Munia Mandel's secret language

Summary

Eight days before he died I visited him in the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem to say goodbye. He was in great pain, but his conversation was still directed at the same subjects that had occupied him through the years: what is right and what is wrong, what one can be certain of and what ought to be done.

He refused to talk about his illness.

When I mumbled an embarrassed question about his health, about what the doctors had said, he shot me one of his shrewd, affectionate glances and said with a smile, ‘Come on, Amos.’ Then he started talking about current affairs.

Ever since I first met Munia in 1959, I have called this language of his, made up of ‘come on’, ‘no, seriously’, compounded with the shrewd, affectionate glance, ‘Galician’. I can't define it.

He closed his eyes for a moment, probably fighting the pain, and made some witty comment on my involvement with the Moked Party. Then he talked a lot about literature and books, and in this last conversation as always his words were directed at what is right and what is wrong, and what ought to be done.

He believed, eight days before his death, that I ought to write something about young people between wars. He wanted, as he put it, ‘to understand what really happens to them’, and he ‘needed a piece of writing that would explain to him at long last what they really want’. I couldn't think of any reply. Then the pain got the better of him again. We said goodbye. In the lift I cried.