A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  Tchernikhowsky stoked his spirits with a glazele or two of vodka, and sometimes he would start to read those poems of his that overflowed with hilarity or sorrow and made everybody in the room melt with him and for him: his liberal ways, his flowing locks, his anarchic mustache, the girls he brought with him, who were not always too bright, and not even necessarily Jewish, but were always beauties who gladdened every eye and caused not a few tongues to wag and whetted the writers' envy—"I'm telling you as a woman (Grandma again), women are never wrong about such things, Bialik used to sit and stare at him like this ... and at the goyish girls he brought along ... Bialik would have given an entire year of his life if only he could have lived for a month as Tchernikhowsky!"

  Arguments raged about the revival of the Hebrew language and literature, the limits of innovation, the connection between the Jewish cultural heritage and that of the nations, the Bundists, the Yiddishists (Uncle Joseph, in polemical vein, called Yiddish jargon, and when he was calm he called it "Judeo-German"), the new agricultural settlements in Judaea and Galilee, and the old troubles of the Jewish farmers in Kherson or Kharkov, Knut Hamsun and Maupassant, the great powers and Sozialismus, women's rights and the agrarian question.

  In 1921, four years after the October Revolution, after Odessa had changed hands several times in the bloody fighting between Whites and Reds, two or three years after my father finally changed from a girl to a boy, Grandma and Grandpa and their two sons fled the city for Vilna, which at that time was part of Poland (long before it became Vilnius in Lithuania).

  Grandpa loathed the Communists. "Don't talk to me about the Bolsheviks," he used to grumble. "Nu, what, I knew them very well, even before they seized power, before they moved into the houses they stole from other people, before they dreamed of becoming apparatchiks, yevseks, politruks, and commissars. I can remember them when they were still hooligans, the Unterwelt of the harbor district in Odessa, hoodlums, bullies, pickpockets, drunkards, and pimps. Nu, what, they were nearly all Jews, Jews of a sort, what can you do. Only they were Jews from the simplest families—nu, what, families of fishmongers from the market, straight from the dredgings that clung to the bottom of the pot, that's what we used to say. Lenin and Trotsky—what Trotsky, which Trotsky, Leibele Bronstein, the crazy son of some gonef called Dovidl from Janowka—this riffraff they dressed up as revolutionaries, nu, what, with leather boots and revolvers in their belts, like a filthy sow in a silk dress. And that's how they went around the streets, arresting people, confiscating property, and anyone whose apartment or girlfriend they fancied, pif-paf, they murdered him. Nu, what, this whole filthy khaliastra (gang), Kameneff was really Rosenfeld, Maxim Litvinoff was Meir Wallich, Grigory Zinoviev was originally Apfelbaum, Karl Radek was Sobelsohn, Leiser Kaganovich was a cobbler, the son of a butcher. Nu, what, I suppose there were one or two goyim who went along with them, also from the bottom of the pot, from the harbor, from the dredgings, they were riffraff, nu, what, riffraff with smelly socks."

  He had not budged from this view of Communism and the Communists even fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution. A few days after the Israeli army conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in the Six Days' War, Grandpa suggested that the international community should now assist Israel in returning all the Arabs of the Levant "very respectfully, without harming a hair of their heads, without robbing them of a single chicken," to their historic homeland, which he called "Arabia Souadia": "Just the way we Jews are returning to our homeland, so they ought to go back honorably to their own home, to Arabia Souadia, where they came here from."

  To cut the argument short, I inquired what he proposed doing if Russia attacked us, in a desire to spare their Arab allies the hardships of the journey back to Arabia.

