Ben-Gurion and Me

I know.

I am no Ben-Gurion.

We may be connected by a great religion and ancient traditions, but no more so than any of this earth's other 14 million Jews and their countless ancestral generations.  And we may both have taken an interest in the business of being Jewish, but that would seem a necessity amid the world's periodic outbrakes of insensible anti-Semitism and persecution.

However, there is this in which I may feel close to Israel's Old Man:

" . . . Every day he would diligently record his expenses in his notebook.  Often left penniless, he was obliged to beg a pound from a friend to get through the month.  Yet in addition to the usual food, kerosene, cigarettes, and newspapers, Ben-Gurion had added another secret item to his expenditures.  He had begun buying books like a man possessed.  Several times a week, Ben Gurion would record in his diary the list of books he had purchased.  In January 1922, he flung himself at books on Judaism; he asked a friend to buy him Springer's history of art and a number of German books on questions of state; from a Jerusalem shop he ordered books on the geography of Palestine, a biography of Jesus, books of Latin and Armenian grammar; from Germany he received books on Christianity, Palestinian archaeology, and the history and geography of the Middle East.  During his first attack of book-buying, in the spring of 1922, he concentrated systematically on a number of subjects: Judaism, Christianity, the history of the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, the origins of Zionism, the writings of the great socialists, the history of the Arabs, and textbooks on political problems.  On 20 March, he counted his books, and recorded proudly: "The number of my books is: German - 219; English - 340; Arabic - 13; French - 29; Hebrew - 140; Latin - 7; Greek - 2; Russian - 7; Turkish - 2; dictionaries of various languages - 15.  Total - 775 volumes." [1-48]

For many years, I lived a short drive from one of the country's chain thrifts, an operation that recycled everything that could be in the wake of changing fashions, waistlines, and the tragedy that is death.  In the worst years, my poorest, I would say in the voice of the protagonist child (Haley Joel Osment) in the Bruce Willis movie The Sixth Sense, "I wear dead people's clothing"--perhaps I did, or as whatever I bought from that era no longer fits my own expanding gut, perhaps such were merely outgrown.  Be that as it may, the Village Thrift recycled books, 1/2 price on Tuesdays back then, I recall, with first editions topping out at $1.90 before the cut.

I had found where the used booksellers culled their own stock for mark-up several hundred percent.

Armed with both an Access database and the popular "CollectorZ" software (and a barcode reader of grabbing incoming ISBN numbers), I too am counting books.

The numbers are not so important, of course.

In an infamous Al-Jazeera-hosted debate, Arab-American psychologist Wafa Sultan noted this: "Who told you that they are “People of the Book”? They are not the People of the Book, they are people of many books. All the useful scientific books that you have today are theirs, the fruit of their free and creative thinking."

Thank you, Wafa, but we could not have done it without the Muslim scholars of the Iberian Penninsula (Jews produced the translations of medical literature from Arabic to Spanish), but, dolled up here and with many thanks, "The People of Many Books" has stuck with me.

As each book must have been for David Ben-Gurion a deep and rich portal into the world and world view of its author, so has each has been to me, including Michael Bar-Zohar's biography of Ben-Gurion--and what a world his was, with some part of the people working in the groves and swamps of old Palestine, others struggling to make sense of European craftsmanship in an environment not yet conducive to as much.  Edmund James de Rothschild may have purchased some land, founded a winery or two, and launched new businesses in the region, but the young Ben-Gruen" and others arrived to undertake the labor at miserable wages and for the most uncertain of futures imaginable.

Amazon--how I got that book!--had listed just two of the Bar-Zohar "New Millennium" translations available last month, so I've paid a pretty penny for it, but have had a grand tour through it too and caught a glimpse both of Israel's founding personalities and the fundamental military, political, and spiritual building blocks of the Jewish state's existence.

I am thankful for the experience.

Each month, I make my library a little more Jewish--i.e., although the print is very small, I have a Torah, a history of Israel (Benny Morris's 1948--there will be others), a siddur (prayer book), and my candles--as well, perhaps, as more international.  There are quite a few books here concerned with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Somalia, and if you add in the coffee table books from the photography quarter, add in America, France, Paris, and Asia.

As a resource, the library outgrew my ability to read through it many years ago, but then books around my place fulfill many duties: they entertain and instruct, provide literally off-the-shelf reference, and, not so oddly, they relate one to the other too.

In the old apartment, ruined for habitation by a fire elsewhere in the building, I made sure to keep Kawabata next to Hemingway, the principle of influences and themes applying to the shelving.

Here in this still new space (after three years, it has just become familiar): library chaos, but all the friends are out in plain view and with the making of catalog cards and the clearing of cluttering items from each bookcase, one at a time over time, they're each finding their own place in a universe quite their own.

Reference

1. Bar-Zohar, Michael.  Ben-Gurion: A Biography.  Peretz Kidron, Translator.  The New Millennium Edition. Tel-Aviv: Magal Books, 1978.

2. MEMRI.  Attacks on Arab-American Wafa Sultan: Islamist Sheikh on Al-Jazeera Calls Her Heretic; Syrian Sermon Calls Her Infidel."  Special Dispatch - No. 1107, March 7, 2006: http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sd&ID=SP110706&Page=archives.  MEMRI video location on YouTube, poster "itayzil", "Arab-American Psychologist Wafa Sultan," posted August 14, 2006: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1_aypp_5uI:

# # #

Comments

[tammy swofford]

James,

I love books too. My love falls in two categories: new books for the fresh smell and old books for the yellowed pages.

My dream home would be an old lighthouse on a blustery coast with my books for company, the smell of salt water in the air and sound of dancing waves crashing all around. But now, I write like my reading selection veers toward Harlequin Romance. smile

Tammy