Again I observe that Winkler, despite his obtuse exterior, can sense nuances when he has to and size up a situation. He replied to S.T.H. by shifting the plane of the argument.
‘I’m not going to argue with you about matters of Palestinian geography and economics, though I could do so. Nor will I attempt to show you that your arguments about the Arabs and the Jewish proletariat carry no weight. I don’t deny their reality, but there’s a hierarchy of realities which you refuse to recognize. So between two equally valid arguments, one may cancel the other, because it has another meaning, is of another order. So let’s leave it.
‘The question for me isn’t whether Jews can create a Palestinian state, but whether they can do anything but. Understand? The chances of the enterprise succeeding matter less than the fact that it is so pressing. If we don’t do this, we die. If we do – according to you – we still die. I don’t know. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. And for this “maybe” it’s worth making the journey. Don’t ask a nation on the road to creating a country to count its money, take out an insurance policy and make a hotel reservation. In the end, to be honest with you, I find this whole argument pointless. I’m a soldier, a bricklayer, a miner. I listen and work. The rest is an idyll – if I may quote you.’
‘No you may not. You reason like a girl. Why do you love me? “I just do.” Why don’t you love me any more? “I just don’t.” Admit it, your argument isn’t any better. You explain yourself with “just because”. Why are you a Zionist? “Just because.”’
I wanted to interject here, though the lightning flashing in S.T.H.’s eyes made it risky.
‘I’ll ask Winkler to allow me to reply for him. I just want to tell you, dear S.T.H., that this “just because” you laugh at is still a decisive reply. To be a Zionist “just because” means to be a Zionist naturally, by destiny, it’s like being white, or blond, or dark, a Zionist because it’s raining or snowing, because the sun’s rising or setting … I think this is the point at which the Zionist drama begins. In any case, this is where my doubts begin. Because I don’t think Jews are ready to live such a collective life directly and naturally. I regret saying it – though it’s not the first time the idea has occurred to me. I have the feeling that the Zionist movement is an expression of despair: a revolt against destiny. A tragic effort to move towards simplicity, land, peace. Intellectuals who want to escape their solitude. And I believe, ultimately, that the Zionist project contains this tragic seed while we hurry on, hoping we might be able to forget about it … But won’t it rise to the surface some day? For me, this is the only question.’
‘No,’ Winkler replied, sure of himself.
S.T.H. was quiet for a while, and just looked from one of us to the other, with a certain compassion. Then he burst out with it.
‘Let’s go, we’re wasting the evening. It’s impossible to talk to you. Myths, superstition, poetry … Do you pair reason about anything? On what basis? You sing. A couple of tenors, that’s what you are. Puccini, Giacomo Puccini – our master. Waiter, the bill.’
*
I don’t think Winkler is trying to convert me to Zionism. But he has time for me, because I intrigue him a little. With his believer’s calm, my psychological doubts about Zionism throw him off much more than S.T.H.’s political objections.
He sought me out yesterday evening to invite me to a meeting.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’ll meet a Palestinian. A pioneer, Berl Wolf.
‘Really, until now we’ve just been talking like in books, about ideas, impressions, arguments. But this is a living man, flesh and blood. You have to meet him. I told him about you and said I’d bring you.’
Indeed, I went and, I don’t know why, on the way I was very unsettled … I had cold feet. I had asked Winkler for a few details about this Berl Wolf, whom I was going to meet and find out about. A fabulous tale, in short. At age fourteen, he flees on his own from Russia in the early days of the Revolution, a docker in a southern port several months later, stuck in Kiel in 1918 when the sailors mutiny, studies for a year at an English college, crosses the Atlantic, spends some time in the United States, where he’s a successful scandal journalist, and one day drops everything and leaves for Palestine, as a labourer in a colony. He’s there for a year, working from dawn till dusk with pick and spade … One morning, at the hour when they set off for the fields, there’s an Arab attack. He takes a bullet in the right arm, near the shoulder, breaking the bone. Crippled, there is nothing he can do on the plantation. He goes to the office of the Zionist executive and says: ‘I want to continue working, use me somehow, give me a task.’ So they sent him to Europe as a propagandist.
