He has supplied a short
extract from his novel The Secret History of Modernism (Vintage 2001) which has parallel
concerns, Jewish then Palestinian, about treasured books which go missing:
‘Let
me tell you a story,’ he said. ‘I read
it somewhere - in something in there.’
He waved towards a low table in his flat that was littered with books,
magazines and overseas papers.
It was about an elderly Tel Aviv Jew
who had been evicted in 1938 from his apartment in Vienna. He had managed to get out and away to
Palestine, but all his books had been left behind, and that was the loss which
troubled him most. It became the symbol,
or the focus, of all the bad things that had happened to him. Years later, when the war was over, he
revisited Vienna with his daughter. They
stood in the courtyard looking up at where he had once lived. A woman, suspicious and unfriendly, asked
what they wanted. He explained that he’d
once lived there, and had left in a hurry.
‘In 1938’, he said, expecting she would know what that meant. All his books had been left behind. The woman, even more unfriendly, said there
had been no books when she occupied the apartment after the war. That was all.
He went back to Israel.
More years passed. The daughter lived with her husband in Jaffa
in an apartment once occupied by Arabs, some of whom had been driven out by the
1948 Arab-Israeli War. One day she found
two Arab women, mother and daughter, standing in the courtyard looking up at
the windows of her apartment. She went
and spoke to them. The mother had grown
up there. The Jewish woman invited them
in. They went through, looking at all
the rooms, saying nothing, until suddenly the older woman asked, ‘Where are my
father’s books?’
No comments:
Post a Comment