A Tale of Love and Darkness

  Not always, however. Once, it may have been in the late 1950s, a fine new ten-lira note came into circulation bearing a picture of the poet Bialik.* When I got hold of my first Bialik note, I hurried straight to Grandpa's to show him how the state had honored the man he had known in his youth. Grandpa was indeed excited, his cheeks flushed with pleasure, he turned the note this way and that, held it up to the lightbulb, scrutinized the picture of Bialik (who seemed to me suddenly to be winking mischievously at Grandpa, as if to say "Nu?!"). A tiny tear sparkled in Grandpa's eye, but while he reveled in his pride his fingers folded up the new note and tucked it away in the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Ten liras was a tidy sum at that time, particularly for a kibbutznik like me. I was startled:

  "Grandpa, what are you doing? I only brought it to show you and to make you happy. You'll get one of your own in a day or two, for sure."

  "Nu," Grandpa shrugged, "Bialik owed me twenty-two rubles."

  14

  BACK IN ODESSA, as a mustachioed seventeen-year-old, Grandpa had fallen in love with a well-respected young woman by the name of Shlomit Levin, who loved nice things and was drawn to high society. She longed to entertain famous people, to be friendly with artists and "live a cultured life."

  *Hayyim Nahuran Bialok (1873-1934), the Russian-born Hebrew poet, recognized as Israel's national poet, though he did not live to see the birth of the State of Israel.

  It was a terrible love: she was eight or nine years older than her pocket Casanova, and moreover she also happened to be his first cousin.

  At first the startled family did not want to hear about a marriage between the maiden and the boy. As if the difference in their ages and their blood tie were not enough, the young man had no education worthy of the name, no fixed employment, and no regular income beyond what he could earn from buying and selling here and there. Over and above all these catastrophes, Tsarist Russian law forbade the marriage of first cousins.

  According to the photos, Shlomit Levin—the daughter of a sister of Rasha-Keila Klausner, née Braz—was a solidly built, broad-shouldered young woman, not particularly good-looking but elegant, haughty, tailored with severity and restraint. She wears a felt trilby, which cuts a fine slanting line across her brow, its brim coming down on the right over her neat hair and her left ear and sweeping upward on the left like the stern of a boat, while in front a bunch of fruit is held in place by a shiny hat pin, and to the left a feather waves proudly over the fruit, the hat, everything, like an arrogant peacock's tail. The lady's left arm, clad in a stylish kid glove, holds an oblong leather handbag, the other arm being firmly crossed with that of the young Grandpa Alexander, while her fingers, also gloved, hover lightly above the sleeve of his black overcoat, barely touching him.

  He is standing to her right, nattily dressed, stiff, well turned out, his height enhanced by thick soles, yet he looks slighter and shorter than she is, despite the tall black homburg on his head. His young face is serious, resolute, almost lugubrious. His lovingly tended mustache tries in vain to dispel the boyish freshness that still marks his face. His eyes are elongated and dreamy. He is wearing an elegant, wide-lapeled overcoat with padded shoulders, a starched white shirt, and a narrow silk tie, and on his right arm hangs or perhaps even swings a stylish cane with a carved handle and shiny ferrule. In the old photograph it glints like the blade of a sword.

  A shocked Odessa turned its back on this Romeo and Juliet. Their two mothers, who were sisters, engaged in a war of the worlds that began with mutual accusations of culpability and ended in everlasting silence. So Grandpa withdrew his meager savings, sold something here and something there, added one ruble to another, both families may have contributed something, if only to drive the scandal out of sight and out of mind, and my grandparents, the love-struck cousins, set sail for New York, as hundreds of thousands of other Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries were doing at that time. Their intention was to marry in New York and take American citizenship, in which case I might have been born in Brooklyn or in Newark, New Jersey, and written clever novels in English about the passions and inhibitions of top-hatted immigrants and the neurotic ordeals of their agonized progeny.

