Zichron Ya’akov, Israel
What is a snoop? In a review of one of his books, the Israeli writer, translator, and critic Hillel Halkin was called “one of the great snoops of the age.” In English, the word carries a negative connotation: A snoop is one who sticks his nose in others’ affairs, who pries. In Hebrew, the noun can be rendered as balash, a word that suggests a gumshoe, a detective. That somewhat more dignified Hebrew concept applies to Halkin. He has the snoop’s attitude and gimlet eye, a critic sizing up everything and everyone before him, including his readers.
Halkin and I recently met at a café, upscale by Israeli standards, in Zichron Ya’akov, the village in which he has lived 45 of his 47 Israeli years. He moved to Israel from the United States in 1970, when he was 31, with his wife Marcia. Dressed casually in a T-shirt, jeans, sandals, and a blue hat to shade from the Levantine sun, Halkin sat across from me at a table on the stone patio. When he ordered a glass of Merlot, the waitress asked (in Hebrew) whether he wanted the expensive one or the cheap one. Halkin inquired as to the difference in price, but the waitress didn’t know and went to check. She came back, informed us of the costs, which differed by around 20 shekels, but said she only had the more expensive one. “Fine,” said Halkin, “but pour a little extra in my glass.” He explained that in Israel, he “feels free to connect to people in that way,” but “in any other country I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that. The flip side is the Israeli rudeness everyone is always complaining about, but rudeness and closeness are two different forms of the same thing.” When his wine came, he commented to me that she added nothing extra to his glass.
He shared his fish and chips with the stray cats of Zichron, the feral vestige of Israel’s overcorrection of a rat infestation decades ago. One jumped onto our table. I tried to shoo it away but it didn’t budge. “Well, if you want it off the table,” Halkin said, “you’ll have to push it harder than that!” He stood up and whacked the thing. It gracefully landed beside us and, without skipping a beat, leapt onto a nearby table from which some half-eaten shakshuka hadn’t yet been cleared.
The day we met, Halkin was in the midst of a move—leaving his house of 45 years for another on a smaller plot of land in Zichron. The place is becoming a commuter town, Halkin said, a village in which people who work in Tel Aviv or Haifa can sink roots somewhere a reasonable distance outside of the urban districts. His former home will be demolished to make room for row cottages. So it’s something of a wistful moment, suitable for reflecting on Halkin’s memories of what originally brought him to his adopted town and country.
Halkin was born in New York City in 1939, the son of a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary—“a man,” Halkin says, “of extraordinary Jewish erudition,” who spoke Yiddish and “better than perfect” Hebrew. Halkin was schooled until ninth grade at Ramaz, a modern-Orthodox Jewish day school in Manhattan, and spent his summers at a Hebrew-speaking camp. After high school at Bronx Science he went to Columbia, studying English literature.
During his boyhood and into his college years, Halkin was an avid reader of novels, which he now considers “the highest form of literature.” He still holds dear James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, for in the character of Stephen Dedalus, Halkin sees much of himself—“if you allow for the fact that I grew up as a Jew and Stephen grew up as a Catholic.” But in college his interests grew to include philosophy. If Columbia’s Butler Library is missing its reserve copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, it might be because Halkin absconded with the volume one night a half-century ago. He slipped it under his arm, covering it in the shade of his jacket, and walked out with it, needing to finish it despite the library’s closing. The ends justified his snoopy means.
He studied for a year at Cambridge University on a fellowship, then returned to New York in 1961 and was hired for his first salaried job, an editorial position at Schocken, a Jewish publishing house. Halkin worked alongside three others—a bookkeeper, a secretary, and the publisher Herzl Rome—in an apartment on Park Avenue. He edited manuscripts, drafted blurbs, and brought books to the post office for mailing. After getting a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia and spending time in Israel, California, and Alabama (where he taught at the Tuskegee Institute), he returned again to New York, first taking a magazine job, then writing and translating for the Encyclopaedia Judaica as an assistant divisional editor of its first volume. By the late 1960s, he was a literary man in the making.
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As we sat for a few hours in the café, several patrons approached our table and introduced themselves to Halkin. He accepted their praise—“You can stick that into your interview,” he told me—but maintained he didn’t quite understand it. “This happens to me more often than you’d expect. I’m not sure why.”
