A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [59]
And here is my young father, looking very much like my son Daniel (whose middle names are Yehuda Arieh, after him), a spine-chilling resemblance, seventeen years old, long and thin as a cornstalk, wearing a bowtie, with his innocent eyes looking at me through his round spectacles, partly embarrassed and partly proud, a great talker and yet, with no contradiction, terribly shy, with his dark hair combed neatly back over his head and a cheerful optimism on his face, Don't worry, pals, everything's going to be fine, we shall overcome, somehow we'll put everything behind us, what more can happen, it's not so bad, it'll all be OK.
My father in this picture is younger than my son. If only it were possible, I would get into the photo and warn him and his cheerful chums. I would try to tell them what's in store. It's almost certain they wouldn't believe me if I told them: would just make fun of me.
Here is my father again, dressed for a party, wearing a shapka, a Russian hat, rowing a boat, with two girls who are smiling at him coquettishly. Here he is wearing slightly ridiculous knickers, showing his socks, embracing from behind a smiling girl with a neat center parting. The girl is about to post a letter in a box marked "Skrzynka Pocztowa" (the words are clearly legible in the picture). Who is the letter to? What happened to the addressee? What was the fate of the other girl in the picture, the pretty girl in a striped dress, with a little black handbag tucked under her arm and white socks and shoes? For how long after the picture was taken did this pretty girl go on smiling?
And here is my father, smiling too, suddenly reminiscent of the sweet little girl his mother made him into when he was a child, in a group of five girls and three boys. They are in a forest, but are dressed in their best town clothes. The boys, however, have removed their jackets and are standing in their shirts and ties, in a bold, laddish posture, daring fate—or the girls. And here they are constructing a human pyramid, with two boys carrying a rather plump girl on their shoulders and the third holding her thigh rather daringly, and two other girls looking on and laughing. The bright sky too looks merry, and so does the railing of the bridge over the river. Only the surrounding forest is dense, serious, dark: it extends from one side of the picture to the other and presumably a good deal farther. A forest near Vilna: the Rudnik Forest? Or the Ponar Forest? Or is it perhaps the Popishok or Olkieniki Forest, which my father's grandfather, Yehuda Leib Klausner, loved to cross on his cart, trusting to his horse, his strong arms, and his good luck in the dense darkness, even on rainy, stormy winter nights?
Grandpa yearned for the Land of Israel that was being rebuilt after its two thousand years of desolation; he yearned for Galilee and the valleys, Sharon, Gilead, Gilboa, the hills of Samaria and the mountains of Edom, "Flow, Jordan flow on, with your roaring billows"; he contributed to the Jewish National Fund, paid the Zionist shekel, eagerly devoured every scrap of information from the Land of Israel, got drunk on the speeches of Jabotinsky, who occasionally passed through Jewish Vilna and attracted an enthusiastic following. Grandpa was always a wholehearted supporter of Jabotinsky's proud, uncompromising nationalist politics and considered himself a militant Zionist. However, even