Michael Spikov, a 19-year-old college student from Pittsburgh, returns to the US after spending the summer in Israel and has to win back his girlfriend. But it might be too late. The year is 1968.
“Don’t try to see me when you get back,” she had warned him in a letter before he left Jerusalem. “The gate has instructions not to let you in. Please believe me when I say, it’s over.”
Lisa was Michael’s first true love and is now working at a resort in the Pocono Mountains in eastern Pennsylvania. Immediately upon arrival at JFK, Michael puts a plan into action. He rents a car and barrels toward the resort at over 80 mph. When he gets close, he parks along the road and sets off on foot through a forest so as to avoid easy detection. He lumbers through thickets, gets whipped in the face by branches and hears what might be a big bear crashing through the woods behind him. He bolts in a panic, but is not about to give up.
He eventually infiltrates the resort only to spot Lisa with Dick Golomb, the resort’s bell captain. The two are returning from a tennis match. With rackets in hand, they embrace passionately and Dick “plants a wet kiss on Lisa’s receptive mouth.” Michael is devastated. His “heart was no longer in his chest, but somewhere on the ground beneath his feet.”
So begins Ilan Chaim’s pleasure and angst-filled novel, The Flying Blue Meanies: Surviving the bipolar ’60s in America and Israel. In addition to what happens with Lisa, it follows Michael’s personal highs and lows amid the tumultuous events of the time: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the Vietnam protests, the fight for minority and women’s rights, and Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War.
One way of coping with a tough breakup is to hurl yourself into a vortex of pleasure. And that’s exactly what Michael does. He moves from one girl to the next in quick succession. He’s in his sexual prime and his libido is unquenchable. Chaim is unflinchingly truthful in his descriptions of these intimate moments, as well as of the odd arrangement the couple had forged in high school, when they met at summer camp. Living in different cities, Michael and Lisa were not exactly faithful to one another before they broke up. On account of their long-distance romance, they shared an accustomed practice: “When you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”
Though Michael doesn’t shy away in the least from sex, drugs, fast cars, slick motorcycles and rock ‘n’ roll, there is something else tugging at his sleeve. His Jewish upbringing and Israel. He devotes himself to Jewish causes, like the movement to free Soviet Jewry, and teaches Hebrew school. At the same time, he begins to question the meaning of a future in America, after discovering Israel.
“He tried to imagine walking down the street in Pittsburgh as a gentile and just couldn’t envision it: his Jewish identity ran too deep – he was always, always aware of it.” And so begin his journeys to the Jewish state between his undergraduate years at the University of Pittsburgh and graduate school at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As the novel progresses, so does Michael’s desire to break away from the US, as well as the tutelage of his parents, and make Israel his new home. Another reason was the great optimism Israelis enjoyed after the Six Day War when they smashed a combined force of Arab armies. Michael feels a calling to play a role in Israel’s unfolding drama.
Israel clearly stands as a pillar of meaning in Michael’s world of transient delights and lost lovers. But not only that. He is also a philosophy student and something of a poet. The book is peppered with lovely stanzas he pens in his notebook, especially in times of uncertainty, pain, and joy.
Oh yes, the Flying Blue Meanies. What the hell are they?
These are the cycles of depression and mania that periodically descend upon Michael and threaten to undo everything. At one point, while he is in the US and about to leave again for Israel, they gain the upper hand and Michael finds himself in a psychiatric ward for two weeks’ treatment. A strength of this exquisitely written page-turner is that Chaim doesn’t tell us what in his protagonist causes these crises of deep depression or manic behavior, leaving it to the reader to decide.
Will Israel – Jerusalem in particular – become his psychological anchor?
Michael finally makes aliyah and just when we think he is about to open a new and more stable chapter of his life in Israel, the Blue Meanies return with a vengeance. The suicide of a lover sends them swarming around him. He drives his motorcycle to a promenade overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City and focuses on the Temple Mount in the distance.
“That is where it all began, so they say. It was there that God tested Abraham, where Abraham said ‘Hineni,’ I am here. I am here now, God, but I don’t think I can pass your test.”
He drives back to his apartment through a steady drizzle. Seeing that his roommate is not home, he rummages through the latter’s desk and pulls out a revolver. He cocks back the hammer and places the cold barrel against his temple.
“They built the Temple on the Mount, and God destroyed it. Twice. I’ll destroy my own temple, once and for all, and end this pain. I’m sorry, God. I wanted to say hineni.”
What happens next? As the title suggests, Michael survives, but how is a bit of surprise. Does he manage to subdue the Blue Meanies on his own accord, or does something else scare them off for good?
The writer is a former editor at The Jerusalem Post and The Jerusalem Report who is now based in the US.■
The Flying Blue Meanies
Ilan Chaim
Amazon 2020
378 pages; Kindle $10, paperback $15