A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [33]
Joseph Klausner was born in 1874 in Olkieniki, Lithuania, and died in Jerusalem in 1958. When he was ten, the Klausners moved from Lithuania to Odessa, where he progressed through the traditional Jewish educational system from the cheder to the modern-style yeshiva, and thence to the Hibbat Zion movement and the circles of Ahad Ha'am. At the age of nineteen he published his first article, titled "New Words and Fine Writing," in which he argued for the bounds of the Hebrew language to be extended, even by the incorporation of foreign words, so as to enable it to function as a living language. In the summer of 1897 he went to study in Heidelberg in south Germany, because in Tsarist Russia the universities were closed to Jews. During his five years in Heidelberg he studied philosophy with Professor Kuno Fischer, became deeply attracted to Eastern history a la Renan, and was profoundly influenced by Carlyle. His studies led from philosophy and history to literature, Semitic languages, and oriental studies (he mastered some fifteen languages, including Greek and Latin, Sanskrit and Arabic, Aramaic, Persian, and Amharic).
Tchernikhowsky, his friend from the Odessa days, was studying medicine at Heidelberg at the same time, and their friendship deepened into a warm, fruitful affinity. "A passionate poet!" Uncle Joseph would say about him, "an eagle of a Hebrew poet, with one wing touching the Bible and the landscape of Canaan while the other spreads over the whole of modern Europe!" And he sometimes said of Tchernikhowsky: "The soul of a simple, pure child in the sturdy body of a Cossack!"
Uncle Joseph was selected to be a delegate representing Jewish students at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, and at the following one, and he once even exchanged a few words with the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl himself. ("He was a handsome man! Like an angel of God! His face had an inner glow! He looked to us like an Assyrian king with his black beard and his inspired, dreamy expression! And his eyes, I'll remember his eyes to my dying day, Herzl had the eyes of a young poet in love, blazing, lugubrious eyes that bewitched everyone who looked into them. And his high forehead also endowed him with majestic splendor!")
On his return to Odessa, Klausner wrote, taught, and engaged in Zionist activity until, at the tender age of twenty-nine, he inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of Hashiloah, the main monthly of modern Hebrew culture. To be more precise, Uncle Joseph inherited from Ahad Ha'am a "periodical letter," and he turned it into a monthly immediately by inventing the Hebrew word for "monthly."
A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality. To this day I sometimes close my eyes and visualize this frail old man, with his pointed white goatee, his soft mustache, his delicate hands, his Russian glasses, shuffling along absentmindedly with his eggshell footsteps like a tiny Gulliver in a Brobdingnag peopled by a multicolored throng of mighty icebergs, tall cranes, and massive rhinoceroses, all bowing politely to him in gratitude.
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He and his wife, Fanni Wernick (who from the day of their marriage was invariably known as "my dear Zippora," or, in the presence of guests, "Mrs. Klausner"), made their home in Rimislinaya Street, Odessa, into a kind of social club and meeting place for Zionists and literary figures.
Uncle Joseph always radiated an almost childlike cheerfulness. Even when he spoke of his sadness, his deep loneliness, his enemies, his aches and