by Amos Oz
The films that were shown every Wednesday in the hall at Herzl House or on a white cloth set up on the lawn outside the dining hall gave firm evidence that the big wide world was peopled mainly by men and women out of the pages of Hemingway or Knut Hamsun. The same picture emerged from the stories told by the red-bereted soldiers of the kibbutz who came home on weekend leave straight from reprisal raids by the famed Unit 101, strong, silent men resplendent in their paratroopers' uniforms, armed with Uzis, "clad in workaday garb, shod in heavy boots, and wet with the dew of Hebrew youth."
I almost gave up in despair: surely to write like Remarque or Hemingway you had to get out of here into the real world, go to places where men were as virile as a fist and women as tender as the night, where bridges spanned wide rivers and the evenings sparkled with the lights of bars where real life really happened. No one who lacked experience of that world could get even half a temporary permit to write stories or novels. The place of a real writer was not here but out there, in the big wide world. Until I got out and lived in a real place, there was not a hope that I could find anything to write about.
A real place: Paris, Madrid, New York, Monte Carlo, the African deserts, or the Scandinavian forests. In a pinch one could write about a country town in Russia or even a Jewish shtetl in Galicia. But here, in the kibbutz, what was there? A hen house, a barn, children's houses, committees, duty rosters, the small supplies store. Tired men and women who got up early every morning for work, argued, showered, drank tea, read a little in bed, and fell asleep exhausted before ten o'clock. Even in Kerem Avraham where I came from there did not seem to be anything worth writing about. What was there there, apart from dull people leading gray, tawdry lives? Rather like here in Hulda. I had even missed the War of Independence: I was born too late to get more than a few miserable crumbs, filling sandbags, collecting empty bottles, running with messages from the local Civil Defense post to the lookout post on the Slonimskys' roof and back.
True, in the kibbutz library I did discover two or three virile novelists who managed to write almost Hemingway-like stories about kibbutz life: Natan Shaham, Yigal Mossensohn, Moshe Shamir. But they belonged to the generation that had smuggled in immigrants and arms, blown up British headquarters, and repelled the Arab armies; their stories seemed to me swathed in mists of brandy and cigarettes and the smell of gunpowder. And they all lived in Tel Aviv, which was more or less connected to the real world, a city with cafés where young artists sat over a glass of liquor, a city with cabarets, scandals, theaters, and a bohemian life full of forbidden love and helpless passion. Not like Jerusalem or Hulda.
Who had ever seen brandy in Hulda? Who had ever heard of daring women or sublime love here?
If I wanted to write like those writers, I first had to get to London or Milan. But how? Simple farmers from kibbutzim did not suddenly go off to London or Milan to draw inspiration for creative writing. If I wanted to have a chance to get to Paris or Rome, I first had to be famous, I had to write a successful book like one of those writers. But before I could write the successful book, I first had to live in London or New York. A vicious circle.
It was Sherwood Anderson who got me out of the vicious circle and "freed my writing hand." I shall always be grateful to him.
In September 1959 the Popular Library of Am Oved Publishing House brought out a Hebrew translation of Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio by Aharon Amir. Before I read this book, I did not know that Winesburg existed and I had never heard of Ohio. Or I may have remembered it vaguely from Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Then this modest book appeared and excited me to the bone: for nearly a whole summer night until half past three in the morning I walked the paths of the kibbutz like a drunken man, talking to myself, trembling like a lovesick swain, singing and skipping, sobbing with awestruck joy and ecstasy: eureka!
At half past three in the morning I put on my work clothes and boots, ran to the tractor shed from which we set out for a field called Mansura to weed the cotton, snatched a hoe from the pile, and till noon I charged along the rows of cotton plants, racing ahead of the others as though I had sprouted wings, dizzy with happiness, running and hoeing and bellowing, running and hoeing and lecturing myself and the hills and the breeze, hoeing and making vows, running, excited and tearful.
