In the Land of Oz: A Tribute to

Rachel Korazim

I. In The 1

1. Thank God for His Daily Blessings 1

2. The Insult and the Fury 3 3. An Argument on Life and Death (A) 4

II. A Tale of Love and Darkness 6

4. Home – 6

5. Homeland – Vilna 7

6. Remaking the Home 9

7. Home in Hulda 11

III. The Same Sea 12

8. A Cat 12

9. Back in Bat Yam his Father Upbraids him 12 10. But his Mother Defends Him 12

11. No Butterflies and No Tortoise 13

12. Ditta Offers 16 13. and Words 17

CLP Summer 2019 I. In The Land of Israel

1. Thank God for His Daily Blessings

IN THE GEULAH QUARTER of Jerusalem, on Rabbi Meir Street, imprinted on one of the metal sewer covers is the English inscription “City of Westminster”—a reminder of the British Mandate in Palestine. The grocery store that was here forty years ago is still here. A new man sits there and studies Scriptures. It is after the High Holy Days: in Geulah, in Achvah, in , and in , the tatters of the flimsy booths built for the Feast of Tabernacles are still visible in the yards. Their greenery has faded and turned gray. There is a chill in the air. From porch to porch, the entire width of the alleyways, stretch laundry lines with white and colored clothes: these are the eternal morning blossoms of the neighborhood in which I grew up. The Kings of Israel Street, which was once Geulah Street, throbs with pious Jews in black garb, bearded, bespectacled, chattering in Yiddish, tumultuous, in a hurry, scented with the heavy aroma of Eastern European Ashkenazi cooking.

------

During my childhood, Eastern European intellectuals and educated refugees from Germany and Austria used to live here side by side with the ultraorthodox. There were artisans here, and scholars, trade-union functionaries, National Religious Party hacks and dedicated Revisionists, clerks in the Mandatory government and workers in the Jewish Agency, members of the Haganah and the Irgun, youth from Betar and the United Socialist Movement and the Bnai Akiva, the religious youth movement, noted scholars, village fools, madmen burning with prophetic light, world reformers who would compose and dedicate to one another fiery brochures about the brutal realities of , or about how the Palestinian Arabs originated from the ancient Hebrews, or about the blessings of organic vegetarianism. Almost every man was a kind of messiah, eager to crucify his opponents and willing to be crucified for his own faith in turn. All of them have gone. Or changed their minds. Or pulled up their roots from here and gone to more moderate places. But they left behind them a vibrant Jewish shtetl. The potted plants so carefully nurtured by enthusiastic would-be farmers have long since died. The gardens and pigeon coops have gone to rubble. In the courtyards stand sheds of tin and plywood and piles of junk.

Yeshiva students, Hasidim, petty merchants have overflowed into this place from the Meah Shearim and the quarters, or bunched up here from Toronto, from New York, and from Belgium. They have many children. Most of the children, even the littlest ones, wear glasses. Yiddish is the language of the street. Zionism was here once and was repelled. Were it not for the stone, and the olive trees and the pines, were it not for that particular quality of light in Jerusalem, you might think you are standing in some Eastern European Jewish shtetl before Hitler. Eastern

1 European with perhaps a tinge of America, and a slight, remote echo from neighboring Israel. Next to “Photo Geulah, Especially for the Ultra-orthodox,” there is a notice board: “Performance tonight in the Convention Center by Mordecai Ben David Werdiger and the Diaspora Yeshiva Band. Tickets at the Bookshop, Beer Books. Special discounts for groups. Proceeds to be donated for Torah education in Jerusalem.” Someone has defaced the notice with tar and scrawled the words “Criminals of Israel,” painting, for added emphasis, a fat swastika. The explanation apparently lies in another notice, on a stone wall nearby: Rabbi Yisrael Yaakov Kravesky proclaims, “A clarion call to shun ugliness and anything resembling it, with regard to community singing, men and women together, in the guise of holiness and piety, which leads to the pitfalls of levity and immodesty, heaven forbid. Even if it were guaranteed to be arranged in a kosher way, they still err, for now that the Temple is destroyed, because of our many transgressions, it is forbidden to sing, especially in gatherings with musical instruments. Rather, one may find joy only in those commandments prescribed by the Lord, Blessed be He, without the jesting and riotousness which are poison to the spirit in the garb of piety. May he who cares for his soul keep his distance.” In medieval prayer-book Hebrew, ancient hatreds simmer and bubble, controversies in the name of God entangled, as in days gone by, in enmities born from lust for authority and dominion: Mitnagdim versus Hasidim, the followers of one versus the followers of another, sect against sect, thundering wrath or sour cruelty draped with the robes of scholarship, keen and pious. The Orthodox Eastern European Jewish world continues as though nothing had happened, but the fathers of modern Hebrew literature, Mendele and Berdyczewsky, Bialik and Brenner and the others, would have banished this reality from the world around them and from within their souls. In an eruption of rebellion and loathing, they portrayed this world as a swamp, a heap of dead words and extinguished souls. They reviled it and at the same time immortalized it in their books. However, you cannot afford to loathe this reality, because between then and now it was choked and burned, exterminated by Hitler. Nor can you even afford yourself a measure of secret admiration for the incredible vitality of this Judaism, for as it grows and swells, it threatens your own spiritual existence and eats away at the roots of your own world, prepared to inherit it all when you and your kind have gone.

