Under This Blazing Light Read Online Free PDF Page A

point of fact, how is it possible? Surely the time and place will always burst in, however hard you try to hide from them and write about desert islands or Nebuchadnezzar in Tahiti. S. Yizhar once talked about oak trees that cannot grow where there is only a thin layer of topsoil over bedrock. In a rocky wilderness, he said, only shallow-rooted plants can grow. But maybe they will rot down into humus that will permit the growth of shrubs that will rot in their turn so that one day mighty oaks can grow.
    This is the State of Israel: a refugee camp thrown together in a hurry. A place of wet paint. Remnants of foreign ways from Marrakesh, Warsaw and Bucharest and godforsaken shtetls drying in the sun among the sand in the backyards of wretched new housing developments. There are ancient remains, but only rarely, in Metulla, Ekron or Gedera, will you find a family home that has been standing for three or four generations. Who in the whole of this frantic country lives in the house he was bom in? Who lives in the house one of his grandparents was bom in? Who has inherited a house from his grandfather or his great-grandfather? Who lives within walls covered with nooks and family memories, surrounded by furniture used by his ancestors (not nouveau riche antiques from the flea market but your own family heirlooms)? Who was brought up on the same lullabies that were sung to his grandparents and great-grandparents? Even our lullabies smell of fresh paint: they were composed yesterday out of more or less Polish or Russian melodies embellished with a few biblical or Arab trills. Everything is new, everything is disposable, cardboard, nylon, plastic, everything, folk-stories, lullabies, customs, speech, terms of endearment and curses, the place, the view. I could prove, on the basis of a ‘statistical sample’, that virtually all the writers we enjoy reading grew up with a grandmother. Which of us has a real grandma? I don’t mean some weird, Yiddish-speaking old woman but a real grandmother with memories, who can be a ‘conductor’ between you and your origins.
    And so, in this blight, it is very hard. It is hard to trace the criss-crossed complex of genetic encounters generation after generation that gives each of us his makeup. The uncles and aunts were murdered in Europe or emigrated to America. The grandparents spoke another language. Everything that constitutes the depth of family and tribe - the jokes, stories, customs, lullabies, gestures, whims, beliefs, superstitions, the resemblance to a remote ancestor or distant cousin - has all been destroyed like an unpicked embroidery.
    I was born in Jerusalem in a pool of shade within (relatively) ancient stone walls, but I can picture to myself how awful Kibbutz Hulda must have been for its children in the early days: a place that had nothing but hope, declarations of intent, and limitless good will. No big trees, only saplings. No old houses, only tents, shacks, and a few whitewashed concrete structures. No old people, just enthusiastic young pioneers. ‘We have left all our yesterdays behind us, / But tomorrow is a long, long way away.’ A world that was all new fencing, new plantations, a new language, which sounded rather artificial as spoken by the settlers from the shtetl (to this day they still cry, laugh, count and quarrel in Yiddish), new buildings, new lawns, new lessons, fresh paint everywhere. There were even new lullabies and new ‘folk-tales’ synthesised by writers from the Jewish National Fund for the new Israeli children. We had folk-songs before we had a folk. Travelling instructors from the competent agencies taught the people how to sing the folk-songs and dance the folk-dances properly.
    Yes, I know, we had no choice. Backs to the wall. ‘To conquer the mountain or die.’ A new land and a new chapter. I know all that. I’m just trying to explain, perhaps to apologise, and tell you why it is hard to make a story with depth here, one which, like any good