• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

For several years I endeavored to free myself from Agnon's shadow. I struggled to distance my writing from his influence, his dense, ornamented, sometimes Philistine language, his measured rhythms, a certain midrashic self-satisfaction, a beat of Yiddish tunes, juicy ripples of Hasidic tales. I had to liberate myself from the influence of his sarcasm and wit, his baroque symbolism, his enigmatic labyrinthine games, his double meanings, and his complicated, erudite literary games.

Despite all my efforts to free myself from him, what I have learned from Agnon no doubt still resonates in my writing.

What is it, in fact, that I learned from him?

Perhaps this. To cast more than one shadow. Not to pick the raisins from the cake. To rein in and polish pain. And one other thing, that my grandmother used to say in a sharper way than I have found it expressed by Agnon: "If you have no more tears left to weep, then don't weep. Laugh."

12

SOMETIMES I was left with my grandparents for the night. My grandmother used to point suddenly at a piece of furniture or an item of clothing or a person and say to me:

"It's so ugly, it's almost beautiful."

Sometimes she said:

"He's become so clever, he can't understand anything anymore."

Or:

"It hurts so much, it almost makes me laugh."

All day long she hummed tunes to herself that she had brought with her from places where she lived apparently without fear of germs and without the rudeness that she complained also infected everything here.

"Like animals," she would suddenly hiss disgustedly, for no visible reason, with no provocation or connection, without bothering to explain whom she was comparing to animals. Even when I sat next to her on a park bench in the evening, and there was no one in the park, and a slight breeze gently touched the tips of the leaves or perhaps made them tremble without really touching them with its invisible fingertips, Grandma could suddenly erupt, quivering with shocked loathing:

"Really! How could they! Worse than animals!"

A moment later she was humming to herself gentle tunes that were unfamiliar to me.

She was always humming, in the kitchen, in front of the mirror, on her deck chair on the veranda, even in the night.

Sometimes, after I had had my bath and brushed my teeth and cleaned out my ears with an orange stick with its tip wrapped in cotton wool, I was put to bed next to her, in her wide bed (the double bed that Grandpa had abandoned, or been evicted from, before I was born). Grandma read me a story or two, stroked my cheek, kissed my forehead, and immediately rubbed it with a little handkerchief moistened with perfume, which she always kept in her left sleeve and which she used to wipe away or squash germs, and then she turned out the light. Even then she went on humming in the dark, or rather she expelled from inside her a distant, dreamy voice, a chestnut-colored voice, a pleasant, dark voice that was gradually refined into an echo, a color, a scent, a gentle roughness, a brown warmth, lukewarm amniotic fluid. All night long.

But all these nocturnal delights she made you scrub off furiously first thing in the morning, even before your cup of cocoa without the skin. I would wake up in her bed to the sound of Grandpa's carpet beater as he fought his regular dawn battle with the bedding.

Before you even opened your eyes, there was a steaming hot bath waiting for you, smelling like a medical clinic because of the antiseptic solution that had been added to the water. On the edge of the bath a toothbrush was laid out, with a curly white worm of Ivory toothpaste already lying along the bristles. Your duty was to immerse yourself, soap yourself all over and rub yourself with the loofah, and rinse yourself, and then Grandma came, got you up on your knees in the bathtub, held you firmly by the arm, and scrubbed you all over, from head to toe and back again, with the dreaded brush, reminiscent of the iron combs that the