Two Paths, Two Destinies

By Joseph Itiel

The book starts in the late 1940’s in Tel-Aviv. It is an intellectual affair b between Tamir, a high school student, and Leah, the family’s house cleaner, who tries to make him into a young communist. In this she fails. Tamir is involved in the political turmoil of the pre-Israel Palestine. However, he is also keenly aware that his sexual interests are different from those of other boys. Eventually, communist Leah winds up in a Soviet-era gulag, and Tamir in the U.S. as a student, still unsure about his sexuality.

Many years later Leah, now in San Francisco, a devotee of rogue guru and Tamir meet in San Francisco. Tamir is much more open about being gay, while Leah tries to find meaning in her life through Indian gurus. Who is happier? Tamir, who tries to find fulfillment in his gay life or Leah who expects her leaders, whether communists or Indian gurus, to reveal the Ultimate Truth to her?

The book describes the many worldwide political upheavals taking place in the second half of the 20th century as well as the emergence of a gay movement in the U.S. in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joseph Itiel
• Release date: Jul 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311153128

Joseph Itiel

I was raised in Tel Aviv when it was still part of the British mandate of Palestine. Upon graduating from high school, Tel Aviv became the principal city of the new state of Israel and I was drafted into the new army.After my military service, I moved to New York City. Four years later, I earned a B.A. degree from what is now The New School. After graduating, I lived, for a while, in Toronto, Canada. I was a troubled, extremely closeted, gay young man. I read a lot about India. I saved as much money as I could planning to travel to that country, stay in an ashram, study yoga and, in the best case scenario, become a brhamachari – one who abstains from sex. I did quite well for myself as a yoga student but had absolutely no vocation for celibacy.With very little money, I had to leave India. I stayed in Ceylon (the modern Sri Lanka) for a while, then returned to Canada. A few weeks later I found myself in Mexico City, working as an “indocumentado” teacher in Mexico City. There I discovered a great abundance of sexual adventures. Many times the police (all too often ordinary men masquerading as cops) would shake me down. Mexico, governed by the Napoleonic code, had no laws against homosexuality – but bribes (‘mordidas" – bites) were always gladly accepted. It was the cost of doing business. My partners usually asked for a small amount of money because, invariably, "their father was in prison and their mother in the hospital". In Spanish-speaking countries, when one does things one ought not to do for the sake of one’s family welfare, the act itself cannot be criticized. I fell in love with Spanish and spoke it fairly fluently after a short while.Soon I had to leave Mexico because granting me a work permit required a bribe that was way above my financial means. And so my globetrotting days started. Back to Toronto with “side trips” to Puerto Rico and Spain. A year in New York to earn an M.A degree, in social science. A year in Galilee teaching high school, a stay in Europe, and a return trip to Mexico.Only in 1964 have I settled in San Francisco where I have resided since then. However, even here I made many trips to the Philippines and Japan. I studied Tagalog and Japanese at two universities. I recounted my globetrotting days in a book published in 2003, “Escapades of a Gay Traveler: Sexual, cultural, and spiritual encounters.”San Francisco allowed me to become who I really was. Even in those days, in spite various actions of the authorities to enforce the anti-homosexual laws, San Francisco was a haven for gays. It was the first time of my life that that I made gay friends, joined the newly created homosexual organizations and, most importantly, rid myself of the illusion that one day I would marry and have my own family.More or less fluent in four language (English, German, Hebrew, Spanish) it was easy for me to find jobs in education. I finally got rid of the silent-movie era, where homosexuality invariably lead to blackmail, prison, and suicide.By complete coincidence I enrolled in a hypnosis class, The goal was to become a "lay" hypnotherapist. The medical profession is intolerant of any outsider who claims to cure any physical or mental affliction. A lay hypnotherapist needs to be careful not to practice medicine. Easier said than done. Learning how to hypnotize is an easy task for good raconteurs who believe in their ability to induce a hypnotic trance.For ten years, I conducted self-hypnosis seminars at the College of Marin and other institutions. I also had a private hypnotherapy practice. I soon came to two conclusions: First, that I was a better teacher than a practitioner of hypnotherapy. Second, that hypnosis was an excellent motivational tool (e.g., "jog five miles every morning) but often did not work at all when the hypnotized subjects had no real desire to change their behavior.Luckily for me, a publisher's scout spotted a course I was giving at the College of Marin titled, "Self-Hypnosis for Financial Well-Being." A major publishing house asked me to write a book about this subject. With only a small advance against future royalties, I decided to write as candidly as I could, not caring at all to please the publisher.After my first book was published, I decided to become an author something I had tried, unsuccessfully to do for many years. A small publishing house agreed to print my first novel, "The Franz Document," provided I would write a gay guidebook to the Philippines. Later I wrote gay guidebooks to Mexico and Costa Rica for the same publisher.I really wanted to write about my *positive* experiences with hustlers, as they were then called. My first book, "A Consumers Guide to Male Hustlers" was followed by a second book, "Sex Workers As Virtual Boyfriends." By and large,the gay community was not enchanted. They failed to realize the difference between male and female prostitution. The former have no pimps, are not trafficked, and their clients are smart enough not to use violence against younger and physically stronger partners. Most importantly, and that happens all the time, male sex workers are free to enter, leave, and reenter the "profession" as it suits them. One reads about "fallen women; " I have never heard anybody refer to a "fallen man."I continued my writing about sex workers and my book "Escort Tales," was published in English and in a Turkish translation. I wrote that book solely from the point of view of the sex workers, without any editorial comments from me. And so my writing career continued to a semi-autobiographical book, followed by a gay novel. All these books are listed on my Webpage.