Through a ground-floor window an old man can be seen, swaying in his chair before an open book. Jerusalem’s autumn light is kept outside: his room is dim. He turns his head, looks at you without seeing you—wanting, perhaps, not to see you. An old woman fills his glass with tea from a sooty kettle and disappears into the darkness. You do not permit yourself to hate them but you cannot avoid detesting them. Bialik’s poem “As I Come Back” begins, “Again this worn old man / shriveled wrinkled face / dry straw shadow, a leaf which bobs apace / weaving, bobbing over his books,” and continues, “As ever stretched in darkness / spider webs are molten / full of flies, full of death / are swollen” and ends, “Eternally unchanged / aged, old, forever stagnant / I come, my brothers, one with you / and stinking souls, let’s rot to fragments.” I turn to escape, almost

2 like a claustrophobic. Here in northwestern Jerusalem everything remains almost as it was. Enlightenment and assimilation, the , the murder of Europe’s Jews, and the establishment of the State of Israel seem swallowed up, covered over by the growth of this Judaism, fierce and tropical, like some primeval jungle.

2. The Insult and the Fury

I sit down at a café that has four or five tables outside, by the square. Young men drinking beer. Someone reading an afternoon newspaper. Several people discussing sports events. One turns to me and asks if I have come to look into “Project Build-Your-Own-Home.” Without waiting for my answer, he says, “What do you want to live in Bet Shemesh for? Forget it. This place is a dump and will always be a dump.” Why a dump? “There’s nothing here: people work, eat, watch TV, go to sleep; that’s it. And on the Sabbath they chew sunflower seeds.” Another man, a local patriot perhaps, differs: “And what do you think Tel Aviv is today? America? In Tel Aviv, everybody watches TV and goes to sleep, too. And, actually, what do they do in America today? TV and bed. The whole world’s like that these days. You from Nature Preservation?” Why? “I just thought. . . you sort of look like that. I once worked for Nature Preservation.” Someone else comments acidly, “One thing’s for sure: this here is an Alignment type.” I ask if there aren’t any Alignment supporters in Bet Shemesh. “There are a few left—living on handouts from the Labor Party. And there are a lot in Givat Sharett. [Givat Sharett evokes an expression of disgust.] But most of us know exactly what Shimon Peres is, and we can tell those kibbutzniks by their faces.” I try cautiously, “Is there such a thing as a Likud face, too?” Now the table erupts, as five or six men talk at once, their faces distorted by hatred. One voice, of scathing ridicule, is heard over the rest. “A Likud face? Sure—black, a delinquent, Khomeini. A punk. Violent. That’s what Shimon Peres [he pronounces it” Peretz"] called us at his rally, before the elections. You must have heard. Saw they were heckling him a little and went crazy. He began to flip out deliberately, so they would heckle him some more and it would appear on TV, to scare the Ashkenazim so they’d run and vote for him and hooligans like us wouldn’t be on top.” At this point, a young man with delicate features intervenes. Using logic, restraint, and moderation, he presents me with a question of principle. “Tell me, what’s your honest opinion of a guy who flips out because of a couple of pranksters shouting ‘Begin, Begin,’ and right then and there starts cursing out the audience? Can a guy like that be prime minister? That’s a leader? Can’t take the pressure. Breaks down right away. Almost began to cry. Believe me, the guy had tears in his eyes. And he started to call the audience names—Khomeinis, hooligans. How’s this guy going to stand up to the Arabs? How’s he going to stand up to the world? How?” Another man, his head covered with a skullcap, adds emphasis to the question with a contrasting example: “Look at Begin in the Knesset. As soon as he starts to speak, they start shouting at him from the floor, worse than Bet Shemesh. Rakach and the Arabs and Yossi Sarid and all those. And Begin stands there quietly, looking at them like a

3 father, letting them spill it all out, then destroys them with one joke and continues talking. That’s the way a leader acts. This Peretz is uptight. He’s got no guts. And he’s changed his mind maybe twenty times. They say, maybe you heard, that when Golda was alive Peretz wanted to join the Likud but Begin wouldn’t have him. Maybe that’s where his hatred comes from.” A man of about forty-five, fat and balding, approaches the table and bursts out angrily: “What are you talking to him for, anyway? Don’t you know who this is? Didn’t you see him on television?” There is a small embarrassed silence. Then, loudly, they begin to try to identify me: From the newspaper? From the Knesset? From the Communists? This isn’t Peace Now, is it? Are you a writer? Aren’t you from Kibbutz Hulda? Amos Kenan? Dan Ben-Amos? Oz? Sure, we recognize you. What did you come for? To write an article on Bet Shemesh? To make propaganda for the Alignment? And then to smear us? Within a few minutes, about twenty young men have gathered around the table. They order a cold drink for me. They order coffee. They ask my word of honor that I will write the “truth.” That I won’t write at all. That I will sit in silence and listen to what troubles them. That I will tell my “friends among the writers and from television” what people in Bet Shemesh think. That I mustn’t think I have any idea what Bet Shemesh is really about. Not one of them asks me to leave. On the contrary: “You should know that we don’t hold grudges. We won’t get even with you for what you said on TV against Begin and against the country.”

