It was such a simpler time, that summer of 2001. Remember it? That last season of America’s (cyclical) innocence shimmers in the memory, sorta like those gauzy images of lovebirds Robert Redford and Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby – images so blurry they make you wonder if you need to adjust the focus on your TV. Ah, for those halcyon days! … when the only Washington story most of us cared about was the fate of Chandra Levy, and the most pressing topic on George Bush’s plate was stem cells (because he sure as hell wasn’t paying attention to al Qaeda).
Back then, the Taliban were a nasty band of fundamentalist cusses about whom we knew rather little – apart from the facts that they oppressed their women, didn’t care much for poppy growing, and were somehow in cahoots with that bin Laden guy we’d been hearing about. That summer the biggest Taliban-related news was a minor international uproar over their peculiar decision to use small explosives and machine-gun fire to attack a pair of massive Buddha statues that had been carved out of Afghan cliffs a couple millennia earlier. Meanwhile, a fascinating story emerged (I don’t remember where) about the last two remaining Jews in Kabul, and their daily struggle to observe their cultural traditions despite the Taliban’s strict enforcement of Sharia laws concerning everything from beard length to public worship.
It’s a story that has shown remarkable legs through the years, partly because of this juicy detail: The two aging men were living in the ruins of a synagogue … and they weren’t speaking to one another! Their saga has spawned at least two darkly comic plays: My Brother’s Keeper played in Edinburgh and London in 2006, while The Last Two Jews of Kabul premiered off-off-Broadway last year. Much earlier than that, during those happy-go-lucky days of summer 2001, that first article had inspired me to write what remains my one and only original limerick. So if you’ll forgive my mispronunciation of the Afghan capital…
There was just one Jew left in Kabul
His beard shaven, by government rule
But he was much too distinct
In his lower precinct
So the Taliban shot off his tool (more…)
