To My Friend: Amos Oz_
Dear Amos:
I am intimidated by writing to you. But you are the one who made me want to write to you. And to write in general.
You left this existential plane 2 years ago, four days after my daughter was born. I silently accepted it, but I still have words that I want to tell you. Because conversations, as you taught me, never end when someone dies, but perhaps that is exactly where they begin.
I miss you and I don’t miss you.
As you have always lived for me only through your books, the feeling of your constant presence is here but at the same time it is quite strange since you are no longer here to keep commenting on the events of 2019, 2020, 2021 …
My name is Victor Saadia, I was born in 1986 in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Mexico City. I have never seen war or geopolitical instability in my life. I did not see my mother’s suicide, I did not go to the army, I cannot say that I saw terrorism in the streets of my city. You never heard my name, nor did you know anyone from my family, (although among Jews”Somebody always knows somebody”) and still: We are brothers. Or Iam your son. And some kind of continuation of you.
I grew up reading your books. Black Box was the first, and then my mother (or destiny) put in front of me theimmortal: “I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.” (I still can’t find a better line to start a story. It is up there with other immortal lines like: “Many years later, in front of the firing squad”, with “Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember”, and many others).
I cannot conceive what my subjectivity would be like -my perception of myself and reality-, if I had not grown up with you in the years that I was slowly becoming aware of the fact that I existed. In your accounts of the kibbutzim, I was able to observe my own kibbutz, which at times came to resemble a ghetto, but without the external oppression. Those tiny and insignificant communities, full of banal characters, hardworking worms full of dreams, all tiny compared to the size of human history. And that, in your pen, they not only show their universality, but their epic and transcendent nature.
Ever since I read your books, I ask myself all the time: How can I live epically in my everyday life? The one that from the beginning was endowed with vacations and credit cards? The one who has no other judge than its own pen? The one that his own pen, even if he never writes a word on paper, still guides the perception of his entire existence? The one who also — I can’t get this image out of my mind — sees tears not with his eyes, but with his hands?
Your words invited me to invent the epic story of my own existence. A life that wants to legitimize itself through art, through feeling. To know that, on this planet, every minute, there are deserts, battles, refugees and friends. That we are subjects of contradictions, emotional blindness, depositories of the truth, gutters of uncertainty. That we hold generational grudges. That we are children with nuclear weapons. Childred armed with words of mass destruction.
In a world where we sometimes choose tyranny because we despise living in the unknown, and other times we choose anarchy, because we do not want to be responsible for what we are or what we could become. Or sometimes, as you have referenced alongside one of your daughters, the historian-, we choose God and give him our freedom in exchange of peace of mind.
We have one foot in the world of chaos and another foot in the world of order, in this way, we have security and confidence but, at the same time, we have enough challenges in front of us to be vigilant and in constant evolution. Although we must never forget, you always tell us, that as fathers, mothers, citizens, philosophers, our mortality is assured, not by the weaknesses of the body, but by those of the mind.
Your words have always pushed us to calculate the debts that we have left unpaid throughout our lives. Your whole life is a reflection of this deep commitment, and, on the way to pay them off, you remind us at every step that it is always time to unlearn what we inherited from people who are full of wounds.
From a very young age my father gave me the example of seeing others with his heart and my mother was the one who showed me that humans cry. When I read you, I realized that this was no small thing, especially when we live in a world where tears are not only inevitable, but necessary. And because writing is wanting to cry.
Following our millennial lineage of words, you made me pay attention to the power of ideas and how much it is worth spending our time arguing with our ancestors, while we prepare for our descendants to come and argue with us. Along the way, you made me want to renew my opinion on old-fashioned concepts like: Commitment. Truce. Reflection. Lineage. Identity. And also: Redemption. Through your father you taught me to have fun thinking about the origin of words and their floating nature in the eternal game of contextualization and signification. Writing these words to you, now that it is your turn to read me, reinforces my deep conviction — although it is also my inherited indoctrination-, that I want to live through my words: Live thanks to, and for, words. What greater gift could one human give to another?
You are the writer, the man, that even if you had been born in 1989 — after the wars, after the founding of the State and consolidation of language, after the great heroes of Zionism — and you were born and raised with iPads and Facebooks, you would have told the same story of love and darkness. You would not have told us how to walk the path, but you would have given us the certainty that it is a path that deserves our attention, and, above all, that humility and hope are never wasted as we face our dragons.
José Saramago concluded his thank-yous for the Nobel Prize, (the one we all know you are the winner, although that does not matter much) apologizing for only having been able to speak with the voice of his fictional characters, and that, although for many people, that could be a minor thing, for him, it was everything. You know, dear friend? Dear teacher, dear father: the voices of your characters are everything to me. You did something that no one can ever take away from me: you gave my life meaning because I learned to tell it as a story. Being dentists and not warriors, therapists and not pioneers of a new land, entrepreneurs, bricklayers, lawyers, all writing their own history living on the edge of existential meaning. Every day I celebrate the space we make in the family bookcase for my daughters’ books and I look forward to fate putting your words in their hands as well.
I asked a friend in which language I should write to you, she told me that there is only one language of the heart and that never changes. So I am writing to you in Spanish (this letter has been translated), but I should say that I connected with you through English in which I read you, when your words actually came out of your pens in Hebrew. What proves that there can be several languages to say things and that what connects us is what is common to them, or rather, what is common to them is everything that they cannot find a way to utter.
Thinking that I am writing to you in another language also reminds me that you will read this epistle in another language. Not in an email, not on printed paper, neither in Hebrew nor in English, but from another dimension where words and books are written in fire and air, and not only with the water of ink and the soil of paper.
I miss you and I don’t miss you. I love you and I thank you.
December 2020