A Tale of Love and Darkness (16 page)

As for my father, he never protested. He rarely shared his memories of the women's showers and his other feminine experiences, except when he took it into his head to try to joke with us.

But his jokes always seemed more like a declaration of intent: look, watch how a serious man like me can step outside himself for you and volunteer to make you laugh.

My mother and I used to smile at him, as though to thank him for his efforts, but he, excitedly, almost touchingly, interpreted our smiles as an invitation to go on amusing us, and he would offer us two or three jokes that we had already heard from him a thousand times, about the Jew and the Gentile on the train, or about Stalin meeting the Empress Catherine, and we had already laughed ourselves to tears when Father, bursting with pride at having managed to make us laugh, charged on to the story of Stalin sitting on a bus opposite Ben Gurion and Churchill, and about Bialik meeting Shlonsky in paradise, and about Shlonsky meeting a girl. Until Mother said to him gently:

"Didn't you want to do some more work this evening?"

Or:

"Don't forget you promised to stick some stamps in the album with the child before he goes to bed."

Once he said to his guests:

"The female heart! In vain have the great poets attempted to reveal its mysteries. Look, Schiller wrote somewhere that in the whole of creation there is no secret as deep as a woman's heart, and that no woman has ever revealed or will ever reveal to a man the full extent of the female mystique. He could simply have asked me: after all, I've been there."

Sometimes he joked in his unfunny way: "Of course I chase skirts sometimes, like most men, if not more so, because I used to have plenty of skirts of my own, and suddenly they were all taken away from me."

Once he said something like this: "If we had a daughter, she would almost certainly be a beauty." And he added: "In the future, in generations to come, the gap between the sexes may well narrow. This gap is generally considered to be a tragedy, but one day it may transpire that it is nothing but a comedy of errors."

IT WAS
Grandma Shlomit, the distinguished lady who loved books and understood writers, who turned their home in Odessa into a literary salon—perhaps the first Hebrew literary salon ever. With her sensitivity she grasped that the sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania
that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek one another out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel one another, lay a hand on a shoulder or put an arm around a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collide, be right, take offense, apologize, make amends, avoid one another, and seek one another's company again.

She was the perfect hostess, and she received her guests unpretentiously but graciously. She offered everyone an attentive ear, a supportive shoulder, curious, admiring eyes, a sympathetic heart, homemade fish delicacies or bowls of thick, steaming stew on winter evenings, poppy-seed cakes that melted in the mouth, and rivers of scalding tea from the samovar.

Grandpa's job was to pour out liqueurs expertly, and keep the ladies supplied with chocolates and sweet cakes, and the men with
papirosi
, those pungent Russian cigarettes. Uncle Joseph, who at the tender age of twenty-nine had inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of
Hashiloach
, the leading periodical of modern Hebrew culture (the poet Bialik himself was the literary editor), ruled Hebrew literature from Odessa and promoted or demoted writers by his word. Aunt Zippora accompanied him to his brother and sister-in-law's "soirees," careful to wrap him well in woolen scarves, warm overcoats, and earmuffs. Menahem Ussishkin, the leader of those forerunners of Zionism, the Lovers of Zion, smartly turned out, his chest puffed out like a buffalo's, his voice as coarse as a Russian governor's, as effervescent as a boiling samovar, reduced the room to silence with his entrance: everyone stopped talking out of respect, someone or other would leap up to offer him a seat, Ussishkin would stride across the room with the gait of a general, seat himself expansively with his large legs spread wide, and tap the floor twice with his cane to indicate his consent that the conversations in the salon should continue. Even Rabbi Czernowitz (whose nom de plume was Rav Tsair) was a regular visitor. There was also a plump young historian who had once paid court to my grandmother ("But it was hard for a decent woman to be close to him—he was extremely intelligent and interesting, but he always had all sorts of disgusting stains on his collar, and his cuffs were grimy, and sometimes you could see bits of food caught in the folds of his trousers. He was a total
shlump, shmutsik, fui!
").