The whole of Winesburg, Ohio was a string of stories and episodes that grew out of each other and were connected to each other, particularly because they all took place in a single, poor, godforsaken provincial town. It was filled with small-time people: an old carpenter, an absent-minded young man, some hotel owner, and a servant girl. The stories were also connected to each other because the characters slipped from story to story: what had been central characters in one story reappeared as secondary, background characters in another.
The stories in Winesburg, Ohio all revolved around trivial, everyday happenings, based on snatches of local gossip or on unfulfilled dreams. An old carpenter and an old writer discuss the raising of some bed, while a dreamy young man by the name of George Willard who works as a cub reporter on the local rag overhears their conversation and thinks his own thoughts. And there is an eccentric old man named Bid-dlebaum, nicknamed Wing Biddlebaum. And a tall dark-haired woman who for some reason marries a man called Doctor Reefy, but dies a year later. Then there is Abner Groff, the town baker, and Doctor Parcival, a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache, who always wears a dirty white vest out of the pockets of which protrudes a number of black cigars known as stogies, and other similar characters, types who until that night I had supposed had no place in literature, unless it was as background characters who afforded readers at most half a minute of mockery mixed with pity. And here, in Winesburg, Ohio, events and people that I was certain were far beneath the dignity of literature, below its acceptability threshold, occupied center stage. There was nothing daring about Sherwood Anderson's women, they were not mysterious temptresses. And his men were not strong, silent types swathed in cigarette smoke and manly grief.
So Sherwood Anderson's stories brought back what I had put behind me when I left Jerusalem, or rather the ground that my feet had trodden all through my childhood and that I had never bothered to bend down and touch. The tawdriness of my parents' life. The faint smell of flour-and-water paste and pickled herring that always wafted around the Krochmals, the couple who mended broken toys and dolls. Teacher Zelda's dingy brown apartment with its peeling veneer cabinet. Mr. Zarchi the writer with a heart complaint, and his wife, who suffered from perpetual migraines. Zerta Abramski's sooty kitchen, and the two birds that Staszek and Mala Rudnicki kept in a cage, the old bald one and the other one made out of a pinecone. And Teacher Isabella Nahlieli's houseful of cats, and her husband Getsel, the open-mouthed cashier in the cooperative shop. And Stakh, Grandma Shlomit's mournful old dog with the melancholy button eyes that they used to stuff full of mothballs and beat cruelly to get rid of the dust, until one day they didn't want him anymore and they wrapped him in old newspaper and threw him in the garbage.
I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Mai-monides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.
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br /> Here too, in Kibbutz Hulda, there lived a cowman who was an expert on the anarchist movement in Russia, a teacher who was once put in eighty-fourth place on the list of Labor candidates for the elections to the Second Knesset, and a good-looking needlewoman who was fond of classical music and spent her evenings drawing the landscape of her native village in Bessarabia as she remembered it from before the village was destroyed. There was also an aging bachelor who enjoyed sitting on a bench on his own in the cool of the evening staring at little girls, a truck driver with a pleasant baritone voice who secretly dreamed of being an opera singer, a pair of fiery ideologues who had heaped scorn and contempt on each other, verbally and in print, for the past twenty-five years, a woman who had been the prettiest girl in her class back in Poland and had even appeared once in a silent film, but now sat on a rough stool behind the food store every day in a stained apron, fat, red-faced, and uncared-for, peeling huge piles of vegetables and occasionally wiping her face with her apron—a tear, perspiration, or both.
Winesburg, Ohio taught me what the world according to Chekhov was like even before I encountered Chekhov himself: no longer the world of Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Knut Hamsun, or that of Hemingway or Yigal Mossensohn. No more mysterious women on bridges or men with their collars turned up in smoky bars.
This modest book hit me like a Copernican revolution in reverse. Whereas Copernicus showed that our world is not the center of the universe but just one planet among others in the solar system, Sherwood Anderson opened my eyes to write about what was around me. Thanks to him I suddenly realized that the written world does not depend on Milan or London but always revolves around the hand that is writing, wherever it happens to be writing: where you are is the center of the universe.*
And so I chose myself a corner table in the deserted study room, and here every evening I opened my brown school exercise book on which was printed "utility" and also "forty pages." Next to it I laid out a ballpoint pen called Globus, a pencil with a rubber tip, printed with the name of the trade-union retail outlets, and a beige plastic cup of tap water.
