The locust flowers are all blooming, and the leaflet plants always bloom late. Walking on North Renmin Road at night, the lights are dim and thin, and the nose is full of sweet smell. I can't help but think of when I was a child, A few locusts were planted on the north side of my grandmother's yard, and in late spring, Grandpa would use bamboo poles to knock down a few strings and give us children to eat. The locust flower is small and flourishing, and even if it is picked by bees, it still cannot hide its sweetness. If you eat it with brown rice noodles and steaming, the taste buds will be soothed by the roughness of the corn and the creaminess of the flowers. Chateaubriand said that every man carries with him a world, a world of everything he has seen and loved, and that even though he seems to be traveling and living in a different world, he keeps returning to the world he carries with him. He makes sense. If it makes sense, it is probably the so-called truth. In The Story of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz is dragged by this truth about the hidden world, and lets us accompany him on his walk in the world he once loved.
As Amos Oz says in the foreword, it's a story about the family. There are many novels about the family, and it is inevitable to fall into the delicate and lustrous, poetic daily life, but if the protagonist is Jewish and he happens to be born during the Second World War, then his story about the family is impossible without being involved with war and religion. How soft and sweet was It when Amos Oz wrote this novel at the age of sixty-three, writing about his loved ones and memories that have been overwhelmed by time?
To understand this book, we must first understand the history of Israel's founding. In 1922, the League of Nations adopted the British Mandate for Palestine, which provided for the establishment of a "Jewish National House" in Palestine. Subsequently, Jews from all over the world emigrated to Palestine in large numbers. The British issued a white paper in 1939 that limited the number of Jews to emigrate and restricted Jews from purchasing land. The white paper was seen by many Jews and Zionists as a betrayal of the Jews and a violation of the Balfour Declaration. The Arabs did not settle down, and they wanted a complete halt to Jewish immigration. In 1933, the Nazis came to power in Germany, setting off the fifth wave of Jewish returns, and over the next fifteen years, more than 200,000 Jews came to Palestine through various channels. On May 14, 1948, on the eve of the end of the British Mandate, the State of Israel was officially proclaimed, on the national day of Israel. For the Jews, who have fled for thousands of years from many disasters, this newly established kingdom may be the safest paradise on earth.
The Tale of Love and Darkness is an autobiography of Oz's early life, which seems to be a gloomy look back on family life, inevitably with some kind of small but hard core, but it is not just a story about family, because there is a ubiquitous ghost between the words, I think its name is sad, and it must be added a neutral adjective: clarity. Oz has no intention of finding Israel's destiny through the family; instead, he uses an extraordinary patience to deconstruct how Israel's fate changes, infiltrates, and even shapes the fate of a family—the weak family always makes the most humble footnote to the fate of the nation and the nation in the form of tragedy, or, in the history of Honghao, the fate of the individual and the individual innately has a certain strong tragic temperament.
In "A Tale of Love and Darkness", the lives of fathers and mothers, grandparents, maternal grandfathers and grandmothers, and uncles are interspersed with various historical fragments and historical shadows. To my slight surprise, Oz wrote these histories without the anger, resentment, or condemnation that I imagined, but rather calmly and intermittently told family stories, with a low voice, a Proustian ornate lightness in his language, and occasionally jumping out of good-natured mockery and self-deprecation. When I first read this book eight years ago, my mother's death had left me in endless grief, and for a long time I had a deep suspicion and anger about my mother's death. Re-reading this book eight years later, I still can't help but sob for my mother's death, as if it was not Oz's relatives who had passed away, but my relatives. In the novel, Oz describes his mother's feelings after committing suicide:
I have not the slightest pity. Didn't want her at all. I was not sad that my mother had died—I was so angry that there was no place in my heart that I could hold any other feelings. For example, a few weeks after her death, I noticed that her checkered apron was still hanging from the hook behind the kitchen door, and I was furious, as if I had sprinkled salt on the wound. Mom's toiletries on the green shelves in the bathroom, her powder box, and the brush on her head hurt me as if they were left there to fool me. The books she'd read, her shoes that no one was wearing, every time I opened Mom's closet, Mom's scent would constantly drift to my face. It all made me feel like her pullover, somehow slipping into my pile of pullovers, grinning at me with schadenfreude.
