Chapter 3 A Tale of Love and Darkness (3)

In the balance between pioneers and hapless peddlers, my parents had no clearly defined place.They have one foot in their affiliation (they are members of health foundations and donate to community funds) and the other in the air.Baba was at heart close to the idea of ​​the non-subordinate, the neo-Zionist ideology splintered from Jabotinsky, even though he was very far from the guns of those people.At best, he put his knowledge of English to the service of the underground, contributing to the occasional inflammatory and illegal pamphlet, Albion the Treacherous.The intellectuals of Rejavea had a strong appeal to their parents, but Martin Buber's pacifist ideal of a close and loving relationship between Jews and Arabs completely rejected the dream of a Hebrew state so that the Arabs could take pity on us and allow us to live here at their feet, the idea seemed to my parents a spineless consolation, a cowardly defeatism that showed the Jewish people in the long diaspora character traits manifested in.My mother had studied at the University of Prague and completed her studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, giving private lessons, history and literature, to students preparing for exams.My father got his degree at the University of Vilna (today Vilnius).He also obtained a master's degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Mount Scorpions campus, but he did not have the opportunity to obtain a teaching position at the Hebrew University.The number of qualified literary experts in Jerusalem at that time far outnumbered the number of students.To make matters worse, many of the classroom teachers had real degrees, shiny ones from prestigious German universities, not crappy Polish/Jerusalemite ones like my father's.He then took a job as a librarian at the National Library on Mount Scorpio, where he sat at night writing treatises on the Hebrew novella and a brief history of world literature.My father was a well-bred, courteous librarian with a stern, shy expression, in a tie, round glasses, and a somewhat worn-out blazer.He nodded and bowed to those who were higher than himself, jumped forward to open the door for the lady, persistently exercised the little bit of power, passionately quoted poems in ten languages, always made a friendly and playful look, and kept repeating An identical repertoire of jokes (he called them "anecdotes" or "gags").Yet his jokes are generally labored to deliver, not as everyday humor but as positive statements of intent about our obligation to have fun in tough times.Whenever my father faced pioneers in khakis, revolutionaries, intellectuals turned laborers, he felt a little confused.Elsewhere, in Vilna or Warsaw, it is quite clear how to speak to the proles.Everyone knows exactly where he is, and although it's up to you to clearly prove to this laborer how democratic you are and how unyielding you are, but here, in Jerusalem, everything is so vague.Not upside down like communist Russia, just vague.On the one hand, my father was decidedly middle-class, if a little lower-middle-class, but he was educated, he wrote articles and books, he had a modest position at the National Library, and his interlocutor was a sweaty construction worker in a Wearing work clothes and heavy rubber shoes; on the other hand, the same worker, who is said to have a diploma in chemistry, is also a staunch pioneer, salt of the earth, hero of the Hebrew revolution, and manual laborer.Baba, by contrast, felt—at least in his heart—a rootless, short-sighted intellectual with two left hands, a bit of an outcast on the front lines of homebuilding.

Most of our neighbors are clerks, small store retailers, bank tellers, movie theater conductors, school teachers, tutors, and dentists.They are not religious Jews. They only go to the synagogue on Yom Kippur and occasionally during the Shimha "Torah" ceremony. However, they light candles on the Sabbath night to preserve a trace of Jewishness, perhaps also for safety See, just in case.They are more or less well-educated, but a little uncomfortable in that regard.They had clear ideas about the Mandate, about the future of Zionism, about the working class, about local cultural life, about Dühring's attacks on Marx, about the novels of Knut Hamsun.There were thinkers and preachers of all stripes, for example, calling on Orthodox Jews to lift the ban on Spinoza, or going all out to explain to the Arabs in Palestine that they were not really Arabs but ancient Greeks. The descendants of the Hebrews, or a combination of Kant and Hegel, Tolstoy and Zionist teachings, this combination will make a pure and healthy wonderful way of life in Aritz Israel Birth, or to increase goat milk production, or to form an alliance with the United States or even Stalin, with the purpose of driving out the British, or to require everyone to do simple exercises every morning, so that they will not feel depressed and can purify their souls.The neighbors who gather to sip Russian tea in our little courtyard on Saturday afternoons are almost always out of place.Whenever someone needed to fix a fuse, change a faucet, or drill a small hole in a wall, everyone turned to Baruch. He was the only person in the neighborhood who could do such a miracle, so people called him "Baruch." Ruh Goldfinger".Others knew how to use strong rhetoric to analyze the importance of the return of the Jewish people to agricultural life and manual labor.They claim that we have a surplus of intellectuals here, but a shortage of ordinary workers.But in our neighbors, except for "Baruch Goldfinger", there is hardly a laborer.We also have no important intellectuals. We all read a lot of newspapers, and we all like to chat.Some of them might have a knack for everything, others could be witty, but most just recited with varying degrees of impassioned enthusiasm what they had read in newspapers, pamphlets, and party manifestos.As children, I could only dimly guess that they fiddled with the brims of their hats at tea, or showed a little more skin than usual from their mother's demure neckline as she leaned (only slightly) to sweeten them, that they Will blushed, very embarrassed, fingers flustered, trying to shrink back and don't want it.There is a huge gulf between these actions and their desire to change the world.All of this is from Chekhov - and it also makes me feel a little rustic.There are places in the world where real life is emerging, and that place is particularly remote, in Europe before Hitler came to power.There, hundreds of candles are lit every night, and ladies and gentlemen drink cream-frothed coffee in rooms separated by eucalyptus partitions, or sit comfortably under gilded chandeliers, Palatial coffee houses, going arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, watching the lives of great artists up close, thrilling affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend suddenly falling in love with the painter's best friend— The composer walked out of the house in the middle of the night, let the rain hit the top of his head, and stood alone on the ancient bridge, the bridge shadow trembling in the water.

