by Amos Oz
For years we had a regular arrangement for a telephone link with the family in Tel Aviv. We used to phone them every three or four months, even though we didn't have a phone and neither did they. First we would write to Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi to let them know that on, say, the nineteenth of the month—which was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays Tsvi left his work at the Health Clinic at three—we would phone from our pharmacy to their pharmacy at five. The letter was sent well in advance, and then we waited for a reply. In their letter, Auntie Hayya and Uncle Tsvi assured us that Wednesday the nineteenth suited them perfectly, and they would be waiting at the pharmacy a little before five, and not to worry if we didn't manage to phone at five on the dot, they wouldn't run away.
I don't remember whether we put on our best clothes for the expedition to the pharmacy, for the phone call to Tel Aviv, but it wouldn't surprise me if we did. It was a solemn undertaking. As early as the Sunday before, my father would say to my mother, Fania, you haven't forgotten that this is the week that we're phoning Tel Aviv? On Monday my mother would say, Arieh, don't be late home the day after tomorrow, don't mess things up. And on Tuesday they would both say to me, Amos, just don't make any surprises for us, you hear, just don't be ill, you hear, don't catch cold or fall over until after tomorrow afternoon. And that evening they would say to me, Go to sleep early, so you'll be in good shape for the phone call, we don't want you to sound as though you haven't been eating properly.
So they would build up the excitement. We lived in Amos Street, and the pharmacy was a five-minute walk away, in Zephaniah Street, but by three o'clock my father would say to my mother:
"Don't start anything new now, so you won't be in a rush."
"I'm perfectly OK, but what about you with your books, you might forget all about it."
"Me? Forget? I'm looking at the clock every few minutes. And Amos will remind me."
Here I am, just five or six years old, and already I have to assume a historic responsibility. I didn't have a watch—how could I?—and so every few moments I ran to the kitchen to see what the clock said, and then I would announce, like the countdown to a spaceship launch: twenty-five minutes to go, twenty minutes to go, fifteen to go, ten and a half to go—and at that point we would get up, lock the front door carefully, and set off, the three of us, turn left as far as Mr. Auster's grocery shop, then right into Zechariah Street, left into Malachi Street, right into Zephaniah Street, and straight into the pharmacy to announce:
"Good afternoon to you, Mr. Heinemann, how are you? We've come to phone."
He knew perfectly well, of course, that on Wednesday we would be coming to phone our relatives in Tel Aviv, and he knew that Tsvi worked at the Health Clinic, and that Hayya had an important job in the Working Women's League, and that Yigal was going to grow up to be a sportsman, and that they were good friends of Golda Meyerson (who later became Golda Meir) and of Misha Kolodny, who was known as Moshe Kol over here, but still we reminded him: "We've come to phone our relatives in Tel Aviv." Mr. Heinemann would say: "Yes, of course, please take a seat." Then he would tell us his usual telephone joke. "Once, at the Zionist Congress in Zurich, terrible roaring sounds were suddenly heard from a side room. Berl Locker asked Harzfeld what was going on, and Harzfeld explained that it was Comrade Rubashov speaking to Ben Gurion in Jerusalem. 'Speaking to Jerusalem,' exclaimed Berl Locker, 'so why doesn't he use the telephone?' "
Father would say: "I'll dial now." And Mother said: "It's too soon, Arieh. There's still a few minutes to go." He would reply: "Yes, but they have to be put through" (there was no direct dialing at that time). Mother: "Yes, but what if for once we are put through right away, and they're not there yet?" Father replied: "In that case we shall simply try again later." Mother: "No, they'll worry, they'll think they've missed us."
While they were still arguing, suddenly it was almost five o'clock. Father picked up the receiver, standing up to do so, and said to the operator: "Good afternoon, Madam. Would you please give me Tel Aviv 648." (Or something like that: we were still living in a three-digit world). Sometimes the operator would answer: "Would you please wait a few minutes, Sir, the Postmaster is on the line." Or Mr. Sitton. Or Mr. Nashashibi. And we felt quite nervous: whatever would they think of us?
