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Opinion

My Land, My Pain

By Daniel Barenboim

In the 1950s Israel was the most social and idealistic state imaginable. The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has eaten away at the Jewish soul -- and it has been allowed to do so.

There are photographs hanging on the walls of my dressing room in the Staatsoper Berlin, photographs that remind me of what I see when I look out the windows of my house in Jerusalem. They are slightly faded, and here and there the paper is crumbling, but one can easily recognize the views. The Old City, the Dome of the Rock with its shining cupola, the walls, the gates.

Sometimes I sit in this room before a performance, looking at these pictures and thinking of Jerusalem, of Israel, my home. Before 1989, this room was supposedly a refuge of the East German Stasi, the state police; if I happened to be a sentimental person, that fact would surely help me to become unsentimental, but I am not a sentimental person. The situation in the Middle East is much too close to me, much too personal to be able to be sentimental about it.

Since 1952 I have owned an Israeli passport. Since I was 15 years old, I have traveled the world as a musician. I have lived in London and in Paris and I commuted for years between Chicago and Berlin. Before I had an Israeli passport, I had an Argentinean one; later I acquired a Spanish one. And in 2007, I became the only Israeli in the world who can also show a Palestinian passport at an Israeli border crossing.

I am, so to speak, living evidence of the fact that only a pragmatic two-state solution (or better yet, absurd as it sounds, a federation of three states: Israel, Palestine and Jordan) can bring peace to the region.

My answer to those who say I am naïve, only an artist? That I am not a political person, even if I shook the hands of David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres as a child: Not politics, but humanity has always concerned me. In that sense I feel able and, as an artist, especially qualified to analyze the situation.

Both my paternal and maternal grandparents were Russian Jews who fled to Buenos Aires in the pogroms of 1904. Unfortunately, I never asked my parents much about our family's history.

For one thing, as a child, I was very preoccupied with myself and for another, it was "normal" that we were in a state of permanent change. The story of my maternal grandparents, however, is a very special one.

When they arrived in the harbor of Buenos Aires (he was 16, she 14) after the miserably long trip, it was announced that only families would be allowed to disembark; the quota for all others had been exhausted.

They were both alone, and my grandfather took my grandmother and said, "let's get married!" And they did. Once on land, they went their separate ways. After two or three years they met again by coincidence, fell in love and spent the rest of their lives with one another.

This grandmother was a fervent Zionist. Already in 1929, she went to Palestine for half a year with her three daughters - including my 17-year-old mother -- to see if one could live there.

My father's family, on the other hand, had completely assimilated; the "Holy Land" had no significance for them, at least not until they discovered that I was musically talented. Suddenly it seemed important to my parents that I, as a future artist, should grow up as part of a majority and not as part of a minority somewhere in the diaspora. The conviction that normality would be a fundamental element of my intellectual development was, so to speak, fuel for the fire of my grandmother's Zionism: The Barenboim family resolved to emigrate to Israel.

Our first stop on the long journey was Salzburg, where I participated in the final concert of conductor Igor Markewitsch's summer master class. The entire trip took 52 hours with stops in Montevideo, Rio, Sao Paulo, Recife, the Isla del Sol, Madrid -- and then we took the train from Rome to Salzburg. As a nine-year-old I spoke only Spanish and a bit of Yiddish, which I had learned from my grandmother. This was not especially problematic as we did not plan to stay in Austria, and I would be mostly in the company of musicians. While I had not been aware of any Jewish problem in Buenos Aires, I began to take notice of one in Salzburg. Jewish friends took me along to Bad Gastein one day to a great waterfall and told me that during the Nazi era Jews had been thrown into it. Here I received my first inkling of the fate of the Jewish people; the stories my parents had told me about the Holocaust also deeply disturbed me, although I was unable to fully understand them at the time.

In December 1952 we reached Israel. It was winter, the school year had started long before, and I had to learn a new alphabet and a new language. It was anything but easy, but since I was an uncomplicated and extroverted child, I adapted quickly, and it was the beginning of a wonderful and very intense new life.

