The Story of a Life (17 page)

“Shut up!” I was seething.

“My life is worth nothing anyway, so just go ahead and kill me.”

“If your life was worthless, you’d shut up.” I wanted to provoke him, too.

“Even if that were the case, it’d be no worse than the misery that you’ve caused.”

I don’t remember how I replied to him, or how he answered me. The thought that even in his wretched state he was talking logically and still had his wits about him made me so angry that I kicked him. The kick must have been sharp, because it hurt him, yet he didn’t cry out. He closed his eyes and bit his lips.

I saw that I would not prevail over him by force. So I said to him, “If you stop annoying me, I’ll leave you alone. I have no interest in hurting you.”

He didn’t reply. He was trying to ease his pain. I let go of him and returned to the base. For a whole month we trained far up in the hills, without any break. We failed in some of the missions we were given and were punished more than once. From day to day the heat intensified, and all
thought contracted. Had it not been for the cook, a civilian employee who pampered us with good food, our life in the hills would have been even harder.

One night I remembered that in Italy, in one of the transit huts on our way to Israel, I had seen a wristwatch on the floor. Without thinking, I picked it up and put it into my pocket. When the owner of the watch realized that he had lost it, he cried like a child and pleaded with everyone to return it to him, for it was the only thing left from his home. People around him tried to calm him down and console him. When their words proved ineffective, they said to him, “After living through the Holocaust, how can you cry over a watch?”

But he wouldn’t stop wailing. By nightfall, totally fed up, everyone began to snap at him: “You’re selfish. You’re bad.” Upon hearing their words, he covered his face with both hands, like a tired and confused child, and began to drum his legs on the ground. People turned their backs on him when they saw this tantrum; it seemed as if he’d lost his mind.

And I, completely terrified, buried the watch in the sand.

FROM 1952 TO 1956, I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. These were years spent scrambling to fill in the gaps in my education, to find my place within the social and cultural whirlwind that surrounded me, and, most of all, to find my own voice.

My formal education lasted only through the first grade. But in order to get the matriculation certificate that would enable me to attend university, I first had to pass a preliminary examination that included material taught in grade school. Passing this exam would allow me to go on to take the main matriculation exam. This examination was unforgiving: algebra, trigonometry, literature, English, Bible, etc. Material that is usually taught and then reviewed over the course of years I had to cram into a year and a half of study. No wonder I twice failed the mathematics and English components.

This huge effort drained me and left me with no desire to study. I wanted to return to the orchard. That quiet orchard that changed with each season now seemed to me like a well-spring
of blessing. I loved the hours I spent alone there, plowing and harrowing the soil, spraying the insects, watching for the fruit to ripen in the spring and for the leaves to fall in the autumn, and then pruning the trees in winter.

But I did not return to agricultural work. This was not a decision arrived at through a rational thought process. Like many Jewish mothers, my mother dearly wanted to see me excel at my studies. She made no attempt to hide her wishes from me, reminding me at every opportunity that I had to study. Just a few days before she was killed, she said to me, “You will be learned.” I don’t know what she meant by the term “learned,” whether she meant that I would be an intellectual or perhaps just an educated man, someone at home with books. At any rate, it was her heartfelt wish that appeared before my eyes when I decided in favor of studying.

But what should I learn? I considered studying agriculture, so as to combine academic studies with a practical application, but there was no getting around it—my inadequate education was an obstacle once again. When I was tested on the principles of chemistry, botany, and zoology, I had so little knowledge that I couldn’t even start university studies in the sciences. In my entire life I hadn’t ever set foot in a laboratory or looked into a microscope. The man who interviewed me suggested, not without some derision, that I study the humanities.

I signed up for courses in Yiddish. Why Yiddish? My mother tongue had been German, but during the war and after it we all spoke Yiddish. This language still held dim memories of my grandfather’s home, my own home, and the war, and it touched something within me as well. Perhaps it represented the response of someone weak, someone who could not face the outside world and so retreated into his shell. Nineteen fifty-two was not a time for love of Yiddish. It
had become a symbol of sloppiness, weakness, and the Diaspora. Everyone disparaged it. But it was this attitude that actually drew me to the study of Yiddish. My orphanhood melded into its orphanhood.

