The Drifters (27 page)

Everyone complains of his memory, and

no one complains of his judgment.—La Rochefoucauld

If you insist upon booking passage on the
Titanic
, there’s no point in going steerage.

History tailgates.

Each year, in various nations around the world, a select group of young people nearing the age of twenty-one is faced with a dilemma, which though gratifying, is nevertheless most perplexing. They must sit down, judge alternatives and make a choice that will determine their future. The choice, once made, is irrevocable, and if wrongly made, can produce unhappy consequences that will permanently damage them.

Of course, the above could be said of every human being in the world: sometime around the age of twenty-one he or she will make a series of crucial choices which will delimit the future, but usually one is not aware of this. The young people of whom I speak are painfully aware of what they are doing, because in one brief moment of time they must select the nationality to which they will owe allegiance for the rest of their lives.

Because of accidents of place of birth—or the peculiar decisions of their parents at that time—they find themselves legally entitled to two or even three different passports. In the years of their childhood they may travel one year on a British passport, for example, the next on an Italian, as convenience dictates. But at the age of twenty-one they must make up their minds and state formally, ‘From this date on I shall be a British subject,’ or a German, or an American.

I have known several such multiple-passport people, the most dramatic being a lovely Swedish girl living in the unlikely kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. Her parents were both Swedish, so she was entitled to a Swedish passport. She had been born in London, so she could claim British citizenship. She had lived in Tonga most of her life, and was eligible for Tongan citizenship. And when, some years after her birth, her father became an Australian, she was included in the legal maneuvering and came away with a passport from that country.

I met her when she was twenty, a beautiful, fair-skinned young lady living among the dark Tongans and exciting the imagination of all young men who passed through her island. She talked with me often about which of the four passports she should choose when she became twenty-one; I advised the Australian, since she would presumably live within the influence of that nation, but in the end she surprised me by opting for Tonga, and her reasoning introduced me for the first time to what later came to be known as the disengaged generation.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to belong to any large nation with large plans. I don’t want the responsibility of either England or Australia. Let them solve their problems in their own ways, without involving me. I don’t want to be a Swede with the schizoid problem of living next to Russia, so that I must insult America, yet trying to be a free nation, so that I must defend myself against Russia. I want to be a Tongan. Nobody hates us. Nobody envies us. Any of the great powers can invade us by mailing a penny postcard, addressed Chief of Police, Nuku’alofa.’ And damned if she didn’t drop all her other passports and keep the Tongan.

Psychologically, the most interesting case was that of a young man whose history I followed from birth—indeed, from before birth. Thanks to a curious set of circumstances, he was legally entitled to two passports—United States and Israel—and as he matured he grew increasingly aware that one day he would be required to state which of these two nations he would elect as his permanent home.

It happened this way. Many years ago, when I was still working for Minneapolis Mutual, peddling funds throughout the midwest, I spent one campaign in Detroit, where I wasted two weeks trying to sell an investment program to one of the merchandising experts at General Motors. He was an extraordinary man, an Odessa Jew named Marcus Melnikoff; around the automobile industry he was called with some affection ‘Mark, our mad Russian,’ it being more fashionable in Detroit to be known as a renegade communist than as a Jew. He was a genius in the management of ideas and men but was having much difficulty with his daughter, a pretty senior at Vassar with headstrong ideas and numerous admirers from Yale and Amherst.

I remember Melnikoff’s interrupting me one afternoon in 1949 when I was trying to explain the merits of Minneapolis Mutual: ‘You’re lucky your kid’s a son. Don’t never have daughters. Zowie, what a headache!’ Seeking to ingratiate myself, I asked why, and he exploded: ‘Because they grow up and want to get married. Last summer a tennis bum. Never earned a kopek in his life. Last autumn, an exchange student from Indonesia. Where the hell is Indonesia? This winter an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke with radical ideas. My wife keeps asking, “Why can’t you settle on some nice, respectable Jewish boy?” ’

Several days later, when I dropped by to see Melnikoff at his home in Grosse Pointe, I found him awaiting a visit from his rabbi. ‘It’s embarrassing to have that goddamned Rabbi Fineshriber park his Ford in our driveway,’ he growled. At first I thought the make of the car was the problem, since his job at General Motors was to fight Ford, but he explained, ‘When the social committee was meeting to determine whether my wife and I were educated enough to be permitted entrance into Grosse Pointe, our sponsors passed us off as fugitive Russian scientists. That idea seemed rather exciting, so we were admitted, but there has always been a distrustful faction which suspects we’re Jewish. Now this goddamned Rabbi Fineshriber begins driving up, and everyone knows.’ I was startled at such a statement and was about to question him, when I realized that he was making fun of the system he had outsmarted.