Climbing the stairs, I was sorry I’d come. If Winkler hadn’t been with me, I might have turned back on reaching the doorstep. ‘Who knows what’s waiting for me.’ A long conversation with an agitated prophet, another series of arguments, another string of misunderstandings, another S.T.H., a Zionist this time and much more intolerant than the first one, because this one would speak, without wanting to, in the name of his sacrifice, with the silent prestige of an arm lost in battle. I felt already humiliated by any victory possible over him through argument.
And what am I anyway? A machine for arguing? What will this man say to me? What will I say to him? Who will arbitrate between his truth and mine? What is the point of all this wasted time, all this hot air? What’s the point, if you end up back against the same dead-end questions, with that same stubborn sadness? An argument, a hundred arguments, a million – to hell with them all.
We went in. A big, empty room with a few wooden benches and – on the walls – a few photographs, Palestinian scenes probably. Some twenty girls and boys of between fourteen and sixteen years old were sitting around an older boy, listening to a story. They were speaking fluent Hebrew, which surprised me at first (I hadn’t known it could be spoken easily, colloquially) and then made me feel awkward. I understood nothing and felt like an uninvited guest. However, the older boy, the one telling the story, made a welcoming gesture and, as we approached the group, I realized with surprise that this child, this adolescent, had to be our man, the Palestinian missionary. While he gestured expansively with his left arm as he narrated, almost singing, his right sleeve was empty to the shoulder, tight against his body and tucked into his pocket.
In amazement, I ran over everything Winkler had told me about him on the way, watched again as if seeing brief cinematic images of his flight from Russia, the prison in Kiel, the crossing of the Atlantic, refuge in Haifa, the years of work in the colony, and I asked myself where this man with the cheeks of a child kept his scars and memories hidden …
When he had finished his story, he approached me and Winkler, extending his undamaged left hand and asked in clumsy French if we didn’t mind waiting half an hour until he had finished with the children.
‘In the meantime, join the circle.’
I hung back. The game seemed rather silly to me, but hesitating seemed even sillier, intimidated as I was before the kids.
‘What the hell, I’m not that old,’ I told myself, and two young pupils made space for me.
Our Palestinian friend, always in the centre of the group, was now teaching us a Yemeni song. He would say a verse and the kids had to repeat it after him, first speaking it out loud, then singing it together. I kept quiet at first, but he stopped the whole choir after the first few words.
‘That’s no good: everybody has to sing along.’
I blushed, feeling myself singled out, but kept quiet. He insisted again, in a good-tempered, comradely way.
‘Somebody h
ere doesn’t want to sing. It seems he’s annoyed with us – what other explanation can there be for not wanting to sing? Let’s all ask him to sing, then I’m sure he will.’
Anything but that. I’ll do what they want, sing if they want, do cartwheels, tumble, roll head-over-heels if I have to, just don’t all stare at me like that, like a bad student caught copying and put in the corner in front of the whole class. So I sang.
S.T.H. should have been there to see me. He would have roared with laughter. Recalling it, I feel rather embarrassed – wrongly in fact and fussily – for – why should I be ashamed to say it? – it was a pleasant hour, an hour of holiday, in which I was conscious of doing a thousand silly irresistible things, things more powerful than ‘my critical spirit’, more powerful than my fear of being ridiculous.
In the middle of the room, with a lock of hair falling over his forehead (as he conducted us by nodding to the beat), with a wide smile lighting his adolescent face, our man managed to get us playing in the end. By the time we were leaving, I’d forgotten that we’d gone there to debate ideas. He came up to me and shook my hand again.
‘I don’t have anything else to tell you. I wanted you to sing and you sang. That’s all there is to it.’
And that really is all there is to it. Can you sing? You’re saved.