Everything was on the verge of change and progress. Imagine - in the streets of Tel Aviv, of all places, I learned to play football! Later on I became part of a youth movement and I still remember how much we looked down upon young men with moustaches and girls who wore lipstick; we felt they were superficial, simply not of the essence.

Because my family had no money, we were supported in the beginning by an uncle from Brazil. His daughter is now the Brazilian ambassador to Slovenia -- at least one Barenboim got somewhere. . . . As for the name, my family was encouraged to translate it into Hebrew in the new spirit of Jewish-Israeli self-confidence.

Ben-Gurion, for one, whom I vastly admired as a statesman and visionary, came from the Polish city of Plonsk and was originally called David Grün. It was he who tried to convince my parents that I would never become famous with the name Barenboim (the Yiddish version of Birnbaum, pear tree); he felt that Agassi, the Hebrew word for pear, would be much better. One could always think I might be Italian. None of us, though, was truly enthusiastic about this idea.

Strictly speaking, the length of time that I have spent in Israel is not substantial. It was mainly restricted to the years between 1952 and 1954, and between 1956 and the early '60s. When I was not in school, I was on concert tours in Zurich, Amsterdam or Bournemouth.

In the winter of 1954 I went to Paris to study counterpoint and composition with the famous and famously strict Nadia Boulanger for one and a half years. She taught me that the ideal musician should think with the heart and feel with the intellect. My parents accompanied me on all my travels, being of the opinion that it was necessary for me to have the most "normal" family life possible.

The Europe of the '50s was deeply scarred by the consequences of the war. Being a traveler between both worlds, I found the contrast between Europe and Israel especially stark. Israel was at the time the most social, idealistic state imaginable. It was lucky for Israel and for us that we were young at the same time.

Nobody had the feeling of working "for the state," because there was no such thing. The state literally evolved before our eyes and fed on our idealism, our daily commitment, our work. To live in Israel as a Jew meant no longer pursuing only the so-called free professions as in the diaspora (artist, lawyer, doctor, banker), but also becoming farmers, police officers, soldiers or, as the case may be, even criminals. State and home, home and state melded into one unit.

The Israeli left wing, the workers' party, was in power until 1977, an often forgotten fact. Twenty-nine years. Why was this so? The traditionalists had no chance after the War of Independence in 1948; the war had already been won. The religious Jews were still waiting for the Messiah. That left the Socialists. Only after the Six-Day War of 1967 did the winds change. The idea of a "grassroots-Israel" paled. Suddenly there was cheaper labor from the Palestinian territories and not much later, the first Israeli millionaires appeared. The socialist system lost its balance; the idea of Israel teetered.

I grew up in Israel with European culture and values; the director of my high school was an art historian, the kind of woman one might find in Berlin-Dahlem. This suited me very well because in my rebellious adolescent phase I wanted to have nothing to do with Argentina, the Spanish language, or anything from the diaspora. For me this was all history. What counted was Israel's present and future.

At the age of 19 or 20, I was called to do my compulsory service in the Argentinean military. I was able to postpone it twice, finally arguing that I should be exempt because I was a citizen of Israel. The result was that I could go anywhere with my Argentinean passport except to Israel, and that I could go anywhere with my Israeli passport except to Argentina.

In 1966 I met the cellist Jacqueline du Pré in London. We felt immediately attracted to one another, both personally and musically, and two or three months later, we decided to get married. Without any influence on my part, Jacqueline took it upon herself to convert to Judaism.

The thought of eventually having children played a role in her decision, as well as the fact that she knew many great musicians who were Jewish. Her conversion was not always a boon to her career; one read and heard that she had joined the "Jewish music mafia."

In June 1967 we got married in Jerusalem, shortly after the Six-Day War. Ben-Gurion, who did not think much of music, was present at our wedding. He was impressed that a non-Jewish, English girl could identify with his country so strongly.

On May 31, when the war had seemed inevitable, we had flown to Israel with one of the last passenger planes. We had given concerts almost every evening. The last one took place on June 5 in Beersheba, a town halfway between Tel Aviv and the Egyptian border. As we were leaving the concert to drive home, the first tanks began to come toward us.