A Tale of Love and Darkness

by Amos Oz

  My grandfather's business affairs were also in crisis: the inflation of the early 1930s wiped out all his savings overnight. Aunt Sonia told me about "loads of Polish banknotes for millions and trillions that Papa gave me, that I wallpapered my room with. All the dowries that he had been saving for ten years for the three of us went down the drain in two months." Haya and Fania soon had to abandon their studies in Prague because the money, their father's money, had almost run out.

  And so the flour mill, the house and orchard in Dubinska Street, the carriage, horses, and sleigh were all sold in a hasty, unfavorable deal. Itta and Hertz Mussman reached Palestine in 1933 almost penniless. They rented a miserable little hut covered with tar paper. Papa, who had always enjoyed being near flour, managed to find work in the Pat bakery. Later, when he was about fifty, as Aunt Sonia recalled, he bought a horse and cart and made his living first delivering bread, then transporting building materials around Haifa Bay. I can see him clearly, a darkly suntanned, thoughtful man, in his work clothes and sweaty gray vest, his smile rather shy but his blue eyes shooting sparks of laughter, the reins slack in his hands, as though from his seat on a board set across the cart he found some charming and amusing side to the views of Haifa Bay, the Carmel range, the oil refineries, the derricks of the port in the distance, and the factory chimneys.

  Now that he had stopped being a wealthy man and returned to the proletariat, he seemed rejuvenated. A sort of perpetual suppressed joy seemed to have descended on him, a joie de vivre in which an anarchistic spark flickered. Just like Yehuda Leib Klausner of Ulkieniki in Lithuania, the father of my other grandfather, Alexander, my grandfather Naphtali Hertz Mussman enjoyed the life of a carter, the lonely, peaceful rhythm of the long slow journeys, the feel of the horse and its pungent smells, the stable, the straw, the harness, the shafts, the oat bag, the reins, and the bit.

  Sonia, who was a girl of sixteen when her parents emigrated and her sisters were studying in Prague, stayed on in Rovno for five years, until she had qualified as a nurse at the nursing college attached to the Polish military hospital. She reached the port of Tel Aviv, where her parents, her sisters, and Tsvi Shapiro, Haya's "fresh" husband, were waiting for her, two days before the end of 1938. After a few years she married in Tel Aviv the man who had been her leader in the youth movement in Rovno, a strict, pedantic, opinionated man named Avraham Gendel-berg. Buma.

  And in 1934, a year or so after her parents and her elder sister Haya and four years before her younger sister Sonia, Fania too reached the Land of Israel. People who knew her said that she had had a painful love affair in Prague; they couldn't give me any details. When I visited Prague and on several successive evenings walked in the warren of ancient cobblestone streets around the university, I conjured up images and composed stories in my head.

  A year or so after she arrived in Jerusalem, my mother registered to continue her history and philosophy studies at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Forty-eight years later, apparently with no notion of what her grandmother had studied in her youth, my daughter Fania decided to study history and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.

  I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents' money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, book-learned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

  By the time I reached the age when my mother could have told me about her childhood and her early days in the Land, her mind was elsewhere and set on other matters. The bedtime stories she told me were peopled by giants, fairies, witches, the farmer's wife and the miller's daughter, remote huts deep in the forest. If she ever spoke about the past, about her parents' house or the flour mill or the bitch Prima, something bitter and desperate would creep into her voice, something ambivalent or vaguely sarcastic, a kind of suppressed mockery, something too complicated or veiled for me to catch, something provocative and disconcerting.

  Maybe that is why I did not like her to talk about these things and begged her to tell me simple stories I could relate to instead, like that of Matvey the Water Drawer and his six bewitched wives, or the dead horseman who went on crossing continents and cities in the form of a skeleton wearing armor and blazing spurs.

  I have hardly any idea about my mother's arrival in Haifa, her first days in Tel Aviv, or her first years in Jerusalem. Instead, I can hand you back to Aunt Sonia to tell her story of how and why she came here, what she hoped to find and what she really found.

  At the Tarbuth school we not only learned to read and write and speak very good Hebrew, which my subsequent life has corrupted. We also learned Bible and Mishnah and medieval Hebrew poetry, as well as biology, Polish literature and history, Renaissance art and European history. And above all we learned that beyond the horizon, beyond the rivers and forests, there was a land that we would all soon have to go to because the days of the Jews in Europe, at least those of us who lived in Eastern Europe, were numbered.

