The Story of a Life (13 page)

Another language, which we didn’t use at home but which was the most common on the streets, was Romanian. After World War I, Bukovina, the country of my birth, was annexed to Romania and the official language became Romanian. We spoke only broken Romanian and never mastered this language.

Four languages surrounded us and lived within us, complementing one another in a strange way. If you were speaking German and you were searching for a word, phrase, or proverb, you’d use Yiddish or Ruthenian. My parents tried, but couldn’t maintain the purity of their German, because words from all the languages that surrounded us flowed imperceptibly into our own, insinuating themselves. These four languages merged into one, rich in nuance, contrasts, humor,
and satire. This language had lots of room for emotion, for delicate shadings of feeling, imagination, and memory. Today these languages no longer live within me, but I feel their roots. Sometimes, as if by magic, just one word will evoke entire scenes.

I RETURN TO 1946, the year I came to Israel. On the ship and afterward, at the camp at Atlit, where we were interned by the British, we learned some Hebrew words. They sounded exotic but were hard to pronounce. They lacked warmth, their sound aroused no associations, as if they had been born from the sand that surrounded us on all sides. Worse yet, they sounded like orders—Work! Eat! Clean up! Go to sleep!—as if this were a language of soldiers, and not one in which you could converse quietly. On the kibbutzim and in the youth villages, this language was forced upon us. At the very least, those who spoke in their mother tongues would be sternly reprimanded.

I had never been talkative, but now the few words that might have come out of me were swallowed back in. We stopped speaking among ourselves, and, as is the case in any critical situation, basic character traits were laid bare. The extroverts and the bossy knew how to take advantage. They turned their words into orders that quickly filled the vacuum, taking control of the empty space as their voices rang out loudly. I would retreat into myself more and more. My first year in Israel was not an opening out to the world for me, but an even more extreme withdrawal into myself.

During that first year we worked in the fields and we learned Hebrew, the Bible, and the poems of Hayyim Nachman Bialik. Memories of home and the sounds of its language faded away, but the new language would not take root easily.
There were youths who adopted Hebrew slang as if they’d been born here, the words tripping off their tongues with ease. But for me, for some reason, saying even a single word—let alone a sentence—required a huge effort.

Sometimes I’d go to Jaffa, where a few distant relatives lived—people I’d known before the war. In their midst, my mother tongue would temporarily leave its prison. To overcome my muteness and stuttering, I read widely in the two languages I knew: German and Yiddish. I would repeat entire sentences so as to bring back some fluency.

The effort to preserve my mother tongue amid surroundings that imposed another language upon me proved futile. From week to week it dwindled; by the end of that first year all that remained were embers. The pain this brought was double-edged. My mother had been murdered at the start of the war, and all through it I carried her image within me, somehow believing that I would meet up with her when it was over and things would go back to the way they had been. My mother and her language were one and the same. Now, as that language faded within me, it was as if my mother were dying a second time. A deep sadness suffused me like a drug, not only during my waking hours, but in sleep as well. While asleep, I would be wandering with a convoy of refugees, all of them stuttering, with only the roadside animals—the horses, the cows, and the dogs—speaking fluently, as if man and beast had exchanged places.

The effort to adopt Hebrew and to turn it into my mother tongue continued for some years; the yellowing diary that lies on my desk is enduring testimony to this. It doesn’t take a graphologist to note the confusion and disorientation there. Spelling mistakes are no less pronounced in Hebrew than in German. Every letter signals great rupture and sorrow, but not a lack of self-consciousness.
What will become of me
without a language?
I ask myself in these faded diaries.
Without a language I’m like a stone.
I don’t know where I got that image, but it seems like a good metaphor for the feeling that without a language I would also wither away in an ugly and lengthy desiccation, like the garden behind our dormitory during winter.

My years in the youth village and then in the army were not congenial ones. Some young people did find themselves through agricultural work, quite a few carved out their niche within the regular army, but most of them joined the general labor force, dispersing in all directions. We tended to meet up less and less frequently. Without a language a man doesn’t talk. My mother tongue, which I had greatly loved, died within me after two years in Israel. I tried to revive it in different ways, by reading and even repeating words and sentences, but despite these efforts it still died rapidly.

