Blumenfeld, Laura



Blumenfeld, Laura. Revenge: A Story of Hope. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

The following excerpts are from Blumenfeld’s book. Blumenfeld’s father was shot by a terrorist in 1986 while visiting Jerusalem. Her father recovered fully, but Blumenfeld found herself obsessed with revenge, and after graduating from college in 1998, she undertook a trip to the Middle East to find “the shooter.” Along the way, she amassed stories of revenge and studied the phenomenon in all its complexity. Four excerpts from her book follow. For the ending of Blumenfeld’s story, you’ll have to read the book (or go to newshour/conversation/jan-june02/blumenfeld_4-24.html for an interview with Blumenfeld that offers a condensed version of the story).

Excerpt 1

In some tribal societies, shame is the only lawful motive for homicide. Among the Druze, a religious community in northern Israel, Syria and Lebanon, men are expected to avenge their family honor by killing female relatives who disgrace them. Later, I came to know one Druze family torn apart by honor. Their story helped me understand the connection between shame and revenge.

IT BEGAN with a kiss. Every time Mahdi said good-bye to his sister, he would kiss her on the neck. One year separated them. Mahdi 1ived and worked at a packing house near the sea. Maytal, a high school senior, lived at home, in a village whose houses were built like bird nests in the cliffs above the plains of Galilee.

It was an idyllic setting, but Mahdi and Maytal Khatib found their home in Al Assad revolting. Their mother had died of cancer. Their father had remarried a prickly younger woman who detested his children. The brother and sister hid out in the kitchen, two slight, inclining shadows frying up potatoes and eggs for dinner. Maytal stood in for their mother, buying Mahdi a pair of black hiking boots. Mahdi stood in for their father, helping Maytal with homework at the computer.

“They were one soul, two bodies,” an older sister said later.

Although, not quite. As a boy, Mahdi could escape their unhappy home. As a girl, Maytal was forbidden by Druze custom to leave home until marriage. If her virginity were lost, so was the family’s honor. The men would be scorned, the younger sisters shunned.

One morning, Maytal argued with her stepmother about borrowing her sister’s jeans. It was trivial, but for Maytal decisive. She wrote a letter to her brother:

Mahdi my love,

I can’t take it anymore. And so I decided either to kill myself or to leave home. Since suicide is taboo, completely forbidden, I’ve decided to leave home. I swear to you, on your life, I can’t live in this house a minute longer. Forgive me for this, I am begging you. Forgive me. Take care of my sisters and my father.

By the time her note was discovered, she was dead.

Her escape lasted less than twelve hours. A friend helped her reach the nearest town. They called Maytal’s uncle for help, but to Maytal’s horror the uncle insisted on returning her home.

As Maytal dragged herself down the path to her house, her father barred the entrance. First Maytal had to prove she was a virgin. The friend who had helped her escape was a boy; rumors ricocheted around the village. At midnight the extended family squeezed into two cars in search of a doctor who could check her hymen. Maytal consented, but the doctor at the hospital refused to examine the girl without a police order. The police refused to order the exam because they said it was demeaning.

Everyone went home to bed. The next morning, Mahdi arrived to celebrate the Feast of the Sacrifice. When his father told him about Maytal, Mahdi’s hands shook so badly be dropped his coffee cup on the floor. He kissed Maytal, as always, on her neck. He sat down in the living room, leaning his head against a chair, listening to his heart beat in his brain.

All around him, relatives argued Maytal’s case.

“Your sister is clean. There’s no reason to suspect her,” an uncle said.

“It was a small mistake; these things happen,” said a brother.

Mahdi could not speak. He looked gray like a mop, soaked and twisted. He had absorbed one fact: his sister had left the house, left with a boy and even if he was only a friend, Mahdi did not care. The rumors, true or not, shamed the family. Mahdi snapped up out of his chair.

Maytal, meanwhile, had withdrawn to rest before the holiday meal.

After fifteen minutes a brother-in-law knocked on her door, calling Maytal to the feast. The door was locked. A man’s voice answered from inside the room: “Just a minute.”

It was Mahdi.

Five minutes later, the brother-in-law knocked again.

Mahdi replied “Wait, I’m talk to Maytal.”

