At 11 a.m. on Thursday July 15, 1993, Lisa Beyer,
Time magazine's Jerusalem correspondent, starts her weekly staff meeting.
"It was great not meeting last week. I know -- you don't have to thank me," she says with a chuckle. "We've got mucho things to discuss today."
Lisa, 29, is wearing pale orange shirt and pants. A cheery, wisecracking person, she is somewhat subdued in the meeting. The four full-time members of her staff have worked in the Jerusalem bureau far longer than she, and they are a good deal older. She listens hard to what they say.
"As some of you know, we got an O.K. on the Plia Albeck story," Lisa says. "I cabled on Tuesday and it will run in 'Talk of the Streets.'"
Plia Albeck has just been removed from her post as head of the civil claims department in the Israeli Ministry of Justice. For years she had provoked controversy by her insensitive handling of Palestinian suits against the Israeli government. An example: in 1992, a court awarded $333,000 to a Palestinian who lost both hands when an Israeli officer ordered him to remove a Palestinian flag from a live power line; Albeck protested that the award was excessive because the man, a street vendor, could "sell falafel with artificial arms."
Time's "Talk of the Streets" is a series of paragraph-long reports in its international edition.
Lisa says the
Time editors in New York need three things. "A picture of Albeck, which I assume we have."
"We will have," says Anni Rubinger. Her husband, David, nods. David Rubinger,
Time's staff photographer, is one of Israeli's most celebrated photographers. Anni is the bureau's photo-archivist and -researcher. The Rubingers are in their sixties and came to Israel from Austria.
David photographed Plia Albeck some years ago against the day when she might be important enough to make
Time. A smiling image of her will be culled from the files to run, with nice incongruity, alongside the paragraph about her losing her job.
"Great," Lisa says. "They want to know why the Palestinian woman was killed by the Israeli army -- you know, when Plia argued that her husband shouldn't get any money because now he didn't have to support her."
There are groans at the table.
"Do you remember, Jamail?"
The incident happened in 1991.
Jamail Hamad is the bureau's Arabic-language reporter. A Palestinian in his 50s and a well-known writer, Jamail replies after a moment's reflection. "It was an accident. I don't remember how it happened."
"Can you find out?"
"Yes. I can try."
"Finally, they want some pithy quotes about Plia getting sacked. Some happy, some outraged. I'll get those, but if any of you have heard good things, tell me.
"Now, we need to come up with stories we can propose."
Silence at the table.
"Well, the army's moving north," says Jean Marx, Lisa's administrative assistant. "Leaves have been cancelled." Jean, who is in her 50s, surveys the Hebrew press. She came from England.
The table is silent. The army suddenly moving additional troops into southern Lebanon has happened countless times before. Many people hoped it wouldn't happen under the new, liberal Israeli government.
"Yah," says Lisa. "Something's happening up there."
"Shelling," several people say.
"The army's not going to tell us anything yet," Lisa says. "I think I may have to go there. Anyhow, that's for next week."
"There's Demjanjuk," someone says.
"All we can do is an update," Lisa says. "That's next week too -- when the Supreme Court verdict comes out."
"It's done," one of the staff says.
"Why do you say that?" Lisa asks.
"Someone in Justice told me."
"It's written?"
"At the printer's."
Lisa thinks for a moment. "I ought to be able to get a confirmation on that."
John Demjanjuk is the retired Cleveland autoworker whom an Israeli court condemned to death in 1988 for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" of the Treblinka death camp in Poland. Subsequent evidence has suggested that, while Demjanjuk was a guard at another Nazi camp, he wasn't at Treblinka.
"Everybody think he's going to be acquitted?" Lisa asks.
Everybody does. Israel can't afford to kill a man who might be innocent; that would smack too much of the Holocaust.
"Ivan-the-Not-So-Terrible," Lisa says, repeating a phrase from the papers. "I heard on French radio that the 40th anniversary of the UZI is coming up. That's in a month or so. We'll propose a story."
There is talk about the whereabouts of the submachine gun's inventor.
"I think the best thing we can propose is the 'Fractured Fatah' story again," Lisa says. "They didn't run it four weeks ago, but with Abdel-Shafi's blow-up at Arafat it's bigger than ever. It's really a new story.
Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian negotiating with the Israelis, has just demanded that Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, cede his autocratic power to a collective leadership.
"I know what they're going to say in New York," Lisa says. "'Aw, this is defrosted fish! Everybody's read it.'
"Yeah, right --" she answers her own accusation, "everybody in the office! Four weeks ago we would have been the first to publish, but we still can be, maybe. Anyhow, it's the best we've got."
There is consensus on this, and Lisa says she'll send a cable suggesting the story and the new angle on it that afternoon.
"Hey, if I do go north," she says, as the meeting is breaking up, "where's that bulletproof vest I heard about?"
There's some laughter. Jean Marx says it's up in the storeroom.
"Good," Lisa says. "Would you bring it out, Jean? We want the chief to be taken care of."
Lisa and the staff chuckle.
