A Tale of Love and Darkness (3 page)

As for my father, he glowered whenever I used the word "fix": an innocent enough word, I could never understand why it got on his nerves. He never explained of course, and it was impossible for me to ask. Years later I learned that before I was born, in the 1930s, if a woman got herself in a fix, it meant she was pregnant. "That night in the packing room he got her in a fix, and in the morning the so-and-so made out he didn't know her" So if I said that "Uri's sister was in a fix" about something, Father used to purse his lips and clench the base of his nose. Naturally he never explained—how could he?

In their private moments they never spoke Hebrew to each other. Perhaps in their most private moments they did not speak at all. They said nothing. Everything was overshadowed by the fear of appearing or sounding ridiculous.

OSTENSIBLY, IN
those days it was the pioneers who occupied the highest rung on the ladder of prestige. But the pioneers lived far from Jerusalem, in the Valleys, in Galilee, and in the wilderness on the shores of the Dead Sea. We admired their rugged, pensive silhouettes, poised between tractor and plowed earth, that were displayed on the posters of the Jewish National Fund.

On the next rung below the pioneers stood the "affiliated community," reading the socialist newspaper
Davar
in their T-shirts on summer verandas, members of the Histadrut, the Hagganah, and the Health Fund, men of khaki and contributors to the voluntary Community Chest fund, eaters of salad with an omelette and yogurt, devotees of self-restraint, responsibility, a solid way of life, homegrown produce, the working class, party discipline, and mild olives from the distinctive Tnuva jar,
Blue beneath and blue above, we'll build our land with love, with love!

Over against this established community stood the "unaffiliated," aka the terrorists, as well as the pious Jews of Meah Shearim, and the "Zion-hating," ultra-orthodox communists, together with a mixed rabble of eccentric intellectuals, careerists, and egocentric artists of the decadent-cosmopolitan type, along with all sorts of outcasts and individualists and dubious nihilists, German Jews who had not managed to recover from their Germanic ways, Anglophile snobs, wealthy Frenchified Levantines with what we considered the exaggerated manners of uppity butlers, and then the Yemenites, Georgians, North Africans, Kurds, and Salonicans, all of them definitely our brothers, all of them undoubtedly promising human material, but what could you do, they would need a huge amount of patience and effort.

Apart from all these, there were the refugees, the survivors, whom we generally treated with compassion and a certain revulsion: miserable wretches, was it our fault that they chose to sit and wait for Hitler instead
of coming here while there was still time? Why did they allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter instead of organizing and fighting back? And if only they'd stop nattering on in Yiddish, and stop telling us about all the things that were done to them over there, because that didn't reflect too well on them, or on us for that matter. Anyway, our faces here are turned toward the future, not the past, and if we do have to rake up the past, surely we have more than enough uplifting Hebrew history, from biblical times, and the Hasmoneans, there's no need to foul it up with this depressing Jewish history that's nothing but a bundle of troubles (they always used the Yiddish word
tsores,
with an expression of disgust on their faces, so the boy realizes that these
tsores
are a kind of sickness that belonged to them, not to us). Survivors like Mr. Licht, whom the local kids called Million
Kinder.
He rented a little hole-in-the-wall in Malachi Street where he slept on a mattress at night, and during the day he rolled up his bedding and ran a small business called Dry Cleaning and Steam Pressing. The corners of his mouth were always turned down in an expression of scorn or disgust. He used to sit in the doorway of his shop waiting for a customer, and whenever one of the neighborhood children went past, he would always spit to one side and hiss through his pursed lips: "A million
Kinder
they killed! Kiddies like you! Slaughtered them!" He did not say this sadly, but with hatred, with loathing, as though he were cursing us.

