Between Lines

I recently picked up Hillel Halkin’s Across the Sabbath River, an account of his engagement with the 'lost tribes of Israel' phenomenon, partly because his position as outsider on the subject of the Chhinlung Israel mipuite and partly because of my own investment in the topic. The Chhinlung Israel mipuite in its most lay sense refers to the Israel lost-tribe claims of contiguous communities in Mizoram, Manipur and Myanmar. The read has been very educating as I was able to thread the constituent strands in a much more detailed manner than before. It has also been very engaging because of the mental commentaries I am able to conjure up as he builds his narrative. For instance, on page 169, he narrates a visit by Zohminga who, “worked for the ministry of tourism which meant he had a lot of free time. He spent part of it riding around Aizawl on a motorcycle with Israeli flags. He wished to know how he might acquire some Israeli army fatigues.” Hillel’s caricature of my cousin was eerily spot on and yet ambiguous because of the many subtexts that lend themselves to ambivalent inferences. The ethnographic details projected an objective innocence and yet underscored a subtle chutzpah that suggested implied binaries in their descriptive constructions. Hence, to take note of ‘free time’ or an inquiry regarding the procurement of army fatigues does not just figure as a value free predicate but rather seems to indicate a rhetorical position that Hillel progressively sets up for himself.

Hillel does not hide his own investment in the ‘hunt’ for the lost tribes. On the part of lost-tribe hunters, he finds an innocence in their obsession and futility. This attitude in turn seemed to inform what he perceives as a mimetic impulse in the Chhinlung Israel mipuite and also engenders an overflow of facetious additions that constantly color the otherwise keen observations he records. Two of them that caught my attention were, “In the back, a thin, pretty woman listened intently while rocking back and forth with a nursing baby. It was imbibing a taste for hermeneutics with its mother’s milk.” (168) and, “As we spoke, the house filled up with several generations of Pu Liankeuva’s family. The older offspring occupied the chairs and floor and the younger ones crowded outside the open window and stuck their heads through its bars. Even the children in Mizoram were keen to know their true identity. (164) Then again, without such colorful flags, one might just have bulleted the evidence and relegated the read to nothing more than the perfunctory.

Minor quibbles aside, the Chhinlung Israel mipuite issue finds an ably measured treatment in Across the Sabbath River and as I knock off each page, the engagement forces me to speculate that Hillel might execute a volte-face toward the end. Another part of me thinks he will not.