“For my honor,” Mahdi sobbed hours later when he turned himself in. He threw his identity card on the police station floor, stomping with the black hiking boots that Maytal had bought for him. He took a pen and scrawled out this confession:

I murdered her. Because she shamed me for the rest of my life and if didn’t murder her I would die every day. And then I would be a dead man, even though I would continue to live. Honor is the most important thing in my life. Because everything in life can be replaced, but if honor is lost, it never returns.

Afterward, be turned to the officer and said, “If it happened to you, what would you do? Wouldn’t you do the same?”

IN MAHDI’S WORLD, when a man is shamed, revenge follows. Killings to avenge family honor are so routine, they appear in the papers as news briefs, if at all. In cultures that value reputation and respect—in American Street gangs, for example—revenge is expected for the most minor affronts, even for assault.

Excerpt 2

When I went for my daily swim, I moved through the water, drawing quick, guttural breaths, pushing myself into a kind of hyperventilated intensity. Predator or prey. What kind of family do you come from, anyway?

“You hit me!” a woman yelled.

She grabbed me and yanked me back toward the wall. I stood up, breathing heavily. She was a large woman with a hard, carved nose. She and a friend had barreled down the middle of the lane, swimming in the wrong direction, pushing me into the ropes. After a few laps, I swam between them, and, in passing, I had banged one. Not completely by accident. Jungle justice.

“You hit me!”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said, unconvincingly.

“You shouldn’t hit,” the woman said, the veins in her eyes zigzagging like striking bolts. Whoever this woman was, toweled off and clothed, she liked to be in command.

“Well,” I said, rising up on my toes, “then don’t invade my lane.”

Both of us seemed surprised by my response. I was a short, begoggled woman, borrowing lines from a gangster or a defensive linebacker.

But the strange thing was, it worked. I went from prey to predator. The woman retreated, her daisy bathing cap askew, her chlorinated eyes pink as a rabbit’s as she climbed out of the pool.

“I was getting out, anyway,” she snuffled without turning around.

I went back to my crawl, smug that I had won. Instead of swimming smoothly, though, my legs wobbled like jellyfish tentacles. It occurred to me that I had just been mean.

I tried to assure myself that hitting back served a pedagogical function: that woman needed to learn.

I had picked up this tip from businessmen in Tel Aviv. Their high-rise boardrooms were a long way from the curb outside the methadone clinic. Yet when I asked business executives about revenge, their answers resembled Smitt’s[1]: revenge is necessary for deterrence.

“You feel rage and you have to respond, otherwise it’ll happen again and again,” said Yossi Vardi, the father of Israel Internet trade. Rather than being about the past, he said, revenge was forward-looking. “Getting even is a management tool. You use it both ways, as reward and punishment.”

He said, “You teach them a lesson.” One of the many justifications of revenge. But what lesson is taught? Does the other person learn, or does he retreat unthinkingly, or does he subvert the lesson and strike back? I knew, however pedantic it sounded, that I wanted to teach the shooter[2] a lesson. I had a specific message in mind, but I had to get close to him first. As I swam my daily laps, I floated various plans.

Excerpt 3

American Jews played out their revenge fantasies on Nazis in quirky ways. Some Jews refused to buy German cars. Bernie owned a Mercedes sedan, but he would only play Yiddish music while driving,

“Did you ever get revenge on the Nazis?’ I said ‘to Baruch.

I expected him to ignore my question. When Baruch’s mother and father were teenagers, they were deported to the Auschwitz death camp. On the train platform, they were selected for labor by Josef Mengele; he pushed them to the left with the crack of a whip. Almost all of their relatives—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, their fathers, an older sister, a baby brother—were sent in the other direction, to the gas chambers. Baruch hardly ever talked about it. I did not expect him to now. I had been edgy lately, and he had been remote.

“I’ve always had dreams of Nazis deporting me to Auschwitz,” he said with a vulnerable look around his eyes I had never seen. “I’m always a child in the dreams. I’m on a school bus and the bus stops, and Nazis get on. They take over the bus and ship us off to Auschwitz. And I’m terrified and absolutely powerless.”

There was nothing Baruch could do to stop the nightmares. When he was awake, though, he balanced them with dreams of getting even.

“I’ve always had daydreams. One I still have—I show up secretly during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I knock on the door of resistance headquarters. I say, ‘I’m a Jew from America,’ and I’ supply the resistance with food and vitamins and infrared binoculars so they could shoot at night.”

