A Tale of Love and Darkness

SOME THIRTY years later, in 1976, I was invited to spend a couple of months in Jerusalem and give some guest lectures at the Hebrew University. I was offered a studio room in the campus on Mount Scopus, and every morning I sat and wrote the story "Mr. Levi" in The Hill of Evil Counsel. The story takes place on Zephaniah Street at the end of the British Mandate, and so I went for a walk on Zephaniah Street and the adjoining streets, to see what had changed since then. The Children's Realm Private School had long since closed. The yards were full of junk. The fruit trees had died. The teachers, clerks, translators, and cashiers, bookbinders, domestic intellectuals, and writers of letters to the newspaper had mostly disappeared, and the district had filled up over the years with poor ultra-Orthodox Jews. Almost all our neighbors' names had disappeared from the letter boxes.

The only familiar person I saw was Mrs. Stich, the invalid mother of Menuchele Stich, the girl with the stoop that we called Nemuchele, "Shortie"; I caught sight of her in the distance, sitting dozing on a stool in an out-of-the-way yard, not far from the garbage cans. Every wall was festooned with strident handbills that waved puny fists in the air and threatened sinners with various forms of unnatural death: "The bounds of modesty have been breached," "We have suffered a great loss," "Touch not mine anointed," "Stones cry out from the wall for the evil decree," "Heavens behold the dreadful abomination the like of which has never been seen in Israel," and so forth.