All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (4 page)

Like all children, I had my share of rebellion against this or that teacher or classmate, and even against my parents. Sometimes I felt they didn’t understand me, that they judged me wrongly or were unfair. A single stern look or harsh word and I wanted to flee, far beyond the rivers and valleys, preferably to my grandfather’s, or to the Holy Land. Don’t laugh, I really thought it was possible. All you had to do was climb the mountain and look for the secret door to the special corridor that led to Galilee. There, far from my family, all my anger would vanish. But I wasn’t old enough. It was easier to sulk in silence. Fortunately these storms did not last long.

World events had little direct effect on me at the time. I was too young. I remember only feeble echoes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s victory in the American presidential elections, the Reichstag fire, the first Stalinist purges, social and political convulsions in Spain, the war in Ethiopia, the death of the League of Nations: there was talk of all these things at the synagogue, and my father would discuss them with visitors at night, but they felt very far away.

The local situation, on the other hand, did scare me. When the anti-Semitic Iron Guard raised its head, we lowered ours. Slogans would sprout on the walls: “Jews to Palestine!” Thugs, their faces twisted with hate, would assault Jews in the street, tearing at their beards and side curls. The Kuzists, as they called themselves, were the Romanian version of Nazis. Savages thirsting for Jewish blood, they would launch pogroms on the slightest pretext. “Don’t go to
heder
today,” my worried father would say. My sisters often didn’t go to school. On those days the store was bolted shut, and regular customers were escorted in through the living room. At the slightest warning we rushed to the cellar, though I had no idea why. Were the thugs afraid of the dark? We couldn’t rely on the police, who not only failed to protect us from these murderers but helped them. We lived in terror. Our enemies were capable of anything, including accusing us of ritual murders.

I remember a sad song my mother used to sing to me, a popular song about a Hungarian village. In it a Jew recounts his grief: Accused
of cutting the throat of a Christian child for ritual purposes, he cries out, “Cursed be our enemies who claim the Jews need blood to practice their religion!”

In general, I accepted outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred as endemic to our condition. If they beat us on Christmas Eve or threatened us at Easter, it would pass soon enough. If drunks insulted us, cursing us for having “profaned the Host,” “poisoned the wells,” or “killed the Lord,” it was only natural, to be expected. I faced these ordeals without astonishment, almost without sorrow, as though telling myself, it’s their problem, not ours.

But during the darkest times, I would ask myself simple, perhaps simplistic questions: Why do they hate us? Why do they persecute us? What did we do to arouse such cruelty? I would discuss it with my teachers, and even more often with my friends.

My teachers’ response was to have us read and reread the Bible, the prophets, and martyrological literature. Jewish history, flooded by suffering but anchored in defiance, describes a permanent conflict between us and the others. Ever since Abraham, we have been on one side and the rest of the world on the other. Hence the animosity. “Abraham, the first of the patriarchs, was a better Jew than you,” said one of my tutors, a tense and agitated man with eyes that burned with rage. “He was a thousand times better than all of us, but the Midrash tells us that he was cast into a burning furnace. So how do you expect to breeze through life without a scratch? Daniel was wiser than you and more pious, yet he was condemned to die in a lion’s den. And you dream of living your life without suffering? The children of Jerusalem were massacred by the soldiers of General Nebuzaradan, and you complain?” Later Kalman, my Kabalist Master, had me recite aloud the litanies and chronicles of the afflictions of Jewish communities dispersed during the Crusades and ensuing pogroms. The communities of Blois and Mainz, York and Reims, all perished by sword and fire for refusing to renounce their faith. And he would conclude by quoting the Talmud: “Better to be among the victims than among the killers.”

I thrived on these stories, proud of these Jews whose fidelity to the Covenant made them both vulnerable and immortal. I felt drawn to the prisoners of the Inquisition. Each of them recalled Isaac, though no angel intervened to extinguish the flames that were to consume them. I was haunted by their ordeal. Would I have had the strength to endure? I dreamed of Rabbi Hanina ben Tradyon, the Talmudic sage condemned by the Romans to die slowly on the pyre because he had
taught the law in the public square. How had he and his disciples and theirs managed not to yield? I thought of my own ancestor Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann, author of the
Tossafot Yom-Tov
, who was imprisoned in Prague and Vienna during the Thirty Years’ War. Would I, too, be able to remain Jewish under my jailers’ eyes? I liked to invoke the memory of another ancestor, the Sh’la Hakadosh: at the supreme moment would he come to help me follow him without fear or shame?

