A Tale of Love and Darkness

A caf? kiss

When Amos Oz was small he wanted to be a book. Not a writer but a book, like the ones his librarian -- father catalogued and looked after. Now in his sixties and Israel's best-known author, he has chosen to write a book about his parents and himself, about his parents in order to understand himself, and especially in order to try to understand the event that marked him more than any other, the suicide of his mother when he was twelve, and his subsequent decision to leave his father's house, change his name, and go and live in a kibbutz. It is a universal human story, but it is also a very Jewish story, and in telling it Oz has written his best book so far.

It begins, of course, in Europe. Oz's father's great-great-great-grandfather was the famous kabbalist and mystic, Rav Alexander Ziskind of Horodno, whose son, Rav Yossele Braz, a "consummate Righteous Man", studied the Torah all his days and never left the house of study on a weekday even to sleep. His son became a successful businessman who traded in grain, linen and even hog's bristles as far afield as Konigsberg and Leipzig. "He did not turn his back on the world", as Oz puts it, "did not live by the sweat of his wife's brow, and did not hate the Zeitgeist and the Enlightenment." His son settled in Odessa and ran a small glass factory, while his daughter, Rasha-Keila, married a simple Jew from the village of Olkieniki near Vilna, Yehuda Leib Klausner, an easy-going, gentle and happy man, a carter, who liked nothing better than to travel alone at a slow pace through the dark forests and empty plains of the region. They had six children, but when, in 1884, Rasha Keila fell seriously ill, they decided to join her brother in Odessa. Their eldest son, Joseph, was already, at eleven, an infant prodigy, and his rich, free-thinking uncle supported his studies. His younger brother, Alexander -- Oz's grandfather -- was of a different disposition, curious about the world, cheerful, and something of a dreamer. While Joseph pursued a brilliant career, first in Odessa and then in Heidelberg, Alexander left school at fifteen and became a petty trader, a great talker, a dreamer and a ladies' man. He wrote fervent poems in Russian to the Hebrew language, which, even after forty years in Jerusalem, he never mastered. In his last postcard to his grandson he wrote (in Nicholas de Lange's splendidly resourceful translation), "My very dear grandchildrens and greatgrandchildrens. I mist you lots and lots. I want to sea you all lots and lots".

In Odessa, aged seventeen, he had fallen in love with a certain Shlomit Levin. "It was a terrible love", writes Oz, "she was eight or nine years older than her pocket Casanova, and moreover she also happened to be his first cousin." The young couple, unable to marry in Odessa, set sail, like thousands of others, for New York, determined to marry there. On the boat, however, Alexander fell for another passenger. Shlomit, so the story goes, grabbed him by the ear and did not let go till their union had been blessed in the capital of the New World; whereupon they promptly returned to Odessa. There they had two boys, David and Yehuda Arieh, Oz's father, whom his mother insisted on dressing up as a girl to do duty for the daughter she had wanted.

The October Revolution, the Civil War that followed, and the victory of the Red Army, created havoc among the Jewish intelligentsia of Odessa. Joseph Klausner and his wife left for Jerusalem, where he blossomed into a renowned scholar, author of many books on Jewish history and literature, the Rightist candidate for the Presidency of the new state, and famous enough to have the street where he had lived named after him. To Alexander and Shlomit, Palestine seemed too dirty and primitive, so they returned to Lithuania. When they did finally decide, in 1933, that Europe definitely did not want them, they left behind their eldest son, David, now married and with a son of his own, and a successful academic at the University of Vilna. He felt that Europe and its culture was his spiritual homeland and that no nationalist thugs were going to dictate his life for him. As a result he and his wife and child were swallowed up in the Nazi Holocaust.

In Palestine, Grandma Shlomit saw it as her main task (apart from keeping her husband in order) to single-handedly fight the bugs that infested the land. She died in her bath when her husband was seventy-seven, and he promptly took up where he had left off sixty years previously and for twenty years enjoyed a glorious Indian summer, for, it seems, the ladies still flocked to him, charmed by, among other things, what Oz describes as his marvellous ability to listen. He was the only member of the Klausner clan Oz's mother's family ever had a good word for.

