When I finally met Eliezer Friedman two days later, I was more than half an hour late. A plan had been made to meet for breakfast at Fortuna del Mare, a few minutes’ walk from the Hilton. But having finally fallen asleep at three in the morning, I slept through the alarm I’d set and only woke up when Friedman rang the room. It was the first time we’d spoken—all the arrangements had been made through Effie—and yet his accent, Israeli but inflected with a childhood German, was deeply familiar to me from my grandmother and her friends, the women she took me to visit as a child whose apartment doors opened in Tel Aviv but whose hallways led to lost corners of Nuremberg and Berlin.
I sputtered an apology, threw on some clothes, and raced down to the beach through the hotel’s back exit. I’d been to the restaurant before, a little Italian place with a handful of tables in view of the masts of the sailboats in the marina. Seated at the farthest table in the corner was a little man with a crown of gauzy white hair; all of the color had been sucked down into his dark, bushy eyebrows. Two deep furrows extended from just above his nostrils to either side of his lips, which turned sharply downward at the corners. Altogether the effect was of a gravity that looked to be irreversible until it reached the chin, which tilted upward in proud defiance. He was dressed in an old khaki field vest with bulging pockets, though, judging by the cane hooked neatly on the table edge next to his right leg, any kind of fieldwork had long become impossible. I hurried over to the table and spilled out more apologies.
“Sit,” Friedman said. “I won’t get up, if you don’t mind,” he added. I shook the thick-fingered hand he extended and sat down across from him, still trying to catch my breath. Fumbling with the buttons of my jean jacket, I felt him studying me with a steady gaze.
“You’re younger than I thought.”
I stopped myself from saying that he was more or less as old as I’d thought, and that I was no longer as young as I looked.
Friedman called the waitress over and insisted I order some breakfast even though I wasn’t hungry. I assumed he’d ordered for himself already, and chose something so he wouldn’t have to eat alone. But when she returned, it was with a plate of food for me and only a cup of coffee for him. Despite his shortness—it was no wonder he and Effie had sought each other out—there was something commanding about him. And yet when he lifted the spoon to wring out the tea bag, I thought I saw his hand shake. But his gray eyes, magnified behind the smoky lenses, seemed to miss nothing.
He wasted no time with small talk, and right away started in with questions. I hadn’t expected to be interviewed. But it wasn’t only his authoritative presence that made me prone to revealing myself; it was also something about the attentiveness with which he listened to my answers. It was a windy day, and the sailboats gently rocked and clinked in the marina while whitecaps rammed the breakwater. I found myself speaking freely about my many memories of Israel, of stories my father had told me of his childhood in Tel Aviv, and of my own relationship with the city, which often felt to me more like my true home than anywhere else. When he asked me what I meant, I tried to explain how I felt comfortable with people here in a way I never did in America, because everything could be touched, so little was hidden or held back, people were hungry to engage with whatever the other had to offer, however messy and intense, and this openness and immediacy made me feel more alive and less alone; made me feel, I suppose, that an authentic life was more possible. Many things that were possible in America were impossible in Israel, but in Israel it was also impossible to feel nothing, to provoke nothing, to walk down the street and not exist. But my love for Tel Aviv went further than that, I told him. The shameless dilapidation of the buildings, sweetened by the bright fuchsia bougainvillea that grew over the rust and the cracks, asserting the importance of accidental beauty over that of keeping up appearances. The way the city seemed to refuse constriction; how everywhere, always, suddenly, one ran into pockets of surreality where reason was exploded like an unclaimed suitcase at Ben Gurion.
To all this, Friedman nodded and said that he wasn’t surprised, he had always sensed an affinity with this place in my work. Only then did he at last begin to guide the conversation toward my writing, and the reason he’d asked to meet.
“I’ve read your novels. We all have,” he said, gesturing toward the other tables in the restaurant. “You’re adding to the Jewish story. For this, we’re very proud of you.”