Trafika Europe 6 - Arabesque

captivity

his father had said once, as had gullible Palestinian Jewish “people of the land,” the spiritually impoverished am ha’aretz , with their purblind, narrow-minded, and pernicious notions, which commercial travelers returning to Rome’s Jewish quarter from Palestine would often recall, disapprovingly, with a shudder. Uri, in his hovel, spent a lot of timemullingover resurrection, coming to the conclusion that if the Creator had just a touch of compassion He would make resurrection possible, and he, Uri, would meet with many fair, clever, and wise people who had lived before he was born, and would also live after he was dead, and they would carry on a timeless discourse, rich in ideas, in a fragrant and radiant space without time, after the Last Judgment, where bodies become

weightless and painless, and human bodies that had been restored by magic would float and fly even without wings, as he pictured himself doing in his most delightful dreams as, so to speak, a foretaste of existence after the Last Judgment. It was rational, even natural, for that to be so, because if there were no resurrection with Judgment Day and the end of time, an individual’s life would not have the slightest meaning at all. Uri passed his time either with his eyes screwed up, gazing out at the life of the yard, happy at least that he could see at all, or else he read. Hedidnotneedtobeinstructed in anything; he would have been able to instruct others, but he had no desire to do so, even though his father had also asked him. If he did not

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