Book preview

Two Paths, Two Destinies

a novel

Joseph Itiel

~~~~~*~~~~~

Author of Three Faces in the Mirror

ALSO BY JOSEPH ITIEL

Financial Well-Being Through Self-Hypnosis

The Franz Document

Philippine Diary: A Gay Guide to the Philippines

De Onda: A Gay Guide to Mexico and Its People

Pura Vida: A Gay and Lesbian Guide to Costa Rica

A Consumer’s Guide to Male Hustlers

Sex Workers As Virtual Boyfriends

Escapades of a Gay Traveler: Sexual, Cultural, and Spiritual Encounters

Escort Tales: The Trophy Boy and Other Stories

Dirty Young Men and Other Gay Stories

Three Faces in the Mirror

~~~~~*~~~~~

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: The Communist Ozert

Chapter 2: The Swami

Chapter 3: Clandestine Assignation

Chapter 4: Mysterious Goings On

Chapter 5: The New Guru

Chapter 6: The Taoist Masseuse

Chapter 7: Out of the Closet

Chapter 8: The Hypnotherapist

Chapter 9: Teaching Self-Hypnosis

Chapter 10: Changes in Baba’s House

Chapter 11: A Lover at Last

Chapter 12: Leah Keeps the Upper Hand

Chapter 13: Leah Keeps the Upper Hand

Chapter 14: The Keepsake

EPILOGUE

BACK COVER PAGE

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Two Paths, Two Destinies Copyright © 2015 by Joseph Itiel

Cover Credit: Anthony PeterKai Figueroa

Website:

http://www.josephitiel.com/

[e-mail]

CHAPTER ONE: The Communist Ozeret

My name is Tamir Ronen. Before I came to the U.S., all my friends called me Tamie. I was a gauche, pimply, fifteen-year-old boy living in Tel Aviv in 1946, two years before the State of Israel came into existence. It was an extremely confusing year for me, but then every year since the Second World War broke out in 1939 had been one of universal and personal chaos.

It would take a voluminous book to explain coherently the political situation in the world and in Palestine at the time. Likewise, it would take many hours of talk therapy to analyze my own state of mind in the 1940s. Since I don’t intend to write a book about politics or my childhood, I will confine myself here to the events in 1946 that have a bearing on later developments.

Despite my father’s protestations to the contrary, we were financially pretty well off. At home I lived like a burgani — a bourgeois — a state that caused me some embarrassment. Two years earlier, I had joined the Scouts, which were co-ed in the Jewish community. This exposed me to their intense socialist and Zionist indoctrination. The Scout movement I belonged to was much less concerned with tying knots and the like than with molding our bodies and minds so that, as soon as we were old enough, we would establish a socialist utopia on the kibbutz (a collective farm) we would found.

