A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [249]
And once the three of them were outside the Edison Auditorium, the one who was doing the dragging, seething with rage, the one who was being dragged, choking and weeping with laughter, and the poor ear that was by now as red as a beet, Grandpa raised his right hand and administered the grandfather of a slap on my right cheek, then he raised his left hand and slapped my other cheek with all the force of his hatred for the Left, and because he was such a Rightist, he did not want to let the left have the last word, so he gave me another slap on the right, not a feeble, obsequious Diaspora slap in the spirit of the worm of Jacob, but a bold, hawkish, patriotic slap, proud, magnificent, and furious.
Jotapata, Masada, and besieged Beitar had lost: they might indeed rise again in glory and might, but without me. As for the Herut movement and the Likkud Party, they lost someone that morning who might have become in time a little heir, a fiery orator, perhaps an articulate member of the Knesset, or even a deputy minister without portfolio.
I have never again blended happily into an ecstatic crowd, or been a blind molecule in a gigantic superhuman body. On the contrary, I have developed a morbid fear of crowds. The line "Repose is like mire" seems to me now to attest to a widespread, dangerous illness. In the phrase "blood and fire" I can taste blood and smell burning human flesh. As on the plains of northern Sinai during the Six Day War and among the blazing tanks on the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War.
The autobiography of Professor Klausner, Uncle Joseph, which I have drawn on for much of what I have written here about the history of the Klausner family, is entitled My Road to Resurrection and Redemption. On that Saturday, while kindhearted Grandpa Alexander, Uncle Joseph's brother, was dragging me outside by my ear and making furious noises that sounded like sobs of horror and madness, I seem to have begun to run away from resurrection and redemption. I am still running.
But that was not the only thing I ran away from. The suffocation of life in that basement, between my father and mother and between the two of them and all those books, the ambitions, the repressed, denied nostalgia for Rovno and Vilna, for a Europe that was embodied by a black tea cart and gleaming white napkins, the burden of his failure in life, the wound of hers, failures that I was tacitly charged with the responsibility of converting into victories in the fullness of time, all this oppressed me so much that I wanted to run away from it. At other times young people left their parents' homes and went off to find them-selves—or to lose themselves—in Eilat or the Sinai Desert, later on in New York or Paris, and later still in ashrams in India or jungles in South America, or in the Himalayas (where the only child Rico went in my book The Same Sea following the death of his mother). But in the early 1950s the opposite pole to the oppressiveness of the parental home was the kibbutz. There, far from Jerusalem, "over the hills and far away," in Galilee, Sharon, the Negev, or the Valleys—so we imagined in Jerusalem in those days—a new, rugged race of pioneers was taking shape, strong, serious but not complicated, laconic, able to keep a secret, able to be swept away in a riot of heady dancing, yet also able to be lonely and thoughtful, fitted for life in the fields and under canvas: tough young men and women, ready for any kind of hard work yet with a rich cultural and intellectual life and sensitive, contained feelings. I wanted to be like them so as not to be like my father or my mother