Well, I for one can’t sing. I am discreet, have a critical disposition, a sense of the ridiculous, self-control, and other tragic nonsense of that kind, and possess the supreme folly of self-regard. Yes, indeed, at precisely the moment you hide behind your own penmanship, writing what you think is a confession and a severe internal reckoning, somebody within creeps up and claps you on the back and decorates you with the order of merit, first class. I write here plainly and in good faith that I’m an unfortunate fool and meanwhile a voice secretly consoles me. ‘You’re a martyr,’ it says, ‘the hero of your own destiny, the guardian of the purest values of human dignity.’
The duplicity of humility and pride, which frustrates all my sincerity … There’s no cause that I haven’t undermined, no revolt against myself that I haven’t annulled with a small hidden reserve, with a prearranged excuse.
And still I believe, I want to believe, I am convinced that my inability to sing is an infirmity, not a mark of nobility. I believe this inability to join the crowd – any crowd –to cast myself into the throng, to forget myself and lose myself there, is a sad failure, a sad defeat.
If I could only not be proud of this. If I could achieve only that …
8
I hadn’t seen Abraham Sulitzer, my old Ahasverus, since that meeting on the train in the Christmas holidays. And now, our paths cross. It’s extraordinary how opportunely people enter and leave my circle, as if directed by an argument that calls them closer or pushes them away, depending on whether they are required or not. Life has this kind of aptness, which is not allowed in literature. Were I a man of letters, I think the hardest thing would be to mask the unbelievable twists of reality, which show such daring and initiative … (But what is this thought doing here? I’ll tell it to Walter. He, as a critic and newspaperman, could at least put it in an article.)
It turns out that Abraham Sulitzer is my neighbour. He lives a hundred metres away, to the left, in an alley that opens on to my street. But because he heads out for work at seven in the morning and I closer to nine, an age has passed without us intersecting. Yesterday, though, I had to get to the train station at dawn (a package sent home through Lulu) and on the way back I turned a corner and bumped into my friend Abraham.
‘I saw you last week at Jabotinski’s conference and wanted to call out to you, but thought better of it. Who knows? I thought, maybe he’s forgotten me. A bookseller he met once on a train … But I wanted to ask if you’d read Şapsă Zwi’s history. It’s a book I was fond of.’
I reassured him somewhat, telling him that it had interested me greatly. But I’m sure my reply did not please him. (What was ‘It interested me’ supposed to mean? A book either knocks you down or raises you up. Otherwise, why pay money for it?) Abraham Sulitzer certainly thinks this way, but doesn’t say it out loud. He just smiles, full of reticence and eager amiability. (Well? Didn’t you like it? Let’s say, as you do, that you found it interesting. Well? Aren’t you entitled to? Perhaps I can do something for you …)
We separated quickly – we were both in a hurry – but he invited me to visit him some evening – an invitation I accepted with pleasure.
*
Books, books, everywhere books. I’ve seen people talking to their cats, their dogs … Abraham Sulitzer talks to his books.
‘Come down here to Papa, third in line. Easy, now, don’t wreck the whole row. Who’ll put you back in place if you do? You? The hell you will. It’s always me. And who does Roza shout at? Also at poor me!’
Mr Sulitzer exaggerates. Roza, his wife, doesn’t shout: at most she grumbles.
‘Lord,’ she complains to me, in that same lilting Jewish-Moldovan as his, ‘I have brothers too, and brothers-in-law, who are salesmen. One sells bobbins, another sells boots. And? They spend the day at the shop, and shut up shop in the evening – and that’s the end of it. Does anybody take their bobbins home to sit and talk to them?
‘It’s a curse, life with this husband of mine. I’m so embarrassed when neighbours call by to borrow a little tea or salt when they run out, and come across a fully grown man, talking to himself, to the walls, to the books. Now, tell me if you think that isn’t pure madness.’