In a nutshell, we were taught that blue-collar laborers were the social elite, and that the communal workers on a kibbutz were the Zionist role models. In my new social circles, being the son of a man who owned a food processing business was not something to be proud of.

These were the years when the Jews in Eretz Yisrael, as they called it (Palestine, as the world knew it), were fighting the British by landing illegal immigrants, and slugging it out with each other. For a change, the Arabs were more or less quiescent, letting the British do the work of suppressing the Jewish national aspirations. At the age of fifteen, as was expected of me, I joined the Gadna, the youth squads of the Haganah, the largest of the three Jewish paramilitary underground movements. There I got to do what American youth gang members do routinely — like play with handguns. I was a whiz at dismantling the guns but a complete klutz when the time came to put them together. I took my oath as a member of the Haganah by placing my hand on a Pistola Beretta revolver. We faced a table on which lay a big Bible topped by a pistol and a dagger. (The Bible had symbolic rather than religious significance.) Next to the table stood our instructors with drawn handguns. Since secular socialists ran my Haganah group, God's name was not invoked. Rather, we declared and affirmed our loyalty to the cause. Though we behaved like juvenile delinquents, our elders took inordinate pride in their no’ar — their precious youth. They believed whole-heartedly that we youngsters were the healthy product of Eretz Yisrael — brave soldiers in the struggle to establish a Jewish state.

In retrospect, my membership in the Haganah probably saved my sanity. By the age of fifteen, I was quite certain that I was a homosexual: as far as I knew, the only such person in the Jewish community. It was common knowledge that there were Arab homosexuals (we referred to them as nablusim, after the Arab city Nablus) who engaged in such activities. However, even though I had studied Arabic at school, I had never exchanged a single word with an Arab. The two communities kept strictly apart. In my mind, Arab nablusim and Jewish homosexuals were altogether different human beings. Fortunately, the endless training and chores in the Haganah kept me too busy to obsess about my sexual identity.

~~*~~

In the beginning of 1946, my mother hired a new ozeret. The egalitarian word "ozeret — helper — was coined in modern Hebrew to circumvent the usage of the Hebrew Biblical noun handmaiden. We had a number of house cleaners at our home during my formative years. Though my mother often stated, a good ozeret is like a precious pearl," she had difficulties keeping her helpers. Only one of our many house cleaners made an indelible impression on me.

Leah had arrived in Eretz Yisrael from Poland sometime before World War II. Her Hebrew was excellent since she had learned the language while attending a Hebrew high school in Warsaw. She immediately joined a kibbutz belonging to Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist Zionist organization. She moved to Tel Aviv after the kibbutz expelled her because her political ideology had shifted from the officially approved position of extreme left-of-center Zionism to full-fledged communism.

Leah must have been in her early twenties when she became our ozeret. As I see her now in my mind’s eye, she was a slim woman of medium height, with a pleasant enough face, languid brown eyes, and long black hair. As I recall, the only thing that marred her looks somewhat was a very crooked incisor that almost covered another of her front teeth. Naturally, as an anti-bourgeois, she wore no lipstick, makeup, or nail polish. In hindsight, she probably was an attractive and even sexy young woman, though this wasn’t something I paid attention to, because of the difference in our ages and my sexual orientation.

Soon I realized that Leah knew all sorts of things that might be very important and that I was ignorant of. One day, when I was talking to her about my problems with math, she told me, "I wish I were studying math."

Whatever for?

Because you need to know a lot of math to understand Karl Marx’s writings.

"I’ve already read Das Kapital," I told Leah proudly. I had read the book earlier that year and thought I understood it. In fact, I was familiar enough with Marxist terminology that the book itself must have seemed a rehash of something I had heard over and over again. (As a university student, I would struggle with Das Kapital once again. I had understood it much better as an adolescent boy.)

