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P«|e 14 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 7, 1978
Above, Imri Tel-Oren, 14 years old, who was shot to death in Al Fatah’s attack
in Israel, with one of his twin sisters. At left, his sister and mother at his funeral.
‘A fallen soldier
in the army
of clarinets’
by Cynthia Ozick
A famed writer’s moving letter
to the PLO after her 14-year-old
cousin was murdered in the
Tel Aviv bus raid.
1 ■ '
Dear Palestinian Spokesman: £
When you say that your friends killed 33 Israeli soldiers in last
weekend's terror attack on the road near Haifa, do you mean my
cousin Imri? Your friends shot him in the throat. He was not a soldier.
He was 14 years old, and played the clarinet.
Now I am not sure what the mentality of a terrorist might be, since
Unlike you, I have never had one for a friend; but it seems logical to
assume that if you have murdered someone, you might like—even if
only out of idle curiosity, but especially out of ideology—to know
something about the life you have taken. So please let me tell you a
little bit about my cousin Imri. I promise you it won’t occupy much of
your time, because if someone is murdered when he is only 14 years
old, how much can there be to tell?
In fact, Imri’s life was so brief, and there wis so little he ever had a
chance to do, that I might as well begin with his grandfather and
grandmother.
Imri’s grandfather is a poet, a lover of the English Romantics. He
has won some fine prizes for his work (including the Brenner Prize,
named after an early Zionist who vowed that Jews were no longer
going to be murdered just for being Jews), and he has translated Walt
Whitman into Hebrew; but is rather elderly now, so these days he
mostly sits in his little garden reading Wordsworth and Keats and
Shelley and Blake.
The garden is rather special. It is in the backyard of a house not far
from the Lod airport (where some
of your other friends murdered a
group of Christian pilgrims not so
long ago).
When Imri’s grandparents built
the house—a simple concrete cube
filled with volumes and volumes of
poetry—it was entirely surrounded
by sand. But Imri’s grandmother
climbs a shaky ladder to reach up to
each young pear, which she patiently and meticulously wraps in a
little paper-bag. It looks pretty comical—a paper-bag tree!—but
Imri’s grandmother will not spray the trees with insecticide; she does
not want to kill the insects, who also have a right to live. Imri’s
grandparents are vegetarians, and so was Imri, and so are his parents
and all his brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. You see, they do
not like to take life.
Imri’s mother and father are passionate musicians. They play first
and second flute in the Jerusalem Symphony—or at least they did
until last weekend, because Imri’s father may never play again. One
of your friends blew up his hand. In the hospital at Haifa they are
trying to patch together some of it with bone grafts; soon they will
know whether the nerve will die. (Imri’s brother Nir is luckier; it was
only his leg that was wounded. He lost a lot of blood, but he is all
right.)
About two years ago, Imri’s father came to America for a time to
teach flute at Ithaca College. It was hard to tell which he loved
more—music or his students. Tears fell from him when the term
drew to an end and he had to say goodbye. When he heard or played
music he seemed illuminated: “Isn’t this beautiful?’’ he would
murmur. All of Imri’s six brothers and sisters are musical. They play all
sorts of instruments, and the beauty flies out of their hands.
Imri’s oldest sister, Anva, a dancer, just had her second baby, and
so what happened was this: Imri and his brother Nir and Adiel and
his little twin sisters Viv and Cori and their parents all piled into the
family car to drive up to Haifa to see the new baby. After the visit,
they were on their way home to Jerusalem, just behind a bus, when
your friends started throwing grenades and shooting at them, at first
on the road itself and then from inside the bus. When Imri’s father,
who was driving, got hit, Imri’s brother Nir managed to grab the
wheel and save his family, even though his leg was streaming blood.
In the horror of the explosions and the pursuit it was a little while
before anyone realized that Imri was dead.
All right, now about Imri himself.
He was mainly a quiet boy,private like some adolescents like to be,
and a good student. Until not long ago he was still quite small, but In
the last few months his family had begun to marvel at how he was
springing up. He was going to be tall, like his father. He was fond of
stamp-collecting, and when his mother toured with the orchestra
she always brought back interesting foreign stamps for him. His
instrument was the clarinet; he was a member of a youth orchestra in
Jerusalem. He used to grumble over his clarinet because it was
second-hand and somewhat woebegone; but only two days before
your friends killed him he had the delight of learning that he was
going to get a better clarinet.
And that is about all I can tell you about your victim Imri. I warned
you it wouldn't amount to much. The main thing, you know, is that
he was never going to kill anyone or anything—not even a fish or a
chicken, much less a fellow human being. He was only going to make
beautiful sounds on his clarinet.
Imri’s grandfather, when he was not much older than Imri during
the First World War, used to write pacifist poems; and once after the
1948 war he began a lyric about Bialik, the Hebrew poet, that in the
most natural wav turned into a prayer for fraternity between Arabs
and Jews. And after that Imri’s grandmother kept on growing trees
and flowers in what used to be sand, and Imri’s whole family kept on
sending music, one of the languages of peace, up into the Middle
East air.
A Palestine military spokesman in Beirut said
the attack had been carried out by members of
Al Fatah, the largest guerrilla group in the
Palestine Liberation Organization. He asserted
that 33 Israeli soldiers had bekn killed in the
attack.
—The New York Times, March 12, 1978
Well, I just thought you
would like to hear about one
obscure 14-year-old who
happened to become a target of
yours; because why shouldn’t you
know who it is you hated enough to
kill? And now that your friends have
murdered Imri and blown up his
father's hand, there will be much
less music in the world, and that
much less civilization.
You have made it pretty clear that atkof this feeds your pride and
your notion of manhood and especially Vour sense of nationhood.
The triumph of guns and blood excites you, more than symphonies
and poems and clarinets. *
It could be, though, that you didn't really tell an untruth when you
called Imri a “soldier.” On our battered planet there are always, after
all, two armies—the army of guns and the army of clarinets. Death
flies out of one and beauty from the other. Imri is a fallen soldier in
the army of clarinets, and in the end your most intractable stumbling
block, your deepest contest, will have to be not politics, or your
Soviet arms suppliers, or land, or your propagandists abroad, or your
multiple perversions of the vocabulary of idealism, or your fellow
Arabs who have imprisoned and despised and morally crippled and
corrupted you for the last 30 years, or your hatred of Jews, or what
you call “self-determination” while denying it to another people, or
your vow to dismantle Israel, or your putting military uniforms on
boys just Imri’s age and teaching them terrorism, or,even your
blood-thirsty braggadocio; or anything like that.
No. You will have to grapple with what you know to be your
chosen enemies—rank after rank of the singing clarinets: the army of
civilization. Your guns cough in brutal eye-blink blasts and shatter
human bones. Your friends, by stealth and ambush, murdered Imri.
You are terribly proud of this, and Crow it over the airwaves. No
matter. Civilization is more tenacious than the death you bring.
Paper bag trees, and Keats in a garden near an airport, and the long,
long voice of the flute, and the singing clarinets—these are the
soldiers you will have to defeat. If you can.
—Npw York Time*
Cynthia Ozick, a writer, is the author of Bloodshed, the Pagan
Rabbi, Trust, and is now working on a new novel.
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PM* 17 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE April 7, 1978
