Mihail Sebastian - For Two Thousand Years

There are some very strange aspects to our family tree. On father’s side, there is at least a century of Romanian life, in town and country, living alongside Romanian neighbours, working with them, mingling with them. For how many tens of years we were here before, or how many hundreds, living as an isolated community, I do not know. But my great-grandfather’s name appears clearly in the census of 1828. Certainly, we cannot speak of a process of assimilation, but I sense a certain resilience in this branch of my family, which must have something to do with the Danube since four consecutive generations have grown up beside it. That great-grandfather of 1828 — Mendel of Gropeni, as he was called — spoke and wrote Romanian, wore boots and a traditional Romanian waistcoat. As for my grandfather, I can still remember his strange look of a boatman when he returned in the evening from the docks. He wore heavy metal-studded boots, his hands were calloused, and he would be white from head to toe from the sacks of wheat and corn which he breathed his whole life, fourteen hours a day, from dawn to dusk. There was something rough and ready about him: something of a boatman, a cart-driver, a day-labourer. On the evenings of holy festivals he also read from some immense Hebrew books, but didn’t read with the same trembling passion I sensed in the other grandfather, Mother’s father. One was an intellectual, the other not, though he too was — they say — well read.

He lived in the fresh air, exposed to the wind, his feet upon rock and earth, gazing at a horizon saturated by pools of water, raising his voice above the rushing river, the sirens of the boats, the rattling of the hoists. A man of the Danube.

Mother’s family, on the other hand, didn’t leave the ghetto until much later. From Bukovina and northern Moldova, they were all people who lived indoors, in lamplight, over books. They have always lived close to the synagogue. From there perhaps they get their black eyes, their long thin hands, the pallor of their cheeks. Their delicate, easily disturbed constitutions are sustained more by their nerves than by bodily strength.

Bad news or a sleepless night or a tense wait devastates them immediately: black circles around the eyes, pale lips, hot cheeks. The toughness of Father’s family seems like coarseness alongside this peculiar glasshouse sensitivity. This explains perhaps the deaf incomprehension that has always divided them, the reckless from the delicate. What’s vigour to one side is boorishness to the other. One side’s sensitivity is the other’s fussiness.

The divide between the Danube and the ghetto.

*

I keep thinking about that great-grandfather of 1828. He must have been born in the last decades of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, Napoleon … Something about his existence strikes me as fabulous and I’ve tried, without much success, to discover details from some elderly aunts who knew him in his final years.

He was born here and lived here all his life. A lifetime working his fingers to the bone, almost an entire century.

One fine day — he was well past ninety — he gathered his things, convoked his children, shared out among them what there was to share, and kept for himself a few gold coins, a few books and maps, which he packed into a knapsack. He said he was leaving. Where to? To Eretz Israel! Home. With whom? Alone.

The idea of a 100-year-old man deciding to do such a thing seems so wild to me that I asked Grandmother a thousand questions to find out exactly what was at the root of this flight. The truth is that he wasn’t running away. It was absolutely simple. The old man just woke up one morning with the idea — and that was it.

They implored him, tried to restrain him forcibly, struggled to make him at least accept an escort to Jaffa — one of his sons would have taken him there and found him a home — all in vain. He would not be swayed. He gave them all he had, put the little he retained on his back and went down to the docks, followed, like in a scene from the Bible, by his sons and daughters and grandchildren, all bewailing him, he alone calm, collected and at peace.

Wintry old man. He died in Jerusalem, a few months after arriving. Grandmother claims he appeared to her in a dream that night, in the white shroud of the dead, saying: ‘Behold, I have died. You will bear a son and you will give him my name.’

That was in 1876. With that information, perhaps it would not be hard for us to find his gravestone someday, if he managed to be buried with one.

It’s much more likely he lies in an unmarked grave, among other unmarked graves.

Nobody in the family has a photograph of the old man. He refused to partake of such foolishness. A short time before, a German had arrived in town with a complicated machine and installed himself on the corner of the main street. On his way to the docks, says Grandmother, the day he departed, they all stopped there and begged the old man to leave them that small reminder: a photograph. He shook his head, annoyed. No.

*

Had I the time, it would be revealing to trace my family’s migrations on a map. It seems very few of them have moved away.

Though members of my family can be wild, crazy and unstable as individuals, as a group their spirit is slower, more sedentary and tenacious.

Some broke away, left, became lost. The roots remained here, though, their traditions undisturbed, in enduring unity against those who ran off.

I find it significant that our people form two compact groups — my father’s side of the family here, in the bend of the Danube, and my mother’s family up in northern Bukovina. There have been few migrations and even those have been within a very small radius. In any case, the family’s centre of gravity remains constant in each person’s consciousness, and it only requires a family event — a death, a birth, or some trouble — for everybody to come together, either in happiness or alarm, and fall back into line.

All of this makes the escapees all the harder to explain, however few and far between they’ve been.

I’ve heard speak of an uncle who as a youth ran off to Vienna in midwinter by sled, in the last century, after a woman. A vague love story and the only one, I think, in a family of people who are sensual but not passionate in such matters. I’ve also heard of a brother of Mother’s who left for America in 1900. Somewhere in an old album is a photograph of him from that time: his young, almost adolescent face, the bold pioneer’s forehead and, overlying everything, some kind of shadow, or light, foreboding the defeats that were to come.

He left with a few coins in his pocket and a head full of crazy ideas. ‘A socialist,’ whispered the gossips. A ‘crazy kid’ who wouldn’t listen, growled Grandfather, who locked the boy out of the house at night when he loitered too late in town.

It seems that during those years many small groups of people set out from all around the country for Alaska and California, some looking for gold, others chasing mirages. Shortly before the war, the American legation sent a document with the news that he had died in a small town in Texas where he had somehow become a plantation worker.

*

I gave Grandma the illustrated Bible bought on the train from Abraham Sulitzer, and now she’s reading aloud to me and to Grandmother, who didn’t get a school education.

It’s a fairly ordinary Yiddish translation, I think; a popular edition, from its appearance, on poor paper, with cheap woodcuts. Grandma reads with a certain air of superiority. For her, Grandmother and I are both illiterate, since all my French and German books don’t compensate for my ignorance of her Bible.

We began properly, in the beginning, with ‘Let there be light’. I listen to Grandma and the story becomes new to me, its appeal diaristic rather than biblical. Grandma reads avidly, visibly curious, turning the pages nervously and immersed in the delivery, as if it were about people she knew, neighbours or close relatives.