A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [2]
Our neighborhood Tolstoyans (whom my parents referred to as Tolstoyshchiks) were without exception devout vegetarians, world reformers with strong feelings for nature, seekers after the moral life, lovers of humankind, lovers of every single living creature, with a perpetual yearning for the rural life, for simple agricultural labor among fields and orchards. But they were not successful even in cultivating their own potted plants: perhaps they killed them by overwatering, or perhaps they forgot to water them, or else it was the fault of the nasty British administration that put chlorine in our water.
Some of them were Tolstoyans who might have stepped straight out of the pages of a novel by Dostoevsky: tormented, talkative, suppressing their desires, consumed by ideas. But all of them, Tolstoyans and Dostoevskians alike, in our neighborhood of Kerem Avraham, worked for Chekhov.
The rest of the world was generally known as "the worldatlarge," but it had other epithets too: enlightened, outside, free, hypocritical. I knew it almost exclusively from my stamp collection: Danzig, Bohemia, and Moravia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ubangi-Shari, Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanganyika. That worldatlarge was far away, attractive, marvelous, but to us it was dangerous and threatening. It didn't like the Jews because they were clever, quick-witted, successful, but also because they were noisy and pushy. It didn't like what we were doing here in the Land of Israel either, because it begrudged us even this meager strip of marshland, boulders, and desert. Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: "Yids, go back to Palestine," so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: "Yids, get out of Palestine."
It was not only the worldatlarge that was a long way away: even the Land of Israel was pretty far off. Somewhere, over the hills and far away, a new breed of heroic Jews was springing up, a tanned, tough, silent, practical breed of men, totally unlike the Jews of the Diaspora, totally unlike the residents of Kerem Avraham. Courageous, rugged pioneers, who had succeeded in making friends with the darkness of night, and had overstepped every limit, too, as regards relations between a boy and a girl and vice versa. They were not ashamed of anything. Grandpa Alexander once said: "They think in the future it's going to be so simple, a boy will be able to go up to a girl and just ask for it, or maybe the girls won't even wait to be approached, but will go and ask the boys for it, like asking for a glass of water." Shortsighted Uncle Betsalel said with polite anger: "Isn't this sheer Bolshevism, to trample on every secret, every mystery?! To abolish all emotions?! To turn our whole life into a glass of lukewarm water?!" Uncle Nehemia, from his corner, let fly a couple of lines of a song that sounded to me like the growling of a cornered beast: "Oh, long is the journey and winding the road, I travel o'er mountain and plain, Oh Mamma, I seek you through heat and through snow, I miss you but you're far away!..." Then Aunt Zippora said, in Russian: "That'll do, now. Have you all gone out of your minds? The boy can hear you!" And so they all changed to Russian.
The pioneers lived beyond our horizon, in Galilee, Sharon, and the Valleys. Tough, warmhearted, though of course silent and thoughtful, young men, and strapping, straightforward, self-disciplined young women, who seemed to know and understand everything; they knew you and your shy confusion, yet they would treat you with affection, seriousness, and