Under This Blazing Light (14 page)

And so a problem raised its head. A friend of mine called Yossi and I were both madly in love with a girl who lived down our street, even though she was a year and a half older than we were. We wanted to confess our love, but we couldn’t work out how to do it. There were no bears to rip apart in our suburb of

Keren Avraham. So we invited this girl, Ruthy, into the cab of the lorry which belonged to Yossi’s father, and which was parked outside his house, on a steep slope. Suddenly Yossi released the handbrake, and we began to roll downhill. Fortunately for us we did not hit any pedestrians, we merely knocked over a telegraph pole, broke down a fence and ruined somebody’s garden. Eventually, just before we were all rescued, pale with fright, from the cab, Yossi managed to inform her (on behalf of the two of us) that it was a matter of love.

After that we had to decide matters between ourselves, and here Yossi enjoyed a tremendous advantage. He was much stronger than I was, and he demonstrated the fact mercilessly. Whenever he saw her coming out of her house he started to beat me up. A moment earlier we would have been playing on the pavement, two minutes later we would be back at our game, but whenever she came out of doors and saw us - he hit me.

I, for my part, did not give in. One day I invited her into the garden shed and there, in a whisper I revealed to her the full horror of the thickening plot: it wasn’t just Yossi, it was a whole secret gang, Natan, Eli, Eitan, they were all in it together, and they had decided to bump me off. But, I whispered to her in secret, I was preparing a complicated trap for them, and soon I was going to shut them all up in a certain abandoned cellar, and there they would stay ‘until their bones whitened, and it might be two hundred years before the remains of their skeletons were discovered’.

I asked for her help in executing this plan, and told her to keep it top secret. I might have won Ruthy’s heart, if a rival suitor had not suddenly appeared on the scene, who was nearly fifteen and a half and a full member of the YMCA. The fact that neither of us got her in the end did not make us doubt the philosophy of the films. We thought, Yossi and I, that in our case reality was flawed. And we comforted each other with the reflection that ‘something like that would never have happened to us in America’.

Soon after this episode Russian war films arrived. Yossi, whose father was a revolutionary and an important Marxist, and I, whose parents held ‘rightist’ views, galloped from garden to garden and met, armed with sticks, at a hole in one of the fences: he was the Red Army and I was America. We embraced, and the remains of the German army were crushed between us. I don’t recall if we immediately started to quarrel, and so anticipated the Cold War.

All my life those films that I saw when I was a child have stayed with me, like a vague memory of a mythical world, orderly, just, simple and harmonious. Of course, the myth has been shattered: its loss caused me rage, irony and yearning ...

On the one hand, that sort of cinema made us all into idealists, it implanted in us a stubborn optimism together with an almost religious faith in the power of good, in the simplicity and clarity of the difference between right and wrong and in an orderly symmetry in life. On the other hand, we became racist, boastful, violent and insensitive to nuances. The films taught us to despise misery and weakness (which was only for girls!) and to admire the simplicity of violent solutions. They also held up to us murderous standards in love (who, after all, can compete with the sexual prowess of cinematic lovers?) and superhuman standards of sangfroid, daring and resourcefulness.

The world (the real world, not the world of Kerem Avraham and its surroundings, but the world of the jungles, and the suburbs of New York) appeared as a wonderful stage where the lights were always bright, where the orchestra was always playing, where a thrilling struggle was always being played out, where the good side always won, and where everybody - heroes and villains alike - was always occupied in action, not in thoughts or doubts or looking on.

And so there grew up a deep-seated alienation from the oriental rhythm of life. Alienation from all misfortune - emotional, romantic, or intellectual. Alienation from old age, loneliness and depression. Bright lights, hard fists, mood music and wonderful machines - that was life.

Years later, on 5 June 1967,1 was present when the signal (‘Red Sheet’) was given for hundreds of tanks to rumble simultaneously westwards towards the Egyptian fortifications in Rafah. The ground shook under their tracks and the thunder of their engines was louder than anything I had ever heard before. But I recall that the scene seemed unreal to me: somehow it was too quiet to be a real war. Only after an effort of recollection lasting several weeks did I discover what was missing: the music. How could hundreds of tanks roll into battle without a blaring orchestra?

