All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (58 page)

After court sessions I often joined a group of intellectuals who gathered around their uncrowned king, Joseph Kessel, on the terrace of the King David Hotel. The best French reporters were part of this circle. Kessel talked about other trials, other adventures. I liked him and admired his blend of strength and tenderness, and his stunning sensitivity and humanity. For him, as for us, Eichmann was an enigma and a challenge.

I remained obsessed by the same old questions. How to explain the power of evil and the complicity of the “neutral” countries? What about the passivity of American Judaism and the Palestinian Jewish community? If only the defendant could be declared irrevocably inhuman, expelled from the human species. It irritated me to think of Eichmann as human. I would have preferred him to have a monstrous countenance, like a Picasso portrait with three ears and four eyes.

I stared at him for hours on end, and he frightened me. Yet in his present state, locked in a bulletproof glass cage, he presented no danger. Why did he inspire such fear in me? Is there an ontological evil unrelated to action?

Jurists had long technical debates about the necessity of the trial, its conduct, and its probable outcome. Some said it would have been better for Israel to have turned Eichmann over to an international tribunal. Another debate: Could there be any punishment for crimes of this magnitude? Cain, after all, exterminated half the human race when he killed his brother, Abel, yet his only punishment was to bear the mark of his crime on his forehead. He remained alive, even untouchable.
No one had the right to harm him. Martin Buber declared himself against the death penalty for Eichmann. He was not alone. As for me, I trusted in Israeli justice.

Years later, during a March of the Living, a pilgrimage of some five thousand youths to Birkenau, I stood near a retired Israeli police officer originally from my region. He was a camp survivor, a quiet but intense man. We said Kaddish together. He had been one of Eichmann’s executioners.

The Town Beyond the Wall
appeared in 1962. I used a disquieting quotation from Dostoevsky as an epigraph: “I have a plan—to go mad.” But my plan was to combat madness. By which I mean that the only way to escape being contaminated by another person’s madness is by attempting to cure it. It was a lyrical, mystical adventure novel recounting one survivor’s itinerary—religious childhood, deportation, arrival in France; faith, rage, and friendship. His dreams of returning to his native town land him in a Communist prison cell, in the company of a mute madman. This book, my fourth, was favorably received and won the Prix Rivarol, awarded annually to a foreign novelist writing in French. One judge hesitated to grant the prize to the stateless person I still was.

During the reception in my honor I met Anna and Piotr Rawicz. Anna, blond and dynamic, was a film producer. Piotr, a writer of Polish origin, had won the same prize the year before for his masterly novel
Le Sang du ciel
, later published in the United States under the title
Blood from the Sky
. Today, as I write these words, I see Piotr in front of me: tall, his wiry frame slightly stooped, his gaze a mixture of irony and desperation. I will speak of him, and of his death, later.

Increasingly absorbed in my own writing, I gradually reduced my commitments to
Yedioth
. But I continued to write about political and Jewish current events for the
Forverts
. Sometimes I replaced the permanent UN correspondent, Shlomo Ben Israel, the author of remarkable detective novels. In time Rogoff and Fogelman allowed me to do more book reviews. I wrote about the work of Albert Camus and Nikos Kazantzakis, Ernest Hemingway and André Schwarz-Bart, Shmuel-Yosef Agnon and Nelly Sachs. I also wrote reviews of works by minor authors I regrettably believed it judicious to pan. I should have been more disciplined, more circumspect. But I was young, and enjoyed flaunting my “power” over talented but unfortunate (or vice
versa) writers who thought they had “made it” in the Yiddish world. Indeed, every nasty review earned me winks and compliments from my colleagues, whereas praise brought pleasure only to the recipients. Even the angels in heaven are afflicted by jealousy, the Midrash tells us.

The star of the show was Bashevis Singer, several of whose stories had been translated into English, notably by Saul Bellow (who to this day likes to chat with me in Yiddish). Singer was not liked by his colleagues. They complained of his greed, egocentricity, and vanity. As might be expected, he was envied, and as a result people made fun of him behind his back. His introduction of sensuality and eroticism into the Jewish experience shocked puritans but was well received by most. One critic in particular wrote an essay about him that, though it was never published, was widely circulated. In it he argued that Singer’s Jewish characters reflected classic anti-Semitic stereotypes: men and women obsessed with money and sex. His conclusion, purely rhetorical of course, was that if Polish Jews had been as Bashevis Singer portrayed them, did not their enemies have every reason to hate and persecute them?

