588
PARTISAN REVIEW
sandy beaches or under the orange blossoms.
It
also had poems,
lyrics and ballads full of barricades and secret bands, blood, tommy
guns and vengeance.
During my three days' detention I had food - bread and
goat's-milk yogurt - snuck in by Suzy, who was wracked with guilt.
She had no idea how much I loved my prison.
On Friday evening, when Gabriel arrived, I mustered my
courage. I showed him, out of sight of the others, a few of the poems
I'd written during my detention, of which he knew nothing. They
were lyrics and ballads. One of them began, "Leaves have fallen
from the tree of my life, ah me!" Gabriel whisked me to his room
and, locking the door behind him, produced from between the school
books the diary I knew so well. He showed me a poem written a few
months earlier: "Leaves have sprung free from the oak of my life,
alas!"
I let myself steal a peek at his wonderful moustache, at the hair
on his chest, at the tear in his eye, and forgot for a moment the stub–
ble just beginning to sprout around my head wound.
"You and I are soul mates, little girl," he said. and then: "But
the rest is not for you, not yet." And he put the diary back among the
texts. He showed me how to crawl in through the window-which I
already knew - so I could write my poetry undisturbed.
I had another secret stash in Gabriel's room: a suitcase full of
Young People's Enemy Number One, the cheap novel. Farewell,
David Copperfield,
au revoir
Anna Karenina, and hello cowboy,
gangster, good-time girl! From that point on, my reading fever was
virulent. I read on a fixed schedule: one mystery, one Western, one
romance. When I finished the suitcase, I read it through again. And
again. The ancient rabbis of blessed memory wrote, "A small organ
doth man possess; that for which it hungers, sates it - yet that which
sates it, only makes it hunger more." So it is with reading.
My reading introduced me to many new and weighty concepts,
things like the Colt Forty-five, Wall Street, the mustang pony, the
French Riviera, roulette and baccarat, caviar and champagne, the
knock-out, the ten-carat diamond, and endless details of life in
Budapest (since the editor of the series, Avigdor Ha-Meiri, came
from Hungary).
It
was thus I learned that the spoken sentence must
never exceed three words: "Shut your kisser!" - "Keep the change!"–
"Stick 'em up!" Only weaklings think at length. The dime novel was
the major literary industry in British Mandate Palestine of the
1940s. School children read then under their teacher's noses, just as