No, Leah replied, just reading the book once is nothing. The more times you read it, the better you understand it, and the easier it will be for you to really comprehend how things work out in this society and, indeed, in all other societies and lands. I suspect that she guided our conversations deliberately to focus on issues that were significant to her, such as the difference between the Russian Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

One day Leah asked me, "Have you already started doing shtuyot in the Haganah? The two other undergrounds sometimes referred to us as traitors, the ultra-orthodox Jews called us blasphemers, and the British considered us terrorists. However, nobody I knew had ever dismissed the Haganah as foolishness." Only Leah, certain that Marxism had given her special insights, would have dared say something so outrageous.

With missionary zeal, Leah tried to convert me to her cause. By that time, I had turned sixteen, but had not yet been exposed to enough political indoctrination to fully understand the subtle difference between left-of-center Zionism and outright Jewish communism.

I was familiar with two issues related to communism, and raised these with our ozeret. First, Stalin’s pact with Hitler at the beginning of the war, giving the Nazis a free hand to attack Poland. Second, in Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish communists had periodically joined the Arabs attacking Jewish settlements.

Leah always had an explanation for everything. According to her, British imperialism, Jewish-Arab strife, the two World Wars, were all just manifestations of the class conflict between the capitalists and their bourgeois lackeys on the one hand, and the international proletariat on the other hand. The evil power of capitalism, according to Leah, was centered in the New York Wall Street Trusts. The U.S.S.R., under the wise leadership of Stalin, was the vanguard of the international proletariat. There were logical reasons for every political event, but they could only be understood by mastering the theories of dialectical materialism as laid down by Karl Marx, and wisely interpreted by Lenin and Stalin.

To understand Leah’s philosophy better, I bought a book written by Stalin himself — it said so on the

cover — explaining Lenin’s interpretation of dialectical materialism. Leah enlightened me when I came upon an obscure passage, of which there were many. But as much I admired her, and however much at that young age I wanted the master key that would unlock the doors to all wisdom, I knew that dialectical materialism was not it.

I suppose that I loved Leah intellectually, although physically, she was like a sister to me. It never occurred to me that she would be attracted to me. Like many teenagers, I considered myself ungainly. I was too short, had a pimply face, and, in general, did not consider myself handsome. In hindsight, judging from photos of myself many decades later, I was an OK-looking kid. I had lively brown eyes, an engaging smile, and a muscular body. I was quite good in gymnastics but a complete failure in competitive games like football (soccer as it is called in America). I cared little whether I was handsome or ugly. Whether girls liked me or not made absolutely no difference to me, and I never would have believed that another boy might take a shine to me.

At school we had a twenty-five-minute recess at noon. I would run home, a few short blocks away, to spend precious minutes chatting with our ozeret. Leaving the school compound was strictly forbidden, but after ten years there, I knew all the secret ways to get out. To keep us confined, the school authorities would suddenly fence off all the secret passages we kids used to escape. I would sneak in night after night and cut a hole in one of the fences.

Once during recess, I referred to Leah as comrade. Primly she said, You will call me comrade when, and only when, you become a member of the Party.

What fascinated me was not Leah’s political theories, but rather, their elegant simplicity. According to her, there was always one single correct answer for every human problem. In spite of the terrible shape of the world, Jewry, and Eretz Yisrael, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Inexorably, after a brief period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the entire world would become a classless society to which all citizens would contribute according to their ability and be rewarded according to their needs.

Leah sensed soon enough that I wasn’t destined to become a convert to her cause. Analyzing me with her dialectical materialism tools, she informed me scathingly, Marx stated the people’s ideologies are shaped by their economic circumstances. You are, and you’ll always be nothing but a petty bourgeois. Being a petty bourgeois, by a Marxist’s standards, was a most ignoble classification.

What actually prevented me from joining Leah’s cause wasn’t my economic circumstances. After all, I felt embarrassed that my parents weren’t members of the working class. Leah’s doctrines fascinated me but failed to convince me. In spite of her detailed explanations, I couldn’t understand how international capitalism and the Wall Street Trusts in New York were related to the situation in Eretz Yisrael.

There was also a subtler reason that I resisted all the ideologies to which she exposed me. In retrospect, I realize now