The mother of the literary researcher Haim Weiss used to tell him again and again her first childhood memory - she was sitting on the lap of the national poet Haim Nachman Bialik at one of the famous "Ong Shabbat" events.
She described the formative experience, with the names of those present accompanying the memories of the body.
Only when he grew up did Weiss realize that Bialik had died about seven years before his mother was born.
The founding memory did not happen, nor could it happen.
But his mother insisted on the truth of the story.
Weiss learned from his mother that "the visible reality, the one that stands exposed to the prying eyes and violence of humans, is superficial and mean, and its power will never compare to the beauty of stories and events that deserve to take place, but due to the laxity of reality and the limitations of life, they did not reach any realization."
Thus, the author, who testifies to himself that his memory tends to betray him, and that his childhood memories are "fragmented, partial and most of the time shrouded in a thick fog" - chooses to write Memoir, a book that describes personal memories.
Weiss does this with the hand of a master: his memories are so real, overwhelming with descriptions in which every detail is calculated and connected to the being around him, but he informs the reader at the very beginning - he does not seek to reveal the "truth", but like his mother, he reveals the small events that outweigh the ones that happened really.
But during the reading this information is also forgotten - Weiss places small details throughout the book that give the reader a broader picture, and also hint at what is not in the text but is accompanied by the background, and for a moment the reliability of the things cannot be doubted.
At the starting point, you can't go wrong.
These are the coming-of-age stories of a religious boy in Jerusalem in the early 1980s and the colorful characters that accompany his life.
Together the stories coalesce into the story of a boy who leaves the religious world that he sees as dry and petty, and becomes infected with the literary bug that fills his inner world in return.
Weiss devotes the bulk of the book to dealing with the national religious high school yeshiva and its ultra-Orthodox rabbis - colorful characters in black and white - in their attempts to instill faith in the students, which leads to the opposite action in the author's mind.
"We, the rejected children of the Beit Midrash and the defeated sons of the Yeshiva, sat in the last rows: idlers, dreamers, football lovers, readers of forbidden literature by stealth, and hallucinating about the beautiful girls of the 'Flech' school who studied one neighborhood and light years away from us. We were boys who didn't belong Their respect and dreams were inversely proportional to their social status and their abilities on the soccer fields, basketball and Gemara classes."
The author did not find the passion for the holy, a passion that is used in these initiation stories as a key concept, and searches for it in foreign regions - in the halls and gardens of literature.
For example, he is appointed to be the censor of the school library, one of his favorite places, and deletes forbidden passages in beautiful novels, these "ruled books" that the book bears their name.
The boy who prepares the wild books for his classmates dives with pleasure into the forbidden spaces and finds there what he wants.
After all, he was chosen because "he is a hopelessly destroyed boy whose thick mind, according to the testimony of his educators, is drawn only to practical stories and he despises the law and denies the truth."
The boy in general is indignant at the proposal to "hurt the sanctities of Hebrew literature".
This is the unresolved tension between the holy and the profane, which shakes his world and requires him to choose a side.
In the last story it is already clear: he works on his parents that he prays in their bedroom, and when in fact he is calling "a woman" crowned with a tefillin, he meets in an interview with the poet David Avidan, who dissects his world and gives him words for what turns out to be "the great loneliness and the great despair".
This is also the story of a boy who was born with a disability in one of his hands and the social struggles that arise from this.
"A chain of wrong medical decisions during the birth, eventually led to the obstetrician grabbing my shoulders and pulling me out, while tearing muscles, nerves and tendons," he writes.
"As a child, it seemed to me that this hand has a life of its own, a life that is disconnected and separate from the body that carries it."
In one of the most beautiful texts in the book, Weiss describes his relationship with Dr. Blau, who took care of him from childhood and was a kind of substitute for his silent and distant father. As in some of the other stories, Weiss combines archetypal images from Jewish sources and Hebrew poetry that help characterize the inner happenings bubbling at the bottom of the consciousness experiencing it. In this story, "Mati Mebar", at the beginning of the story, Weiss introduces the two children of the doctor's wife, who are connected to breathing machines and live as plants, like the Israelites waiting to die in the desert that Bialik wrote about in his poem, "Like two enormous giants, the boys lay beside them on pale beds in a room near the entrance The meetings with the doctor teach the young boy about dealing with a disability from bullying, and how to manage to live with the external view examining the damaged hand and the person holding it.
These join a selection of marginal Jerusalem figures, in the best literary tradition of Yosel Birstein or Amnon Dankner.
Whether it's a holocaust survivor standing in the city in a pink robe whose ragged edges are dragging on the floor, and she cries bitterly against the Lord of the Worlds for her fate, or whether it's the new student at the school who invites the students to a lavish bar mitzvah celebration and leaves the school after it - Weiss looks at everyone of curiosity, compassion and sympathy, which produce an immersive and touching reading.
Haim Weiss / Books from laws, persimmon, 128 p.
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