My relations with Bashevis were for a time correct, even cordial. Sometimes we took the subway uptown together. Occasionally we were invited to the Webers’ at the same time. Bashevis considered me a slightly misguided, inoffensive beginner, of little interest to him since I didn’t write my novels in Yiddish. In fact, it is unlikely that he ever read them. I did read his, however, but also never referred to them in our conversations. A crisis erupted when Rogoff asked me to review one of Singers works. The article not only earned me unpleasant remarks from his enemies, who thought it too favorable; he, too, manifested his discontent. He had been expecting a rave, and subsequently took his revenge by writing a lukewarm review of my book
The Jews of Silence
. My reply was a satirical sketch of “the second son of the Haggadah,” in which I was careful not to name him. The second son is the wicked son, the
rasha
, who arrogantly questions the meaning of the Pesach festival. The text is hostile to him. In our tradition no one likes the
rasha
because he doesn’t like anyone.

When I read my article to Weber over the phone, he burst out laughing. “That’s him, exactly,” he said. “Give this article to Fogelman, let’s see what he says.” I was sure he would recognize Bashevis, but Weber felt it was worth a try. With a show of innocence, I handed my text to Fogelman, as though it were an ordinary news article. I don’t
know if he read it, but it was published the following week. Singer’s enemies were jubilant. I expected to be scolded by Fogelman, but I had underestimated him—he congratulated me. For once, Singer must have read my article, because from that moment on contact between us became increasingly rare and finally stopped. No more polite smiles in the elevator. When I praised his foremost rival, Chaim Grade, in
The New York Times
, calling him (sincerely and with conviction) “the greatest contemporary Yiddish writer,” the rift was sealed.

The day my satirical article appeared, I was the most popular man in Yiddish circles. I noted with a mixture of amusement and sadness how unappreciated Bashevis was by the Jewish “man in the street.” Other Yiddish writers sulked at every honor he received. The day his Nobel Prize was announced was a day of mourning for many of them.

Yet his fortnightly articles were stunning successes, especially among female readers. He was fond of recounting his amorous exploits and did so with great exuberance and talent. What his colleagues reproached him for most of all was his lack of solidarity. They accused him of maneuvering to prevent their own writings from being translated, and of posing as “the last writer in this dead language.” That kind of attitude enraged Yiddish writers: “He’s trying to bury us alive.” Many felt, as I do, that among living Yiddish novelists Chaim Grade surpassed him; others whispered that any one of them surpassed him (I disagree).

He aroused such animosity inside the Yiddish world because he appeared to be distorting and caricaturing the image of the Eastern European Jew. Without denying or minimizing Singer’s talent, the purists among Yiddish writers complained that his protagonists were frequently ugly and morally deficient, charming but unbalanced, clever but perverse. He painted a picture of Polish Jews as sex maniacs, of pious rabbis who dreamed of nothing but adultery on Yom Kippur eve. Yes, I know it is fiction, but still …

The more the general public admired him, the more Yiddish authors rejected him. He was well aware of this. One evening, at a dinner at the home of a well-known rabbi, he said, “Jews are never satisfied. Whatever I write, they say it wasn’t what they expected of me. I’ve never seen such ungrateful readers.” He laughed about it, but it annoyed him. In fact, he was easily annoyed. Yet his admirers are legion, and they remain faithful to him.

As for myself, I like his short stories most of all. He was a superb storyteller; his strength lay in his compression. I appreciate his imagination
and taste for the occult. His world was inhabited by sprites and demons, in whom he truly believed. He invited a rabbi friend to his Nobel Prize ceremony in order, he said, to ward off the evil eye: with so many mischievous spirits everywhere, a rabbi’s presence couldn’t hurt, which nobody could dispute.

