by Amos Oz
Very soon I knew all these poems by heart and walked around all day drunk on the romantic anguish and macabre torments that enveloped them.
Side by side with the militaristic patriotic verses that I composed in the splendid black notebook that was a present from Uncle Joseph, I started to write poems of Weltschmerz as well, full of storm, forest, and sea. And some love poems too, before I even knew what was what. Or didn't know but vainly tried to find some accommodation between the westerns in which whoever slew the most Indians won the pretty girl as the prize and the tearful vows of Annabel Lee and her partner and their love beyond the grave. It was not easy to reconcile them. And much harder still to make some sort of peace between all of this and the school nurse's labyrinth of sheaths-eggs-and-Fallopian-tubes. And the nocturnal filth that tormented me so mercilessly that I wanted to die. Or to go back to being as I had been before I fell into the clutches of those jeering night hags: night after night I resolved to kill them off once and for all, and night after night those Scheherazades revealed to my startled gaze such uninhibited plots that all day long I waited impatiently to be in bed at night. Sometimes I could not wait and locked myself in the smelly toilets in the playground at Tachkemoni or our bathroom at home and emerged a few minutes later with my tail between my legs and as wretched as a rag.
The love of girls and everything associated with it seemed to me to be a catastrophe, a terrible trap from which there was no way out: you start out floating dreamily into an enchanted crystal palace, and you wake up immersed up to here in a cesspool.
I ran away and sought refuge in the fortress of sanity of books of mystery, adventure, and battle: Jules Verne, Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper, Mayne Reid, Sherlock Holmes, The Three Musketeers, Captain Hatteras, Montezuma's Daughter, The Prisoner of Zenda, With Fire and Sword, De Amicis's The Heart of a Boy, Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Through the Desert and Jungle, The Gold ofCaxa-malca, The Mysterious Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Last of the Mohicans, The Children of Captain Grant, the darkest recesses of Africa, grenadiers and Indians, wrongdoers, cavalrymen, cattle thieves, robbers, cowboys, pirates, archipelagos, hordes of bloodthirsty natives in feathered headdresses and war paint, blood-chilling battle cries, magical spells, knights of the dragon and Saracen horsemen with curved scimitars, monsters, wizards, emperors, bad guys, hauntings, and especially stories about pale little adolescents who are destined for great things when they have managed to overcome their own wretchedness. I wanted to be like them and I wanted to be able to write like the people who wrote them. Perhaps I did not make a distinction yet between writing and winning.
Jules Verne's Michael Strogoff imprinted something on me that is with me to this day. The Russian tsar has sent Strogoff on a secret mission to take a fateful message to the beleaguered Russian forces in remotest Siberia. On the way he has to cross regions that are under Tartar control. Michael Strogoff is captured by Tartar guards and taken to their leader, the Great Khan, who orders his eyes to be put out by being touched with a white-hot sword, so that he will be unable to continue with his mission to Siberia. Strogoff has memorized the fateful message, but how can he slip through the Tartar ranks and reach Siberia if he cannot see? Even after the glowing iron touches his eyes, the faithful messenger continues to grope his way blindly eastward, until at a crucial moment in the plot it is revealed to the reader that he has not lost his sight after all: the white-hot sword as it approached his eyes was cooled by his tears! Because at the crucial moment Michael Strogoff thought of his beloved family whom he would never see again, and the thought filled his eyes with tears, which cooled the blade and saved his sight as well as his fateful mission, which is crowned with success and leads to the victory of his country over all its foes.
So it was Strogoff's tears that saved him and the whole of Russia. But where I lived, men were not allowed to shed tears! Tears were shameful! Only women and children were permitted to weep. Even when I was five, I was ashamed of crying, and at the age of eight or nine I learned to suppress it so as to be admitted to the ranks of men. That is why I was so astonished on the night of November 29 when my left hand in the dark encountered my father's wet cheek. That is why I never talked about it, either to Father himself or to any other living soul. And now here was Michael Strogoff, a flawless hero, a man of iron who could endure any hardship or torture, and yet when he suddenly thinks of love, he shows no restraint: he weeps. Michael Strogoff does not weep from fear, or from pain, but because of the intensity of his feelings.
