A Tale of Love and Darkness (21 page)

One fine day he too would be a professor on Mount Scopus, he would help push back the frontiers of knowledge and drain the swamps of exile in the people's hearts. Just as the pioneers in Galilee and the Valleys made the desert places bloom, so he too would labor with all his strength, with enthusiasm and dedication, to plow the furrows of the national spirit and make the new Hebrew culture bloom. The picture says it all.

EVERY MORNING
Yehuda Arieh Klausner took the No. 9 bus from the stop in Geula Street via the Bukharian Quarter, Prophet Samuel Street, Simeon the Righteous Street, the American Colony, and the Sheikh
Jarrah district to the university buildings on Mount Scopus, where he diligently pursued his MA studies. He attended lectures on history by Professor Richard Michael Kobner, who never succeeded in learning Hebrew; Semitic linguistics by Professor Hans Jacob Polotsky; Biblical studies from Professor Umberto Moshe David Cassuto; and Hebrew literature from Uncle Joseph, alias Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner, the author of
Judaism and Humanism.

While Uncle Joseph definitely encouraged my father, who was one of his star pupils, he never chose him, when the time came, as a teaching assistant, so as not give malicious tongues anything to wag about. So important was it for Professor Klausner to avoid aspersions on his good name that he may have behaved unfairly to his brother's son, his own flesh and blood.

On the front page of one of his books the childless uncle inscribed the following words: "To my beloved Yehuda Arieh, my nephew who is as dear to me as a son, from his uncle Joseph who loves him like his own soul." Father once quipped bitterly: "If only we had not been related, if only he loved me a little less, who knows, I might have been a lecturer in the literature department by now instead of a librarian."

All those years it was like a running sore in my father's soul, because he really deserved to be a professor like his uncle and his brother David, the one who had taught literature in Vilna and died of it. My father was amazingly knowledgeable, an excellent student with a prodigious memory, an expert in world literature as well as Hebrew literature, who was at home in many languages, utterly familiar with the Tosefta, the Midrashic literature, the religious poetry of the Jews of Spain, as well as Homer, Ovid, Babylonian poetry, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Adam Mickiewicz, as hard-working as a honey bee, as straight as a die, a gifted teacher who could give a simple and accurate explanation of the barbarian invasions,
Crime and Punishment
, the workings of a submarine, or the solar system. Yet he never earned the chance to stand up before a class or to have pupils of his own, but ended his days as a librarian and bibliographer who wrote three or four scholarly books and contributed a few entries to the
Hebrew Encyclopedia
, mainly on comparative and Polish literature.

In 1936 he was found a modest post in the newspaper department of the National Library, where he worked for twenty years or so, first on
Mount Scopus and after 1948 in the Terra Sancta Building, beginning as a simple librarian and eventually rising to deputy to the head of the department, Dr. Pfeffermann. In a Jerusalem that was full of immigrants from Poland and Russia and refugees from Hitler, among them distinguished luminaries from famous universities, there were more lecturers and scholars than students.

In the late 1950s, after receiving his doctorate from London University, my father tried unsuccessfully to secure a foothold in the literature department in Jerusalem as an outside lecturer. Professor Klausner, in his day, had been afraid of what people would say if he employed his own nephew. Klausner was succeeded as professor by the poet Shimon Halkin, who attempted to make a fresh start by eliminating the heritage, the methods, and the very smell of Klausner and certainly did not want to take on Klausner's nephew. In the early 1960s Father tried his luck at the newly opened Tel Aviv University, but he was not welcome there either.

In the last year of his life he negotiated for a literature post in the academic institute that was being set up in Beer Sheva and was eventually to become Ben Gurion University. Sixteen years after my father's death I myself became an adjunct professor of literature at Ben Gurion University; a year or two later I was made a full professor, and eventually I was appointed to the Agnon Chair. In time I received generous invitations from both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Universities to be a full professor of literature, I, who am neither an expert nor a scholar nor a mover of mountains, who have never had any talent for research and whose mind always turns cloudy at the sight of a footnote.* My father's little finger was more professorial than a dozen "parachuted in" professors like me.