“Do you help them fight?”

“It doesn’t go that far. More recently, I have another daydream—I’m in one of the death camps, and I grab the kids of the commandant and hold them hostage unless he stops the crematoriums.”

“What happens?”

“It never gets that far. One more”—his voice was hurried, the dreams leaking out for the first time—“the Allies are in the air over Europe, about to go on a bombing raid, and I’m a member of a secret unit that goes back in time with all the most modern equipment. We have big Jewish stars our planes and we join the Allies. We broadcast, ‘Don’t shoot, we’re friendly.’ And the Allies say, ‘Who are you? Identify yourself.’ And we say, ‘We’re American and we’re Jews out to get the Nazis.’ And they don’t know whether to shoot us until they see us start bombing the hell out of the Nazis. They radio back to headquarters, ‘We don’t know who these guys are, but they’re good.’”

The glow in Baruch’s’ face was boyish and strong, like that of a teenage comic book hero scaling a building.

“It makes me feel better for a moment, but then I realize it’s a fantasy.” The color in his face began to fade. “Everyone died. And I feel powerless.”

Powerless—power: That was it, the common thread. In all the simple justice stories that I had heard, the avengers reversed the balance of power. The weak became strong, the strong became weak. That was made their revenge a success. Baruch’s fantasies worked so well because they transformed him from a powerless child on a bus to Auschwitz to a powerful pilot dropping bombs.

Faisal Husseini, Jerusalem’s most important Palestinian politician, told me that he too had revenge fantasies about being a fighter pilot. His father, Abdel Kader al-Husseini, a commander in the 1948 war, was killed by Israelis. Arab forces never recovered from the psychological blow, and lost the war. As a boy, Faisal would dream that he was flying over the Israeli soldiers, gunning, them down in revenge, changing places with the men who had killed his father.

Every simple revenge story pivots on this reversal of power. Societies with honor codes demand it. Revenge can be taken only on equals or superiors. There is no point in revenge on a slave, a woman, a sleeping man or a man from a lower class, because they are weak. Their defeat brings no honor.

The most spectacular story about a reversal of power was told to me by Rafi Eitan. Short, with thick glasses and a bad ear, he might easily be mistaken for a benign old man. But his deafness had come from dismantling explosives. He worked for Israel’s General Security Services and the Mossad. Among other operations, he was responsible for Jonathan Pollard, the American intelligence agent who spied for Israel.

“An eye for an eye gives you nothing,” he advised. “You have to go for the head.”

Rafi followed his own advice, literally. In 1960, he joined a team of Mossad agents to kidnap Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution. The agent tracked him to Argentina and ambushed him outside his house.

“Three of us carried him back to our car. One carried his legs, one his middle. I wanted to hold his head.”

Inside the car, Rafi lifted Eichmann’s shirt and looked for the number SS officers had tattooed on their arms. A scar with blue dots puckered the skin where Eichmann had had it removed.

“He tried to shout,” Rafi recalled. “Our driver, who knew German, told him to be quiet. He breathed heavily. I kept his head on my lap. This man was a Caesar and all the Jews would quake to hear his name. I felt I should touch his head, to show him, ‘You tried to destroy us—we’re still alive. And your head is in my hands.’”

The most recent interviews, those people who went from feeling powerless to powerful, had a choice. They could let the offense pass and move on. If they got revenge it was partly for their own psychic pleasure. Baruch’s fantasy about bombing the Nazis was not about deterrence, but the satisfaction of giving back.

Baruch’s dreams about payback surprised me. I thought of him as someone defined by logic, not fantasy. Meanwhile he was walking around screening action movies in his head that starred himself. Knowing that made me feel tender toward him. Maybe that was why he encouraged my exploits. Like a kid playing an adventure video game, he was enjoying the catharsis of vicarious revenge.

As we waited for our pizza, I wondered, “What else don’t I know about my new husband?”

“Did you ever get revenge on the Nazis?” I asked again.

“The closest I ever came was working as an intern at the Nazi-hunting office at the Justice Department. The school bus nightmares stopped because for the first time in my life I didn’t feel helpless. My work gave me a sense of empowerment.”