Oz's mother left him like this, without a word of farewell, without a hug, and his childhood, surrounded every day by the fairy tales told by his mother, loved him so much (and warned him before her death: love is rather vulgar and even clumsy compared to friendship) that she never left him alone in the park or grocery store. And now, all this came to an abrupt end, and there was not even a note left under the vase. Oz also hated her for her father, just like a woman who eloped, except that it was death who abducted her mother. So why would the mother choose such a cruel way to say goodbye? Let's go back in her history: she spent her teenage years in Poland, then went to the Faculty of Literature at the University of Prague, where she knew all five Chinese. Later, he traveled with his family to Jerusalem, where he married his father and had children. In Poland, the mother of a teenage girl once explained the suicide of a governor: It is much easier to live in mistake than in darkness. As an anarchist, she will remain silent about anything, even when hurt, she will only escape from herself, but there is a very hard and shafty part of her personality: when she was fifteen years old, she used to shout at her beloved sister, because she felt that the painting that had been hanging in the house was whitewashing reality: the shepherd girl in the painting should not wear aya silk satin, but should wear a torn shirt, the shepherd girl should not have the face of an angel, and their face should be frightened by the cold and hunger. And lice and fleas grew in her hair; in Jerusalem, when my mother and grandmother quarreled, she once slapped her cheek in front of Oz, tore her hair, grabbed a hanger and beat her head and back until she could not cry.
In Oz's view, the education of her mother in her youth, the school curriculum, or some kind of romantic germ that invaded her mother's heart, some kind of strong Polish-Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mitskevich, something between "The Troubles of Young Werther" and Lord Byron, something in the vague zone between the sublime, the pain, the dream and the loneliness, the various and elusive "longings and longings" that deceived her for most of her life. Tempts her to eventually succumb to death. In the novel, Oz has always seemed calm but painfully asked his mother the reason for suicide, and in the five-hundred-page novel, he would occasionally jump out of the narrative and guess his mother's motives, such as when he said: Next to the Lomber family, surrounded by zinc buckets, pickled cucumbers, and oleanders that were gradually dying in a rusty olive bucket, my mother began to wither all day long by cabbage, laundry, the smell of boiled fish, and urine. She may be able to grit her teeth and endure hardship, loss, poverty, or the cruelty of married life, but I think she can't stand vulgarity.
Oz then asked again, as if it were only in this inquiry that the shadow of his mother's death would clear the clouds, and that his growth, and what he would do in the future, would make sense. He suspected that the cause of his mother's suicide was still infected by some kind of romantic poisonous shell related to the death muse. This is a characteristic of a melancholic Slavic middle class. A few years after his mother's death, he met again in the works of Chekov, Turgenev, Gernissin, and even lahair. It made the mother conceive of death as some kind of exciting and protective lover, the final artist lover, and finally the one who could heal her lonely heart. Perhaps for the rest of his life, Oz would curse this old serial killer who slaughtered broken souls. The mother may have rested in death, and the living have to live in pain and remembrance.
