A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [146]
"There, in the land our fathers loved," my parents used to sing when they were young, she in Rovno and he in Odessa and Vilna, like thousands of other young Zionists in Eastern Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century, "all our hopes will be fulfilled. There to live in liberty, there to flourish, pure and free."
But what were all the hopes? What sort of "pure and free" life did my parents expect to find here?
Perhaps they vaguely thought they would find in the renewed Land of Israel something less petit-bourgeois and Jewish and more European and modern; something less crudely materialistic and more idealistic; something less feverish and voluble and more settled and reserved.
My mother may have dreamed of living the life of a bookish, creative teacher in a village school in the Land of Israel, writing lyric poetry in her spare time, or perhaps sensitive, allusive stories. I think that she hoped to forge gentle relationships with subtle artists, relationships marked by baring one's breast and revealing one's true feelings, and so to break free at last of her mother's noisy, domineering hold on her, and to escape from the stifling puritanism, poor taste, and base materialism that were apparently rampant where she came from.
My father, on the other hand, saw himself as destined to become an original scholar in Jerusalem, a bold pioneer of the renewal of the Hebrew spirit, a worthy heir to Professor Joseph Klausner, a gallant officer in the cultured army of the Sons of Light battling against the forces of darkness, a fitting successor to a long and glorious dynasty of scholars that began with the childless Uncle Joseph and continued with his devoted nephew who was as dear to him as a son. Like his famous uncle, and no doubt under his inspiration, my father could read scholarly works in sixteen or seventeen languages. He had studied in the universities of Vilna and Jerusalem (and even wrote a doctoral thesis later, in London). For years, neighbors and strangers had addressed him as "Herr Doktor," and then, at the age of fifty, he finally had a real doctorate. He had also studied, mostly on his own, ancient and modern history, the history of literature, Hebrew linguistics and general philology, biblical studies, Jewish thought, archaeology, medieval literature, philosophy, Slavonic studies, Renaissance history, and Romance studies: he was equipped and ready to become an assistant lecturer and to advance through the ranks to senior lecturer and eventually professor, to be a path-breaking scholar, and indeed to end up sitting at the head of the table every Saturday afternoon and delivering one monologue after another to his awestruck tea-time audience of admirers and devotees, just like his esteemed uncle.
But nobody wanted him, or his learned accomplishments. So this Treplev had to eke out a wretched existence as a librarian in the newspaper department of the National Library, writing his books about the history of the novella and other subjects of literary history at night, with what remained of his strength, while his Seagull spent her days in a basement apartment, cooking, laundering, cleaning, baking, looking after a sickly child, and when she wasn't reading novels, she stood staring out of the window while her glass of tea grew cold in her hand. Whenever she could, she gave private lessons.
I was an only child, and they both placed the full weight of their disappointments on my little shoulders. First of all, I had to eat well and sleep a lot and wash properly, so as to improve my chances of growing up to fulfill something of the promise of my parents when they were young. They expected me to learn to read and write even before I reached school age. They vied with each other to offer me blandishments and bribes to make me learn the letters (which was unnecessary, as letters