• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But your mother, as though suddenly rebelling, started to pour scorn on that artistic painting that had been hanging there in our dining room all those years. She ridiculed it for sweetening reality! For lying! She said that in real life, shepherdesses are dressed in rags, not in silk, and they have faces scarred by cold and hunger, not angelic faces, and dirty hair with lice and fleas, not golden locks. And that to ignore suffering is almost as bad as inflicting it, and that the picture turned real life into some kind of Swiss chocolate box scene.

Maybe the reason your mother was in such a rage about the picture in the dining room was that the khudozhnik who painted it had made it seem as if there were no more disasters in the world. I think that's what made her angry. At the time of this outburst she must have been more miserable than anyone could have imagined. Forgive me for crying. She was my sister and she loved me a lot and she's been ravaged by scorpions. That's enough: I've finished crying now. Sorry. Every time I remember that prettified picture, every time I see a picture with three underskirts and a feathery sky, I see scorpions ravaging my sister and I start to cry.

25

SO THE eighteen-year-old Fania, following in the footsteps of her elder sister Haya, was sent in 1931 to study at the university in Prague, because in Poland the universities were virtually closed to Jews. Mother studied history and philosophy. Her parents, Hertz and Itta, like all the Jews of Rovno, were witnesses and victims of the anti-Semitism that was growing among their Polish neighbors and among the Ukrainians and Germans, Catholic and Orthodox Christians—acts of violence by Ukrainian hooligans and increasingly discriminatory measures by the Polish authorities. And, like the rumble of distant thunder, echoes reached Rovno of deadly incitement to violence and the persecution of Jews in Hitler's Germany.

My grandfather's business affairs were also in crisis: the inflation of the early 1930s wiped out all his savings overnight. Aunt Sonia told me about "loads of Polish banknotes for millions and trillions that Papa gave me, that I wallpapered my room with. All the dowries that he had been saving for ten years for the three of us went down the drain in two months." Haya and Fania soon had to abandon their studies in Prague because the money, their father's money, had almost run out.

And so the flour mill, the house and orchard in Dubinska Street, the carriage, horses, and sleigh were all sold in a hasty, unfavorable deal. Itta and Hertz Mussman reached Palestine in 1933 almost penniless. They rented a miserable little hut covered with tar paper. Papa, who had always enjoyed being near flour, managed to find work in the Pat bakery. Later, when he was about fifty, as Aunt Sonia recalled, he bought a horse and cart and made his living first delivering bread, then transporting building materials around Haifa Bay. I can see him clearly, a darkly suntanned, thoughtful man, in his work clothes and sweaty gray vest, his smile rather shy but his blue eyes shooting sparks of laughter, the reins slack in his hands, as though from his seat on a board set across the cart he found some charming and amusing side to the views of Haifa Bay, the Carmel range, the oil refineries, the derricks of the port in the distance, and the factory chimneys.

Now that he had stopped being a wealthy man and returned to the proletariat, he seemed rejuvenated. A sort of perpetual suppressed joy seemed to have descended on him, a joie de vivre in which an anarchistic spark flickered. Just like Yehuda Leib Klausner of Ulkieniki in Lithuania, the father of my other grandfather, Alexander, my grandfather Naphtali Hertz Mussman enjoyed the life of a carter, the lonely, peaceful rhythm of the long slow journeys, the feel of the horse and its pungent smells, the stable, the straw, the harness, the shafts, the oat bag, the reins, and the bit.

Sonia, who