Fifteen minutes later, beneath a trellis of bougainvillea in a nearby café, Lisa digs pita bread into a mound of hummus and tells her guest she always wanted to be a reporter. "I'm a very confrontational person. I love being able to pick up a phone and ask questions and have people feel some compulsion to answer.
"I'm a Louisiana Cajun -- proudly. I went to Texas just because they had a better Journalism department. And then I found, more important,
The Daily Texan."
The Daily Texan is the University of Texas at Austin's student newspaper. Lisa worked for the
Texan as reporter, copy editor, managing editor, and, finally, editor-in-chief.
"I didn't know what I wanted. I guess I dreamed about a conventional newspaper career culminating with
The New York Times. If you'd held a gun to my head, I'd probably have said, '
The Austin American-Statesman, The Dallas Times-Herald, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, and then
The New York Times.'
"Red Gibson, famous teacher, neat guy, said -- it's the only thing I remember from the class -- 'If you want to get to
The New York Times, be editor-in-chief of
The Daily Texan.' So that gave me the goal.
"I had a great time as editor, hobnobbing with the campus administrators and the politicians who wanted our endorsement. I didn't know what would happen when I graduated.
"One night I was walking across campus and I met a teacher I'd had in American Studies. He asked me what I was going on to and, when I said I didn't know, said, 'What kind of grades do you have?'
"Well, no one in Journalism cares about grades, not if they're serious about journalism. A lot of the
Daily Texan staff doesn't graduate when they're supposed to -- you know, like athletes -- because they've been doing something More Important.
"But they didn't have my mother. I told my teacher, 'I have a perfect 4.0' and mashed my teeth together in a big smile.
"'My God,' he said, 'we've got to get you a Rhodes!'
"I don't think I said, 'What's a Rhodes?', but I may have. It had never crossed my mind. Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was a finalist but didn't get a Rhodes. And I was a finalist for a Luce Fellowship, from the Henry Luce Foundation, which sends young people with no background in Asia to work there for a year.
"I called up my American Studies teacher and said, 'Should I go for the interview?' I thought I'd probably bomb out again in the interview. He said, 'Why not? If you don't get it, you've had a trip to San Francisco and a learning experience."
"'But what if I don't get it?'
"'Then you won't have to go to Asia!'"
Lisa laughs. "I'll never forget that line. I got the Fellowship, so I had to go. I worked for
Asia Week in Hong Kong. It was really tough being away from the States and my friends for the first time, and in Hong Kong, the meanest city of them all. After Hong Kong, New York is a piece of cake.
"It took time -- maybe half a year -- but I adapted. I always loved the work. So when the editor asked me to stay on, I said, 'Where do you need a correspondent?' The answer was Singapore.
"Singapore was another world. New. Clean -- because if you dropped a candy wrapper you got a $100 fine. Waterskiing the whole year round. Remember 'I have seen the future and it works'? Well, I have seen the future and the reason it works is tyranny.
"I was in Singapore for three years having fun and falling more and more out of favor with remarkable Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew. Until I wrote about the detention without trial of a group of Catholic church workers. Lee banned the sale of
Asia Week in his happy island republic.
"
Asia Week screamed for a while and then sold me out. The magazine would return; I would go.
"They offered me a job in Hong Kong, but I preferred to come back to the U.S. I went through the torture of thinking I wouldn't have a job -- I'd never not had a job.
"But I landed on my feet at
Time and in New York. Beat out a Rhodes Scholar, which was sweet. I wrote for the International Edition for a year, then foreign affairs for the domestic magazine. I learned a lot from the people who edited me, particularly a genius named George Church. How to be colloquial but not too colloquial. How to make news a story. How never to create a question in the reader's mind you don't answer right away. How to condense, condense, condense, and then tighten.
"I wasn't getting noticed. The American audience doesn't care about foreign affairs. The glamor assignments in the magazine are everywhere else. I had to wear pantyhose, and I felt my pantyhose wasn't sexy enough.
"Then a big break: Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I became a star because of my first sentence in the story: 'In hindsight, it made perfect sense that . . .' In fact, an early version of the sentence had been in a correspondent's story.
"People asked, 'Should a woman be writing the war for us?' But I was a star: a star can do anything. Forget about pantyhose."
After lunch, Lisa and her guest stroll over to the Israeli foreign ministry where she chats with friends about the status of the Demjanjuk verdict. She is told that it has been sent out to a private printer.
Back in her office, she phones a printer on the outskirts of Jerusalem. She greets the person on the other end of the line in Hebrew, and then says, in English, "I'm Lisa Beyer, correspondent with
Time magazine. Do you have a spokesman, someone who does press relations?"
She learns that there are Israeli troops outside the building making sure only authorized people enter.
"This is a journalist's dream," she says to her guest. "Important news and a great place to live. Everybody's got an opinion that they put forward very strongly. I found South East Asia hard to take because you can't argue about anything. Everything's hidden to save face. I have a tough time chitchatting, and the Asians think that's what women are for -- keep the conversation going.
The guest asks whether it's an advantage or disadvantage being a woman reporter in the Middle East.