  But on board the ship, somewhere between Odessa and New York, on the Black Sea or off the coast of Sicily, or as they glided through the night toward the twinkling lights of the Straits of Gibraltar, or maybe as their love boat was passing over the lost continent of Atlantis, there was a further drama, a sudden twist to the plot: love raised its awesome dragon's head once more.

  To cut a long story short, my grandfather, the bridegroom-to-be who had not yet reached his eighteenth birthday, fell in love again, passionately, heart-breakingly, desperately, up on deck or somewhere in the bowels of the ship, with another woman, a fellow passenger, who was also, as far as we know, a full decade older than he, give or take a year.

  But Grandma Shlomit, so the family tradition has it, never entertained for a moment the thought of giving him up. She immediately took hold of him by the earlobe and held fast, she did not relax her grip day or night until they emerged from the premises of the New York rabbi who had married them to each other according to the laws of Moses and of Israel. ("By the ear," my family would say in a hilarious whisper, "she pulled him by the ear all the way, and she didn't let go till they were well and truly hitched." And sometimes they said: "Till they were hitched? Naah. She never let go of him. Ever. Not till her dying day, and maybe even a little bit longer than that, she held fast to his ear, and sometimes gave him a little tug.")

  And then, a great puzzle followed. Within a year or two this odd couple had paid for another passage—or perhaps their parents helped them again—and embarked on another steamship, and without a backward glance they returned to Odessa.

  It was utterly unheard of: some two million Jews migrated from east to west and settled in America in fewer than two score years between 1880 and 1917, and for all of them it was a one-way trip, except for my grandparents, who made the return journey. It must be supposed that they were the only passengers, so that there was no one for my passionate grandfather to fall in love with, and his ear was safe all the way back to Odessa.

  Why did they return?

  I was never able to extract a clear answer from them.

  "Grandma, what was wrong with America?"

  "There was nothing wrong. Only it was so crowded."

  "Crowded? In America?"

  "Too many people in such a small country."

  "Who decided to go back, Grandpa? You or Grandma?"

  "Nu, shto, what do you mean? What sort of a question is that?"

  "And why did you decide to leave? What didn't you like about it?"

  "What didn't we like? What didn't we like? We didn't like anything about it. Nu, well. It was full of horses and Red Indians."

  "Red Indians?"

  "Red Indians."

  More than this I was never able to get out of him.

  Here is a translation of a poem called "Winter" that Grandpa wrote in Russian, as usual:

  Springtime has fled, now it's winter instead,

  The storm winds do rage and the skies have turned black.

  Joy and gladness depart from my gloom-laden heart,

  I wanted to weep but my tears are held back.

  My soul feels weak and my spirit is bleak,

  My heart is as dark as the heavens above.

  My days have grown old, I'll no longer behold

  The joys of the spring and the pleasures of love.

  In 1972, when I first went to New York, I looked for and found a woman who looked like a Native American; she was standing, as I recall, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-third Street handing out leaflets. She was neither young nor old, had wide cheekbones, and she wore an old man's overcoat and a kind of shawl against the biting cold wind. She held out a leaflet and smiled; I took it and said thank you. "Love awaits you," it promised, under the address of a singles bar. "Don't waste another minute
. Come now."

  In a picture taken back in Odessa in 1913 or 1914 my grandfather is wearing a bowtie, a gray hat with a shiny silk band, and a three-piece suit whose open jacket reveals, running across the buttoned-up vest, a fine line of silver apparently connected to a pocket watch. The dark silk bow stands out against his brilliant white shirt, there is a high shine on his black shoes, his smart cane hangs, as usual, from his arm, just below the elbow; he is holding hands with a six-year-old boy on his right and a pretty four-year-old girl on his left. The boy has a round face, and a carefully combed lock of hair peeps endearingly from under his cap and cuts a straight line across his forehead. He is wearing a magnificent double-breasted coat with two rows of huge white buttons. From the bottom of the coat sprouts a pair of short trousers beneath which peeps a narrow band of white knee that is immediately swallowed up in long white socks presumably held up by garters.