My parents did not have a clearly defined place on this scale between the pioneers and the tsores-mongers. They had one foot in the affiliated community (they belonged to the Health Fund and paid their dues to the Community Chest) and the other in the air. My father was close in his heart to the ideology of the unaffiliated, the breakaway New Zionist of Jabotinsky, although he was very far from their bombs and rifles. The most he did was put his knowledge of English at the service of the underground and contribute an occasional illegal and inflammatory leaflet about "perfidious Albion." My parents were attracted to the intelligentsia of Rehavia, but the pacifist ideals of Martin Buber's Brit Shalom—sentimental kinship between Jews and Arabs, total abandonment of the dream of a Hebrew state so that the Arabs would take pity on us and kindly allow us to live here at their feet—such ideals appeared to my parents as spineless appeasement, craven defeatism of the type that had characterized the centuries of Jewish Diaspora life.

My mother, who had studied at Prague University and graduated from the university in Jerusalem, gave private lessons to students who were preparing for the examinations in history or occasionally in literature. My father had a degree in literature from the University of Vilna (now Vilnius), and a second degree from the university at Mount Scopus, but he had no prospect of securing a teaching position in the Hebrew University at a time when the number of qualified experts in literature in Jerusalem far exceeded that of the students. To make matters worse, many of the lecturers had real degrees, gleaming diplomas from famous German universities, not like my father's shabby Polish-Jerusalemite qualification. He therefore settled for the post of librarian in the National Library on Mount Scopus, and sat up late at night writing his books about the Hebrew novella or the concise history of world literature. My father was a cultivated, well-mannered librarian, severe yet also rather shy, who wore a tie, round glasses, and a somewhat threadbare jacket. He bowed before his superiors, leaped to open doors for ladies, insisted firmly on his few rights, enthusiastically cited lines of poetry in ten languages, endeavored always to be pleasant and amusing, and endlessly repeated the same repertoire of jokes (which he referred to as "anecdotes" or "pleasantries"). These jokes generally came out rather labored: they were not so much specimens of living humor as a positive declaration of intent as regards our obligation to be entertaining in times of adversity.

Whenever my father found himself facing a pioneer in khaki, a revolutionary, an intellectual turned worker, he was thoroughly confused. Out in the world, in Vilna or Warsaw, it was perfectly clear how you addressed a proletarian. Everyone knew his place, although it was up to you to demonstrate clearly to this worker how democratic and uncon-descending you were. But here, in Jerusalem, everything was ambiguous. Not topsy-turvy, as in communist Russia, but simply ambiguous. On the one hand, my father definitely belonged to the middle class, albeit the slightly lower middle class; he was an educated man, the author of articles and books, the holder of a modest position in the National Library, while his interlocutor was a sweaty construction worker in overalls and heavy boots. On the other hand, this same worker was said
to have some sort of degree in chemistry, and he was also a committed pioneer, the salt of the earth, a hero of the Hebrew Revolution, a manual laborer, while Father considered himself—at least in his heart of hearts—to be a sort of rootless, shortsighted intellectual with two left hands. Something of a deserter from the battlefront where the homeland was being built.

Most of our neighbors were petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers, cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers, dispensers of private lessons, or dentists. They were not religious Jews; they went to synagogue only for Yom Kippur and occasionally for the procession at Simhat Torah, yet they lit candles on Friday night, to maintain some vestige of Jewishness and perhaps also as a precaution, to be on the safe side, you never know. They were all more or less well educated, but they were not entirely comfortable about it. They all had very definite views about the British Mandate, the future of Zionism, the working class, the cultural life of the land, Dühring's attack on Marx, the novels of Knut Hamsun, the Arab question, and women's rights. There were all sorts of thinkers and preachers, who called for the Orthodox Jewish ban on Spinoza to be lifted, for instance, or for a campaign to explain to the Palestinian Arabs that they were not really Arabs but the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or for a conclusive synthesis between the ideas of Kant and Hegel, the teachings of Tolstoy and Zionism, a synthesis that would give birth here in the Land of Israel to a wonderfully pure and healthy way of life, or for the promotion of goat's milk, or for an alliance with America and even with Stalin with the object of driving out the British, or for everyone to do some simple exercises every morning that would keep gloom at bay and purify the soul.

