All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (34 page)

In Algeciras we spent the night in a small hotel near the port. I couldn’t sleep. My journey through this country, with its Jewish, Christian, and Muslim past, haunted me. I spoke of it in
Legends of Our Time
, though perhaps not enough.

We took a boat to Tangier. It was a stormy crossing, and I got the worst case of seasickness of my life. I told myself it was a punishment. I never should have left Saragossa.

I was dazzled by the subterranean nightlife of Tangier, a cosmopolitan city of countless entrepreneurs, from the most honest to the shadiest. My impressions and memories would later go into
The Town Beyond the Wall
Tangier by night, the
soco chico
—thieves were so resourceful it was hard to get angry at them. They were just doing their job. There were kids offering you all the gold of the Orient for
a few francs; fire-eaters; smugglers trying desperately to pick up easy money; adventurers eager for dangerous missions in lands that often existed only in their imagination. There were Arab storytellers entertaining ecstatic crowds, arousing emotion, admiration, for a few pennies. Tangier, for me, was Pedro, my friend, the man who to me embodies the ideal of friendship, as much madman as sage, as brave as he was philosophical, as sad as he was triumphant over all sadness. I created Pedro because I missed him. I still do.

We crossed Spanish Morocco at breakneck speed and, arriving in Casablanca, encountered a blinding but somehow soothing whiteness. There were mischievous little shoeshine boys, and blanket merchants who stared at us openly.

It was 1950 and I was too ignorant to notice the tensions dividing the various communities. Foolishly, I was convinced that everyone respected and liked everyone else. National and ethnic identity, the right of self-determination—these ideas were not yet current. What was current was much poverty.

My traveling companions had contacts within the Jewish community. A young man, in tattered clothes, offered to serve as my guide. His name was Ifergan. He knew rabbis, merchants, and Jewish activists. All doors were open to him. He couldn’t understand why I wanted to be introduced to rabbinical masters. “Are you a journalist,” he asked, “or a yeshiva student?” He wanted me to meet the notables of the community. The erudite old men I met were astonished when I asked them more about their traditions than about contemporary political issues. I accommodated them by asking about the contemporary value of tradition, and their answers, steeped in wisdom, were far more stimulating than any politician’s pronouncements. A
dayan
(rabbinical judge) showed me some unknown mystical writings attributed to the sages of Fez. A rabbi told me little-known anecdotes about Maimonides’s years in Morocco. Here, as in Spain, the Jewish past was pervasive.

The Jews in Morocco seemed attached to their soil and to their sovereign. I was surprised at their praise for the sultan, Mohammed V, but I should have known better. The sultan had protected his Jewish subjects during the war, standing up to Vichy and the Germans alike. Not a single Moroccan Jew was deported. Rich Jews maintained friendly relations with rich Muslims. And yet. Many Moroccan Jews planned to make aliyah, to “ascend” to the Holy Land, because the future was uncertain. Signs of dislocation were appearing in this energetic,
exuberant community. My companion, the emissary of the Jewish Agency, predicted that few of its 250,000 souls would remain. But if things were so good in this beautiful land, why would the Jews want to confront the unknown? Ifergan’s answer: “For a Jew Israel is never the unknown.” I recalled the Jews of my city. How was it that the Moroccan Jews were more perspicacious and audacious than those of Sighet in 1940–44? And thanks to the World Jewish Congress, and the Jewish Agency, nearly the entire Moroccan Jewish community emigrated to Israel between 1952 and 1956.

I became attached to them—not surprisingly, since I love the Sephardim. As a child I pictured the Messiah with dark skin, a black beard, and dark eyes—in a word, a Sephardi. (May the Ashkenazis forgive me, and if the Messiah is an Ashkenazi, may He forgive me as well.) I also loved the familial, patriarchal spirit that governed their relations. On Friday night the synagogue was full. Children kissed their fathers’ hands, and fathers, in turn, kissed
their
fathers’ hands. Despite the differences in customs and languages, I pictured myself back home, far away.

On Saturday afternoon I attended the meetings of Zionist clubs, for songs, lectures, prayers. It was like being back in Versailles or Orsay. I taught them a few songs, and my friend from the Jewish Agency, declaring that he was pleased with my “influence” on the youth, handed me an envelope containing a modest sum that seemed princely to me: no more money worries for two or three weeks. Even better, there was a member of the choir who reminded me of Hanna, though they did not really look alike. This one, small and very dark, was a soprano, whereas Hanna was an alto. She was calm and sweet, not volcanic like Hanna. I was not surprised to find myself spinning dreams and talking to her—you guessed it—about Nietzsche and about nostalgia in the works of Yehuda Halevy. She seemed friendly and interested. One night we were alone in the street. Shyly, I took her hand. She expressed a desire to ride in a carriage. In love as never before, I gazed at the stars, witnesses to my happiness, imploring them to glitter in the dreams of this beautiful young woman. But when I escorted her home I didn’t dare kiss her good night.

