Remembering Robert

Much has been written about Robert Rosenberg in the few days since he died and Robert, I suspect, would have been gratified but a little embarrassed by the superlatives. Beneath his larger-than-life persona and his penchant for self-aggrandizement, Robert was a private person and he took himself, along with much else, with liberal pinches of salt. Robert was not one to be taken in by hyperbole.

Not that what has been said and written about him is hyperbole; far from it. Robert was an accomplished writer and journalist, with an almost clairvoyant understanding of the possibilities of technology in the Information Age and a keen nose for the ridiculous and pretentious in our daily lives. He richly deserved all the praise that has come his way.

How many of us, after all, have written a bunch of novels, been a blogger before the term even existed, single-handedly run a Web site with an international audience for over 10 years and provided the production backbone for a daily national newspaper, as Ha’aretz editor David Landau wrote this week? The answer is very, very few. Robert was one of a kind.

But Robert’s myriad accomplishments tell only part of the story. And the public Robert, tall and dashing with a cavalry mustache and a mouth that moved faster than the speed of light, is also only part of the story. Like all consummate personalities, Robert was a complex individual and his true beauty lay in the quieter, more subtle recesses of his nature.

Robert was a good person; “good” in the majestic, almost religious sense of the word, though religious is not a quality that I would readily associate with him. (Silvie, his wife, assures me, however, that he could hold his own when it came to knocking off a bracha. That was a side of him I never knew.) He was a virtuous person. He knew instinctively the difference between right and wrong and his life was a constant quest after right. In his politics, as in his personal relationships, Robert embodied an innate humanity and kindness.

Others have written that they never heard him say a bad word about anyone and I can testify to the truth of that. Despite the strength of his opinions – and Robert was never lacking in the opinion department – he had a genteel, almost old-fashioned sense of propriety. Coarseness was alien to him. He was an island, a beacon, in this increasingly crass and boorish society. He was that rarest of all things, a truly gentle soul (which may come as a surprise to those who only knew his bluff, sometimes intimidating exterior.)

Above all, Robert was an optimist, another rare quality in today’s depressed world. He not only was good, he believed in good, and he believed that good would prevail. I can’t recall ever having seen him really down, even when he had every reason to be so. Despite the knocks he took, and there were many, Robert was always ready with another idea, another goal. He never let the present distort the promise of the future.

Not even cancer could hold Robert down. There were many times during his illness when he was the most positive, the most optimistic, person in the room. The same self-confidence that sometimes put him over the top when he was healthy was his great strength when he was ill. In the first year or so of his illness he was full of plans for the future and he was writing a novel when he died. Three weeks before he finally succumbed to his cancer, we were discussing how Ariga, his Web site, could be continued without him. Weak and in great pain, he nevertheless jumped up with typical Robert impetuosity and began knocking out a new site layout on his laptop, his mind working and his mouth going a mile a minute. He was Robert until the end and in his last days he had more life in him than most of us have in a lifetime.

I happened to have an operation and was off work for several weeks just when Robert began his final descent towards death. We would sit around – no longer with a couple of bottles between us; his health no longer permitted liquid indulgence – and talk about things for hours. We spoke about current affairs and books (one of the last things he did was receive a new consignment of books from Amazon, though by then he was unable to read much) and we laughed a lot. I laughed more and spoke more utter nonsense with Robert than with anyone else. There was very little nostalgia, which is surprising for middle-aged people whose lives are mostly behind them. But that was Robert; he rarely looked back.

Robert may have died, but a big part of him remains – and her name is Silvie. Robert and Silvie were more than lovers, more than just another married couple. They were symbiotic, virtually one unit. They exemplified a mutuality of love, caring and respect. I don’t think I have ever had a friendship with a couple in which there wasn’t an imbalance, a natural leaning on my part towards one of the partners. But Rob and Silvie were different. It was impossible to love one without loving the other.

I have a final image of Robert lying in his hospital bed in the week before he died and Sylvie leaning over him, her long blonde hair splayed over his emaciated chest. She was caressing his drawn, jaundiced cheek and whispering in his ear. What she said remains between them. But it was lovely to see.