Today, half a century later, these questions remain open. My people’s survival leaves me perplexed even now, just as the undying hatred for it continues to preoccupy me.

Guided by my teachers, I hoped to find the answer in books. I read assiduously, perhaps too assiduously. Hence my disdain—surely a failing—for sports. Football, skiing, tennis: none of them was for me. Certain rich young Jews of assimilated families engaged in these sports, but I didn’t even know how to swim. For relaxation I played chess, and sometimes cards on Christmas Eve, when even ultraorthodox Jews played cards rather than show themselves on the street. Other evenings I spent with friends among the Hasidim, who always found some occasion for celebration. On Saturday afternoons in spring I would go for walks in the Malompark or along the banks of the Tisza and Iza, our town’s two rivers. One summer evening I followed a crowd to the main square and spent hours watching an acrobat perform on two enormous stilts, his head touching the roofs. Another time I saw a tightrope walker. I still remember the crowds cry of fright when he fell. “That’s human life,” someone remarked, “a tightrope.” A Jewish theater troupe from Vilna, I think, came to put on several performances. I don’t remember which plays. Once my mother took me to the movies to see a Yiddish film about Jewish settlements in Palestine, or was it Birobidzhan? Boys and girls were shown working in the fields, laughing and singing. Another time a Hungarian film,
Girl of the Night
, was shown. I remember the face and the name of the star, the beautiful Karády Katalyn, from a poster. But I never saw the film. After all, a good Jewish boy, religious to boot, did not waste his time—and lose his soul—watching women doing God-knows-what.

From the pedagogical point of view, of course, my parents were making a mistake. Though I hadn’t seen the film, the actress occupied my thoughts. Considerable efforts were required to drive her out, especially at night, just before I went to sleep. And she was not alone. Despite (or because of) the prohibitions, there were times when my glance roamed where it shouldn’t have, in the direction of a young female
neighbor or a beautiful stranger passing through the neighborhood. This troubled me, and I punished myself. Satan was leading me astray, casting a spell over me. He wanted to make me his slave, his prey; he was trying to capture my soul and poison it. How could I defend myself? I remember a judges daughter, a lovely, haughty blonde with long silky hair who would walk past our house at a measured pace. I didn’t know why, but she made my heart pound. To purify my spirit I resorted to prayer, a common and sometimes effective device. At least it took time. There were psalms in the morning, psalms in the afternoon, and psalms in the evening. At the time of my bar mitzvah I went to the ritual baths every morning before services. Thirteen immersions, corresponding to the numerical value of Ehad, God is one, or twenty-six immersions because the Tetragrammaton adds up to twenty-six. I prayed with fervor, convinced that with a bit of
kavanah
, of concentration, I would vanquish the temptations of evil, along with evil itself. Just a bit more inner discipline and my prayers would rise to seventh heaven, leaving the judge’s daughter and all the others behind.

I sometimes envied one or another friend not because he was better dressed or more often praised by our teachers, but because he prayed with greater devotion.

Would that I could open my soul to prayer and aspire to purity today as I did in those days.

I see my father, I dream I see him. Sometimes I see only him. He seems worried, somber. Is he looking for a little Jewish boy like any other, in a little Jewish town like so many others, a Jewish adolescent in search of redemption? He is looking for me: Eliezer, son of Shlomo. I see him at the store. Across the street from us lives the Rebbe of Borsha, Reb Pinhas Hager. On our right the Slotvener Rebbe holds court for his elated faithful. On our left is the home of Reb Shloimele Heller, a rabbinical judge known for his levelheadedness.

It seems funny, I know. This little town has so many rabbis, each drawing his own followers. You might think Sighet was one enormous synagogue, that God’s service was all we cared about, that material considerations were of no concern. But you’d be wrong. We had our share of thieves and informers. There was “Yankel the horse thief” and “Berl the fink.”

