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By Root 1035 0

listened in respectful silence or expressed agreement in a few quiet words so as not to interrupt the flow of his lecture. Uncle Joseph's table talk consisted of emotive monologues: from his seat at the head of the table, Professor Klausner would censure and denounce, reminisce or share his opinions, ideas, and feelings about such matters as the plebeian wretchedness of the leadership of the Jewish Agency, forever fawning on the Gentiles, the status of the Hebrew language, under constant threat from the Scylla and Charybdis of Yiddish on the one hand and the European languages on the other, the petty jealousy of some of his professorial colleagues, the shallowness of the younger writers and poets, particularly those born in the land, who not only failed to master a single language of European culture but limped even in Hebrew, or the Jews of Europe who had failed to understand Jabotinsky's prophetic warnings, and the American Jews, who even now, after Hitler, still clung to their fleshpots instead of settling in the Homeland.

Occasionally one of the male guests would venture a question or comment, like someone throwing a twig on a bonfire. But very rarely would one of them dare to take issue with some detail or other in their host's discourse; most of the time they all sat respectfully, uttering polite cries of agreement and contentment, or laughed when Uncle Joseph adopted a sarcastic or humorous tone, in which case he invariably explained: I was only joking when I said what I said a moment ago.

As for the ladies, their role in the conversation was limited to that of nodding listeners, who were expected to smile in the appropriate places and convey by their facial expressions delight at the pearls of wisdom that Uncle Joseph scattered before them so generously. I do not recall Aunt Zippora herself ever sitting at the table: she was forever scurrying back and forth between the kitchen or the larder and the living room, topping up the biscuit dish or the fruit bowl, adding hot water to the tea from the large silver-plated samovar, always hurrying, with a little apron around her waist, and when she had no tea to pour and there was no need for fresh supplies of cakes, biscuits, fruit, or the sweet concoction known as varinye, she would stand near the door between the living room and the corridor, to Uncle Joseph's right and a couple of paces behind him, with her hands joined on her stomach, waiting to see if anything was needed or if any of the guests wanted something, from a damp napkin to a toothpick, or if Uncle Joseph indicated to her politely that she should fetch from the far right-hand corner of the desk in his library the latest number of the periodical Leshonenu or the new volume of poems by Yitzhak Lamdan from which he wanted to quote a passage to support his argument.

Such was the invariable order of things in those days: Uncle Joseph sitting at the head of the table, pouring forth words of wisdom, polemic, and wit, and Aunt Zippora standing in her white apron, serving or waiting till she was needed. And yet, my uncle and aunt were utterly devoted to each other and lavished signs of affection on each other, an elderly, chronically ill, childless couple, he treating his wife like a baby and behaving toward her with extreme sweetness and affection, she treating her husband like a pampered only child, swaddling him in scarves and coats in case he caught cold and beating an egg in milk and honey to soothe his throat.

Once I happened to catch sight of them sitting side by side on their bed, his translucent hand in hers, while she carefully trimmed his fingernails, whispering all sorts of endearments to him in Russian.

Uncle Joseph had a penchant for putting emotional inscriptions in books: each year, from the time I was nine or ten, he gave me a volume of the Children's Encyclopedia, in one of which he wrote, in letters that slanted slightly backward, as though recoiling:

To my clever and hard-working little Amos

with heartfelt hopes

that he will grow up to be a credit to his people from

Uncle Joseph

Jerusalem-Talpiot,