A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [112]
In every classroom in the Tarbuth kindergarten, the Tarbuth primary school, and the Tarbuth secondary school there hung a large picture of Theodor Herzl, a large map of the Land from Dan to Beer Sheba with the pioneering villages highlighted, a Jewish National Fund collecting box, pictures of pioneers at work, and all sorts of slogans with snatches of verse. Bialik visited Rovno twice and Tchernikhowsky came twice too, and Asher Barash as well, I think, or it may have been some other writer. Prominent Zionists from Palestine came too, almost every month, Zalman Rubashov, Tabenkin, Yaakov Zerubavel, Vladimir Jabotinsky.
We used to put on big processions for them, with drums and banners, decorations, paper lanterns, passion, slogans, armbands, and songs. The Polish mayor himself went out to meet them in the square, and in that way we could sometimes begin to feel that we were also a nation, not just some kind of scum. It may be a little hard for you to understand, but in those days all the Poles were drunk on Polishness, the Ukrainians were drunk on Ukrainianness, not to mention the Germans, the Czechs, all of them, even the Slovaks, the Lithuanians, and the Latvians, and there was no place for us in that carnival, we didn't belong and we weren't wanted. Small wonder that we too wanted to be a nation, like the rest of them. What alternative had they left us?
But our education was not chauvinistic. Actually the education at Tarbuth was humanistic, progressive, democratic, and also artistic and scientific. They tried to give boys and girls equal rights. They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.
From a very early age our thoughts were with the Land of Israel. We knew by heart the situation in every new village, what was grown in Beer Tuvia and how many inhabitants there were in Zichron Yaakov, who built the metaled road from Tiberias to Tsemach, and when the pioneers climbed Mount Gilboa. We even knew what people ate and wore there.
That is, we thought we knew. In fact our teachers did not know the whole truth, so even if they had wanted to tell us about the bad aspects, they couldn't have. They didn't have the faintest idea. Everybody who came from the Land—emissaries, youth leaders, politicians—and everyone who went and came back painted a rosy picture. And if anyone came back and told us less pleasant things, we didn't want to hear. We simply silenced them. We treated them with contempt.
Our headmaster was a delightful man. Charmant. He was a firstrate teacher with a sharp mind and the heart of a poet. His name was Reiss, Dr. Issachar Reiss. He came from Galicia and soon became the idol of the young people. The girls secretly adored him, including my sister Haya, who was involved in communal activities and was a natural leader, and Fania, your mother, on whom Dr. Reiss had a mysterious influence, gently steering her in the direction of literature and art. He was so handsome and manly, a bit like Rudolph Valentino or Ramon Navarro, full of warmth and natural empathy, he hardly ever lost his temper, and when he did, he never hesitated to send for the student afterward to apologize.
The whole town was under his spell. I think the mothers dreamed of him at night and the daughters swooned at the sight ofhim by day. And the boys, no less than the girls, tried to imitate him, to speak like him, to cough like him, to stop in the middle of a sentence like him and go and stand by the window for a few moments, deep in thought. He could have been a successful seducer. But no, so far as I know he was married—not particularly happily, to a woman who barely came up to his ankles—and behaved like an exemplary family man. He could also have been