These neighbors, who would congregate in our little yard on Saturday afternoons to sip Russian tea, were almost all dislocated people. Whenever anyone needed to mend a fuse or change a washer or drill a hole in the wall, they would send for Baruch, the only man in the neighborhood who could work such magic, which was why he was dubbed Baruch Goldfingers. All the rest knew how to analyze, with fierce rhetoric, the importance for the Jewish people to return to a life of agriculture and manual labor: we have more intellectuals here than we need, they
declared, but what we are short of is plain manual laborers. But in our neighborhood, apart from Baruch Goldfingers, there was hardly a laborer to be seen. We didn't have any heavyweight intellectuals either. Everyone read a lot of newspapers, and everyone loved talking. Some may have been proficient at all sorts of things, others may have been sharp-witted, but most of them simply declaimed more or less what they had read in the papers or in myriad pamphlets and party manifestos.

As a child I could only dimly sense the gulf between their enthusiastic desire to reform the world and the way they fidgeted with the brims of their hats when they were offered a glass of tea, or the terrible embarrassment that reddened their cheeks when my mother bent over (just a little) to sugar their tea and her decorous neckline revealed a tiny bit more flesh than usual: the confusion of their fingers, which tried to curl into themselves and stop being fingers.

All this was straight out of Chekhov—and also gave me a feeling of provinciality: that there are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-paneled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffeehouses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river.

Nothing like this ever happened in our neighborhood. Things like this happened only over the hills and far away, in places where people live recklessly. In America, for instance, where people dig for gold, hold up mail trains, stampede herds of cattle across endless plains, and whoever kills the most Indians ends up getting the girl. That was the America we saw at the Edison Cinema: the pretty girl was the prize for the best shooter. What one did with such a prize I had not the faintest idea. If they had shown us in those films an America where the man who shot the most girls was rewarded with a good-looking Indian, I would simply have believed that that was the way it was. At any rate—in those far-off
worlds. In America, and in other wonderful places in my stamp album, in Paris, Alexandria, Rotterdam, Lugano, Biarritz, St. Moritz, places where godlike men fell in love, fought each other politely, lost, gave up the struggle, wandered off, sat drinking alone late at night at dimly lit bars in hotels on boulevards in rain-swept cities. And lived recklessly.

Even in those novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky that they were always arguing over, the heroes lived recklessly and died for love. Or for some exalted ideal. Or of consumption and a broken heart. Those suntanned pioneers too, on some hilltop in Galilee, lived recklessly. Nobody in our neighborhood ever died from consumption or unrequited love or idealism. They were anything but reckless. Not just my parents. Everyone.

We had an iron rule that one should never buy anything imported, anything foreign, if it was possible to buy a locally made equivalent. Still, when we went to Mr. Auster's grocery shop on the corner of Obadiah and Amos streets, we had to choose between kibbutz cheese, made by the Jewish cooperative Tnuva, and Arab cheese: did Arab cheese from the nearby village, Lifta, count as homemade or imported produce? Tricky. True, the Arab cheese was just a little cheaper. But if you bought Arab cheese, weren't you being a traitor to Zionism? Somewhere, in some kibbutz or moshav, in the Jezreel Valley or the hills of Galilee, an overworked pioneer girl was sitting, with tears in her eyes perhaps, packing this Hebrew cheese for us—how could we turn our backs on her and buy alien cheese? Did we have the heart? On the other hand, if we boycotted the produce of our Arab neighbors, we would be deepening and perpetuating the hatred between our two peoples. And we would be partly responsible for any blood that was shed, heaven forbid. Surely the humble Arab fellah, a simple, honest tiller of the soil, whose soul was still undefiled by the miasma of town life, was nothing more or less than the dusky brother of the simple, noble-hearted muzhik in the stories of Tolstoy! Could we be so heartless as to turn our backs on his rustic cheese? Could we be so cruel as to punish him? What for? Because the deceitful British and the corrupt effendis had set him against us? No. this time we would definitely buy the cheese from the Arab village, which incidentally really did taste better than the Tnuva cheese,
and cost a little less in the bargain. But still, on the third hand, what if the Arab cheese wasn't clean? Who knew what the dairies were like there? What if it turned out, too late, that their cheese was full of germs?