Read Online When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant - Free Book Online
Authors: Linda Grant
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truth. I look at the kibbutz and I am
astonished
at what we have achieved. I compare us to the Arabs who haven’t got a future, at least not unless they accept that they must cast in their lot with us and learn from us how to live a modern life and learn our language and our ways. We set out to build a new kind of Jew and we are succeeding beyond our wildest dreams and we should be happy for that, but sometimes I’m not so sure.”
“I heard,” I said, “that a boy came from Damascus who wanted to join the kibbutz but you wouldn’t let him.”
“Join the kibbutz? No. It’s absurd. The kibbutz is for
Jews
, it’s a Jewish idea, to show what Jews can do when left to our own devices.Anyway, how could we know that we could trust him? Who knows what his real motives were? Do
you
know? I don’t.”
“Couldn’t you take him at his word and see how he got on?” I asked. Besides, the Syrian was educated, a university student, and it seemed to me that I was proud of the Jewish experiment in socialism and felt it should be showed off and even shared with anyone who cared to join and obey the rules
we
had set out.
“Listen,” Meier said. “Be realistic. At worst he’s a spy, at best a collaborator. Anyway, he’s not the problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“I don’t know, it’s thorny. Everything I see is a vindication of what we came here to do and yet I still wonder, what will become of us all? To be modern, we have to deny our past, that there
is
a past, and I don’t know if you can tamper with time, like we are doing, without consequences. Do you understand anything I’m saying, Eve?”
“Yes,” I said, but I did not. I understood nothing at all. If Meier wanted to talk, then by all means I would listen, or pretend to, but frankly all this was too philosophical for me and not just because I was in love at that moment with action. The only thing I was interested in Meier doing with his mouth was applying it to my breasts, not talking obscure nonsense.
He had Russian editions of the books he loved—Gogol and Dostoevsky—and he wanted me to read their English translations. What he needs, I thought, is the invigoration of a new generation. He’s haunted by the old nightmares. I can drive those cobwebs away.
O ne evening the people of a bad dream were made flesh. They did not seem like people to me, but visitors from Hades, the mark of Hades on their wrists. They were the nearly drowned, literally. They had been picked up from a leaky ship that had sunk at the end of the previous year and they were the only survivors. They had been held for months in the detention camp at Atlit and promised in no uncertain terms that they would be deported back to where they had come from, which was a DP camp in Poland. Somehow, a hole had appeared in the perimeter fence at night and the next day, when the soldiers looked for them, they weren’t there.
They had been smuggled to the kibbutz but the arrangement was not working. To start with, having spent many years in one camp or another, their sole aim in life was each to have his own room and his own everything else, and this in a miniature society set up to outlaw private property.
They despised the language classes. Each had learned a modicum of Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah in Lodz or Vilna or wherever and then cast it aside as he got on with the business of living. They spoke Yiddish and Polish or Russian and whatever German they had picked up in the camps. After all they had been through it seemed an outrageous demand that they should be required to learn a tongue which had been discarded as a mark of antiquity, the gabbling mutter of the old men who prayed as they were led to the gas chamber instead of keeping their wits about them and looking carefully at the situation to see what tiny advantage could be snatched from it.
Then there was the business of rules. In the camps they had survived because they were good at playing the system and
astonished
at what we have achieved. I compare us to the Arabs who haven’t got a future, at least not unless they accept that they must cast in their lot with us and learn from us how to live a modern life and learn our language and our ways. We set out to build a new kind of Jew and we are succeeding beyond our wildest dreams and we should be happy for that, but sometimes I’m not so sure.”
“I heard,” I said, “that a boy came from Damascus who wanted to join the kibbutz but you wouldn’t let him.”
“Join the kibbutz? No. It’s absurd. The kibbutz is for
Jews
, it’s a Jewish idea, to show what Jews can do when left to our own devices.Anyway, how could we know that we could trust him? Who knows what his real motives were? Do
you
know? I don’t.”
“Couldn’t you take him at his word and see how he got on?” I asked. Besides, the Syrian was educated, a university student, and it seemed to me that I was proud of the Jewish experiment in socialism and felt it should be showed off and even shared with anyone who cared to join and obey the rules
we
had set out.
“Listen,” Meier said. “Be realistic. At worst he’s a spy, at best a collaborator. Anyway, he’s not the problem.”
“What is the problem?”
“I don’t know, it’s thorny. Everything I see is a vindication of what we came here to do and yet I still wonder, what will become of us all? To be modern, we have to deny our past, that there
is
a past, and I don’t know if you can tamper with time, like we are doing, without consequences. Do you understand anything I’m saying, Eve?”
“Yes,” I said, but I did not. I understood nothing at all. If Meier wanted to talk, then by all means I would listen, or pretend to, but frankly all this was too philosophical for me and not just because I was in love at that moment with action. The only thing I was interested in Meier doing with his mouth was applying it to my breasts, not talking obscure nonsense.
He had Russian editions of the books he loved—Gogol and Dostoevsky—and he wanted me to read their English translations. What he needs, I thought, is the invigoration of a new generation. He’s haunted by the old nightmares. I can drive those cobwebs away.
O ne evening the people of a bad dream were made flesh. They did not seem like people to me, but visitors from Hades, the mark of Hades on their wrists. They were the nearly drowned, literally. They had been picked up from a leaky ship that had sunk at the end of the previous year and they were the only survivors. They had been held for months in the detention camp at Atlit and promised in no uncertain terms that they would be deported back to where they had come from, which was a DP camp in Poland. Somehow, a hole had appeared in the perimeter fence at night and the next day, when the soldiers looked for them, they weren’t there.
They had been smuggled to the kibbutz but the arrangement was not working. To start with, having spent many years in one camp or another, their sole aim in life was each to have his own room and his own everything else, and this in a miniature society set up to outlaw private property.
They despised the language classes. Each had learned a modicum of Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah in Lodz or Vilna or wherever and then cast it aside as he got on with the business of living. They spoke Yiddish and Polish or Russian and whatever German they had picked up in the camps. After all they had been through it seemed an outrageous demand that they should be required to learn a tongue which had been discarded as a mark of antiquity, the gabbling mutter of the old men who prayed as they were led to the gas chamber instead of keeping their wits about them and looking carefully at the situation to see what tiny advantage could be snatched from it.
Then there was the business of rules. In the camps they had survived because they were good at playing the system and
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