From the moment I arrived in Israel, I hated the people who forced me to speak Hebrew, and with the death of my mother tongue, my hostility toward them only increased. This hostility did not, of course, change the situation, but it did clarify it. Quite obviously, I was neither here nor there. What had been mine—my parents, my home, and my mother tongue—was now lost to me forever, and this language, which promised to be my mother tongue, was nothing more than a stepmother.

Let me be clear: we acquired the rudiments of Hebrew quite quickly, and by the end of first year we could even read the newspaper. But there was little joy in this acquisition. It was like being trapped in a protracted military tour of duty that would last for many years and for which I immediately had to adopt the soldiers’ language. But at the end of my service (which would be equivalent to the end of the war), I would return to my mother tongue. There was, of course, an
inescapable dilemma: that language had been German—the language of those who murdered my mother. How does one go back to speaking in a language drenched in the blood of Jews? This dilemma, in all its severity, did not detract from the feeling that my German was not the language of those Germans but the language of my mother, and it was as clear as daylight that if I met up with her I’d speak to her in the language that we had spoken together since I was a small child.

My years in the army were years of loneliness and estrangement. I had no home in Israel, and being posted in the desolate huts in Tzrifin, at Beit Lid, and at Hazerim, doing guard duty day and night, only increased this sense of alienation. Because I had nowhere to escape to, I escaped into my diary. The entries from those days are full of longing for my parents and for the home I had lost. It’s strange that, of all places, it was in the army that my first stutterings should have taken the shape of short poems. I say “poems,” but they were more like the howling of an abandoned animal who takes up his cries time and again with a wearying monotony. Thoughts, feelings, and images churned within me all the time, but without words everything shrank to a mere whimper.

In the army I started to read Hebrew literature, or, more accurately, I tried to do so. It was like a sheer mountain wall, and climbing it was far beyond my capabilities. In the early 1950s, S. Yizhar and Moshe Shamir were the writers in vogue. Every page was a hurdle for me, and yet I still read voraciously, as if trying to familiarize myself with the strange country into which I had been thrown. At the same time, I searched for myself and my identity in young characters with a similar fate. But what I got from the pages I read was a strange world, populated by young people who were set in their views, soldiers or officers or farmers in the open fields. Though the life I had come from lacked structure or dignity, neither did it have
childish naïveté or idealization. I went back and read, but the more I read, the clearer it became that this beautiful and honest life of work, warfare, and love would not be my allotted portion, even if I were to accomplish the impossible.

Another matter, but in fact the same thing: during that period people around me all seemed to speak in very elevated words and in slogans. From my childhood I’ve hated pomposity, preferring instead small, quiet words that evoke scents and sounds. Here again was a conflict that there was no bridging.

In time it became clear to me that I needed to have a different connection to Hebrew, not an external connection but an interior one. In this, as in other areas, people came to my aid, and it is doubtful whether without their help I would have been able to leave the prison in which I found myself. First and foremost were Dov Sadan and, later, Leib Roichman. I learned Yiddish with Dov Sadan. Yiddish had been the language of my grandparents. During the war and my subsequent wanderings, my Yiddish vocabulary increased, but I never arrived at a real grasp of the language. For Sadan, Yiddish and Hebrew dwelt side by side, like twin sisters. In his classes we spoke Hebrew, but we read the texts in Yiddish. From Sadan, I learned something that was not much talked about in those days: that most Hebrew writers were bilingual, that they wrote simultaneously in the two languages. This was a sensational discovery for me. It meant that the “here” and the “there” were not cut off from each other, as the slogans proclaimed. We read Mendele Mocher Sefarim in his two languages, and Bialik, Steinberg, and Agnon. Their Hebrew was connected to places with which I was familiar, to landscapes I remembered, and to forgotten melodies that came to me from my grandparents’ prayers. The Hebrew of my youth-village days and of the army had been a language unto itself, unconnected to my previous language or life experience.

