I TRAVEL 1

For as little as S20/day (plus
airfare) on an El Al Milk &
Honey Vacation, we'll provide
you with a really great hotel.
We'll provide you with free
Israeli breakfasts.
We'll provide you with a
free car rental.*
With an escorted package,
we'll provide you with a guided
tour of Jerusalem.
We'll provide you with a
guided tour of Galilee.
We'll provide you with a
guided tour of Masada.
We'll provide you with
baggage handling at the airport.
We'll provide you with
baggage handling at the hotel.
There are, however, some
things you will have to provide
for yourself

ELI%

Mideast Travel
Comes At Last

JOSEPH COHEN

Special to The Jewish News

A

///1

The Airline of Israel.

DIRECT FLIGHTS BETWEEN CHICAGO AND TEL AVIV EVERY MONDAY AND WEDNESDAY.
DAILY NONSTOPS BETWEEN NEW YORK AND TEL AVIV (EXCEPT FOR THE SABBATH).

To find out more about our exclusive Milk & Honey Vacations, call your local travel agent or 1-800-EL AL SUN.
Or for a free brochure, write: El Al Milk & Honey Vacations, 120 W. 45th St., New York, NY 10036

'820/day avail. until 2/28/93 except 12/16/92 • 1/15/93. Hotel and car rental good for 5 nights/6 days. Based on per person, double
occupancy. 21 day adv. purch. req. Car rental. Does not include gas, mileage and insurance. Other restrictions may apply.

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Since 1971

i, of his life my father
dreamed of going to
Eretz Yisrael, of settl-
ing in Palestine before it
became Israel, of playing his
own small role in the new na-
tion after the War for In-
dependence, of praying at the
Western Wall — oh, how he
wanted to pray at the Wall —
of living out his years in the
land of his forefathers, and, at
the end of his days, now long
since passed, of being buried
in its sacred earth. He never
made it.
There were many times in
my own life when I didn't
think I'd make it either. For
too long the Promised Land
was only that, a promise, not
a viable reality. In a time
when American Jews travel
to Israel frequently and even
forget how many times
they've been there over the
years, I couldn't go.
As it was for my father, so
Israel has always been impor-
tant to me, but for different
reasons. Where his link was
ancient, traditional and
religious, my attraction has
been modern, political and
cultural: I need to identify
with the aspirations and the
hopes of our people, long
persecuted but now free and
vibrant, building a new coun-
try, rising phoenix-like from
the ashes of the Holocaust,
and, additionally, I need to ex-
perience and savor its unique
culture, particularly, through
its literature.
For me it has never been
enough to acknowledge and
exult over the miracle of the
creation of the modern State
of Israel, or, as most Jews do,
to take pride in its
achievements and agonize
over its problems. I have to go
a step further and be involv-
ed with the ebb and flow of its
personal interiorized life (as
opposed to its exteriorized
public life) through the pulse-
takings of its serious writers.
That's all well and good if one
is fluent in Hebrew. All I
remember from my bar mitz-
vah in 1939 is a few prayers.

Daddy didn't make it. I
couldn't go. I can't read
Hebrew. What would you do
in a jam like that? Write a
book about a country you've

Joseph Cohen is emeritus
professor of English at
Tulane University and the
founding director of its
Jewish Studies Program.

never even set foot in, about
its poets and novelists who
are experts in the most
masterful subtleties of a
language you don't even
know? Well, why not? You
talk about chutzpah! Alan
Dershowitz, move over.
Chutzpah or not, I wrote the
book. As director of the
Jewish Studies Program at
Tulane University, I had the
opportunity to invite Israelis
to come to the campus to lec-
ture. In a space of five years
I brought seventeen of them
to New Orleans, including the
poets Yehuda Amichai and T.
Carmi, and the novelists A.B.
Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld
and Amos Oz. (There were a
couple of other Israelis almost
as important as these writers.
What's that fellow's name,
the one with the Oxford ac-
cent who is as articulate as
Winston Churchill was ar-

Writing the book
only whetted my
appetite more.

ticulate? Abba somebody, I
think. He came, too.)
The poems and novels of the
above-named Israeli writers
were all accessible, translated
into English; and with their-
congenial authors' will-
ingness to be interviewed I
soon had enough material to
write Voices of Israel, publish-
ed by the State University
Press of New York in 1990.
For a university press book, it
has done all right if you don't
ask about royalties. The
paperback is already into a
second printing, and the folks
at Haifa University have told
me it's on the required
reading lists there.
But what to do about going
to Israel? Writing the book
only whetted my appetite
more. When my second wife,
Ruth Samuels, and I were
married in the summer of
1987, some of our friends,
knowing we already had two
full households of furniture,
silver, china, linens, books,
pictures, tsatskes and a dog
and a cat, decided we didn't
need another pitcher or
toaster and instead put
together an Israel travel fund
as a wedding gift, the trip was
practically jump-started into
reality. Better late than
never!

It took a while to put the
rest of the pieces into place,
but the reality is that we
touched down at Ben-Gurion
Airport late on the afternoon