Tour de Force

By Stefan Kanfer

TO JERUSALEM AND BACK

by SAUL BELLOW 182 pages. Viking. $8.95.

"If all pulled in the same direction" says the Yiddish proverb, "the whole world would topple over." Nowhere is that folk wisdom more apparent than on the acreage of Israel or in the first work of nonfiction by Nobel-prizewinning Novelist Saul Bellow. Late in 1975, when the author was a youthful 60 and the country was a ravaged 27, Bellow visited the Holy Land--his first trip since the Six-Day War.

Despite its geopolitical subject, the result is a typical Bellow production: part meditation, part crank letter, tinged with the doubt of Ecclesiastes and the faith of Moses, full of quicksilver insights and deep Talmudic scholarship. It is as if the Messrs. Sammler, Humboldt and Herzog collaborated on a travel-cum-history book, pulling in several directions to keep it aloft.

Work and Mozart. On the voyage out, Bellow finds himself surrounded by Hasidim, Jews in outmoded black attire, long earlocks and beards. One of them asks Bellow what his wife does for a living. She is a mathematician, the author explains. The Hasid has no idea what the occupation is. "Do you recognize the name of Einstein?" "Never. Who is he?" In me, reflects Bellow, "he sees what deformities the modern age can produce in the seed of Abraham. In him I see a piece of history, an antiquity."

Once he sets foot on Jerusalem soil, contradictions pursue Bellow like a shadow in the pitiless sun. The city itself is "the only ancient place I've ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use." People he meets on a nearby kibbutz work in the fields until the afternoon, then listen to Mozart and discuss nuances of Goethe. An Arab who is mildly sym pathetic to Israel has his car blown apart by terrorists; Israelis confide pro-Palestinian sympathies. The nation, demoralized by the Yom Kippur War, is also torn--and sometimes transfigured--by diversity. Young violinists audition for Isaac Stern ("a death-defying act on four taut strings") while soldiers patrol gardens and political hawks call for takeovers of the West Bank. Israel, Bellow concludes, "is both a garrison state and a cultivated society, both Spartan and Athenian. It tries to do everything, to understand everything, to make provisions for everything. All resources, all faculties are strained. Unremitting thought about the world situation parallels the defense effort. These people are actively, individually involved in universal history. I don't see how they can bear it." Bellow knows very well how they can bear it: there is no other choice but war or social chaos--the "solutions" of Viet Nam and Lebanon.

The writer is most successful in his evocation of an emotional landscape. A young Israeli cab driver tells him of a recent visit to a coffee shop with a friend whom he left for a second to chat with someone else: " '... just then the bomb went off and my friend was still there. So now my friend is dead,' said the cabby. His voice, still adolescent, was cracking. 'And this is how we live, mister! O.K.? We live this way.' "

The most saline of American writers finds himself unable to escape the tenebrous undertow of Jewish mysticism. "My inclination is to resist the imagination when it operates in this way," he writes. "Yet I, too, feel that the light of Jerusalem has purifying pow ers and filters the blood and the thoughts. I don't forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God."

Rather surprisingly, Bellow also proves himself adept at political analysis and brisk invective. His view of the U.S. Secretary of State is swiftly conveyed: "Kissinger was deep in conversation with Danny Kaye . . . One of Kissinger's assistants earnestly said, 'That is an old relationship and a very meaningful one.' " His perceptive summa tions of Islamic tradition or Zionist his tory are comparable to the great riffs and turbulences of his novels. But the Middle East, no matter how bizarre, is not fictive, and in the end its complex ity forces Bellow to quote the urgent pas sage in Handel's Messiah: "Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the peoples imagine a vain thing?" With the positing of that query, Bellow acknowledges that in the terri tory he has examined there are no easy answers. Indeed, there may be no answers at all -- only questions. Still, it is vital to have those questions asked continually by men of talent and conscience and grace.

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