All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (3 page)

One day, some twenty-five years later, I got an urgent phone call from a distant relative who told me my cousin Anshel Feig was gravely ill. He needed an operation, but had refused to sign the consent form until he could see me. Fearing the worst, I jumped in a cab. Anshel had owned a fish market on Amsterdam Avenue near Eighty-sixth Street, close to where I lived. Whenever I had seen him, he was modest and happy. A kipa on his head. He spoke in Manhattan just as he had in Sighet: in song.

“Thank you for coming,” Anshel said. “I need you. I need your blessing.”

“Are you out of your mind?” I asked, trying to hide my concern. “You want me to bless
you?
Your standing up above is surely a lot stronger than mine.”

Anshel, in fact, had retained his old Hasidic fervor, carefully observing all the commandments of the Torah, going to synagogue morning and evening, whereas I … But he insisted. “What are you waiting for?” his doctor—the relative who had called me—whispered in my ear. “His life is at stake.”

So I took the patient’s hand and gave him my blessing, the same one I had received when I was sick as a child: May everything turn out for good, may God bring a swift and total cure.

A few days later I went to visit Anshel. The operation had been a success and I could now speak to him freely. I asked him why he had insisted on receiving my blessing. He did not seem surprised by the question.

“Do you remember the last time the Rabbi of Wizhnitz visited Sighet?” he asked.

“Like yesterday,” I replied. “How could I forget?” The painful
image of my mothers sobbing surged back. “It’s funny,” I told Anshel, “but I never found out why she came away from the Rabbi in tears.”

“I know why,” Anshel said with the hint of a smile.

“You know?” I jumped. Stunned, I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, even if it sent him back to the O.R. “You knew all along and you never told me?”

His eyes clouded, and he spoke as if in a dream. “I was one of the people waiting in the antechamber to see the Rabbi, but when I saw your mother crying I left to see her home. You were walking ahead of us and that was when she swore me to secrecy and told me what Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, may his memory protect us, had said to her. He said: ‘Sarah, know that your son will become a
gadol b’Israel
, a great man in Israel, but neither you nor I will live to see the day. That’s why I’m telling you now.’ And now you know why she cried.”

I stared at him. Neither of us spoke until finally he sighed deeply and said, “That’s why I wanted your blessing. If the Rabbi of Wizhnitz had such faith in you, your blessing must mean something in heaven.” Which only proves that even a great hasidic Master can be wrong.…

As for me, the only blessing that meant anything was my mother’s. Away from her I felt lost, surrounded by enemies. In my child’s imagination, my first teacher viewed me with scorn. To please him I had to work infinitely harder. There was another melamed who wore a heavy coat winter and summer. I was troubled by his cold and indifferent air, and tried to win him over by redoubling my efforts to explain a page of the Talmud. I was convinced that my classmates detested me, and I decided to mollify them with bribery. At first I shared my buttered bread, fruit, and snacks, and later I let them divide it all among themselves while I stood apart and watched. They would laugh and devour my treats without so much as thanking me, as though I didn’t exist. I should have been bolder, devised other ways of asserting myself, but years went by before I dared. Until my bar mitzvah, whenever I received a present, I gave it away to my classmates. Sometimes—though it shames me to recall it—I even dipped into the till at the store, not out of generosity but out of insecurity. I feared exclusion and isolation, but as much as I yearned to be part of the group, to be like the others and with the others, I always remained apart. My mother was my sole ally and support. She alone understood me. Yet I never gave
her
a present.

•   •   •

At the time we had a lodger. The only thing I remember about him is that he did magic tricks for us in the evening. He claimed to be an expert hypnotist and said he could predict the future. Whenever I hid something, he would find it immediately. I told myself that when I grew up, I would be like him, I would have his powers. No one replaced him when he moved out, but the house was always full. One or another yeshiva student took his meals with us every day. On Shabbat there was always a guest, usually a stranger, sometimes a beggar. Often it was Moshe the drunkard. In my stories I call him Moshe the madman, but he was mad only in summer. The rest of the year he acted normal, by which I mean, like a normal madman. He spent most of his time at the House of Study, helping the beadle sweep up and keep the stove burning. He would study only when there was no one else around. When he came to our house, he would sing the zemirot (Shabbat songs) for my father’s benefit. I remember how his beautiful voice brought out the power in every word, every syllable. Eyes closed, he seemed in ecstasy. He sang in summer too, only faster.

One evening I ran into him at the well while I was fetching water for the kitchen. “Did I scare you?” he asked when I gave a start. No, I said, it was the well that scared me. It was said a woman once drowned in it, and I was afraid of hauling up her body. I expected him to laugh, but instead he fell silent and leaned over to stare down toward the bottom. “Don’t worry,” he said hoarsely. “If she’s there, I’ll find out and take care of it. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

I was convinced we were well off. How else could we have entertained so many visitors and fed so many beggars? How else could I have been so generous with my classmates?

In fact, we were far from rich; comfortable at best. When we bought cherries, we got ten each. When there was corn, it was one ear per person. Three apricots or a piece of watermelon or cantaloupe on a summer’s evening was a rare treat. When I think back on it now, a sense of remorse comes over me. My parents worked hard for the daily bread that I gave away to my
heder
classmates.

Many years after leaving my town I returned for a day and a night. When I saw our house and the homes of the other Jews on my street and the neighboring blocks, I realized my misperception. Even seemingly well-off Jews lived on the edge of poverty. I recalled my parents’ interminable family discussions on autumn nights. Should we buy a new stove for the dining room or a winter coat for my little sister Tsipouka?

