Graduate Studies in Hebrew by Sue William Silverman

Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of nonfiction.
Final Judge: Aimee Liu

Bored with straight-laced Israeli mores, I was determined to have sex with M. Tonight. I slipped on an embroidered mini-dress I’d bought in the Old City earlier that day. No bra. Leather sandals. My braid hung almost to my waist. Only a hint of mascara. I thought M might be more attracted to my flower-child self than to someone appearing older and sophisticated. He was a friend of a former college professor, a man with whom I’d had a brief affair. Before I flew to Jerusalem from DC, for a three-week vacation, he mentioned that M would be there on business. You’d like him, my professor said.

Was the professor offering me to his friend, M? At the time, was I simply too clueless to know? Back then I considered it a compliment.

That morning, after my first week in the promised land, I’d called M at the King David Hotel. He invited me for drinks. I assumed drinks included dinner. He said his wife wasn’t with him. I interpreted that to mean drinks and dinner included sex.

During my time in Jerusalem, I was staying with Mr. and Mrs. A, old friends of my parents. A few days earlier, they’d asked me to recommend an American movie, inviting me to join them. I’d already seen The Graduate in DC, loved it, and assumed they would, too.

After the movie, Mr. and Mrs. A talked rapidly in Hebrew. I didn’t understand, but I intuited the movie offended them. College graduate, affair with older woman, friend of the family, falls in love with his mistress’ daughter. Clearly a bad decision on my part. I only later realized that Israelis translated experience differently from Americans; I only later realized what happens when disparate cultures collide.

Thus, the phone call to M.

§

I had a miniature crush on Mr. and Mrs. A’s son, a few years older than I. He was studying for a PhD in philosophy at Hebrew University, lived with his parents, and one night after Shabbat (I knew none of the prayers), I suggested we take a walk. We meandered winding streets past homes tucked behind stone walls. Cypress trees swayed. In the distance, I heard the rumble of Army trucks shifting gears, maybe heading toward Syria, toward ongoing wars. The faint scent of diesel darkened the air. The son told me he’d already served in the military but could be called up again. Thinking about Vietnam and America’s draft, I expressed concern. He shook his head explaining Israelis wanted to protect the Homeland. Of course, I belatedly realized. Of course.

Yet I tried to explain my feelings about American hegemony, the waste of lives. He said many Israelis, worried about the spread of Communism, supported the Vietnam War. “But look what happened with the French….” My voice trailed off.

The last thing I wanted to discuss was war. Make love not war! He was smart and handsome. I wanted him to hold my hand. When I inadvertently-on-purpose nudged him, he stepped away. He started to explain his dissertation. I was lost in philosophical abstractions with the first sentence.

My vocabulary was limited to the elemental: kissing beneath stars sprayed across the Mediterranean sky…enveloped by the rose-gold scent of apricots drifting from fields north of the city.

§

I was alone in Mr. and Mrs. A’s house when the washing machine overflowed. I didn’t notice. That’s a lie. I did notice, but I couldn’t figure out how to stop it, so I lied. More mumbling by Mrs. A in Hebrew, which I both did and didn’t understand.

Another reason for the phone call to M.

§

At dusk I took the #9 bus to the King David Hotel. In the lowering sun, the limestone buildings glowed pink. A breeze scented with olive trees swirled in the open windows. A perfect Israeli evening in which to meet American M.

Even though The Oriental Bar was filled with tourists, I recognized M immediately. He sat alone at the wood bar, a drink in front of him. He had silvery hair and wore an expensive suit. Maybe I should have tried to appear more sophisticated after all, but I assumed his wife as well as the women with whom he worked wore couture and expensive jewelry. Surely he’d be more intrigued by someone different: an American flower child pretending to be Israeli. In any event, all the clothes I brought from the States were of the tie-dyed, cut-off jeans variety. This green embroidered dress was as good as it got.

I slipped onto the stool beside him. He did a quick double-take, maybe not expecting someone so infused with hippie-dom. He seemed far from disappointed, however. His smile was slow but inviting. It was a two-strangers-alone-in-a-foreign-country-in-a-bar-at-night smile. I returned it. The bartender asked what I wanted to drink. I pointed to M’s glass. “Whatever he’s having.” It was a phrase I’d never said before, but liked. Surely it suggested worldliness, even though I possessed none.

Scotch. Pinch. On the rocks. After two glasses I was fairly drunk. Drop the “fairly.”

