A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  10

  AS A CHILD the thing I most admired Uncle Joseph for was that, as I had been told, he had invented and given us several simple, everyday Hebrew words, words that seemed to have been known and used forever, including "pencil," "iceberg," "shirt," "greenhouse," "toast," "cargo," "monotonous," "multicolored," "sensual," "crane," and "rhinoceros." (Come to think of it, what would I have put on each morning if Uncle Joseph had not given us the word "shirt"? A "coat of many colors"? And what would I have written with without his pencil? A "lead stylus"? Not to mention "sensual," a rather surprising gift from this puritanical uncle.)

  Joseph Klausner was born in 1874 in Olkieniki, Lithuania, and died in Jerusalem in 1958. When he was ten, the Klausners moved from Lithuania to Odessa, where he progressed through the traditional Jewish educational system from the cheder to the modern-style yeshiva, and thence to the Hibbat Zion movement and the circles of Ahad Ha'am. At the age of nineteen he published his first article, titled "New Words and Fine Writing," in which he argued for the bounds of the Hebrew language to be extended, even by the incorporation of foreign words, so as to enable it to function as a living language. In the summer of 1897 he went to study in Heidelberg in south Germany, because in Tsarist Russia the universities were closed to Jews. During his five years in Heidelberg he studied philosophy with Professor Kuno Fischer, became deeply attracted to Eastern history a la Renan, and was profoundly influenced by Carlyle. His studies led from philosophy and history to literature, Semitic languages, and oriental studies (he mastered some fifteen languages, including Greek and Latin, Sanskrit and Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, and Amharic).

  Tchernikhowsky, his friend from the Odessa days, was studying medicine at Heidelberg at the same time, and their friendship deepened into a warm, fruitful affinity. "A passionate poet!" Uncle Joseph would say about him, "an eagle of a Hebrew poet, with one wing touching the Bible and the landscape of Canaan while the other spreads over the whole of modern Europe!" And he sometimes said of Tchernikhowsky: "The soul of a simple, pure child in the sturdy body of a Cossack!"

  Uncle Joseph was selected to be a delegate representing Jewish students at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and at the following one, and he once even exchanged a few words with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself. ("He was a handsome man! Like an angel of God! His face had an inner glow! He looked to us like an Assyrian king with his black beard and his inspired, dreamy expression! And his eyes, I'll remember his eyes to my dying day, Herzl had the eyes of a young poet in love, blazing, lugubrious eyes that bewitched everyone who looked into them. And his high forehead also endowed him with majestic splendor!")

  On his return to Odessa, Klausner wrote, taught, and engaged in Zionist activity until, at the tender age of twenty-nine, he inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloah, the main monthly of modern Hebrew culture. To be more precise, Uncle Joseph inherited from Ahad Ha'am a "periodical letter," and he turned it into a monthly immediately by inventing the Hebrew word for "monthly."

  A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality. To this day I sometimes close my eyes and visualize this frail old man, with his pointed white goatee, his soft mustache, his delicate hands, his Russian glasses, shuffling along absentmindedly with his eggshell footsteps like a tiny Gulliver in a Brobdingnag peopled by a multicolored throng of mighty icebergs, tall cranes, and massive rhinoceroses, all bowing politely to him in gratitude.

  ***

  He and his wife, Fanni Wernick (who from the day of their marriage was invariably known as "my dear Zippora," or, in the presence of guests, "Mrs. Klausner"), made their home in Rimislinaya Street, Odessa, into a kind of social club and meeting place for Zionists and literary figures.

  Uncle Joseph always radiated an almost childlike cheerfulness. Even when he spoke of his sadness, his deep loneliness, his enemies, his aches and illnesses, the tragic destiny of the nonconformist, the injustices and humiliations he had had to suffer all through his life, there was always a restrained joy lurking behind his round spectacles. His movements, his bright eyes, his pink baby cheeks projected a cheery, optimistic vivaciousness that was life-affirming and almost hedonistic: "I didn't sleep a wink again all night," he would always say to his visitors, "the anxieties of our nation, fears for our future, the narrow vision of our dwarf-like leaders, weighed more heavily on me in the dark than my own considerable problems, not to mention my pain, my shortness of breath, and the terrible migraines I suffer night and day." (If you could believe what he said, he never closed his eyes for a moment between at least the early 1920s and his death in 1958.)

  Between 1917 and 1919 Klausner was a lecturer, and eventually professor, at the University of Odessa, which was already changing hands with bloody fighting between Whites and Reds in the civil war that followed Lenin's revolution. In 1919 Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora and my uncle's elderly mother, my great-grandmother Rasha-Keila née Braz, set sail from Odessa to Jaffa on board the Ruslan, which was the Zionist Mayflower of the Third Aliyah, the postwar wave of immigration. By Hanukkah of that year they were living in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem.

  My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, Pan-Germanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin's empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

  Europe has now changed completely, and is full of Europeans from wall to wall. Incidentally, the graffiti in Europe have also changed from wall to wall. When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, "Jews go home to Palestine." Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, "Jews get out of Palestine."

