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By Root 1023 0

children went to their parents' homes, while the outside boarders relaxed in the clubroom or played basketball. In the evenings there were various activities—dancing, for instance, or sing-alongs—which I avoided so as not to appear ridiculous. When everyone else had disappeared, I would lie down half naked on the grass in front of our dormitory sunbathing and reading till it was dark. (I was very careful to avoid lying on my bed in the empty room, because there my filthy mind lay in wait for me, swarming with Scheherazade-like fantasies.)

Once or twice a week toward evening I would check the progress of my tan in the mirror before putting on my shirt, then pluck up my courage and go to the veterans' block to drink a glass of fruit juice and eat a slice of cake with my kibbutz "parents" Hanka and Oizer Huldai. This pair of teachers, both originally from Lodz, in Poland, presided year after year over the cultural and educational life of the kibbutz. Hanka, who taught in the primary school, was a buxom, energetic woman, always as taut as a spring, and surrounded by a powerful aura of dedication and cigarette smoke. She shouldered the whole burden of organizing the Jewish festivals, weddings, anniversaries, putting on productions and shaping the local tradition of rustic proletarian life. This tradition, as Hanka envisaged it, was supposed to blend the flavor of the Song of Songs with the olives-and-carobs Hebraic taste of the new biblical tillers of the soil, Ha-sidic melodies from Eastern Europe with the rough and ready ways of Polish peasants and other children of nature who drew their purity of mind and mystical joie de vivre straight from the Knut Hamsun-like Growth of the Soil under their bare feet.

As for Oizer Huldai, the director of the "continuation classes" or secondary school, he was a hard, wiry man whose Jewish wrinkles were plowed with suffering and ironic sagacity. Occasionally a mischievous sparkle of anarchic playfulness flickered for an instant among these tortured lines. He was lean and angular, short of stature but with devastating steely eyes and a hypnotic presence. He had the gift of the gab and a radioactive sarcasm. He could emanate a warmth of affection that melted anyone who was exposed to it to the point of total submission, but he was also capable of volcanic fits of rage that could put the fear of doomsday into those around him.

Oizer combined the intellectual acumen of a Lithuanian Talmud scholar with a dithyrambic Hasidic ecstasy that could make him suddenly screw up his eyes and burst forth in a rapturous song straining to break free from the trammels of the corporeal world. In a different time or place he might have become a revered Hasidic rebbe, a charismatic wonder-worker surrounded by a packed court of entranced admirers. He could have gone a long way if he had chosen to be a politician, a Tribune of the Plebs, leaving behind him a foaming wake of visceral admiration in some and no less visceral hatred in others. But Oizer Huldai had chosen to live as a kibbutz schoolmaster. He was a hard man of uncompromising principles who enjoyed a fight and could be domineering and even tyrannical. He taught, with an equal degree of detailed proficiency and almost erotic zeal, like a wandering preacher of the shtetl, Bible, biology, Baroque music, Renaissance art, rabbinic thought, principles of socialist ideology, ornithology, taxonomy, the recorder, and subjects like "the historic Napoleon and his representation in nineteenth-century European literature and art."

My heart pounded as I entered the one-and-a-half-room bungalow with a little front porch in the northern block at the edge of the veterans' quarters, opposite the alley of cypresses. The walls were adorned with reproductions of pictures by Modigliani and Paul Klee and a precise, almost Japanese, drawing of almond blossoms. Between two plain armchairs a small coffee table bore a tall vase that almost always contained not flowers but a tasteful arrangement of sprigs. The bright, rustic-style curtains were hand-embroidered in a faintly