"I don't know," Lisa says. "It's both. The Israeli military are reluctant to have me as a correspondent. Don't want a woman killed on their watch. On the other hand, the officers love to flirt, and interviewing is a kind of flirtation.
"There's tremendous formality in all my relations with the Arabs. Sometimes, like when I interview the fundamentalists, Hamas or other, I have be heavily dressed, with my hair covered, no bright colors.
"It turns me into a wild beast. I can't hear. It's degrading and absurd. I type interviews into my laptop as they're taking place, and the men think I'm the secretary for Jamail or whoever is translating. I'm a non-person. It's awkward, but you can't let it hurt your professionalism. You can't let it affect your reporting.
"
People are always asking me, 'How do you like it here?' What they mean is, 'Which side are you on?' I say, 'I love my job -- and the weather.' I hope that reading my stuff they don't have any idea what my politics are."
Lisa spends the rest of the afternoon (1) phoning to get quotes for the Plia Albeck story ("Small items can be as time-consuming as big ones," she says) and writing them up ("Says a right-winger: 'They're only picking on her because she's not a leftist.' A left-winger responds: 'She's a racist, an abomination. She should have been dismissed long ago'"); (2) writing an update on the Demjanjuk case, which begins with a color sentence about the suburban printer protected by army troops; (3) writing a proposal that something be done for the UZI's anniversary; and (4) writing a proposal for a 500-word story combining Abdel-Shafi's criticism of Arafat with an article she wrote four weeks earlier on conflicts among the Palestinian leadership.
By five p.m., all this is sent via electronic mail to Time's offices in New York, where it is 10 a.m.
At midnight Jerusalem time, Lisa is asleep in her apartment when a Time International editor phones to say they want the Abdel-Shafi story. Lisa has to file it by 5 p.m. the next day, Friday, so that
Time will can edit, check the edited version with her, title, format, picture and caption the story by the Saturday press deadline.
While Lisa talks on the phone, the man she calls her "semi-spouse," the writer Ze'ev Chafets, who woke her, returns to a couch in the living room and lies down. He is watching American TV via satellite. Lisa gives him a kiss and returns to bed. Ze'ev is in the throes of the first draft of a novel. During the night he occasionally pads to his study to write more pages. Then he returns to the couch, where he watches
The MacNeil/Lehrer Show and part of
Larry King Live before falling asleep with the TV on.
The next morning, Lisa has set up a tennis match for her guest, herself, and Richard and Natasha Beston (Richard is the Jerusalem correspondent for
The Times of London). One of the Bestons is sick, so Lisa and her guest play singles.
On the drive to the court, the guest protests that Lisa has a big story to write by 5 and probably can't afford to play tennis.
"I write better under pressure," she says. "I'm already writing it in my head."
"Do you have the first sentence?"
"Yep, I think I so: 'It had been clear for some time that Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafi was cranky.' That gives me something to unwrap. The difference between a newspaper dispatch and a
Time article is that we present the news as part of a process, an unfolding, a story."
Lisa plays a strong game of tennis -- she worked her teenage years in a pro shop -- but she doesn't get much involved in the match. She stops early, drives home, showers, grabs a bite to eat, and is in the office before noon.
"In a way, it's good not to give them a story too soon," she says. "Because then they don't have time to get tired of it or to change it a lot.
"No calls," she tells Jean.
Lisa closes her office door and doesn't reappear for more than an hour. She then drinks two cups of water from the water cooler, an abstracted look on her face. After that, she comes out every half hour or so.
"Others smoke and drink bourbon," she says. "I fret. I have to walk around. I drink water. Which makes me go to the bathroom. Which makes me wash my hands. Which makes my hands chapped. Which gives me something else to fret about."
One time when she appears, she says flatly, "I have to get each sentence right. Arrrg."
Her dispatch is on the wire at 5:25 p.m. Lisa has written so hard that when she gets home at 6 she takes a nap.
Lisa and Ze'ev spend weekends at his house in Tel Aviv, less than an hour away. After her nap, Lisa drives there. On route, she says, "The story used to be that
Time had such a thick layer of editors because they never knew how many would be drunk. It's tough, tough work. I always try to put in an extra paragraph so the editors feel they improved the story by cutting."
After dinner, at 10:45 p.m., much later than she'd like it to be, Lisa calls Jamail to find if he's learned how the Israeli army killed the Palestinian woman in 1991. Jamail, it turns out, has just returned from a two-hour drive to a Palestinian village, tracking down the facts. Unfortunately they are too complicated for the Albeck paragraph, and Lisa decides simply to say that the army killed the woman "mistakenly."
An hour later, the fax machine at Ze'ev's receives
Time's first edit of the Abdel-Shafi story.
At 12:49 a.m., Lisa sends back her comments, prefacing them, "Nice chopping. A few niggles." She makes nine points about the edited story, offers suggestions on things that can be cut if space requires, and closes: "that's all from me. thanks and I'll be in touch with the saturday staff on updates tomorrow. albest."