The next day the faithful Ifergan confessed that he had followed us, and he chided me: You are courting danger. I thought he was mad. What danger? “You held that girl’s hand.” So? “Here that means you intend to marry her.” Marry her! “What are you going to tell her father or her brother if they show up at your hotel tomorrow?” Thanks to
good old Ifergan, I may have escaped fleeting happiness and lasting misfortune.

A conscientious guide, he was constantly underfoot, awkward but accommodating. Little by little I was initiated into the real life of Casablanca, learning to distrust appearances and ready assertions. My reports became more balanced, more subtle and objective. I now understood better why so many of these Jews were ready to uproot themselves.

Back in France I received a telegram from Ifergan: “Your articles aroused considerable anger. I am now in the hospital, with a few broken ribs.”

I felt responsible and wanted to do something for him, but I didn’t know his address. I sent two or three letters “in care of the Jewish community,” but they were returned marked “addressee unknown.”

Twenty years later, in an article on repentance for the Rosh Hashana issue of
Yedioth Ahronoth
, I mentioned the unwitting wrong I had done to Ifergan so long ago. It was a sincere but humorous apology. Ifergan responded immediately: “Don’t blame yourself. I was only doing my job when I followed you. I was working for the Mossad at the time, and they told me to keep an eye on you. The chance of having my ribs broken was part of the deal.”

As for the young girl who liked carriage rides, I happened to run into her in New York, years later. Her husband and children were with her.

“How is your father?” I asked.

“My father?” she replied, surprised. “He’s no longer alive.”

“When did he die?”

“Oh, a long time ago. When I was five.”

“And your brother?”

Her eyes widened. “Brother? I’m an only child.”

Dov, the Old Man’s nephew, was now in charge of all departments of the paper except the editorial page. He suggested I write a column entitled “Sparks from the City of Light.” I accepted immediately, not only for purely material reasons—I would now draw a monthly salary of twenty-five thousand francs, modest enough, but better than before—but also because I would at last be able to break out of the “ghetto” to which my newspaper had previously confined me. Twice a week I recounted amusing anecdotes, gossip, and stories from the world of arts and letters. I attended openings, but not receptions. I was invited to various performances, but not to banquets. Neither
Yedioth Ahronoth
nor its correspondent was important enough for that. I was refused an interview with the winner of the Prix Goncourt but was granted one with a novelist who had just been awarded a less august literary prize. I had a brief exchange with Louis Jouvet, whom I went to see in his dressing room after a performance of a play by Molière. “Monsieur Jouvet,” I asked, “what do you do when you’re not being Louis Jouvet?” His reply: “I call him to show you the door, young man.” I scoured the weeklies, looking for sensational reports. Dov was happy with the column, and so was I.

Mira Avrech, Israel’s most famous gossip columnist, later told me a secret that pleased me: When she was hired by the paper to write a column on society and politics, the Old Man recommended that she
read my “Sparks” for inspiration. And so I found out that I had at least one reader in Israel.

I had one in France as well. Dana, an Israeli woman of Romanian origin, worked with my friend Shlomo Friedrich. She had many suitors, whom she attracted and discarded with great frequency. Hers was a quick and stinging intelligence, and she had lots of charm. I didn’t dare pursue her; it would have been hopeless. I was therefore content with her company. She had a bawdy sense of humor that would have made a regiment of soldiers blush. She had opinions on everything and hated being contradicted. I loved the fact that she enjoyed my articles and sometimes invited me to share her meals in a small restaurant near the Grands Boulevards. She was almost as broke as I was, but the “almost” made all the difference. She often acted as my banker, helping me make it to the next payday.

It was around that time that I saw Rachel Mintz again, the poet who had recited Yiddish verses for us in Écouis. She wanted to see me, and when I asked why, she told me it was “personal.”

She lived not far away, near the Place de la République, in a small, well-appointed apartment filled with books and flowers. There was a samovar on the table. As I looked at her, the thought crossed my mind that she must once have been very beautiful.

“I’ve been reading your articles,” she told me. “Some are good. You will be a writer. That’s why I phoned you.”

I waited to find out more about her intentions.

“I want to ask you a favor,” she continued. “But you have to promise me you’ll say yes.”

A strange request, but what did I have to lose? I replied with a phrase from the Book of Esther: “Ask for half my kingdom and it shall be yours.”

“This favor is rather more modest,” she said with a smile. “All I want is for you to listen to me, then write, and then publish. But not until after my death.”

My mind raced ahead while she stared at me calmly, waiting for my answer.

“Madame Mintz,” I said, “I promise you the second half of the kingdom.”

“Good,” she said. “Then listen …”

She began to tell me of her love affair with Nikos Kazantzakis in Berlin after the First World War, how they had met in an archaeological museum filled with Egyptian statues. “Nikos was convinced I was a
reincarnation of Nefertiti,” Rachel said. “He thought I looked like her.”