The Zarchis' apartment had two and a half small rooms, and was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The rear part of the apartment
was occupied by Israel Zarchi, his wife Esther, and his two aged parents. The front room, where my father lived, first with his parents, then on his own, and eventually with my mother, had its own door, leading onto the veranda, then down a few steps into the narrow front garden, and out into Amos Street, which was still no more than a dusty track, with no roadway or pavements, still scattered with heaps of building materials and dismantled scaffolding among which hunger-weary cats roamed and a few doves pecked. Three or four times a day a cart drawn by a donkey or mule came down the road, a cart bearing long iron rods for building, or the paraffin seller's cart, the iceman's cart, the milkman's cart, the cart of the rag-and-bone man, whose hoarse cry "
alte sachen
"always made my blood freeze: all the years of my childhood I imagined that I was being warned against illness, old age, and death, which though still distant from me were gradually and inexorably approaching, creeping secretly like a viper through the tangle of dark vegetation, ready to strike me from behind. The Yiddish cry
alte sachen
sounded to me just like the Hebrew words
al-tezaken
, "do not age." To this day, the cry sends a cold shiver up my spine.

*My father's books are rich in footnotes. As for me, I have only used them freely in one book,
The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Tear of God
(Jerusalem: Keter, 1993; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2000). I introduced my father into note 92 on page 192 of the Hebrew edtion of that book. That is to say, I referred the reader to his book
The Novella in Hebrew Literature.
In writing that note, some twenty years after his death, I hoped to afford him a small pleasure yet at the same time feared that instead of being pleased he might be waving an admonishing finger at me.

Swallows nested in the fruit trees in the gardens, while lizards, geckos, and scorpions crept in and out of the clefts of the rocks. Occasionally we even saw a tortoise. The children burrowed under the fences, creating a network of shortcuts that spread through the backyards of the neighborhood, or climbed up on the flat rooftops to watch the British soldiers in the Schneller Barracks or to look out at the distant Arab villages on the surrounding hillsides: Isawiya, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Lifta, Nebi Samwil.

Today the name of Israel Zarchi is almost forgotten, but in those days he was a prolific young writer whose books sold many copies. He was about my father's age, but by 1937, when he was twenty-eight, he had published no fewer than three books. I revered him because I was told that he was not like other writers: the whole of Jerusalem wrote scholarly books, put together from notes, from other books, from booklists, dictionaries, weighty foreign tomes, and ink-stained index cards, but Mr. Zarchi wrote books "out of his own head." (My father used to say: "If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books, you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.")

On winter evenings a few members of my parents' circle used to get together sometimes at our place or at the Zarchis' in the building across the road: Hayim and Hannah Toren, Shmuel Werses, the Breimans, flamboyant Mr. Sharon-Shvadron, who was a great talker, Mr. Haim Schwarzbaum the red-headed folklorist, Israel Hanani, who worked at the Jewish Agency, and his wife Esther Hananit. They arrived after supper, at seven or half past, and left at half past nine, which was considered a late hour. In between, they drank scalding tea, nibbled honey cake or fresh fruit, discussed with well-bred anger all kinds of topics that I could not understand; but I knew that when the time came, I would understand them, I would participate in the discussions and would produce decisive arguments that they had not thought of. I might even manage to surprise them, I might end up writing books out of my own head like Mr. Zarchi, or collections of poems like Bialik and Grandpa Alexander and Levin Kipnis and Dr. Saul Tchernikhowsky, the doctor whose smell I shall never forget.

The Zarchis were not only Father's former landlords but also dear friends, despite the regular arguments between my Revisionist father and Zarchi the "Red": my father loved to talk and explain, and Zarchi liked to listen. My mother would interpose a quiet sentence or two from time to time. Esther Zarchi, for her part, tended to ask questions, and my father enjoyed giving her extensively detailed replies. Israel Zarchi would turn to my mother sometimes, with downcast eyes, and ask her opinion as though begging her in coded language to take his side in the argument: my mother knew how to cast a new light on everything. She did this with a few brief words, after which the conversation sometimes took on a pleasant, relaxed tone, a new calm, a cautious or hesitant note entered the argument, until after a while tempers became inflamed again and voices were once more raised in a civilized fury, which simmered with exclamation marks.

