors were still overwhelmingly of my mother’s Irish stock—hard-worked housewives who relaxed over a “cuppa” at the neighbors’ or gathered at the local Returned Services League club (the Australian version of the American Legion) for a flutter on the poker machines or the Wednesday afternoon races.

At school we had increasing numbers of immigrants—Italians, Poles, Lithuanians—but all of them were Catholic. Two of my best friends’ families were from the Middle East—Zita’s from Lebanon and Angela’s from Alexandria, Egypt. Another classmate, Monique, was a Palestinian whose father’s village was destroyed by Israelis after the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. Monique spoke Arabic and French before she’d learned English. Working in her third language, she was no match for me in history-class arguments. I remember her eyes, filled with tears, as she sat down in frustration after I’d delivered a passionate oration rebutting her account of her family’s forced flight at the hands of the Jewish fighters.

Zita and Angela were easier converts to my point of view. The two of them helped me write and perform a one-act Holocaust play for English class. (SCENE: WARSAW GHETTO 1942. A DIMLY LIT CELLAR.) They played Ruth and Eva, two Jewish sisters hiding from Nazis. The centerpiece was a long monologue by Ruth, ostensibly read from her diary, cataloguing Nazi crimes against Jews in Poland, including the horrors of a death camp identified in the script as Austwich.

Speech delivered, Ruth becomes expendable. Two Nazis break into the cellar. (We enlisted a Lithuanian classmate who had the right tall blond looks for one of these parts; for the other we had to make do with an Italian.) The first Nazi, Helmet Fitzbrak, summarily executes Ruth. The other Nazi berates him: “You mad man—you ruined our sport. The men would have loved her.” Eva then swallows a cyanide pill.

At this point I make my entrance as the girls’ brother Baraak, a brave resistance fighter. Baraak shoots Helmet, stabs Wilfred. Alone on the corpse-strewn stage, he delivers a stirring monologue to the effect that resistance is the secret of joy. (CURTAIN).

Incredibly, this was well received by our English teacher, and we got an excellent mark for it. Emboldened, I asked her to add Leon Uris to the class reading list. When she explained that she thought his books were execrably written propaganda, I was completely baffled by her sudden failure of discernment.

I decided that there was only one way around the lack of Jews in my circumscribed orbit: I would have to find an Israeli pen pal. It seemed unlikely that I would find such a person in the Spock fan-club newsletter. Israelis were surely too busy tilling the soil and fighting guerrillas to watch TV. I imagined them huddled around crackly radios, listening to the news and an occasional Holocaust documentary.

I was considering writing to the Israeli Embassy in Canberra when I noticed a small advertisement in the children’s pages of the Sydney newspaper for the International Youth Service, an organization a world away, in Finland, that arranged pen-pal correspondences. For a small fee, they would pair Australians with would-be correspondents elsewhere in the world.

Obviously, my plan called for my correspondent to be a boy, so I could eventually marry him. For the same reason, he needed to be at least a year older than I. Listing these requirements in my request to Finland’s International Youth Service, I pondered what to write under “interests.” I put down “Zionism, agriculture” and then, to make myself sound a little broader, since I had read that kibbutzniks valued learning and culture as well as the skills of farmer and warrior, I added “science, art, reading, flute and pets.” I mulled the inclusion of “pets” for a while before opting for honesty over strategy. I hoped that my Israeli—no doubt laboring long hours in the cow sheds and turkey coops—wouldn’t think pets were too bourgeois.

After a long wait, the reply finally came. I returned home from school to find it sitting in the silver dish on the side table where my mother put the sorted mail. She took care of the bills. What was left, most days, were the letters in answer to my father’s eclectic correspondence. But since I’d started writing to Sonny and Joannie, often there would also be a letter in the dish for me.

The Hebrew postmark and the stamp picturing Jerusalem’s Jaffa gate thrilled me. His name was Mishal, and as I tore the letter open, I was prepared to fall in love with my young sabra correspondent, right there where I stood on the pale green carpet of our dining room.

From the first paragraph, the letter was a litany of tiny disappointments. Mishal wrote that he didn’t live on a kibbutz. However, it could have been worse; he wrote that he had worked on one “in the summer for a few days.”

It seemed that Mishal’s family wasn’t exactly pioneer stock. His father, rather than draining the Hula Swamp, worked as a French-polisher. Somehow, French-polished furniture hadn’t figured in my mental image of Israeli interiors. Hand-hewn cypress logs propped on spent shell casings was more the kind of décor I’d pictured.

But the worst blow of all came in paragraph four, where Mishal listed the languages he knew. “I also know Arabic, because I am an Arabian fellow.”

Yech. I stuffed the letter back in its envelope, picked up my school case and trudged dejectedly to my room. It hadn’t occurred to me that in asking for an Israeli pen pal I might get a reply from an Israeli Arab—a descendant of one of the 156,000 Arabs who had