And this was the center of the universe.
*Years later I managed to repay a few pence of my debt. In America the wonderful Sherwood Anderson, friend and contemporary of William Faulkner, was almost forgotten; only in a handful of English departments were his stories still twitching with life. Then one day I received a letter from his publishers (Norton), who were reissuing a collection of his stories, titled Death in the Woods and Other Stories, and had heard that I was an admirer: would I kindly write a couple of lines of praise for the back cover of the book? I felt like a humble fiddle player in a restaurant who is suddenly asked if he would let his name be used to promote the music of Bach.
In the newspaper room, on the other side of the thin wall, Moishe Kalker, Alyoshka, and Alec are having a furious argument about Moshe Dayan's speech, which has "thrown a stone through the window of the fifth floor" in the Trade Union Building, where the Central Committee meets. Three men, none of them good-looking or young anymore, arguing among themselves in the singsong tones of yeshiva students. Alec, a vigorous, energetic man, always tries to play the part of the good sport who likes plain talking. His wife, Zushka, is not well, but he mostly spends his evenings with the single men. He is vainly attempting to interpose a sentence between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker: "Just a moment, you've both got it wrong," or: "Give me just a minute to tell you something that will resolve your dispute."
Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker are both bachelors, and they have opposing views about almost everything, despite which they are hardly ever apart in the evening: they always eat together in the dining hall, take a stroll together afterward, and go to the newspaper room together. Alyoshka, who is as shy as a little boy, is a modest, good-natured man with a smiling round face, but his puzzled eyes are always downcast as though his life itself is something shameful. But when he is arguing, he sometimes heats up and starts flashing sparks, and his eyes almost start out of their sockets. Then his gentle childlike face looks not so much angry as panicky and offended, as though it is his own views that humiliate him.
Moishe Kalker, the electrician, on the other hand, is a thin, wry, sardonic man, and when he is arguing, he screws up his face and gives you an almost salacious wink, he smiles at you with a mischievous, self-satisfied air and winks again with Mephistophelian glee, as if he finally discovered what he has been searching for all these years, the whereabouts of some quagmire that you have managed to hide from the world but that you cannot conceal from those eyes of his, which pierce your disguises and take pleasure in the very swamp they have uncovered inside you: everyone thinks of you as such a reasonable, respectable man, such a positive figure, but both of us know the unsavory truth, even though most of the time you manage to hide it under seventy-seven veils. I can see through everything, chum, including your vile nature, everything is exposed to my gaze and I take nothing but pleasure in it.
Alec gently tries to quell the argument between Alyoshka and Moishe Kalker, but the two opponents gang up on him and both shout at him, because in their view he has not even begun to grasp what the argument is about.
Alyoshka says:
"Excuse me, Alec, but you're simply not praying from the same prayer book as us."
Moishe Kalker says:
"Alec, when everyone else is eating borscht, you're singing the national anthem; when everyone else is fasting for Tisha Be-Av, you're celebrating Purim."
Alec, offended, gets up to go, but the two bachelors, as usual, insist on accompanying him to his door while continuing to debate, and he, as usual, invites them in. Why not, Zushka will be delighted, and we'll drink some tea, but they refuse politely. They always refuse. For years now he has been inviting them both to tea in his home after the newspaper room, Come inside, come in for a while, we'll drink a glass of tea, why not, Zushka will be delighted, but year after year they always refuse his invitation politely. Until one day—
Here, that is how I will write stories.
And because it is night outside and jackals are howling hungrily very close to the perimeter fence, I will put them in the story too. Why not. Let them weep under the windows. And the night watchman who lost his son on a reprisal raid, too. And the gossipy widow who is called the Black Widow behind her back. And the barking dogs and the movement of the cypress trees that are trembling slightly in the breeze in the dark, which makes me think of them as a row of people praying in an undertone.