  His pink cheeks turned red with rage, he puffed himself up and roared:

  "Russia?! What Russia do you mean?! There is no more Russia, bed-wetter! Russia doesn't exist! Are you talking about the Bolsheviks, maybe? Nu, what. I've known the Bolsheviks since they were pimping in the harbor district in Odessa. They're nothing but a gang of thieves and hooligans! Riffraff from the bottom of the pot! The whole of Bolshevism is just one gigantic bluff! Now that we've seen what wonderful Hebrew airplanes we have, and guns, nu, what, we ought to send these young lads and planes of ours across to Petersburg, two weeks there, two weeks back, then one decent bombing—what they've deserved from us a long time now—one big phoosh—and the whole of Bolshevism will fly away to hell there just like dirty cotton wool!"

  "Are you suggesting Israel should bomb Leningrad, Grandpa? And for a world war to break out? Haven't you ever heard of atom bombs? Hydrogen bombs?"

  "It's all in Jewish hands, nu, what, the Americans, the Bolsheviks, all these newfangled bombs of theirs are all in the hands of Jewish scientists, and they're bound to know what to do and what not to do."

  "What about peace? Is there any way to bring peace?"

  "Yes there is: we have to defeat all our enemies. We have to beat them up so they'll come and beg us for peace—and then, nu, what, of course we'll give it to them. Why should we deny it to them? After all, we are a peace-loving people. We even have such a commandment, to pursue peace—nu, what, so we'll pursue it as far as Baghdad if we have to, as far as Cairo even. Shouldn't we? How so?"

  Bewildered, impoverished, censored, and terrified after the October Revolution, the Civil War, and the Red victory, the Hebrew writers and Zionist activists of Odessa scattered in every direction. Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora, together with many of their friends, left for Palestine at the end of 1919 on board the Ruslan, whose arrival in the port of Jaffa announced the beginning of the Third Aliyah. Others fled from Odessa to Berlin, Lausanne, and America.

  Grandpa Alexander and Grandma Shlomit with their two sons did not emigrate to Palestine—despite the Zionist passion that throbbed in Grandpa's Russian poems, the country still seemed to them too Asiatic, too primitive and backward, lacking in minimal standards of hygiene and elementary culture. So they went to Lithuania, which the Klausners, the parents of Grandpa, Uncle Joseph, and Uncle Betsalel, had left more than twenty-five years earlier. Vilna was still under Polish rule, and the violent anti-Semitism that had always existed there was growing by the year. Poland and Lithuania were in the grip of nationalism and xenophobia. To the conquered and subdued Lithuanians the large Jewish minority appeared as the agent of the oppressive regimes. Across the border, Germany was in the grip of the new, cold-blooded, murderous Nazi brand of Jew hatred.

  In Vilna, too, Grandpa was a businessman. He did not set his sights high; he bought a little here and sold a little there, and in between he sometimes made some money, and he sent his two sons first to Hebrew school and then to the classical gymnasium. The brothers David and Arieh, otherwise known as Zyuzia and Lonia, had brought three languages with them from Odessa: at home they had spoken Russian and Yiddish, in the street Russian, and at the Zionist kindergarten they had learned to speak Hebrew. Here, in the classical gymnasium in Vilna, they added Greek and Latin, Polish, German, and French. Later, in the European literature department at the university, English and Italian were added to the list, and in the Semitic philology department my father also learned Arabic, Aramaic, and cuneiform writing. Uncle David soon got a teaching job in literature, and my father, Yehuda Arieh, who took his first degree at Vilna University in 1932, was hoping to follow in his footsteps, but the anti-Semitism by now had become unbearable. Jewish students had to endure humiliation, blows, discrimination, and sadistic abuse.

  "But what exactly did they do to you?" I asked my father. "What sort of sadistic abuse? Did they hit you? Tear up your exercise books? And why didn't you complain about them?"