  Our parents' generation were much more aware than we were that time was running out. Even those who had made money, like our father, or those who had built modern factories in Rovno or turned to medicine, law, or engineering, those who enjoyed good social relations with the local authorities and intelligentsia, felt that we were living on a volcano. We were right on the borderline between Stalin and Grajewski and Pilsudski. We already knew that Stalin wanted to put an end to Jewish existence by force; he wanted all the Jews to become good Komsomolniks who would inform on one another. On the other hand, the Polish attitude toward the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish and can neither swallow it nor spit it out. They didn't feel like spewing us forth in the presence of the Versailles nations, in the atmosphere of minority rights, in front of Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations: in the 1920s the Poles still had some shame, they were keen to look good. Like a drunk trying to walk straight, so that no one can see he's weaving. They still hoped to appear outwardly more or less like other countries. But under the table they oppressed and humiliated us, so that we would gradually all go off to Palestine and they wouldn't have to see us anymore. That's why they even encouraged Zionist education and Hebrew schools: by all means let us become a nation, why not, the main thing was that we should scram to Palestine, and good riddance.

  The fear in every Jewish home, the fear that we never talked about but that we were unintentionally injected with, like a poison, drop by drop, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enou
gh, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing. Perhaps we didn't have proper manners. There was a terror that we might, heaven forbid, make a bad impression on the Gentiles, and then they would be angry and do things to us too dreadful to think about.

  A thousand times it was hammered into the head of every Jewish child that we must behave nicely and politely with the Gentiles even when they were rude or drunk, that whatever else we did, we must not provoke them or argue with them or haggle with them, we must not irritate them, or hold our heads up, and we must speak to them quietly, with a smile, so they shouldn't say we were noisy, and we must always speak to them in good, correct Polish, so they couldn't say we were defiling their language, but we mustn't speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn't say we had ambitions above our station, we must not give them any excuse to accuse us of being too greedy, and heaven forbid that they should say we had stains on our skirts. In short, we had to try very hard to make a good impression, an impression that no child must mar, because even a single child with dirty hair who spread lice could damage the reputation of the entire Jewish people. They could not stand us as it was, so heaven forbid we should give them more reasons not to stand us.

  You who were born here in Israel can never understand how this constant drip-drip distorts all your feelings, how it corrodes your human dignity like rust. Gradually it makes you as fawning and dishonest and full of tricks as a cat. I dislike cats intensely. I don't like dogs much either, but if I had to choose, I prefer a dog. A dog is like a Gentile, you can see at once what it's thinking or feeling. Diaspora Jews became cats, in the bad sense, if you know what I mean.

  But most of all they dreaded the mobs. They were terrified of what might happen in the gap between governments, for instance if the Poles were thrown out and the Communists came in, they were afraid that in the interval gangs of Ukrainians or Belarussians or the inflamed Polish masses or, farther north, the Lithuanians, would raise their heads once more. It was a volcano that kept dribbling lava all the time and smelling of smoke. "They're sharpening their knives for us in the dark," people said, and they never said who, because it could be any of them. The mobs. Even here in Israel, it turns out, Jewish mobs can be a bit of a monster.

  The only people we were not too afraid of were the Germans. I can remember in 1934 or 1935—I'd stayed behind in Rovno to finish my nursing training when the rest of the family had left—there were quite a few Jews who said if only Hitler would come, at least in Germany there's law and order and everyone knows his place, it doesn't matter so much what Hitler says, what matters is that over there in Germany he imposes German order and the mob is terrified of him. What matters is that in Hitler's Germany there is no rioting in the streets and they don't have anarchy—we still thought then that anarchy was the worst state. Our nightmare was that one day the priests would start preaching that the blood of Jesus was flowing again, because of the Jews, and they would start to ring those scary bells of theirs and the peasants would hear and fill their bellies with schnapps and pick up their axes and pitchforks, that's the way it always began.

  Nobody imagined what was really in store, but already in the 1920s almost everyone knew deep down that there was no future for the Jews either with Stalin or in Poland or anywhere in Eastern Europe, and so the pull of Palestine became stronger and stronger. Not with everyone, naturally. The religious Jews were very much against it, and so were the Bundists, the Yiddishists, the Communists, and the assimilated Jews who thought they were already more Polish than Paderewski or Wojciechowski. But many ordinary Jews in Rovno in the 1920s were keen that their children should learn Hebrew and go to Tarbuth. Those who had enough money sent their children to study in Haifa, at the Technion, or at the Tel Aviv gymnasium, or the agricultural colleges in Palestine, and the echoes that came back to us from the Land were simply wonderful—the young people were just waiting, when would your turn come? Meanwhile everyone read newspapers in Hebrew, argued, sang songs from the Land of Israel, recited Bialik and Tchernikhowsky, split up into rival factions and parties, ran up uniforms and banners, there was a kind of tremendous excitement about everything national. It was very similar to what you see here today with the Palestinians, only without their penchant for bloodshed. Among us Jews you hardly see such nationalism nowadays.

