All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (55 page)

Antoine Gallimard and Bernard Henri-Levy (on behalf of Grasset) came to see me in New York in the following weeks. Gallimard’s prestige is unequaled, and Antoine and I quickly established a good rapport. I appreciated his dynamism and his devotion to his authors, as well as his vision of the role of literature in society and his concept of friendship. But I was afraid of the size of his firm. On the other hand, Grasset, for me at that time, was Bernard, whom I had known since we met on the Cambodian border, where we both took part in the March Against Hunger. I remembered that when I had shown him the proofs of
Paroles d’étranger
, he told me it was that work that had inspired him to write his first novel. Bernard introduced me to Jean-Claude Fasquelle, whose strong character and discretion I came to admire. He spoke little, but his silences were eloquent. His wife, Nikki, a magazine publisher, has the keenest sense of humor in the small world of Parisian publishing.

My wife Marion and I spent hours discussing the merits of the two houses with Georges. The Grasset team (Jean-Claude, Bernard, and Yves Berger) worked efficiently and aggressively. When I gave them T
he Fifth Son
, Paul Flamand sent me a one-line letter—“I am devastated.” Chodkiewicz’s word “genocide” stood between Le Seuil and me. But I never considered it a divorce. Le Seuil was still my family, Grasset now became my adoptive family. Bernard visited New York often. (A brilliant philosopher and observer of the social scene, he brought me news of the latest literary intrigues in Paris. No one was better informed about what went on in the circles that concerned us.) I stayed with Grasset until the scientist Claude Cherki succeeded Michel Chodkiewicz at Le Seuil.

I also changed publishers in the United States several times, but, unlike in France, the practice is common here. Few writers publish all
their work with a single house. After
The Accident
, Arthur Wang judiciously advised me to take my next novel to a larger house. Paul Flamand put me in touch with Mike and Cornelia Bessie at Atheneum. I gave them
The Town Beyond the Wall The Gates of the Forest, Legends of Our Time
, and
The Jews of Silence
were published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
A Beggar in Jerusalem
and
Souls on Fire
by Random House,
The Testament
and
The Forgotten
by Summit/Simon and Schuster.

These changes upset me, even though they were useful and often necessary. I simply followed my editors. When they changed houses, I went with them.

Peter Mayer was—at the time—the boy wonder of American publishing. He made a success of everything he undertook professionally. As publisher of the paperback editions of my works he got so interested in the landscape of my books that he accompanied me to Sighet and Jerusalem. When he attended a Friday evening service at the Wall, completely unprepared for the experience, he burst into tears. Eventually, his career took him from Avon Books to Penguin. One day he wrote me a long letter. The bottom line was that he was not taking the rights to
The Forgotten;
the hardcover edition was not selling briskly enough. Business is business.

Arthur Kurzweil is a different kind of publisher. As the talented head of Aronson Books, he mainly reprints titles that he considers essential reading. He was my student at City College and at one point wanted to write a book about me. I discouraged him. “Instead,” I said, “why don’t you write something about yourself?” He did. His book on Jewish genealogy is a “must” for any Jewish home.

Everything went well at Hill and Wang. Its efforts, as a small house, were highly focused, and during the months after
Night
was published, the company promoted it exclusively, with great fervor, and successfully. The literary pages were unanimous in their praise. For the most part the reviewers understood the work well and captured its essential themes. The important newspapers praised the book’s austere style and its dimension of truth. My moment of triumph came when
The New York Times Book Review
invited me to write reviews. (In my own Uncle Sam’s view, that was at least as good as a Nobel Prize.)

When
La Ville de la Chance
(in the American edition,
The Town Beyond the Wall)
was published in Paris, a reporter from Belgian Radio asked me—and I quote—“How much longer are you going to wallow in suffering?” In France, as in the United States, some critics began to
suggest that the time had come to let go of the subject. Their objections were less literary than personal. Had they said that my characters were too transparent or too opaque, that my words or images were unsatisfactory, I could have learned to live with it. But most framed the discussion in other terms, questioning the theme and my own experience. In other words, either overtly or obliquely, they expressed annoyance with me for having lived a past different from theirs and for being the Jewish witness that I am. Even when my theme was the Bible, the Talmud, the Middle Ages, or Hasidism, there were those who linked the works to the Holocaust.