As it turned out, intuition did not mislead me. I did not find many students in the Yiddish department. If the truth be told, there were only three of us, grouped around a short man with alert eyes: Dov Sadan. Sadan was precisely the teacher whom I needed at that time—a sharp yet extremely warm person who knew how to take the measure of his students.

In the early 1950s, Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Simon, and Yehezkel Kaufmann were among those who taught at the Hebrew University. All of them had extensive Jewish and secular education, with expertise in all areas of knowledge and in all beliefs. They were fluent in both ancient and modern languages. No wonder we students felt like mere grasshoppers in their presence.

Like other members of my generation who had come to Israel as youngsters, I didn’t know how to adjust my experiences in Europe to life in my new country. More precisely, I didn’t know how to deny my past. The past lived inside me with a burning intensity, demanding that I give it my attention. Because of this, the university was not simply a place where I acquired specific knowledge; it was also where my consciousness as an individual began to take shape for the first time. It was where I began to figure out where I came from and where I was headed.

The Hebrew University in the 1950s was an odd mixture of teachers who had immigrated to Israel from Germany or who had passed through Germany just before the war, students who had recently been released from protracted army service, and students who were young and not-so-young Holocaust survivors. Though people often considered it a
fusty institution, this was not at all my experience. All my teachers had been born in Europe and, like myself, carried within them the pain of two homelands. Leah Goldberg and Ludwig Strauss, to name but two, had much to say about the dichotomy of having two languages and two homelands. They were poets and spoke like poets. From them I learned how to respond to a line of poetry and, indeed, to an individual word, and to understand that every sound has meaning.

I learned both Yiddish literature and Hebrew literature, but I was increasingly drawn to Kabbalah and to Hasidism. Gershom Scholem conducted his lessons like a magician, mesmerizing everyone. Martin Buber was part professor of the German variety and part Hasidic rabbi. Both of them cultivated a circle of admirers. Kabbalistic and Hasidic language spoke to my heart in a much more profound way than did the literature of the Enlightenment and considerable portions of modern Hebrew literature. A sociological perspective was foreign to me. From the very outset, I felt that literature does not provide a suitable basis for sociological analysis. True literature engages what is concealed in fate and hidden in the human soul; it exists in the metaphysical realms.

I constantly struggled to refine my literary voice. Language was now singing within me, but not the right melody. The melody is the soul of all poetry and prose. I knew it, and it pained me. Throughout my university years I wrote poems, but these were more like the howls of an animal who had been abandoned and for years thereafter was trying to find his way home. Mother, Mother, Father, Father: Where are you? Where are you hiding? Why don’t you come, why don’t you pull me out of this misery? Where is my house, and where is the street and the strip of land that have cast me out? These formed the essence of my cries, and I loaded all the weight and pain upon words like “loneliness,” “longings,” “wistfulness,”
and “darkness,” certain that they were my faithful messengers and would go straight into the reader’s heart.

Prose saved me from this sentimentality. By its very nature, prose demands the concrete. Abstract emotions and ideas are not among things that prose likes. Only ideas or emotions that arise from something concrete can have a legitimate existence. One has to learn these basic facts very slowly, and I, with my minimal education, was even slower. Instead of learning to observe the body and its movements, I was drawn toward vagueness and dreams.

Like many of my generation at the university, I devoured the writings of Kafka and Camus. They were the first prophets from whom I sought to learn. As is the case with anything one studies when young, my first encounters with them were superficial. I got enmeshed in the dreams and in the vagueness, and I didn’t see that Kafka’s mist was shaped by detailed descriptions, by precise sensations that strip the mist of its haze and make the mystery into an “ordinary mystery,” to borrow Max Kadushin’s well-known saying.

