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About Fania Klausner
Yehudah Arie Klausner (Odessa 1910 - Jerusalem 1970).
Yehuda lived and studied in Vilna during his youth. He moved to E. Israel in 1933. He was a Scholar of Hebrew literature. He married Fania daughter of Naphtali Hertz Musman and Itta nee Shuster ( Her parents: Gedaliah Schuster and Pearl Gibor).
Yehuda Arieh and Fania, came from Eastern Europe, in the nineteen-thirties, speaking Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and German. In Jerusalem, they spoke Hebrew with their son, Russian when there were secrets to keep. In those days, Palestine was predominantly Arab. Jerusalem was not. Except in the era of the Crusades, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, there had been a continuous Jewish presence in the city. When Amos was born, the population was small—around a hundred thousand—and each neighborhood was distinct. The Klausners would walk from their basement apartment, on Amos Street, in Kerem Avraham, to see their more distinguished relatives in the neighborhood of Talpiot, and, Oz said, “it was in the same spirit that shtetl Jews would take the train to Warsaw to see the five-story buildings.”
"...… . So yes, this Klausner environment was very right-wing, very militaristic, intoxicated by the fact that Jews can fight, and fight well. Thrilled by it in a childish way. Remember, this is two years after the Holocaust. In those years, the Jews were never accused of being bullies or thugs; they were accused of being cowards who hide and will not fight back.”
Fania’s father had owned a mill in Rovno, in western Ukraine, and came with his family to Haifa, in 1934, to work as a carter on the docks. In the book, Oz describes his mother’s knowledge, in the mid-forties, that, on the outskirts of Rovno, in the Sosenki Forest, “among boughs, birds, mushrooms, currants, and berries,” the Nazis had slaughtered more than twenty thousand Jews, with submachine guns, in two days.
...Even as a young boy, as he makes clear in “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” Oz was keenly aware that his mother was adrift and that relations between his parents had eroded. Fania became increasingly depressed, withdrawn. “Among the immediate reasons for my mother’s decline was the weight of history, the personal insult, the traumas, and the fears for the future,” Oz said. “My mother had premonitions all the time, probably because of the trauma of the Holocaust. She might have sensed that what happened to the Jews in her home town would sooner or later happen here, that there would be a total massacre. This is not something she would share with a little boy, except perhaps obliquely, through some of the stories and fairy tales she told, the books she read, a hair-raising Schopenhauerian world view.”
By the end of 1951, Fania’s black periods had become worse and more frequent. Amos and his father were, he writes, “like a pair of stretcher bearers carrying an injured person up a steep slope.” In “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” the reader knows early on that Fania is doomed, and at the end of the book, as she wanders the streets of Tel Aviv in a downpour and, finally, takes her life with an overdose of sedatives, it is possible to get some sense of the son’s loss and fury.
Only now, after reaching an age when he is old enough to be the father of his lost mother, Oz told me, can he look at those days with a certain detachment.
Fania Klausner killed herself in January, 1952, Oz said, for countless reasons: “She died because, for her, Jerusalem was an exile. This climate and environment and reality was alien. And she died because her hopes, if she had any, that maybe a replica of her Europe could be built here, without the bad aspects of the Diaspora Jewish shtetl, were apparently refuted by the reality of the morning after.” Fania was just thirty-eight years old.
“After my mother died, my father and I never talked about her,” he said. “We never mentioned her name, not once. If we referred to her at all, it was as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ We had plenty of discussions, political discussions—he thought I was a Red—but never about her.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108fa_fact?currentPa...
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Fania Klausner's Timeline
| 1913 |
1913
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Rovno, Ukraine
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| 1939 |
May 4, 1939
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Jerusalem, Jerusalem District, Israel
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| 1952 |
January 1952
Age 39
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