All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (45 page)

A man of integrity whose personality was riddled with contradictions, he was by turns humble and ironic, acerbic and compassionate, a rich bourgeois but a friend of the dispossessed, charitable but
fiercely polemical, a devout believer who understood those who doubted faith. “We should have met sooner,” he confided to me one day, a tinge of sorrow in his voice. “I’m an old man now, too old to start over.”

He wrote of our first meeting in his column of Saturday, May 14, 1955, referring to a “young Israeli who had been a Jewish child in a German camp.” Of course, I wasn’t Israeli. Perhaps in his mind, Jew and Israeli were the same thing.

I owe him a lot. He was the first person to read
Night
after I reworked it from the original Yiddish. He submitted it to his own publisher, promising to write a preface for the book, to speak of it in the press, and to support it with all the considerable means at his disposal. “No one’s interested in the death camps anymore,” he was told. “It won’t sell.” He then took my manuscript to Jérôme Lindon at Éditions de Minuit. The ever-daring Lindon ignored commercial considerations and gave my story a chance.

I don’t know how I would have fared without Mauriac. He kept a watchful eye on my literary efforts. During each of my trips to France I went to see him, just to talk. I needed his approval, his trust. He always began with a summary of what people had been talking about in France while I was away. I will never forget his account of a woman’s failed suicide against the background of an ill-fated love affair; she was a great journalist for whom he felt true tenderness. Then there was the story of his granddaughter’s marriage to a film director. But we also talked about such matters as his latest conversation with General de Gaulle, or the verbal thrashing he had administered to an insolent writer. He spoke often of his confessor, whom he considered a true confidant. Mauriac wept as he spoke of his brother Pierre, an ardent Pétainist accused of collaboration, who had been arrested and imprisoned in Bordeaux in 1944.

Excerpts from conversations with François Mauriac:

“But you were among the few who discerned the evil and refused to compromise.”

“Not at first, not at first. Like everyone else, I thought Pétain had the interests of France at heart. I believed that, and even wrote two articles that said so.”

“You were not alone.”

“No, I wasn’t. Others went further, longer, and deeper into error. But that’s no excuse.”

“Still. You stopped in time. Then there was
Le Cahier noir.…”

“Yes, of course. But let’s tell it as it was, as it is. In those days no one was innocent—I mean entirely innocent.”

“Except those who resisted. And the victims.”

“The victims, yes. Their innocence was absolute.”

“You told me I had to speak, to write.”

“Yes, I suggested that. You belong to a people who has survived by and through the Word.”

“What word?”

“The Lord’s Word.”

“And the Lord needs men to communicate His will?”

“It would seem so. Otherwise He would not have done it. The Jewish people have been invested with His word, have they not?”

“We are supposed to testify for Him. But how? Christians say, through suffering. We say, through faith.”

“But is that enough? You are not the only ones to have suffered, nor to have rejected heresy. In what way are the Jewish people different from others?”

“All peoples are different, each in their own way.”

“But only the Jewish people offered the world and its history the man capable and desirous of saving them from themselves.”

“Jesus of Nazareth? I know you believe that. But for me—forgive me for repeating it—he is not the Savior.”

“For me He is. I recognize it by His suffering, his agony. I belong to Him because he is Love.”

“The Jew in me is obliged to say that he belongs only to God. And God is one.”

“Any Christian believer would say the same. For us too, God is God, and He is one. But Jesus is His son.”

“All human beings are His sons.”

“In that case, how do you explain the existence of evil?”

“I distrust explanations.”

“And the Nazi hangmen? Those who massacred the Jewish children you knew? Were they, too, God’s sons?”

“That is for God to answer.”

“Sometimes God prefers to ask questions.”

“The answer is beyond me,
Maître
. But I do know that the Nazi killers and torturers were baptized.”

A long silence.

“Let us not blame Jesus for that,” Mauriac said, lowering his voice. “It is not His fault if we betray His love for us.”

“I’m not blaming Jesus. He was crucified by the Romans, and now it is Christians who torment him by committing evil in his name.”

