RACHEL EYTAN
589
their fathers and their fathers' fathers once hid Spinoza and Karl
Marx between the folio leaves of the Talmud.
Once I learned the suitcase by heart, I found a strange transfor–
mation overtaking me. Tolstoy, Jack London and Maupassant be–
gan to repel me. After the mustangs of the Texas prairie, who had
the patience for Rosinante's moods? Who could wait for page two
hundred to reap what was sown on page two?
Since I had long since sworn a secret vow to the literary life , the
change frightened me. I dimly perceived myself undergoing some
sort of metamorphosis, of moral de-evolution. I took an oath of
penitence , that I might sit once again in the chambers of the gods. It
was not an easy atonement. I may have grasped back then, in some
unformed fashion, that the ecology ofliterature must be guarded just
as jealously as the greenery of the earth. Plastic trees cannot hold
back the desert.
As for Gabriel himself, he was eventually arrested by the
British , as he had foretold in his diary, and exiled to a prison camp
in Eritrea along with a young journalist who translated dime novels
for a living. Gabriel ended up as a bureaucrat with the Likud health
plan, and the journalist, the last I heard, was writing speeches for a
Likud politician.
I finally ran away from Aunt Hasya's institution after they
caught me reading in her son's room . As far as I was concerned, hell
was the place where they wouldn't let you read.
• • •
My grandfather on my mother's side was the Unknown
Yiddish Author.
He wrote, but he was unread except by me. All the children of
his imagination who never entered the covenant of print were left for
me to read, in what the Talmud delicately calls the chamber of
honor. Torn up drafts of his manuscripts were hung on a hook by
the toilet in those days of paper shortages. A new chapter every day.
His first drafts were like Mozart's, almost uncorrected.
It
was during the austerity time of the World War. Everything
went to the war effort. Most civilians used newspaper for their pri–
vate needs, despite the toxic lead content in the newsprint. When
millions of soldiers were eating lead at the front, who cared about a
little lead poisoning from the rear? But in my grandfather's house we
used his first draft manuscripts to good effect.
He used to write open-ended trilogies (Literally, "Chapter
