A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [284]
So Sherwood Anderson's stories brought back what I had put behind me when I left Jerusalem, or rather the ground that my feet had trodden all through my childhood and that I had never bothered to bend down and touch. The tawdriness of my parents' life. The faint smell of flour-and-water paste and pickled herring that always wafted around the Krochmals, the couple who mended broken toys and dolls. Teacher Zelda's dingy brown apartment with its peeling veneer cabinet. Mr. Zarchi the writer with a heart complaint, and his wife, who suffered from perpetual migraines. Zerta Abramski's sooty kitchen, and the two birds that Staszek and Mala Rudnicki kept in a cage, the old bald one and the other one made out of a pinecone. And Teacher Isabella Nahlieli's houseful of cats, and her husband Getsel, the open-mouthed cashier in the cooperative shop. And Stakh, Grandma Shlomit's mournful old dog with the melancholy button eyes that they used to stuff full of mothballs and beat cruelly to get rid of the dust, until one day they didn't want him anymore and they wrapped him in old newspaper and threw him in the garbage.
I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Mai-monides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.
Here too, in Kibbutz Hulda, there lived a cowman who was an expert on the anarchist movement in Russia, a teacher who was once put in eighty-fourth place on the list of Labor candidates for the elections to the Second Knesset, and a good-looking needlewoman who was fond of classical music and spent her evenings drawing the landscape of her native village in Bessarabia as she remembered it from before the village was destroyed. There was also an aging bachelor who enjoyed sitting on a bench on his own in the cool of the evening staring at little girls, a truck driver with a pleasant baritone voice who secretly dreamed of being an opera singer, a pair of fiery ideologues who had heaped scorn and contempt on each other, verbally and in print, for the past twenty-five years, a woman who had been the prettiest girl in her class back in Poland and had even appeared once in a silent film, but now sat on a rough stool behind the food store every day in a stained apron, fat, red-faced, and uncared-for, peeling huge piles of vegetables and occasionally wiping her face with her apron—a tear, perspiration, or both.
Winesburg, Ohio taught me what the world according to Chekhov was like even before I encountered Chekhov himself: no longer the world of Dostoevsky, Kafka, or Knut Hamsun, or that of Hemingway or Yigal Mossensohn. No more mysterious women on bridges or men with their collars turned up in smoky bars.
This modest book hit me like a Copernican revolution in reverse.