A Tale of Love and Darkness Read Free Page B

the same thing all over again. How are you? What's new? And then: "Now Amos wants to say a few words."
    And that was the whole conversation. What's new? Good. Well, so let's speak again soon. It's good to hear from you. It's good to hear from you too. We'll write and set a time for the next call. We'll talk. Yes. Definitely. Soon. See you soon. Look after yourselves. All the best. You too.

    But it was no joke: our lives hung by a thread. I realize now that they were not at all sure they would really talk again, this might be the last time, who knew what would happen, there could be riots, a pogrom, a blood bath, the Arabs might rise up and slaughter the lot of us, there might be a war, a terrible disaster, after all Hitler's tanks had almost reached our doorstep from two directions, North Africa and the Caucasus, who knew what else awaited us? This empty conversation was not really empty, it was just awkward.
    What those telephone conversations reveal to me now is how hard it was for them—for everyone, not just my parents—to express private feelings. They had no difficulty at all expressing communal feelings—they were emotional people, and they knew how to talk. Oh, how they could talk! They were capable of conversing for hours on end in excited tones about Nietzsche, Stalin, Freud, Jabotinsky, giving it everything
they had, shedding tears of pathos, arguing in a singsong, about colonialism, anti-Semitism, justice, the "agrarian question," the "woman question," "art versus life," but the moment they tried to give voice to a private feeling, what came out was something tense, dry, even frightened, the result of generation upon generation of repression and negation. A double negation in fact, two sets of brakes, as bourgeois European manners reinforced the constraints of the religious Jewish community. Virtually everything was "forbidden" or "not done" or "not very nice."
    Apart from which, there was a great lack of words: Hebrew was still not a natural enough language, it was certainly not an intimate language, and it was hard to know what would actually come out when you spoke it. They could never be certain that they would not utter something ridiculous, and ridicule was something they lived in fear of. They were scared to death of it. Even people like my parents who knew Hebrew well were not entirely its masters. They spoke it with a kind of obsession for accuracy. They frequently changed their minds, and reformulated something they had just said. Perhaps that is how a shortsighted driver feels, trying to find his way at night through a warren of side streets in a strange city in an unfamiliar car.
    One Saturday a friend of my mother's came to visit us, a teacher by the name of Lilia Bar-Samkha. Whenever the visitor said in the course of the conversation that she had had a fright or that someone was in a frightful state, I burst out laughing. In everyday slang her word for "fright" meant "fart" No one else seemed to find it funny, or perhaps they were pretending not to. It was the same when my father spoke about the arms race, or raged against the decision of the NATO countries to rearm Germany as a deterrent to Stalin. He had no idea that his bookish word for "arm" meant "fuck" in current Hebrew slang.
    As for my father, he glowered whenever I used the word "fix": an innocent enough word, I could never understand why it got on his nerves. He never explained of course, and it was impossible for me to ask. Years later I learned that before I was born, in the 1930s, if a woman got herself in a fix, it meant she was pregnant. "That night in the packing room he got her in a fix, and in the morning the so-and-so made out he didn't know her" So if I said that "Uri's sister was in a fix" about something, Father used to purse his lips and clench the base of his nose. Naturally he never explained—how could he?
    In their private moments they never spoke Hebrew to each other. Perhaps in their most private moments they did not