Where we live, such things never happen. Such things can only appear in the distance beyond the mountains, where people live casually.In America, for example, where people pan for gold, rob postal trains, and startle herds of cattle to flee across endless fields, and whoever kills the most Indians wins the pretty girl at the end.This is America as we see it at the Edison: pretty girls are awarded for the top marksman.What's the use of such a prize?I have no idea.If what we see in the movies is the opposite America, where whoever shoots the most girls gets a handsome Indian as a prize at the end, I'd have to believe that.Anyway, this is the world far away.In America, and other wonderful places that appear in my stamp albums, in Paris, in Alexandria, in Rotterdam, in Lugano, in Biarritz, in St. Moritz, the holy man loves those places, Binbin Politely fighting each other, losing, giving up the war, drifting, in the city where the rain is pouring, he sits alone in the dark bar of the Boulevard Hotel drinking wine, and lives casually.Even in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, everyone is always discussing that the protagonist lives freely, dies for love, or dies for some lofty ideal, or dies from exhaustion.The same goes for these tanned pioneers, somewhere in Galilee, living at will.In our part of the world, no one dies from exhaustion, unrequited love, or idealism, and people don't just live in random ways—not just my parents, but everyone.

We have an iron rule that we do not buy any imported goods, and we do not buy foreign products if we can buy corresponding local products.But when we came to Mr. Oster's shop on the corner of Eufadia and Amos Streets, we had to choose whether to buy a kibbutz made by the Jewish cooperative Tanoi or an Arabic cheese. .Whether the Arabic cheese is homemade or imported from the small nearby village of Rifta is hard to say.True, Arabic cheese is a little cheaper.But aren't you betraying Zionism a bit if you buy Arabic cheese?Sometimes, in some kibbutz or Moshav, in the valley of Yazriel or the mountains of Galilee, an overworked pioneer girl sits, perhaps with tears in her eyes, wrapping Heber Cheese—we turn our backs on her for alien cheese?Do we have hearts?On the other hand, if we boycott the products of our Arab neighbors, we will deepen and perpetuate the animosity between the two peoples.We will be partly responsible for the bloodshed that will follow, and God forbids it.Indeed, the humble Arab peasant, simple, honest, working the land, whose soul has not been polluted by the vices of urban life, is the black brother of Tolstoy's simple and noble-hearted peasants!Shall we turn our backs on his rough cheese without heart?How could we punish him so cruelly?for what?Because dishonest Englishmen and wicked gentlemen send peasants against us?no.This time we decided to buy cheese from Arab villages, which, by the way, tastes better than cheese from our cooperative and is a little cheaper.But, on the other hand, who knows if Arabic cheese can be less than clean?Anyone know what their dairy looks like there?What if they learned, too late, that their cheese had germs?Germs are one of our worst nightmares.Like anti-Semitism, you never really set your sights on anti-Semitism or germs, but you know very well that they are waiting for you on all sides, and you can't see them.It's true that none of us have ever seen germs. It's not true, I have.I stared intently at a block of old cheese for a long time until suddenly I started seeing thousands of little things wriggling on it.Just like the gravitational force in Jerusalem, the gravitational force at that time was much larger than it is now, and the germs were also big and strong.I see them.In Mr. Oster's grocery store, a small debate might break out among customers: To buy or not to buy Arabian farmers' cheese?On the one hand, "Love begins with itself", so it is our duty to only buy cheese from the Cooperative; You were sojourners in Egypt."