Oz, Amos. In the Land of Israel (pp. 29-30). Mariner Books. Kindle Edition.

3. An Argument on Life and Death (A)

Yisrael Harel, chairman of the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and editor of its newspaper, Nekuda, is a journalist by profession, a graduate of Bnai Akiva, the religious youth movement, and one of the central activists in Gush Emunim. He arrived in Ofra with his family a year and a half after the founders. Yisrael is an agreeable man, reflective, soft- spoken, a receptive listener. In the last few months, he says, since the evacuation of Yammit and the war in Lebanon, positions have polarized. The faith of those who believe in the path of Gush Emunim has been strengthened. The conviction of its opponents has deepened. Gush Emunim, Yisrael maintains, was born out of a deep residue of inferiority feelings among religious Zionist youth, accumulated over many years, toward the socialist Zionist movement’s “Land of Israel.” The nationalist religious camp used to be essentially an imitation of the Labor movement. It was only with the first breach by the students from Rabbi Kook’s yeshiva in Jerusalem that a new style, a new outlook, even a new fashion were born. And the frustrated spiritual energies that had been dwarfed by the kibbutzim and the leftist youth movements found independent channels only after the Six-Day War, “when portions of the Land of Israel were liberated.” Since the Six-Day War, if not before then, Yisrael Harel posits, an “eclipse” has descended on the Labor movement: it has been gnawed at by vacillation, doubt, weakness, perhaps by its own feelings of

4 guilt at the victory, and, in short, the spirit expressed in The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk, which was published immediately after that war. Into the spiritual vacuum entered fiery, enthusiastic graduates of Bnai Akiva and disciples of Rabbi Kook’s yeshiva. They had no doubts, from the moment the Six-Day War ended, about what had to be done in the “liberated Land of Israel.” And they were, indeed, the spearhead of fulfillment in the liberated territories, sweeping others along after them. But in recent months, as a result of the destruction of the Yammit region and the war in Lebanon, the “dovish left” again finds itself on the offensive, while Gush Emunim and its followers have been pushed into a defensive position. “How shall I put it . . . there is a sort of weight upon us, a fear that the price for what we did in Lebanon will be paid in Judea and Samaria. Our leftist opponents apparently feel it, too, and that’s why they have opened a general assault. Only a few of us understood properly what the chief of staff said about the war in Lebanon (’This is a war over the Land of Israel!’). It was precisely the left who grasped it, perhaps subconsciously. And I, too, see it that way.” So, the situation forces the “faithful of the Land of Israel” to rally around Begin and Sharon, in spite of the open wound of the Yammit evacuation. “But there are more than a few doubts within our camp. They are not exclusive to the less determined in the National Religious Party. We have reached the time to take stock of our souls. And perhaps there is a need to establish a dialogue between the two sides of the barricades.” I ask Yisrael Harel where he thinks the major barricade stands in the Land of Israel right now. He is silent for a long while before he replies, “With a number of reservations, and only for the sake of brevity, I’ll put it this way: the major barricade is the one that divides the Jews from the Israelis. The Jews are those who want to live, to one degree or another, in accordance with the Bible. The Israelis pay lip service, maybe, to the heritage, but in essence they aspire to be a completely new people here, a satellite of Western culture. For many of those Israelis the Land of Israel is no more than a ”biographical accident.’ As it happens, they make a decent living here, but if they were offered a better job somewhere else, abroad, they’d simply pack up and move. Eretz Yisrael means very little to them. “I think that the positions of Gush Emunim really do constitute an irritating and alarming threat to the legitimacy of this secular, hedonistic ‘Israeli-ism.’ The existence of Gush Emunim disturbs your experience of modern Western existence, including permissiveness and pacifism and internationalism; it interferes with your attempt to ‘adjust’ our society to fashionable West-era values. You have been trapped by a multifaceted threat: First of all, in terms of Zionist fulfillment, you are no longer the pioneers. Second, you’ve been tangled up in a war you don’t really believe in. Third, what you view as injustice is being done to the Arabs in your name. “All of this becomes even more complicated, in your terms, because Begin has won two elections and you have been trounced. For those reasons you tend to confuse the spiritual struggle with settling political accounts, and spiritual poverty with the loss of power positions.

Oz, Amos. In the Land of Israel (p. 116). Mariner Books. Kindle Edition.