They came from the area of Rovno, in the Ukraine. Oz's maternal great grandfather was a poor miller, whose son, Naphtali Herz Mussman, became an apprentice at the age of sixteen on the estate of an eccentric unmarried noblewoman, Princess Ravzova. Impressed by the charm and skill of the young Jew and by his knowledge of flour milling, she herself built a mill on the outskirts of Rovno and put in charge of it one of her nephews and heirs, with Mussman as his assistant. Soon the boy was the real manager, as the Princess grew more and more reclusive and eccentric and her nephew subsided into drunkenness. At twenty-three he bought up the mill, then took over that of his father. His men adored him and it seemed he could do no wrong in either human or financial matters. Unfortunately in 1909, at twenty-one, he married a spoiled and capricious woman, Itta Schuster. "The marriage of Itta and Hertz Mussman", writes Oz, "endured with gritted teeth, through sixty-five years of insults, wrongs, humiliations, truces, shame, restraint and pursed-lipped mutual politeness." Their three daughters always took their father's side, loathed their mother, feared and were ashamed of her. All three, thinks Oz, were in love with their father, who, indeed, comes across as a remarkable and lovable man.

In a marvellous extended passage Oz re-creates for us the ambience of eccentricity and material comfort in which the girls grew up, in the form of a monologue from his Aunt Sonia, the youngest of the three, and lets this other voice sketch in his mother's early life and some of the reasons for her later illness:

Of the three of us, your mother was the one who suffered most from our mother, who was a strident, rather military woman, like a Feldwebel, a sergeant.... Fania, your mother, wanted to be talked to quietly and reasonably, not shouted at. She liked to explain and she wanted to be explained to. She couldn't stand orders. Even in her bedroom she had her own special way of ordering things -- she was a very tidy girl -- and if someone disturbed the order she was very upset. Yet she held her peace. Too much: I don't recall her ever raising her voice. Or telling someone off. She responded with silence even to things that she shouldn't have.... Deep down in my heart I'm a bit of an anarchist. Like Papa. Your mother was also an anarchist at heart. Of course, among the Klausners she could never express it.... There's a children's story about Puss-in-Boots. In the Klausner family your mother was like a captive bird in a cage hanging in Puss- in-Boots's drawing-room.

In 1931 Fania followed her elder sister Haya to study in Prague. But her father's business was in crisis: the inflation of the early 1930s wiped out all his savings almost overnight. Everything was quickly sold off and Itta and Hertz Mussman reached Palestine in 1933, almost penniless. For the extraordinary Hertz this seems actually to have been a kind of blessing: the loss of his wealth rejuvenated him. First he worked in a bakery, then he bought a horse and cart and made his living delivering bread and then building materials round Haifa Bay. Like that other carter, Yehuda Leib Klausner, writes Oz, "he enjoyed... the lonely peaceful rhythm of the long slow journeys, the feel of the horse and its pungent smells". Not so his wife. The following year Fania joined them and so, three years later, did Sonia, who had qualified as a nurse in Rovno. Fania registered at the Hebrew University to continue her studies in history and philosophy, and that is where she met Yehuda Arieh Klausner, a charmer and great talker like his father, but determined also to be a mighty scholar like his uncle. To that end he mastered a reading knowledge of seventeen languages and learned to speak eleven (all with a Russian accent), but he had to make do with the career of librarian, though he published several books and later, when he had remarried, gained a doctorate in London. He and Fania were married in 1938, and she moved into his single room in Amos Street in Kerem Avraham, where their son was born in 1939.

"I was an only child", Oz writes, "and they both placed the full weight of their disappointments on my little shoulders." He was brought up to be a star, to fulfil their own dreams. Yet his childhood was lived not just in the oppressive shadow of his parents and grandparents, of his famous great-uncle and his melancholy aunts, but also of public events which affected the lives of everyone in Palestine: those leading up to the formation of the State of Israel and the war with the Arabs which followed, but also, colouring the reactions of every Jew, news of the war in Europe and of what had happened to those left behind. Oz has been an eloquent spokesman for a solution to the problems of the region based on an acceptance by each side of the other's right to land and livelihood. From his father, though, he inherited a militant nationalist ideology which, he says, only began to reveal itself for what it was when he heard, at the age of ten or eleven, a speech by Menachem Begin. However, it was only when he joined Kibbutz Hulda, after his mother's death, that he became aware of the rights and wrongs of both sides. He puts this in the mouth of a fellow kibbutznik: "I asked Ephraim if he had ever, in the War of Independence or during the troubles in the thirties, shot and killed one of those murderers". "Murderers?" replies Ephraim. "What do you expect from them? From their point of view, we are aliens from outer space who have landed and trespassed on their land, gradually taken over parts of it, and while we promise them that we've come here to lavish all sorts of goodies on them...we've craftily grabbed more and more of their land. Vell, what did you think? That they should thank us?" The young Oz is shocked: "In that case what are you doing here with your gun? Why don't you go and fight on their side?".

