The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman Read Online Free PDF Page B

comptroller’s office, in which capacity they spent most of their time scrutinizing the faults and failings of the new government. At work, the mother outranked the father, who reported to her, and so at home, as compensation, she served and coddled him. Yair Moses was an only child, and he learned from his parents that every politician had a little back pocket filled with secrets worth investigating. His parents insisted that after his military service he pursue higher education that would enable him to follow in their footsteps and be useful to society. At first he studied economics and accounting, but then, breaking free of his parents, he switched to philosophy and history, and ultimately got a teaching job at an elite Jerusalem high school, the same one he had attended as a youth. He had no trouble controlling his students. If a teacher maintains a cool distance and occasionally erupts in spontaneous rage, students are careful not to defy him. In those days he still lived at home to save on rent, and his parents would pester him to go out at night to get free of his dependence on them. But as an only child, accustomed to solitude, he didn’t tend to seek the company of others and often found himself wandering about Jerusalem or going to see a film alone, never thinking he might someday want to make motion pictures and certainly not believing he had the capacity to do so.
    Then, after three or four years, there appeared in his eleventh-grade class an unusual student whose creative originality and aura of self-confidence deflated the standoffish pose of the teacher. This talented young man was from a small town in the south of Israel, formerly a transit camp for Jewish immigrants from North Africa. While still in elementary school, the boy had lost his father, and was sent to a vocational school in the hope he would find employment as an auto mechanic or factory worker and support his mother. But the power of his imagination and ideas prompted his teachers to put him on an academic track, and a modest scholarship was arranged so he could attend a first-rate school. It was under the influence of this student who happened to land in his class that the teacher of history and philosophy became a film director.
    â€œA student?”
    â€œWho later became my screenwriter.”
    â€œThis fellow . . .” murmurs the mayor, perusing the bio sheet, looking for the name.
    â€œI don’t think you’ll find him there,” Moses quickly comments, “he was the writer in only my very first films.”
    â€œThe marvelous ones . . .” whispers the priest to himself.
    â€œAnd perhaps may again be in the future,” graciously suggests the mayor.
    â€œPerhaps . . .” softly repeats the actress, closely following the detailed story she knows so well and will soon be part of.
    â€œIn the future?” Moses chuckles. “But the future is so short and concentrated . . .”
    â€œIf a student turns a teacher of history and philosophy into a film director,” says de Viola, “it proves that students can revolutionize the lives of their teachers, not just the other way around.”
    Of course, the director continues, but if the connection had existed only in the classroom, it’s doubtful even so special a student would have had such an influence. The student’s stipend was small and he had to work. He found a job as an usher and janitor at a local movie theater beloved by Jerusalemites for the caliber of its films and its location in a pleasant, formerly Arab neighborhood outside the shabby city center. In those days—because Ben-Gurion, the legendary prime minister, prohibited television broadcasting in the young country lest hard-working citizens waste precious sleeping time—people went often to the movies. Moses would usually go to a second show, and he’d bump into the usher on entering and leaving. It wasn’t right to give only a