He asked where I’d toured in Jerusalem. I told him about wandering the Old City past stalls of opium, filigreed jewelry, scented oils. I didn’t mention I’d stuffed over eight messages between the stones of the Wailing Wall ranging from a wish to have sex with him to ending the war in Vietnam. I also told him about The Graduate. He said he liked it, too. Maybe you had to be American to appreciate its wobbly moral existential conundrums.

“I suppose that means you should be older than I am,” he said, referring to Mrs. Robinson in the movie. He finished his drink.

“It works either way,” I said.

“What’ll you do when you’re the age of the mother?” he asked.

“You have a son?” I said, half-joking.

Instead of answering, he said he had a bottle of Sabra in his room. We skipped dinner.

§

We stood on his balcony overlooking the city. We sipped Sabra. The rustle of palms, the scent of ancient stone, softened the air. I wanted to believe the backdrop suggested either sex or love—or close enough. I leaned against him. He nudged his lips against my neck. Our mouths tasted of orange and chocolate.

Just as we turned away from the balcony—toward the bedroom, the bed—I felt my period (early) dampen my underwear. Briefly, I wondered if there was any possibility he wouldn’t notice, any possibility I wouldn’t stain the gazillion-count Egyptian white cotton sheets. Probably he’d notice.

I explained. I suggested a towel beneath us.

He held my shoulders but pushed me back, shaking his head. “Jewish law,” he said.

I shrugged, not understanding.

He explained it’s considered unclean for a man to have intercourse with a woman who has her period. I didn’t know this…like so much else I didn’t know. I wanted to make a pitch that Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, the stars of The Graduate, were both Jewish, and maybe Bancroft once had her period when her character went to the tryst hotel to have sex with Hoffman’s character. But that reasoning, even drunk, seemed too tangential and beside the point.

I considered offering a blow job. But those two American words, in the King David Hotel, scented with acacia, sounded too, well, American. And it goes without saying I didn’t know how to say “blow job” in Hebrew.

Before I considered other possibilities, it occurred to me I didn’t have tampons. I may have even forgotten to pack them in my suitcase, back at Mr. and Mrs. A’s, anyway. I went to M’s immaculate bathroom and stuffed toilet paper in my underpants, but I was barely back in the bedroom before it was saturated. I explained the problem. He took a deep breath. I opened my wallet to at least offer to pay. He pushed away my money, said he’d find a pharmacy, and would be back soon.

While he was gone, I returned to his bathroom. I opened his toiletries kit. The usual, except at the bottom were ten condoms. Trojans. Wasn’t adultery also against Jewish law? Even I knew it was one of the Ten Commandments. How could he be willing to break one law—surely the more serious one—yet not another?

§

Perhaps there wasn’t a pharmacy nearby. Perhaps he struggled to convey the idea of “tampons” in Hebrew. Perhaps he found a woman without her period and had sex with her instead. In any event, by the time he returned it was close to midnight. I decided to splurge on a taxi back to Mr. and Mrs. A’s.

Was it because I was in a foreign country and my body was out-of-whack? Was it because I’d been about to have sex? Regardless, even with the tampon, I felt a smear of blood beneath my thighs dampen the plastic-leather seat. There was no way to decode this problem to the taxi driver in any language, including pantomime. I figured he’d just find a bloody stain in the morning.

I wanted to sneak inside Mr. and Mrs. A’s house, but I didn’t have a key. I paused on the stoop. No army trucks in the distance. No muffled voices nearby, either in Hebrew or English. Only a breeze, centuries-old, swirled the harshness of wars, the tenderness of apricots—a wind that never dissipated. I could not grasp its intricacies in my uneducated hands.

I knocked on the door. Mrs. A, awake, waited for me. She gave me a look that didn’t require translation. I was the one who needed translation—to be translated—to understand more beyond my limited American existence. Instead, I left a trail, smudges of imprecise words, an unlawful vocabulary—a random alphabet of my unformed self—the only self who visited Jerusalem after I graduated college.

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning author of seven books of nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, was named “one of 9 essay collections feminists should read in 2020” (Bitch Media). Her first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Other books include Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, made into a Lifetime TV original movie; The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew; Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir; and, in poetry, If the Girl Never Learns. Her essays have won awards with Water~Stone Review, Mid-American Review, Hotel Amerika, and Blue Mesa Review. Sue’s media interviews include The View, Anderson Cooper 360, and PBS Books. She teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. www.SueWilliamSilverman