The one thing we had plenty of was books. They were everywhere: From wall to laden wall, in the passage and the kitchen and entrance and on every windowsill. Thousands of books, in every corner of the apartment. I had the feeling that people might come and go, be born and die, but books went on forever. When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver.
If once or twice it happened that there was not enough money to buy food for Shabbat, my mother would look at Father, and Father would understand that the moment had come to make a sacrifice, and turn to the bookcase. He was an ethical man, and he knew that bread takes precedence over books and that the good of the child takes precedence over everything. I remember his hunched back as he walked through the doorway, on his way to Mr. Meyer's secondhand bookshop with two or three beloved tomes under his arm, looking as though it cut him to the quick. So must Abraham's back have been bowed as he set off early in the morning from his tent with Isaac on his shoulder, on their way to Mount Moriah.
I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and them, even other peoples books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather binding, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. and there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away with cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells.
Father would generally return an hour or two later, without the book, laden with brown paper bags containing bread, egg, cheese, occasionally even a can of corned beef. But sometimes he would come back from the sacrifice with a broad smile on his face, without his beloved books but also without anything to eat: he had indeed sold his books, but had immediately bought other books to take their place, because he had found such wonderful treasures in the secondhand bookshop, the kind of opportunity you encounter only once in a lifetime, and he had been unable to control himself. My mother forgave him, and so did I. . .
- Israel literature, Books, Amos Oz,
