A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  13

  RAV ALEXANDER ZISKIND of Horodno (at that time in Russia, but later Poland, Belarus...), who died in 1794, is known in rabbinic tradition as YVShH, after the initials of his best-known work, Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah ("The Foundation and Root of Worship"). He was a mystic, kabbalist, ascetic, the author of several influential ethical writings. It was said of him that "He spent his life shut away in a small room studying Torah; he never kissed or held his children and never had any conversation with them that was not directed to heavenly things." His wife ran the household and brought up the children on her own. Nevertheless, this outstanding ascetic taught that one should "worship the Creator with great joy and fervor." (Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav said of him that he was a hasid avant la lettre.") But neither joy nor fervor prevented Rabbi Alexander Ziskind from leaving instructions in his will that after his death "the Burial Society shall perform on my corpse the four death penalties entrusted to the Sanhedrin," until all his limbs were crushed. For example: "Let them raise me to the height of the ceiling and throw me violently to the ground with no intervening sheet or straw, and let them repeat this seven times, and I solemnly admonish the Burial Society under pain of excommunication to afflict me with these seven deaths, and not to spare my humiliation, for my humiliation is my honor, that I may be released somewhat from the great Judgment on high." All this in atonement for sins or for purification, "for the spirit or soul of Alexander Ziskind who was born of the woman Rebecca." It is also known about him that he wandered through the German towns collecting money to settle Jews in the Holy Land, and he was even imprisoned for this. His descendants bear the family name Braz, which is an abbreviation for "Born of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind."

  His son, Rav Yossele Braz, one of those whom their father never kissed or held, was considered a consummate Righteous Man who studied the Torah all his days and never left the house of study on a weekday even to sleep: he would permit himself to doze off as he sat, with his head on his arms and his arms on the desk, for four hours each night, with a lighted candle held between his fingers so that when it burned down, the flame would wake him. Even his snatched meals were brought to him in the house of study, which he left only at the onset of Sabbath and to which he returned as soon as the Sabbath was over. He was an ascetic like his father. His wife kept a draper's shop, and she kept him and his offspring until the day he died and beyond, as his mother too had done in her day, because Rav Yossele's humility did not allow him to assume the position of a rabbi, but he taught Torah for nothing to the children of the poor. Nor did he leave any books behind him, because he considered himself inadequate to say anything new that his predecessors had not said before him.

  Rav Yossele's son, Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz (my grandfather Alexander's grandfather), was a successful businessman who dealt in grain, linen, and even hogs' bristles; he traded as far afield as Königsberg and Leipzig. He was a scrupulously observant Jew, but so far as is known he distanced himself from his father's and grandfather's zealotry: he did not turn his back on the world, did not live by the sweat of his wife's brow, and did not hate the Zeitgeist and the Enlightenment. He allowed his children to learn Russian and German and a little "alien wisdom," and even encouraged his daughter, Rasha-Keile Braz, to study, to read, and to be an educated woman. He certainly did not admonish the burial society with dire threats to crush his body after his death.

  Menahem Mendel Braz, son of Alexander Ziskind, grandson of Rav Yossele, great-grandson of Rabbi Alexander Ziskind the author of the Yesod Ve-Shoresh Ha-'Avodah, settled in the early 1880s in Odessa where, together with his wife Perla, he owned and ran a small glass factory. Previously, in his youth, he had worked as a government clerk back in Königsberg. Menahem Braz was a well-to-do, good-looking bon vivant, and a strong-willed nonconformist even by the very tolerant standards of late-nineteenth-century Jewish Odessa. An undisguised atheist and well-known hedonist, he abhorred both religion and religious fanatics with the same whole-hearted devotion with which his grandfather and great-grandfather had insisted on observing every jot and tittle of the Law. Menahem Braz was a freethinker to the point of exhibitionism: he smoked publicly on the Sabbath, consumed forbidden foods with gay abandon, and pursued pleasure out of a gloomy vision of the brevity of human life and a passionate denial of the afterlife and divine judgment. This admirer of Epicurus and Voltaire believed that a man should reach out and help himself to whatever life put in his way and give himself over to the unrestrained enjoyment of whatever his heart desired, provided that in doing so he inflicted neither injury, injustice, nor suffering on others. His sister, Rasha-Keila, that educated daughter of Rav Alexander Ziskind Braz, was, on the other hand, affianced to a simple Jew back in the village of Olkieniki in Lithuania (not far from Vilna), whose name was Yehuda Leib Klausner, the son of Ezekiel Klausner, a tenant farmer.*

