by Bart Midwood
Though Cesare laughed at Chaim, and even tweaked his nose, making him blush, the words of the little mystic had a lasting effect. Chaim died of TB soon afterward, but to this day when Cesare makes a mistake, maybe drops a cup on the floor or makes a slip of the tongue, often he’ll say, “Well, Chaim, so what do you think of your genius now!”
In the end, though, he did at last cultivate this architectural genius of his, and it was just this thing in fact that sent him running off to Samaria.
For the last fifteen years, ever since the death of Frieda, his wife, he has been in retirement from his masonry work and has been giving all his time to study and reflection and letter-writing, all of which is focussed on the question of how (“how specifically,” as he insists) to improve the social order, and his little house on the kibbutz has become so crowded with books it looks inside like a library. Even in the bathroom and the kitchen he has books, hundreds of books, all neatly stacked on shelves that he built himself.
“All my life I used to be Cesare the Mason,” he said to me once with his big comical smile. “Now I’m Cesare the Shelver!”
Most of his collection are books of architecture and philosophy and history, but he has also nice old editions of Dante and Shakespeare and Cervantes, all in the original. Homer he has in modern Italian. Also he has three shelves of the great modern psychologists, a very nice representation, and some science books in a popular vein.
Now comes an important event.
About six years ago Cesare found an article by a Russian, Abram Cohen, in a philosophic journal. This article it excited Cesare so much that as soon as he finished reading it, he came running to our house in the middle of the night, quite late, about ten-thirty, and demanded that Lo Yadua and I read it at once.
“This minute!” he said. “Then you’ll see clearly what I’ve been trying to say to everyone for the last thirty years!”
So first I read it, then Lo Yadua read it, and by the time we both finished, it was past midnight; and then we began to talk, and we talked until sunrise; and then we went to the dining hall and had breakfast together.
This was what you can call a real talk, a talk that puts away the clock. Such a talk you can’t have every day, so naturally you remember it, and cherish it, if for no other reason than for its triumph over Sleep, over unconsciousness.
In this talk Cesare said, “My true politics I knew first with my hands. This was in ‘56, when I built the kindergarten room. In my head still I was socialist, full of phrases, but my hands already they knew something that my head did not yet know.
“After the war for the Sinai, I came to know also with my head. Even so, still I didn’t have the words. Not until now, tonight, here, from this Russian in the magazine, this Cohen, like a gift from God.”
I have to explain to you about the kindergarten room.
In ‘56, just before The Sinai Campaign, Cesare built a new classroom for the kindergarten, with big slabs of marble that he got shipped like a miracle by Catholic friends in Bologna that he once worked with in the quarries. Also he used granite and mortar and bricks, which he got locally, and some kind of smooth stones he dug up out of the little hill at the edge of the orange grove. All these materials he arranged in a very cheerful design; and he made everything, the whole room with the idea of the size of the children in mind; like the window sills, which he made very low, so a child can lift the window and also stand and look out; and a little water fountain he made in the wall, so cute, where a child can turn the faucet and drink from the spout without help. Many other things like this Cesare put in the room, so many details I would need ten pages to tell you everything.
One more thing I’ll tell you, because to me and to the children this was the best of all.
In the middle of the room he built a small pool, a circle maybe eight feet across, not deep; a foot-and-a-half of water you could keep in it, and the bottom was inlaid with tiles.
“So what’s this pool?” said the kindergarten teacher when she saw what Cesare was building.
Well, she was horrified and immediately began to talk about how maybe the children could drown in it.
Then Cesare told her no, in such a shallow pool nobody will drown.
“But what do I need this for in a classroom?”
“You could teach them how to make little boats, toy boats, and they could sail the boats in the pool. You see? Also they could sit on the edge and cool their feet in the water on a hot day. Also it makes a nice feeling in a room for children. They’ll be more cooperative, believe me. Listen, I’ll make you a proposition. See if the pool doesn’t make the teaching easier. If it doesn’t, I promise you I’ll fill it up. Just try it for a month. You’ll see. It’ll be nice. Water is feeling. A child likes to be in a room where there’s feeling.”