At La Méditerranée restaurant:

“I brought you here so you could finally eat something. They don’t serve meat. Just fish.”

“I am grateful.”

“So how would you like some lobster?”

“Sorry, that’s not kosher.”

“But it’s not meat!”

“Some seafood is also forbidden.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s complicated. It’s a matter of having scales or not.”

“Shrimp?”

“Forbidden.”

“It sure is complicated being a Jew.”

“And not only in restaurants.”

I settled for a cheese sandwich.

“How did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“To survive.”

“I don’t know.”

“It was God. God’s will. The Lord chose you.”

“No, don’t say that.”

“Don’t you believe in God?”

“Yes, I do.”

“It was your faith that saved you.”

“Don’t say that, I beg you.”

“Faith can offer support and comfort. It can be a kind of nourishment,
a higher nourishment. Faith embodies life and life’s power. Perhaps it was faith that made you strong.”

“Strength had nothing to do with it.”

“Or God?”

“Not God either.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a long sigh, followed by his usual little smile.

“It is when one knows not that faith arrives.”

I felt obliged to reply: “Does that mean when faith arrives, you do know?”

Mauriac, a man of tolerance, never sought to entice me toward Christianity, never made any attempt to proselytize. In one of his columns he recounted a conversation we had about Jesus. I told him that in my view Jesus surely began as a pious Jew who put on his phylacteries every day and that it was because he was a Jew that the Romans condemned him to death and crucified him.

Let me quote from Mauriac’s text, for it requires some commentary:

I thanked him for the warm friendship with which this text is imbued, but when we next met I drew his attention to certain inaccuracies. To begin with,
Night
is not a novel. Second, having never been at the Austerlitz station during the Occupation, I could not have said that I was on that train packed with Jewish children. I probably remarked that I had been in a camp with Jewish children. Third, his criticism of Israel (which aroused no negative reaction within the Jewish community, which trusted him) was unjustified. Fourth, concerning Jesus Christ he ascribes to me a thought that is not mine but his: I believe it was Basil of Caesarea who said that man’s aim is to become God. In the Jewish tradition we aspire to greater humility: Man’s aim is to be human. Finally, I don’t know why he added that “Elie Wiesel stands on the borders of the two testaments,” like John the Baptist, but I felt I had to clarify my position for him (as I later did for my friend Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, archbishop of Paris): Where I come from and from where I stand, one cannot be Jew and Christian at the same time. Jesus was Jewish, but those who claim allegiance to him today are not. In no way does this mean that Jews are better or worse than Christians, but simply that each of us has the right, if not the duty, to be what we are.

We had already discussed this latter point several years earlier, when he did me the honor of dedicating his book on Jesus to me: “To Elie Wiesel, who was a crucified Jewish child.” On the whole, however, our relationship was free of conflict. I responded to his friendship with friendship.

Mauriac was interested in Judaism, the Jews, and their enemies. He was perturbed by the anti-Semitism of some of his peers. We spoke often, very often, of Israel, its mission and its ordeals. I invited him to visit the Promised Land: “Let us go together where it all began,
for you and me alike.” He agreed immediately. I got in touch with the Israeli ambassador, who sent him an official invitation, which he accepted in principle. But he feared the emotional upheaval he might feel at seeing the places where Christ lived his agony and his death. He postponed the journey repeatedly.

A single disagreement briefly troubled our relations when General de Gaulle in 1968 uttered his famous “little phrase” about a “self-assured and dominating people,” possibly inspired by Mauriac’s comment about genius devoted to conquest and domination. Except that Mauriac was referring to the state of Israel, de Gaulle to the people of Israel and therefore the Jewish people. I felt it necessary to criticize de Gaulle for this, while Mauriac defended him: “No one will convince me that de Gaulle is an anti-Semite.” I replied: “A man in his position is responsible not merely for what he says but also for how his words are interpreted. And his comment was interpreted as anti-Jewish.” Our quarrel did not last long. Mauriac was not only a great writer but a sincere humanist as well. He found a way to disassociate himself from the general’s comment without distancing himself from him. (His son Jean Mauriac later told me of de Gaulle’s warm admiration for the Jewish people.)