All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (32 page)

The “children” were adolescents of Romanian and Bulgarian origin. I spent a few enjoyable and instructive weeks with them. There were campfires, of course, as at Fantana and Ambloy, and songs and tales. We studied Scripture and ancient Jewish history as well as modern European philosophy and literature. I was astonished at these young people’s breadth of knowledge. The Romanians in the group were remarkable for their fervor. There were many evenings of music, lectures, and discussions in the orange groves. There were also some flirtations. As usual, they came to nought.

The autumn rains arrived, and I withdrew further and further into myself. A wave of depression courses through my notebooks. In Shushani’s absence I made little headway in my study of asceticism. And once again I was at a crossroads, and once again I forced myself to draw a balance sheet. I was not yet ready to settle down in this, the country of my dreams, in which I felt not alien but useless and superfluous. I loved Israel with all my heart, and yet I felt it was time to go back to France. I needed friends. Nicolas was still in the army, Israel Adler had resumed his studies in Paris. A little love affair would have been just the thing, but there was nothing on the horizon. Solitude weighed heavily upon me. I dreamed of love and yearned for Paris, where surprises happen every day. I missed the sidewalk cafés, strolling along the Seine, dropping in at little shops. But here it was again: How would I get by? What would I live on?

I had an idea. Why not become a “foreign correspondent” in France? I made the rounds of all the dailies:
Haaretz, Haboker, Maariv
. All had representatives in Paris, all except
Yedioth Ahronoth
, the smallest and poorest of Israel’s daily papers. I set out in search of a recommendation and found someone who knew someone who knew the editor in chief. I telephoned, and was granted an interview.

Dr. Herzl Rosenblum, a signatory of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, was a man of great political erudition. A funny man, eyes glinting with irony and intelligence, he treated me to a detailed history of this once rich and influential paper that had lost its fortune and its prestige in a stunning putsch.

One morning in 1948 the then editor in chief, Dr. Azriel Carlebach, left his post and launched his own evening paper,
Yedioth Maariv
(he changed only one word in the title), taking with him the
whole editorial and administrative staffs. Most readers went with Carlebach. This left
Yedioth Ahronoth
in dire straits, but its owner, Yehuda Mozes, was determined to keep it alive at whatever cost. In a matter of hours, he created a whole new editorial team.
Yedioth Ahronoth
appeared the next day, a bare two hours late. Unfortunately, Rosenblum explained, the paper lacked the resources to employ a correspondent in Paris. “If you went to Moscow it would be different,” he said slyly. I couldn’t imagine what he meant, since he could pay no more rubles in Moscow than francs in Paris. But this Lithuanian Jewish intellectual had a nostalgia for old Russia. Indeed, in his memoirs he misses no opportunity to evoke the glorious era of Kerensky, whose talents as an orator he admired. (“If only he had been a little more decisive in 1917, the world would be very different.”) I listened with great interest, since I love stories and history. The bottom line was that he would be pleased to have me as a correspondent, but as for a salary … that was another matter. I would have to work as a freelance. So be it. As long as I had a press card, I would manage to get by.

I sailed back to Paris on the
Kedma
, older sister of the
Negba
, and this time I was violently seasick. I cursed the day I first dreamed of the sea, swore I would never again set foot on a boat. By the third day I felt better. I forgot my vows and stood on the deck, loving the soft and soothing song of the waves, letting my thoughts ride them to the end of the world and beyond.

I was not alone on deck. Once again—no surprise—there was a beautiful young girl who intrigued me. Neither Inge nor Hanna, she could easily have taken their place. I spoke to her of destiny, and of Dante for good measure. She told me not to be a fool. Nothing had changed. There was no point in even trying. Also on deck was another girl, probably Moroccan or Tunisian, surely Sephardic, with long dark hair, treating a crew member to a voluptuous kiss. Maybe I should join the Navy. Behind me a young woman, very blond, sobbed desperately, refusing to part from a boy she had probably just met. Other couples were engaged in similar exercises. I could hear their whispered promises. The next day I noticed with some glee that the blonde had acquired a new suitor. And what about me? For them I didn’t exist. I didn’t exist for anyone. I was the only passenger on board not to have had even the slightest flirtation. The less said about my self-esteem the better. I promised myself I would be more enterprising in Paris. I would be a new man. I owed it to myself.

