A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [164]
My mother wanted me to go to the House of Education for Workers' Children from the first grade on, either because she did not approve of the rigorous religious separation of boys and girls or because Tachke-moni, with its heavy old stone buildings, which were built under Turkish rule, seemed antiquated and gloomy compared to the House of Education for Workers' Children, which had big windows, light, airy classrooms, cheerful beds of vegetables, and a sort of infectious youthful joy. Perhaps it reminded her in some way of the Tarbuth gymnasium in Rovno.
As for my father, he worried himself about the choice. He would have preferred me to go to school with the professors' children in Rehavia or at least with the children of the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who lived in Beit Hakerem, but we were living in times of riots and shooting, and both Rehavia and Beit Hakerem were two bus rides away from our home in Kerem Avraham. Tachkemoni was alien to my father's secular outlook and to his skeptical, enlightened mind. The House of Education, on the other hand, he considered a murky source of leftist indoctrination and proletarian brainwashing. He had no alternative but to weigh the black peril against the red peril and choose the lesser of two evils.
After a difficult period of indecision Father decided, against my mother's choice, to send me to Tachkemoni. He believed that there was no fear that they would turn me into a religious child, because in any case the end of religion was nigh, progress was driving it out fast, and even if they did succeed in turning me into a little cleric there, I would soon go out into the wide world and shake off that archaic dust, I would give up any religious observance just as the religious Jews themselves with their synagogues would disappear off the face of the earth in a few years, leaving nothing behind but a vague folk memory.
The House of Education, on the other hand, presented in Father's view a serious danger. The red tide was on the upsurge in our land, it was sweeping through the whole world, and socialist indoctrination was a one-way road to disaster. If we sent the child there, they would instantly brainwash him and stuff his head full of all sorts of Marxist straw and turn him into a Bolshevik, one of Stalin's little soldiers, they would pack him off to one of their kibbutzim and he would never come back ("None that go into her return again," as Father put it).
But the way to Tachkemoni, which was also the way to the House of Education for Workers' Children, ran along the side of the Schneller Barracks. From sandbagged positions on top of the walls, nervous, Jew-hating, or simply drunken British soldiers sometimes fired on passersby in the street below. Once they opened fire with a machine gun and killed the milkman's donkey because they were afraid that the milk churns were full of explosives, as had happened in the bombing of the King David Hotel. Once or twice British drivers even ran pedestrians over with their jeeps, because they had not got out of the way fast enough.
These were the days after the World War, the days of the underground and terrorism, the blowing up of the British headquarters, infernal devices planted by the Irgun in the basement of the King David Hotel, attacks on CID HQ in Mamilla Road and on army and police installations.
Consequently my parents decided to postpone the frustrating choice between the darkness of the Middle Ages and the Stalinist trap for another two years and send me for the time being to Mrs. Isabella Nahlieli's Children's Realm. The great advantage of her cat-ridden school was that it was literally within hailing distance of our home. You went out of our yard and turned left, passed the entrance to the Lembergs' and Mr. Auster's grocery shop, carefully