Behind the Headlines Death of a Jewish Journalist

An epoch in Jewish journalism come to an end this week with the death of Yitzhak Shargil. It is hard to accept the fact that his grand Homeric style will no longer find expression. It is inconceivable that his majestic depiction of all facets of Jewish life will no longer be drown with such consummate skill. It is unimaginable that his unique style of writing — a blend of Hebrew, Yiddish, French and English which regularly drove his American editors to distraction — will no longer emerge from Tel Aviv each day via the international wire service.

Yitzhak was one of the last feuilletonists for whom on event or incident in the life of the Jewish people and the State of Israel was merely a freeze-frame in the continuity of a people whose ultimate victory over anguish and despair was always assured. Almost every story he wrote, especially those covering Israel’s last two wars and its diplomatic efforts to achieve peace was cost in heroic proportions.

LAST OF A BREED

He was one of the last of a breed of journalists who identified with the subject matter of his stories because in one way or another the incidents and

Yitzhak worked at being a journalist with an inexhaustable amount of energy. There were stories out there and they had to be told. It was his grand passion. During the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War he would often work around the clock, transmitting an endless flow of words. This was his forte, his strength, his life-blood. He could do no less.

Yitzhak did not merely report an event. He provided the myriad, the minute, the diverse and the pulsating fibers in the fabric and tableau of Jewish life. He often said he disliked the stilted mannerism of reporting an event as if it were just a matter of copying down the price of a piece of meat in a butcher shop. Joy and tragedy were more than just words depicting the human condition; they constituted the elan vital, the metabolic process of being. And how, he would ask, does a reporter present this to the reader without rendering it lifeless and stilted?

STORIES TOOK WING

Yitzhak seldom had a sharp, straightforward textbook-clear journalistic lead, with a following an exposition and a final “-30-” If 200 words would have told the story, Yitzhak took a few hundred more just to place it in context and to humanize it. He refused to allow the lifeline of a story to be ruled by either an editor’s short temper or his blue pencil. Once a story took wing, it secured on its own, he would say.

At times, looking for a lead in one of his stories could be exasperating, especially at the approach of a deadline. Something was happening to be sure: but where, how, when and to whom? In one such leisurely-paced story of a Passover weekend, the scene he depicted was one of serenity: people thronging the beaches, pick nickers dotting the parks and byways, and gales of laughter welling up from crowds of children chasing imaginary butterflies.

Some 200 words later, toward the end of the idyllic story, Yitzhak added a few casual sentences noting that the joy of the day was marred by a multi-car collision on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway in which several people were killed and a number were injured.

JOY IN IMPARTING JOY

For Yitzhak, the style was the man. And his life style was as expansive and creative as was his writing. He gave fully of himself — to his family, to the Jewish people, to Israel, to Yiddishkeit, to Zionism and to his friends. It was sheer joy for him to impart joy and to watch it take effect. He had a zeal for life and a zest for living. All he required was a good cigar, a glass of wine, a steak au just and always, but always, a story suitable to the occasion.

But all this had to have a special setting, especially for out of town friends who were in New York, London or Paris. A bon vivant and a raconteur who seemed, somehow to have missed his calling as a leading member of the Yiddish Art Theater and Cafe Royalty, Yitzhak always knew “the best place in town” even if it wasn’t always in the best part of town … for a memorable repast after an even more memorable car ride, Israeli-style.

In swift succession from neutral to high, he would lurch his car into speedway throttle along the Tel Aviv highways and side streets; then, three tire-screeching fast broke stops to the left, two careening circles to the right, a rapid reverse and forward into a parking space and a quick sprint along a catwalk in a dark alley and there was “the best place in town.” All this without ever missing a puff on the cigar that seemed to be perennially affixed to his lips and asking, with a brood grin and a twinkle in his eyes, “Are you hungry, yet; are you hungry, yet?”

SYNTHESIZED PERSONAL WITH UNIVERSAL

His ability to synthesize the personal with the universal was what made Yitzhak the consummate journalist that he was. One of his most dramatic stories was that of the Tel Aviv-Haifa coastal road massacre of 1978 where he described in harrowing detail the wanton murders of innocent Israelis and American nature photographer Gail Rubin by a band of terrorists. At the end of the story, he appended a note to this writer recalling that a restaurant where we had eaten supper a year earlier was located along the same highway where the terrorists had staged their massacre.

Yitzhok excelled as a military correspondent, but he was also a crackerjack diplomatic correspondent. Overriding both, however, was his yearning for the end of wars and for the establishment of peace so that he could devote his writing to the theater, art, music, sports, Yiddishkeit and the laughter of children chasing imaginary butterflies.

How would Yitzhak have written an obituary about someone like himself? Probably by pointing out how ironic it was that one whose heart went out to the sufferings and joys of others, one whose heart was. always open to victims of historic injustice, and one who could never find it in his heart to publicly criticize Israel while it was isolated and endangered, should have succumbed to a massive heart attack at the age of 53. Yitzhok understood ironies. He thrived on them.