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By Root 1136 0

after my father's death I myself became an adjunct professor of literature at Ben Gurion University; a year or two later I was made a full professor, and eventually I was appointed to the Agnon Chair. In time I received generous invitations from both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Universities to be a full professor of literature, I, who am neither an expert nor a scholar nor a mover of mountains, who have never had any talent for research and whose mind always turns cloudy at the sight of a footnote.* My father's little finger was more professorial than a dozen "parachuted in" professors like me.

The Zarchis' apartment had two and a half small rooms, and was on the ground floor of a three-story building. The rear part of the apartment was occupied by Israel Zarchi, his wife Esther, and his two aged parents. The front room, where my father lived, first with his parents, then on his own, and eventually with my mother, had its own door, leading onto the veranda, then down a few steps into the narrow front garden, and out into Amos Street, which was still no more than a dusty track, with no roadway or pavements, still scattered with heaps of building materials and dismantled scaffolding among which hunger-weary cats roamed and a few doves pecked. Three or four times a day a cart drawn by a donkey or mule came down the road, a cart bearing long iron rods for building, or the paraffin seller's cart, the iceman's cart, the milkman's cart, the cart of the rag-and-bone man, whose hoarse cry "alte sachen"always made my blood freeze: all the years of my childhood I imagined that I was being warned against illness, old age, and death, which though still distant from me were gradually and inexorably approaching, creeping secretly like a viper through the tangle of dark vegetation, ready to strike me from behind. The Yiddish cry alte sachen sounded to me just like the Hebrew words al-tezaken, "do not age." To this day, the cry sends a cold shiver up my spine.

*My father's books are rich in footnotes. As for me, I have only used them freely in one book, The Silence of Heaven: Agnons Tear of God (Jerusalem: Keter, 1993; Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2000). I introduced my father into note 92 on page 192 of the Hebrew edtion of that book. That is to say, I referred the reader to his book The Novella in Hebrew Literature. In writing that note, some twenty years after his death, I hoped to afford him a small pleasure yet at the same time feared that instead of being pleased he might be waving an admonishing finger at me.

Swallows nested in the fruit trees in the gardens, while lizards, geckos, and scorpions crept in and out of the clefts of the rocks. Occasionally we even saw a tortoise. The children burrowed under the fences, creating a network of shortcuts that spread through the backyards of the neighborhood, or climbed up on the flat rooftops to watch the British soldiers in the Schneller Barracks or to look out at the distant Arab villages on the surrounding hillsides: Isawiya, Shuafat, Beit Iksa, Lifta, Nebi Samwil.

Today the name of Israel Zarchi is almost forgotten, but in those days he was a prolific young writer whose books sold many copies. He was about my father's age, but by 1937, when he was twenty-eight, he had published no fewer than three books. I revered him because I was told that he was not like other writers: the whole of Jerusalem wrote scholarly books, put together from notes, from other books, from booklists, dictionaries, weighty foreign tomes, and ink-stained index cards, but Mr. Zarchi wrote books "out of his own head." (My father used to say: "If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books, you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.")

On winter evenings a few members of my parents' circle used to get together sometimes at our place or at the Zarchis' in the building across the road: Hayim and Hannah Toren, Shmuel Werses, the Breimans, flamboyant Mr. Sharon-Shvadron, who was a great talker, Mr.