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By Root 1174 0

scribbling passionate poems in Russian by night, casting covetous eyes into shop windows and at the mountains of melons, grapes, and watermelons, as well as the sensual southern women, dashing home to compose yet another emotional poem, then cycling around the streets of Odessa once more, carefully dressed in the latest flashy style, smoking cigarettes like a grown-up, with his carefully waxed black mustache; he sometimes went down to the port to feast his eyes on the ships, stevedores, and cheap whores, or he watched excitedly as a troop of soldiers marched past to the accompaniment of a military band, and sometimes he would spend an hour or two in the library, eagerly reading whatever came to hand, resolving not to try to compete with the bookishness of his elder brother, the prodigy. Meanwhile he learned how to dance with well-bred young ladies, how to drink several glasses of brandy without losing his wits, how to cultivate acquaintances in coffeehouses, and how to pay court to the little dog so as to woo the lady.

As he made his way around the sun-washed streets of Odessa, a harbor town with a heady atmosphere colored by the presence of several different nationalities, he made friends of various kinds, courted girls, bought and sold and sometimes made a profit, sat down in a corner of a café or on a park bench, took out his notebook, wrote a poem (four stanzas, eight rhymes), then cycled around again as the unpaid errand boy of the leaders of the Lovers of Zion Society in pre-telephone Odessa: carrying a hasty note from Ahad Ha'am to Mendele Mokher Seforim, or from Mendele Mokher Seforim to Mr. Bialik, who was fond of saucy jokes, or to Mr. Menahem Ussishkin, from Mr. Ussishkin to Mr. Lilienblum, and while he waited in the drawing room or the hall for the reply, poems in Russian in the spirit of the Love of Zion movement played in his heart: Jerusalem whose streets are paved with onyx and jasper, an angel standing at every street corner, the sky above shining with the radiant light of the Seven Heavens.

He even wrote love poems to the Hebrew language, praising its beauty and its musicality, pledging his undying faithfulness—all in Russian. (Even after he had been living in Jerusalem for more than forty years, Grandpa was unable fully to master Hebrew: to his dying day he spoke a personal Hebrew that broke every rule, and he made horrific mistakes when he wrote it. In the last postcard he sent us to Kibbutz Hulda shortly before his death, he wrote, more or less: "My very dear grandchildrens and greatgrandchildrens, I mist you lots and lots. I want to sea you all lots and lots!")

When he finally arrived in Jerusalem in 1933 with a fear-ridden Grandma Shlomit, he stopped writing poems and devoted himself to commerce. For a few years he successfully sold dresses imported from Vienna in the fashion of the previous year to Jerusalemite women who longed for the delights of Europe. But eventually another Jew appeared who was cleverer than Grandpa, and began to import dresses from Paris in the fashion of the previous year, and Grandpa with his Viennese dresses had to admit defeat: he was forced to abandon the business and his love of dresses, and found himself supplying Jerusalem with hosiery by Lodzia in Holon and towels from a small firm called Szczupak and Sons in Ramat Gan.

Failure and want brought back the muse, who had abandoned him during his years of commercial success. Once more he shut himself away in his "study" at night and penned passionate verses in Russian about the splendors of the Hebrew language, the enchantments of Jerusalem, not the poverty-stricken, dusty, heat-stifled city of zealots but a Jerusalem whose streets are fragrant with myrrh and frankincense, where an angel of God floats over every one of its squares. At this point I entered the picture, in the role of the brave little boy in the story of the emperor's new clothes, and attacked Grandpa with exasperated realism for these poems of his: "You've been living in Jerusalem for years now, and you know perfectly well what the streets are paved