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By Root 1225 0

nor has the Muslim Mufti, Haj Amin the Nazi-lover!"). On the other hand, he did believe at times in a vague providence, a "presiding spirit of the people" or "Rock of Israel," or in the wonders of the "creative Jewish genius," and he also pinned his hopes on the redeeming and reviving powers of art: "The priests of beauty and the artists' brush," he used to recite dramatically from Tchernikhowsky's sonnet cycle, "and those who master verse's mystic charm / redeem the world by melody and song." He believed that artists were superior to other human beings, more perceptive, more honest, unbesmirched by ugliness. The question of how some artists, despite all this, could have followed Stalin, or even Hitler, troubled and saddened him. He often argued with himself about this: artists who were captivated by the charms of tyrants and placed themselves at the service of repression and wickedness did not deserve the title "priests of beauty." Sometimes he tried to explain to himself that they had sold their souls to the devil, like Goethe's Faust.

The Zionist fervor of those who built new suburbs, who purchased and cultivated virgin land and paved roads, while it intoxicated my father to some extent, passed my mother by. She would usually put the newspaper down after a glance at the headlines. Politics she considered a disaster. Chitchat and gossip bored her. When we had visitors, or when we went to call on Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora in Talpiot, or the Zarchis, the Abramskis, the Rudnickis, Mr. Agnon, the Hananis, or Hannah and Hayim Toren, my mother rarely joined in the conversation. Yet sometimes her mere presence made men talk and talk with all their might while she just sat silent, smiling faintly, as though she was trying to decipher from their argument why Mr. Zarchi maintained that particular view and Mr. Hanani the opposite one: would the argument be any different if they suddenly changed around, and each defended the other's position while attacking the one he had argued for previously?

Clothes, objects, hairdos, and furniture interested my mother only as peepholes through which she could peer into people's inner lives. Whenever we went into someone's home, or even a waiting room, my mother would always sit up straight in a corner, with her hands folded across her chest like a model pupil in a boarding school for young ladies, and stare carefully, unhurriedly, at the curtains, the upholstery, the pictures on the walls, the books, the china, the objects displayed on the shelves, like a detective amassing details, some of which might eventually combine to yield a clue.

Other people's secrets fascinated her, but not on the level of gossip—who fancied whom, who was going out with whom, who had bought what. She was like someone studying the placing of tiles in a mosaic or of the pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. She listened attentively to conversations, and with that faint smile hovering unawares on her lips she would observe the speaker carefully, watching the mouth, the wrinkles on the face, what the hands were doing, what the body was saying or trying to hide, where the eyes were looking, any change of position, and whether the feet were restless or still inside the shoes. She rarely contributed to the conversation, but if she came out of her silence and spoke a sentence or two, the conversation usually did not go back to being as it was before she intervened.

Maybe it was that in those days women were allotted the role of the audience in conversations. If a woman suddenly opened her mouth and said a sentence or two, it caused some surprise.

Now and then my mother gave private lessons. Occasionally she went to a lecture or a literary reading. Most of the time, though, she stayed at home. She did not sit around, but worked hard. She worked silently and efficiently. I never heard her humming or grumbling while she was doing the housework. She cooked, baked, did the washing, put the shopping away, ironed, cleaned, tidied, washed the dishes, sliced vegetables, kneaded dough. But when the apartment was perfectly tidy, the