In France my novels now met with silence, or smug politeness. I was awarded the Prix Médicis for
A Beggar in Jerusalem
, even though only three or four newspapers reviewed it. Only after the Médicis was announced did critics allow that it had merit.

In France and the United States the Jews were not yet being accused of “collecting the dividends of Auschwitz,” but in interviews I was often asked: “Are you ever going to stop writing about the Jewish tragedy? Don’t you think other, more recent tragedies are equally worthy of attention?” (In the 1980s one Goncourt juror commented, “We’ll give him the prize when he brings us a novel on some other theme.”)

I responded only rarely, with a phrase borrowed from the writer Manès Sperber, who in turn had paraphrased a Talmudic saying. Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough; even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. After a while I ceased to react, especially since nasty rumors had begun to circulate. It seemed my colleagues and I were making a fortune off the Holocaust. Sperber, whose advice I sought when it all started in the mid-sixties, was enraged. But he didn’t know how to stop the slanderous rumors, and neither did I. All this criticism leveled at writers on the Holocaust was outrageous and unworthy of reply. Just as it is humiliating to have to combat the Holocaust deniers by reiterating that the tragedy did indeed occur, that our parents and grandparents were in fact murdered. At some point in their lives, every writer who has written about the Holocaust has had to defend himself against this sort of accusation, which leaves one feeling smeared and powerless. Yet it is crucial to denounce such malevolence, whose most dangerous and perverse effect would be to make people shrink from speaking of the Holocaust.

In my essay “A Plea for the Survivors” I wrote: “You who have not
experienced their anguish, who do not speak their language and do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them.… Wait until the last survivor, the last witness, has joined the long procession of silent shadows whose judgment one day will resound and shake the earth and its Creator.”

Yes, who will tell the censors, so determined to attribute their own baseness to us, to have the decency to be quiet? Who will tell them that we have nothing to learn from them?

But I am ashamed to admit that the charge of being mercenary did hurt me at first, as it did many of my fellow writers. Probably in response to it, I decided to share the prize money from my two French awards with the French Jewish writers Piotr Rawicz and Arnold Mandel. In 1970, in an epilogue to
One Generation After
, I announced my intention to bring this chapter to a close: “And now, teller of tales, turn the page. Speak to us of other things. Let your mad prophets, your old men drunk with nostalgia, your possessed, return to their nocturnal den. They have survived their deaths for more than a quarter century now. That should suffice. And if they refuse to be gone, at least make them keep quiet. At all costs. By any means necessary. Tell them that silence, more than speech, remains the sign and substance of what was once their world and that it, like speech, demands to be recognized and transmitted.” This passage earned me an “open letter” from the Jewish historian Joseph Wulf (who committed suicide several years later in Berlin). He urged me not to give up. He spoke of the duty of testifying. In truth, how can anyone fail to see that a witness rendered mute betrays the living as much as the dead?

One French Jewish critic, a judge by profession, was particularly virulent in his personal attacks on me. Having heaped praise on my first writings, he now began to express an antipathy that grieved my friends in Paris. Living in New York, I was unaware of this, but with obvious pleasure he informed me of it in person.

He came to see me at my hotel in Paris in 1966. I had just returned from Moscow, where I had barely escaped arrest for having written
The Jews of Silence
. When the judge telephoned, I assumed he wanted to question me about the tragedy of the Soviet Jews. In fact, he wished to tell me why his attitude toward me had changed. “You’re too attached to God and Israel,” he said. “I find that disappointing.” No doubt he did, but those who knew him felt there was something else at issue as well. He was annoyed by what he considered my “celebrity.” And not only mine. Three leading French Jewish intellectuais,
André Neher, Emmanuel Levinas, and Léon Ashkenazy, also drew his ire. His articles denouncing our influence were violent and irrational.

My only response was silence. Once again I recalled Mauriac’s warning: first they build statues to you, then they dismantle them. Of course, literary envy is hardly new. Even the Talmud refers to
kin’at sofrim
, or writers’ jealousy. Tolstoy called Shakespeare a scribbler, Strindberg accused Tolstoy of plagiarism.

