PERSIAN GULF CRISIS

Life Goes On
Sort Of

But in this Age of Anxiety, the
distractions are overpowering.

STUART SCHOFFMAN

Special to The Jewish News

erusalem — The hard
part is the waiting.
The uncertainty, the
endless speculation — and
that tiny jackhammer of anx-
iety that never ceases to
pound your muscles and pre-
vent your mind from concen-
trating on much of anything.
Like someone sitting in
Detroit or Denver, I watch the
ravaging of Tel Aviv, 40 miles
away, on TV I may know first-
hand what it's like to hear
the bone-chilling siren as we
sit down to after-dinner coffee,
or, worse, in the cold pre-
dawn; but the awful Boom!
within terrifying earshot is
something I can still, thank
heaven, only imagine. But
each time, and this is the dif-

j

Stuart Schoffman, literary
editor of the Jerusalem
Report, is a frequent
contributor to these pages.

ference that makes all the dif-
ference, I wonder: Is this the
one that hits Jerusalem? Will
he aim for the Knesset — or
for the Prime Minister's
house, a 12 minute walk from
mine?
We live a no-frills life: vir-
tually no socializing, mini-
mum straying from home.
Everywhere we go — the gro-
cer, the playground up the
block — we take gas masks,
and don't stay long. At the
downtown offices of the
weekly magazine where I
work, the show, of course, goes
on. We have sealed off several
rooms, but only once have
they been used: last week, on
closing night. On other nights
the staff is sure to get home
early. There's an odd security
in your own sealed room, like
your own bed.
In the first days of the war
I was surprised, as I darted
out for a sandwich at lunch-
time, to discover that most of
the people on Jaffa Road and

Ben-Yehuda weren't carrying
their brown gas-mask boxes.
But after the devastating
attack on Ramat-Gan, across
the freeway from Tel Aviv, on
Tuesday the 22nd, there was
a marked increase in mask-
toting. Slung over the shoul-
der or across the chest, the
boxes with their long black
plastic carrying straps have a
bizarre chicness to them, a
sort of post-modern industrial
minimalism.
On rainy days we carry the
boxes in shopping bags, or
wrap them in plastic: mois-
ture is damaging to the
mask's filter, that strange,
squat cylinder that could
some day save one's life. In-
deed the boxes seem
sometimes to be eerie props
from a science-fiction movie:
life-support kits that all
creatures from the Planet
Israel must carry at all times.
And above all: you must be
home before dark. It's
downright Transylvanian.
There's no guarantee that
Saddam won't fire his mis-
siles during the day, but
attacking us at night is to his
advantage: it exposes his
launchers less, and reduces
the time we have to respond.
Our mood is lighter during
the day, to be sure — which
only makes the inevitable

nightly descent into fear-
fulness more painful.
Still, Jerusalem has thus
far been spared the worst.
Friends from lel Aviv come to
stay in the guest room — they
can't take another night of
bombardment. The woman
clutches her knees in our
sealed room as we sit out that
night's attack. As it happens,
this couple decided months
ago to leave the country, for
reasons having nothing to do
with Saddam Hussein. ,My
friend runs around making
arrangements — flight sched-
ules are unreliable — and
tells me he feels like he is
boarding the last helicopter
out of Saigon. "It's tacky," he
says. "I didn't want to leave
like this."
Far tackier was the remark
by Tel Aviv's mayor, Shlomo
("Chich") Lahat, as he sur-
veyed the damage in Ramat
Gan in the company of New
York Senator Al D'Amato.
The mayor said that Tel Aviv
residents who've fled the city
for hotels and fold-out sofas in
other parts of the country are
deserters, the sort of people
who'd abandon their home-
land in time of need.
If I lived in Tel Aviv, I'd pack
up my wife and baby and
make for my parents' flat in
Jerusalem faster than you

can say "bombastic politi-
cian!' If staying in Tel Aviv
meant strengthening the
city's defenses, Mr. Lahat
might have a point. But it
doesn't, and this is no time for
misguided Israeli machismo.
On TV, residents of the Jor-
dan Valley claim that their
area, bordering as it does on
Iraq's ally, Jordan, is as safe
as can be, and call upon the
refugees from Tel Aviv to
make themselves useful by
coming to help with the fresh-
flower harvest. It's a good old-
fashioned Zionist idea — and
a good way to keep one's mind
off chemical, and biological —
and maybe nuclear —
weapons. Life, our leaders tell
us, is supposed to go on, but
the distractions are over-
powering.
Sitting at home every even-
ing, and all weekend, and, for
many people — only high
school students have returned
to class — all day too, we are
sick of the radio and TV, but
cannot, on the hour, fail to
turn them on. Perhaps there
will be a new shard of infor-
mation to encourage us, or at
least make us more aware of
what is really going on. But
instead we learn that Saddam
may or may not have large
stockpiles of chemicals, that
he may or may not be able to
deliver them by missile, that
the U.S.-led forces may or may
not have demolished, dam-
aged, or dented the stationary
or mobile missile launchers.
On Shabbat a few friends
drop by, a respite from cabin
fever. The kids play and watch
films, but all we do is discuss
the war. Someone has heard
on radio that Saddam's
mother, when pregnant with
him, said she was carrying
Satan in her belly. We all saw,
on a talk show, an Iraqi Jew
claiming — his bona fides
have since been challenged —
to have gone to high school
with Saddam Hussein. Was
he a good student? asked the
interviewer. "He was bad at
English," said the alleged
classmate.
It's great to be able to
laugh, but the humor is vir-
tually all black. We watch our
friends leave, parents and
kids hurrying home in the
chilly late afternoon, every-
one carrying his mask. A
four-year-old, earlier, has put
his on for us, to show he is a
big boy and can do it himself.

Children are interviewed on
the air by psychologists. They
are more scared of the sirens
than the masks. Maybe, sug-
gests the psychologist, it
would be good, when wearing
the mask, to think of some-
thing fun — like Purim. The
surrealism is unabating. 111

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

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