A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [52]
*Hayyim Nahuran Bialok (1873-1934), the Russian-born Hebrew poet, recognized as Israel's national poet, though he did not live to see the birth of the State of Israel.
It was a terrible love: she was eight or nine years older than her pocket Casanova, and moreover she also happened to be his first cousin.
At first the startled family did not want to hear about a marriage between the maiden and the boy. As if the difference in their ages and their blood tie were not enough, the young man had no education worthy of the name, no fixed employment, and no regular income beyond what he could earn from buying and selling here and there. Over and above all these catastrophes, Tsarist Russian law forbade the marriage of first cousins.
According to the photos, Shlomit Levin—the daughter of a sister of Rasha-Keila Klausner, née Braz—was a solidly built, broad-shouldered young woman, not particularly good-looking but elegant, haughty, tailored with severity and restraint. She wears a felt trilby, which cuts a fine slanting line across her brow, its brim coming down on the right over her neat hair and her left ear and sweeping upward on the left like the stern of a boat, while in front a bunch of fruit is held in place by a shiny hat pin, and to the left a feather waves proudly over the fruit, the hat, everything, like an arrogant peacock's tail. The lady's left arm, clad in a stylish kid glove, holds an oblong leather handbag, the other arm being firmly crossed with that of the young Grandpa Alexander, while her fingers, also gloved, hover lightly above the sleeve of his black overcoat, barely touching him.
He is standing to her right, nattily dressed, stiff, well turned out, his height enhanced by thick soles, yet he looks slighter and shorter than she is, despite the tall black homburg on his head. His young face is serious, resolute, almost lugubrious. His lovingly tended mustache tries in vain to dispel the boyish freshness that still marks his face. His eyes are elongated and dreamy. He is wearing an elegant, wide-lapeled overcoat with padded shoulders, a starched white shirt, and a narrow silk tie, and on his right arm hangs or perhaps even swings a stylish cane with a carved handle and shiny ferrule. In the old photograph it glints like the blade of a sword.
A shocked Odessa turned its back on this Romeo and Juliet. Their two mothers, who were sisters, engaged in a war of the worlds that began with mutual accusations of culpability and ended in everlasting silence. So Grandpa withdrew his meager savings, sold something here and something there, added one ruble to another, both families may have contributed something, if only to drive the scandal out of sight and out of mind, and my grandparents, the love-struck cousins, set sail for New York, as hundreds of thousands of other Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries were doing at that time. Their intention was to marry in New York and take American citizenship, in which case I might have been born in Brooklyn or in Newark, New Jersey, and written clever novels in English about the passions and inhibitions of top-hatted immigrants and the neurotic ordeals of their agonized progeny.
But on board the ship, somewhere between Odessa and New York, on the Black Sea or off the coast of Sicily, or as they glided through the night toward the twinkling lights of the Straits of Gibraltar, or maybe as their love boat was passing over the lost continent of Atlantis, there was a further drama, a sudden twist to the plot: love raised its awesome dragon's head once more.
To cut a long story short, my grandfather, the bridegroom-to-be who had not yet reached his eighteenth birthday, fell in love again, passionately, heart-breakingly, desperately, up on deck or somewhere in the bowels of the ship, with another woman, a fellow passenger, who was also,