  "There's no way," Father said, "that you can understand this. And it's better that way. I'm glad, even though you can't understand this either, that is to say, why I'm glad that you can't understand what it was like: I definitely don't want you to understand. Because there's no need, there's simply no need anymore. Because it's all over.
It's all over once and for all. That is to say, it won't happen here. Now let's talk about something else: shall we talk about your album of planets? Of course we still have enemies. And there are wars. There is a siege and no small losses. Definitely. I'm not denying it. But not persecution. That—no. Neither persecution nor humiliation nor pogroms. Not the sadism we had to endure there. That will never come back, for sure. Not here. If they attack us, we'll give as good as we get. It seems to me you've stuck Mars between Saturn and Jupiter. That's wrong. No, I'm not telling you. You can look it up yourself and see where you went wrong, and you can put it right all by yourself."

  A battered photo album survives from Vilna days. Here is Father, with his brother David, both still at school, both looking very serious, pale, with their big ears sticking out from under peaked caps, both in suits, ties, shirts with stiff collars. Here is Grandpa Alexander, starting to go a little bald, still mustached, nattily turned out, looking a little like a minor Tsarist diplomat. And here are some group photographs, perhaps a graduation class. Is it Father's year or his brother David's? It's hard to tell: the faces are rather blurred. The boys are wearing caps and the girls round berets. Most of the girls have dark hair, and some are smiling a Mona Lisa smile that knows something that you're dying to know but that you won't discover because it's not meant for you.

  Who for, then? It is almost certain that virtually all the young people in these group photographs were stripped naked and made to run, whipped and chased by dogs, starved and frozen, into the large pits in the Ponar Forest. Which of them survived, apart from my father? I study the group photograph under a bright light and try to discern something in their faces: some hint of cunning or determination, of inner toughness that might have made this boy in the second row on the left guess what was in store for him, mistrust all the reassuring words, climb down into the drains under the ghetto while there was still time, and join the partisans in the forests. Or how about that pretty girl in the middle, with the clever, cynical look, no, my dear, they can't deceive me, I may still be a youngster but I know it all, I know things that you don't even dream I know. Perhaps she survived? Did she escape to join the partisans in the Rudnik Forest? Did she manage to go into hiding in a district outside the ghetto, thanks to her "Aryan" appearance? Was she sheltered in a convent? Or did she escape while there was time, manage to elude the Germans and their Lithuanian henchmen, and slip across the border into Russia? Or did she emigrate to the Land of Israel while there was still time, and live the life of a tight-lipped pioneer till the age of seventy-six, introducing beehives or running the chicken farm in a kibbutz in Jezreel Valley?

  And here is my young father, looking very much like my son Daniel (whose middle names are Yehuda Arieh, after him), a spine-chilling resemblance, seventeen years old, long and thin as a cornstalk, wearing a bowtie, with his innocent eyes looking at me through his round spectacles, partly embarrassed and partly proud, a great talker and yet, with no contradiction, terribly shy, with his dark hair combed neatly back over his head and a cheerful optimism on his face, Don't worry, pals, everything's going to be fine, we shall overcome, somehow we'll put everything behind us, what more can happen, it's not so bad, it'll all be OK.

  My father in this picture is younger than my son. If only it were possible, I would get into the photo and warn him and his cheerful chums. I would try to tell them what's in store. It's almost certain they wouldn't believe me if I told them: would just make fun of me.

  Here is my father again, dressed for a party, wearing a shapka, a Russian hat, rowing a boat, with two girls who are smiling at him coquettishly. Here he is wearing slightly ridiculous knickers, showing his socks, embracing from behind a smiling girl with a neat center parting. The girl is about to post a letter in a box marked "Skrzynka Pocztowa" (the words are clearly legible in the picture). Who is the letter to? What happened to the addressee? What was the fate of the other girl in the picture, the pretty girl in a striped dress, with a little black handbag tucked under her arm and white socks and shoes? For how long after the picture was taken did this pretty girl go on smiling?

