A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [58]
In Vilna, too, Grandpa was a businessman. He did not set his sights high; he bought a little here and sold a little there, and in between he sometimes made some money, and he sent his two sons first to Hebrew school and then to the classical gymnasium. The brothers David and Arieh, otherwise known as Zyuzia and Lonia, had brought three languages with them from Odessa: at home they had spoken Russian and Yiddish, in the street Russian, and at the Zionist kindergarten they had learned to speak Hebrew. Here, in the classical gymnasium in Vilna, they added Greek and Latin, Polish, German, and French. Later, in the European literature department at the university, English and Italian were added to the list, and in the Semitic philology department my father also learned Arabic, Aramaic, and cuneiform writing. Uncle David soon got a teaching job in literature, and my father, Yehuda Arieh, who took his first degree at Vilna University in 1932, was hoping to follow in his footsteps, but the anti-Semitism by now had become unbearable. Jewish students had to endure humiliation, blows, discrimination, and sadistic abuse.
"But what exactly did they do to you?" I asked my father. "What sort of sadistic abuse? Did they hit you? Tear up your exercise books? And why didn't you complain about them?"
"There's no way," Father said, "that you can understand this. And it's better that way. I'm glad, even though you can't understand this either, that is to say, why I'm glad that you can't understand what it was like: I definitely don't want you to understand. Because there's no need, there's simply no need anymore. Because it's all over. It's all over once and for all. That is to say, it won't happen here. Now let's talk about something else: shall we talk about your album of planets? Of course we still have enemies. And there are wars. There is a siege and no small losses. Definitely. I'm not denying it. But not persecution. That—no. Neither persecution nor humiliation nor pogroms. Not the sadism we had to endure there. That will never come back, for sure. Not here. If they attack us, we'll give as good as we get. It seems to me you've stuck Mars between Saturn and Jupiter. That's wrong. No, I'm not telling you. You can look it up yourself and see where you went wrong, and you can put it right all by yourself."
A battered photo album survives from Vilna days. Here is Father, with his brother David, both still at school, both looking very serious, pale, with their big ears sticking out from under peaked caps, both in suits, ties, shirts with stiff collars. Here is Grandpa Alexander, starting to go a little bald, still mustached, nattily turned out, looking a little like a minor Tsarist diplomat. And here are some group photographs, perhaps a graduation class. Is it Father's year or his brother David's? It's hard to tell: the faces are rather blurred. The boys are wearing caps and the girls round berets. Most of the girls have dark hair, and some are smiling a Mona Lisa smile that knows something that you're dying to know but that you won't discover because it's not meant for you.
Who for, then? It is almost certain that virtually all the young people in these group photographs were stripped naked and made to run, whipped and chased by dogs, starved and frozen, into the large pits in the Ponar Forest. Which of them survived, apart from my father? I study the group photograph under a bright light and try to discern something in their faces: some hint of cunning or determination, of inner toughness that might have made this boy in the second row on the left guess what was in store for him, mistrust all the reassuring words, climb down into the drains under the ghetto while there was still time, and join the partisans in the forests. Or how about that pretty girl in the middle, with the clever, cynical look, no, my dear, they can't deceive