Occasionally Bialik would drop in for an evening, pale with grief or shivering with cold and anger—or quite the contrary: he could also be the life and soul of the party. "And how!" said my grandmother. "Like a kid, he was! A real scalawag! No holds barred! So risqué! Sometimes he would joke with us in Yiddish till he made the ladies blush, and Chone Rawnitski would shout at him:
'Nu, sha!
Bialik! What's up with you!
Fui!
That's enough, now!'" Bialik loved food and drink, he loved having a good time, he stuffed himself with bread and cheese, followed by a handful of cakes, a glass of scalding tea, and a little glass of liqueur, and then he would launch into entire serenades in Yiddish about the wonders of the Hebrew language and his deep love for it.

The poet Tchernikhowsky, too, might burst into the salon, flamboyant but shy, passionate yet prickly, conquering hearts, touching in his childlike innocence, as fragile as a butterfly but also hurtful, wounding people left, right, and center without even noticing. The truth? "He never meant to give offense—he was so innocent! A kind soul! The soul of a baby who has never known sin! Not like a sad Jewish baby, no! Like a
goyish
baby! Full of
joie de vivre
, naughtiness, and energy! Sometimes he was just like a calf! Such a happy calf! Leaping around! Playing the fool in front of everybody! But only sometimes. Other times he would arrive so miserable it immediately made every woman want to make a fuss over him! Every single one! Young and old, free or married, plain or pretty, they all felt some kind of hidden desire to make a fuss over him. It was a power he had. He didn't even know he had it—if he had, it simply would never have worked on us the way it did!"

Tchernikhowsky stoked his spirits with a
glazele
or two of vodka, and sometimes he would start to read those poems of his that overflowed with hilarity or sorrow and made everybody in the room melt with him and for him: his liberal ways, his flowing locks, his anarchic mustache, the girls he brought with him, who were not always too bright, and not even necessarily Jewish, but were always beauties who gladdened every eye and caused not a few tongues to wag and whetted the writers' envy—"I'm telling you as a woman (Grandma again), women are never wrong about such things, Bialik used to sit and stare at him like this ... and at the
goyish
girls he brought along ... Bialik would have given an entire year of his life if only he could have lived for a month as Tchernikhowsky!"

Arguments raged about the revival of the Hebrew language and literature, the limits of innovation, the connection between the Jewish cultural heritage and that of the nations, the Bundists, the Yiddishists (Uncle Joseph, in polemical vein, called Yiddish
jargon
, and when he was calm he called it "Judeo-German"), the new agricultural settlements in Judaea and Galilee, and the old troubles of the Jewish farmers in Kherson or Kharkov, Knut Hamsun and Maupassant, the great powers and
Sozialismus
, women's rights and the agrarian question.

In 1921, four years after the October Revolution, after Odessa had changed hands several times in the bloody fighting between Whites and Reds, two or three years after my father finally changed from a girl to a boy, Grandma and Grandpa and their two sons fled the city for Vilna, which at that time was part of Poland (long before it became Vilnius in Lithuania).

Grandpa loathed the Communists. "Don't talk to me about the Bolsheviks," he used to grumble. "
Nu
, what, I knew them very well, even before they seized power, before they moved into the houses they stole from other people, before they dreamed of becoming
apparatchiks, yevseks, politruks
, and commissars. I can remember them when they were still hooligans, the
Unterwelt
of the harbor district in Odessa, hoodlums, bullies, pickpockets, drunkards, and pimps.
Nu
, what, they were nearly all Jews, Jews of a sort, what can you do. Only they were Jews from the simplest families—
nu
, what, families of fishmongers from the market, straight from the dredgings that clung to the bottom of the pot, that's what we used to say. Lenin and Trotsky—what Trotsky, which Trotsky, Leibele Bronstein, the crazy son of some
gonef
called Dovidl from Janowka—this riffraff they dressed up as revolutionaries,
nu
, what, with leather boots and revolvers in their belts, like a filthy sow in a silk dress. And that's how they went around the streets, arresting people, confiscating property, and anyone whose apartment or girlfriend they fancied,
pif-paf
, they murdered him.
Nu
, what, this whole filthy
khaliastra
(gang), Kameneff was really Rosenfeld, Maxim Litvinoff was Meir Wallich, Grigory Zinoviev was originally Apfelbaum, Karl Radek was Sobelsohn, Leiser Kaganovich was a cobbler, the son of a butcher.
Nu
, what, I suppose there were one or two
goyim
who went along with them, also
from the bottom of the pot, from the harbor, from the dredgings, they were riffraff,
nu
, what, riffraff with smelly socks."

