A Tale of Love and Darkness

IT WAS Grandma Shlomit, the distinguished lady who loved books and understood writers, who turned their home in Odessa into a literary salon-perhaps the first Hebrew literary salon ever. With her sensitivity she grasped that the sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek one another out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel one another, lay a hand on a shoulder or put an arm around a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collide, be right, take offense, apologize, make amends, avoid one another, and seek one another's company again.

She was the perfect hostess, and she received her guests unpretentiously but graciously. She offered everyone an attentive ear, a supportive shoulder, curious, admiring eyes, a sympathetic heart, homemade fish delicacies or bowls of thick, steaming stew on winter evenings, poppy-seed cakes that melted in the mouth, and rivers of scalding tea from the samovar.