Now twenty-seven years later the pool is still in the room. If you come, I’ll show it to you. All my daughters they had kindergarten in this room with the pool and to this day they talk about it.
In the days when Cesare was building the kindergarten, he was on the conscious level still a passionate socialist, just as we all were. But then about a year later, after The Sinai Campaign, where he got hurt badly with shrapnel, many tiny fragments of metal all over the body, he was forced to lay in hospital for three months, and here he had very little to do and too much time for thinking, which was in him not a very strong function. And when he came back to the kibbutz, the first general meeting he stood up and expounded what he called his “new politics.”
This new politics of his he was able to express mainly in images, vivid, strong images, yes, but the effect it was like a big enigma he threw in everyone’s face. Nobody could understand what he was talking about. And then here and there he put in also some kind of metaphysical phrases, very eccentric, which made matters even worse, and the upshot was that he produced in the kibbutz some anxiety; and soon there was gossip, whispers, letters to bureaucrats and so on.
Then a week later comes a yellow Fiat, with wrinkled fenders, and in it is a little poo-bah, a freckle-face, from the socialist workers’ office in Tel Aviv.
“I heard about your new politics, Cesare,” says the pooh-bah.
“So congratulations,” says Cesare.
“I’d like to hear more.”
“Good!” says Cesare and immediately he takes the poo-bah to the school and shows him the kindergarten.
“Very nice,” says the poo-bah.
“I built this last year. Before the war.”
“Well, you did a good job, Cesare. And I like the little pool too. So now, tell me about your politics.”
“This is my politics,” says Cesare and he makes with his hand a sweeping gesture to indicate the room.
“I see no politics here,” says the pooh-bah. “All I see is a room.”
“This room is my politics.”
“Listen, Cesare, what kind of nonsense are you talking here? A room is a room. Politics is politics.”
“In your mind, yes.”
“And in yours?”
“In my mind politics is a room.”
“A room.”
“Yes. End of discussion.”
To be agreeable, Cesare could have given some phrases he had used in the general meeting, like, say, “the sacred essence of matter,” and so on, but already he had found out what kind of effect such phrases could produce, so he kept his mouth shut.
In the end the little pooh-bah took one photograph of the kindergarten room and went back to Tel Aviv. With what kind of impression in his mind, I don’t know, but that was the end of the matter.
From then on Cesare permitted himself to express his ideas only in material objects, in stone and wood and metal and so on, but never in words, not anyway until that night twenty years later when he came running to Lo Yadua and me with the Cohen article.
On that night Cesare at last found language. And such a lot of language too! And the next day he sat down and wrote Cohen feverishly a long letter, to which about a month l
ater came a very nice reply, also long, and very serious and friendly; and this was the beginning of a six-year correspondence.
Then last year Cohen emigrated to Israel. As he had some money, the government offered to sell him a nice house very cheap in a settlement in Samaria, and he took it.
So now these two old men, Cesare and Cohen, they were both in Israel and they said, “Why should we keep writing letters? We should meet, talk, write a book together.”
So this is what they did. And this is why six months ago Cesare went to Samaria. To be with Cohen and write a book with him.
How they collaborate is this: Cesare makes the architectural drawings, what he calls “blueprints for a better world,” and Cohen makes the verbal argument.
Cesare he tells me that everything in the book it is specific, particularized. So far they have done Bologna, Odessa, Tel Aviv, Manhattan, and some little village in Portugal. All these places either Cohen or Cesare has visited. Also they were able to get detailed drawings of everything, water and sewage systems, roads, all the public and private buildings, etc. And with this they make a plan, externalize a vision, which they refer to alternately as “The Polis” or “The Good City.”
Now this approach to politics is what you can call “fatherly.” To me it’s irresistible, because it puts first the question of human accommodation. “The city,” says Cohen, “is the father of its people.” And by “the city” he means not the government, but the physical artifice.
One of the things that Cohen is up to by way of all this particularization with sewers and roads and what-not is to make an attack on the communists, who, as he says, “have unconscious contempt for material and desacralize it.”
