us like an Assyrian king with his black beard and his inspired, dreamy expression! And his eyes, I'll remember his eyes to my dying day, Herzl had the eyes of a young poet in love, blazing, lugubrious eyes that bewitched everyone who looked into them. And his high forehead also endowed him with majestic splendor!")
On his return to Odessa, Klausner wrote, taught, and engaged in Zionist activity until, at the tender age of twenty-nine, he inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of
Hashiloah
, the main monthly of modern Hebrew culture. To be more precise, Uncle Joseph inherited from Ahad Ha'am a "periodical letter," and he turned it into a monthly immediately by inventing the Hebrew word for "monthly."
A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality. To this day I sometimes close my eyes and visualize this frail old man, with his pointed white goatee, his soft mustache, his delicate hands, his Russian glasses, shuffling along absentmindedly with his eggshell footsteps like a tiny Gulliver in a Brobdingnag peopled by a multicolored throng of mighty icebergs, tall cranes, and massive rhinoceroses, all bowing politely to him in gratitude.
***
He and his wife, Fanni Wernick (who from the day of their marriage was invariably known as "my dear Zippora," or, in the presence of guests, "Mrs. Klausner"), made their home in Rimislinaya Street, Odessa, into a kind of social club and meeting place for Zionists and literary figures.
Uncle Joseph always radiated an almost childlike cheerfulness. Even when he spoke of his sadness, his deep loneliness, his enemies, his aches and illnesses, the tragic destiny of the nonconformist, the injustices and humiliations he had had to suffer all through his life, there was always a restrained joy lurking behind his round spectacles. His movements, his bright eyes, his pink baby cheeks projected a cheery, optimistic vivaciousness that was life-affirming and almost hedonistic: "I didn't sleep a wink again all night," he would always say to his visitors, "the anxieties of our nation, fears for our future, the narrow vision of our dwarf-like leaders, weighed more heavily on me in the dark than my own considerable problems, not to mention my pain, my shortness of breath, and the terrible migraines I suffer night and day." (If you could believe what he said, he never closed his eyes for a moment between at least the early 1920s and his death in 1958.)
Between 1917 and 1919 Klausner was a lecturer, and eventually professor, at the University of Odessa, which was already changing hands with bloody fighting between Whites and Reds in the civil war that followed Lenin's revolution. In 1919 Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora and my uncle's elderly mother, my great-grandmother Rasha-Keila née Braz, set sail from Odessa to Jaffa on board the
Ruslan
, which was the Zionist
Mayflower
of the Third Aliyah, the postwar wave of immigration. By Hanukkah of that year they were living in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem.
My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, Pan-Germanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or
On his return to Odessa, Klausner wrote, taught, and engaged in Zionist activity until, at the tender age of twenty-nine, he inherited from Ahad Ha'am the editorship of
Hashiloah
, the main monthly of modern Hebrew culture. To be more precise, Uncle Joseph inherited from Ahad Ha'am a "periodical letter," and he turned it into a monthly immediately by inventing the Hebrew word for "monthly."
A man who has the ability to generate a new word and to inject it into the bloodstream of the language seems to me only a little lower than the Creator of light and darkness. If you write a book, you may be fortunate enough to be read for a while, until other, better books come along and take its place; but to produce a new word is to approach immortality. To this day I sometimes close my eyes and visualize this frail old man, with his pointed white goatee, his soft mustache, his delicate hands, his Russian glasses, shuffling along absentmindedly with his eggshell footsteps like a tiny Gulliver in a Brobdingnag peopled by a multicolored throng of mighty icebergs, tall cranes, and massive rhinoceroses, all bowing politely to him in gratitude.
***
He and his wife, Fanni Wernick (who from the day of their marriage was invariably known as "my dear Zippora," or, in the presence of guests, "Mrs. Klausner"), made their home in Rimislinaya Street, Odessa, into a kind of social club and meeting place for Zionists and literary figures.
Uncle Joseph always radiated an almost childlike cheerfulness. Even when he spoke of his sadness, his deep loneliness, his enemies, his aches and illnesses, the tragic destiny of the nonconformist, the injustices and humiliations he had had to suffer all through his life, there was always a restrained joy lurking behind his round spectacles. His movements, his bright eyes, his pink baby cheeks projected a cheery, optimistic vivaciousness that was life-affirming and almost hedonistic: "I didn't sleep a wink again all night," he would always say to his visitors, "the anxieties of our nation, fears for our future, the narrow vision of our dwarf-like leaders, weighed more heavily on me in the dark than my own considerable problems, not to mention my pain, my shortness of breath, and the terrible migraines I suffer night and day." (If you could believe what he said, he never closed his eyes for a moment between at least the early 1920s and his death in 1958.)
Between 1917 and 1919 Klausner was a lecturer, and eventually professor, at the University of Odessa, which was already changing hands with bloody fighting between Whites and Reds in the civil war that followed Lenin's revolution. In 1919 Uncle Joseph and Aunt Zippora and my uncle's elderly mother, my great-grandmother Rasha-Keila née Braz, set sail from Odessa to Jaffa on board the
Ruslan
, which was the Zionist
Mayflower
of the Third Aliyah, the postwar wave of immigration. By Hanukkah of that year they were living in the Bukharian Quarter of Jerusalem.
My grandfather Alexander and my grandmother Shlomit, with my father and his elder brother David, on the other hand, did not go to Palestine even though they were also ardent Zionists: the conditions of life there seemed too Asiatic to them, so they went to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, and arrived there only in 1933, by which time, as it turned out, anti-Semitism in Vilna had grown to the point of violence against Jewish students. My Uncle David especially was a confirmed European, at a time when, it seems, no one else in Europe was, apart from the members of my family and other Jews like them. Everyone else turns out to have been Pan-Slavic, Pan-Germanic, or simply Latvian, Bulgarian, Irish, or
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