  And here is my father, smiling too, suddenly reminiscent of the sweet little girl his mother made him into when he was a child, in a group of five girls and three boys. They are in a forest, but are dressed in their best town clothes. The boys, however, have removed their jackets and are standing in their shirts and ties, in a bold, laddish posture, daring fate—or the girls. And here they are constructing a human pyramid, with two boys carrying a rather plump girl on their shoulders and the third holding her thigh rather daringly, and two other girls looking on and laughing. The bright sky too looks merry, and so does the railing of the bridge over the river. Only the surrounding forest is dense, serious, dark: it extends from one side of the picture to the other and presumably a good deal farther. A forest near Vilna: the Rudnik Forest? Or the Ponar Forest? Or is it perhaps the Popishok or Olkieniki Forest, which my father's grandfather, Yehuda Leib Klausner, loved to cross on his cart, trusting to his horse, his strong arms, and his good luck in the dense darkness, even on rainy, stormy winter nights?

  Grandpa yearned for the Land of Israel that was being rebuilt after its two thousand years of desolation; he yearned for Galilee and the valleys, Sharon, Gilead, Gilboa, the hills of Samaria and the mountains of Edom, "Flow, Jordan flow on, with your roaring billows"; he contributed to the Jewish National Fund, paid the Zionist shekel, eagerly devoured every scrap of information from the Land of Israel, got drunk on the speeches of Jabotinsky, who occasionally passed through Jewish Vilna and attracted an enthusiastic following. Grandpa was always a wholehearted supporter of Jabotinsky's proud, uncompromising nationalist politics and considered himself a militant Zionist. However, even as the ground of Vilna burned underneath his and his family's feet he was still inclined—or perhaps Grandma Shlomit inclined him—to seek a new homeland somewhere a little less Asiatic than Palestine and a little more European than ever-darkening Vilna. During 1930-32 the Klausners attempted to obtain immigration papers for France, Switzerland, America (Red Indians notwithstanding), a Scandinavian country, and England. None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. ("None is too many," ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries felt the same without advertising the fact.)

  Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the anti-Semitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved...

  And so in 1933 Shlomit and Alexander Klausner, those disappointed lovers of Europe, together with their younger son Yehuda Arieh, who had just completed his first degree in Polish and world literature, emigrated halfheartedly, almost against their will, to Asiatic Asia, to the Jerusalem that Grandpa's sentimental poems had longed for ever since his youth.

  They sailed from Trieste to Haifa on the Italia, and on the way they were photographed with the captain, whose name, recorded on the edge of the picture, was Beniamino Umberto Steindler. Nothing less.

  And in the port of Haifa, so runs the family story, a British Mandatory doctor or sanitary officer in a white coat was waiting for them, to spray all the passengers with disinfectant. When it was Grandpa Alexander's turn, so the story goes, he was so furious that he grabbed the spray from the doctor and gave him a good
dousing, as if to say: Thus shall it be done unto the man who dares to treat us here in our own homeland as though we were still in the Diaspora; for two thousand years we have borne everything in silence, but here, in our own land, we shall not put up with a new exile, our honor shall not be trampled underfoot—or disinfected.

  Their elder son, David, a committed and conscientious Europhile, stayed behind in Vilna. There, at a very early age, and despite being Jewish, he was appointed to a teaching position in literature at the university. He had no doubt set his heart on the glorious career of Uncle Joseph, just as my father did all his life. There in Vilna he would marry a young woman called Malka, and there, in 1938, his son Daniel would be born. I never saw this son, born a year and a half before me, nor have I ever managed to find a photograph of him. There are only some postcards and a few letters left, written in Polish by Aunt Malka (Macia), Uncle David's wife. 10.2.39: The first night Danush slept from nine in the evening to six in the morning. He has no trouble sleeping at night. During the day he lies with his eyes open with his arms and legs in constant motion. Sometimes he screams...

  Little Daniel Klausner would live for less than three years. Soon they would come and kill him to protect "Europe" from him, to prevent in advance Hitler's "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards ... With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood ... The final Jewish goal is denationalization ... by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest ... with the secret ... aim of ruining the ... white race ... If 5,000 Jews were transported to Sweden, within a short time they would occupy all the leading positions ... the universal poisoner of all races, international Jewry."*