I agree with him on this point. In Das Kapital, for example, you find mainly a dialectic of abstractions, concerned less with material than with the price of it; moreover, if you look beyond the rhetoric, which is so sophisticated and compelling, and examine the ideas regarding motive and action, you find a mental process impelled entirely by hatred.
So, what can you make with such a text for a teacher? In Cohen’s opinion you can make “nothing but Hell on Earth.”
This is sharp language, yes, but when Cohen is dealing with the communists, he must be sharp, because, on account of his longing for community, he could be so easily confused with them. To the capitalists he can afford to be more polite, since already his basic complaint it flies in their face.
This complaint I can tell you in two words. It’s a complaint against the gestalt, the whole gestalt of political discussion, where you have always in the foreground the theme of social and economic power, of how best to distribute authority and money, while in the background you have, like an orphan in the alley, the theme of human accommodation. As a result you have always these arguments, polemics, where you talk only about the foreground issue, about maybe you should distribute the authority and the money this way, or that way, idiotically supposing that if only the proper power arrangements could be effected, the orphan would be housed.
For Cohen all this is a madness, where you put the cart before the horse. In response he particularizes. That is, he puts the horse where he thinks it belongs, before the cart, by expressing the political idea first through the architectural picture, from which, as he says, “may then be inferred the social arrangements, the distribution of authority, money, value.”
Such an approach in my opinion is maybe naive and one-sided, but at least humane. If you look at the ideologues on the left and the right since the Eighteenth Century, you can see that each one tries to persuade you that from this or that social-economic idea will proceed an improved accommodation, but all are clearly contradicted by the evidence of history and by what is present to the eye. “From any single social-economic idea,” Cohen says, “you can make one city that is good and another that is bad. Consequently let us make the picture of a good city and then build it. In this way we will take up the real employment question, which is not: ‘How do we get all of us to work?’, but: ‘What should we work at!’”
There you have in a nutshell Cohen’s ideas. Maybe you’re sympathetic and maybe not. I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. The main thing for you to understand about these ideas is that they’re what drew Cesare to Samaria.
What drew Lo Yadua to Samaria, though, was Cesare. Not that Lo Yadua was against Cohen’s ideas. On the contrary, he liked them very much, just as I did, but my husband he was not the sort of man who would put himself in mortal danger for ideas. Only for people would he put himself in mortal danger, people he loved.
In early May when Cesare set off to visit Cohen, the settlement appeared to be secure. By July, though, all of a sudden the settlers there they began to have trouble and to be not sure anymore of their ground, and many of us were worried for them.
Lo Yadua made a fuss that I should telephone Cesare and tell him to come home. So I did, and I used the kitchen phone, which has a speaker-button, because Lo Yadua he wanted to hear.
“You think I’m going to run away from a little trouble at my age?” said Cesare.
“We’re not talking ‘little,’” I said.
“Listen, Ila, Cohen and I are having excellent conversation. Very important. And we’re making good progress with the book. Already we have a hundred pages.”
“So bring Cohen here.”
“He can’t travel. He’s ill.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Something with the lungs.”
“So how did he make the trip from Russia?”
“It almost killed him, this trip. Anyway it’s beautiful here in Samaria.”
Two days later Lo Yadua persuaded me to call again. This time Cesare said there had been an attack on the settlement, six or seven men with machine guns.
“They put some holes in things,” he said, “but nobody was hurt, Ila, so don’t worry!”
“Why shouldn’t I worry?”
“Who’s going to kill an old man like me?”
“Who’s going to ask how old you are?”
“Who needs to ask?”
“Listen, Cesare. When did they come? In the night or the day?”
“What’s the difference?”
“You don’t know anymore the difference between night and day?”
“What do you think?”
After the phone-call Lo Yadua sat at the kitchen table and put his face in his hands and wept in silence. He thought I didn’t see this. Never before, except once, had I seen him weep.
Two days later he went to Samaria. He took two weapons, a pistol and an automatic rifle.
