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By Root 979 0

compilations, a shelf of Hebrew works from Spain and another with books from Italy, and a section with the writings of the Hebrew Enlightenment, from Berlin and elsewhere, and an endless expanse of Jewish thought and Jewish history and early Near Eastern history, Greek and Roman history, Church history both ancient and modern, and the various pagan cultures, Islamic thought, eastern religions, medieval history, and there were wide Slavic regions that left me mystified, Greek territories, and gray-brown areas of ring binders and cardboard folders stuffed with offprints and manuscripts. Even the floor was covered with dozens of piledup books, some of them laid open facedown, some full of little markers, while others huddled like frightened sheep on the high-backed chairs that were intended for visitors, or even on the windowsills; while a black ladder that could be moved all around the library on a metal track gave access to the upper shelves that clung on under the high ceiling. Occasionally, I was permitted to move it from bookcase to bookcase very carefully on its rubber wheels. There were no pictures, plants, or ornaments. Only books, more books, and silence filled the room, and a wonderful rich smell of leather bindings, yellowing paper, mold, a strange hint of seaweed and old glue, of wisdom, secrets, and dust.

In the center of his library, like a large dark destroyer that had dropped anchor in the waters of a mountain-girt bay, stood Professor Klausner's desk, entirely covered with piles and piles of reference works, notebooks, an assortment of different pens, blue, black, green, and red, pencils, erasers, inkwells, containers full of paper clips, rubber bands, and staples, manila envelopes, white envelopes, and envelopes with attractive colorful stamps on them, sheets of paper, leaflets, notes, and index cards, foreign volumes piled open on top of open Hebrew volumes, interleaved here and there with sheets torn from a spiral-bound pad, inscribed with the cobwebs of my uncle's spidery handwriting, full of crossings out and corrections, like corpses of bloated flies, full of little slips of paper, and Uncle Joseph's gold-rimmed spectacles lay on top of the pile as though hovering over the void, while a second, black-framed, pair lay on top of another pile of books, on a little trolley beside his chair, and a third pair peered out from among the pages of an open booklet on a small chest that stood beside the dark sofa.

On this sofa, curled up in the fetal position, covered to his shoulders in a green and red tartan rug, like a Scottish soldier's kilt, his face bare and childlike without his glasses, lay Uncle Joseph himself, thin and small, his elongated brown eyes looking both happy and a little lost. He gave us a feeble wave of his translucent white hand, smiled a pink smile between his white mustache and his goatee, and said something like this:

"Come in, my dears, come in, come in" (even though we were already in the room, standing right in front of him, though still close to the door, huddled together—my mother, my father, and myself—like a tiny flock that had strayed into a strange pasture) "and please forgive me for not standing up to greet you, do not judge me too harshly, for two nights and three days now I have not stirred from my desk or closed my eyes, ask Mrs. Klausner and she will testify on my behalf, I am neither eating nor sleeping, I do not even glance at the newspaper while I finish this article, which, when it is published, will cause a great stir in this land of ours, and not only here, the whole cultural world is following this debate with bated breath, and this time I believe I have succeeded in silencing the obscurantists once and for all! This time they will be forced to concur and say Amen, or at least to admit that they have nothing more to say, they have lost their case, their game is up. And how about you? Fania my dear? My dear Lonia? And dear little Amos? How are you? What is new in your world? Have you read a few pages from my When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom to dear little Amos