A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [36]
Under Uncle Joseph's influence my grandfather and grandmother also became New Zionist Jabotinskyites, and my father actually grew close to the ideas of the Irgun—the paramilitary underground—and its political wing, and Menahem Begin's Herut Party, even though Begin actually aroused in such broad-minded, secular Odessan Jabotinskyites rather mixed feelings, mingled with a certain restrained condescension: his Polish shtetl origins and his excessive emotionalism may have made him appear somewhat plebeian or provincial, and however indisputably dedicated and stalwart a nationalist, he may have appeared not quite enough of a man of the world, not quite charmant enough, too lacking in poetry, in the ability to radiate the charisma, the grandeur of spirit, that touch of tragic loneliness, that they felt became a leader possessed of the qualities of a lion or an eagle. What was it Jabotinsky wrote about the relationship between Israel and the nations after the national revival: "Like a lion confronting other lions." Begin did not look much like a lion. Even my father, despite his name, was not a lion. He was a shortsighted, clumsy Jerusalem academic. He was not capable of becoming an underground fighter, but made his contribution to the struggle by composing occasional manifestos in English for the underground in which he denounced the hypocrisy of "perfidious Albion." These manifestos were printed on a clandestine printing press, and lithe young men used to go around the neighborhood at night posting them on every wall and even on the telegraph poles.
I, too, was a child of the underground; more than once I drove out the British with a flanking movement of my troops, sank His Majesty's fleet after a daring ambush at sea, kidnapped and court-martialed the High Commissioner and even the King of England himself, and with my own hands I raised the Hebrew flag (like those soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima on an American stamp) on the flagpole at Government House on the Hill of Evil Counsel. After driving them out, I would sign an agreement with the conquered, perfidious British to set up a front of the so-called civilized, enlightened nations against the waves of savage orientals with their ancient curly writing and their curved scimitars that threatened to burst out of the desert to kill, loot, and burn us with bloodcurdling guttural shrieks. I wanted to grow up to be like the good-looking, curly-haired, tight-lipped statue of David by Bernini, reproduced on the title page of Uncle Joseph's When a Nation Fights for Its Freedom. I wanted to be a strong, silent man with a slow, deep voice. Not like Uncle Joseph's reedy, slightly querulous voice. I didn't want my hands to be like his soft, old lady's hands.
He was a wonderfully frank man, my great-uncle Joseph, full of self-love and self-pity, vulnerable and craving recognition, brimming with childlike merriment, a happy man who always pretended to be miserable. With a kind of cheery contentment he loved to talk endlessly about his achievements, his discoveries, his insomnia, his detractors, his experiences, his books, articles, and lectures, all of which without exception had caused a "great stir in the world," his encounters, his work plans, his greatness, his importance, and his magnanimity.
He was at once a kind man and a selfish, spoiled one, with the sweetness of a baby and the arrogance of a wunderkind.
There, in Talpiot, which was intended to be a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin suburb, a peaceful wooded hill where, in the fullness of time, red-tiled roofs would gleam