In 1947 the Tel Aviv publisher Joshua Chachik brought out my father's first book,
The Novella in Hebrew Literature, from Its Origins to the End ofthe Haskalah.
This book was based on my father's MA dissertation. The title page declared that the book had been awarded the Klausner Prize of Tel Aviv Municipality and was published with the assistance of
the Municipality and that of the Zippora Klausner Memorial Fund. Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner in person contributed a foreword:

It is a twofold pleasure for me to see the publication of a Hebrew book on the novella that was submitted to me in my capacity as Professor of Literature in our one and only Hebrew University as a final dissertation in Modern Hebrew Literature by my long-standing pupil, my nephew Yehuda Arieh Klausner. This is no ordinary work ... It is a comprehensive and all-embracing study ... Even the style of the book is both rich and lucid, and is in keeping with the important subject matter ... I am unable therefore to forbear from rejoicing ... The Talmud says "Pupils are like sons"...

and on a separate page, after the title page, my father dedicated his book to the memory of his brother David:

To my first teacher of literary history—
my only brother
David
whom I lost in the darkness of exile.
Where art thou?

For ten days or a fortnight, as soon as my father got home from work at the library on Mount Scopus, he hurried to the local post office at the eastern end of Geula Street, opposite the entrance to Mea Shearim, eagerly awaiting copies of his first book, which he had been informed had been published and which someone or other had seen in a bookshop in Tel Aviv. So every day he rushed to the post office, and every day he returned empty-handed, and every day he promised himself that if the parcel from Mr. Gruber at Sinai Printers had not arrived by the next day, he would definitely go to the pharmacy and telephone forcefully to Mr. Chachik in Tel Aviv: This is simply unacceptable! If the books did not arrive by Sunday, by the middle of the week, by Friday at the latest—but the parcel did arrive, not by mail but by personal delivery, brought to our home by a smiling Yemenite girl, not from Tel Aviv but straight from Sinai Printers (Jerusalem, tel. no. 2892).

The parcel contained five copies of
The Novella in Hebrew Literature
, hot from the press, virginal, wrapped in several layers of good-quality white paper (on which the proofs of some picture book had been printed) and tied up with string. Father thanked the girl, and despite his excitement did not forget to give her a shilling (a handsome sum in those days, sufficient for a vegetarian meal at the Tnuva Restaurant). Then he asked me and my mother to step into his study to be with him while he opened the packet.

I remember how my father mastered his trembling enthusiasm, and did not forcibly snap the string holding the parcel together or even cut it with scissors but—I shall never forget this—undid the strong knots, one after another, with infinite patience, making alternate use of his strong fingernails, the tip of his paper knife, and the point of a bent paper clip. When he had finished, he did not pounce on his new book but slowly wound up the string, removed the wrapping of glossy paper, touched the jacket of the uppermost copy lightly with his fingertips, like a shy lover, raised it gently to his face, ruffled the pages a little, closed his eyes and sniffed them, inhaling deeply the fresh printing smells, the pleasure of new paper, the delightful, intoxicating odor of glue. Only then did he start to leaf through his book, peering first at the index, scrutinizing the list of addenda and corrigenda, reading and rereading Uncle Joseph's foreword and his own preface, lingering on the title page, caressing the cover again, then, alarmed that my mother might be secretly making fun of him, he said apologetically:

"A new book fresh from the press, a first book, it's as though I've just had another baby."

"When it's time to change its nappy," my mother replied, "I expect you'll call me."

So saying, she turned and left the room, but she returned a few moments later carrying a bottle of sweet, sacramental Tokay and three tiny liqueur glasses, saying that we must drink the health of Father's first book. She poured some wine for the two of them and a little drop for me, she may even have kissed him on the forehead, while he stroked her hair.