I avoid a straight reply, so as not to add to conflict in the Sulitzer household, but my friend Abraham, at his table, besieged by books, shy and wise, smiles at me from behind his glasses, from behind the covers of a book opened wide – a smile of complicity (‘Let her talk, that’s how she is; women are like that; she’ll get over it’), the smile of a child who has upset a jam-jar and awaits his punishment.
I look at this kindly old man, who loves books with a passion, like an addiction. I look at this patient philosopher, terrorized by the nagging of a terrible wife, against whom he has no defence but a hidden smile, and I suddenly remember Monsieur Bergeret.
How well Abraham Sulitzer resembles him in this moment, surrounded by books. Abraham Sulitzer and Anatole France. A Yiddish-speaking Anatole France. What a blasphemer I am!
He shows me an entire library, full of surprises. A Yiddish translation of Cervantes. Molière, Shakespeare. And, nearer to us, Galsworthy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy. I’m amazed, he is triumphant. With every volume he places in my hands, he has a kind of smile of false modesty, like a host proud of the vintage wine he has served you, without announcing its quality, precisely in order to test you. However often I exclaim in surprise at a new discovery, he buries himself deeper between two covers, with an attempt at indifference which only half-hides his pleasure. And, when his triumph is decisive (a Jewish edition of Dante, printed magnificently on parchment, with tiny letters, as if engraved in wood), he can take it no longer and explodes almost furiously, struggling with I know not whom.
‘Beautiful? Beautiful you say? Beautiful like a puppy? Beautiful like a tie? No, sir, it’s not beautiful: it’s earth-shaking.’
His eyes burn – frowning for the first time. Roza, a little frightened, unsure what is happening, says nothing. Me, I feel embarrassed somehow. (I don’t like you, Abraham Sulitzer; I thought you were a serious sceptic, not an amateur, subject to tantrums.)
But he calms down quickly and becomes tolerant again. Now, with a little courage, perhaps my life may not even be in danger if I said – to test him – that I didn’t like a p
articular edition which inflames him with feeling. I don’t think he’d kill me; he’d settle for throwing me out.
The truth is that I am not in the mood for joking either and the revelations of his library open for me a world I never guessed existed. A culture in dialect? European culture in dialect. Why? For whom?
I ask Abraham Sulitzer and his reply this time is no longer excited or furious. It is sad.
‘I thought you’d ask. I’m surprised it took you so long. When it gets down to it, you’re no wiser than some street kid who runs after Jews with caftans, when one wanders along, shouting “Oy vey” and “Achychy azoy”. Dialect! Broken German! A ghetto language: that’s what Yiddish is to you. If I told you it was a language, neither a beautiful or ugly one, but a living one, through which people have suffered and sung for hundreds of years, if I told you that it’s a language containing everything in the world which has been pondered, you’d look at me, well, just as you’re doing now. Dialect indeed! It’s a living language, with nerves and blood, with its own troubles, its own beauty. With its own homeland, which is the ghetto – the whole world, in other words. It makes me laugh when I hear those Zionists talking Hebrew picked up from books. Is that what we need? Hebrew? With dictionaries, grammar and philology, or whatever they call it? God help them … Turning their backs on a healthy language to go searching in a tomb for a defunct one. God forgive me, I speak Hebrew myself after a fashion, having picked it up in my old age, but – what can I say? – to me it’s cold, harsh and empty somehow, like wandering through a long, long deserted stone hallway, without a single person or plant or window. How do you say “It hurts”, “I’m burning up” or “I miss you” in this language? And if you say it, does it do any good? Say “It hurts” in Yiddish – and you sense the pain. There’s blood there, it’s warm, it’s alive …’
‘I don’t know either of them well,’ I replied. ‘I wonder, though, to what degree you’re right, but – and I hope you don’t mind me saying this – I don’t think you’re entirely right. Yiddish is still a dialect – and that’s a serious problem. It’s a deformed language, derived from the corruption of another. Isn’t that a humiliating origin? I find it hard to believe that from the degeneration of one language you can create another.’
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