Moreover, Michael Strogoff's crying does not demote him to the rank of a miserable wretch or a woman or a wreck of a man; it is acceptable both to the author, Jules Verne, and to the reader. And as if it were not enough that it is suddenly acceptable for a man to weep, both he and the whole of Russia are saved by his tears. And so this manliest of men defeats all his foes thanks to his "feminine side," which rose up from the depths of his soul at the crucial moment, without impairing or weakening his "masculine side" (as they brainwashed us to say in those days): on the contrary, it complemented it and made peace with it. So perhaps there was an honorable way out of the choice that tormented me in those days, the choice between emotion and manliness? (A dozen years later, Hannah in My Michael would also be fascinated by the character of Michael Strogoff.)
And then there was Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, who detested exploitative regimes and the oppression of nations and individuals by heartless bullies and selfish powers. He had a hatred for the arrogant condescension of the northwestern countries that is reminiscent of Edward Said, if not Franz Fanon, so he decided to dissociate himself from all of it and to create a little utopia under the ocean.
This apparently aroused in me, among other things, a throb of Zionist responsiveness. The world always persecuted us and treated us unjustly: that was why we had retreated sideways, to create our own little independent bubble where we could live "a life of purity and freedom," far from the cruelty of our persecutors. But, like Captain Nemo, we would not go on being helpless victims but by the power of our creative genius we would arm our own Nautilus with sophisticated death rays. No one would ever dare to plot against us again. Our long arm would reach to the end of the world if necessary.
In Verne's The Mysterious Island a group of survivors from a shipwreck manage to create a tiny patch of civilization on a barren desert island. The survivors are all Europeans, all men, all rational, generous-hearted men of goodwill, they are all technologically minded, bold and resourceful: they are the very image of the way the nineteenth century wanted to see the future: sane, enlightened, virile, capable of solving any problem by the power of reason and in accordance with the tenets of the new religion of progress. (Cruelty, baser instincts, and evil were apparently banished to another, later island: the one in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.)
By their hard work, common sense, and pioneering enthusiasm the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch, with their bare hands, a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me, imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I had received from my father: secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, mil-itantly optimistic and progressive.
And yet, there were moments when the pioneers of The Mysterious Island were threatened by catastrophe from the forces of nature, moments when they had their backs to the wall and their brains were of no further use to them, and at such fateful moments a mysterious hand always intervened in the plot, a miraculous, all-powerful providence that time and again delivered them from certain destruction. "If there be justice, let it shine forth at once," Bialik wrote: in The Mysterious Island there was justice and it did shine forth at once, as quick as lightning, whenever all hope was lost.
But that was precisely the other ethos, the one diametrically opposed to my father's rationalism. It was the logic of the stories my mother used to tell me at night, tales of demons, of miracles, the tale of the ancient man who sheltered an e
ven more ancient man under his roof, tales of evil, mystery, and grace, Pandora's box where at the end hope still remained beyond all despair. It was also the miracle-laden logic of the Hasidic tales that Teacher Zelda first exposed me to and that my storytelling teacher at Tachkemoni, Mordechai Michaeli, took up from the place where she had left off.
It was as if here, in The Mysterious Island, there was at last some kind of reconciliation between the two opposing windows through which the world had first been revealed to me, at the beginning of my life: my father's commonsensical, optimistic window, over against my mother's window, which opened onto grim landscapes and strange supernatural forces, of evil but also of pity and compassion.
At the end of The Mysterious Island it turns out that the providential force that intervened over and over again to rescue the "Zionist enterprise" of the survivors of the shipwreck whenever they were threatened with destruction was actually the discreet intervention of Captain Nemo, the angry-eyed captain from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. But that in no way diminished the pleasure of reconciliation that I got from the book, the elimination of the contradiction between my childish fascination with Zionism and my no less childish fascination with the Gothic.
