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By Root 951 0

illnesses, the tragic destiny of the nonconformist, the injustices and humiliations he had had to suffer all through his life, there was always a restrained joy lurking behind his round spectacles. His movements, his bright eyes, his pink baby cheeks projected a cheery, optimistic vivaciousness that was life-affirming and almost hedonistic: "I didn't sleep a wink again all night," he would always say to his visitors, "the anxieties of our nation, fears for our future, the narrow vision of our dwarf-like leaders, weighed more heavily on me in the dark than my own considerable problems, not to mention my pain, my shortness of breath, and the terrible migraines I suffer night and day." (If you could believe what he said, he never closed his eyes for a moment between at least the early 1920s and his death in 1958.)

Between 1917 and 1919 Klausner was a lecturer, and eventually professor, at the University of Odessa, which was already changing hands with bloody fighting between Whites and Reds in the civil war that followed Lenin's revolution. In 1919 Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora and my uncle's elderly mother, my great-grandmother Rasha-Keila née Braz, set sail from Odessa to Jaffa on board the Ruslan, which was the Zionist Mayflower of the Third Aliyah, the postwar wave of immigration. By Hanukkah of that year they were living in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem.

My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, Pan-Germanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or Slovak patriots. The only Europeans in the whole of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s were the Jews. My father always used to say: In Czechoslovakia there are three nations, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and the Czecho-Slovaks, i.e., the Jews; in Yugoslavia there are Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Montenegrines, but, even there, there lives a group of unmistakable Yugoslavs; and even in Stalin's empire there are Russians, there are Ukrainians, and there are Uzbeks and Chukchis and Tatars, and among them are our brethren, the only real members of a Soviet nation.

Europe has now changed completely, and is full of Europeans from wall to wall. Incidentally, the graffiti in Europe have also changed from wall to wall. When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, "Jews go home to Palestine." Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, "Jews get out of Palestine."

Uncle Joseph spent many years writing his magnum opus on Jesus of Nazareth, in which he maintained—to the amazement of Christians and Jews alike—that Jesus was born and died a Jew and never intended to found a new religion. Moreover, he considered him to be "the Jewish moralist par excellence." Ahad Ha'am pleaded with Klausner to delete this and other sentences, to avoid unleashing a colossal scandal in the Jewish world, as indeed happened both among Jews and among Christians when the book was published in Jerusalem in 1921: the ultras accused him of having "accepted bribes from the missionaries to sing the praises of That Man," while the Anglican missionaries in Jerusalem demanded that the archbishop dismiss Dr. Danby, the missionary who had translated Jesus of Nazareth into English, as it was a book that was "tainted with heresy, in that it portrays our Saviour as a kind of Reform rabbi, as a mortal, and as a Jew who has nothing at all to do with the Church." Uncle Joseph's international reputation was acquired mainly from this book and from the sequel that