He had not budged from this view of Communism and the Communists even fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A few days after the Israeli army conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Days' War, Grandpa suggested that the international community should now assist Israel in returning all the Arabs of the Levant "very respectfully, without harming a hair of their heads, without robbing them of a single chicken," to their historic homeland, which he called "Arabia Souadia": "Just the way we Jews are returning to our homeland, so they ought to go back honorably to their own home, to Arabia Souadia, where they came here from."

To cut the argument short, I inquired what he proposed doing if Russia attacked us, in a desire to spare their Arab allies the hardships of the journey back to Arabia.

His pink cheeks turned red with rage, he puffed himself up and roared:

"Russia?! What Russia do you mean?! There is no more Russia, bed-wetter! Russia doesn't exist! Are you talking about the Bolsheviks, maybe?
Nu
, what. I've known the Bolsheviks since they were pimping in the harbor district in Odessa. They're nothing but a gang of thieves and hooligans! Riffraff from the bottom of the pot! The whole of Bolshevism is just one gigantic bluff! Now that we've seen what wonderful Hebrew airplanes we have, and guns,
nu
, what, we ought to send these young lads and planes of ours across to Petersburg, two weeks there, two weeks back, then one decent bombing—what they've deserved from us a long time now—one big
phoosh
—and the whole of Bolshevism will fly away to hell there just like dirty cotton wool!"

"Are you suggesting Israel should bomb Leningrad, Grandpa? And for a world war to break out? Haven't you ever heard of atom bombs? Hydrogen bombs?"

"It's all in Jewish hands,
nu
, what, the Americans, the Bolsheviks, all these newfangled bombs of theirs are all in the hands of Jewish scientists, and they're bound to know what to do and what not to do."

"What about peace? Is there any way to bring peace?"

"Yes there is: we have to defeat all our enemies. We have to beat them up so they'll come and beg us for peace—and then,
nu
, what, of course we'll give it to them. Why should we deny it to them? After all, we are a peace-loving people. We even have such a commandment, to pursue peace
—nu
, what, so we'll pursue it as far as Baghdad if we have to, as far as Cairo even. Shouldn't we? How so?"

Bewildered, impoverished, censored, and terrified after the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the Red victory, the Hebrew writers and Zionist activists of Odessa scattered in every direction. Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, together with many of their friends, left for Palestine at the end of 1919 on board the
Ruslan
, whose arrival in the port of Jaffa announced the beginning of the Third Aliyah. Others fled from Odessa to Berlin, Lausanne, and America.

Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit with their two sons did not emigrate to Palestine—despite the Zionist passion that throbbed in Grandpa's Russian poems, the country still seemed to them too Asiatic, too primitive and backward, lacking in minimal standards of hygiene and elementary culture. So they went to Lithuania, which the Klausners, the parents of Grandpa, Uncle Joseph, and Uncle Betsalel, had left more than twenty-five years earlier. Vilna was still under Polish rule, and the violent anti-Semitism that had always existed there was growing by the year. Poland and Lithuania were in the grip of nationalism and xenophobia. To the conquered and subdued Lithuanians the large Jewish minority appeared as the agent of the oppressive regimes. Across the border, Germany was in the grip of the new, cold-blooded, murderous Nazi brand of Jew hatred.

In Vilna, too, Grandpa was a businessman. He did not set his sights high; he bought a little here and sold a little there, and in between he sometimes made some money, and he sent his two sons first to Hebrew school and then to the classical gymnasium. The brothers David and Arieh, otherwise known as Zyuzia and Lonia, had brought three languages with them from Odessa: at home they had spoken Russian and Yiddish, in the street Russian, and at the Zionist kindergarten they had learned to speak Hebrew. Here, in the classical gymnasium in Vilna, they added Greek and Latin, Polish, German, and French. Later, in the European literature department at the university, English and Italian were added to the list, and in the Semitic philology department my father also learned Arabic, Aramaic, and cuneiform writing. Uncle David soon got a teaching job in literature, and my father, Yehuda Arieh, who took his first degree at Vilna University in 1932, was hoping to follow in his footsteps, but the anti-Semitism by now had become unbearable. Jewish students had to endure humiliation, blows, discrimination, and sadistic abuse.