It was as though my father and mother had finally made peace and were living together in perfect harmony. Admittedly not here in Jerusalem but on some desert island. But still, they could make peace.
Kindhearted Mr. Marcus, who sold new and secondhand books on Jonah Street, almost at the corner of Geula Street, also ran a lending library, and eventually he allowed me to change my book every day. Sometimes twice on the same day. At first he would not believe that I had really read the whole book, and when I brought a book back only a few hours after I had borrowed it, he used to test me on it with all sorts of crafty trick questions. Gradually his suspicion turned to astonishment and finally to devotion. He was convinced that with such an amazing memory and the ability to read so fast, particularly if I also learned the major languages, someday I could become the ideal private secretary for one of our great leaders. Who knew, I might end up as Ben-Gurion's secretary, or Moshe Sharet's. Consequently he decided that I was worth a long-term investment, that he should cast his bread upon the water: who knew, he might need some permit one day, he might need to jump a line or oil the wheels of the publishing business he was planning to join, and then surely his ties of friendship with the private secretary of one of the greatest of the great would be worth its weight in gold.
Mr. Marcus sometimes used to show my crowded reader's ticket proudly to selected customers, as though gloating over the fruits of his investment. Just look what we have here! A bookworm! A phenomenon! A child who devours not just books but whole shelves every month!
So I got special permission from Mr. Marcus to make myself at home in his library. I could borrow four books at a time so as not to go hungry over the holidays, when the shop was closed. I could leaf— carefully!—through books hot from the press that were intended for sale, not for lending. I could even look at books that were not meant for someone of my age, like the stories of Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Stefan Zweig, and even spicy Maupassant.
In the winter I ran in the dark, through showers of piercing rain and driving wind, to get to Mr. Marcus's bookshop before it closed, at six o'clock. It was very cold in Jerusalem in those days, a sharp biting cold, and hungry polar bears came down from Siberia to roam the streets of Kerem Avraham on those late December nights. I ran without a coat, and so my sweater got drenched and gave off a depressing, itchy smell of wet wool all evening.
Occasionally it happened that I was left without a scrap to read, on those long empty Saturdays when by ten in the morning I had finished all the ammunition I had brought from the library. Frantically I grabbed whatever came to hand in my father's bookcases: Till Eulenspiegel in Shlonsky's translation, the Arabian Nights translated by Rivlin, the books of Israel Zarchi, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Berdyczewski, Rahel's poetry, Balzac, Hamsun, Yigal Mossensohn, Feierberg, Natan Shaham, Gnessin, Brenner, Hazaz, even Mr. Agnon's books. I understood almost nothing, except perhaps for what I could see through my father's spectacles, namely that life in the shtetl was despicable, repulsive, and even ridiculous. In my foolish heart, I was not entirely surprised by its terrible end.
Father had most of the key works of world literature in the original languages, so I could hardly even read their titles. But whatever was there in Hebrew, if I didn't actually read it, at least I sniffed at it. I left no stone unturned.
Of course, I also read the weekly children's section of Davar, and those children's books that were on everyone's dessert menu: poems by Leah Goldberg and Fania Bergstein, The Children's Island by Mira Lobeh, and all the books by Nahum Guttmann. Lobengula's Africa, Beatrice's Paris, Tel Aviv surrounded by sand dunes, orchards, and sea, all these were destinations of my first hedonistic world cruises. The difference between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv-that-was-joined-to-the-rest-of-the-big-wide-world seemed to me like the difference between our wintry, black-and-white life and a life of color, summer, and light. One book that particularly captured my imagination was Over the Ruins by Tsvi Liebermann-Livne, which I read and reread. Once upon a time, in the days of the Second Temple, there was a remote Jewish village, tucked away peacefully among hills, valleys, and vineyards. One day the Roman legionnaires arrived, slaughtered all the inhabitants, men, women, and old folk, looted their property, set fire to the buildings, and went on their way. But the villagers had managed before the massacre to hide their little children, the ones who were not yet twelve and could not take part in the defense of the village, in a cave in the hills.
