The Seven Good Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

also has to bear the insult of being taken for a Jew.
    And only a week ago, at a literary festival in Poland, someone in the audience asked me if I was ashamed to be a Jew. I gave him a logical, well-reasoned answer that wasn’t the slightest bit emotional. The audience, which had listened attentively, applauded. But later, in my hotel room, I had a hard time falling asleep.
    There’s nothing like a couple of good November khamsins to put the Jew in you back in its place. The direct Middle Eastern sunlight burns all traces of the Diaspora right out of you. My best friend, Uzi, and I are sitting on Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv. Sitting next to him are Krista and Renate. “Don’t tell me,” Uzi says, trying to cover up his ballooning horniness with some unsuccessful telepathy. “You’re both from Sweden.”
    â€œNo,” Renate says, laughing, “we’re from Düsseldorf. Germany. You know Germany?”
    â€œSure,” Uzi says, nodding enthusiastically, “Kraftwerk, Modern Talking, Nietzsche, BMW, Bayern München . . .” He forages around in his brain for a few more German associations, to no avail. “Hey, bro,” he says to me, “why did we send you to college for all those years? How about contributing a little something to the conversation.”

Requiem for a Dream
    I t all began with a dream. A lot of troubles in my life begin with a dream. And in this dream I was at a train station in a strange city, behind a hot dog stand. A horde of passengers were huddling around it. They were all jumpy, impatient. They were dying for a hot dog, they were afraid of missing the train. They were barking orders at me in a strange language that sounded like a scary blend of German and Japanese. I answered them in the same strange, nerve-wracking language. They tried to make me go faster, and I did my best to keep up. My shirt was so splattered with mustard and relish and sauerkraut that the few places where you could still see the white looked like spots. I tried to concentrate on the buns but couldn’t help noticing the angry mob. They looked at me with the ravenous eyes of predators. The orders in the incomprehensible language seemed more and more menacing. My hands started to shake. Beads of salty sweat dripped from my forehead onto the thick hot dogs. And then I woke up.
    The first time I had that dream was five years ago. In the middle of the night, when I got out of bed, covered in perspiration, I made do with a glass of iced tea and watched an episode of
The Wire
. It’s not that I’d never had a bad dream before, but when I saw this one start to make itself at home in my unconscious, I knew I had a problem, one that even the winning combination of iced tea and Officer Jimmy McNulty couldn’t solve.
    Uzi, a well-known dream and hot dog buff, worked out its meaning in no time. “You’re second generation,” he said. “Your parents were forced to leave their country, their home, their natural social environment overnight. That unsettling experience filtered down from your parents’ unsettled consciousness to yours, which was unsettled to begin with. On top of which, there’s the unstable reality of our lives in the Middle East and your being a new father. Stir it all up and what do you get? A dream that includes all of those fears: of being uprooted, of arriving in a strange, alien place, of being forced to work at something unfamiliar or unsuitable. You’ve got it all.”
    â€œThat makes sense,” I told Uzi. “But what do I do to make sure that nightmare doesn’t come back—see a psychologist?”
    â€œThat won’t do you any good,” he said. “What’s the therapist going to tell you? That your parents weren’t actually persecuted by Nazis, that there’s no chance of Israel being destroyed, leaving you a refugee? That even with your lousy coordination you can do a good