Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online Page B

Whitechapel, for all its filth, was holy ground at that moment, as his feet trod it...’
    It is worth recalling that the ‘great brother’ described here was at that time aged twenty-five or twenty-six.
    The writer J. L. Arieli-Orloff says: ‘As he loved children ... so he hated, in life and literature, everything that seemed at all posed or false. And that gloomy man certainly knew how to hate. To conceal any falsehood from his penetrating eye was impossible. Literary lies or public malice enraged him ... Upon everything which he thought or wrote was imprinted the stamp of the weighty responsibility of an ancient priest, the guardian of the sacred flame ...’
    Decades after the murder of this ‘ancient priest’, the hero of Camus’s The Plague asked how one can be a saint in a world with no God. Reliable witnesses like Beilin and Arieli, and even a clever sardonic observer like Agnon, would reply quite seriously: Brenner was a saintly man in his world without God.
    I may be over-cautious, but I would not call Brenner a priest or a saint. Brenner himself, if these friends of his had dared to call him ‘priest’ or ‘saint’ to his face, would certainly have responded with loud, raucous laughter, what he called ‘vulgar laughter’, or he would have lost his temper and sworn in Yiddish or even in Russian. (Brenner made frequent use of inverted commas.) Therefore I should prefer to be cautious, and say: ‘How can one be a saint in a world with no God?’ No. Much less than that. How can one not be a beast in a world with no God? And how can one remain more or less sane in a world with no God? And can one find some sort of inner peace, or repose? These questions tormented Brenner’s heroes despite all the inverted commas, and they tormented Brenner himself like a malignant growth.
    (Yes, a malignant growth. We have Brenner’s own admission that he was a ‘sick writer’. He suffered, in his own words, from ‘psychopathic anger’. At this point every healthy person among you is entitled to express a faint disgust or to smile to himself with satisfaction because he is healthy, whereas this great and famous author, after whom we have named streets and buildings and a kibbutz and a literary prize, was not healthy, and indeed was always jealous of healthy people, except, perhaps, in his moments of‘psychopathic anger’, when he despised the healthy and their good health.)
    But it was this Brenner, broken, twisted, sick, and so on, who somehow managed to discover eventually a secret passage or door which led straight from that mouldy cellar up to the attic, if not higher, without going through the drawing-room. He literally climbed from the cellar, avoiding the apartments of the healthy and well-fed, to the highest attainable spheres. From sickness to secret sweetness. From despair to the verge of repose. From sin to the edge of saintliness. If only we could attain to that secret sweetness, I say to you, if only we could reach that verge of repose. Just as, in Breakdown and Bereavement, Yehezkel Hefetz sticks out ‘a warm tongue in the face of cold eternity’: if only we could do the same!
    And now I have promised to say something about myself and my stories, which have been honoured today with the Brenner Prize for Literature. I can best introduce this subject with a famous sentence from Brenner’s ‘From Here and There’: ‘All the bent and broken men in the world came to Palestine.’
    Of course, the clever, healthy ones went to America, while those bent and broken people are, more or less, our parents. And even if among those bent and broken men there are some specimens of mighty heroes, founding fathers hewn of stone with adamantine strength, on closer inspection it is plain that even in those demigods, those heroes of the monumental age, there was something broken and bent. It is not only so in the older literature, but even in the latest Hebrew writing those bent and broken men that we know so well