When Rabbie Fineshriber arrived, he turned out to be a plump, jovial man of about fifty, as extroverted in religion as Melnikoff was in salesmanship. He felt no embarrassment at having me overhear what he had come to say and welcomed my questions, so we had a pleasant drink together, waiting for the arrival of Mrs. Melnikoff, an ebullient woman in her middle fifties. When she joined us, she warned that the rabbi would have to go over his admonitions a second time when Doris came back from playing indoor tennis with her latest admirer. ‘Non-Jewish, naturally,’ Mrs. Melnikoff said wryly.

Rabbi Fineshriber said, ‘I oppose heartily your plan for taking Doris to Israel. She’ll meet Jewish young men … some with great potential. But there’s a danger. Word will circulate very quickly concerning your purpose in coming to Israel. They’ll hear about your husband’s fortune. The suitors will begin to gather, and I want you to promise me
this. Whenever one of them proposes, as they will, Doris must say rapturously, “Oh, David! All my life I’ve wanted to live in Israel.” When he hears that she intends to live there instead of bringing him to the United States, you’ll see his interest evaporate. I said evaporate. It vanishes.’ He waved his hands violently back and forth across his face to indicate total abolishment.

I asked, ‘You mean the Israeli young men see American girls principally as passports?’

‘For a gentile, you express yourself very well,’ he replied. ‘And with a girl as pretty as Doris, the urge to get to America and her fortune will be … well, accentuated.’

Now Doris returned from her tennis, a tall, attractive, dark-haired girl in her early twenties. It seemed ridiculous for Rabbi Fineshriber and her mother to be worrying themselves about getting her a husband, for I judged she could have pretty nearly anyone she wished. Melnikoff must have guessed my thoughts, for he said, ‘Mr. Fairbanks may thing it strange that with a girl like Doris we should be so concerned about her marrying a Jewish boy.’ I noticed that Doris showed no embarrassment at such discussion before a relative stranger; apparently it had occurred before. ‘But when you’ve been a boy in Odessa, you see Jewish-gentile relationships in a different way. I support the idea of taking this longlegged colt to Israel for some training.’ He leaned forward and slapped his daughter on the knee.

‘So what you are to do, Doris,’ the rabbi instructed her, ‘is to say, as soon as the boy proposes, “Thank God, I’ve always wanted to live in Israel.” ’ He snapped his fingers in an afterthought: ‘Even better, say, “I’ve always wanted to live on a kibbutz.” That will really scare hell out of them.’

There was much discussion of Israel, which Rabbi Fineshriber knew favorably from having led three pilgrimages of his synagogue members there. He liked it, understood why Jews might want to settle there, and hoped to return often in the years ahead. But as a practical man who also knew Detroit and its surroundings, he preferred the United States and felt that a Jew had about as good a chance in Michigan as he did anywhere in the world. He especially wanted Doris Melnikoff not to make a fool of herself; three times in the last year she had come close to doing so with unworthy gentile men, and he saw no reason why, having escaped that nonsense, she would now fall into an equally
bad Jewish trap. As I left, still unsuccessful in my attempt to peddle mutual funds, I heard the rabbi saying, ‘Doris, if you really want yourself a nice Jewish boy, why don’t you inspect my sister’s son? Thick glasses, failing grades at Stanford, thirty pounds overweight and vaguely addicted to Karl Marx.’ In Boston I had once known an Irish priest who talked with his parishioners in this same joshing way.

Doris Melnikoff did go to Israel, she did fall in love with a nice Jewish boy, and she did tell him, ‘All my life I’ve wanted to live on a kibbutz.’ The hell of it was, he replied with great emotion, ‘I’m so relieved. I was afraid you’d want me to go to America and work with your father.’ He was Yochanan Zmora, a scientist teaching at the technical school in Haifa. When he took Doris to see that marvelous city, perched on a hill at the edge of the Mediterranean, with the Crusader city of Acre to the north and timeless Megiddo, the scene of Armageddon, to the southeast, she knew that this was what she had always hoped for, and on the spur of the moment she married him to share in the excitement of building a new land.

