A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [73]
19
EVERY MORNING Yehuda Arieh Klausner took the No. 9 bus from the stop in Geula Street via the Bukharian Quarter, Prophet Samuel Street, Simeon the Righteous Street, the American Colony, and the Sheikh Jarrah district to the university buildings on Mount Scopus, where he diligently pursued his MA studies. He attended lectures on history by Professor Richard Michael Kobner, who never succeeded in learning Hebrew; Semitic linguistics by Professor Hans Jacob Polotsky; Biblical studies from Professor Umberto Moshe David Cassuto; and Hebrew literature from Uncle Joseph, alias Professor Dr. Joseph Klausner, the author of Judaism and Humanism.
While Uncle Joseph definitely encouraged my father, who was one of his star pupils, he never chose him, when the time came, as a teaching assistant, so as not give malicious tongues anything to wag about. So important was it for Professor Klausner to avoid aspersions on his good name that he may have behaved unfairly to his brother's son, his own flesh and blood.
On the front page of one of his books the childless uncle inscribed the following words: "To my beloved Yehuda Arieh, my nephew who is as dear to me as a son, from his uncle Joseph who loves him like his own soul." Father once quipped bitterly: "If only we had not been related, if only he loved me a little less, who knows, I might have been a lecturer in the literature department by now instead of a librarian."
All those years it was like a running sore in my father's soul, because he really deserved to be a professor like his uncle and his brother David, the one who had taught literature in Vilna and died of it. My father was amazingly knowledgeable, an excellent student with a prodigious memory, an expert in world literature as well as Hebrew literature, who was at home in many languages, utterly familiar with the Tosefta, the Midrashic literature, the religious poetry of the Jews of Spain, as well as Homer, Ovid, Babylonian poetry, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Adam Mickiewicz, as hard-working as a honey bee, as straight as a die, a gifted teacher who could give a simple and accurate explanation of the barbarian invasions, Crime and Punishment, the workings of a submarine, or the solar system. Yet he never earned the chance to stand up before a class or to have pupils of his own, but ended his days as a librarian and bibliographer who wrote three or four scholarly books and contributed a few entries to the Hebrew Encyclopedia, mainly on comparative and Polish literature.
In 1936 he was found a modest post in the newspaper department of the National Library, where he worked for twenty years or so, first on Mount Scopus and after 1948 in the Terra Sancta Building, beginning as a simple librarian and eventually rising to deputy to the head of the department, Dr. Pfeffermann. In a Jerusalem that was full of immigrants from Poland and Russia and refugees from Hitler, among them distinguished luminaries from famous universities, there were more lecturers and scholars than students.
In the late 1950s, after receiving his doctorate from London University, my father tried unsuccessfully to secure a foothold in the literature department in Jerusalem as an outside lecturer. Professor Klausner, in his day, had been afraid of what people would say if he employed his own nephew. Klausner was succeeded as professor by the poet Shimon Halkin, who attempted to make a fresh start by eliminating the heritage, the methods, and the very smell of Klausner and certainly did not want to take on Klausner's nephew. In the early 1960s Father tried his luck at the newly opened Tel Aviv University, but he was not welcome there either.
In the last year of his life he negotiated for a literature post in the academic institute that was being set up in Beer Sheva and was eventually to become Ben Gurion University. Sixteen years