something about them. And indeed, what could I understand from a sentence like “My mother’s husband is Polish by origin, and because of that in ’58 they let us leave.” Because what did I know about it? I loved Dostoevsky and to a lesser degree also Tolstoy, they “spoke to me” and for some reason I assumed that I understood them. I liked the “Russian songs” we sang in the youth movement, until I saw that Alek detested them. AndI was fascinated by the tales my father used to tell about the “Russian lunacies” of the early days on the kibbutz. My mother would purse her lips whenever he told these stories. She was born on the kibbutz and he wasn’t, so: “Not everything has to be talked about. Some things are better left alone.”
Apart from that, there were the almost daily articles about the “Jews of Silence” and a lot of arguments about the dropouts at the transit station in Austria, and one graffiti on Gaza Street next to the Prime Minister’s house: “The Russian Jews want to go home? Let them go home.” To put it plainly, I didn’t have what’s called a background, I didn’t know a thing, not about the country Alek called his “prehistoric motherland”—France he sometimes referred to as his “historic motherland”—and not even about a mother’s husbands. I didn’t know anyone who had a “mother’s husband.”
Alek wasn’t any keener on explaining the facts than he was on revealing them, and in this he was completely different not only from Amikam but in fact from anyone else I knew. Questions like “If you were already studying in Paris, why did you actually come to Israel?” would make him close up completely.
“I thought this was a country of Jews,” “The students there, in Paris, didn’t really understand. They didn’t have any clue about what their slogans meant. It was clear from the outset that the Communists would take over the whole thing, it couldn’t have happened any other way.” Sometimes he would produce sentences like this, but I didn’t know what to make of them, even though I tried to look as if I understood. Somehow I grasped that Alek’s politics too were different from those of the crowd that hung around in his house, but nothing in my education had prepared me to actually understand what he was saying.
More than twenty years later, in ’93, when I came to him in Moscow, he began to talk to me about Russians and Russia, and he continued to do so in the six further visits I paid him. Perhaps the changed times made it easier for him to explain, and perhaps he needed the years of our common history to trust me. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that in these meetings he was the host, and therefore the guide by force of circumstance. In any event, one of the many things I didn’t understand in ’72 was how much of an Israeli I was in his eyes. And that “Israeli” meant foreign. It was enough for me that his Hebrew was almost flawless, it was enough that he had spent six months on a kibbutz and then served in the Golani Brigade, to take it for granted that he understood everything as I did. And more than that, that he understood me as I did.
Close to my final exams in Bible studies—an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest—I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.
And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a total illusion. That is to say, if I
Apart from that, there were the almost daily articles about the “Jews of Silence” and a lot of arguments about the dropouts at the transit station in Austria, and one graffiti on Gaza Street next to the Prime Minister’s house: “The Russian Jews want to go home? Let them go home.” To put it plainly, I didn’t have what’s called a background, I didn’t know a thing, not about the country Alek called his “prehistoric motherland”—France he sometimes referred to as his “historic motherland”—and not even about a mother’s husbands. I didn’t know anyone who had a “mother’s husband.”
Alek wasn’t any keener on explaining the facts than he was on revealing them, and in this he was completely different not only from Amikam but in fact from anyone else I knew. Questions like “If you were already studying in Paris, why did you actually come to Israel?” would make him close up completely.
“I thought this was a country of Jews,” “The students there, in Paris, didn’t really understand. They didn’t have any clue about what their slogans meant. It was clear from the outset that the Communists would take over the whole thing, it couldn’t have happened any other way.” Sometimes he would produce sentences like this, but I didn’t know what to make of them, even though I tried to look as if I understood. Somehow I grasped that Alek’s politics too were different from those of the crowd that hung around in his house, but nothing in my education had prepared me to actually understand what he was saying.
More than twenty years later, in ’93, when I came to him in Moscow, he began to talk to me about Russians and Russia, and he continued to do so in the six further visits I paid him. Perhaps the changed times made it easier for him to explain, and perhaps he needed the years of our common history to trust me. Perhaps he was also influenced by the fact that in these meetings he was the host, and therefore the guide by force of circumstance. In any event, one of the many things I didn’t understand in ’72 was how much of an Israeli I was in his eyes. And that “Israeli” meant foreign. It was enough for me that his Hebrew was almost flawless, it was enough that he had spent six months on a kibbutz and then served in the Golani Brigade, to take it for granted that he understood everything as I did. And more than that, that he understood me as I did.
Close to my final exams in Bible studies—an exam in which Alek showed a surprising interest—I adopted the verb “to know” as it is used in the Book of Genesis as part of my inner language: What, for example, did Adam know about his wife Eve? He didn’t ask, investigate, clarify things to enable him to “know about” her, and nor did she, for her part, “know about” him. Adam knew Eve his wife, and Eve, so I decided, knew Adam. And this primordial knowledge, whatever its meaning, seemed to me the highest level of relationship. A kind of pristine knowledge, preceding words and names. An illumination that does not need biographical data, and is always felt as a miracle.
And even today, years later, I’m not sure that this subliminal knowledge was a total illusion. That is to say, if I
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