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PARTISAN REVIEW
feels sorry for the religious neighbors , for the three New Zealand sol–
diers, who knows if or when they will ever see their distant home
again, for the Arabs who don't think rationally. Anyway, by the time
Aunt Natalia has finished washing up and Daddy has finished dry–
ing the dishes the blue light will have vanished and the winter clouds
will have appeared again . By three o'clock the rain will be pouring
down and it will go on raining all through the evening and all night
long almost without a break. The cardboard boat will have to be de–
stroyed and the mast snapped in half. There is no archipelago.
When the Hebrew state is finally set up it will not be he who will
conquer the Golden Isles far away in the south of the globe and pre–
sent them to it. He will grow up and be thus and thus. Jotapata and
Masada, captured Beitar, their ruins will continue to be rainswept
each winter. Aunt Natalia will die of a malignant tumor in her
womb and she will leave him in her will half an acre of land on the
edge of the settlement of Pardes Hannah, a wickerwork chair, a curi–
ous old china dinner service, a brown glass-fronted cabinet full of
yellowing Russian novels and a pretty lambskin rug which lies next
to his bed to this day. Here the author is mistaken. There is no evi–
dence for this. That might have been interpreted differently. Such
are the pencil notes which Father has left behind him in the margins
of the
History of theJews in Poland.
Their love, their hatred, their envy
is now perished, but truly the light is still sweet and a pleasant thing
it is for the eyes to behold the sun . And so sometimes towards eve–
ning he will stand alone at the window and watch an old cat drows–
ing on the wall on a winter's day while a foolish bird perched on the
same wall , apparently out of its mind, repeats interminably a sen–
tence of four syllables . That is the way things are.