  Uncle Joseph spent many years writing his magnum opus on Jesus of Nazareth, in which he maintained—to the amazement of Christians and Jews alike—that Jesus was born and died a Jew and never intended to found a new religion. Moreover, he considered him to be "the Jewish moralist par excellence." Ahad Ha'am pleaded with Klausner to delete this and other sentences, to avoid unleashing a colossal scandal in the Jewish world, as indeed happened both among Jews and among Christians when the book was published in Jerusalem in 1921: the ultras accused him of having "accepted bribes from the missionaries to sing the praises of That Man," while the Anglican missionaries in Jerusalem demanded that the archbishop dismiss Dr. Danby, the missionary who had translated Jesus of Nazareth into English, as it was a book that was "tainted with heresy, in that it portrays our Saviour as a kind of Reform rabbi, as a mortal, and as a Jew who has nothing at all to do with the Church." Uncle Joseph's international reputation was acquired mainly from this book and from the sequel that followed some years later, From Jesus to Paul.

  Once Uncle Joseph said to me: "At your school, my dear, I imagine they teach you to loathe that tragic and wonde
rful Jew, and I only hope that they do not teach you to spit every time you go past his image or his cross. When you are older, my dear, read the New Testament, despite your teachers, and you will discover that this man was flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, he was a kind of wonder-working Jewish pietist, and although he was indeed a dreamer, lacking any political understanding whatever, yet he has his place in the pantheon of great Jews, beside Baruch Spinoza, who was also excommunicated. Know this: those who condemn me are yesterday's Jews, narrow-minded, ineffectual worms. And you, my dear, to avoid ending up like them, must read good books—read, reread, and read again! And now, would you be kind enough to ask Mrs. Klausner, dear Aunt Zippora, where the skin cream is? The cream for my face? Please tell her, the old cream, because the new cream is not fit to feed to a dog. Do you know, my dear, the huge difference between the 'redeemer' in Gentile languages and our messiah? The messiah is simply someone who has been anointed with oil: every priest or king in the Bible is a messiah, and the Hebrew word 'messiah' is a thoroughly prosaic and everyday word, closely related to the word for face cream—unlike in the Gentile languages, where the messiah is called Redeemer and Savior. Or are you still too young to understand this lesson? If so, run along now and ask your aunt what I asked you to ask her. What was it? I've forgotten. Can you remember? If so, ask her to be kind enough to make me a glass of tea, for, as Rav Huna says in Tractate Pesahim of the Babylonian Talmud, 'Whatever the master of the house tells you to do, do, except leave,' which I interpret as referring to tea leaves. I am only joking, of course. Now run along, my dear, and do not steal any more of my time, as all the world does, having no thought for the minutes and hours that are my only treasure, and that are seeping away."

  When he arrived in Jerusalem, Uncle Joseph served as secretary to the Hebrew Language Committee, before he was nominated to a chair of Hebrew literature in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was opened in 1925. He had hoped and expected to be put in charge of the department of Jewish history, or at least of the teaching of the Second Temple period, but, as he said, "the grandees of the university, from the exalted heights of their Germanness, looked down on me." In the department of Hebrew literature Uncle Joseph felt, in his own words, like Napoleon on Elba: since he was prevented from moving the whole European continent forward, he shouldered the task of imposing some progressive and well-organized order on his little island of exile. Only after some twenty years was the chair of history for the Second Temple era (536 bce to 70 ad) established, and Uncle Joseph was finally put in charge of this subject, without relinquishing his position as the head of the Hebrew literature department. "To absorb alien culture and to turn it into our own national and human flesh and blood," he wrote, "that is the ideal I have fought for most of my life, and I shall not abandon it to my dying day."

  And elsewhere he wrote, with Napoleonic fervor, "If we aspire to be a people ruling over our own land, then our children must be made of iron!" He used to point to the two bronze busts on the sideboard in his living room, the raging, passionate Beethoven and Jabotinsky in his splendid uniform and his resolutely pursed lips, and say to his guests: "The spirit of the individual is just like that of the nation—both reach upward and both become unruly in the absence of a vision." He was fond of Churchillian expressions like "our flesh and blood," "human and national," "ideals," "I have battled for the best part of my life," "we shall not budge," "the few against the many," "alien to his contemporaries," "generations yet to come," and "to my dying breath."

  In 1929 he was forced to flee when Talpiot was attacked by Arabs. His house, like Agnon's, was looted and burned, and his library, like Agnon's again, was badly damaged. "We must re-educate the younger generation," he had written in his book When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom, "we must clothe it in a spirit of heroism, a spirit of steadfast opposition....Most of our teachers have still not overcome the submissive defeatist Diaspora spirit, whether of the European or the Arab Diaspora, that lurks within them."

