A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [60]
Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the anti-Semitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages and recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its postnational unity, and adored its manners, clothes, and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and who had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved...
And so in 1933 Shlomit and Alexander Klausner, those disappointed lovers of Europe, together with their younger son Yehuda Arieh, who had just completed his first degree in Polish and world literature, emigrated halfheartedly, almost against their will, to Asiatic Asia, to the Jerusalem that Grandpa's sentimental poems had longed for ever since his youth.
They sailed from Trieste to Haifa on the Italia, and on the way they were photographed with the captain, whose name, recorded on the edge of the picture, was Beniamino Umberto Steindler. Nothing less.
And in the port of Haifa, so runs the family story, a British Mandatory doctor or sanitary officer in a white coat was waiting for them, to spray all the passengers with disinfectant. When it was Grandpa Alexander's turn, so the story goes, he was so furious that he grabbed the spray from the doctor and gave him a good dousing, as if to say: Thus shall it be done unto the man who dares to treat us here in our own homeland as though we were still in the Diaspora; for two thousand years we have borne everything in silence, but here, in our own land, we shall not put up with a new exile, our honor shall not be trampled underfoot—or disinfected.
Their elder son, David, a committed and conscientious Europhile, stayed behind in Vilna. There, at a very early age, and despite being Jewish, he was appointed to a teaching position in literature at the university. He had no doubt set his heart on the glorious career of Uncle Joseph, just as my father did all his life. There in Vilna he would marry a young woman called Malka, and there, in 1938, his son Daniel would be born. I never saw this son, born a year and a half before me, nor have I ever managed to find a photograph of him. There are only some postcards and a few letters left, written in Polish by Aunt Malka (Macia), Uncle David's wife. 10.2.39: The first night Danush slept from nine in the evening to six in the morning. He has no trouble sleeping at night. During the day he lies with his eyes open with his arms and legs in constant motion. Sometimes he screams...
Little Daniel Klausner would live for less than three years. Soon they would come and kill him to protect "Europe" from him, to prevent in advance Hitler's "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards ... With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood ... The final