But the reasons that Halkin is well known are perfectly apparent to readers interested in Jewish life, literature, and ideas. He has been a frequent contributor to Commentary and the web magazine Mosaic, bringing his classical learning and astonishing intellect to bear on questions of the day. He has translated into English dozens of Hebrew and Yiddish texts, including S. Y. Agnon’s novels To This Day and A Simple Story, A. B. Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem, and Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories. And he has written eight nonfiction books, including Across the Sabbath River (2002), in which he chronicled his research and travels in Asia looking for the scattered descendants of a lost tribe of Israel, the Bnei Menashe. He has written biographies of the medieval philosopher-poet Yehuda Halevi (for which he earned a National Jewish Book Award in 2010) and the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky.
Not all of Halkin’s work is as well known, and a large portion of it is hiding in plain sight: Under a pseudonym—I’ll refrain from mentioning it here—Halkin has written some 1,200 columns about language and etymology, first for the Forward and now for Mosaic. Here we see something more of the snoop about Halkin’s work, and perhaps some of the tension between the way of the snoop (a good snoop goes unseen) and the way of the writer (who usually seeks to persuade, tell stories, or receive praise).
The Tishbi Cafe in Zichron, a culinary outpost of the well-known winery. [Flickr: State of Israel (CC BY-SA 2.0)]
The fact that Halkin is greeted in public and thanked by strangers surely has something to do with his first book. A few years after he and Marcia moved to Israel he began work on Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic (1977). The book is written as if it were Halkin’s side of an exchange of letters over several months with a fictitious American friend, a composite of some of Halkin’s real friends. It is a deep yet lively exploration of Jewish continuity. The classical Zionists, Halkin writes, believed that Jews were “hopelessly trapped between the Scylla of assimilation and the Charybdis of anti-Semitism.” The existence of Israel offers another option. He draws on history, philosophy, sociopolitical commentary, and descriptions of his young family’s life in the young country to make the case that for a Jew, Israel is the most logical place to live. “I have tried to reason with you,” Halkin writes his pen pal in the book’s concluding letter, “to implant in you no more than a feeling of unease for being where you are, or if you prefer, since I don’t mind speaking bluntly, of guilt.” And even if the reader does not leave America to make aliyah—that is, does not move to Israel—“I should hope that these letters will have helped you to think more clearly about the alternatives before us.”
The best dialogic literature forces a confrontation with one’s basic assumptions; it riles the reader. But what makes Halkin’s case so compelling is that he and his wife had recently made the move to Israel—that is, he is a case study in the security of his own argument. Letters combines the thumotic and the erotic—the spirited, preservatory case for aliyah with a yearning for completeness.
Halkin wrote a new introductory essay for the book’s 2013 reprinting, reminding readers that he doesn’t know
In a symposium of responses to Halkin’s essay, commissioned by the editors of Mosaic, you can see how the debate Letters engendered in the ’70s remains alive today. “What bothers me,” wrote SUNY Binghamton professor Allan Arkush, is Halkin’s “reluctance to acknowledge that we [the Jewish diaspora] might serve some useful purpose.” The scholar Ruth Wisse—a friend of Halkin and someone who moved to Israel around the same time he did but eventually returned to America—praises Letters but joins Arkush in believing “Israel may need more reinforcement from us [non-Israeli Jews] than [Halkin had] anticipated.” (When I asked Halkin about this notion of Western reinforcement, he demurred, saying that while it was certainly true at Israel’s inception, it is less true today.)
Someone who has known Halkin for decades but who asked for professional reasons not to be identified here told me, “If I were the state of Israel I would have given him the Israel Prize long ago.” Halkin has, in his writings, “done as much for the country, for Zionism, for the Jewish people, for the morale of the Jewish people, as almost anyone I can think of.”
While official recognition from the state of Israel would surely be gratifying, Halkin seems moved more by the personal kind of recognition he regularly receives. He told me that in the years after Letters was published, hundreds of readers sent him notes thanking him and citing the book as a factor in their making aliyah. For a writer, a person whose work is so often solitary and can sometimes feel removed from its real-world effects, it is hard to imagine more deeply rewarding praise.