5 II. A Tale of Love and Darkness

4. Home – Jerusalem

I WAS BORN and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor flat. My parents slept on a sofa bed that filled their room almost from wall to wall when it was opened up each evening. Early every morning they used to shut away this bed deep into itself, hide the bedclothes in the chest underneath, turn the mattress over, press it all tight shut, and conceal the whole under a light grey cover, then scatter a few embroidered oriental cushions on top, so that all evidence of their night’s sleep disappeared. In this way their bedroom also served as study, library, dining room and living room. Opposite this room was my little green room, half taken up with a big-bellied wardrobe. A narrow, low passage, dark and slightly curved, like an escape tunnel from a prison, linked the little kitchenette and toilet to these two small rooms. A faint light-bulb imprisoned in an iron cage cast a gloomy half-light on this passage even during the daytime. At the front both rooms had just a single window, guarded by metal blinds, squinting to catch a glimpse of the view to the east but seeing only a dusty cypress tree and a low wall of roughly dressed stones. Through a tiny opening high up in their back walls the kitchenette and toilet peered out into a little prison yard, surrounded by high walls and paved in concrete, where a pale geranium planted in a rusty olive can was gradually dying for want of a single ray of sunlight. On the sills of these tiny openings we always kept jars of pickled gherkins and a stubborn cactus in a cracked vase that served as a flower pot. It was actually a basement flat, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbor, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbor, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, wintry hill, that never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the party walls there seeped constantly towards us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and dampness of this melancholy neighbor of ours. Consequently right through the summer there was always a hint of winter in our home.

Visitors would say: it’s always so pleasant here in a heatwave, so cool and fresh, really chilly, but how do you manage in the winter? Don’t the walls let in the damp? Don’t you find it depressing? * Books filled our home. My father could read in sixteen or seventeen languages, and could speak eleven (all with a Russian accent). My mother spoke four or five languages and read seven or eight. They conversed in Russian or Polish when they did not want me to understand. (Which was most of the time. When my mother referred to a stallion in Hebrew in my hearing my father rebuked her furiously in Russian: Shto s toboy?! Vidish malchik ryadom s nami! – What’s the matter with you? You can see the boy’s just there!) Out of cultural considerations they mostly read books in German or English, and they presumably dreamed in Yiddish. But the only

6 language they taught me was Hebrew. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent. On my parents’ scale of values, the more western something was the more cultured it was considered. For all that Tolstoy and Dostoevski were dear to their Russian souls, I suspect that Germany – despite Hitler – seemed to them more cultured than Russia or Poland, and France more so than Germany. England stood even higher on their scale than France. As for America, there they were not so sure: after all, it was a country where people shot at Indians, held up mail trains, chased gold and hunted girls. Europe for them was a forbidden promised land, a yearned-for landscape of belfries and squares paved with ancient flagstones, of trams and bridges and church spires, remote villages, spa towns, forests and snow-covered meadows. Words like ‘cottage’, ‘meadow’ or ‘goose-girl’ excited and seduced me all through my childhood. They had a sensual aroma of a genuine, cosy world, far from the dusty tin roofs, the urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, the parched hillsides of our Jerusalem, suffocating under the weight of white-hot summer. It was enough for me to whisper to myself ‘meadow’, and at once I could hear the lowing of cows with little bells tied round their necks, and the burbling of brooks. Closing my eyes I could see the barefoot goose-girl, whose sexiness brought me to tears before I knew about anything.

Oz, Amos. A Tale Of Love and Darkness (p. 2). Random House. Kindle Edition.

5. Homeland – Vilna

Their elder son, David, that committed and conscientious Europhile, stayed in Vilna. There, at a very early age, and despite being Jewish, he was appointed to a teaching position in literature at the University. He had no doubt set his heart on the glorious career of Uncle Joseph, just as my father did all his life. There in Vilna he would marry a young woman called Malka, and there, in 1938, his son Daniel would be born. I never saw this son, born a year and a half before me, nor have I ever managed to find a photograph of him. There are only some postcards and a few letters left, written in Polish by Aunt Malka (Macia). ‘10.2.39: The first night Danush slept from nine in the evening to six in the morning. He has no trouble sleeping at night. During the day he lies with his eyes open with his arms and legs in constant motion. Sometimes he screams . . .’ Little Daniel Klausner would live for less than three years. Soon they would come and kill him to protect ‘Europe’ from him, to prevent in advance Hitler’s ‘nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards . . . With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood . . . The final Jewish goal is denationalization . . . by the bastardisation of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest . . . with the secret . . . aim of ruining the . . . white race . . . If 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions . . . the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry.’1 But Uncle David thought

7 otherwise: he despised and dismissed such hateful views as these, refused to consider solemn Catholic antisemitism echoing among the stone vaults of high cathedrals, or coldly lethal Protestant antisemitism, German racialism, Austrian murderousness, Polish Jew-hatred, Lithuanian, Hungarian or French cruelty, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian and Croatian love of pogroms, Belgian, Dutch, British, Irish and Scandinavian mistrust of Jews. All these seemed to him an obscure relic of savage, ignorant aeons, remains of yesteryear, whose time was up. A specialist in comparative literature, for him the literatures of Europe were a spiritual homeland. He did not see why he should leave where he was and immigrate to Western Asia, a place that was strange and alien, just to please ignorant anti-Semites and narrow-minded nationalist thugs. So he stayed at his post, flying the flag of progress, culture, art, and spirit without frontiers, until the Nazis came to Vilna: culture-loving Jews, intellectuals and cosmopolitans were not to their taste, and so they murdered David, Malka and my little cousin Daniel, who was nicknamed Danush or Danushek; in a penultimate letter, dated 15.12.40, his parents wrote that ‘he has recently started walking . . . and he has an excellent memory’. Uncle David saw himself as a child of his time: a distinguished, multicultural, multi-lingual, fluent, enlightened European and a decidedly modern man. He despised prejudices and ethnic hatreds, and he was resolved never to give in to low-brow racialists, chauvinists, demagogues and benighted, prejudice-ridden anti- Semites, whose raucous voices promised ‘death to the Jews’ and barked at him from the walls: ‘Yids, go to Palestine!’ To Palestine? Definitely not: a man of his stamp would not take his young bride and infant son, defect from the front line and run away to hide from the violence of a noisy rabble in some drought-stricken Levantine province, where a few desperate Jews tried their hand at establishing a segregationist armed nationhood that, ironically, they had apparently learned from the worst of their foes. No, he would definitely stay here in Vilna, at his post, in one of the most vital forward trenches of that rational, broad-minded, tolerant and liberal European enlightenment that was now fighting for its existence against the waves of barbarism that were threatening to engulf it. Here he would stand, for he could do no other. To the end.