Those films dominated my life for not more than seven or eight years. Perhaps less. But the war of liberation I had to wage against them was long and hard and no doubt it has left deep traces in me still: struggles and affection, mockery, scorn and nostalgia. Thomas Mann wrote somewhere that hatred is merely love with a minus sign attached to it.

What is left? One thing is a dislike of cinema a la these, intellectual or ‘literary’ cinema. Even today I get angry at films with an ‘open ending’, even though I like ‘open endings’ in books.

The cinema, something inside me insists, should be a definite world: actions, not words. Certainty, not doubts. Symmetry, not confusion.

Admittedly, this is sheer prejudice. Cinema should consist of ‘action’ and nothing else. When a complex, introverted world appears on the screen I react like a squire who catches scallywags poaching on his land. Cinema ought to remain for ever the original Eliza Doolittle. In a word, I have to confess that my attitude to the cinema is that of a sentimental snob.

(Based on an essay published in 1968)

Shortly after the October Revolution my grandfather, Alexander Klausner, a businessman and poet, fled from Odessa in southern Russia. He had always been a ‘Lover of Zion’, and was one of the first Zionists. He believed wholeheartedly that the time had come for the Jews to return to the Land of Israel, so that they could begin by becoming a normal nation like all the rest, and later perhaps an exceptional nation. Nevertheless, after leaving Odessa my grandfather did not head for Jerusalem - that Jerusalem that all his poems had yearned for (in Russian) - but settled with his wife and two sons in Vilna, which was then in Poland. In addition to his profound affection for the ancestral land, my grandfather was also a thoroughgoing European, in his bearing, his habits, his dress and his principles. He considered that conditions in the Land of Israel were as yet insufficiently European. That is why he settled in Vilna, where he once more divided his time between business and poetry. He raised his two sons in a spirit of European and Zionist idealism.

However in those days no one in Europe, apart from my 
grandfather and some other Jews like him, was a European: they were all either pan-Slavists, or communists, or pan-Germanists, or just plain Bulgarian nationalists. In 1933, having been taunted by his antisemitic or order-loving neighbours to ‘Go to Palestine, little Yid’, Grandfather reluctantly decided to go to ‘Asia’ with his wife and his younger son.

As for the elder son, my uncle David, he resolutely refused to succumb to chauvinism and barbarism: he stood at his post and continued lecturing on European literature at Vilna University until the Nazis arrived and murdered him, together with his wife and their baby son Daniel, to purge Europe of cosmopolitanism and Jews.

In Jerusalem Alexander Klausner continued with his business and his poetry, despite the heat, the poverty, the hostility of the Arabs, and the strange oriental atmosphere. He went on writing poems in Russian about the beauty of the Hebrew language and the splendour of Jerusalem, not this wretched, dusty Jerusalem but the other one, the real one.

His son, my father, obtained a post as a librarian which allowed him to eke out a living, but at night he sat up writing articles on comparative literature. He married the middle daughter of a former mill-owner from Rovno in Ukraine, who for ideological reasons had become a carter in Haifa Bay. My parents made themselves a simple but book-filled home in Jerusalem with a black tea-trolley, a painting of a European landscape, and a Russian-style tea-set. They told each other that some day Hebrew Jerusalem would develop into a real city.

I was bom in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, when it became clear to my parents that there was no going back. They may have dreamed in Yiddish, spoken to each other in Russian and Polish, and read mainly in German and English, but they brought me up speaking one language only: Hebrew. I was destined to be a new chapter, a plain, tough Israeli, fair-haired and free from Jewish neuroses and excessive intellectualism.

The Jerusalem of my childhood was a lunatic town, ridden with conflicting dreams, a vague federation of different ethnic, national and religious communities, ideologies and aspirations. There were ultra-pious Jews who sat waiting prayerfully for the Messiah to come, and there were active revolutionary Jews who aimed to cast themselves in the role of Messiah; there were oriental Jews who had lived in Jerusalem for generations in their placid Mediterranean fashion, and there were various fanatical sects of Christians who had come to Jerusalem to be ‘reborn’; there were also the Arabs, who sometimes called us ‘children of death’ and threw stones at us. Besides all these there were weird and crazy people from just about everywhere in the world, each with his own private formula for saving mankind. Many of them may have been secretly longing to crucify or to be crucified. My parents chose to send me to a Hebrew school of strong National Religious leanings, where I was taught to yearn for the glory of the ancient Jewish kingdoms and to long for their resurrection in blood and fire. My Jerusalem childhood made me an expert in comparative fanaticism.

