An Israeli Arab makes it to America, but doesn't feel saved - Opinion
Sayed Kashua
Haaretz
In a minute I’ll have to shovel the snow off the drive that leads from the garage to the road. In a minute I’ll put on a hat, wrap myself in a scarf and slip on a pair of gloves. I’ll stick boots on my feet and, with all that equipment, which isn’t even to be had in Israel, I’ll go out to clear the snow.
The snow means it’s not too cold: It’s below-zero Celsius, that’s obvious, but by now I know that when it’s really cold, when the temperature hits zero Fahrenheit and it’s hard to breathe outside – it doesn’t snow. For some reason, I imagine the clouds themselves as being frozen to the point where they can’t release anything.
I hope the city’s snowplows reach our neighborhood and clear the roads. I don’t know whether they’ll send plows or tractors. I’m not even sure that it’s the city’s job, maybe it belongs to some other body. I don’t know anything here, not a thing. I do what the authorities tell me to do, and afterwards, I say thank you. Once, for example, they told me that it’s the occupant’s duty to remove the snow from the driveway or sidewalk next to his house. Since then, I’ve been clearing the snow, even though I’m not sure that there really is such a law.
It’s an immigrant thing, I sometimes think; it has to do with the first generation of newcomers, who are trying to become permanent residents or citizens. Sometimes I tell myself: Okay, okay, I’ll shovel snow until I get a Green Card, then I’ll show them what’s what.
Ever since a friend mentioned it, it seems to me too that Americans think you’ve been saved by the very fact that you even got here. I don’t mean, heaven forbid, that university lecturers or people with money and power think that you have to thank God for being in this country. No. It’s the taxi drivers, the barbers. Or the plumber who came to our house and engaged us in a short conversation. For them, the very fact that you are here, in the United States of America, is a kind of salvation, and it makes no difference where you came from or what you did before, or how much money you made in your home country. It’s like the American dream is fulfilled the moment you see the land.
“So, do you have family back home?” someone asked me this week. “Do you have parents, siblings?” he persisted, and when I answered affirmatively he asked, in a tone of sorrow tinged with faint hope, “And can you bring them here to live?”
Because everyone wants to be here, that isn’t even a question in America. And you have to play the game, you have to tell an American who takes an interest that indeed you were saved and that America is the fulfillment of a wish you always harbored.
I feel so pitiful sometimes, with my still-embarrassing English, with this accent that only allows me to say thank you. I feel pitiful sometimes because I have to weigh my words, for fear, heaven forbid, that the feelings of a native of this host country, no matter what his views, will be hurt by a foreign guest who hasn’t yet learned to respect the Promised Land. So I will never talk about the appalling horrors that I hear about frequently on the news here. I will listen to the terrifying words of Sarah Palin and of the presidential candidates and say, Amen. I’m only a guest here, only a stranger, it’s not my war, I am not an American, I mustn’t meddle.
“How do your children feel here?” I am sometimes asked.
“Wonderful” – by now I have a ready-made answer – “just marvelous. They’re so happy, and I am so glad that we are here.” That’s also the answer I believe in, or have persuaded myself that I believe in, after reiterating it a million times.
It’s a migration thing, it’s being a stranger among people who consider themselves superior, a chosen people, without the least justification.
This week I wondered seriously, for the first time in my life, about how the Jewish immigrants from Arab countries felt when they first arrived in Israel. It wasn’t so much because of the snow, but because of remarks by the Mapai throwback Isaac Herzog at a conference in Tel Aviv this week. Not that I ever liked anything Bougie ever said, God forbid. But his doctrine, as reflected in his speech, was filled with arrogance, dripping with racism. The desire to separate and cast people out, you there and we here. You can go wallow in your own garbage, except, of course, for those who want to work. Those who want to be human beings. We’ll let them work – why not, gladly. We will build higher fences and wield greater force. We have to get rid of the Palestinians, we have to do all we can so that we don’t see them. And the fewer of them there are, the better.
Suddenly, because of Herzog, I was reminded of a high-school physics class. I don’t remember any details, except that it was the day Menachem Begin died, and the Education Ministry must have asked teachers to say something on the subject in the first class of the day. The physics teacher came into the classroom and told us that the former prime minister died today, then he adjusted his glasses and added, “Begin was prime minister. He was Polish. A lot of people thought he was Moroccan.”
I really don’t know why, or how, the snow and the need to say thank you are connected, along with the feeling of alienation and the language and the disaffection from Bougie’s speech and Begin’s death. But somehow, out of all the feelings that came to the fore this week, when I heard Herzog, I was really happy that Likud came to power in 1977.
Source: www.haaretz.com