A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [265]
In Verne's The Mysterious Island a group of survivors from a shipwreck manage to create a tiny patch of civilization on a barren desert island. The survivors are all Europeans, all men, all rational, generous-hearted men of goodwill, they are all technologically minded, bold and resourceful: they are the very image of the way the nineteenth century wanted to see the future: sane, enlightened, virile, capable of solving any problem by the power of reason and in accordance with the tenets of the new religion of progress. (Cruelty, baser instincts, and evil were apparently banished to another, later island: the one in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.)
By their hard work, common sense, and pioneering enthusiasm the group manages to survive and to build up from scratch, with their bare hands, a prosperous homestead on the desert island. This delighted me, imbued as I was with the pioneering ethos of Zionism that I had received from my father: secular, enlightened, rationalistic, idealistic, mil-itantly optimistic and progressive.
And yet, there were moments when the pioneers of The Mysterious Island were threatened by catastrophe from the forces of nature, moments when they had their backs to the wall and their brains were of no further use to them, and at such fateful moments a mysterious hand always intervened in the plot, a miraculous, all-powerful providence that time and again delivered them from certain destruction. "If there be justice, let it shine forth at once," Bialik wrote: in The Mysterious Island there was justice and it did shine forth at once, as quick as lightning, whenever all hope was lost.
But that was precisely the other ethos, the one diametrically opposed to my father's rationalism. It was the logic of the stories my mother used to tell me at night, tales of demons, of miracles, the tale of the ancient man who sheltered an even more ancient man under his roof, tales of evil, mystery, and grace, Pandora's box where at the end hope still remained beyond all despair. It was also the miracle-laden logic of the Hasidic tales that Teacher Zelda first exposed me to and that my storytelling teacher at Tachkemoni, Mordechai Michaeli, took up from the place where she had left off.
It was as if here, in The Mysterious Island, there was at last some kind of reconciliation between the two opposing windows through which the world had first been revealed to me, at the beginning of my life: my father's commonsensical, optimistic window, over against my mother's window, which opened onto grim landscapes and strange supernatural forces, of evil but also of pity and compassion.
At the end of The Mysterious Island it turns out that the providential force that intervened over and over again to rescue the "Zionist enterprise" of the survivors of the shipwreck whenever they were threatened with destruction was actually the discreet intervention of Captain Nemo, the angry-eyed captain from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. But that in no way diminished the pleasure of reconciliation that I got from the book, the elimination of the contradiction between my childish fascination with Zionism and my no less childish fascination with the Gothic.
It was as though my father and mother had finally made peace and were living together in perfect harmony. Admittedly not here in Jerusalem but on some desert island. But still, they could make peace.
Kindhearted Mr. Marcus, who sold new and secondhand books on Jonah Street, almost at the corner of Geula Street, also ran a lending library, and eventually he allowed me to change