In 1947 the Tel Aviv publisher Joshua Chachik brought out my father’s first book, The Novella in Hebrew Literature, from its origins to the end of the Haskalah…. on a separate page, after the title page, my father dedicated his book to the memory of his brother David:

To my first teacher of literary history – My only brother David Whom I lost in the darkness of exile. Where art thou?

Oz, Amos. A Tale of Love and Darkness (pp. 101-102). Random House. Kindle Edition.

8 6. Remaking the Home

MY MOTHER WAS thirty-eight when she died. At the age I am today, I could be her father. After her funeral, my father and I stayed at home for several days. He did not go to work and I did not go to school. The door of the flat was open all day long. We received a constant flow of neighbors, acquaintances and relations. Kind neighbors volunteered to make sure there were soft drinks for all the visitors, and coffee, cakes and tea.

------

Even after the mourning period was over, when the flat was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked to one another. Except about the most essential things. The kitchen door is jammed. There Even after the mourning period was over, when the flat was finally empty and my father and I locked the door and were alone together, we hardly talked to one another. Except about the most essential things. The kitchen door is jammed. There was no post today. The bathroom’s free but there’s no toilet paper. We also avoided meeting each other’s eyes, as though we were ashamed of something we had both done that it would have been better if we hadn’t, and at the very least it would have been better if we could have been ashamed quietly without a partner who knew everything about you that you knew about him. We never talked about my mother. Not a single word. Or about ourselves. Or about anything that had the least thing to do with emotions. We talked about the Cold War. We talked about the assassination of King Abdullah and the threat of a second round of fighting. My father explained to me the difference between a symbol, a parable and an allegory, and the difference between a saga and a legend. He also gave me a clear and accurate account of the difference between Liberalism and Social Democracy……………………………………………………….

During the first weeks after the disaster the house went to the dogs. Neither my father nor I cleared away the left-over food from the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, we did not touch the dishes that we submerged in the murky water in the sink, until there were no clean ones left and we had to fish out a couple of plates, forks and knives, and rinse them under the tap, and after we had used them we put them back on the pile of dishes that was beginning to stink. The dustbin overflowed and smelt because neither of us wanted to empty it. We threw our clothes over the nearest chair, and if we needed a chair we simply threw anything that was on it to the floor, which was thick with books and papers and fruit peel and dirty handkerchiefs and yellowing newspapers. Grey coils of dust drifted around the floors. Even when the toilet was getting blocked, neither of us lifted a finger. Piles of dirty washing overflowed from the bathroom into the corridor, where it met a jumble of empty bottles, cardboard boxes, used envelopes and wrapping paper. (This was more or less how I described Fima’s flat in Fima.) And yet, in all the chaos, a deep mutual consideration prevailed in our silent home. My father finally gave up

9 insisting on my bedtime and left me to decide when to turn my light out. As for me, when I came home from school to the empty, neglected flat I made myself something simple to eat: a hardboiled egg, cheese, bread, vegetables, and some sardines or tuna from a tin. And I made a couple of slices of bread with egg and tomato for my father too, even though he had generally had something to eat earlier in the canteen at Terra Sancta. Despite the silence and the shame, Dad and I were close at that time, as we had been the previous winter, a year and a month before, when Mother’s condition took a turn for the worse and he and I were like a pair of stretcher- bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope. This time we were carrying each other.

………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Then one day my father made a furious assault on Mother’s drawers and her side of their wardrobe: the only things that survived his wrath were a few items that her sisters and parents had requested as keepsakes, via me, and in fact on one of my trips to Tel Aviv I took them with me in a cardboard box tied up with a stout length of cord. All the rest, dresses, skirts, shoes, underwear, notebooks, stockings, headscarves, neckerchiefs, and even envelopes full of photographs from her childhood, he stuffed into waterproof sacks that he had brought from the National Library. I accompanied him like a puppy from room to room and watched his frenzy of activity; I neither helped nor hindered him. Soundlessly I watched my father furiously pull out the drawer of her bedside table and empty all the contents, cheap jewelry, notebooks, pill-boxes, a book, a handkerchief, an eyeshade and some loose change, into one of his sacks. I did not say a word. And my mother’s powder compact and hairbrush and her toilet things and her toothbrush. Everything. I stood, hushed and terrified, leaning on the doorpost and watching my father tearing her blue dressing-gown off the hook in the bathroom with a ripping sound and cramming it into one of the sacks. Was this the way Christian neighbors stood and stared, aghast, not knowing their own hearts because of the conflicting emotions, as their Jewish neighbors were taken away by force and crammed into cattle trucks? Where he took the sacks, whether he gave it all away to the poor people in the transit camps or the victims of that winter’s floods, he never told me. By evening not a trace of her was left. But a year later, when my father’s new wife was settling in, a packet of six plain hairpins appeared, that had somehow managed to survive hidden for a whole year in the narrow gap between the bedside table and the side of the wardrobe. My father pursed his lips and threw this away too.

