A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [61]
But Uncle David thought otherwise: he despised and dismissed such hateful views as these, refused to consider solemn Catholic anti-Semitism echoing among the stone vaults of high cathedrals, or coldly lethal Protestant anti-Semitism, German racism, Austrian murderousness, Polish Jew-hatred, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and French cruelty, Ukrainian, Rumanian, Russian, and Croatian love of pogroms, Belgian, Dutch, British, Irish, and Scandinavian fear of Jews. All these seemed to him an obscure relic of savage, ignorant eons, remains of yesteryear, whose time was up.
*Hitler, quoted in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Har-court, 2002), pp. 40,204,533, and 746 (Hitler's testament); see also Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd., 1939).
A specialist in comparative literature, he found in the literatures of Europe his spiritual homeland. He did not see why he should leave where he was and emigrate to western Asia, a place that was strange and alien to him, just to please ignorant anti-Semites and narrow-minded nationalist thugs. So he stayed at his post, flying the flag of progress, culture, art, and spirit without frontiers, until the Nazis came to Vilna: culture-loving Jews, intellectuals, and cosmopolitans were not to their taste, and so they murdered David, Malka, and my little cousin Daniel, who was nicknamed Danush or Danushek. In their penultimate letter, dated 15.12.40, his parents wrote that "he has recently started walking ... and he has an excellent memory."
Uncle David saw himself as a child of his time: a distinguished, multicultural, multilingual, fluent, enlightened European and a decidedly modern man. He despised prejudices and ethnic hatreds, and he was resolved never to give in to lowbrow racists, chauvinists, demagogues, and benighted, prejudice-ridden anti-Semites, whose raucous voices promised "death to the Jews" and barked at him from the walls: "Yids, go to Palestine!"
To Palestine? Definitely not: a man of his stamp would not take his young bride and infant son, defect from the front line and run away to hide from the violence of a noisy rabble in some drought-stricken Levantine province, where a few desperate Jews tried their hand at establishing a segregationist armed nationhood that, ironically, they had apparently learned from the worst of their foes.
No, he would definitely stay here in Vilna, at his post, in one of the most vital forward trenches of that rational, broad-minded, tolerant, and liberal European enlightenment that was now fighting for its existence against the waves of barbarism that were threatening to engulf it. Here he would stand, for he could do no other.
To the end.
16
GRANDMA CAST a single startled look around her and pronounced the famous sentence that was to become her motto for the twenty-five years she lived in Jerusalem: The Levant is full of germs.
Henceforth Grandpa had to get up at six or six thirty every morning, attack the mattresses and bedding violently for her with a carpet beater, air the bedspreads and pillows, spray the whole house with DDT, help her in her ruthless boiling of vegetables, fruit, linen, towels, and kitchen utensils. Every two or three hours he had to disinfect the toilet and washbasins with chlorine. These basins, whose drains were normally kept stoppered, had a little chlorine or Lysol solution at the bottom, like the moat of a medieval castle, to block any invasion by the cockroaches and evil spirits that were always trying to penetrate the apartment through the plumbing. Even the nostrils of the basins, the overflow holes, were kept blocked with improvised