Dov Sadan laid out another kind of Jewish map before us, a map in which Hebrew and Yiddish, the art of a people and the art of individuals, coexisted. In Sadan’s inclusive vision, there was no monolithic Jewishness, neither linguistic nor artistic. He saw contemporary Jewish life as though after a catastrophic rupture, to use a Kabbalistic term. He believed that then, as now, there were many fragments of Jewish life that had splintered off from that rupture, and that it was our job to reconnect them, drawing out the sparks of holiness hidden within them all and bringing them together. He realized that the major Jewish movements of the past two hundred years—Hasidism, its Lithuanian opponents, the Jewish Enlightenment, and the national Jewish rebirth—no longer had the power to exist separately, and that a new Jewish life had to be created from them. This pluralism sounded strange back then. Ideologues couldn’t stand pluralism. Their world was divided into black and white: the Diaspora versus the Homeland, commerce versus a life of labor, collective life versus private life. And above everything hovered the familiar slogan: “Forget the Diaspora and root yourself in the present!”

But what could I do? Within me there was a deep refusal to efface my past and build a new life on its ruins. The idea that a person has to destroy his past in order to build a new life seemed to me totally misguided even then, but I didn’t dare voice this thought, not even to myself. On the contrary, I blamed myself for having a Diaspora mentality, for having a bourgeois outlook, and, of course, for hopeless egotism. In this respect, Sadan was a true guide for me. He knew exactly where I had come from and the legacy I bore blindly within me, and he also guessed that in the future it would form the foundation and the building blocks of my life.

Leib Roichman was a Yiddish writer, someone with whom I became very close. At his home I heard a different
kind of Yiddish. A small group of us would get together frequently, and he would read aloud from Yiddish poetry and prose. It was at his home that I heard the poems of M. L. Halperin, Ya’akov Glattstein, and Rachel Zichlinski for the first time. He read quietly and without dramatization, as if he were pouring the words into us.

Roichman had grown up in a Hasidic household and been educated at the home of the Rabbi of Prusof. Unlike other members of his generation, he kept faith with his Hasidic heritage. His vocabulary and his expressions were completely Hasidic, although his lifestyle was not. Once a week I would sit with him and read the Hasidic classics, such as
Likutei Maharan.
The books were written in Hebrew, but not in modern spoken Hebrew—certainly not the Hebrew I knew from the youth movement. “Work” meant worshipping God, “providence” meant Divine Providence, “security” was not the defense of small villages but the security of faith in God. Not only did the words have different meanings, but the sentences did, too. It was as if they were being played to a different tune, a kind of blend of Yiddish and Hebrew, with an occasional Slavic word thrown in here and there.

Though Yiddish literature and Hasidic literature were in complete contrast to everything that was then going on in Israel, for me these two aspects of my life were pleasantly compatible, just as they’d been in the home I had lost. But I sensed something that only later did I come to understand in greater depth: literature, if it is genuine, is the religious melody that has been lost to us. Literature gathers within it all the elements of faith: the seriousness, the internality, the melody, and the connection with the hidden aspects of the soul. It goes without saying how far this concept was from the ubiquitous social realism then rampant in the socialist newspapers. In truth, even I wasn’t quite aware in those days
of what I was learning from my two teachers, or where these studies would lead me over time.

When I look through my diary from the late 1940s and the early 1950s, there is a clear division. When I write about my parents’ home, most of the words are in German or in Yiddish; when I speak of my life in Israel, the words are in Hebrew. Not until the mid-1950s do the sentences begin to flow consistently, and in Hebrew. Adopting the language was simpler for the friends who had come to Israel with me, because they cut themselves off from memory and built themselves a language that was completely “here,” and here alone. From this perspective, they were the faithful sons of that era. We had come to Israel, as the saying went, “to build and to be rebuilt.” This was interpreted by most of us as the extinction of memory, a complete personal transformation and a total identification with this narrow strip of land. In other words, we had come to Israel to “lead a normal life”—as such terms used to be defined.