"Their side? But their side doesn't want me. Nowhere in the world wants me.... That's the only reason I'm here. That's the only reason I'm carrying a gun, so they won't kick me out of here the way they kicked me out of everywhere else.... It's really very simple. Where is the Jewish people's land if not here? Under the sea? On the moon? Or is the Jewish people the only people in the world that doesn't deserve to have a little homeland of its own?"

Oz has already prepared us for this with a wonderful scene of a garden party in 1947 at the house of a wealthy Palestinian. This episode, with its evocation of a wealthy and cultured milieu, not intellectual but deeply civilized, has the effect of making us see the different Jewish worlds we have so far encountered in a different light, from the outside, as it were, not as coterminous with the world but merely one element within it. It is a remarkable achievement.

His evocation of a child's view of those years, 1947 to 1950, is also remarkable: the Arab determination to strangle the new State at birth; the silent complicity of the British; the confusion and despair of most Jews. During the siege of Jerusalem up to twenty-five people were sleeping in the Klausners' three-room flat, while the children were sent out by the Army to find any bottles they could for the manufacture of Molotov cocktails, and anyone, man, woman or child could -- and did -- at any moment become the victim of a sniper's bullet.

These experiences could not help but draw the little family closer together, but already there were warning signs. The mother, beautiful, reserved, with some deep inner sadness that nothing seemed able to shake, began to act in strange ways. She would sit all day staring out of the window. She grew unable to sleep, moving restlessly about the flat in the night. Doctors were summoned, every possible medication tried. For a while she would be normal, but then it would start again, worse than before. "We were very close to one another at that time, Father and ...", writes Oz. "Like a pair of stretcher-bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope." Yet in the evenings his father would often leave the house, nattily dressed and whistling cheerfully. "I'll be back before midnight", he would say to his wife. "Try to sleep." "Yes, yes", she would answer. "Have a good time." One day, playing truant from school, Amos caught sight of him in a cafe with another woman, kissing her hand. He immediately repressed the memory and it only surfaced several years later, to be promptly buried again until the writing of this book. He does not try to explain or condemn, merely lets us intuit the desperation of both parents and his own deep confusions and misery. He moves on to recount how, after his mother's death, he fought to get his father (who remarried within a year) to let him go and start a new life by himself in a kibbutz; how, having finally got his way, he struggled to adapt to a totally different way of life; how he began to write and gradually found his own voice; how he met and eventually married none other than the daughter of the librarian of the kibbutz. And he gives us glimpses of himself as a husband and father and as an internationally acclaimed author, now living in the Dead Sea town of Arad.

But it is to the last few days of his mother's life that he returns at the end of the book, as though by repeatedly visiting that time he could make it yield up its secret. Perhaps the most terrible thing about it is the way it seemed to make all communication, between husband and wife, between mother and child, and finally between father and child, impossible. "We never talked about my mother", he says of the days that followed her death:

Not a single word. Or about ourselves. Or about anything that had the least thing to do with emotions.... I have hardly ever spoken about my mother till now, till I came to write these pages. Not with my father, or my wife, or my children or with anybody else. After my father died I hardly spoke about him either. As if I were a foundling.

There are no photographs in the book. Not, that is, till, close to the end, one turns a page and there is a single photo of Amos with his mother and father. By that time we have got to know all three so well that it is a shock and brilliantly judged. I wish though that Oz had found a better title and not let his penchant for rhetoric triumph in the last paragraph; such a fine book deserved better.

Gabriel Josipovici's most recent novel, Goldberg: Variations, was published in 2002. His new novel, Only Joking, will be published in Germany next year.

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