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By Root 1118 0

of the addressee alone. Never forget Danush, Ammi, and Lulik, or the girls with the soldiers in the woods, or what your grandma said to your other grandma, or the sweet fish floating, dead and seasoned, in a sauce of carrots. Never forget the roughness of the wet stone that was in your mouth more than half a century ago, an echo of whose grayish taste of chalk, plaster, and salt still seduces the tip of your tongue. And all the thoughts that stone conjured up you are never to forget, a universe inside a universe inside a universe. Remember the vertiginous sense of time within time within time, and the whole host of heaven trying on, blending, and hurting the innumerable hues of light just after the sun has set, purple lilac lime orange gold mauve crimson scarlet blue and dull red with gushing blood, and slowly there descends over all a deep dim blue-gray color like the color of silence with a smell like that of the repeated notes on the piano, climbing and stumbling over and over again up a broken scale, while a single bird answers with the five opening notes of Für Elise: Ti-da-di-da-di.

33

MY FATHER had a weakness for the momentous, whereas my mother was fascinated by yearning and surrender. My father was an enthusiastic admirer of Abraham Lincoln, Louis Pasteur, and the speeches of Churchill, "blood, sweat, and tears," "never have so many owed so much," "we shall fight them on the beaches." My mother, with a gentle smile, identified with the poetry of Rahel, "I have not sung to you, my land, or praised your name with deeds of heroism, only a path have my feet trodden down..." My father, at the kitchen sink, would suddenly erupt into a spirited recital, with no prior warning, of Tchernikhowsky: "...and in this Land will rise a brood / that breaks its iron chains / looking the light straight in the eye!" Or sometimes Jabotinsky: "...Jotapata, Masada / and captured Beitar / shall rise again in might and splendor! O Hebrew—whether pauper, / slave, or wanderer / you were born a prince / crowned with David's royal diadem."When the spirit descended upon him, Father would roar out, with a tunelessness that would startle the dead, Tchernikhowsky's "My country, oh my land, bare rock-covered highland!" Until Mother had to remind him that the Lembergs next door and probably the other neighbors, the Buchovskis and the Rosendorffs, must be listening to his recital and laughing, whereupon father would stop sheepishly, with an embarrassed smile, as though he had been caught stealing sweets.

As for my mother, she liked to spend the evening sitting on the bed that was disguised as a sofa, with her bare feet folded underneath her, bent over a book on her knees, wandering for hours on end along the paths of autumnal gardens in the stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Iwaszkewicz, André Maurois, and U. N. Gnessin.

Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle decadence.

Kerem Avraham, our suburb, with its street hawkers, shopkeepers and little middlemen, its fancy-goods sellers and Yiddishists, its pietists with their wailing chants, its displaced petite bourgeoisie and its eccentric world reformers, suited neither of them. There was always a hesitant dream hovering over our home of moving to a more cultured neighborhood, such as Beit Hakerem or Kiryat Shemuel, if not to Tal-piot or Rehavia, not right away but someday, in the future, when it was a possibility, when we'd put something by, when the child was a bit older, when Father had managed to get his foot on the academic ladder, when Mother had a regular teaching position,