Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

(it once sheltered my father’s substantial Cuban cigars) with an ornamental lid, the lid to serve as a warning to trespassers. But the growing length of my memoir can no longer be contained in so shallow a receptacle, and in any event I no longer fear a recurrence of vandalism: the vandal is dead. (Sans gravestone, it pleases me to say. Through Hedda I learn that the nonagenarian’s younger brother, himself a fading octogenarian, has disposed of the ashes in some obscure upstate waterway.) Hence I am free now to allow these increasing pages to build as they will, open to sight and secured by a cherished paperweight: my grandfather’s antiquated brass notary seal. The vacant box will henceforth have another use. I intend to sequester therein a certain portion of this manuscript, i.e., what I can only describe as my attempt to transcribe the tenor of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s utterances. Not, let it be understood, that they have faded over the last seven or more decades. On the contrary: they remain for me akin to a burning bush, unquenchable. I will determine later whether I judge this putative transcription to be suitable or worthy (I mean comprehensible). If not, and it is the crux of my memoir, then all that I have set down so far will be null and void. But even if it should have a certain validity, ought it to be preserved? Or does it demand to be hidden, lest it expose an already broken being, one whom I once loved (while unaware of that love) and whose whereabouts today I do not know?

*

[Note: concealed herein are the papers in question. As of this writing, August 2, 1949, they will so remain until their disposition is determined, which determination will itself depend on the trustworthiness of the contents.]

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You asked how I came here to the Academy. My uncle brought me. In every city where my parents are obliged to leave me, there is always an uncle to choose a school for me, yet not one of them is truly an uncle. How my present uncle happened on this place, it is impossible to surmise. It may be that he was impressed by what he took to be a congenial name, and believed that my parents might be pleased by it. My father and mother are transients and travelers, with no settled home, they are buyers and sellers, they are seekers and doubters, and they live mainly in hotels. Some of these hotels are pleasant, most are not, but rather than being shut up in a school, I always prefer those indifferent rooms where we never stay long and I am never expected to explain who I am, or pressed to find a friend my own age. When I was much younger, I pleaded to be taken wherever they might go, and promised that I would never complain of the heat or cry if I hated the food, and would never be sick, and would always be good. But they told me there were too many dangers for a child in those Levantine regions of constant upheaval where their particular business led them. To calm me, they explained as simply as they could that though they held themselves out to be ordinary traders, they were in truth pilgrims in search of a certain relic of our heritage, and that this was the primary hope of their work. Somewhere, I came to understand, lying unrecognized in one of the thousand alleyways and souks in the village markets of Egypt, or Palestine, or Syria, or Iraq, this significant thing, whatever it was, could be uncovered.

And when I asked why it was significant, they assured me that one day, when I was older, I would see for myself, and meanwhile, until it was found, they must earn our bread. This, they said, was the reason for their peregrinations: it was for the sake of foreign objects, exceedingly ancient, that persons in the West coveted and might wish to buy. And when I asked why these objects were coveted, my father replied It is for the vanity of the coveters, and my mother said It is because they are hollow and have no histories of their own. This was the cause of our having come to New York, where there are many such buyers. Our hotel in this city was too small and too cramped and too noisy, near streets made too bright in the middle of the night and crowds swimming like fishes all around, but still I would be more content to be left in such an unsavory scene than confined here where there are grasses and trees and schoolbooks without interest or weight, and where Scripture, the story of my people, is derided and whistled at by unlettered boys. My parents are not to blame, they must leave me behind to purchase their wares from fellahin who scratch with their hoes among the stones of the field, or from hawkers who crook their fingers under the shadowy arches of defeated cities. And soon an uncle will come to take me away to another hotel in another country, where a different uncle will accompany me to another school.

What my parents promised has come to pass. Though the significant thing has yet to be discovered, I have by now seen for myself who we are. My family name reveals our origins, which for reasons of rivalry and obfuscation have been omitted from the Books of the Jews, where it ought by historic rights to have been set within the chronicles of the Israelites. Never mind that there are in our own language missives attesting to our presence—we Elefantins remain outcasts from the history of our people. They say of us that because of our far-flung island home we were without knowledge of the breadth of the imperatives of Moshe our Teacher, whom we revered, and followed into the wilderness. As if we are not ourselves Israelites, as if we