A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [9]
Most of our neighbors were petty clerks, small retailers, bank tellers, cinema ticket sellers, schoolteachers, dispensers of private lessons, or dentists. They were not religious Jews; they went to synagogue only for Yom Kippur and occasionally for the procession at Simhat Torah, yet they lit candles on Friday night, to maintain some vestige of Jewishness and perhaps also as a precaution, to be on the safe side, you never know. They were all more or less well educated, but they were not entirely comfortable about it. They all had very definite views about the British Mandate, the future of Zionism, the working class, the cultural life of the land, Dühring's attack on Marx, the novels of Knut Hamsun, the Arab question, and women's rights. There were all sorts of thinkers and preachers, who called for the Orthodox Jewish ban on Spinoza to be lifted, for instance, or for a campaign to explain to the Palestinian Arabs that they were not really Arabs but the descendants of the ancient Hebrews, or for a conclusive synthesis between the ideas of Kant and Hegel, the teachings of Tolstoy and Zionism, a synthesis that would give birth here in the Land of Israel to a wonderfully pure and healthy way of life, or for the promotion of goat's milk, or for an alliance with America and even with Stalin with the object of driving out the British, or for everyone to do some simple exercises every morning that would keep gloom at bay and purify the soul.
These neighbors, who would congregate in our little yard on Saturday afternoons to sip Russian tea, were almost all dislocated people. Whenever anyone needed to mend a fuse or change a washer or drill a hole in the wall, they would send for Baruch, the only man in the neighborhood who could work such magic, which was why he was dubbed Baruch Goldfingers. All the rest knew how to analyze, with fierce rhetoric, the importance for the Jewish people to return to a life of agriculture and manual labor: we have more intellectuals here than we need, they declared, but what we are short of is plain manual laborers. But in our neighborhood, apart from Baruch Goldfingers, there was hardly a laborer to be seen. We didn't have any heavyweight intellectuals either. Everyone read a lot of newspapers, and everyone loved talking. Some may have been proficient at all sorts of things, others may have been sharp-witted, but most of them simply declaimed more or less what they had read in the papers or in myriad pamphlets and party manifestos.
As a child I could only dimly sense the gulf between their enthusiastic desire to reform the world and the way they fidgeted with the brims of their hats when they were offered a glass of tea, or the terrible embarrassment that reddened their cheeks when my mother bent over (just a little) to sugar their tea and her decorous neckline revealed a tiny bit more flesh than usual: the confusion of their fingers, which tried to curl into themselves and stop being fingers.
All this was straight out of Chekhov—and also gave me a feeling of provinciality: that there are places in the world where real life is still happening, far away from here, in a pre-Hitler Europe, where hundreds of lights are lit every evening, ladies and gentlemen gather to drink coffee with cream in oak-paneled rooms, or sit comfortably in splendid coffeehouses under gilt chandeliers, stroll arm in arm to the opera or the ballet, observe from close up the lives of great artists, passionate love affairs, broken hearts, the painter's girlfriend falling in love with his best friend the composer, and going out at midnight bareheaded in the rain to stand alone on the ancient bridge whose reflection trembles in the river.
Nothing like this ever happened in our neighborhood. Things like this happened only over the hills and far away, in places where people live recklessly. In America, for instance, where people dig for gold, hold up mail trains, stampede herds of cattle across endless plains, and whoever kills the most Indians ends up getting the girl. That was the