A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [7]
As for my father, he glowered whenever I used the word "fix": an innocent enough word, I could never understand why it got on his nerves. He never explained of course, and it was impossible for me to ask. Years later I learned that before I was born, in the 1930s, if a woman got herself in a fix, it meant she was pregnant. "That night in the packing room he got her in a fix, and in the morning the so-and-so made out he didn't know her" So if I said that "Uri's sister was in a fix" about something, Father used to purse his lips and clench the base of his nose. Naturally he never explained—how could he?
In their private moments they never spoke Hebrew to each other. Perhaps in their most private moments they did not speak at all. They said nothing. Everything was overshadowed by the fear of appearing or sounding ridiculous.
2
OSTENSIBLY, IN those days it was the pioneers who occupied the highest rung on the ladder of prestige. But the pioneers lived far from Jerusalem, in the Valleys, in Galilee, and in the wilderness on the shores of the Dead Sea. We admired their rugged, pensive silhouettes, poised between tractor and plowed earth, that were displayed on the posters of the Jewish National Fund.
On the next rung below the pioneers stood the "affiliated community," reading the socialist newspaper Davar in their T-shirts on summer verandas, members of the Histadrut, the Hagganah, and the Health Fund, men of khaki and contributors to the voluntary Community Chest fund, eaters of salad with an omelette and yogurt, devotees of self-restraint, responsibility, a solid way of life, homegrown produce, the working class, party discipline, and mild olives from the distinctive Tnuva jar, Blue beneath and blue above, we'll build our land with love, with love!
Over against this established community stood the "unaffiliated," aka the terrorists, as well as the pious Jews of Meah Shearim, and the "Zion-hating," ultra-orthodox communists, together with a mixed rabble of eccentric intellectuals, careerists, and egocentric artists of the decadent-cosmopolitan type, along with all sorts of outcasts and individualists and dubious nihilists, German Jews who had not managed to recover from their Germanic ways, Anglophile snobs, wealthy Frenchified Levantines with what we considered the exaggerated manners of uppity butlers, and then the Yemenites, Georgians, North Africans, Kurds, and Salonicans, all of them definitely our brothers, all of them undoubtedly promising human material, but what could you do, they would need a huge amount of patience and effort.
Apart from all these, there were the refugees, the survivors, whom we generally treated with compassion and a certain revulsion: miserable wretches, was it our fault that they chose to sit and wait for Hitler instead of coming here while there was still time? Why did they allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter instead of organizing and fighting back? And if only they'd stop nattering on in Yiddish, and stop telling us about all the things that were done to them over there, because that didn't reflect too well on them, or on us for that matter. Anyway, our faces here are turned toward the future, not the past, and if we do have to rake up the past, surely we have more than enough uplifting Hebrew history, from biblical times, and the Hasmoneans, there's no need to foul it up with this depressing Jewish history that's nothing but a bundle of troubles (they always used the Yiddish word tsores, with an expression of disgust on their faces, so the boy realizes that these tsores are a kind of sickness that belonged to them, not to us). Survivors like Mr. Licht, whom the local kids called Million Kinder. He rented a little hole-in-the-wall in Malachi Street where he slept on a mattress at night, and during the day he rolled up his bedding and ran a small business called Dry Cleaning and Steam Pressing. The corners of his mouth were always turned down in an expression of scorn or disgust. He used to sit in the doorway of