by Amos Oz
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?
Germs were one of our worst nightmares. They were like anti-Semitism: you never actually managed to set eyes on an anti-Semite or a germ, but you knew very well that they were lying in wait for you on every side, out of sight. Actually, it was not true that none of us had ever set eyes on a germ: I had. I used to stare for a long time very intently at a piece of old cheese, until I suddenly began to see thousands of tiny squirming things. Like gravity in Jerusalem, which was much stronger then than now, the germs too were much bigger and stronger. I saw them.
A little argument used to break out among the customers in Mr. Auster's grocery shop: to buy or not to buy Arab cheese? On the one hand, "charity begins at home," so it was our duty to buy Tnuva cheese only; on the other hand, "one law shall there be for you and for the stranger in your midst," so we should sometimes buy the cheese of our Arab neighbors, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." And anyway, imagine the contempt with which Tolstoy would regard anyone who would buy one kind of cheese and not another simply because of a difference of religion, nationality, or race! What of universal values? Humanism? The brotherhood of man? And yet, how pathetic, how weak, how petty-minded, to buy Arab cheese simply because it cost a couple of mils less, instead of cheese made by the pioneers, who worked their backs off for our benefit!
Shame! Shame and disgrace! Either way, shame and disgrace!
The whole of life was full of such shame and disgrace.
Here was another typical dilemma: should one or should one not send flowers for a birthday? And if so, what flowers? Gladioli were very expensive, but they were cultured, aristocratic, sensitive flowers, not some sort of half-wild Asiatic weed. We could pick as many anemones and cyclamen as we liked, but they were not considered suitable for sending to someone for a birthday, or for the publication of a book. Gladioli conjured up recitals, grand parties, the theater, the ballet, culture—deep, fine feelings.
So we'd send gladioli. And hang the expense. But then the question was, wasn't seven overdoing it? And wasn't five too few? Perhaps six then? Or should we send seven after all? Hang the expense. We could surround the gladioli with a forest of asparagus fern, and get by with six. On the other hand, wasn't the whole thing outdated? Gladioli? Who on earth sends gladioli nowadays? In Galilee, do the pioneers send one another gladioli? In Tel Aviv, do people still bother with gladioli? And what are they good for anyway? They cost a fortune, and four or five days later they end up in the trash. So what shall we give instead? How about a box of chocolates? A box of chocolates? That's even more ridiculous than gladioli. Maybe the best idea would be simply to take some serviettes, or one of those sets of glass holders, curly ones made of silvery metal, with cute handles, for serving hot tea, an unostentatious gift that is both aesthetic and very practical and that won't get thrown away but will be used for many years, and each time they use them, they'll think, just for an instant, of us.
3
EVERYWHERE YOU could dis
cern all kinds of little emissaries of Europe, the promised land. For example, the manikins, I mean the little men who held the shutters open during the day, those little metal figures: when you wanted to close the shutters, you swiveled them around so that all night long they hung head down. The way they hung Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci at the end of the World War. It was terrible, it was scary, not the fact that they were hanged, they deserved that, but that they were hanged head down. I felt almost sorry for them, although I shouldn't: are you crazy or something? Feeling sorry for Mussolini? It's almost like feeling sorry for Hitler! But I tried an experiment, I hung upside down by my legs from a pipe attached to the wall, and after a couple of minutes all the blood rushed to my head and I felt I was going to faint. And Mussolini and his mistress were hung like that not for a couple of minutes but for three days and nights, and that was after they were killed! I thought that was an excessively cruel punishment. Even for a murderer. Even for a mistress.
Not that I had the faintest idea what a mistress was. In those days there wasn't a single mistress in all of Jerusalem. There were "companions," "partners," "lady friends, in both senses of the word," there may even have been the odd affair. It was said, very cautiously, for instance, that Mr. Tchernianski had something going on with Mr. Lupatin's girlfriend, and I sensed with a pounding in my heart that "something going on with" was a mysterious, fateful expression that concealed something sweet and terrible and shameful. But a mistress?! That was something altogether biblical. Something larger than life. It was unimaginable. Maybe in Tel Aviv things like that existed, I thought, they always have all sorts of things that don't exist or aren't allowed here.
I started to read almost on my own, when I was very young. What else did we have to do? The evenings were much longer then, because the earth revolved more slowly, because the galaxy was much more relaxed than it is today. The electric light was a pale yellow, and it was interrupted by the many power cuts. To this day the smell of smoky candles or a sooty paraffin lamp makes me want to read a book. By seven o'clock we were confined to our homes because of the curfew that the British imposed on Jerusalem. And even if there wasn't a curfew, who wanted to be out of doors in the dark at that time in Jerusalem? Everything was shut and shuttered, the cobblestone streets were deserted, every passing shadow in those narrow streets was trailed by three or four other shadows.
