A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [21]
It was only two or three years after this incident that I managed to pronounce the name Tchernikhowsky. I was not surprised when I was told that he was a poet: almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer. Nor was I impressed by the title Doctor: in Uncle Joseph and Auntie Zippora's home, all the male guests were called Professor or Doctor.
But he was not just any old doctor or poet. He was a pediatrician, a man with a disheveled mop of hair, with laughing eyes, big warm hands, a thicket of a mustache, a felt cheek, and a unique, strong, soft smell.
To this day, whenever I see a photograph or drawing of the poet Saul or his carved head that stands in the entrance of the Tchernikhowsky Writers' House, I am immediately enveloped, like the embrace of a winter blanket, by his comforting smell.
Like so many Zionist Jews of our time, my father was a bit of a closet Canaanite. He was embarrassed by the shtetl and everything in it, and by its representatives in modern writing, Bialik and Agnon. He wanted us all to be born anew, as blond-haired, muscular, suntanned Hebrew Europeans instead of Jewish Eastern Europeans. He always loathed the Yiddish language, which he termed "jargon." He saw Bialik as the poet of victimhood, of "eternal death pangs," while Tchernikhowsky was the harbinger of the new dawn that was about to break, the dawn of "The Conquerors of Canaan by Storm." He would reel off "Facing the Statue of Apollo" by heart, with tremendous gusto, without even noticing that the poet, while still bowing down to Apollo, unwittingly bursts into a hymn to Dionysus.
He knew more of Tchernikhowsky's poems by heart than anyone else I have met, probably more than Tchernikhowsky himself did, and he recited them with pathos and gusto, such a muse-inspired, and therefore musical, poet, without the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl, writing shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures. Father said: Tchernikhowsky never wallows in all sorts of tsores or krechtzen.
At such moments my mother would look at him skeptically, as though surprised by the crude nature of his pleasures but refraining from comment.
He had a distinctly "Lithuanian" temperament, my father, and he was very fond of using the word "distinctly" (the Klausners came from odessa, but before that they came from Lithuania, and before that apparently from Mattersdorf, now Mattersburg in eastern Austria, near the Hungarian border). He was a sentimental, enthusiastic man, but for most of his life he loathed all forms of mysticism and magic. He considered the supernatural to be the domain of charlatans and tricksters. He thought the tales of the Hasidim to be mere folklore, a word that he always pronounced with the same grimace of loathing that accompanied his use of such words as "jargon," "ecstasy," "hashish," and "intuition."
My mother used to listen to him speak, and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, and sometimes she said to me: "Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep."
Years later, after her death, when his optimistic cheerfulness had faded somewhat, along with his volubility, his taste also changed and may have moved closer to that of my mother. In a basement in the National Library he discovered a previously unknown manuscript of I. L. Peretz, an exercise book from the writer's youth, which contained, in addition to all sorts of sketches and scribbles and attempts at poetry, an unknown story titled "Revenge." My father went off for several years to London, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on this discovery, and with this encounter with the mystically inclined Peretz he moved away from his earlier penchant for the Sturm und Drang of early Tchernikhowsky. He began to study the myths and sagas of faraway peoples, glanced at Yiddish literature, and gradually succumbed, like someone finally relaxing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz's stories in particular and Hasidic