Sara Pomerantz nee Nordenberg

The roots of Yaakov Shabtai come from two places: from Tel Aviv, his hometown, and from the Polish town of Rypin, which is in the Danzig corridor, from which his father and mother, his grandfather, grandmother and uncles arrived. Much has been written about Tel Aviv in his work, but Rypin has hardly written anything, and even in his fiction the town has not been named. Only in a story that does not belong to his family stories, "The Journey to Mauritius," is hinted at, the town of common origin of the story's blind hero, who returns from Mauritius exile, and the narrator's parents.

Yaakov Shabtai was never in Rypin, but he knew the story of the family's life there well from his parents Abraham and Masha Shabtai (nee Pomerantz), his grandmother Sarah Pomerantz, who lived with the family in the same apartment in Tel Aviv for more than twenty years until her death in 1961, from Uncle Nachman who served as a model To "Uncle Samuel" and the many friends of the family. Another important source was the "Rypin Book" which appeared in 1963, that is, about a year before Saturn's fiction began. This impressive commemorative book encompasses the town's life from many aspects, from historical to cultural and from group or personal memories. Echoes of this can be found in his stories and novel "Memory of Things," and through which I will try to recover something from the historical-cultural world in which the Zonaband (Sabtai) family lived for many years.

Already in Sabtai's first stories, "Uncle Samuel" and "Get Out," brief metonymic descriptions of the town can be found through photographs and old furniture descriptions. More than that is in the history story from the estate "Family", in which he tries to reconstruct his family history through the many stories he heard in his parents' home. But the most important description is given in the novel "Memory of Things," in a combined expression of the narrator and Uncle Lazar, the important fictional character in the novel. Lazar was endowed with a passion for contemplation and desire "to understand the great world in which he lived and whose chaos and arbitrariness shaped his life from the time he was a child And useless acts of cruelty… ”(p. 131). This description explains Jewish immigration from the town, which began in the 1920s and encompassed hundreds of Rypin immigrants who immigrated to Israel and thus survived the Holocaust.

In his introduction to the Rypin Book, great historian Jacob Talmon, Son of Rypin, views his town as a microcosm of Jewish fate in the Holocaust: "Rypin embodied all the essential aspects of Jewish fate in recent generations. All patterns of existence and spirit and ideology have been most commonly expressed in the Rypin community. The struggle between the old and the new, the traditional and the revolutionary, the torments of disintegration and birth pangs of worlds that were painfully felt in it … "Talmon notices two characteristics typical of Rypin. One – the intensity, namely the attempt to exhaust any action or emotion to the end. This trait in her beautiful revelation is expressed in idealism, devotion to the idea, and enthusiasm for execution; In her ugly revelation, the zeal, hatred and rejection of others lead to violence. The second feature is the anxiety about the very material and physical existence, which he sees as the dominant experience in his town life as a child. "The feeling of anxiety and instability gave life to something of a proviral, unreal nature. The parents' dream was to send the boys overseas," Talmon wrote.

With the Zonaband family, whose sons were active in the Zionist pioneering youth movements, it was not surprising that the whole family emigrated to Israel – first the older boys and then the parents and young children. They built their first hut in the Nordia neighborhood, which housed three families. Their hut was a meeting place for Rypin veterans and there they also organized themselves for the "Barzilai Group", a sort of municipal municipality that did quarrying and construction work. The group has prepared itself for settlement as an urban kibbutz, a program that is mentioned in "Memory of Things" and which has never been implemented.

The Zonaband family served as a model for Jaakob Shabtai in designing the central family in "Memory of Things" – the Goldman family. Jacob Zonaband's attributes were passed on to Grandpa Baruch Haim (Goldman), as was his death in a heart attack several hours after the first wedding of Rypin's immigrants in Israel, the wedding of his parents Abraham and Masha Shabtai. The features of Uncle Joel and his wife Zippora, the most Zionist character in the novel, were taken from the image of his eldest son Zadok and his wife Rachel. Ephraim Goldman received his qualities of honesty, rage and violence from Abraham Shabtai, while Uncle Lazar in the novel is the only fictional character among the brothers, whose name, features and resume can be defined as a Dostoevskian figure and of great importance in the novel's ideal plane. Two other important characters already mentioned, Uncle Nachman and Grandma Pomerantz, each received a separate literary design in a complete story about them and were included in the chapter entitled "The End of Thing," while the mother Masha was only styled after her death in "The End of Thing."

Grandma Sara Pomerantz deserves to expand her speech. Unlike Grandfather Zonaband, the grandmother was a real figure to her grandchildren because she had lived with her daughter's family in Hod Dormitories in Tel Aviv for over twenty years. In these dormitories, lived many of the Histadrut's top and cultural elite, the Shabtai apartment was exceptional, as in the three rooms of the apartment lived a family of three generations, the last of which were added two grandchildren Aaron (1939) and Joel (1945) . This revered grandmother is seen by the author of "Family" as a mythical figure whose lives are the "first" and begin "by itself." This primacy also connects to her religious lifestyle, in which she continued her daughter-in-law's socialist home: Sabbath observance and kosher observance. On the other hand, other religious issues were in serious disputes, such as Yaakob's Bar Mitzvah, as can be learned from the story "Adusham". It is worth noting that this admiration for grandmother is also with Aaron Shabtai, who wrote four parting songs from her in his book "The Teacher Room." The relationship between Jacob and his grandmother also concerns Yiddish, which Jacob learned from her and his mother. He was to engage in Hebrew translation of Shalom Aleichem's works, Itzik Manger, Shavis-Singer and others.

Uncle Nahman changed the surname Zonaband to the Hebrew name Saturn and followed his brother Abraham. Zadok and Rachel were the only ones to keep the original name. Changing the last name, of course, should mark the wish of starting a new chapter in family life and possibly interfering with the life of the country, but Yaakov Shabtai the writer, who looks and writes from a different distance, has come to realize that wishes do not match reality. He understood very well that "the formula for a 'name' and construction 'fragment here is incorrect. It is simplistic … The construction' here 'is a dialectical process of breaking and building alike," as Zipporah Kagan put it, in her remarks about the "subsistence" in the novel "Memory of Things" ("Discourse Leaves" 1980, 9).

In his introduction to the Book of Rypin, Jacob Talmon expressed his wish to write, according to the model of the town, the epic of the Jewish world in Central Europe in its various shades. This epic was eventually written not by one of the sons but by a son of those sons, who could even partially reconstruct the world of his ancestors and grandparents, whom he knew from direct or indirect acquaintance through stories, testimonies and memories. Rightly, Dov Sadan once said that it was precisely the generation born in the country who would be able to write the epic of the Jewish world that was here and there and leave him a memory of things. Jacob Abramson investigates the life and work of Jacob Shabtai.