Amos Oz - A Perfect Peace

And yet, in the last analysis, our wickedness, if you will, was almost religiously selfless. We served the cause with both the good and the bad in us, and that makes us a thousand times better than this new race of rascals that's sprung up around you, and around me, and everywhere you look. Ah, well! It's all over with now. You, if I may say so, are a fatter, more bloated old dotard than even the cartoonists make you out to be, while I'm a hunchback curmudgeon with — it shouldn't happen even to you — a bad ear in the bargain. And quite ill as well, by the way.

But this isn't the point either. Believe me, for once I'm not writing to you in order to quarrel. We've already quarreled more than enough, the two of us. On the contrary, it's high time we made up, you and I, from the far ends of our two vast deserts of loneliness. That's why I'm not going to have it out with you again over the Lavon affair and all that. Whatever I have to say on the subject has already been said, both to your face and in the press, and deep down in your heart you know only too well that you'll broil on a low flame in hell for your part in the whole charming episode. Finis.

The main thing is that we are defeated, my dear Eshkol. Defeated once and for all. My hand rebels against writing these words, but the truth takes precedence. It's two o'clock in the morning now, the rain keeps falling like a curse, and it's all over with, the whole long journey. In vain, my friend, was all our devotion, in vain all our dreams, in vain all the years we plotted with subtle cunning to save the Jewish people— na, these Yids of ours — from their own hands and those of the Gentiles. An ill wind is tearing it all up now. Pulling it up by the roots. I tell you, it's the end of everything. The cities. The towns. The kibbutzim. And worst of all, of course, the youth. The Devil has had the last laugh. We simply carried the virus of Jewish exile with us to this country, and now we see a new exile sprouting right under our nose. We've gone from the frying pan to the fire, I tell you.

Please forgive me for writing all this. There's such thunder and lightning in the window right now and the electric power, I've already told you — or have I? — has failed. By the way, writing by this lamp is very hard for me. The cigarettes I smoke choke the last breath out of me, but without them I nearly go mad. I do believe, though, that I'll drink a little glass of brandy — just a wee drop. To the Devil's health right now! Cheers!

My dear Eshkol, do you, too, tonight in Jerusalem, hear from the depths, from the belly of the storm, the wail of a freight train in the dark? Do you? Or don't you? Because if you do you'll understand better the frame of mind in which this pitiful letter is being penned. Just now, my good friend, I thought of some lines of the poet Rachel that you used to recite with great feeling and pathos: "Or was it no more than a vision I saw and you but a dream that I dreamed."

Na. It's an old, old story: the dreams, the fire in the breast, the selfless devotion — and the cunning, old age, and disillusionment too. An old story indeed. And now our time has come to die, unless, pace Gogol, we are already dead souls. Please forgive me for venting all this spleen on you. What, if I may ask, are your daughters up to these days? Ah, well! You needn't answer, and you can forget that I asked. With sons like mine, in any case, one certainly can't found a dynasty. Far from it. One has the green bile and the other the black. And a bug in his head — self-fulfillment, self-fulshmillment, doing his own thing, having his own fling, getting his whatsis together, all the possibilities he's missing in the big world out there, and the Devil knows what else. (Incidentally, I assume you do too.) And that long hair of theirs! One might think every last one of them was an artist. A whole generation of artistes ! Half-asleep all the time too, the whole lot of them. And — there's really no contradiction — mad about sports. Who kicked whose ball, who tripped whom, and all the rest of it. A groysser gesheft.

Ben-Gurion once said in one of his dithyrambic moments that here in this country we made a nation out of the human chaff of the Jewish people and turned the Worm of Jacob into the Lion of Judah. That's no more than to say that you and I were worms and chaff, and these long-haired cretins are the lions that we prayed for. How did Alterman once put it in a poem? "As wondrous as the butterfly's birth from the worm." It's enough to bring down the house, I tell you. Why, the thought of this tiny, ugly, airless, poor man's America of ours doing its own banal thing…

And you, by the way, you're to blame too. Nor can you be forgiven. If it had been up to me, I'd have clamped down with an iron fist long ago on all the yowling, all the commercials on the radio. From morning till night this country is being flooded by the most apelike, positively murderous Negro sex music, jungle drums, jazz, rock-and-rock, as if we had come to this land to live in the jungles of Africa and turn at long last into cannibals. As if none of us had ever heard of Chmelnitski and Petliura and Hitler and Bevin and Nasser. As if the last remaining Jews had gathered here from the far corners of the earth for the sole purpose of having an orgy.

Ah, well! This is no time for settling old scores. You too have wearied of tilting against an ill wind. Why, just the other day my older son came to inform me that working in the tractor shed is not for him. And that the kibbutz is not for him either. And that the state of Israel, with all due respect, is just a little corner of a big, wide world. And that he wants to see that world and have all kinds of experiences in it before settling down. In a sudden philosophical epiphany, he came to the earthshaking conclusion that life is short and that one only lives it once. Quote, unquote. And that his own life belongs to him — not to his people, not to his kibbutz, not to the movement, and not even to his parents. Na.

Good morning, Mister Whiz Kid, I said to him. Where have you been taking a crash course in philosophizing? In the sports pages? With some disc jockey? Watching the movies?

Na. He just shrugged and turned to stone.

Let me add that I'm not excusing myself either. Mea culpa. I did him and his brother a great wrong. All through their childhood I was so busy bringing about the kingdom of heaven for the party and the movement that I left their education to the kibbutz. Not, incidentally, that you have any right to talk. From what I hear, you haven't fared much better. Well, we sowed the wind and we have, as it was written, reaped the whirlwind. But the true, the one real culprit is none other than Ben-Gurion. He and his lunatic Canaanite theories about the new generation of biblical Gideons and Nimrods that we were going to raise here, a pack of wild prairie wolves instead of little rabbis. No more Marxes, Freuds, and Einsteins; no more Menuhins and Jascha Heifetzes; not even any more Gordons, Borochovs, and Berls — no, from now on nothing but sunburned, ignorant, illiterate warriors, Joabs and Abners and Ehuds.

And what came out of all this hocus-pocus? Nabal the Carmelite, I tell you, and all the other little pisspots we see on all sides. You yourself are surrounded by these gangsters — wild-eyed kulaks plucked by Ben-Gurion from behind the plow, Jewish Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon heroes, moronic rednecks, circumcised Cossacks, biblical Bedouins, Tatars of the Hebrew faith. To say nothing of all the calculating, diplomaed, foppish young scoundrels with their expensive suits and silver tie clips, all those decadent Anglo-Saxonish dandies and their flashy American elegance. What a far cry they all are from the provincial scoundrels, the mystical Jewish cutthroats, the somnambulists in love with ideas that you and I were! Na. That's just the tone that's between us. Don't you be angry with me. I'm writing from the depths, and they are seething.