A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [56]
The poet Tchernikhowsky, too, might burst into the salon, flamboyant but shy, passionate yet prickly, conquering hearts, touching in his childlike innocence, as fragile as a butterfly but also hurtful, wounding people left, right, and center without even noticing. The truth? "He never meant to give offense—he was so innocent! A kind soul! The soul of a baby who has never known sin! Not like a sad Jewish baby, no! Like a goyish baby! Full of joie de vivre, naughtiness, and energy! Sometimes he was just like a calf! Such a happy calf! Leaping around! Playing the fool in front of everybody! But only sometimes. Other times he would arrive so miserable it immediately made every woman want to make a fuss over him! Every single one! Young and old, free or married, plain or pretty, they all felt some kind of hidden desire to make a fuss over him. It was a power he had. He didn't even know he had it—if he had, it simply would never have worked on us the way it did!"
Tchernikhowsky stoked his spirits with a glazele or two of vodka, and sometimes he would start to read those poems of his that overflowed with hilarity or sorrow and made everybody in the room melt with him and for him: his liberal ways, his flowing locks, his anarchic mustache, the girls he brought with him, who were not always too bright, and not even necessarily Jewish, but were always beauties who gladdened every eye and caused not a few tongues to wag and whetted the writers' envy—"I'm telling you as a woman (Grandma again), women are never wrong about such things, Bialik used to sit and stare at him like this ... and at the goyish girls he brought along ... Bialik would have given an entire year of his life if only he could have lived for a month as Tchernikhowsky!"
Arguments raged about the revival of the Hebrew language and literature, the limits of innovation, the connection between the Jewish cultural heritage and that of the nations, the Bundists, the Yiddishists (Uncle Joseph, in polemical vein, called Yiddish jargon, and when he was calm he called it "Judeo-German"), the new agricultural settlements in Judaea and Galilee, and the old troubles of the Jewish farmers in Kherson or Kharkov, Knut Hamsun and Maupassant, the great powers and Sozialismus, women's rights and the agrarian question.
In 1921, four years after the October Revolution, after Odessa had changed hands several times in the bloody fighting between Whites and Reds, two or three years after my father finally changed from a girl to a boy, Grandma and Grandpa and their two sons fled the city for Vilna, which at that time was part of Poland (long before it became Vilnius in Lithuania).
Grandpa loathed the Communists. "Don't talk to me about the Bolsheviks," he used to grumble. "Nu, what, I knew them very well, even before they seized power, before they moved into the houses they stole from other people, before they dreamed of becoming apparatchiks, yevseks, politruks, and commissars. I can remember them when they were still hooligans, the Unterwelt of the harbor district in Odessa, hoodlums, bullies, pickpockets, drunkards, and pimps. Nu, what, they were nearly all Jews, Jews of a sort, what can you do. Only they were Jews from the simplest families—nu, what, families of fishmongers from the market, straight from the dredgings that clung to the bottom of the pot, that's what we used to say. Lenin and Trotsky—what Trotsky, which Trotsky, Leibele Bronstein, the crazy son of some gonef called Dovidl from Janowka—this riffraff they dressed up as revolutionaries, nu, what, with leather boots and revolvers in their belts, like a filthy sow in a silk dress. And that's how they went around the streets, arresting