After the calamity the children emerged from the cave, saw the destruction, and instead of despairing they decided, in a discussion that resembled a general assembly in a kibbutz, that life must go on and that they must rebuild the ruined village. So they set up committees, which girls sat on too, because these children were not only brave and industrious but also amazingly progressive and enlightened. Gradually, working like ants, they managed to recover the remaining livestock, repair the pens and cow sheds, restore the burned houses, start working the fields again, and set up a model community of children, a sort of idyllic kibbutz: a commune of Robinson Crusoes without a single Man Friday.
Not a cloud darkened the life of sharing and equality enjoyed by these children of the dream: neither power struggles nor rivalries and jealousies, neither filthy sex nor the ghosts of their dead parents. It was exactly the opposite of what happened to the children in Lord of the Flies. Tsvi Livne certainly intended to give the children of Israel an inspiring Zionist allegory: the generation of the wilderness had all died, and in its place there arose the generation of the Land, bold and brave, raising itself up by its own efforts from catastrophe to heroism and from darkness to great light. In my own, Jerusalem version, in the sequel that I composed in my head, the children were not content with milking the cows and harvesting the olives and grapes; they discovered an arms cache, or better still they managed to devise and construct machine guns, mortars, and armored vehicles. Or else it was the Palmach that managed to smuggle these weapons a hundred generations backward in time to the outstretched hands of the children of Over the Ruins. Armed with all these weapons, Tsvi Livne's (and my) children hurried to Masada and arrived at the very last minute. With a devastating barrage of fire, from the rear, with long, accurate salvos and deadly mortar fire they took the Roman legionnaires by surprise—the very same legionnaires who had killed their parents and were now engaged in building a ramp to storm the rocky citadel of Masada. And so, at the very moment when Eleazar Ben Yair was about to conclude his unforgettable farewell speech and the last defenders of Masada were on the point of falling on their swords so as not to be taken captive by the Romans, my young men and I burst onto the mountain and saved them from death, and our nation from the ignominy of defeat.
Then we carried the war to enemy territory: we positioned our mortars on the seve
n hills of Rome, smashed the Arch of Titus to smithereens, and brought the emperor to his knees.
There may well be another sick illicit pleasure concealed here, one that no doubt never occurred to Tsvi Livne when he was writing the book, a dark, oedipal pleasure. Because the children here buried their own parents. All of them. Not a single grown-up was left in the entire village. No parent, no teacher, no neighbor, no uncle, no grandpa, no grandma, no Mr. Krochmal, no Uncle Joseph, no Mala and Staszek Rudnicki, no Abramskis, no Bar-Yizhars, no Aunt Lilia, no Begin, and no Ben-Gurion. And so a well-repressed desire of the Zionist ethos, and of the child that I was then, was miraculously fulfilled: that the grown-ups should be dead. Because they were so alien, so burdensome. They belonged to the Diaspora. They were the generation of the wilderness. They were always full of demands and commands, they never let you breathe. Only when they are dead will we be able to show them at last how we can do everything ourselves. Whatever they want us to do, whatever they expect from us, we'll do the lot, magnificently: we'll plow and reap and build and fight and win, only without them, because the new Hebrew nation needs to break free from them. Because everything here was made to be young, healthy, and tough, while they are old and shattered and complicated and a bit repulsive, and more than a bit ridiculous.
So in Over the Ruins the whole generation of the wilderness has evaporated, leaving behind happy, light-footed orphans, as free as a flock of birds in the clear blue sky. There is no one left to nag them in a Diaspora accent, to speechify, to enforce musty manners, to spoil life with all kinds of depressions, traumas, imperatives, and ambitions. Not one of them has survived to moralize all day long—this is permitted, that is forbidden, that is disgusting. Just us. Alone in the world.