The Voyage And The Dream
Cesare and his wife, Frieda, they are the ones who in 1931 took Lo Yadua from America to Palestine. This was all arranged by a Jewish agency in New York. In other words the Levis and Lo Yadua were thrown together by circumstance and not by any design of their own. On the contrary Lo Yadua, who was only five years old at the time, did not want to leave his parents in New York, and the Levis for their part were not looking particularly to have a strange little boy to worry about on the long voyage to Palestine. Already they had a little boy, their own son, Orsino, seven years old, who was worry enough, but still when the agency asked them to take Lo Yadua too, they didn’t refuse.
Here now I give you the opening passage of a book my Lo Yadua tried to write about his life. This passage is about his voyage to Palestine.
Lo Yadua never finished his book, never even got very far with it, because he was too perfectionist. Over and over he wrote every sentence, twenty, thirty, forty times. I know he wouldn’t approve of me sending to you the whole manuscript, but a few passages here and there I think he wouldn’t mind too much. Of course he wrote in Hebrew, but I give you here a translation, done by Dr. Max Irvine, from the comparative literature department at Jerusalem University, who is a professional translator and an old friend. Myself I don’t trust with such work, as my English is clumsy and Lo Yadua’s written Hebrew was very proper:
Th
e mother and father of Lo Yadua stood on the pier, dressed in black on a gray day in October, waving at him as he stood on the deck of the big old dark iron ship. They looked so small down there, and so pale. Ships all over the harbor were blowing their horns, big deep horns and little horns too, all sorts of horns, probably because there was a heavy fog and a lot of traffic on the water, a lot of coming and going. A big hand was clutching his shoulder, the hand of Mister Levi. Mister Levi was a mason from Bologna. He and his wife had decided after a few months in New York to go and settle in Palestine on a kibbutz and had agreed to take Lo Yadua along. Lo Yadua liked them, but he hardly knew them and they were not his parents, his family, and also they spoke Italian to one another and he knew no Italian. To him they spoke English, but their English was poor and often they did not understand him, even though he was only five and knew only simple words.
As soon as the ship began to move, to pull away from the dock, sailors began to shout, and not only sailors, but other passengers as well, and also many people on the dock. Lo Yadua did not shout, though. Well, what was the point of shouting? To shout at such a moment you have to have some taste for the idea of the voyage, some enthusiasm.
In 1956, Lo Yadua had a dream about this childhood voyage of his, so I know it was a big thing in his psyche. This dream he had in anticipation of a visit he was expecting the next week from Anchel and Surah, whom he hadn’t seen at that point in more than twenty years. Probably he had other anticipatory dreams in that period, but I don’t know about them, because then we were just at the beginning of our second year of marriage, and in those days still he was very selective about what he told me. This is often the case with a young rough-and-ready type of man, specially if his wife happens to be in the psychology business. Such a man is always just a little bit more fearful and wary of his wife than he should be, stubbornly hiding from her his inner world, the whole poetry of his soul, just as if he were keeping a mistress in a secret room in the cellar.
Though now it is almost twenty-five years since he told me his voyage dream, I remember it very clearly, and I will tell it to you because really I think it is important in many respects. In this dream he is a little boy, standing on the deck of an ocean liner, a big old iron ship with rusted sides, which is just beginning to pull away from the dock. There is a gray mist over everything and a chill in the air. Below on the dock are Anchel and Surah, looking up at him and waving sadly. They are dressed in black, and their hands and faces are gray, not like the mist, but like stone. As he looks down at them, he feels at first a terrible grief, until suddenly, from behind him, comes a comforting hand upon his shoulder, a big strong calloused hand with knotty joints, the hand of Cesare. Lo Yadua turns and looks up eagerly, expecting to see Cesare’s face, but instead sees with horror that there is no face, and no body either, that what he has on his shoulder is a severed independent hand. In revulsion he grabs the hand and flings it into the water, then climbs in a desperate panic onto the rail. As he teeters there for a moment, Anchel and Surah cry out to him from below, “No, no, don’t!” But he ignores their pleas, spreads his arms like wings, and makes a leap for the dock. The distance is too great, however, and he lands in the water, which is cold and dark and sucks him to the bottom.
