All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (35 page)

It was she who introduced him to the Jewish tradition, teaching him to fast on Yom Kippur, persuading him to go to Palestine and to learn the sacred tongue. The hero of his novel about Africa is called Toda Raba (“thank you very much” in Hebrew). The widow in
Zorba the Greek
is partly based on Rachel. In fact, she figures in each of his novels.

She let me read the letters the Greek writer had sent her in the twenties. They were love letters of stirring beauty. Though their liaison lasted just a few years, it seems their passion never died.

From that day, I plunged into Kazantzakis’s work and read it all, in one vast gulp. The great writer carried me into an enchanted universe in which man pursues with equal stubbornness his battle with himself and with God.

I spent a week listening to Rachel and then we parted. But our relations had changed. She became too touchy, too demanding. In her frequent letters she complained that I didn’t write often enough.

Years later I was on the French Riviera, covering the Cannes Film Festival. I decided to visit Kazantzakis. I obtained his address in Antibes and soon was knocking on his door. He answered in person and asked me what I wanted. When I said, “Nothing,” he closed the door in my face. A moment later he opened it again and said, “Come in.” He led me to a sofa, sat down next to me, stared at me intently, and asked, “Who are you?” I told him I was a journalist. “What do you want to know?” “Nothing,” I replied. “I just wanted to meet you.” He leaned toward me until our foreheads almost touched, and then he said, very softly, “You know her, huh?”

They had not seen each other in twenty-five years.

There was talk in Israel about the upcoming negotiations with the Konrad Adenauer government, and Dov asked me whether I would be ready to go to Germany. I wasn’t, but I said yes anyway.

After visiting Bonn, I spent a day in Dachau alone. I was troubled and depressed, for the Jewishness of the victims was barely mentioned. In Hitler’s day Jewish life had been in danger. Now it was Jewish memory that was at risk.

It was around that time that an unexpected source of income opened up for me: simultaneous translation. Molière was right: Sometimes
you have talents you don’t know you have. I was completely unaware of the craft that would now supply me with desperately needed funds.

The telephone had rung. A man with a pleasant voice and a slight drawl—“My name is Teddy Pilley and I am in need of your services”—asked me whether I would be interested in a position as an interpreter at the upcoming conference of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva. “Let me add that it’s well paid,” said the voice. “Two hundred dollars a day.” I thought I was hearing things. Two hundred dollars a day! At the time I was making fifty dollars a month. I’d be a millionaire. Teddy Pilley listened to my silence and then said, “But of course that doesn’t include the per diem.” I was speechless. What was a per diem? When I still hadn’t said anything, Pilley went on, “Come to the Congress offices tomorrow morning at eleven. You know the address? On the Champs-Élysées. We’ll talk. Are you interested?”

Was I interested! My only problem was I wasn’t sure I could do it. I had never done any “simultaneous” interpreting, didn’t even know what it was. I had never been to an international conference either. Why had they picked me? Well, I had nothing to lose. But the next morning I panicked. There were six candidates, and they apparently meant to test us one at a time. Well, I don’t like tests, and I said so to the pleasant man who greeted us as we arrived. “Don’t look at it that way,” he said. “Think of it as a game. We’re going to have some fun, that’s all.” I wanted to protest, but he quickly led me to a room where two booths had been set up, and a moment later I found myself sitting in front of a microphone wearing huge earphones. “I’m going to read something in French,” Pilley told me, “and you translate into Yiddish. A word of advice: Don’t think about the words too much. Let yourself be carried by the rhythm of my voice. It’s easy, you’ll see.” He began to read a political article from a morning paper. I felt trapped, but somehow Pilley’s voice forced my own out of my throat, and then I don’t know what came over me. I departed from the text, making things up, saying whatever came to mind. I expected my examiner to lose his temper, but it turned out Pilley didn’t know Yiddish. All he wanted was to hear me speak. I decided to make him happy. When he stopped, so did I. Next he read a speech by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress. Once again I took flight, especially since I had met Goldmann and was familiar with the subject. After about ten minutes Pilley took his earphones off, and I followed suit. “I have made my decision,” he said, smiling. “You will be part of
the team. But to appear fair, I must test all the candidates.” I must have shown my worry, for Pilley reassured me: “I don’t know them, but I doubt they’re better qualified than you. I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”