But this never stopped them from feeding anyone who was hungry or from hiring the best tutor in the region for me. “You can never give too much to the needy or study too much,” my father used to say. One day a week—I think it was Wednesday, market day—our servant, Maria, whom we considered a member of the family, would put a huge cauldron of bean soup in the yard for beggars roaming from village to village. “How can I tell which ones are really hungry?” she asked. “Don’t try,” my father said. “I’d rather feed someone whose pockets are full than send someone away on an empty stomach.” Maria had no way of knowing—nor did I—that my father often had to borrow money to make it to the end of the month. My mother never complained.

I am trying to remember if my parents ever quarreled or bickered, if there was ever any tension between them. If so, I have no memory of it. I want to believe that they loved each other, and that nothing ever clouded that love. That may be too idealized a memory, but I cling to it nevertheless. In fact, years later an old Hasid in New York, Reb Itzikl Fuchs, told me there had been some gossip when they married, because my father had fallen in love with my mother. You weren’t supposed to marry for love. Good Jewish families called in the community matchmaker instead. But one day my father saw a beautiful young girl in a carriage and was so struck by her that he ran after her, calling out, “Who are you?”

Of course, she did not deign to reply, but that evening the driver gave him the answer. The girl was the younger daughter of Reb Dodye Feig, of the village of Bichkev. The following year they were married, and they had four children, three girls and a boy. I was the third, after Hilda and Bea. Tsiporah was the youngest. The Romanian authorities would not allow certain Jewish names, so her birth certificate lists her as Judith. We nicknamed her Tsipouka. There were times when I quarreled with my older sisters, but never with her. We all loved her madly. My father treated her with a special tenderness, always had time for her. He would play with her, make her laugh, take her wherever she wanted to go. He would hold her on his lap and tell her stories. He pampered her, spoiled her, as did we. Perhaps we sensed that time was short, that we had to shower her with all the love and all the joys and favors of which she would soon be deprived.

“Memoirs?” people ask. “What’s the hurry? Why don’t you wait awhile?” It puzzles me. Wait for what? And for how long? I fail to see what age has to do with memory. I am sixty-six years old, and I belong
to a generation obsessed by a thirst to retain and transmit everything. For no other has the commandment
Zachor
—“Remember!”—had such meaning.

You have plenty of time, people tell me. Time for what—to let oblivion wipe out the victims’ final traces? To explore the planet, witnessing its degradation?

To write your memoirs is to draw up a balance sheet of your life so far. Am I ready for a final reckoning? Memory, after all, may well prove voracious and intrusive. Remembering means to shine a merciless light on faces and events, to say “No” to the sands that bury words and to forgetfulness and death. Is that not too ambitious?

It’s been years since I was young. But I would love to rediscover, to recapture, if not the anguish and exaltation that I once felt, then at least the road leading to them. Like everyone else, I have sought and sometimes found. Like everyone else, I have loved and ceased to love. I have done good things and bad, laughed out loud and cried in silence.

Some urge caution on me, insisting on the need for perspective. So be it. I will not tell all in a single breath. I will stop in the middle. In Jerusalem, on the day … But that can wait.

I am also told that to write your memoirs is to make a commitment, to conclude a special pact with the reader. It implies a promise, a willingness to reveal all, to hide nothing. People ask, Are you capable of that? Are you ready to talk about the women you have loved for a year or a night, the people who have helped or denigrated you, the grandiose projects and petty schemes, the true friendships and the ones that burst like soap bubbles, the fruitful adventures and the disappointments, the children dead of starvation and old men blinded by pain? You have yourself written that some experiences are incommunicable, that some events cannot be conveyed in words. How do you intend to surmount that contradiction? How can you hope to transmit truths that you yourself have said lie beyond human understanding and always will? It was said of Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk that he remained silent even when speaking. Is there a language that contains another silence, one shaped and deepened by the word?

And yet. Those are my two favorite words, applicable to every situation, be it happy or bleak. The sun is rising? And yet it will set. A night of anguish? And yet it too, will pass. The important thing is to shun resignation, to refuse to wallow in sterile fatalism. That great pessimist King Solomon put it well: “The days come and the days go;
one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down.… What has been will be.…” Must we stop time, then, and the sun? Yes, sometimes we must try, even if it is for nothing. Sometimes we must try
because
it is for nothing. Precisely because death awaits us in the end, we must live fully. Precisely because an event seems devoid of meaning, we must give it one. Precisely because the future eludes us, we must create it.

I mean to recount not the story of my life, but my stories. Through them you may perhaps understand the rest a little better. Some see their work as a commentary on their life; for others it is the other way around. I count myself among the latter. Consider this account, then, as a kind of commentary.

Moreover, I must warn you that certain events will be omitted, especially those episodes that might embarrass friends and, of course, those that might damage the Jewish people. Call it prudence or cowardice, whatever you like. No witness is capable of recounting everything from start to finish anyway. God alone knows the whole story.

To paraphrase a Talmudic saying, I hope the last page will bring me greater certainty than the first.

Do we write because we are happy or because we’re not? A legend of the Midrash says that King Solomon wore a ring with the power to make him happy when he was sad and sad when he was happy. Why would he want to be sad when he was lucky enough to know happiness? Solomon was a Jew and a writer, which is to say, never content. Is the story meant to make us laugh or cry? To cry is to sow, said the Maharal of Prague; to laugh is to reap.

And to write is to sow and to reap at the same time.