Even when there was no power cut, we always lived in dim light because it was important to economize: my parents replaced the forty-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watt ones, not just for economy but on principle, because a bright light is wasteful, and waste is immoral. Our tiny apartment was always crammed full with the sufferings of the whole human race. The starving children in India, for whose sake I had to finish everything that was put on my plate. The survivors of Hitler's hell whom the British had deported to detention camps in Cyprus. The ragged orphan children still wandering around the snowbound forests of devastated Europe. My father used to sit working at his desk till two in the morning by the light of an anemic twenty-five-watt bulb, straining his eyes because he didn't think it was right to use a stronger light: the pioneers in the kibbutzim in Galilee sit up in their tents night after night writing books of verse or philosophical treatises by the light of guttering candles, and how can you forget about them and sit there like Rothschild with a blazing forty-watt bulb? And what will the neighbors say if they see us suddenly lit up like a ballroom? He preferred to ruin his eyesight rather than draw the glances of others.
We were not among the poorest. Father's job at the National Library brought him a modest but regular salary. My mother gave some private lessons. I watered Mr. Cohen's garden in Tel Arza every Friday for a shilling, and on Wednesdays I earned another four piasters by putting empty bottles in crates behind Mr. Auster's grocery, and I also taught Mrs. Finster's son to read a map for two piasters a lesson (but this was on credit and to this day the Finsters have not paid me).
Despite all these sources of income, we never stopped economizing. Life in our little apartment resembled life in a submarine, as they showed it in a film I saw once at the Edison Cinema, where the sailors had to close a hatch behind them every time they went from one compartment to another. At the very moment I switched on the light in the toilet with one hand I switched off the light in the passage with the other, so as not to waste electricity. I pulled the chain gently, because it was wrong to empty the whole Niagara cistern for a pee. There were other functions (that we never named) that could occasionally justify a full flush. But for a pee? A whole Niagara? While pioneers in the Negev were saving the water they had brushed their teeth with to water the plants? While in the detention camps in Cyprus a whole family had to make a single bucket of water last for three days? When I left the toilet, I switched off the light with my left hand and simultaneously switched on the light in the passage with my right hand, because the Shoah was only yesterday, because there were still homeless Jews roaming the Carpathians and the Dolomites, languishing in the deportation camps and on board unseaworthy hulks, as thin as skeletons, dressed in rags, and because there was hardship and deprivation in other parts of the world too, the coolies in China, the cotton pickers in Mississippi, children in Africa, fishermen in Sicily. It was our duty not to be wasteful.
Apart from which, who could say what each day would bring? Our troubles were not yet over, and it was as good as certain that the worst was still to come. The Nazis might have been vanquished, but there were more pogroms in Poland, Hebrew speakers were being persecuted in Russia, and here the British had not yet said their last word, the Grand Mufti was talking about butchering the Jews, and who knew what the Arab states were planning for us, while the cynical world supported the Arabs from considerations of oil, markets, and other interests. It was not going to be easy for us, even I could see that.
The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: from wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and the entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment. I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on for ever. When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver.
If once or twice it happened that there was not enough money to buy food for Shabbat, my mother would look at Father, and Father would understand that the moment had come to make a sacrifice, and turn to the bookcase. He was an ethical man, and he knew that bread takes precedence over books and that the good of the child takes precedence over everything. I remember his hunched back as he walked through the doorway, on his way to Mr. Meyer's secondhand bookshop with two or three beloved tomes under his arm, looking as though it cut him to the quick. So must Abraham's back have been bowed as he set off early in the morning from his tent with Isaac on his shoulder, on their way to Mount Moriah.
I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.
Fa
ther would generally return an hour or two later, without the books, laden with brown paper bags containing bread, eggs, cheese, occasionally even a can of corned beef. But sometimes he would come back from the sacrifice with a broad smile on his face, without his beloved books but also without anything to eat: he had indeed sold his books, but had immediately bought other books to take their place, because he had found such wonderful treasures in the secondhand bookshop, the kind of opportunity you encounter only once in a lifetime, and he had been unable to control himself. My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweet corn and ice cream. I loathed omelettes and corned beef. To be honest, I was sometimes even jealous of those starving children in India, because nobody ever told them to finish up everything on their plate.
When I was about six, there was a great day in my life: Father cleared a small space for me in one of his bookcases and let me put my own books there. To be precise, he granted me about a quarter of the length of the bottom shelf. I hugged all my books, which up till then had lain on a stool by the side of my bed, carried them in my arms to Father's bookcase, and stood them up in the proper way, with their backs turned to the world outside and their faces to the wall.