Of course, we all awaited the Messiah. It would all work out in the end. A little patience. If the inhabitants of my town were optimists,
it was because they had little choice. What would become of a Jew who resigned himself to pessimism? Can you imagine a pessimistic Messiah?

The Messiah. My poor mother never ceased to demand and await His coming. He was never far from her mind. At night, as she rocked me to sleep, she would sing of her deep conviction that nothing bad would happen to her child, since the Messiah would come in time to protect him. Anti-Semites? Doomed, reduced to impotence. His merest stirring would scare them off. Military service? “Fear not, my child. There will be no more armies.” My mother believed this with all her soul. The Jewish people would soon be delivered, never again sending their children to be killed for European emperors and kings. I don’t know whether the Savior was awaited anywhere else with as much fervor and love as in Sighet. But I do know that every Jewish child in shtetls everywhere lived the same hope.

Yet each town and hamlet has its own personality, its own character and mentality, color and temperament. With just one glance I can tell the difference between Krechnev, where my Uncle Israel, the grocer, lived, and Bichkev, where Grandfather Dodye had his little farm.

But let us linger a moment in Sighet, the region’s capital, which wasn’t much of a capital. It did, however, have a penchant for changing—its name, its nationality, and thus its allegiance. When my father was born, it was a proud part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and called itself Máramarossziget. When I first saw the light of day, it proudly bore the name of Sighetul Marmaţiei and belonged to the Kingdom of Greater Romania. When I left it, it was Máramarossziget again, a Hungarian city of noisy patriotism. Today its capital is Bucharest once more, but Budapest demands its return in the name of God-knows-what.

I will never forget having to learn the Hungarian national anthem overnight, the Romanian royal hymn having been tossed aside like a dirty old sock. Now we shouted “God save Hungary!” with the same enthusiasm with which we had earlier cried “Long live the king!”

At home, of course, Yiddish predominated. But we also spoke German, Romanian, and Hungarian. At the store you might also hear Ruthenian, Ukrainian, and Russian. You had to be a born polyglot to communicate with the peasants, though often just a few words would suffice: hello, yes, no. Most of our customers could get along in Yiddish. Maria, our servant, spoke it fluently, with nearly no accent and
with great conviction. She knew our customs, mores, and laws. Sighet, after all, was pretty much a Jewish town, and all our Christian neighbors knew that a Jew could not light a fire on Saturday, eat leavened bread during Passover, or touch impure meat. The opposite was not the case: I knew nothing of the Christian religion, which inspired in me no curiosity, only fear. I would cross the street when I passed the church on my way to the synagogue or the House of Study. Was it the incense, liturgical processions, and icons that frightened me, or the crowd, whom I imagined filled with hate for the people of Israel? Perhaps I subconsciously recalled traumatizing stories about Jewish children kidnapped by monks and forced to convert.

Yet I did have Christian friends—well, maybe not friends, but classmates. I can still see them playing in the schoolyard among themselves. Some came to the store to buy a kilo of sugar or flour. They smiled at me then, but at school they pretended not to know me. On Christmas Eve they wore masks with horns and carried whips, taking part in the hunt for Jews. No, not all of them. I remember one pallid, timid boy, an excellent pupil. When his comrades let us feel their hatred, Pishta would wink at me, as if encouraging me to hold on. Later, when the ghetto was created, he helped me carry our radio to a friend of my father’s.

Outside
heder
, I was always terrified by exams, but I got good grades in elementary school, partly because I did my homework and learned my history and geography lessons by heart, but perhaps also because my teachers, including a gruff man named Muresan, were eager to please my parents. They were our, shall we say, special customers, and in exchange I was their pet pupil in class. They were kind enough to look the other way when I was absent, which was often, since I was less concerned with secular studies than with holy books. I was no more interested in the patriotic slaughters of Hungarians and Romanians than I was in legends about the birth of Remus and Romulus or Attila’s military exploits. Passing exams was no problem: I simply crammed for a month. During that time I did nothing else, neglecting the Talmud while begging its forgiveness and pledging to return as soon as exams were over, a promise I always kept. Within a week I had forgotten everything secular.