A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [110]
I have hardly any idea about my mother's arrival in Haifa, her first days in Tel Aviv, or her first years in Jerusalem. Instead, I can hand you back to Aunt Sonia to tell her story of how and why she came here, what she hoped to find and what she really found.
At the Tarbuth school we not only learned to read and write and speak very good Hebrew, which my subsequent life has corrupted. We also learned Bible and Mishnah and medieval Hebrew poetry, as well as biology, Polish literature and history, Renaissance art and European history. And above all we learned that beyond the horizon, beyond the rivers and forests, there was a land that we would all soon have to go to because the days of the Jews in Europe, at least those of us who lived in Eastern Europe, were numbered.
Our parents' generation were much more aware than we were that time was running out. Even those who had made money, like our father, or those who had built modern factories in Rovno or turned to medicine, law, or engineering, those who enjoyed good social relations with the local authorities and intelligentsia, felt that we were living on a volcano. We were right on the borderline between Stalin and Grajewski and Pilsudski. We already knew that Stalin wanted to put an end to Jewish existence by force; he wanted all the Jews to become good Komsomolniks who would inform on one another. On the other hand, the Polish attitude toward the Jews was one of disgust, like someone who has bitten into a piece of bad fish and can neither swallow it nor spit it out. They didn't feel like spewing us forth in the presence of the Versailles nations, in the atmosphere of minority rights, in front of Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations: in the 1920s the Poles still had some shame, they were keen to look good. Like a drunk trying to walk straight, so that no one can see he's weaving. They still hoped to appear outwardly more or less like other countries. But under the table they oppressed and humiliated us, so that we would gradually all go off to Palestine and they wouldn't have to see us anymore. That's why they even encouraged Zionist education and Hebrew schools: by all means let us become a nation, why not, the main thing was that we should scram to Palestine, and good riddance.
The fear in every Jewish home, the fear that we never talked about but that we were unintentionally injected with, like a poison, drop by drop, was the chilling fear that perhaps we really were not clean enough, that we really were too noisy and pushy, too clever and money-grubbing. Perhaps we didn't have proper manners. There was a terror that we might, heaven forbid, make a bad impression on the Gentiles, and then they would be angry and do things to us too dreadful to think about.
A thousand times it was hammered into the head of every Jewish child that we must behave nicely and politely with the Gentiles even when they were rude or drunk, that whatever else we did, we must not provoke them or argue with them or haggle with them, we must not irritate them, or hold our heads up, and we must speak to them quietly, with a smile, so they shouldn't say we were noisy, and we must always speak to them in good, correct Polish, so they couldn't say we were defiling their language, but we mustn't speak in Polish that was too high, so they couldn't say we had ambitions above our station, we must not give them any excuse to accuse us of being too greedy, and heaven forbid that they should say we had stains on our skirts. In short, we had to try very hard to make a good impression, an impression that no child must mar, because even a single child with dirty hair who spread lice could damage the reputation of the entire Jewish people. They could not stand us as it was, so heaven forbid we should give them more reasons not to stand us.
You who were born here in Israel can never understand how this constant drip-drip distorts all your feelings, how it corrodes your human