  Under Uncle Joseph's influence my grandfather and grandmother also became New Zionist Jabotinskyites, and my father actually grew close to the ideas of the Irgun—the paramilitary underground—and its political wing, and Menahem Begin's Herut Party, even though Begin actually aroused in such broad-minded, secular Odessan Jabotinskyites rather mixed feelings, mingled with a certain restrained condescension: his Polish shtetl origins and his excessive emotionalism may have made him appear somewhat plebeian or provincial, and however indisputably dedicated and stalwart a nationalist, he may have appeared not quite enough of a man of the world, not quite charmant enough, too lacking in poetry, in the ability to radiate the charisma, the grandeur of spirit, that touch of tragic loneliness, that they felt became a leader possessed of the qualities of a lion or an eagle. What was it Jabotinsky wrote about the relationship between Israel and the nations after the national revival: "Like a lion confronting other lions." Begin did not look much like a lion. Even my father, despite his name, was not a lion. He was a shortsighted, clumsy Jerusalem academic. He was not capable of becoming an underground fighter, but made his contribution to the struggle by composing occasional manifestos in English for the underground in which he denounced the hypocrisy of "perfidious Albion." These manifestos were printed on a clandestine printing press, and lithe young men used to go around the neighborhood at night posting them on every wall and even on the telegraph poles.

  I, too, was a child of the underground; more than once I drove out the British with a flanking movement of my troops, sank His Majesty's fleet after a daring ambush at sea, kidnapped and court-martialed the High Commissioner and even the King of England himself, and with my own hands I raised the Hebrew flag (like those soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima on an American stamp) on the flagpole at Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel. After driving them out, I would sign an agreement with the conquered, perfidious British to set up a front of the so-called civilized, enlightened nations against the waves of savage orientals with their ancient curly writing and their curved scimitars that threatened to burst out of the desert to kill, loot, and burn us with bloodcurdling guttural shrieks. I wanted to grow up to be like the good-looking, curly-haired, tight-lipped statue of David by Bernini, reproduced on the title page of Uncle Joseph's When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. I wanted to be a strong, silent man with a slow, deep voice. Not like Uncle Joseph's reedy, slightly querulous voice. I didn't want my hands to be like his soft, old lady's hands.

  He was a wonderfully frank man, my great-uncle Joseph, full of self-love and self-pity, vulnerable and craving recognition, brimming with childlike merriment, a happy man who always pretended to be miserable. With a kind of cheery contentment he loved to talk endlessly about his achievements, his discoveries, his insomnia, his detractors, his experiences, his books, articles, and lectures, all of which without exception had caused a "great stir in the world," his encounters, his work plans, his greatness, his importance, and his magnanimity.

  He was at once a kind man and a selfish, spoiled one, with the sweetness of a baby and the arrogance of a wunderkind.

  There, in Talpiot, which was intended to be a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin suburb, a peaceful wooded hill where, in the fullness of time, red-tiled roofs would gleam among the foliage and villas would each provide a calm and comfortable home for a famous writer or renowned scholar, Uncle Joseph would go for a stroll sometimes in the evening breeze along the little street that was later to become Klausner Street, his thin arm entwined with the plump arm of Aunt Zippora, his mother, his wife, the child of his old age, and his right-hand person. They walked with tiny, delicate steps just past the house of the architect Kornberg, who occasionally took in paying guests of a polite and cultured kind, at the end of the cul-de-sac that was also the end of Talpiot, the end of Jerusalem, and the end of the settled land: beyond stretched the grim, barren hills of the Judaean desert. The Dead Sea sparkled in the distance like a platter of molten steel.

  I can see them
standing there, at the end of the world, on the edge of the wilderness, both very tender, like a pair of teddy bears, arm in arm, with the evening breeze of Jerusalem blowing above their heads, the rustle of pine trees, and a bitter smell of geraniums floating on the clear dry air, Uncle Joseph in a jacket (which he suggested should be called in Hebrew "jacobite") and tie, wearing slippers on his feet, his white hair bare to the breeze, and Auntie in a flowery, dark silk dress with a gray woolen wrap around her shoulders. The whole width of the horizon is occupied by the blue bulk of the hills of Moab beyond the Dead Sea; beneath them passes the old Roman Road that continues to the walls of the Old City, where before their eyes the domes of the mosques are turning gold, the crosses on the church towers and the crescents atop the minarets gleam in the glow of the setting sun. The walls themselves are turning gray and heavy, and beyond the Old City one can see Mount Scopus, crowned by the buildings of the university that is so dear to Uncle Joseph, and the Mount of Olives, on whose slopes Aunt Zippora will be buried, though his own wish to be buried there will not be granted because at the time of his death East Jerusalem will be under Jordanian rule.

  The evening light intensifies the pink color of his babylike cheeks and his high brow. On his lips floats a distracted, slightly bewildered smile, as when a man knocks on the door of a house where he is a regular visitor and where he is used to being very warmly received, but when the door opens, a stranger suddenly looks out at him and recoils in surprise, as though asking, Who are you, sir, and why exactly are you here?