10 7. Home in Hulda

I WAS ABOUT fifteen when I went to Hulda, two and a half years after my mother’s death: a paleface among the suntanned, a skinny youth among well-built giants, a tireless chatterbox among the taciturn, a versifier among agricultural laborers. All my new classmates had a healthy mind in a healthy body, only I had a dreamy mind in an almost transparent body. Worse still: I was caught a couple of times sitting in out-of-the-way corners of the kibbutz trying to paint watercolors. Or hiding in the study room behind the newspaper room on the ground floor of Herzl House, scribbling away. A McCarthyite rumor soon went round that I was somehow connected to the Herut party that I had grown up in a Revisionist family and I was suspected of having obscure links with the hated demagogue Menachem Begin, the arch-enemy of the Labor Movement. In short: a twisted upbringing and irreparably screwed- up genes. The fact that I had come to Hulda because I had rebelled against my father and his family did not help me. I was not given credit for being a renegade from Herut, or for my helpless laughter during Begin’s speech at the Edison Auditorium: the brave little boy from ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, of all people, was suspected here in Hulda of being in the pay of the crooked tailors. In vain did I endeavor to excel in farm work and fail at school. In vain did I grill myself like a steak in my efforts to be as brown as the rest of them. In vain did I show myself in the Current Affairs Discussion Group to be the most socialist socialist in Hulda, if not in the entire working class. Nothing helped me: for them I was some kind of alien, and so my classmates harassed me pitilessly to make me give up my strange ways and become a normal person like them. Once they sent me off at the double to the cowshed without a torch in the middle of the night, to check and report back if any of the cows was on heat and required the urgent attention of the bull. Another time they put me down for the toilet-polishing rota. And yet another time I was sent to the children’s farm to sex the ducklings. Heaven forbid that I should ever forget where I had come from or have any misapprehensions about where I had landed up. As for me, I took it all with humility, because I knew that the process of getting Jerusalem out of my system and my pangs of re-birth rightly entailed suffering. I considered the practical jokes and the humiliation justified not because I was suffering from some inferiority complex but because I really was inferior. They, those solidly- built boys scorched by dust and sun and those proud-walking girls, were the salt of the earth, the lords of creation. As handsome as demigods, as beautiful as the nights in Canaan. All except for me. No one was taken in by my suntan: they all knew perfectly well – I knew it myself – that even when my skin was finally tanned a deep brown I would still be pale on the inside. Though I forced myself to learn how to lay irrigation hoses in the hayfields, drive a tractor, hit the target in the rifle range with the old Czech rifle, I had still not managed to change my spots: through all the camouflage nets I covered myself with you could still see that weak, soft-hearted, loquacious town boy, who fantasized and made up all sorts of strange stories that could never have happened and didn’t interest anyone here.

11 III. The Same Sea

8. A Cat

A CAT Not far from the sea, Mr Albert Danon lives in Amirim Street, alone. He is fond of olives and feta; a mild accountant, he lost his wife not long ago. Nadia Danon died one morning of ovarian cancer, leaving some clothes, a dressing table, some finely embroidered tablemats. Their only son, Enrico David, has gone off mountaineering in Tibet. Here in Bat Yam the summer morning is hot and clammy but on those mountains night is falling. Mist is swirling low in the ravines. A needle-sharp wind howls as though alive, and the fading light looks more and more like a nasty dream. At this point the track forks: one way is steep, the other gently sloping.

Not a trace on the map of the fork in the track. And as the evening darkens and the wind lashes him with sharp hailstones, Rico has to guess whether to take the shorter or the easier way down. Either way, Mr Danon will get up now and switch off his computer. He will go and stand by the window. Outside in the yard on the wall is a cat. It has spotted a lizard. It will not let go.

Oz, Amos. The Same Sea (p. 1). Random House. Kindle Edition.

9. Back in Bat Yam his Father Upbraids him

Rebellious son. Stubborn son. I am asleep but my heart is awake. My heart is awake and makes lament, The smell of my son is like the smell of a harlot. There is no peace for my bones on account of your wanderings. How long?

Oz, Amos. The Same Sea (p. 30). Random House. Kindle Edition.

10. But his Mother Defends Him

His mother says: My view is different. Wandering is fitting for those who have lost their way. Kiss the feet my son Of the woman Maria Whose womb, for an instant, returned you to mine.