I was nine when the British left Palestine and Jewish Jerusalem underwent a long siege in the War of Independence. Everyone believed that victory would bring a free Hebrew State, where nothing would be as it was before. Three years after Hitler’s downfall, these survivors believed that they were fighting the final battle in the War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of

Darkness, and that Jewish independence would be a decisive sign of the salvation of the whole world.

The War of Independence culminated in a great victory. More than a million Jewish refugees arrived in Israel within a few years. But the siege and the suffering had not ended, universal salvation did not happen and the trivial pains of a very small state made themselves felt. After the sound and the fury came the ‘morning after’. Jerusalem did not turn into a ‘real’ European city. The Jews did not become ‘a merry, contented race of rugged peasants’.

Some continued to wait. Even in advanced old age, and he is now over ninety, my grandfather Alexander Klausner continues to write poems of longing for Jerusalem: a different, real, pure Jerusalem redeemed by the Messiah, freed from all suffering and injustice. To the day of his death, in October 1970, my father, Yehudah Arieh Klausner, went on making literary comparisons in fifteen languages. Only my mother, Fania, could not bear her life: she took her own life in 1952, out of disappointment or nostalgia. Something had gone wrong.

Two years later, when I was fourteen, I left home, walked out on the good manners and the scholarship, changed my surname from Klausner to Oz, and went to work and study in Kibbutz Hulda. I was hoping to start a new chapter in my life, away from Jerusalem. For several years I worked a bit on the land and took my lessons in a free socialist classroom, where we sat barefoot all day long learning about the source of human evil, the corruption of societies, the origins of the Jewish disease, and how to overcome all these by means of labour, simple living, sharing and equality, a gradual improvement in human nature. I still hold to these views, albeit with a certain sadness and an occasional fleeting smile. In their name I still reject any radical doctrine, whether in socialism, Zionism or Israeli politics. My wife, who was born in the kibbutz, my daughters Fania and Gallia and my son Daniel may be spared certain Jewish and Jerusalemite afflictions that tormented my parents and their parents and me myself: I see this as an achievement.

As a child I wrote biblical poems about the restoration of the Davidic kingdom through blood and fire and a terrible vengeance wrought on all the foes of the Jewish people. After serving in the regular army I returned to the kibbutz; by day I worked in the cotton-fields and by night I penned ironic stories about the distance between the pioneers and their dreams. Then the kibbutz assembly sent me to study philosophy and literature in the university in Jerusalem, on the understanding that I would teach the kibbutz children on my return. At night I could hear jackals howling in the fields and occasionally shots could be heard. I heard people crying out in their sleep, refugees who had come to the kibbutz from various countries: some of them had seen the Devil himself with their own eyes. So I wrote about the haunting phantoms: nostalgia, paranoia, nightmare, messianic hopes and the longing for the absolute. I also wrote so as to capture in words where my family had come from and why, what we had been hoping to find here and what we actually found, and why different people in different times and places have hated us and wished us dead. I wrote so as to sort out what more could be done and what could not be done.

Twice, in 1967 with the victorious armoured divisions in the Sinai Desert and in 1973 amid blazing tanks on the Golan Heights, I saw for myself that there is no hope for the weak and the slain, while the strong and triumphant have only a limited hope. After the wars I wrote again about the closeness of death, the power of the desire for salvation, the nostalgic energy motivating all around me, the depth of fear and the impetus of the resolve to start a new chapter. I write so as not to despair nor to yield to the temptation to return hatred for hatred. I have written stories and novels set in Jerusalem and in the kibbutz, in the medieval crusades and Hitler’s Europe. I have written about Jewish refugees, about Zionist pioneers and about the new Israelis. I have also written articles and essays in which I have called for a compromise, grounded neither in principles nor even perhaps in justice between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, because I have seen that whoever seeks absolute and total justice is seeking death. My stories and my articles have often unleashed a storm of public fury against me in Israel. Some have asserted that I am harming Zionist ideological fervour, or providing ‘ammunition’ for the enemy or damaging the image of the kibbutz. Some claim that I am touching a raw nerve and inflicting unnecessary pain.