A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [8]
My parents did not have a clearly defined place on this scale between the pioneers and the tsores-mongers. They had one foot in the affiliated community (they belonged to the Health Fund and paid their dues to the Community Chest) and the other in the air. My father was close in his heart to the ideology of the unaffiliated, the breakaway New Zionist of Jabotinsky, although he was very far from their bombs and rifles. The most he did was put his knowledge of English at the service of the underground and contribute an occasional illegal and inflammatory leaflet about "perfidious Albion." My parents were attracted to the intelligentsia of Rehavia, but the pacifist ideals of Martin Buber's Brit Shalom—sentimental kinship between Jews and Arabs, total abandonment of the dream of a Hebrew state so that the Arabs would take pity on us and kindly allow us to live here at their feet—such ideals appeared to my parents as spineless appeasement, craven defeatism of the type that had characterized the centuries of Jewish Diaspora life.
My mother, who had studied at Prague University and graduated from the university in Jerusalem, gave private lessons to students who were preparing for the examinations in history or occasionally in literature. My father had a degree in literature from the University of Vilna (now Vilnius), and a second degree from the university at Mount Scopus, but he had no prospect of securing a teaching position in the Hebrew University at a time when the number of qualified experts in literature in Jerusalem far exceeded that of the students. To make matters worse, many of the lecturers had real degrees, gleaming diplomas from famous German universities, not like my father's shabby Polish-Jerusalemite qualification. He therefore settled for the post of librarian in the National Library on Mount Scopus, and sat up late at night writing his books about the Hebrew novella or the concise history of world literature. My father was a cultivated, well-mannered librarian, severe yet also rather shy, who wore a tie, round glasses, and a somewhat threadbare jacket. He bowed before his superiors, leaped to open doors for ladies, insisted firmly on his few rights, enthusiastically cited lines of poetry in ten languages, endeavored always to be pleasant and amusing, and endlessly repeated the same repertoire of jokes (which he referred to as "anecdotes" or "pleasantries"). These jokes generally came out rather labored: they were not so much specimens of living humor as a positive declaration of intent as regards our obligation to be entertaining in times of adversity.
Whenever my father found himself facing a pioneer in khaki, a revolutionary, an intellectual turned worker, he was thoroughly confused. Out in the world, in Vilna or Warsaw, it was perfectly clear how you addressed a proletarian. Everyone knew his place, although it was up to you to demonstrate clearly to this worker how democratic and uncon-descending you were. But here, in Jerusalem, everything was ambiguous. Not topsy-turvy, as in communist Russia, but simply ambiguous. On the one hand, my father definitely belonged to the middle class, albeit the slightly lower middle class; he was an educated man, the author of articles and books, the holder of a modest position in the National Library, while his interlocutor was a sweaty construction worker in overalls and heavy boots. On the other hand, this same worker was said to have some sort of degree in chemistry, and he was also a committed pioneer, the salt of the earth, a hero of the Hebrew Revolution, a manual laborer, while Father considered himself—at least in his heart of hearts—to be a sort of rootless, shortsighted intellectual with two left hands. Something of a deserter from the battlefront