The death of his mother may be related to all of Oz's suspicions above, or it may not have anything to do with it. The unparalleled suffering of the Jewish people in history has doomed all novels involving Jews to be filled with an unavoidable sense of instability and wandering. For postwar Jewish writers, the Holocaust during World War II became not only an ethnic disaster for Jews, but also a collective memory, but also a distinct and eternal theme in Jewish literature. Throughout Jewish literature, Jewish writers of different eras have expressed and reflected on the genocide to varying degrees in their work, from the classic writer Isaac Singer to the 70s writer Jonathan Safran Formo. But in A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz doesn't use more brushstrokes to profile massacres and metaphysically interrogate them (massacres were so common in those days). In the Solingi Forest, where people play hide-and-seek, hold bonfires, and are filled with barbecues and singing evenings, twenty-five thousand Jews were shot dead by the Germans, including believers, peddlers, intellectuals, artists, all the classmates of Oz's mother, and about four thousand infants and toddlers. Oz so calmly describes his young companion, "He went to Paris to study and was then killed"). Compared with other Jewish writers, he seems to prefer to explore the spiritual wandering and suffering of Jewish intellectuals before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. In Oz's family, no one talks about the humiliation of being unrequited in love with Europe; no one talks about disillusionment with a new country; no one talks about the feelings of family members; no one talks about sex, memory, and pain. They only talked at home about how they looked at the Balkan wars, or the situation in Jerusalem, and Shakespeare Homer, Marx and Schopenhauer, or broken doorknobs, washing machines, and towels. The inner, hurt, and secret emotions of family members are never the talk of the word, or the difficult to talk about.
In the eyes of Jewish intellectuals, Europe is undoubtedly a magic mountain. In "I Am a Stone in Jerusalem", Varro once summed up Europe in the eyes of the Jews: "They longed for Europe, were fascinated by Europe, learned the language of Europeans, imitated the lives of Europeans, but were expelled and slaughtered by Europe, and for thousands of years, from the Babylonian Empire, Rome, Arabia, the Crusaders, the Ottoman Turkey, all the way to Britain and Germany, the persecution never stopped." "In the face of such a bloody history, it is impossible not to feel pain among Israeli intellectuals, including Oz's father and mother. My father, who could read sixteen languages and speak eleven languages, and my mother, who could speak five or six languages, taught only Oz Hebrew. The reason for this is the fear that Oz knows any European language, that he will be tempted by Europe to go to Europe once he becomes an adult, and then be killed there. In their eyes, Europe is the "home," the "Promised Land" in both a geographical and psychological sense. But it was in this "Promised Land" that the Jews were constantly slaughtered and chased. The Jewish writer Nathan England once borrowed the protagonist in his short story "How We Avenged the Blooms" and said: "After being chased for two thousand years, we do not have any hunter's instinct in us." Therefore, in the face of the hunters, the Jews had to flee and hide. In this sense, "Europe" became, or more desperate than, the enemy. It is no longer a noun, a system of knowledge, but a real capital of purgatory. This uneasiness and fear is not only reflected in the Jewish intellectuals, but also in the blood of ordinary people, and in the novel, Oz uses an exaggerated to absurd brushwork to describe his grandmother's sensitive panic about bacteria, in fact, it is nothing more than a negative confirmation of the neuroticism of a people who have no place to live after persecution. But what better way than fatalistic waiting? Oz said: "If this hysterical Jewish bond is very strong, how can I live without it?" How can I give up this obsession with collective resonance and tribal ties? If I quit this addiction, what will I have left? ”。 What an admirable gentleman.
Thoreau said: The most beautiful character in our nature, like the frost on the fruit, can only be preserved with light hands and feet, but people have not been able to get along so gently with each other. Isn't this true between people, between peoples, between races and races, and between religions and religions? I think that in addition to the greedy nature of human beings, it stems from the ultimate desire for power and the primitive animal nature that has never evolved in human beings. Fortunately, however, there will always be frost on those fruits, and it is also the long-cherished wish of most people to live in gentle harmony with each other. For example, now, at 8:50 p.m., I am writing this article in pain by smelling the aroma of locust flowers in the spring breeze, and the friend who has made dinner with me is still faithfully waiting for me to eat roast leg of lamb in film school—how can this not make me have a purer luxury for human virtue?
About the Author
Zhang Chu, born in 1974, a native of Tangshan, is a civil servant. "People's Literature", "Harvest", "October", "Contemporary" have published novels. He has published short and medium story collections "Cherry Tales", "Seven Peacock Feathers", "How the Night Is Dark", "Miss Wild Elephant", "In the Clouds", and the essay collection "Secretly Calling Your Name". The short story "Good Night" won the 6th Lu Xun Literature Award.