He kept his word and we had dinner together that very evening. “Call me Teddy,” he said. We liked each other. He made an interpreter’s life sound very fine indeed: well-paid trips, a good salary, exciting meetings with world figures. He said it was better than journalism. I protested. I loved my trade and would not let him disparage it. We had a lively discussion, arguments for and against. Teddy was a brilliant, funny man, a born raconteur. He told me of his life as a young Jew in Poland. He remembered Lvov with nostalgia, and seemed to have a great need to speak of his father, who had been an important lawyer there. He had had many protégés, among them a classmate of Teddy’s two years his junior for whom he bought books and clothing and for whom he paid tuition, with a generosity Teddy believed to be motivated by the friendship between the two adolescents. Years later he learned the real reason: The boy was his half-brother. They met again in Lvov after the war. “I’ll never forget how much I owe your father,” his friend said. And Teddy had corrected him gently: “You mean our father.”

Then it was my turn to talk, of Kalman the Kabalist, Shushani, Pedro. Of all my characters, it was Pedro he found the most fascinating. I was delighted to have met Teddy; we had much to talk about, many things to share. He asked me how well I knew Geneva. When I told him I had never been there, he described its tranquil mood, its serenity.

Finally, we talked about the job. Teddy filled me in on practical details and offered useful advice. When he gave me a letter confirming our agreement, I felt rich. This would pay the rent for months. I was still uneasy about whether I would be up to the task, but Teddy reassured me. “Don’t worry, most of the speeches will be in Yiddish, so you’ll have less work than the others.” At that point I confessed the trick I had played on him that morning. He burst out laughing. “I love it! What a lesson. That ought to teach me.” I promised not to do it again.

The conference opened two weeks later. I arrived by train, traveling first-class, in princely style. The eight interpreters (English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish) were housed in a luxury hotel, along
with our chief, who invited us to organize our work over coffee. “I have confidence in you,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t translate the opposite of what the speaker says. For the rest, we can always work it out.”

We worked it out by splitting up into four teams of two for each language, but so many of the speeches were given in Yiddish that my teammate and I had little to do. We therefore tried to help out the French team. That was when something happened that cost me quite a bit of money and caused considerable dissension.

It happened two days before the close of the conference, at a closed-door session of the executive committee. I was translating President Nahum Goldmann’s speech into French. He was reporting to the delegates on his negotiations with West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer about the reparations and indemnities the Bonn government was to pay Israel and the survivors of Nazi persecution.

Here I must explain that while Goldmann had a reputation as a good speaker, as head of the World Jewish Congress (which he had founded in the thirties with the American rabbi Stephen Wise to combat the Nazi peril in Europe), he was known to solicit the views of others only rarely, preferring to impose his own. Though he encouraged discussion, he would not tolerate being contradicted. He considered himself the person most qualified to manage the complex affairs of the Jewish people. He claimed not only to be on a first-name basis with all of the world’s leaders, but to be singularly adept at interpreting their intentions.

On that particular day the session was stormy. Some European and Israeli delegates feared the negotiations would result in the practice of “forgive and forget.” Tempers flared. I had never seen such a disorderly, tumultuous debate. Everyone was talking at once, and we interpreters were swamped, unable to decide whom to translate. I passed a note to Teddy, who sat in the next booth. He passed a note back to me: “Translate Dr. Goldmann, he’s paying the bills.” So I concentrated on the president as he pressed his case like a general facing mutinous troops; but hardly anyone was listening, and those who were, shouted their disagreement. Goldmann hurled slogans and reprimands, but to no avail. I vaguely heard him say to a former Latvian minister, Rabbi Mordechai Nourok, a bearded old man with a prophet’s face: “This is not a matter of sentiment; the point is to save the economy—and therefore the existence—of the Jewish state.” The rabbi
tried to answer, but Goldmann cut him off: “That’s why I wanted this to be a closed-door session. If the West German government found out the tenor of what you’re saying here, they might take it badly.” To which Rabbi Nourok, with a strained voice, responded, “And you’re more concerned about German sensibilities than about our brothers’?”

The discussion grew more and more violent. Would there be a commemoration of German crimes or not? In the end Rabbi Nourok asked: “We won’t even say Kaddish?” Goldmann’s response: “Which will profit Israel more, the Kaddish or German financial compensation?”