After that summer at Justice, Baruch decided to become a prosecutor. “Becoming a government official was a way for me to be part of a legal system that’s fair. We catch people who’ve killed, cheated and defrauded and—unlike the Nazis, who rewarded criminals—we send them to jail. I don’t think you understand how satisfying that feels. My parents would describe the Nazi officials as emissaries of tremendous fear. The bureaucracy was coopted by an evil ideology. For me, working for a government that’s fair is turning the Nazi idea on its head. That’s empowering.”

This was something else I did not know about Baruch. I had always wondered if working for the government reflected a lack of imagination. Meanwhile, he was feeding his need to get even, doing something my father called “constructive revenge.”

From time to time, my father would phone me and say, “Don’t forget about constructive revenge. You should say that’s the best revenge.”[3]

In deference to him, I looked for these constructive avengers. They change the power equation by building themselves up rather than putting others down. They come from the “just you wait” school of vengeance. The ones who, when spat at, lying in the, dirt, vow, “one day, you’ll see.”

There was Zevadia Vidge, a twenty-five-year-old Ethiopian, born on a farm near Addis Ababa. When his family moved to Haifa, Israel the basketball players snubbed him. “I don’t choose little .guys,” the captain, David, sneered. Ninth grade, tenth grade—all the way through school, Zevadia stood sadly on the sidelines.

“I asked myself, ‘Do they hate me? Why was I made so small?’” He remembered how he used to run two miles to the river in Ethiopia carrying jugs of water, and five miles to the forest to gather wood. He felt the ping of an idea. He could run, fast and far. He started training, and today, at five foot four and 118 pounds, Zevadia is Israel’s champion marathon runner.

“I proved it to them,” he told me. Recently, after he won a race, he got a call from a man whose husky voice sounded familiar: “Remember me from the basketball game?” It was David, the captain who had tormented him. “You’re a big media star and I’m a night security guard at a construction site,” David said.

Excerpt 4

[Anez is in jail and hears that his wives have not been loyal to him.]

Anez said, “The shame I felt was worse than dying. Better to die than live in this shame.”

He began thinking about ways get even. “If I was outside prison, I would’ve taken different kind of revenge.”

“Like what?” I said.

“Kill her, or shoot her brother.”

That would have been one of the oldest acts of revenge—the cuckolded husband killing his wife. It sprang from a place so instinctive, many societies sanctioned it. In England under King Alfred, the law allowed for it, and until recently in Jordan the law looked the other way. In the United States, many states treat it as a lesser form of homicide.

Anez, instead, planned a more sophisticated revenge. He set out to replicate the crime—being shamed—with the roles reversed. He wanted to get back at his wives, but more than payback, he wanted them to feel his pain. This kind of revenge is very calculated, an imaginative, psychological art. It has to be staged and manipulated. It is why revenge can take a lifetime. To stab an unfaithful wife in a spasm of rage offers no lesson. To bring the women around to Anez’s own psychological state, to shame them—that was satisfaction.

How could he do it, handcuffed in an Egyptian prison? Anez was illiterate, but he was a skilled oral poet. He devised a form of poetic justice for his wives. They had hurt his reputation, a crippling blow in a closed society. But a woman’s reputation could be destroyed too. A Bedouin woman’s chastity was her most important asset. Rather than curling up on the prison floor and dying of shame, Anez took his wives’ deeds and hurled them back at them.

“I wanted to get the sadness out of me,” he said, opening a pack of Cleopatra cigarettes. “Like when you need a cigarette and when you light the end and inhale.”

He composed poems reproaching his wives, poems of ridicule. He dictated them to a literate prisonmate, who passed them along to a visitor, who passed them along to a merchant friend. The merchant traveled among all the Bedouin of the region, reading the poems out loud. In time, eleven different tribes knew Anez’s poems by heart. It was as if Anez had posted news of his shameful wives on the Bedouin Internet.

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[1] Smitt is the leader of a burglar ring and a recovering drug addict. Blumenfeld meets him at a methadone clinic and interviews him about his thoughts on revenge. He explains that he takes revenge on those who steal from him (members of his burglar ring, who “work” for him) in order to prevent future theft.

[2] Blumenfeld means the terrorist who had shot her father.

[3] Blumenfeld’s father means that she should be sure to mention this in the book she is writing.

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