  The Klausners of Olkieniki, unlike their learned cousins from the nearby town of Trakai, were mostly simple village Jews, stubborn and naive. Ezekiel Klausner had raised cattle and sheep and grown fruit and vegetables, first in a village named Popishuk (or Papishki), and later in another village called Rudnik, and finally in Olkieniki itself. All three villages were near Vilna. Yehuda Leib, like his father Ezekiel before him, had learned a little Torah and Talmud from a village teacher, and observed the commandments, although he loathed exegetical subtleties. He loved the outdoor life and hated being cooped up indoors.

  After trying his hand at dealing in agricultural produce and failing because other traders soon discovered and took advantage of his naïveté and edged him out of the market, Yehuda Leib used the rest of his money to buy a horse and cart and cheerfully carried passengers and goods from village to village. He was an easygoing, gentle-natured carter, who was contented with his lot and enjoyed good food, singing table songs on Sabbaths and festivals, and a drop of schnapps on winter nights; he never beat his horse or recoiled from danger. He liked traveling alone, at a slow, relaxed pace, his cart weighed down with timber or sacks of grain through the dark forests, over empty plains, through snowstorms, and across the thin layer of ice that covered the river in winter. Once (so Grandpa Alexander loved to relate over and over again on winter evenings) the ice broke under the weight of his cart, and Yehuda Leib jumped into the icy water, grabbed the horse's bridle with his strong hands, and pulled his horse and cart to safety.

  Rasha-Keila Braz bore three sons and three daughters to her husband the carter. But in 1884 she fell seriously ill, and the Klausners decided to leave their out-of-the-way village in Lithuania and move hundreds of miles to Odessa, where Rasha-Keila came from and where her affluent brother lived: Menahem Mendel Braz would surely take care of them and see that his sick sister was treated by the best physicians.

  *Names run in families. My elder daughter is named Fania after my mother, Fania. My son is Daniel Yehuda Arie, after Daniel Klausner, my first cousin, who was born the year before me and was murdered together with his parents, David and Malka, by Germans in Vilna when he was three, and also after my father Yehuda Arieh Klausner, who in turn was named after his grandfather Yehuda Leib Klausner from the village of Olkieniki in Lithuania, the son of Rav Ezekiel, the son of Rav Kadish, the son of Rav Gedaliah Klausner-Olkienicki, a descendant of Rabbi Abraham Klausner the author of the Sefer Haminhagim ("Book of Customs"), who lived in Vienna in the late fourteenth century. My brother David was named after Uncle David, my father's brother, the one who was murdered by Germans in Vilna. Three of my grandchildren bear the name of one of their grandparents (Maccabi Salzberger, Lote Salzberger, Riva Zucker-man). And so it goes.

  At the time the Klausners settled in Odessa, in 1885, their eldest son, my great-uncle Joseph, was an infant prodigy of eleven, compulsively hard-working, a lover of Hebrew and thirsty for knowledge. He seemed to take after his cousins, the sharp-minded Klausners of Trakai, rather than his ancestors the farmers and carters from Olkieniki. His uncle, the Epicurean, Voltairian Menahem Braz, declared that little Joseph was destined for great thi
ngs and supported his studies. His brother Alexander Ziskind, on the other hand, who was only four years old or so when they moved to Odessa, was a somewhat unruly and emotional child, who soon displayed an affinity with his father and grandfather, the rustic Klausners. He was not drawn to studying, and from an early age displayed a fondness for staying out of doors for extended periods, observing people's behavior, sniffing and feeling the world, being alone in the meadows and woods, and dreaming dreams. His liveliness, generosity, and kindness endeared him to all whom he met. He was universally known as Zusia or Zissel. And that was Grandpa Alexander.