When the session ended, I asked my colleagues whether I had heard Goldmann right. Was he really against saying Kaddish for the victims? I needed confirmation, because when you are translating so fast, it is not easy to retain what is said. My colleague in the booth reassured me. I had heard right.

Now I had a big problem: As an interpreter I was sworn to secrecy; but as a journalist did I have the right not to report to the Israeli and Jewish public the outrageous words I had just heard? I asked Teddy for advice. He too was troubled. He could not fathom Goldmann’s position, but thought he must have had his reasons, reasons of state perhaps. “In any case,” Teddy said, “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to report this in your newspaper. But you would have to resign from the team first.”

I panicked. Was I ready to give up two hundred dollars a day, not to mention the per diem, be poor again, go back to sleepless nights? It seemed too heavy a sacrifice. There were, on the one hand, food, the rent, the laundry, the métro, the shoemaker; on the other, the duty of informing my readers and, most of all, fidelity to memory. “So, what do you say?” Teddy asked. “What are you going to do?” Feeling myself go pale, I finally murmured, “I have no choice. I resign.”

Teddy’s face lost its habitual smile. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, I’m proud of you,” as though I had performed some heroic deed. But there was nothing heroic about it. A few hundred dollars just wasn’t worth it. My new friend continued to tell me how rare idealism was these days, but I listened with half an ear. Delegates were coming and going around us. The session was soon to reconvene—but without me.

I went to the telecommunications center and feverishly drafted a brief, indignant cable. It was a scoop, and naturally it made the front page, touching off a storm in both Israel and Geneva. Goldmann had
to call a press conference, where Jewish journalists assailed him with questions. Was it true that he was opposed to saying Kaddish at the solemn closing session, that he now preached forgive and forget, that he had betrayed Jewish honor for pecuniary reasons, to please the Germans? Was it worthy of a Jewish leader to act this way? Goldmann, trying to maintain his calm, said he didn’t understand. How could anyone suspect him, a Jew of Galician origin, a friend and collaborator of Rabbi Stephen Wise, of wanting to forget the victims of Nazism or of sacrificing memory to a rapprochement with German leaders? The question of the Kaddish had never even come up in the Executive Committee. What about the story in
Yedioth Ahronoth?
It was utter fantasy, he said. There was not a word of truth in it, on his honor. Moreover, it had been a closed-door session, and all the participants had sworn they had not breathed a word to the press. In other words, the
Yedioth Ahronoth
correspondent had made the whole thing up. Goldmann, of course, didn’t realize I had been present. I could have, should have, stood up and set the record straight. But I was afraid to harm Teddy, who might have been reprimanded for having hired a journalist. And also I felt incapable of speaking in public. I left the press conference sick with shame.

I went back to the hotel and called Dov, who tried to console me. He suggested I go see Rabbi Nourok and ask him to testify, which I did. “Listen,” I said. “Dr. Goldmann is calling me a liar. My professional future is at stake. You were there. Tell them I wasn’t lying.” The rabbi gave me a fully satisfactory statement. But of course it got far less coverage than Goldmann’s denial.

Over the years Goldmann and I came to know one another well. Though I criticized him often—sometimes perhaps unfairly—he never held a grudge, and I learned to appreciate his true worth. He had the courage to shock. The ambiguity of his relations with Israel was such that he once allowed himself to express doubts about its very survival: “Perhaps Israel will turn out to be but an episode in Jewish history.” Ben-Gurion didn’t like him (calling him a Jewish Gypsy), and Golda Meir wasn’t too fond of him either, as she was suspicious of his overtures to the Soviets and the Arabs. He was an agitator ready to challenge received ideas and principles. And while he was not a good listener, he was a great speaker, able to place events in a historical context in a way that both exasperated and fascinated me. We often talked about the dark years of the war. I asked him why the American Jewish lobby hadn’t done more, acted more decisively to save European
Judaism? At first he tried to convince me they hadn’t known what was happening in the countries occupied by the Nazis. Then he admitted that they had known and had remained silent. He claimed extenuating circumstances: Up until 1941 the American Jewish community itself feared anti-Semitism; it would have been dangerous to oppose Roosevelt; the Jews didn’t have the power they came to possess—or were believed to possess—in later years; and finally, Roosevelt had a gift for convincing Jewish visitors that he was the best advocate for and protector of their people.