A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [46]
During the day, Grandpa Alexander worked as a commercial representative and salesman of garments, being the Jerusalem agent of the Lodzia textile factory and a number of other well-respected firms. In a large number of cases piled up on shelves that ran the full height of the wall of his study, he kept a colorful collection of samples of cloths, shirts, and trousers in tricot and gabardine, socks, and all kinds of towels, napkins, and curtains. I was allowed to use these sample cases, provided I did not open them, to construct towers, forts, and defensive walls. Grandpa sat on his chair with his back to the desk, his legs stuck out in front of him, and his pink face, generally beaming with kindness and contentment, smiling happily at me as though the tower of cases and boxes that was growing under my hands would soon put the pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, and the great wall of China in the shade. It was Grandpa Alexander who told me about the great wall, the pyramids, the hanging gardens, and the other wonders of the human spirit, such as the Parthenon and the Coliseum, the Suez and Panama Canals, the Empire State Building, the churches of the Kremlin, the Venetian canals, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Eiffel Tower.
At night, in the solitude of his study, at his desk, over a goblet of cherry brandy, Grandpa Alexander was a sentimental poet who cast over an alien world poems of love, delight, enthusiasm, and longing, all in Russian. His good friend Joseph Kohen-Tsedek translated them into Hebrew. Here is an example:
After many years of slumber
Gracious lord my corpse upraise;
Lovingly my eyelids open,
Let me live for three more days.
From northern Dan down to Beersheva
Let me tour my fatherland,
Let me roam each hill and valley
And in beauty see it stand:
Every man shall dwell in safety
Each beneath his fig and vine,
As the earth bestows its bounty,
Full of joy this land of mine...
He wrote poems of praise, celebrating such figures as Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, and his famous brother, my great-uncle Joseph, and also poems of wrath against the Germans, the Arabs, the British, and all the other Jew haters. Among all these I also found three or four poems of loneliness and sorrow with lines like: "Such gloomy thoughts surround me / In the evening of my days: / Farewell to youthful vigor / And to sunshine's hopeful rays—/ Now icy winter stays..."
But usually it was not icy winter that beset him: he was a nationalist, a patriot, a lover of armies, victories, and conquests, a passionate, innocent-minded hawk who believed that if only we Jews girded ourselves with courage, boldness, iron resolve, etc., if only we finally rose up and stopped worrying about the Gentiles, we could defeat all our foes and establish the Kingdom of David from the Nile to the great river, the Euphrates, and the whole cruel, wicked Gentile world would come and bow down before us. He had a weakness for everything grand, powerful, and gleaming—military uniforms, brass bugles, banners and lances glinting in the sun, royal palaces and coats of arms. He was a child of the nineteenth century, even if he did live long enough to see three-quarters of the twentieth.
I remember him dressed in a light-cream flannel suit, or a sharply creased pinstripe suit under which he sometimes sported a piqué vest with a fine silver chain that hugged him and led into a pocket of the said vest. On his head he wore a loosely woven straw hat in summer, and in winter a Borsalino with a dark silk band. He was terribly irascible, liable to erupt suddenly in billows of resounding thunder, but he would very quickly brighten up, forgive, apologize, be contrite, as though his anger was just a sort of bad coughing fit. You could always tell the state of his temper from a distance, because his face changed color like a traffic light: pink-white-red and back to pink. Most of the