Children of Israel
Learning Laughter. By Stephen Spender. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 15s.) THE title of this travel-book is inappropriate. Laughter was just the thing that Mr. Spender did not find in Israel when he visited it in the spring of 1952. One of his strongest imptessions was of tension ; he found " a nation beset by many pi oblerns.... The most obvious thing that strikes every visitor to Israel is the disastrous economic situation ... real austerity, coupled with the existence of a Black Market and a public economy on the verge of catastrophe." The title, indeed, refers to the children who are still assembling from many parts of the world, but chiefly now from Africa and Asia, to settle in the country ; but even in the children's centres austerity and high thinking prevail.
Mr. Spender visited Israel at the request of Youth Aliyah, the organisation set up in the 'thirties to rescue children from Hitler's Germany. He has, however, written of a good deal besides the position of children—of flowers, sunset over Jerusalem, views of mountains and lakes ; of the towns, from Tel Aviv with its Central European look to Beer Sheba which is like " some pioneering town in California " ; of the Kibbutzim, the country settlements where everything is communally owned ; of the austerity of life, with shops full of luxury goods for tourists and nothing else; of the unfavourable atmosphere for the arts but the idealism of the Hebrew University at Jerusalem. He records many conversations with organisers, and ends by deploring Israel's political and religious divisions, yvhich affect even the children.
To the children themselves he devotes about half his book. He began his tour at a maison de transit at Marseilles, and travelled out with a company of Moroccan children. He visited a reception centre and children's villages, and saw the children's quarters in Kibbutzim. He describes the educators' problem of integrating into a Western way of life the Oriental newcomers.
The book is lively, passing skilfully from detail to generalisation. -Mr. Spender gives few statistics and writes always as a traveller receiving brief impressions, which allows him an opportunity of mingling people, scenery and economic fact and avoiding the neces- sity of making judgements for all time. He is an adept at implying criticism without being offensive ; and, though his book is brief, he does suggest wider issues. One is a doubt of the cohesive power of Jewry. Is the bond that unites Jews, he asks, merely the bond of being a persecuted people in a strange land, and does it fall apart when they meet in a country of their own? The education of the children, all colours together, he sees as an auspicious model for the world, even though Israel's education is bedevilled by political creeds. " So also might we teach our children, by the practice of living, together, that they have a common humanity which ignores barriers." Many of the Jews he met reminded him of Quakers in their simple idealism ; and Mr. Spender's own attitude is of detached idealism—of one who can stand aside from the con- ventions of various societies, including his own, and judge them
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