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By Root 1115 0

my book every day. Sometimes twice on the same day. At first he would not believe that I had really read the whole book, and when I brought a book back only a few hours after I had borrowed it, he used to test me on it with all sorts of crafty trick questions. Gradually his suspicion turned to astonishment and finally to devotion. He was convinced that with such an amazing memory and the ability to read so fast, particularly if I also learned the major languages, someday I could become the ideal private secretary for one of our great leaders. Who knew, I might end up as Ben-Gurion's secretary, or Moshe Sharet's. Consequently he decided that I was worth a long-term investment, that he should cast his bread upon the water: who knew, he might need some permit one day, he might need to jump a line or oil the wheels of the publishing business he was planning to join, and then surely his ties of friendship with the private secretary of one of the greatest of the great would be worth its weight in gold.

Mr. Marcus sometimes used to show my crowded reader's ticket proudly to selected customers, as though gloating over the fruits of his investment. Just look what we have here! A bookworm! A phenomenon! A child who devours not just books but whole shelves every month!

So I got special permission from Mr. Marcus to make myself at home in his library. I could borrow four books at a time so as not to go hungry over the holidays, when the shop was closed. I could leaf— carefully!—through books hot from the press that were intended for sale, not for lending. I could even look at books that were not meant for someone of my age, like the stories of Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Stefan Zweig, and even spicy Maupassant.

In the winter I ran in the dark, through showers of piercing rain and driving wind, to get to Mr. Marcus's bookshop before it closed, at six o'clock. It was very cold in Jerusalem in those days, a sharp biting cold, and hungry polar bears came down from Siberia to roam the streets of Kerem Avraham on those late December nights. I ran without a coat, and so my sweater got drenched and gave off a depressing, itchy smell of wet wool all evening.

Occasionally it happened that I was left without a scrap to read, on those long empty Saturdays when by ten in the morning I had finished all the ammunition I had brought from the library. Frantically I grabbed whatever came to hand in my father's bookcases: Till Eulenspiegel in Shlonsky's translation, the Arabian Nights translated by Rivlin, the books of Israel Zarchi, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, Kafka, Berdyczewski, Rahel's poetry, Balzac, Hamsun, Yigal Mossensohn, Feierberg, Natan Shaham, Gnessin, Brenner, Hazaz, even Mr. Agnon's books. I understood almost nothing, except perhaps for what I could see through my father's spectacles, namely that life in the shtetl was despicable, repulsive, and even ridiculous. In my foolish heart, I was not entirely surprised by its terrible end.

Father had most of the key works of world literature in the original languages, so I could hardly even read their titles. But whatever was there in Hebrew, if I didn't actually read it, at least I sniffed at it. I left no stone unturned.

Of course, I also read the weekly children's section of Davar, and those children's books that were on everyone's dessert menu: poems by Leah Goldberg and Fania Bergstein, The Children's Island by Mira Lobeh, and all the books by Nahum Guttmann. Lobengula's Africa, Beatrice's Paris, Tel Aviv surrounded by sand dunes, orchards, and sea, all these were destinations of my first hedonistic world cruises. The difference between Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv-that-was-joined-to-the-rest-of-the-big-wide-world seemed to me like the difference between our wintry, black-and-white life and a life of color, summer, and light. One book that particularly captured my imagination was Over the Ruins by Tsvi Liebermann-Livne, which I read and reread. Once upon a time, in the days of the Second Temple, there was a remote Jewish village, tucked away peacefully among hills, valleys,