12 Oz, Amos. The Same Sea (p. 31). Random House. Kindle Edition.

11. No Butterflies and No Tortoise

The forecast, that had promised a chance of snow on high ground, had not kept its promise. But Nadia, who had promised nothing, appeared at his door one Saturday morning, in a light-colored frock with a red scarf round her neck, Somewhere between a girl and a woman. Did I surprise you? Are you free? (Am I free? Oh, painfully free. His heart dissolved in bashful glee. Nadia. Has come. To visit. Me.) Albert was renting a room from a childless couple in old Bat Yam. They were away for the weekend. The flat was all his. He sat Nadia down on his bed and went to the kitchen to slice some black bread, and came back bearing a tray with a choice of feta or honey. He paced round the room, then returned to the kitchen, and chopped some tomatoes to make a salad so fine and well-seasoned as though this would convince her that he was right. He would not let her lift a finger to help him. He made an omelet. Put the kettle on. Like a man in his element. This surprised her, because previously whenever they went out together to a café or the cinema Albert had seemed so hesitant and unassertive. And now it emerged that at home he did precisely what he wanted, and what he wanted was to do everything himself. She touched his hand with her fingertip: thank you. It’s nice here. Coffee. Biscuits. But how do you start on love on a rainy Saturday morning like this, in a shabby room in old Bat Yam in the mid-Sixties? (In the headlines in the paper on the kitchen table Nasser threatened and Eshkol warned of the risk of escalation.) The light flickered. The room was small. Nadia sat.

13 Albert faced her. Neither of them knew how to begin. The would-be lover was a shy young man, who had only ever dreamed of sleeping with a woman. He dreaded yet wanted it; he wanted it but was deterred by a faint fear of bodily embarrassments. His would-be partner, a reserved divorcee, lived in a room on a roof, sewed for a living, her past was somewhat conventional. She was no hind and he was no young hart. How and with what do you begin to love? Nadia sat. Albert stood. Outside it was raining again, the rain getting heavier, of dull grey shutters along the empty wet street; hammering on overturned dustbins, polishing the panes in the tight-shut windows, pouring down on rooftops, on forests of aerials trembling in the freezing wind that beat on zinc tubs hanging on grilles of kitchen balconies. And the gutters grunted and choked like an old man sleeping fitfully. How do you start love now? Nadia stood. Albert sat. Through the wall from the next-door flat came the Saturday morning programme on the radio. A musical quiz. Nadia is here but where am I? He tried to tell her some news from the office, not to break the thread of the conversation. But the thread was no thread. She was waiting and he was waiting for whatever would come at the end of the thread. What would come? And who would make it come? She was embarrassed. So was he. He kept on and on trying to explain something in economics. Instead of words like credit side, debit side, Nadia heard, My sister, my bride. And when he spoke of bulls and bears she translated, You have doves’ eyes. While he was talking she reached for a cushion,

14 and Albert trembled because on the way the warmth of her breast touched his back. It’s up to me to overcome his fear. What would a really experienced woman do now in my place? She cut in: apparently, all of a sudden, she had a speck of dust in her eye. Or a fly. He bent over to get a good look. Now his face was close to her brow, she could clasp his temples with her hands, and at last lower his lips for a pleasing, teasing first kiss. Two weeks later, in her room on the roof, between two rainshowers, he asked for her hand. He did not say, Be my wife, but instead: If you’ll marry me then I’ll marry you. Because it was Nadia’s second marriage they had a small, intimate party, at her brother and sister-in-law’s home, with a handful of relations and a few friends, and the elderly couple in whose flat Albert lodged. After the ceremony and the party they took a taxi to the Sharon Hotel. Albert undid the straining hooks one by one down the back of her wedding dress. Then the bride turned out the light and they both undressed modestly, in total darkness, on opposite sides of the bed. They groped their way towards each other. She sensed she would have to teach him: after all I presumably know better than he does. It turned out however that shy Albert could teach her something she neither knew nor imagined: the broad, flowing surge of joy of one who was shy as long as the light was on but in the pitch dark was insatiable. In the dark he entered into his own element. No butterflies now and no tortoise at all, but like a hart panting for water or a swallow for its nest. His chest to her back, and belly to belly, horse and his rider and into every breach.

15 12. Ditta Offers

Give me five minutes to try to sort out this screwed-up business. People are constantly being ditched. Here in Greater Tel Aviv for example I bet the daily total of ditchings is not far short of the figure for burglaries. In New York the statistics must be even higher. Your mother killed herself and left you quite shattered. And haven’t you yourself ditched any number of women? Who in turn had ditched whoever they ditched in favor of you, and those ditched guys had certainly left some wounded Ditchinka lying on the battlefield. It’s all a chain reaction. OK, I’m not saying, I admit being ditched by your own parents is different, it bleeds for longer. Specially a mother. And you an only son. But how long for? Your whole life? The way I see it being in mourning for your mother for forty-five years is pretty ridiculous. It’s more than ridiculous: it’s insulting to other women. Your wife, for instance. Or your daughters. I find it a turn-off myself. Why don’t you try and see it my way for a moment: I’m twenty-six and you’ll soon be sixty, a middle-aged orphan who goes knocking on women’s doors and guess what he’s come to beg for. The fact that before my parents were even born your mother called you Amek isn’t a life sentence. It’s high time you gave her the push. Just the way she chucked you. Let her wander round her forests at night without you. Let her find herself some other sucker. It’s true it’s not easy to ditch your own mother, so why don’t you stick her in some other scene, not in a forest, let’s say in a lake: cast her as the Loch Ness monster, which as everyone knows may be down there or may not exist, but one thing is certain, whatever you see or think you see on the surface isn’t the monster, it’s just a hoax or an illusion.

