Just a few comments about Chapter 6. First, I am not only Solomon Simon’s translator, but also his grandson. But it follows that I am also his wife’s grandson, and I want to put in a word here on her behalf. In the scene in Mea Shearim, the author uses Lena Simon as a foil to demonstrate his more broad-minded acceptance of their very-observant fellow Jews, and for comic relief. In 1949, it was acceptable and even expected to depict women as “practically hysterical” when they expressed strong feelings. He does not apply the same epithet to himself when he becomes distressed, for example, about land being left untilled. Lena was a brilliant woman, with her own ideas and opinions and often little outlet for them. The stereotype painted here is the more unjust for his barely having mentioned her up to now. Without waving it away, I would ask younger readers in particular to keep the historical time in mind.
Second, the photo from Mea Shearim doesn’t precisely match the text. The boys in the photo do not look seven years old to me. They are also joined in the picture by an older boy who is not dressed in a Haredi style. Perhaps he is the son of the shopkeeper who helped set up the photo? There seems to be some poetic license at play. Also, in the narrative, Simon takes the photo in the first person.
The other photos accompanying the text so far were taken by Miriam Forman, who in mid-Tamuz, 1949, was about two weeks shy of her 13th birthday. Simon’s daughter (and the translator’s mother), she may have run out of film early in the trip, or else she may have left the camera at her aunt and uncle’s when they traveled North. For whatever reason, after this photo there are not many more.
Third, it may be useful to underscore one element of the conversation with a bystander that began near the Jaffa Gate. “It seems that you are an observant Jew, so how can you agree with the Etzelniks?” He automatically associates tradition and frumkayt (piety or strict observance) with pacifism. Or, if not out-and-out pacifism, with an extreme and principled reluctance to use force.
There was an event in Simon’s childhood that made such a powerful impact on him that he wrote the story of it at least three times: In the book Amolike Yidn, in the first volume of his memoirs, titled Vortslen (“My Jewish Roots” in the English version), and again in the children’s magazine, Kinder Zhurnal. Simon grew up in a family of eight children. His father was a shoemaker, whose ‘specialty’ was work boots, which he made so well they never had to be replaced and so slowly that he never made any money. At the outset of the Russo-Japanese War, boots were in such high demand in the Russian Empire that the price for them multiplied by many times. However, despite the family’s desperate poverty, his father Yeruchem Bentsion refused to make boots for the war effort. Someone, he said, had to be the first to take a stand.
Unlike most secular Jews of his generation, Solomon Simon did not resent but was proud of his traditional upbringing and Yeshiva education. Like most secular Jews of his generation, he assumed that the dramatic trends in his lifetime towards liberalism and away from fundamentalism would continue. Because they were a small (and shrinking) proportion of the Jewish population, he did not see ‘Ultra-Orthodox’ Jews (the term ‘Haredi’ was not in use then) as a potential threat to his values. Rather, it was the secular Zionists, who wanted Israel to be a country like other countries and for the Jews to be a nation like other nations, whom he saw as a potential threat to the uniqueness of Yiddishkayt as a way of life.
The Nation State and the Promised Land 