  Naturally we knew how hard it was in the Land: we knew it was very hot, a wilderness, and we knew there was unemployment, and we knew there were poor Arabs in the villages, but we could see on the big wall map in our classroom that there weren't many Arabs, there may have been half a million altogether then, certainly less than one million, and there was total certainty that there would be enough room for another few million Jews, and that maybe the Arabs were just being stirred up to hate us, like the simple people in Poland, but surely we'd be able to explain to them and persuade them that our return to the Land represented only a blessing for them, economically, medically, culturally, in every way. We thought that soon, in a few years, the Jews would be the majority here, and as soon as that happened, we'd show the whole world how to treat a minority—our own minority, the Arabs. We, who had always been an oppressed minority, would treat our Arab minority justly, fairly, generously, we would share our homeland with them, share everything with them, we would certainly never turn them into cats. It was a pretty dream.

  In every classroom in the Tarbuth kindergarten, the Tarbuth primary school, and the Tarbuth secondary school there hung a large picture of Theodor Herzl, a large map of the Land from Dan to Beer Sheba with the pioneering villages highlighted, a Jewish National Fund collecting box, pictures of pioneers at work, and all sorts of slogans with snatches of verse. Bialik visited Rovno twice and Tchernikhowsky came twice too, and Asher Barash as well, I think, or it may have been some other writer. Prominent Zionists from Palestine came too, almost every month, Zalman Rubashov, Tabenkin, Yaakov Zerubavel, Vladimir Jabotinsky.

  We used to put on big processions for them, with drums and banners, decorations, paper lanterns, passion, slogans, armbands, and songs. The Polish mayor himself went out to meet them in the square, and in that way we could sometimes begin to feel that we were also a nation, not just some kind of scum. It may be a little hard for you to understand, but in those days all the Poles were drunk on Polishness, the Ukrainians were drunk on Ukrainianness, not to mention the Germans, the Czechs, all of them, even the Slovaks, the Lithuanians, and the Latvians, and there was no place for us in that carnival, we didn't belong and we weren't wanted. Small wonder that we too wanted to be a nation, like the rest of them. What alternative had they left us?

  But our education was not chauvinistic. Actually the education at Tarbuth was humanistic, progressive, democratic, and also artistic and scientific. They tried to give boys and girls equal rights. They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.

  From a very early age our thoughts were with the Land of Israel. We knew by heart the situation in every new village, what was grown in Beer Tuvia and how many inhabitants there were in Zichron Yaakov, who built the metaled road from Tiberias to Tsemach, and when the pioneers climbed Mount Gilboa. We even knew what people ate and wore there.

  That is, we thought we knew. In fact our teachers did not know the whole truth, so even if they had wanted to tell us about the bad aspects, they couldn't have. They didn't have the faintest idea. Everybody who came from the Land—emissaries, youth leaders, politicians—and everyone who went and came back painted a rosy picture. And if anyone came back and told us less pleasant things, we didn't want to hear. We simply silenced them. We treated them with contempt.

  Our headmaster was a delightful man. Charmant. He was a firstrate teacher with a sharp mind and the heart of a poet. His name was Reiss, Dr. Issachar Reiss. He came from Galicia and soon became the idol of the young people. The girls secretly adored him, including my sister Haya, who was involved in communal activities and was a natural leader, and Fania, your mot
her, on whom Dr. Reiss had a mysterious influence, gently steering her in the direction of literature and art. He was so handsome and manly, a bit like Rudolph Valentino or Ramon Navarro, full of warmth and natural empathy, he hardly ever lost his temper, and when he did, he never hesitated to send for the student afterward to apologize.

  The whole town was under his spell. I think the mothers dreamed of him at night and the daughters swooned at the sight ofhim by day. And the boys, no less than the girls, tried to imitate him, to speak like him, to cough like him, to stop in the middle of a sentence like him and go and stand by the window for a few moments, deep in thought. He could have been a successful seducer. But no, so far as I know he was married—not particularly happily, to a woman who barely came up to his ankles—and behaved like an exemplary family man. He could also have been a great leader: he had a quality that made people long to follow him through fire and water, to do anything that would make him smile appreciatively and praise them afterward. His thoughts were our thoughts. His humor became our style. And he believed that the Land of Israel was the only place where the Jews could be cured of their mental illnesses and prove to themselves and to the world that they had some good qualities too.