Urgent E-mail fills my in box.
Another message urges me to contact the White House. Phoning and faxing are most effective, it says, warning that “Muslims and jihad sympathizers” have outphoned and outfaxed Israel’s supporters more than two to one. Don’t E-mail the president, that’s ineffective: a computer program dumps these messages, there’s a kill file for anything with “Israel” in the subject line. Great. All us virtual Jews in a kill file for Israel.
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Once I visited him on his base. I close my eyes and, for an instant, remember how my Israeli soldier-boyfriend’s uniform smelled as I hugged him from behind and pressed my nose to his back. The warm, sour, khaki-in-the-hot-sun smell, an odor foreign to my nose. I try to imagine pressing my face to the bloodied uniforms of the 13 reservists.
I add my name, city, and nationality to electronic forms, then forward them, unhappy that this is my only effort and guilty for thinking that my personal data will be added to some kind of comfortable-upper-middle-class-urban-Jew list. At the very least, I’d like to feel the petition’s clipboard in my hands, the stickiness of the pencil used by my cosigners. Instead, I sit at my desk, in the house afforded me by grandparents who were never to forget the sting of frozen ground through threadbare shoes or the fear that drunken cossacks would arrive at their door. Their immigrant insecurity with the language I use as a substitute for “real” work, their fluency with the backbreaking labors I’ve avoided, an irony that makes me wonder whether they’d be proud or ashamed. The superhuman reserves of faith that allowed them to try again, to reproduce, to build a life and livelihood in a new country leading up to this.
