Drunken Angel (9781936740062) by Alan Kaufman Read Free Book Online

for yourself, and with money paid for by your own books instead of mine. Now, wouldn’t that be nice?”
    Watching him down the second drink, I had to admit: it would. Defeated, I hoisted my glass with a weak smile and savored its slow burning descent down my throat.
    Â 
    In 1977, two years out of college, I lived in a squalid boardinghouse room on the Upper West Side where I continued to slug whiskey and bang out short stories about the Holocaust and about Jewish immigrants, stories that only the rarest journal would lend space to.
    One of these was Shdemot , magazine of the kibbutz movement, to which I sent a story about a Jewish sculptor who is betrayed by her Gentile lover and perishes at Auschwitz. The editor, David Twersky, fired off a letter of acceptance which arrived in an onionskin-thin envelope with Israeli postage bearing the image of Theodore Herzl.
    I couldn’t have been more thrilled. Included was a handwritten note from Twersky himself inviting me to “drop in at the Shdemot offices” should I ever find myself in Tel Aviv.
    To me, who had no link to Israel or to anyone who did, it was
like receiving an invite from Ben-Gurion himself to hang out at the Knesset.

BOOK FOUR

15
    GROANING, STRETCHED ON MY SHOULDER, I surveyed the scene with fuzzy hungover eyes, blinking in the harsh sunlight at sun-browned feet, then up to knees, then the hem of a summer dress, a string-net shopping bag dangling from the wrinkled hand of an old woman wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses, a face framed by a cloud of white hair.
    Came to my feet, swaying, asked the senior: “Where am I?”
    She didn’t say.
    â€œMa’am? Ma’am? If you don’t mind: where am I?”
    Astonished, with a thick accent, she replied: “What do you mean, where am I? You are in ISRAEL!”
    Pale-faced, clammy with sweat, overdressed in a sweater and a tan knee-length thrift-shop camel-hair coat, clutching in one hand a leather suitcase and in the other a typewriter, I asked, baffled: “Where? Where in Israel?”
    She gaped back, annoyed. “Tel Aviv! The city. In the center!”
    We stood on a traffic island on one of the busiest thoroughfares
in Tel Aviv. I had no idea how I’d gotten here. The last I recalled, I was stumbling drunk through Piccadilly Circus in London; then remember vaguely passing somehow through customs at Ben-Gurion airport. After that, drew a blank. I concluded that how I got here didn’t matter: I was here. Good enough! Now needed to situate myself. Twersky had suggested that I go to a kibbutz.
    â€œWould you happen to know where I can find the offices of the kibbutz movement?”
    â€œWhich movement? Each is different.”
    I remembered. “Ihud Hakibbutzim. Ten Dubnov Street.”
    â€œDubnov? Dubnov is near. Here is Dubnov.” She pointed. The loose underskin of her browned arm swung. “You see this big antenna? A couple buildings down is a white building, yes? That is your place. You are from America?”
    â€œNew York,” I answered, as though it were a separate nation.
    â€œYou don’t look so good. Are you all right? Why are you sleeping here? You are poor? A poor American? I didn’t know there is such a thing.”
    â€œNo,” I said, smiling. “Not poor. Drunk. A drunk New Yorker. There are plenty of us.”
    Stiffly, she shrugged and crossed at the light to get away from my leering insolence.
    Looked around. Saw a sign in Hebrew. Oh, my Lord, I thought. I’m really here.
    As dubious a prospect as I may have seemed, I was assigned to a first-rate kibbutz and given a bus ticket to get there. The kibbutz, Mishmar Hasharon, or “Guardian of the Sharon Valley,” was a sprawling agricultural settlement in the central plain, orange grove country, near the coastal city of Netanya.
    The proud land swept through my eyes like a vision. In January, the sun flashed out of somber rainy skies with blades of steely