Oz, Amos. The Same Sea (p. 134). Random House. Kindle Edition.

16 13. Jews and Words

At this early stage we need to say loud and clear what kind of Jews we are. Both of us are secular Jewish Israelis. This self-definition carries several significances. First, we do not believe in God. Second, Hebrew is our mother tongue. Third, our Jewish identity is not faith-powered. We have been reading Hebrew and non-Hebrew Jewish texts all our lives; they are our cultural and intellectual gateways to the world. Yet there is not a religious bone in our bodies. Fourth, we now live in a cultural climate—in the modern and secular part of Israeli society—that increasingly identifies Bible quoting, Talmudic reference, and even a mere interest in the Jewish past, as a politically colored inclination, at best atavistic, at worst nationalist and triumphalist. This current liberal withdrawal from most things Jewish has many reasons, some of them understandable; but it is misguided. What does secularism mean to Israeli Jews? Evidently more than it means to other modern nonbelievers. From nineteenth-century Haskalah thinkers to latter-day Hebrew authors, Jewish secularity has furnished an ever-growing bookshelf and an ever-expanding space for creative thought. Here is just one nutshell, from an essay titled “The Courage to Be Secular” by Yizhar Smilansky, the great Israeli writer who signed his books with the pseudonym Samech Yizhar: Secularism is not permissiveness, nor is it lawless chaos. It does not reject tradition, and it does not turn its back on culture, its impact and its successes. Such accusations are little more than cheap demagoguery. Secularism is a different understanding of man and the world, a non- religious understanding. Man may very well feel the need, from time to time, to search for God. The nature of that search is unimportant. There are no ready-made answers, or ready-made indulgences, pre-packaged and ready to use. And the answers themselves are traps: give up your freedom in order to gain tranquility. God’s name is tranquility. But the tranquility will dissipate and freedom will be wasted. What then? Self-conscious seculars seek not tranquility but intellectual restlessness, and love questions better than answers. To secular Jews like ourselves, the Hebrew Bible is a magnificent human creation. Solely human. We love it and we question it. Some modern archeologists tell us that the scriptural Israelite kingdom was an insignificant dwarf in terms of material culture. For example, the biblical portrayal of Solomon’s great edifices is a later political fabrication. Other scholars cast doubt on all manner of continuity between ancient Hebrews and present-day Jews. Perhaps this is what Amichai meant when he said we are “not even an archaeological people.” But each of these scholarly approaches, whether factually right or wrong, is simply irrelevant for readers like us. Our kind of Bible requires neither divine origin nor material proof, and our claim to it has nothing to do with our chromosomes. The Tanach, the Bible in its original Hebrew, is breathtaking. Do we “understand” it to the last syllable? Obviously not. Even proficient speakers of Modern Hebrew probably misconstrue the original meanings of many biblical words, because their role in our vocabulary differs significantly from what they stood for in Ancient Hebrew. Take this exquisite image from Psalms 104:17, “Wherein the birds ,To a present-day Israeli ear חֲסִידָ הבְּרֹושִ ים בֵּיתָ ּה ”.make their nests, hassida broshim beiyta

17 these three words mean “the stork makes its home in the cypress trees.” Makes you reflect, by the way, on the winsome frugality of Ancient Hebrew, which can often pull off a three-word phrase that requires three times that number in English translation. And how colorful and flavorful is each of the three words, all nouns, brimming with meaning! Anyway, back to our main point. You see, in Israel today storks don’t make their homes on cypresses. Storks very rarely nest here anyhow, and when they settle down in their thousands for a night’s rest en route to Europe or to Africa, those needle-shaped cypresses are not their obvious choice. So we must be getting it wrong; either the hassida is not a stork, or the brosh is not a cypress. Never mind. The phrase is lovely, and we know it is about a tree and a bird, part of a great praise for God’s creation, or—if you prefer—for the beauty of nature. Psalm 104 gives its Hebrew reader the broad imagery, the dense and fine-tuned delight that might be compared to the magic of a Walt Whitman poem. We don’t know whether it does the same in translation. The Bible is thus outliving its status as a holy writ. Its splendor as literature transcends both scientific dissection and devotional reading. It moves and excites in ways comparable to the great literary oeuvres, sometimes Homer, sometimes Shakespeare, sometimes Dostoevsky. But its historical leverage is different from that of these opuses. Granted that other great poems may have inaugurated religions, no other work of literature so effectively carved a legal codex, so convincingly laid out a social ethic. It is also, of course, a book that gave birth to innumerable other books. As though the Bible itself harked and heeded the command it attributes to God, “go forth and multiply.” So even if the scientists and critics are right, and ancient Israel erected no palaces and witnessed

Oz, Amos. Jews and Words (Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization) (pp. 4-6). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

18