•   •   •

I arrived in Paris on an overcast day in January 1950 and moved back into the Hôtel de France on the Rue de Rivoli. I paid a visit to my editor to give a lame explanation as to why I hadn’t sent the series of articles on immigrants in Israel, and then hurried to see Hilda, Israel Adler, and Friedrich, all of whom congratulated me on my new status. When I showed Niny my press card, I was moved to see how proud she was. I caught a train to Versailles and, once again, returned disappointed. Hanna had treated me to a quick “You again?” and turned to talk to someone else. I never went back to Our Place again.

I had lost track of Shushani and François, but decided it would be a mistake to interrupt my studies on that account. I made a promise to myself: I vowed I would never spend less than an hour a day studying.

My first article was a portrait-interview of Emile Najar. The former lawyer and Egyptian Zionist activist, a minister-counselor to the Israeli embassy in Paris, a passionate talker and lover of political and literary anecdotes, took me on a grand tour of Franco-Israeli relations and the political and cultural situation in France. It was not a traditional interview—I was too shy to press my subject for personal revelations—but that didn’t matter. The important thing was being able to quote him.

With images of Sartre and Hemingway dancing in my head, I plunged deeper into the ambiance of Paris, picking a table at a sidewalk café at which to work, perhaps to be accosted by an unknown woman who would ask me in which language I was writing and whether I was a novelist. “No,” I would reply nonchalantly, “a journalist.” But no one showed any interest in my efforts.

I read and reread the published version of my article, “from our Paris correspondent.” I showed it to Israel Adler, who marked the event by treating me to coffee and a kosher salami sandwich. This became a tradition. Every time I had an article published, he would buy me a sandwich, which meant he was paying me about as much as the paper was. He knew I was broke, but he was almost as broke as I was.

I expected a note of thanks from Najar for all the nice things I had said about him, but instead he called me to convey his displeasure. I had described him as middle-aged when he wasn’t even forty. Terrified of losing a precious source of information, I began to stammer apologies, but he burst out laughing. He had a wonderful sense of humor, and as the years went by, this future ambassador to Tokyo, Rome, and Brussels, one of the most brilliant minds in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, continued to be generous with his time and his counsel.

Money remained the problem. Once again, Shlomo Friedrich, my angel of mercy, managed to steer some free-lance translations and editorial work my way. As a favor to him, a Hebrew monthly that would soon become a quarterly before disappearing altogether asked me for an article on any cultural subject I chose, provided it was long. I chose to write about Beethoven. Yerahmiel Viernik, the magazine’s editor in chief and sole staff member, stared at me as though I were mad. “Did I miss something here? Did Beethoven speak Hebrew? He was Jewish, maybe? What am I supposed to do with a biographical text about a poor deaf composer who had nothing to do with Zionism? Yehuda Halevy, Bialik, Jabotinsky, Herzl, Nordau—you forgot about them?” But since he had nothing else at hand, he had to make do. I never loved Beethoven as much as I did that day. Without him I couldn’t have paid the month’s rent.

I worked in my hotel room, a sunless cubicle overlooking the courtyard. Fortunately, the rent was on a par with the amenities. More than once I wondered whether the hotel rented rooms by the hour. I kept running into new customers on the stairway.

My press card, issued by the office of the Président du Conseil, was my most precious possession. It should have been all I needed, but the French were enamored of cards. In the United States the only document one carries is a driver’s license, but in France you are constantly called upon to prove your identity. Like all foreign correspondents, I had to obtain, in addition to the indispensable pass from the Préfecture de Police, a red card (for the theater), a blue card (for concerts), and a green card (for movies). These cards also gave me the right—this was France, after all—to bring along my legal spouse or lady friend of the moment. Most often I went alone.

Though he was a musician by training, Israel Adler had a passion for movies. And so it was he who most often accompanied me to the cinema. We preferred the small neighborhood houses that showed “old” French or Italian films, in particular the masterpieces of Carné-Prévert-Kosma.
Les Enfants du paradis
and
Les Portes de la nuit
had a great impact on me. I saw them two and three times each.

