A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [32]
As I stare at this inscription now, more than fifty years later, I wonder what he really knew about me, my Uncle Joseph, who used to lay his cold little hand on my cheek and question me, with a gentle smile beneath his white mustache, about what I had been reading lately, and which of his books I had read, and what Jewish children were being taught at school these days, which poems by Bialik and Tchernikhowsky I had learned by heart, and who was my favorite biblical hero, and without listening to my answers he told me that I ought to familiarize myself with what he had written about the Maccabees in his History of the Second Temple, while on the future of the state I should read his strongly worded article in yesterday's Hamashkif, or in the interview he gave to Haboker this week. In the inscription itself he had taken care to add the vowel points where there was any risk of ambiguity, while the last letter of his name fluttered like a flag in the wind.
In another inscription, on the title page of a volume of David Frischmann's translations, he wished me, in the third person:
May he succeed in the path of life
and learn from the words of the great translated in this book
that one must follow one's conscience
and not the human herd—the mass that rule at this time,
from his affectionate
Uncle Joseph
Jerusalem-Talpiot, Lag Ba-Omer, 5714
On one of those occasions Uncle Joseph said something like this:
"I am a childless man, after all, ladies and gentlemen, and my books are my children, I have invested the blood of my soul in them, and after my death it is they and they alone that will carry my spirit and my dreams to future generations."
To which Aunt Zippora responded:
"Nu, Osia, that's enough now. Sha. Osinka. That's quite enough of that. You know the doctors have told you not to get excited. And now you've let your tea get cold. It's stone cold. No, no, my dear, don't drink it, I'll go and get you a fresh glass."
Uncle Joseph's anger at the hypocrisy and baseness of his rivals sometimes led him to raise his voice, but his voice was never a roar, rather a high-pitched bleat, more like a sobbing woman than a scoffing, denouncing prophet. Sometimes he struck the top of the table with his frail hand, but when he did so, it seemed less like a blow than a caress. Once, while he was in the midst of a tirade against Bolschewismus or the Bund or the proponents of Judeo-German "jargon" (as he termed Yiddish), he knocked over a jug of lemonade, which spilled into his lap, and Aunt Zippora, who was standing in her apron by the door just behind him, hurried over and mopped at his trousers with her apron, apologized, helped him to his feet, and led him off to the bedroom. Ten minutes later she brought him back, changed and dry and gleaming, to his friends who had been waiting politely around the table, talking quietly about their hosts, who lived just like a pair of doves: he treated her like a daughter of his old age, and he was her darling baby and the apple of her eye. Sometimes she would lace her plump fingers in his translucent ones and for a moment the two of them would exchange a look, and then lower their eyes and smile at each other coyly.
And sometimes she gently undid his tie, helped him to take off his shoes, laid him down to rest for a while, his sad head resting on her bosom and his slight form clinging to the fullness of her body. Or else she would be standing in the kitchen washing up and weeping soundlessly, and he would come up behind her, place his pink hands on her shoulders, and utter a string of chirrups, chuckles, and twitters, as though he were trying to soothe a baby, or perhaps volunteering to be her baby.
10
AS A CHILD the thing I most admired Uncle Joseph for was that, as I had been told, he had invented and given us several simple, everyday Hebrew words, words that seemed to have been known and used forever, including "pencil," "iceberg," "shirt," "greenhouse," "toast," "cargo," "monotonous," "multicolored," "sensual," "crane," and "rhinoceros." (Come to think of it,