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ELI SHAI:
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Not just eating honey

Once, back in high school, I had a friend who got on a bus in Jerusalem and heard an old man say to his long-suffering wife: "let’s just go and get it over with, or else we shall die like donkeys."

He didn’t know where the man wanted to go, maybe for a holiday in Tiberias, maybe to a wedding in the Negev, nor did he understand exactly what he meant, but the words were deeply engraved in my friend’s mind. He packed his bags and went to America.

Every time he sent a postcard, I would think, like the elusive title of this book, indeed, "that is the life I would like to live," not just this routine, donkey-like existence. Finally he came back from New York very sick and broke, a month before he passed away. I took him out for a beer and we agreed that I might write a short story about his voyage.

I remembered that true story while reading one of the most fascinating and promising pieces in this collection of Israeli travel stories, by Avraham Shaked from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, a former guide in the field school at St. Catherine’s. He is crazy about deserts, and under the title Wandering Boats in the Dark of Night, writes the introduction to "a book that will never be written."

Shaked tries to reconstruct the aroma of wandering, especially in America, on whose highways refugees escaping the stress of the Israeli wars meet young Americans who have shaken off the nightmare of Vietnam, trying to fly just a little longer on the "flower power" of the remnants of the Sixties.

Sick of hitchhiking, in San Francisco, Shaked buys an ancient Volkswagen with rust holes in its floor, for a Jack Kerouac and Ken Casey-style trip. But against the advice of his insurance agent, he takes a hitchhiker on board. His passenger is Andy — an eternal orphan with a guitar and a puppy, somebody who got out of the army with a "dishonorable discharge‘ and whose whole dream in life is ’to buy me two donkeys and go to Mexico with them."

Uri Lotan, a radio broadcaster and well-known wanderer, also influenced by the same travel literature of the American beat generation, surprisingly discovers he has agoraphobia — fear of open spaces and of going out of the house. Anna, the lady who sleeps with him (a manic-depressive he meets at the psychiatrist’s), tempts him to go to a Dylan concert in Amsterdam, but as soon as they are in Munich it is clear the trip is beset by bad luck.

Amsterdam turns out to be a bad trip, the security officer gets on his case, and his rising agoraphobia propels him to rush home — to surf on the computer. In the meanwhile Tzur Shezaf, a long-distance traveler with evolved survival skills, goes to Georgia to meet his travel companion, Zaza Tzitzishvilli, the knight of Tbilisi, a colorful and adventurous character. On the way he seeks the "crazy honey‘ that once intoxicated the Greek troops, that wonderful substance extracted from the flowers of the rhododendron, that drove the Greek army wild on its journey from the depth of the Persian Empire to the Black Sea. Finally he finds some stale honey from last year, with a bitter, smoky taste, ’not crazy and not even very good."

Indeed, as opposed to the title’s promise, the lives of the Israeli travelers seem hard and desolate and are very far from eating honey, real or fake; In Crete, Zvi Gilat experiences a marital crisis and visits restaurants sunk into a sort of ongoing coma in the midst of sweaty villages. Sticky men pester Yaron Fried in the Atlas Mountains in oppressive attempts to sell their bodies and find a generous patron. Dan Tzalka spends a stuffy week in Burma; the capital looks like a deserted ghost town, the hotel room resembles a detention cell adorned with kitschy Buddha pictures, the air is polluted, the bus horrifically crowded.

At the end of his journey, he raises the possibility that certain Asiatic regions are destined to hang between two choices: massage parlors for Western tourists, Thailand-style, or a junkyard managed by rigid bureaucrats, Burma-style.

Great, says the reader, as he turns the pages of Tzalka’s excellent travel prose. This is definitely not the life I would like to live, absolutely not, how lucky I am that I am not subject to the rigors of those trips, just give me a lifetime exemption from the impossible chores that face Israeli travelers. NOT ALL the travel stories are written at the same fine standard as Tzalka’s diaries. But, even when some of the stories turn out to be mediocre exercises, the reader may still enjoy the simple fact that he is sitting in a comfortable armchair with a fan, casually leafing, while the writers have to endure sometimes tortuous journeys and then fight their writers’ pens.

I urgently called Moshe (Moshik) Gilad, editor of the new Am Oved series of travel books, to suggest he take Tzalka and open a creative writing workshop for Israeli travel writers. We both lamented the loss of Israeli magazine writing as a training ground for travel writers. If Theresa Maggio, who published The Stone Boudoir, a wonderful travel book about the hidden villages of Sicily, would have approached a typical Israeli magazine editor with it, she would have been thrown out.

"Israelis travel a lot,‘ notes Gilad, ’but the written product is less ripe. There is no point in publishing a National Geographic in the format of half a century ago, because even my neighbor’s kids, who are completely normal, have already been to lots of distant places. The question is how to turn that into quality travel writing that does not depend on whether you went to the most challenging place in the world. Lots of travel junk has been written, and most of the writers who describe conquering the Everest, for instance, are very boring."

Gilad is aware that not all 20 stories in the collection are masterpieces, and is also aware of the gimmick of the title and the attractive cover picture that looks like an advertisement for a travel agency, because it is not at all sure that the book fulfills the promise of such a good time. Yet he hopes that one day the quantity here will lead to quality travel literature.

"If the writers had each practiced at book-length I might be worried about the outcome, but in a collection of stories it is enough for a person to say ’I liked five, a few others were interesting, and I didn’t relate to a few.’"

From that angle the new series can be viewed as an exciting experiment, a creative travel-writing workshop at the Open University. Gilad is planning a Hebrew translation of My Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck’s travel book with his dog, and other English classics, as well as less well-known excellent travel books, and an anthology that will include passages from Marco Polo.

To date, several more books have been published in the series, including Driving over Lemons by Chris Stewart, the ex-drummer of Genesis, who moved to a ranch in Andalusia, and Shopping for Buddhas by Jeff Greenwald, about a young American’s voyage to Kathmandu in search of a statue of the perfect enlightened one. Anticipate the next title, Ghost City by master-travel writer William Dalrymple, on a year in New Delhi.

For now, read That is the Life in a room with a good air conditioner, suck on a spoon of honey and spare yourselves the sweating on the road.