My big problem was that
Yedioth Ahronoth
would publish only articles directly or indirectly related to Israel and/or the Jews, or at the very least to their enemies. This was the result not so much of indifference to the rest of the world as of lack of space, caused by a paper shortage. Newborn Israel, weakened by a merciless war, was racked by an unending economic crisis. For my newspaper, poorer and weaker
than the country itself, the outside world existed only insofar as it was good or bad for the Jewish state.

But there was no lack of subjects for any self-respecting foreign correspondent. All you had to do was open your eyes, leaf through a magazine, attend a political demonstration, or read the obituaries. There was the beginning of the war in Indochina; the death of Léon Blum, who, like me, had been in Buchenwald; the death of André Gide. A succession of strikes and political scandals was erupting. Governments rose and fell at a pace no playwright would have dared attempt. The chasm between the Communists and their adversaries widened. The literati debated whether collaborationist writers whose works had been banned should be pardoned. François Mauriac pleaded for compassion, Louis Aragon for severity. Eventually, the National Committee of Writers was torn apart by tensions dating from the Occupation era. It was also the heyday of existentialism: Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir, the Café de Flore and the cellars of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Long live polemical literature and the philosophy of commitment! Later I wrote of this period in my novel
The Town Beyond the Wall

I was intrigued and stimulated by the intellectual and artistic ferment of Paris. Still working on my education, I was an insatiable patron of the library. Never have I read so much. I devoured the works of Malraux, Mauriac, Paul Valéry, Georges Bernanos, Ignazio Silone, and Roger Martin du Gard. I read everything by Camus (why did he submit to German censorship and agree to delete the chapter on Kafka from his
Myth of Sisyphus?)
and Sartre (couldn’t he have waited until Liberation to have his
No Exit
performed?) and was fascinated by the break between them. I discovered de Beauvoir, Arthur Koestler, and William Faulkner; Cervantes and Miguel de Unamuno, and of course Kafka. I compared their questions to mine. Could one be holy outside religion? Was there a secular priesthood? Where did man’s responsibility end and God’s begin? Would existence be absurd without God? I needed to be guided, but François was nowhere to be found. Nor was Shushani. I went back to my manuscript on asceticism determined to finish it, but doubt assailed me. What was so urgent about that theme?

Strangely, with the exception of the moving testimony of David Rousset and a few works by surviving resistance fighters (among them Robert Anthelme’s
L’Espèce humaine)
, there was practically no concentration camp literature. It was as if people were afraid or ashamed to
broach the subject. Were they still too close to it, too busy reintegrating themselves into society, too busy remaking their lives? As elsewhere in Europe, many books appeared on the Occupation and the Resistance. That was the great theme. Plays, films, documentaries, essays, novels—the source seemed inexhaustible. The men and women who had valiantly confronted the occupier and driven him out were glorified. The heroism of the few obscured the cowardice of the many, concealing the suffering of the victims who had been so readily sacrificed by a defeated and passive France tainted by collaboration. It was more expedient to depict the courage of underground fighters than the humiliation and betrayal of the Jews who were persecuted not only by the Germans but also by the gendarmerie and the police. The letters of denunciation recovered from German archives were taboo. Likewise, references to the notorious site of the most extensive roundup of Jews, the Vel d’hiv, the camps Gurs and Drancy, and the deportation of Jewish children, which, though the Germans had not demanded it, was suggested by Pierre Laval.

Others would later denounce this complacency. But
Yedioth Ahronoth
wanted only articles on current events. How could I convince my employers to grant me some freedom of action? If only I could return to Israel. Come to think of it, why not? I was a journalist, was I not?

I went to see a man called Loinger, a former resistance fighter and OSE official and now director in France of Zim, the Israeli shipping company. I explained my problem: I had to get to Tel Aviv, but … Loinger understood immediately. “If it’s for pleasure,” he said, “there’s nothing I can do. But if you’re going to write … You’re going to write, aren’t you?” He winked at me. “No,” I replied, “what I mean to do is—” He interrupted me. “A journalist can’t help but write. If not immediately, then later, right?” Without waiting for my answer, he picked up the phone and issued instructions to his staff. I was to be given a round-trip ticket on the
Kedma
that very day. He showed me to the door and said, “You’re a journalist, but you still don’t know how to pull strings. Don’t worry, you’ll learn.” Loinger was a nice man, but he was wrong. Some people never learn.