After six sessions of Krav Maga I can escape a choke hold
and slap a break board in two - a thin break
board, the kind for wimps. I have trouble remembering defensive knife blocks,
so my sparring partner, a mom with killer bones, has to cue me before each
attack.
“I’m going to stab you in the neck, okay?”
“Will that be right side or left?” I ask.
Another woman is ready to shin kick her buddy. She blows a huge pink wad of bubble gum, cracks it, and
asks, “Are y’all ready?”
When I’m dressed, waiting outside in the dark for my taxi, I
feel like James Bond. I relax easily against a tree. I imagine my body language.
It says, “I dare you.”
I am so into Krav Maga that I sit with my cat Becky and
watch videos of the stuff on YouTube. I’m keen to test tonight’s class against
the pros. Becky jumps on my lap, tummy and head facing the PC, her blue mouse pinned
in her paws.
In front of the camera, Krav Maga guys talk a lot, as though
they want respect for being geniuses of physics and not merely kick-ass
warriors; the women too. I have to fast forward to the action. Here’s Doug,
ex-Army from the States training in Israel, whimpering under the sting of sensei
Avivat Cohen. Doug’s been downed by fighters
training under her wing.
Doug’s pal, Jim, goes to the IDF, Israel Defense Forces. The
IDF developed Krav Maga; its black belts export it to the outside world.
I’ve watched many videos from Israel; tonight I surf other
countries.
Here’s an IDF SWAT team drilling a gang of Poles. Here, an
Israeli sensei is training Greeks to attack no-holds-barred. I watch black
belts teaching classes in Dubai, Thailand, the US. A muscled Filipino mangles a
gun. A little blonde girl in Holland defends herself with a shimmery backpack. An
Australian local: “We’re going to move on now to byse-bawl bots.”
When Avivat pounds the denizens of Judenburg Austria, (“Jew’s
Borough”, home of a sister of the Mauthausen concentration camp) then rolls on
to the Czech Republic the humor stops. The YouTube irony police are off duty.
Anyway, I want to focus on knife blocks.
We surf, until I find two men on a hill, lunging and fending
against a backdrop of slate peaks and grey impasto clouds. The subtitles are
tiny so I just follow their moves and easy Italian narration. As the camera pans
left to the gladiator wielding the knife something illogical is coming into view. My
phone rings. I hit pause.
For the first time in decades, it’s Brenda, a friend from high
school, assigned the task of informing me of a once in a lifetime class reunion.
How she got my phone number in Israel I don’t know and don’t ask. I don’t ask Brenda
why she axed her blatantly Jewish surname from Facebook; it would end our
conversation pronto. I tread lightly.
We catch up on her milestones, which do not include anything
that could be called ethnic.
Then it’s my turn.
“What’s up?” Brenda asks.
I tell her about Krav Maga.
“Sounds like Judo.”
Nope.
“Jiu-Jitsu? No? Not Taekwondo? Then what – MMA?”
No. It’s contact combat.
“Really! Is there a ceremony?”
No, it’s not Sumo, there’s no ring, no salt.
“Too bad, the ceremonies are interesting. Tell me the rules.”
Don’t get killed, don’t get hurt, blow your attacker away.
Her mind is grinding, trying to picture what something is
from what it’s not. “It is MMA – and it’s
from Japan, or maybe China.”
I tell her. It was devised by a Hungarian Jew to defend against
Nazis gangs. He taught it to Jews in Czechoslovakia, then to the elite Palmach,
and eventually to the IDF for defense here in Israel, where he came to live. I
tell Brenda that my neighbor, one door over, one flight up, is a grandmother
and a brown belt who, after watching her daughter get knifed, took up Krav
Maga. I think to myself, a lot of good it will do her, a lot of good it
will do us.
There’s long static silence.
“Oh.”
Her tone is as flat as a phone off the hook.
A headache stabs the bones between my eyes. My lids droop.
An aura, a piece of cinema, is mid-reel.
Hulk-like, the monster in the nightmare of the Book of
Daniel, the monster of our current, Roman Empire exile, with its estrangement
and agony, stomps the house where I grew up then turns east, heading for my apartment
in Israel.
…I
looked on in the night vision, there was a fourth beast—fearsome, dreadful, and
very powerful, with great iron teeth that devoured and crushed, and stamped the
remains with its feet...[i]
Stand down Hulk, stand down. We can destroy ourselves without
you.
I hang up, wiped. I resume YouTube.
The Italian tells us where an attacker will aim.
“In this position you
can protect your throat, chest area and the central part of your body.” His
dukes are up.
“You have to step
diagonally to the side.”
As he does, his back fills the camera. I hit pause and full
screen. The guy’s wearing a black tee shirt. Emblazoned on it in white are two Hebrew
letters, some kind of logo.
Thanks for share
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