58
AND THERE was a kindergarten or primary school teacher in Hulda, whom I shall call Orna, a hired teacher in her mid-thirties who lived in the end room in one ofthe old blocks. Every Thursday she left to be with her husband, returning early on Sunday morning. One evening she invited me and a couple of girls in my class to her room, to talk about a book of poems by Natan Alterman, Stars Outside, and to listen to Mendelssohn's violin concerto and the Schubert octet. The gramophone stood on a wicker stool in a corner of her room, which also contained a bed, a table, two chairs, an electric coffeepot, a clothes cupboard covered by a flowery curtain, and a shell case that served as a vase and sprouted an arrangement of purple thistles.
Orna had decorated the walls of her room with two reproductions of Gauguin paintings, of plump, sleepy, half-naked Tahitian women, and some pencil drawings of her own that she had framed herself. Perhaps under the influence of Gauguin she had also drawn full-bodied nude women, in lying or reclining positions. All the women, Gauguin's and Orna's, looked sated and slack, as though they had just been pleasured. Yet their inviting poses suggested that they were willing to give plenty more pleasure to anyone who had not had enough yet.
On the bookshelf at the head of Orna's bed I found the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, Camus's The Plague, Peer Gynt, Hemingway, Kafka, poems by Alterman, Rahel, Shlonsky, Leah Goldberg, Hayyim Guri, Natan Yonatan and Zerubbabel Gilead, S. Yizhar's short stories, Yigal Mossensohn's The Way of a Man, Amir Gilboa's Early Morning Poems, O. Hillel's Noonday Land, an
d two books by Rabindranath Tagore. (A few weeks later I bought her his Fireflies out of my pocket money, and on the flyleaf I inscribed a soulful dedication that included the word "moved.")
Orna had green eyes, a slender neck, a caressing, melodic voice, small hands and delicate fingers, but her breasts were full and firm and her thighs were strong. Her normally serious, calm face changed the moment she smiled: she had a captivating, almost suggestive smile, as though she could see into the secret recesses of your mind but forgave you. Her armpits were shaved, but unevenly, as though she had shaded one of them with her drawing pencil. When she was standing, she generally placed most of her weight on her left leg, so that she unconsciously arched her right thigh. She liked to air her views about art and inspiration, and she found me a devoted listener.
A few days later I summoned up the courage to arm myself with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in Halkin's translation (which I had told her about on the first evening) and knocked on her door in the evening— alone this time. It was just the way I had run around to Teacher Zelda's flat in Zephaniah Street ten years earlier. Orna was wearing a long dress buttoned down the front with a row of big buttons. The dress was cream-colored, but the electric light, filtered through an orange raffia shade, gave it a reddish hue. When she stood between me and the lamp, the outline of her thighs and her underpants showed through the cloth of her dress. This time she had Grieg's Peer Gynt on the gramophone. She sat down next to me on the bed with its Middle Eastern bedspread and explained to me the feelings evoked by each of the movements. As for me, I read to her from Leaves of Grass and launched into a conjecture about the influence of Walt Whitman on the poetry of O. Hillel. Orna peeled me tangerines, poured me cold water from an earthenware jug with a muslin cover, placed her hand on my knee to indicate that I should stop talking for a moment, and read me a morbid poem by Uri Zvi Greenberg, not from the collection Streets of the River, which my father liked to recite from, but from a slim volume that was unfamiliar to me, with the strange title Anacreon at the Pole of Sadness. Then she asked me to tell her a little about myself, and I didn't know what, so I said all sorts of muddled things about the idea of beauty, until Orna placed her hand on the back of my neck and said, That's enough now, shall we sit in silence for a bit? At half past ten I got up, said good-night, and went for a walk under the starlight among the sheds and chicken batteries, full of happiness because Orna had invited me to come back, some evening, the day after tomorrow, even tomorrow.