  There was also their younger brother, my great-uncle Bezalel, and three sisters, Sofia, Anna, and Daria, none of whom ever made it to Israel. So far as I have been able to ascertain, after the Russian Revolution Sofia was a literature teacher and later the headmistress of a school in Leningrad. Anna died before World War II, while Daria, or Dvora, and her husband Misha attempted to escape to Palestine after the Revolution but "got stuck" in Kiev because Daria was pregnant.*

  Despite the help of their prosperous uncle Menahem and of other Odessa relations on the Braz side of the family, the Klausners fell on hard times soon after arriving in the city. The carter, Yehuda Leib, a strong, patient man who enjoyed life and loved joking, faded away after having to invest what was left of his savings in the purchase of a small, airless grocery shop from which he and his family eked out a precarious living. He longed for the open plains, the forests, the snowfields, his horse and cart, the inns and the river that he had left behind in Lithuania. After a few years he fell ill and soon died in his mean little shop when he was only fifty-seven. His widow, Rasha-Keila, for whose sake they had come all that way, lived on for twenty-five years after his death. She eventually died in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem in 1928.

  *Daria's daughter, Yvetta Radovskaya, a woman in her eighties, still corresponds with me. Aunt Yvetta, my father's cousin, left St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. Her only child, Marina, who was about my age, died in St. Petersburg in the prime of life. Nikita, Marina's only son, who is my children's generation, went to America with his grandmother but changed his mind after a short while and returned to Russia or Ukraine, where he married and now works as a country vet. His daughters are the same generation as my grandchildren.

  While great-uncle Joseph was pursuing his brilliant student career in Odessa and later in Heidelberg, Grandpa Alexander left school at fifteen and turned his hand to a variety of petty trading ventures, buying something here and selling something there, scribbling passionate poems in Russian by night, casting covetous eyes into shop windows and at the mountains of melons, grapes, and watermelons, as well as the sensual southern women, dashing home to compose yet another emotional poem, then cycling around the streets of Odessa once more, carefully dressed in the latest flashy style, smoking cigarettes like a grown-up, with his carefully waxed black mustache; he sometimes went down to the port to feast his eyes on the ships, stevedores, and cheap whores, or he watched excitedly as a troop of soldiers marched past to the accompaniment of a military band, and sometimes he would spend an hour or two in the library, eagerly reading whatever came to hand, resolving not to try to compete with the bookishness of his elder brother, the prodigy. Meanwhile he learned how to dance with well-bred young ladies, how to drink several glasses of brandy without losing his wits, how to cultivate acquaintances in coffeehouses, and how to pay court to the little dog so as to woo the lady.

  As he made his way around the sun-washed streets of Odessa, a harbor town with a heady atmosphere colored by the presence of several different nationalities, he made friends of various kinds, courted girls, bought and sold and sometimes made a profit, sat down in a corner of a café or on a park bench, took out his notebook, wrote a poem (four stanzas, eight rhymes), then cycled around again as the unpaid errand boy of the leaders of the Lovers of Zion Society in pre-telephone Odessa: carrying a hasty note from Ahad Ha'am to Mendele Mokher Seforim, or from Mendele Mokher Seforim to Mr. Bialik, who was fond of saucy jokes, or to Mr. Menahem Ussishkin, from Mr. Ussishkin to Mr. Lilienblum, and while he waited in the drawing room or the hall for the reply, poems in Russian in the spirit of the Love of Zion movement played in his heart: Jerusalem whose streets are paved with onyx and jasper, an angel standing at every street corner, the sky above shining with the radiant light of the Seven Heavens.

  He even wrote love poems to the Hebrew language, praising its beauty and its musicality, pledging his undying faithfulness—all in Russian. (Even after he had been living in Jerusalem for more than forty years, Grandpa was unable fully to master Hebrew: to his dying day he spoke a personal Hebrew that broke every rule, and he made horrific mistakes when he wrote it. In the last postcard he sent us to Kibbutz Hulda shortly before his death, he wrote, more or less: "My very dear grandchildrens and greatgrandchildrens, I mist you lots and lots. I want to sea you all lots and lots!")

