Resistance In Review-From Israel to Asheville
As Israeli author Larry Derfner powerfully puts it,
“the mindset here is very much like that in red-state America. I think of Israel as a small, Hebrew-speaking Texas, with Tel Aviv the country’s answer to Austin. Like Israel, Texas used to be split between its liberal and hardass wings, but in recent decades the hardasses have taken over completely there, too.”
This comparison was written before the 2016 U. S. election; it’s even more trenchant now. And it brings back the image of Clare Hanrahan having to struggle and negotiate to find a place to sit in a public park, packed full of those who are discarded and “disappeared” in plain sight by our own society. Could even Asheville, North Carolina’s Austin, be joining what seems to be emerging as an American version of Derfner’s Israel?
The haunting phrase is Derfner’s: “the country gets more paranoid, more racist, more aggressive.” He wrote it of his adopted country. But is it now true of this country too?
If so, these two memoirs may become more than gripping personal stories; they could turn into poignant memorials to the loss of something crucial – and reminders of the haunting question that Derfner grapples with in his last few pages: in these increasingly parallel settings, how do you “keep hope alive”?