Russian literature saved me from these nebulous mists and symbols. I learned from Russian authors that there’s no need for them: reality, if described correctly, produces symbols all by itself. In fact, any specific situation can also be viewed symbolically.

But I’m rushing ahead of myself. For a long time, I was enthralled by the magic of Kafka. My reading of Kafka was that he was aligned more closely to Kabbalah and to Hasidism than to the literature of the Jewish Enlightenment and to modern literature. But it was only later, when I became familiar with S. Y. Agnon’s writing, that I discovered literature with a real affinity for the mysterious.

My relationship to Yiddish was different, and I sought to bind myself through it to my grandparents and to their
home in the Carpathians. In the depth of my heart I knew that by binding myself to my grandparents, to the melody of their language, I would be able to bind myself as well to the Jewish sources over which I’d pored with Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber.

I spent my university years searching for an authentic form of Judaism. I didn’t content myself with academic studies. I’d spend hours in the religious neighborhoods of Jerusalem, in the small synagogues in Me’ah She’arim and Sha’arei Hessed. I loved listening to toddlers speaking Yiddish, to students chanting in the
heder
schools, and to the prayers in the synagogues on weekdays and on holy days. I was very drawn to this tangible spirituality, but never as someone who wanted to become religious himself. My relationship to Judaism was like that of my teachers—Sadan, Buber, Scholem, and Bergman. Their connection to their Jewish heritage was a post-assimilatory one that was no longer embroiled in the struggle between fathers and sons, but transcended it. Neither Buber nor Scholem was a traditional mystic, but they both had an affinity to Jewish mysticism. Buber had passed his on to Hugo Bergman. Bergman, a philosopher in his own right, translated it into his own language. Without keeping the 613
mitzvot
, Sadan was an Orthodox Jew.

During these years I became close to Agnon, and we would meet from time to time. I first encountered him in 1946, when I was at Rachel Yana’it’s agricultural school. Agnon, who lived in nearby Talpiot, would sometimes drop by. There were fifty of us youths, Holocaust survivors from Poland and Romania. Agnon would sometimes approach one of the children and ask him about the city of his birth and about what he had been through during the war. When I told him that I had been born in Czernowitz, he was delighted. He knew the city well, and immediately began to rattle off the
names of people and places there. I had no idea what he was talking about, but his appearance and manner of speech were not unfamiliar to me. He resembled my uncle Mark, whom I vaguely remembered. I was surprised when I was told that Agnon was a writer. There were no telltale signs of this in the way he dressed, no long hair, and no ostentatious necktie. He seemed like a man with time on his hands.

It was only years later that I got to know Agnon’s writing, and then I immediately felt close to him. I was thrilled to encounter the names of people, towns, and villages that I vaguely recalled from home. Bukovina and neighboring Galicia had been separated only at the end of World War I, and Father used to talk with great fondness about the Galician towns he had frequented in his youth—Lemberg, Brod, and Buczacz.

Later, when I read Agnon’s books—
In Her Youth, Tehillah
, and
In the Heart of the Seas
—I knew that he was describing the lives of my parents and grandparents, albeit in a fictional form. I vaguely remembered the peacefulness and the tranquillity that reigned throughout the Hapsburg Empire, in the villages and small cities that we would visit in the summer, and I understood what he was talking about.

In my early attempts at writing prose, I didn’t follow Agnon. On the contrary, I strove to cut myself off from the past and tried to insert myself into my new environment. In my first stutterings I was a farmer working in the Judean hills, a kibbutz member, a fighter in the Palmach, a watchman guarding an orchard—anything but what I really was. In those years it seemed to me that I had no identity of my own and that I had to construct or, more accurately, invent one. Through this strange invention I derided those who clung to their memories and were bogged down in the sickness of the past. I was a farm child, not a refugee boy who for years had
wandered from country to country, to be finally washed up on the shores of Atlit. S. Yizhar, Moshe Shamir, and Haim Gouri were my role models. Youthful and optimistic literature suited my secret yearning to change, to forget, to transform myself into a “native” Israeli.