A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [99]
Sometimes Mama stood there breaking eggs into a basin, and she made Haya, Fania, and me swallow the raw yolks, in such quantities that we loathed them, because there was a theory at that time that egg yolks made you resistant to all illnesses. It may even be true. Who knows? It's a fact that we were rarely ill. Nobody had heard of cholesterol in those days. Fania, your mother, was made to swallow the most egg yolks, because she was always the weakest, palest child.
Of the three of us, your mother was the one who suffered most from our mother, who was a strident, rather military woman, like a Feldwebel, a sergeant. From morning to evening she kept sipping her fruit tea and giving instructions and orders. She had some mean habits that exasperated Papa, she was obsessively mean, but mostly he was wary of her and gave way to her, and this irritated us: we were on his side because he had right on his side. Mama used to cover the fauteuils and the fine furniture with dustcovers, so that our drawing room always looked as though it were full of ghosts. Mama was terrified of the tiniest speck of dust. Her nightmare was that children would come and walk on her beautiful chairs with dirty shoes.
Mama hid the porcelain and crystal, and only when we had important guests or at New Year or Passover did she bring it all out and remove the dustcovers in the drawing room. We hated it so. Your mother especially detested the hypocrisy: that sometimes we kept kosher and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we went to synagogue and sometimes we didn't, sometimes we vaunted our wealth and sometimes we kept it hidden under white shrouds. Fania took Papa's side even more than we did, and resisted Mama's rule. I think that he, Papa, was also especially fond of Fania. I can't prove it, though—there was never any favoritism—he was a man with a very strong sense of fairness. I've never known another man like your grandpa, who so hated hurting people's feelings. Even with scoundrels he always tried very hard not to hurt their feelings. In Judaism, upsetting someone is considered worse than shedding their blood, and he was a man who would never hurt a soul. Never.
Mama quarreled with Papa in Yiddish. Most of the time they conversed in a mixture of Russian and Yiddish, but when they fought, it was only in Yiddish. To us daughters, to Papa's business partner, to the lodgers, the maid, the cook, and the coachman they spoke only Russian. With the Polish officials they spoke Polish. (After Rovno was annexed by Poland, the new authorities insisted that everyone speak Polish.)
In our Tarbuth school all the pupils and teachers spoke almost exclusively Hebrew. Among the three of us sisters, at home, we spoke Hebrew and Russian. Mostly we spoke Hebrew, so that our parents wouldn't understand. We never spoke Yiddish to each other. We didn't want to be like Mama: we associated Yiddish with her complaints and bossiness and arguments. All the profits that Papa made by the sweat of his brow from his mill she extorted from him and spent on expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her closet, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-colored housecoat. Only a couple of times a year she got herself up like the Tsar's carriage to go