I was surrounded by people who were as hungry and packed with energy as I was, and our hunger went on raging on the weekends and holidays too, which we were supposed to spend at home. We went on hikes, camped out and attended courses, and I did not refuse a single invitation: I spent Passover with a girlfriend on a kibbutz, and on Sukkoth I went to harvest olives at an Arab village. Every month or two I fell in love with someone else, a boy or girl whose uniqueness was always revealed to me in a flash. Amos, at the piano, singing songs by Georges Brassens. How could I have overlooked him before? Betty, cradling the face of a tiny boy who had cut his chin in the yard of the youth club in Katamon. Dror, declaiming Mark Anthony’s speech in a British accent. Amichai, telling jokes all the way up the stiff climb to Massada without a single pant.
I was full of falling-in-love, and the love, like a moving spotlight, fell unexpectedly on one new object after another.
In order to visit my sister and my parents I had to walk for forty minutes on foot or ride on two buses for about half an hour. But for months at a stretch I didn’t have the time. I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t interested.
But nevertheless, from my rare visits I remember the talk that preceded the arrival of the serpent from America: Your uncle, girls, the professor, the historian and commentator Aharon Gotthilf. Aaron he calls himself today.
“Uncle Aaron,” my mother would say, taking care to flatten the “a” and drawl the “r” so that it would sound American. Uncle Aaron would arrive in December, when it was Christmas vacation over there. He intended to spend three weeks with us, but it was possible, very possible, that if certain things worked out as he hoped, he would stay longer.
Aaron was coming to attend his son’s wedding in Jerusalem. It turns out — such a surprise, we had no idea — that he has a grown son, a son from an early marriage. Suddenly, now Uncle Aaron tells your father that he was once married to some Czech, a woman with serious mental problems. He met her when he was living in Paris. A sad story, very sad. Because the son grew up without him, and the mother, who didn’t have a clue, sent him to a Chabad school, and what can you expect when you send a child to Chabad? The boy grew up ultra-Orthodox, came to Israel, didn’t serve in the army, landed up in a black-coat yeshiva. Now they’ve arranged a match for him, and even though to this day he never had much contact with his father, he invited Aaron to the wedding out of honor for his father. That’s one good thing that has to be said for those people, I have to admit: Honor thy father and thy mother. Aaron has another son who lives in New Mexico, about him we actually knew, we even told you once, his mother is a professor of archeology, she studies the Indians, and this son, who is your second cousin, treats his father very differently. Aaron told us that he isn’t even prepared to come and visit him, even though he offered the mother to pay for the tickets.
Aaron came in December but they already started talking about him in the summer, in the wake of a surprise letter and a long, expensive phone call in which he renewed the connection with my father, his dear cousin. It occurs to me now that my parents described him in way that would have fitted nicely into one of Alice’s idiotic columns: I even remember my father defining him as “a classic Jewish intellectual” and a “colorful character on the personal level.”
I don’t remember him being spoken of before, but once the letter arrived, the talk began to bubble and the anecdotes about “Erwin, to me he’ll always be Erwin”—overflowed to the paying guests as well. All my parents’ acquaintances were required to bask in the glow of our uncle’s glamour, whose glory could be assumed to reflect on his more modest relatives too.
My grandmother Sarah Gotthilf and her sister-in-law Hannah escaped from Vienna in November 1938, carrying in their arms sons who were intended to be the first but turned out to be the last. My grandfather was murdered in Dachau and his brother in Nisko, but we won’t go into that here. The women crossed from Switzerland to Italy, where they spent six months in Genoa — judging by the way my father told the story it sounded as if they had set out on a tour of classical Europe — and then Sarah, who had contacts with the Zionists, obtained a certificate and sailed with her baby for Palestine, while the beautiful Hannah and her son Erwin — that’s what they called him then — made their way to England.
Equipped with enthusiastic recommendations — her dissertation on Feuerbach came out in book form and Freud himself sent his compliments — Hannah Gotthilf found her way to the most interesting circles of the period, and in ’47, two years after the end of the war, she married a well-known economist from Oxford who was also an aristocrat boasting the title of Sir.
As you may imagine, the son of Lady Hannah received the best possible education — the sciences, the arts, classical languages. His Hebrew was classical too, and at the age of twenty-one Erwin, who had in the meantime become Aaron, was already studying for a doctoral degree at the Sorbonne in Paris.
His reputation preceded him, wherever he went he stood out as an original thinker, and since the academic world in France before the students’ revolution seemed fossilized to him, he didn’t wait to complete his doctorate but took advantage of the first opportunity that presented itself to emigrate to America. There are mean-spirited dwarves everywhere. Pettiness and envy too are universal, but Aaron in his innocence believed that he would enjoy more intellectual freedom in America than in Europe.
The main subject of his studies was modern totalitarianism, and he shocked many people when he chose to focus on the writings of the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis, claimed Aaron, drew a dark, prophetic and amazingly accurate picture of modern tyranny.
The issues that engaged Aaron were always broad, too broad for the Procrustean bed of academia, and despite the high esteem in which he was held, the trailblazer also acquired a number of enemies. For three or four years it seemed to him that he had found himself a home in the University of Columbia, but for a man like Aaron every home is only a port from which to sail onward. In the wake of all kinds of slander that arose, he transferred to the University of New Orleans, and from there this Jew went on wandering to other stations and other ports.
Unlike those of his colleagues who secluded themselves in ivory towers, Aaron turned from the outset to the non-academic public as well. His articles were published in dozens of newspapers, and he made frequent appearances on television as well as on the radio. But Aaron was not the kind of sycophant who was only seeking popularity, and the things he wrote and said gave rise to more than a little opposition. The hippies considered him one of theirs, until he poured scorn on them in a stinging essay. A highly regarded Jewish journal flaunted him, until he insisted on publishing a paper on “Jewish murderers in the service of Stalin.” The New York left, which in the past had attempted to embrace him, has not forgiven him to this day for a brilliant article analyzing their psychology. That’s Aaron. A complex personality. Not an easy person, clearly. Not an easy man, but a deep one. Possessing a profundity you don’t often see today.
Uncle Aaron’s history was not always recounted from the beginning, sometimes my father expounded on a single chapter: Genoa, England, the title of Sir, the interesting circles of the period, the Sorbonne University in Paris, the Marquis de Sade, stations and ports. But I remember well how every chapter of the story concluded with the same words: deep, profound, complex.