A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [276]
In vain.
In his fifties now, he was too old to become a teaching assistant or a junior lecturer, and not sufficiently well thought of to be in the running for a senior academic position. He was not wanted anywhere. (This was also a time when Professor Joseph Klausner's reputation suffered a dramatic decline. All Uncle Joseph's work on Hebrew literature had by the 1960s begun to seem antiquated and rather naive.) As Agnon writes about one of his characters, in the story "Forever":
For twenty years Adiel Amzeh conducted research into the secrets of Gumlidatha, which was a great city and the pride of mighty nations until the Gothic hordes descended upon it and made it into a heap of dust and its inhabitants into eternal slaves, and all the years during which he labored he did not show his face to the sages of the universities or to their womenfolk and children; now that he came to ask them for a favor, their eyes radiated such cold anger that their spectacles glinted as they addressed him in these terms: Who are you, sir, we do not know you. His shoulders sagged and he departed from them a disappointed man. Nevertheless, the matter was not without benefit, for he had learned the lesson that if one wishes to be recognized by people, one must be close to them. He was not, however, a man who knew how to be close to people...*
*S. Y. Agnon, "Forever," in Complete Works of S. Y. Agnon, vol. 8 (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv, 1962), pp. 315-14.
My father never learned "how to be close to people," even though he always tried his hardest to do so, by means of jokes and wisecracks, displays of erudition and plays on words, a constant willingness to shoulder any task without counting the cost. He never knew how to flatter, and he did not master the art of attaching oneself to academic power groups and cabals; he was nobody's lackey, and he wrote in praise of people only after their death.
Eventually he seems to have accepted his fate. For another ten years or so he spent his days sitting meekly in a windowless cell in the bibliographical section in the new National Library building in Givat Ram, accumulating footnotes. When he came home from work, he sat down at his desk and compiled entries for the Hebrew Encyclopedia, which was taking shape at the time. He mainly wrote about Polish and Lithuanian literature. Slowly he converted some chapters of his doctoral dissertation about I. L. Peretz into articles that he published in Hebrew journals, and once or twice he even managed to publish in French. Among the copies that I have here in my home in Arad I have found articles on Saul Tchernikhowsky ("The Poet in His Homeland"), Immanuel of Rome, Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, and one entitled "Mendele Studies," which my father dedicated
To the memory of my wife, a woman of discrimination and good taste, who left me on 8 Tebeth 5712*
In 1960, just a few days before Nily and I were married, my father had his first heart attack. It prevented him from attending the ceremony, which took place in Hulda under a canopy held up on the points of four pitchforks. (It was a fixed tradition in Hulda to support the bridal canopy on two rifles and two pitchforks, symbolizing the union of work, defense, and the kibbutz. Nily and I caused quite a scandal by refusing to marry in the shadow of rifles. In the kibbutz assembly Zalman P. called me a "bleeding heart," while Tzvi K. inquired mockingly whether the army unit I was serving in allowed me to go on patrol armed with a pitchfork or a broom.)
My father recovered two or three weeks after the wedding, but his face did not look the same: he was gray and tired. From the mid-1960s on, his liveliness gradually left him. He still