I could visualize this single line that connected Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and via Tel Aviv the rest of the world. If this one line was engaged, we were cut off from the world. The line wound its way over wastelands and rocks, over hills and valleys, and I thought it was a great miracle. I trembled: what if wild animals came in the night and bit through the line? Or if wicked Arabs cut it? Or if the rain got into it? Or if there was a fire? Who could tell? There was this line winding along, so vulnerable, unguarded, baking in the sun, who could tell? I felt full of gratitude to the men who had put up this line, so brave-hearted, so dexterous, it's not easy to put up a line from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. I knew from experience: once we ran a wire from my room to Eliyahu Friedmann's room, only two houses and a garden away, and what a business it was, with the trees in the way, the neighbors, the shed, the wall, the steps, the bushes.
After waiting a while, Father decided that the Postmaster or Mr. Nashashibi must have finished talking, and so he picked up the receiver again and said to the operator: "Excuse me, Madam, I believe I asked to be put through to Tel Aviv 648" She would say: "I've got it written down, Sir. Please wait" (or "Please be patient"). Father would say: "I am waiting, Madam, naturally I am waiting, but there are people waiting at the other end too" This was his way of hinting to her politely that although we were indeed cultured people, there was a limit to our endurance. We were well brought up, but we weren't suckers. We were not to be led like sheep to the slaughter. That idea—that you could treat Jews any way you felt like—was over, once and for all.
Then all of a sudden the phone would ring in the pharmacy, and it was always such an exciting sound, such a magical moment, and the conversation went something like this:
"Hallo, Tsvi?"
"Speaking."
"It's Arieh here, in Jerusalem."
"Yes, Arieh, hallo, it's Tsvi here, how are you?"
"Everything is fine here. We're speaking from the pharmacy."
"So are we. What's new?"
"Nothing new here. How about at your end, Tsvi? Tell us how it's going."
"Everything is OK. Nothing special to report. We're all well."
"No news is good news. There's no news here either. We're all fine. How about you?"
"We're fine too."
"That's good. Now Fania wants to speak to you."
And then the same thing all over again. How are you? What's new? And then: "Now Amos wants to say a few words."
And that was the whole conversation. What's new? Good. Well, so let's speak again soon. It's good to hear from you. It's good to hear from you too. We'll write and set a time for the next call. We'll talk. Yes. Definitely. Soon. See you soon. Look after yourselves. All the best. You too.
But it was no joke: our lives hung by a thread. I realize now that they were not at all sure they would really talk again, this might be the last time, who knew what would happen, there could be riots, a pogrom, a blood bath, the Arabs might rise up and slaughter the lot of us, there might be a war, a terrible disaster, after all Hitler's tanks had almost reached our doorstep from two directions, North Africa and the Caucasus, who knew what else awaited us? This empty conversation was not really empty, it was just awkward.
What those telephone conversations reveal to me now is how hard it was for them—for everyone, not just my parents—to express private feelings. They had no difficulty at all expressing communal feelings—they were emotional people, and they knew how to talk. Oh, how they could talk! They were capable of conversing for hours on end in excited tones about Nietzsche, Stalin, Freud, Jabotinsky, giving it everything they had, shedding tears of pathos, arguing in a singsong, about colonialism, anti-Semitism, justice, the "agrarian question," the "woman question," "art versus life," but
the moment they tried to give voice to a private feeling, what came out was something tense, dry, even frightened, the result of generation upon generation of repression and negation. A double negation in fact, two sets of brakes, as bourgeois European manners reinforced the constraints of the religious Jewish community. Virtually everything was "forbidden" or "not done" or "not very nice."
Apart from which, there was a great lack of words: Hebrew was still not a natural enough language, it was certainly not an intimate language, and it was hard to know what would actually come out when you spoke it. They could never be certain that they would not utter something ridiculous, and ridicule was something they lived in fear of. They were scared to death of it. Even people like my parents who knew Hebrew well were not entirely its masters. They spoke it with a kind of obsession for accuracy. They frequently changed their minds, and reformulated something they had just said. Perhaps that is how a shortsighted driver feels, trying to find his way at night through a warren of side streets in a strange city in an unfamiliar car.
One Saturday a friend of my mother's came to visit us, a teacher by the name of Lilia Bar-Samkha. Whenever the visitor said in the course of the conversation that she had had a fright or that someone was in a frightful state, I burst out laughing. In everyday slang her word for "fright" meant "fart" No one else seemed to find it funny, or perhaps they were pretending not to. It was the same when my father spoke about the arms race, or raged against the decision of the NATO countries to rearm Germany as a deterrent to Stalin. He had no idea that his bookish word for "arm" meant "fuck" in current Hebrew slang.
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.
2
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.