A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [281]
Behind the newspaper room there was another, almost deserted, room called the study room, which was sometimes used for committee meetings or for various group activities but was mostly unoccupied. In a glass-fronted cabinet stood row upon dreary row of tired, dusty copies of Young Worker, Working Woman's Monthly, Field, The Clock, and Davar Yearbook.
*Ron Huldai has been mayor of Tel Aviv since 1998.
This is where I went every evening to read my book until nearly midnight, until my eyelids were stuck together. And this is also where I took up writing again, when no one was looking, feeling ashamed of myself, feeling base and worthless, full of self-loathing: surely I hadn't left Jerusalem for the kibbutz to write poems and stories but to be reborn, to turn my back on the piles of words, to be suntanned to the bone and become an agricultural worker, a tiller of the soil.
But it soon dawned on me in Hulda that even the most agricultural of agricultural workers here read books at night and discussed them all day long. While they picked olives, they debated furiously about Tolstoy, Plekhanov, and Bakunin, about permanent revolution versus revolution in one country, about Gustav Landauer's social democracy and the eternal tension between the values of equality and freedom and between both these and the quest for the brotherhood of man. While they sorted eggs in the hen house, they argued about how to revive the old Jewish holidays for celebration in a rural setting. While they pruned the rows of vines, they disagreed about modern art.
Some of them even wrote modest articles, notwithstanding their dedication to agriculture and their total devotion to manual labor. They wrote mostly about the same topics they debated with each other all day long, but in the pieces they published every fortnight in the local newsletter they occasionally allowed themselves to wax lyrical between one crushing argument and an even more crushing counterargument.
Just as at home.
I had tried to turn my back once and for all on the world of scholarship and debate from which I had come, and I had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, or "as when a man flees from a lion and meets a bear." Admittedly, here the debaters were more suntanned than those who sat around Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora's table, they wore cloth caps, workaday garb, and heavy boots, and instead of bombastic Hebrew with a Russian accent they spoke humorous Hebrew with a juicy flavor of Galician or Bessarabian Yiddish.
Sheftel the librarian, just like Mr. Marcus, the proprietor of the bookshop and lending library on Jonah Street, took pity on my unquenchable thirst for books. He allowed me to borrow as many books as I wanted, far in excess of the library rules that he himself had compiled and typed in eye-catching letters on the kibbutz typewriter and pinned up at various prominent points in his fiefdom, whose vague dusty smell of old glue and seaweed attracted me to it like a wasp to jam.
What did I not read in Hulda in those days? I devoured Kafka, Yigal Mossensohn, Camus, Tolstoy, Moshe Shamir, Chekhov, Natan Shaham, Brenner, Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, Hayyim Guri, Alterman, Amir Gilboa, Leah Goldberg, Shlonsky, O. Hillel, Yizhar, Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Hemingway, I, Claudius, all the volumes of Winston Churchill's The Second World War, Bernard Lewis on the Arabs and Islam, Isaac Deutscher on the Soviet Union, Pearl Buck, The Nuremberg Trials, The Life of Trotsky, Stefan Zweig, the history of Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel, the origins of the Norse saga, Mark Twain, Knut Hamsun, Greek mythology, Memoirs of Hadrian, and Uri Avneri. Everything. Apart from those books that Sheftel did not allow me to read, despite all my entreaties, The Naked and the Dead, for example (I think that even after I was married, Sheftel hesitated to let me