I was with her father in Detroit when Mrs. Melnikoff’s cable reached him. ‘My God! Married to a Jew named Zmora and living in Haifa?’ He looked it up in the Bible and got it confused with Jaffa, so that for the whole time his wife remained in Israel, buying furniture for the newly-weds, he imagined her and Doris in a much different part of the country. By cable he employed a private detective in Tel Aviv to find out who this Yochanan Zmora was, and the man reported: ‘Reputation excellent. Professional ability excellent. Personal appearance excellent. Born an English citizen under the name of John Clifton, Canterbury, Kent, England. Honors in science at Cambridge. Emigrated to Palestine in 1946. Assumed Hebrew name Yochanan Zmora in 1947. I find no adverse report on this man except that he tends toward the left in Israeli politics.’

Melnikoff showed me the cable and asked where he should fly to, Jaffa or Canterbury? I asked him why he didn’t stay in Detroit and wait for further information from his wife, but he snapped, ‘I didn’t make a million dollars staying in Detroit. I have one rule. When there’s trouble, fly there. It never does any good, but it impresses hell out of the boss.’ Against my judgment he flew to London, hired a Rolls-Royce, and tootled down to Canterbury,
where he met the senior Cliftons, a nervous, thin-lipped pair who were appalled by his obstreperous Russian mannerisms. He was relieved, however, to find them as disturbed about their son as he was about his daughter, and when he asked, pointing at Mrs. Clifton with his teacup, ‘Frankly, what can you do about headstrong children these days?’ he won the Cliftons’ sympathy. Mr. Clifton was a precise and pettifogging lawyer; in a burst of enthusiasm he invited Melnikoff to his club, a dreadful place with dark ceilings, dark walls, dark chairs and dark drapes. Melnikoff said, ‘This is very attractive,’ and Clifton said, ‘Yes, well … mmmm, yes. It costs rather more than one would normally wish to pay for frivolity. But it is rather nice, isn’t it?’ After two inconclusive days Melnikoff flew back to Detroit, and when I tried to reopen our discussion about his investing with us, he growled, ‘Get the hell out of here. Who has time to invest money with his daughter in Jaffa?’

Two years later my phone in Minneapolis jangled and the voice of Marcus Melnikoff shouted, ‘Come down immediately. Business.’ As he drove me in to Detroit from the airport he ordered, ‘Set me up a fund—one hundred thousand dollars—favor of my grandson.’ When I asked what name, he frowned and said, ‘Now we face the problem. When we heard that Doris was pregnant, Rebecca flew to Israel and brought her home. We insisted the kid be born under the American flag—ensure him an American passport. We talked Rabbi Fineshriber into registering him as Bruce Clifton, using his father’s legal name in England. Of course, In Israel he had to be registered as Yigal Zmora.’

‘This all sounds silly,’ I said. ‘What name shall I use?’

‘Not so silly,’ Melnikoff said gravely. ‘If you had been a Jew in Russia, trying to escape—a matter not of preference but of life—you’d have appreciated it if some loving grandfather had thoughtfully arranged for you to have two names … two passports. When he grows up, let him choose. United States or Israel. In the meantime, use the name Bruce Clifton. I’m sure he’s going to be an American.’

Thus the boy grew up with two names, two personalities, two homelands. His father, now Dr. Zmora and dean at Israel’s well-regarded scientific university in Haifa, intended Yigal to be an Israeli citizen, finding his place in the national life; but Grandfather Melnikoff, his Russian
enthusiasm intensifying with the years, intended Bruce to be a good American, to attend an American university, and to make his way in American society. The struggle never became overt; certainly from what I heard, it did not scar the boy. He spent most of the year with his parents in Haifa, but each summer he flew to Detroit so that he would be familiar with that home. Dr. Zmora and Grandfather Melnikoff competed for his affections in permissible ways, and although at that time I had not yet seen the boy, I was told that he was becoming an admirable young fellow.

It is strange that I never met him on my visits to Detroit, for I continued to sell funds to his grandfather. After I transferred over to World Mutual, I also spent some time in Haifa conducting feasibility studies of Israel’s oil business, in the course of which I came to know Dr. Zmora and his wife Doris rather well, since he represented the Israeli government in our discussions. Under his tutelage I became familiar with Haifa and was always gratified when, after work in areas like Sweden or Afghanistan, I once more approached this city of steps, this very ancient seaport that had known the Prophet Elijah, the armies of the Pharaohs, the chariots of King Solomon, the violence of the Crusaders. Haifa became one of my favorite cities, for in its harbor I could see Carthaginian longboats and Roman triremes bringing legions to subdue Jerusalem. With the Zmoras as guides, I went as far east as Lake Galilee, which carried connotations of a graver sort.