His funeral was pathetic. There were few mourners, the Yiddish literary world was virtually unrepresented. A rabbi delivered a eulogy in English with a phrase or two of Yiddish thrown in.

Though I was not among his admirers, I felt sad. It should have been different.

The Yiddish (and Hebrew) author to whom I felt closest was Aharon Zeitlin, a childhood friend of Singer’s. I loved him as a man and as a writer. His father, Reb Hillel Zeitlin, produced a literary and philosophical corpus I reread with ever-renewed emotion and amazement. They say he left the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 wrapped in his talit, the Zohar under his arm, along with several thousand other Jews who were taken to the Umschlagplatz, where sealed cattle cars were waiting to carry them to Treblinka.

Once a month I visited Aharon, the last survivor of a long line of sages and scholars. Bald, with a thin, almost transparent face and blue, limpid eyes, he spoke rapidly in a voice of great clarity. I loved listening to his memories of literary Warsaw, sayings of his father’s, reflections on his contemporaries. Singer publicly acknowledged how much he owed him, but refused to help him find an American publisher. Zeitlin was not bitter.

Reb Aharon died of a heart attack. At his funeral this is what I wrote in my notebook.

I made friends with another Yiddish poet and thinker from Warsaw, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great-grandson of the Rebbe of Apt, whose name he bore. Heschel was profoundly Jewish, a deep believer and a sincere pacifist who wrote lyric poems in Yiddish (one of which I recited at his funeral). He also produced a magnificent work on Rebbe Mendel of Kotz, and two volumes of Talmudic studies in Hebrew, as well as theological works in English. He was generous with his advice when I was writing on Hasidic masters.

We spent hours together, sometimes strolling up and down Riverside Drive discussing God, prayers, Polish Hasidism compared to Hungarian Hasidism, Lithuanian Yiddish folklore, and Polish Yiddish literature. He loved to reminisce about Frankfurt, where in the thirties he succeeded Martin Buber at the Institute of Jewish Studies. Heschel was a man motivated by humanism and civic virtue as well as Hasidic fervor. Nor did he conduct his quest for knowledge from an ivory tower. He was an active opponent of the war in Vietnam. One Shabbat afternoon he confided to me that Israeli friends had asked him—possibly on the initiative of American officials—to keep a lower
profile in his struggle against Lyndon Johnsons policy in Southeast Asia. “What can I do?” Heschel asked. “How can I keep silent when week after week thousands of Vietnamese civilians are being killed by our bombs? How can I forget the Jewish concept of
ra’hmanut
, of pity, of charity? How can I proclaim my Jewishness if I remain insensitive to the pain and mourning of men, women, and children who have been deprived of sleep by years of nighttime bombing?” He was genuinely distressed and since he was asking my opinion, I gave it to him. Press on, I told him, even at the cost of annoying the administration.

Heschel was the major spokesman for Jewish ecumenism, a Jewish friend of all the oppressed. He was among the first to fight for Russian Jews and—it should be noted—for American blacks. It was he who introduced me to Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he revered. In the civil rights movement they called him Father Abraham, as a result of which certain Orthodox circles kept their distance from him, which grieved him. “He’s too close to the Christians,” they said. Nonsense, I replied when I heard such criticism. What is wrong with a Jew teaching Judaism to non-Jews while defending the honor and tradition of his people? When he went to see Pope Paul VI in Rome, it was to discuss the Catholic Church’s anti-Semitism. He believed that a Jew must not lock himself into a kind of spiritual ghetto, forever separated from the society that envelops or opposes him. It is not human, it is not Jewish, to ignore everything that is not Jewish. Scripture teaches us the value of human life—all human life, whether Jewish or not. Our sages insist on the obligation of
pikua’h nefesh
, of coming to the aid of any endangered person whatever his ethnic origin, social standing, or religious faith. That is why the Talmud offers us two versions of the same precept: One says that to save a human life is to save humanity, the other that to save a
Jewish
life is to save humanity, thus tempering a universalism and particularism either of which could easily be exaggerated. In other words: one can be a good Jew and work with those who are not Jews to create a better world. Heschel expressed and lived that wish in his way, I in mine.