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After lunch, Halkin showed me around Zichron. We passed the house where Sarah Aaronsohn was tortured by the Turks during the First World War. Aaronsohn, in her mid-20s, was a member of an anti-Ottoman spy ring that smuggled information to British intelligence. The Turks busted the ring, and most of its members were imprisoned or executed; Aaronsohn chose to end her own life. Halkin’s book A Strange Death (2005) recounts his efforts to piece together the mysterious aftermath of these events in his adopted hometown. It is a complex and stirring work, postmodern in the best sense—a meditation on both the power and the frailty of memory, and on the ways stories live through communities and communities live through stories.
Zichron’s main entrance, the Yishai Gate. [Moris Kushelevitch/Alamy]
After we stopped a few times to see the sights of Zichron, Halkin led me up the pathway to his home of four decades—his home, that is, of only three days more. He walked me up to his study, in which sat a computer and many bookshelves. Light came in from a window overlooking his garden of prickly pears, lemons, persimmons, and pomegranates, and down and across the valley the minarets of Fureidis, a neighboring Arab town. The view is distracting, he told me, yet he still seems to have found beside it the focus to compose his many books and articles.
Halkin also showed me his copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, although he wasn’t sure it was the same one he had swiped from the Columbia library; he may have disposed of the “hot goods” long ago, he told me.
When we came back down the stairs, we chatted with Marcia, Halkin’s wife of a half-century and mother of their two adult children. She is charming and shares Halkin’s wit. Our conversation was a welcome break, it seemed, from the house-packing that occupied much of her day. And she took the opportunity to launch a mini-inquisition, asking me about my life.
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On a birthday, Jews will often say ad Meyah v’esrim—“until 120,” more or less an injunction to live the lifespan of Moses. Halkin’s most recent book, published in 2016, is titled After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition. When he fears death, he writes, “I fear losing a life that has been lived. I fear dying with the knowledge that I failed to accomplish or experience all I was capable of or meant to.” He fears “the grief my death will cause others” and “dying without knowing exactly what it was that I lived for.” Although the book touches on esoteric corners of history, theology, and art, it retains a plainspoken humanism:
The same humanism in reflecting on living and purpose can be found in Halkin’s lone novel, Melisande! What Are Dreams? (2012). It is a poignant and often painful tale of love found and lost, of dreams and reality, of affection and madness, an account of Melisande (Mellie) and the two men who loved her, Hoo and Ricky. Hoo, the narrator, recalls that when he was in high school, he longed for a thousand lives—so that he could “watch a million suns set, love a million women, walk down a million city streets and lonely roads.” But by the time, maybe a decade later, that Hoo and Mellie are about to marry, his longing for immortality has taken a new shape:
Everyone, at some point, has thought himself invincible, and acknowledging inevitable death is supposed to be part of maturing. Hoo clings to the wish of a thousand lives, but with the purpose of living them with just one love. But he doesn’t yet know, he can’t yet know, what it fully means to live one life—the experience of the joy and sadness, the betrayal and guilt, the everyday mundane happiness, while aging through the years—let alone a thousand lives. In the pages that follow, he learns.
Halkin told me he feels much of his work has been misunderstood, not least Melisande! Knowing how disappointed he was with the novel’s reception, a friend asked him to write a review of his own book. Instead of a review, he wrote the friend a letter explaining his feelings about the book. The letter—which he tells me “only two other people have read”—says, in part, “Even the people who have told me they loved Melisande! haven’t given me the feeling of being aware of all that is in it. Not that they may not be; but they haven’t conveyed it to me. And this is especially hard for me because Melisande! is the best thing I’ve ever written and what I would most like to be remembered by if I were never to write anything again.”
If novels are, as Halkin believes, “the highest form of literature,” why did he wait so long before writing one? “The stakes seemed too high,” he told me. “There’s something godlike about being a novelist—you’re free to create any world you want—but the responsibility, like God’s when he created the world we live in, is enormous. For a long time, I didn’t feel ready for it. Now, I hope I’ll have the time and health to write one or two more.”
Adam Rubenstein is assistant books & arts editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
