Security guards flanked the stage last night at the Gladstone Hotel’s ballroom, where Gregory Levey launched his madcap memoir, Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government. The protection was dressed casually, however, thus more unnerving to anyone taking notice.
“Moral support,” the author shrugged from the stage when asked about their presence during the Q&A portion of his This is Not a Reading Series event. And, the morning after, he’s similarly nonchalant: “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
For a 29-year-old Ryerson communications professor with an American book deal, Levey is disarmingly subdued in person. His temperament offers some indication of how, while studying law at Fordham University in New York City, he stumbled into a speechwriting job at the United Nations that led to a transfer to Israel in 2005 — relocating on the same day as the Gaza Strip disengagement.
“What does it say about the delegation that they hired you?” Levey was asked last week on NPR. “Maybe that was the most incompetent thing they ever did?”
Good for the launch of a book writing career, though, thanks to an agent who helped Levey hone a proposal and sell it to Simon and Schuster’s imprint Free Press in early 2007. The emails he exchanged and diaries he kept during this period — along with anecdotes his now-wife was able to recall — helped fill out the narrative details. The slapstick tales tend to the same rhythm, where there’s a handy quip to conclude every episode, the apparent reward for being low key.
“There were days when I had to spend eight hours on the internet researching a speech on a topic like science,” says Levey. “That drudgery wouldn’t have made for a very interesting book, of course, so it helps that I had material to work with.”
And it’s enough to feed the conversation addressed on the current covers of The Atlantic (“Is Israel Finished?”) and Maclean’s (“Why Israel Can’t Survive”). Meanwhile, the website Jewcy stirred things up by getting the US correspondent for Israeli paper Ha’aretz to debate Levey’s qualifications to fill the 257 pages.
More intriguingly, though, is that Levey managed to draw a 150-person crowd on his home turf that was significantly younger on average than the demographic prone to showing up at Jewish cultural events in this town. (To wit, an annual film festival whose main draw this year are movies featuring comedians mostly born before Woody Allen.)
Levey can’t deny that the readership for a book about the farcical side of Israel is going to appeal to an audience inclined to see that country from the lighter side, but his speechwriting experiences provided the opportunity to exercise his own influences. “The bastard child of Thomas Friedman and David Sedaris,” touted on the inside flap, might be a bit of a stretch – if not an utterly unappealing prospect. Realistically, dropping names like Bill Bryson, Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta cuts closer to Levey’s aspirations of an unadorned narrative style.
Shut Up, I’m Talking also portrays bureaucratic writing work as more akin to a hapless string of temp assignments — faking skill sets, feigning friendships and answering to impotent authority — rather than a one-way ticket to the security that’s now only associated with a government job. But the endless string of civil service walkouts and lockouts in Israel only served to sour Levey’s circumstance.
The folks in charge, whether at the UN General Assembly or the Prime Minister’s Office, didn’t impress him much either. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon went from devouring large meals to falling into his current vegetative state in the first few months Levey was tasked with crafting the English words coming from his mouth. Sharon was also “very gossipy” about the love lives of his younger staffers, Levey reveals — on top of that, the former military commander had stage fright.
So, any reverence for state leaders Levey might’ve had from afar evaporated during his time in Israel’s PMO. “They might be the most famous people in the country,” he says, “but the politicians are looked at as no-good uncles or cousins, constantly being bad-mouthed and disrespected. Sharon would be referred to as ‘Arik’ — it’s like referring to Stephen Harper as ‘Stevie’.
“There was constant jostling with the media, and you’d always see politicians making passes at female journalists, but it just a part of the everyday culture.”
The experience also switched off any waning enthusiasm Levey had for the Jewish religion — born in South Africa, he attended Bialik Hebrew Day School, prior to attending Forest Hill Collegiate. “I became more and more annoyed with religious fundamentalism,” he says. “The way it was impacting policy was unarguably destructive — I believe in the separation of synagogue and state.”
Rather than getting entangled in interminable political discussions, Levey would rather stick to observations — steadily contributing pieces on the Middle East to The New Republic and Salon.com. The latter posted a book excerpt last week, and his publisher anticipates Levey will build his name recognition via bylines.
Can a writer covering conflict succeed without actually courting confrontation? Well, making mental notes on other people’s benign behaviour can pay off, also.
“Diplomatic security was par for the course at the United Nations,” says Levey.” And getting into the Prime Minister’s office in Israel was definitely a big ordeal.
“But, eventually, people get to know who you are and things are less of a hassle.”
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