A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [114]
I embarked from Trieste on a Romanian cargo boat, the ConstanŢa it was called, and I remember that, even though I didn't believe in any religion, I didn't want to eat pork—not because of God, after all God created pigs, they don't disgust him, and when a piglet is killed and it squeals and pleads with the voice of a tortured child, God sees and hears every grunt and has about as much pity for the tortured piglet as He does for human beings. He has neither more nor less pity for the piglet than He does for all His rabbis and Hasidim who keep all the commandments and worship Him all their lives.
So it wasn't because of God but merely because it didn't seem appropriate, on my way to the Land of Israel, to gobble smoked pork and salt pork and pork sausages on board that boat. So I ate wonderful white bread instead, bread that was so fine and rich. At night I slept belowdecks, in third class, in a dormitory, next to a Greek girl with a baby who must have been no more than three weeks old. Every evening the two of us used to rock the baby in a sheet so that she'd stop crying and go to sleep. We didn't speak to each other because we had no common language, and maybe that's the reason we parted from each other with great affection.
I even remember that at one moment I had a fleeting thought, why did I have to go to the Land of Israel at all? Just to be among Jews? Yet this Greek girl, who probably didn't even know what a Jew was, was closer to me than the entire Jewish people. The entire Jewish people seemed to me at that moment like a great sweaty mass whose belly I was being tempted to enter, so it could consume me entirely with its digestive juices, and I said to myself, Sonia, is that what you really want? It's curious that in Rovno I'd never experienced this fear, that I was going to be consumed by the digestive juices of the Jewish people. It never came back once I was here, either. It was just then, for a moment, on that boat, on the way, when the Greek baby fell asleep in my lap and I could feel it through my dress as though at that moment she really was flesh of my flesh, even though she wasn't Jewish, and despite the wicked Jew-hating Antiochus Epiphanes.
Early one morning, I can even tell you the precise date and time—it was exactly three days before the end of 1938, Wednesday, December 28,1938, just after Hanukkah—it happened to be a very clear, almost cloudless day, by six in the morning I'd already dressed warmly, a sweater and light coat, and I went up on deck and looked at the gray line of clouds ahead. I watched for maybe an hour and all I saw was a few seagulls. And suddenly, almost in an instant, above the line of the clouds the winter sun appeared and below the clouds there was the city of Tel Aviv: row after row of square, white-painted houses, quite unlike houses in a town or a village in Poland or Ukraine, quite unlike Rovno or Warsaw or Trieste, but very like the pictures on the wall in every classroom at Tarbuth, and the drawings and photographs that our teacher Menahem Gelehrter used to show us. So I was both surprised and not surprised.
I can't describe how all at once the joy rose up in my throat; suddenly all I wanted to do was shout and sing, This is mine! All mine! It really is all mine! It's a funny thing, I'd never experienced such a strong feeling before in my life, of belonging, of ownership, if you know what I mean, not in our house, our orchard, the flour mill, never. Never in my life, either before that morning or after it, have I known that kind of joy: at long last this would be my home, at long last here I'd be