Association
of Jewish Libraries of Southern California
Susan March forwarded this article to us - noted
in the ALA Direct,
the American Library Association's electronic newsletter to members:
Asa-El's Israel: Thoughts in a
Jerusalem library
Amotz Asa-El, THE JERUSALEM
POST Oct. 24, 2006
The other day I entered the Yad Ben-Zvi Library where I often write and
saw a familiar face, former president Yitzhak Navon, writing diligently
and sitting modestly among the rest of the library's usual crowd, a
random collection of researchers, teachers, students, journalists and
tour guides.
Few sights could be more Jerusalemite than this, I thought.
True Jerusalemites are library animals. They can't help entering one
when passing by it, sometimes even if it's in a language they can't
read. And once inside a library, or a good book store, pulling them
away from it can be as challenging as disconnecting Winnie the Pooh
from a honey jar.
At the Bet-Ha'am Public Library, a cubic, white structure that still
operates on downtown Jerusalem's Bezalel Street, we first put to work
the reading skills we acquired a mere few months earlier, at the nearby
Le-Dugma elementary school.
There we gulped one after another of such classic Israeli children's
books as Tukides, Dani-Din, Chippopo and Kofiko - whose heroes were,
respectively, a talking bird, an invisible boy, a talking monkey who
traveled the world and a talking monkey from Petah Tikva - as well as
translations like Enid Blyton's The Secret Seven, a series whose
protagonists bore names like George, Peter, Janet, Jack, Collin and
Suzy, and whose junior-detective adventures involved barns, tree
houses, stolen cars, snow fields and tea-and-cookie breaks, all of
which could hardly be more distant from the border town of academics,
bureaucrats and soldiers where we were being raised.
As a kid, that modest library's solitude, cleanliness, variety and
depth inspired me then at least as much as Harvard's Widener,
Columbia's Butler and the Hebrew University's National Library would
later. For my friends and me, at a time when computers, Gameboys or
Play-stations were science fiction, and when even black-and-white TV
had yet to arrive, that library was a universe in its own right, a
child's best friend. Proceeding slowly along its stacks, plucking a
volume with a peculiar title and sifting through its yellowing,
thinning and sometimes scribbled pages was as delicious as a Mediaeval
wine cellar's fragrance is for a vintner.
Special though it was, and always will be, to those who had in it their
first literary tastings, Bet-Ha'am was but one of numerous other
Jerusalemite libraries, from the Vatican's next door to the King David
Hotel and the Van Leer Institute's which shares a fence with the
President's House, to the Rubin Academy's music library, which shared a
fence with the prime minister's residence on Smolenskin Street, and
from Yad Ben-Tzvi which replaced the previous presidential compound, to
Bnei-Brith on Hazanovitch Street - Jerusalem's first modern library.
Surely, if even put together these and the rest of Jerusalem's
libraries would still dwarf next to where we proceeded by eighth grade,
the National Library at Givat Ram, one of the world's largest literary
shrines. There, in the reading halls that seemed to us at the time as
vast as international airports, we saw at work world-renowned
luminaries like Kabbala expert Gerschom Scholem, philosopher Yeshayahu
Leibowitz and historian Jacob Katz, bent over this or that fraying,
ancient document alongside a pile of voluminous books, and a
multi-lingual assortment of periodicals.
In such a setting it was only natural for the President of Israel,
Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, to frequent the Jewish Studies library in the nearby
Meiser Building, where he could frequently be seen on Fridays
researching the lost tribes of Israel, which were his obsession. Not
only was he sitting there unassumingly among undergraduates, he would
go there by foot, without bodyguards, from his Rehavia residency, where
he would greet guests in a wooden hut, one that is still preserved just
outside the library where this blog began.
Now, as I am sitting here writing these lines two chairs away from
former president Yitzhak Navon, I am compelled to take stock of the
sex-lies-and audiotape scandal where our presidency has arrived, and
contrast it with the days when our leaders had so much less vainglory
and so much more gravitas.
Like that moment in 1982, after our Christian allies massacred
Palestinians in Lebanon, when the man now drowning in several
word-processed pages two chairs away from me confronted Prime Minister
Menachem Begin as he demanded, and obtained, the establishment of an
independent judicial commission of inquiry. Several months later, when
that commission fired then-defense minister Ariel Sharon and then
inspired Begin's resignation, it was clear that the Israeli presidency,
ordinarily a celebration of pomp, circumstance and irrelevance, had
just seen its finest hour; the very inversion of where it now has
arrived.
Amotz Asa-El, The Jerusalem Post's
most veteran columnist, has served until recently as the Post's executive editor, and before
that as its business editor, news editor, and editor of its overseas
edition - the International
Jerusalem Post.
A former foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle and foreign
editor of the Hebrew financial daily Telegraph,
Amotz is a frequent Middle East analyst for the BBC, SKY, NPR, CBC and
other broadcast networks and a frequent speaker for AIPAC, the American
Jewish Committee, the Canada Israel Committee, JNF, the
Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Committee, and others.
His column, "Middle Israel," now in its 11th year, discusses Israeli,
Jewish, and international issues from the viewpoint of a native Israeli
who has traveled the world extensively. Asa-El has been quoted among
others by the New York Times,
the Washington Post, the New Republic, and Le Figaro.
Author of The Diaspora and the Lost
Tribes of Israel, an Amazon bestseller in Jewish history,
Asa-El's writing on Diaspora affairs has been awarded twice (1998 and
2004) by Bnai Brith.
A former Israeli delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, Mr.
Asa-El holds advanced degrees in journalism and history from Columbia
University in New York and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
A co-founder and editorial-board member of the Hebrew opinion journal Eretz Aheret, Asa-El is also a
member of the Encyclopedia of the
Jewish Diaspora's board, alongside Sir Martin Gilbert, Natan
Sharansky and others.
He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and their three children.