At the end of the daily Amidah prayer, we ask the Lord to spare us envy: “May I not feel it toward others, may others not feel it toward me.” I understood this prayer far better once I began to write. Too mystical for some, I was not mystical enough for others; too Jewish or not Jewish enough, too much or not enough the believer, too accessible or too obscure. They think you have power, and they insist they have claims on you. Since you have attained “success,” it is incumbent upon you to help all those who demand your assistance. How many writers are angry with other writers because they did not praise their work, because they refused to supply a blurb for the jacket or failed to place their manuscript with his or her publisher?

I realize I ought not to linger on this unpleasant subject. But I have not yet spoken of Alfred Kazin. This critic remains one of my great disappointments. I forget who it was who said, “The writer the gods wish to destroy, they make Kazin’s friend.” He is among the few people whose paths I regret ever having crossed. When I was unknown, his praise of
Night
in an intellectual weekly called T
he Reporter
helped me get noticed. When, at last, several of my books had found readers, he did what he could to turn them away. Why? I have been told he has acted similarly with other writers. His generosity is often short-lived. In 1994 he caused a furor when he accused his former friend Saul Bellow of racism.

In his most recent outburst of venom, he wrote the following ghoulish and mean-spirited lines about a writer who left us a remarkable body of work: “Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide—in sensational fashion, of course—sitting in the bathtub, his head in a plastic bag.” According to Kazin, it was just another publicity stunt. “I never managed to believe a word he said,” Kazin wrote in
The New Yorker
. “He always manufactured himself in public. Probably it was all tied to the fact that he was a Holocaust survivor.” Once again he let the mask slip: he distrusted Kosinski, repudiated and condemned him in large measure because he was a survivor.

There was a time when we saw each other or spoke on the phone regularly. He was a member of a literary panel founded by survivors of Bergen-Belsen, headed by Yossel Rosensaft. Kazin accompanied the group to Belsen and then to Jerusalem. Rosensaft took good care of him, providing a luxurious hotel room, pocket money, gifts for him and his wife. Back in Manhattan he even invited him to his home. But all Mr. Kazin found to say about his hosts in a smug magazine article was that Yossel’s wife was the owner not only of a luxurious apartment but also of an inordinately large number tattooed on her arm. As though she had ordered it from Cardin. As for me, he was annoyed with me for having too sad a face and too frail a body. But worst of all, in a text in which he recalled “what he owed” to Primo Levi and me, he wrote that he would not be surprised to find that the episode in
Night
describing three inmates who were hanged together had been invented. How dare he? There were thousands of witnesses, some of them still alive, among them Yaakov Hendeli, who now lives in Jerusalem, and Freddy Diamond of Los Angeles, whose brother Leo Yehuda was the youngest of the three victims. (The two others were Nathan Weisman and Yanek Grossfeld.) Of all the vile things this bitter man who has aged so badly has written in his life, this is the most intolerable.

The witness has nothing but his memory. If that is impugned, what does he have left? In the last analysis, a man like Kazin is lending credence to those who deny the Holocaust. If
he
refuses to believe me, why should others, more removed, believe any survivor? For some people it is easier and more convenient to say that the event never happened, that it is merely an abstraction, a delusion, a Hollywood production. How to explain to them that it was an experience that can
neither he
imagined nor shared?

Let me be clear: I don’t blame the critics. They are just doing their job, some in good faith, others not. No author should expect only praise. But he has the right to condemn abuse and personal insult. I place my trust in readers, hoping I will be understood. They must know that the truth I present is unvarnished; I cannot do otherwise. Sing or die, said Heine. Write or disappear. Kazin’s concept of writing and mine are not the same, nor are our motives. For him literature is an end in itself. Not for me. I don’t believe in art for art’s sake. For me literature must have an ethical dimension. The aim of the literature I call testimony is to disturb. I disturb the believer because I dare to put questions to God, the source of all faith. I disturb the miscreant
because, despite my doubts and questions, I refuse to break with the religious and mystical universe that has shaped my own. Most of all, I disturb those who are comfortably settled within a system—be it political, psychological, or theological. If I have learned anything in my life, it is to distrust intellectual comfort.