  When he finally arrived in Jerusalem in 1933 with a fear-ridden Grandma Shlomit, he stopped writing poems and devoted himself to commerce. For a few years he successfully sold dresses imported from Vienna in the fashion of the previous year to Jerusalemite women who longed for the delights of Europe. But eventually another Jew appeared who was cleverer than Grandpa, and began to import dresses from Paris in the fashion of the previous year, and Grandpa with his Viennese dresses had to admit defeat: he was forced to abandon the business and his love of dresses, and found himself supplying Jerusalem with hosiery by Lodzia in Holon and towels from a small firm called Szczupak and Sons in Ramat Gan.

  Failure and want brought back the muse, who had abandoned him during his years of commercial success. Once more he shut himself away in his "study" at night and penned passionate verses in Russian about the splendors of the Hebrew language, the enchantments of Jerusalem, not the poverty-stricken, dusty, heat-stifled city of zealots but a Jerusalem whose streets are fragrant with myrrh and frankincense, where an angel of God floats over every one of its squares. At this point I entered the picture, in the role of the brave little boy in the story of the emperor's new clothes, and attacked Grandpa with exasperated realism for these poems of his: "You've been living in Jerusalem for years now, and you know perfectly well what the streets are paved with, and what really floats over Zion Square, so why do you keep writing about something that simply doesn't exist? Why don't you write about the real Jerusalem?"

  Grandpa Alexander, furious at my impertinent words, turned in an instant from a pleasant pink hue to a blazing red, thumped the table with his fist, and roared: "The real Jerusalem? What on earth does a little bed-wetter like you know about the real Jerusalem?! The real Jerusalem is the one in my poems!!"

  "And how long will you go on writing in Russian, Grandpa?"

  "What do you mean, ty durak, you fool, you little bed-wetter? I do sums in Russian! I curse myself in Russian! I dream in Russian! I even—" (but here Grandma Shlomit, who knew exactly what was coming next, interrupted him: "Shto's toboi? Ty ni normalni?! Vidish malchik ryadom's nami!!"—What's the matter with you? Are you crazy? You can see the boy is right here!!)

  "Would you like to go back to Russia, Grandpa? For a visit?"

  "It doesn't exist anymore. Propali!"

  "What doesn't exist anymore?"

  "What doesn't exist anymore, what doesn't exist anymore—Russia doesn't exist anymore! Russia is dead. There is Stalin. There is Dzherzhinsky. There is Yezhov. There is Beria. There is one great big prison. Gulag! Yevsektsia! Apparatchiks! Murderers!"

  "But surely you still love Odessa a little?"

  "Nu. Love, don't love—what difference does it make. Chort ego znayet. The Devil knows"

  "Don't you want to see it again?"

  "Nu, sha, little bed-wetter, that's enough now. Sha. Chtob ty propal. Sha."

  One day, in his study, over a glass of tea and kichelakh, after the discovery of one of those scandals of embezzlement and corruption that shook the country, Grandpa t
old me how, when he was fifteen, in Odessa, "on my bike, very fast, I once carried a dispatch, a message, to Mr. Lilienblum, a committee member of the Lovers of Zion." (Besides being a well-known Hebrew writer, Lilienblum served in an honorary capacity as treasurer of the Lovers of Zion in Odessa.) "He, Lilienblum, was really our first finance minister," Grandpa explained to me.

  While he was waiting for Lilienblum to write the reply, the fifteen-year-old man-about-town took out his cigarettes and reached for the ashtray and matchbox on the drawing room table. Mr. Lilienblum quickly put his hand on Grandpa's to stop him, then went out of the room and returned a moment later with another matchbox that he had brought from the kitchen, explaining that the matches on the drawing room table had been bought out of the budget of the Lovers of Zion, and were to be used only at committee meetings, and then only by members of the committee. "So, you see. In those days public property was public property, not a free-for-all. Not the way it is in the country at the moment, when after two thousand years we've established a state so as to have someone to steal from. In those days every child knew what was permitted and what was not, what was ownerless property and what was not, what was mine and what was not."