  The little girl is smiling at the photographer. She looks as though she is well aware of her charms, which she is projecting very deliberately at the lens of the camera. Her soft, long hair, which comes down over her shoulders and rests on her coat, is neatly parted on the right. Her round face is plump and happy, her eyes are elongated and slanted, almost Chinese-looking, and there is a half smile on her full lips. She has been dressed in a tiny double-breasted coat over her dress, identical to her brother's in every respect, only smaller, and wonderfully sweet. She too is wearing little socks that go up to her knees. On her feet she has shoes whose buckles sport cute little bows.

  The boy in the picture is my uncle David, who was always called Ziuzya or Ziuzinka. And the girl, that enchanting, coquettish little woman, the little girl is my father.

  From his infancy until the age of seven or eight—though sometimes he told us that it went on until he was nine—Grandma Shlomit used to dress him exclusively in dresses with collars, or in little pleated and starched skirts that she ran up for him herself, and girls' shoes, often in red. His magnificent long hair cascaded down onto his shoulders and was tied with a red, yellow, pale blue, or pink bow. Every evening his mother washed his hair in fragrant solutions, and sometimes she washed it again in the morning, because night grease is well known to harm hair and rob it of its freshness and sheen and serve as a hothouse for dandruff. She made him wear pretty rings on his fingers and bracelets on his pudgy arms. When they went to bathe in the sea, Ziuzinka—Uncle David—went to the men's changing rooms with Grandpa Alexander, while Grandma Shlomit and little Lionichka—my father—headed for the women's showers, where they soaped themselves thoroughly, yes, there, and there too, and especially there please, and wash twice down there.

  After she gave birth to Ziuzinka, Grandma Shlomit had set her heart on having a daughter. When she gave birth to what was apparently not a daughter, she decided on the spot that it was her natural and indisputable right to bring this child, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bones, up as her heart desired, according to her own choice and taste, and no power in the world had the right to interfere and dictate her Lonia or Lionichka's education, dress, sex, or manners.

  Grandpa Alexander apparently saw no cause for rebellion: behind the closed door of his little den, inside his own nutshell, he enjoyed a relative autonomy and was even permitted to pursue some of his own interests. Like some Monaco or Liechtenstein, he never would have thought to make a fool of himself and jeopardize his frail sovereignty by poking his nose into the internal affairs of a more extensive neighboring power, whose territory enclosed that of his own Lilliputian duchy on all sides.

  As for my father, he never protested. He rarely shared his memories of the women's showers and his other feminine experiences, except when he took it into his head to try to joke with us.

  But his jokes always seemed more like a declaration of intent: look, watch how a serious man like me can step outside himself for you and volunteer to make you laugh.

  My mother and I used to smile at him, as though to thank him for his efforts, but he, excitedly, almost touchingly, interpreted our smiles as an invitation to go on amusing us, and he would offer us two or three jokes that we had already heard from him a thousand times, about the Jew and the Gentile on the train, or about Stalin meeting the Empress Catherine, and we had already laughed ourselves to tears when Father, bursting with pride at having managed to make us laugh, charged on to the story of Stalin sitting on a bus opposite Ben Gurion and Churchill, and about Bialik meeting Shlonsky in paradise, and about Shlonsky meeting a girl. Until Mother said to him gently:

  "Didn't you want to do some more work this evening?"

  Or:

  "Don't forget you promised to stick some stamps in the album with the child before he goes to bed."

  Once he said to his guests:

  "The female heart! In vain have the great poets attempted to reveal its mysteries. Look, Schiller wrote somewhere that in the whole of creation there is no secret as deep as a woman's heart, and that no woman has ever revealed or will ever reveal to a man the full extent of the female mystique. He could simply have asked me: after all, I've been there."

  Sometimes he joked in his unfunny way: "Of course I chase skirts sometimes, like most men, if not more so, because I used to have plenty of skirts of my own, and suddenly they were all taken away from me."

  Once he said something like this: "If we had a daughter, she would almost certainly be a beauty." And he added: "In the future, in generations to come, the gap between the sexes may well narrow. This gap is generally considered to be a tragedy, but one day it may transpire that it is nothing but a comedy of errors."

  15

  IT WAS Grandma Shlomit, the distinguished lady who loved books and understood writers, who turned their home in Odessa into a literary salon—perhaps the first Hebrew literary salon ever. With her sensitivity she grasped that the sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek one another out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel one another, lay a hand on a shoulder or put an arm around a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collide, be right, take offense, apologize, make amends, avoid one another, and seek one another's company again.

  She was the perfect hostess, and she received her guests unpretentiously but graciously. She offered everyone an attentive ear, a supportive shoulder, curious, admiring eyes, a sympathetic heart, homemade fish delicacies or bowls of thick, steaming stew on winter evenings, poppy-seed cakes that melted in the mouth, and rivers of scalding tea from the samovar.

  Grandpa's job was to pour out liqueurs expertly, and keep the ladies supplied with chocolates and sweet cakes, and the men with papirosi, those pungent Russian cigarettes. Uncle Joseph, who at the tender age of twenty-nine had inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloach, the leading periodical of modern Hebrew culture (the poet Bialik himself was the literary editor), ruled Hebrew literature from Odessa and promoted or demoted writers by his word. Aunt Zippora accompanied him to his brother and sister-in-law's "soirees," careful to wrap him well in woolen scarves, warm overcoats, and earmuffs. Menahem Ussishkin, the leader of those forerunners of Zionism, the Lovers of Zion, smartly turned out, his chest puffed out like a buffalo's, his voice as coarse as a Russian governor's, as effervescent as a boiling samovar, reduced the room to silence with his entrance: everyone stopped talking out of respect, someone or other would leap up to offer him a seat, Ussishkin would stride across the room with the gait of a general, seat himself expansively with his large legs spread wide, and tap the floor twice with his cane to indicate his consent that the conversations in the salon should continue. Even Rabbi Czernowitz (whose nom de plume was Rav Tsair) was a regular visitor. There was also a plump young historian who had once paid court to my grandmother ("But it was hard for a decent woman to be close to him—he was extremely intelligent and interesting, but he always h
ad all sorts of disgusting stains on his collar, and his cuffs were grimy, and sometimes you could see bits of food caught in the folds of his trousers. He was a total shlump, shmutsik, fui!").

  Occasionally Bialik would drop in for an evening, pale with grief or shivering with cold and anger—or quite the contrary: he could also be the life and soul of the party. "And how!" said my grandmother. "Like a kid, he was! A real scalawag! No holds barred! So risqué! Sometimes he would joke with us in Yiddish till he made the ladies blush, and Chone Rawnitski would shout at him: 'Nu, sha! Bialik! What's up with you! Fui! That's enough, now!'" Bialik loved food and drink, he loved having a good time, he stuffed himself with bread and cheese, followed by a handful of cakes, a glass of scalding tea, and a little glass of liqueur, and then he would launch into entire serenades in Yiddish about the wonders of the Hebrew language and his deep love for it.

  The poet Tchernikhowsky, too, might burst into the salon, flamboyant but shy, passionate yet prickly, conquering hearts, touching in his childlike innocence, as fragile as a butterfly but also hurtful, wounding people left, right, and center without even noticing. The truth? "He never meant to give offense—he was so innocent! A kind soul! The soul of a baby who has never known sin! Not like a sad Jewish baby, no! Like a goyish baby! Full of joie de vivre, naughtiness, and energy! Sometimes he was just like a calf! Such a happy calf! Leaping around! Playing the fool in front of everybody! But only sometimes. Other times he would arrive so miserable it immediately made every woman want to make a fuss over him! Every single one! Young and old, free or married, plain or pretty, they all felt some kind of hidden desire to make a fuss over him. It was a power he had. He didn't even know he had it—if he had, it simply would never have worked on us the way it did!"