All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (59 page)

There is an anecdote about Martin Buber. Addressing an audience of priests, he said something like this: “What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?” Then he paused and added: “And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, ‘For the love of
heaven, don’t answer.’” In matters ecumenical Heschel was even more direct and engaged than Buber.

At Stanford University in California a group of professors was dining with the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the highly renowned “liberation theologian” from New York. The conversation turned to Heschel, and everyone had an amusing anecdote or touching episode to relate. Coffin offered his contribution. “One day, during an ecumenical meeting in which the ever-present subject of anti-Semitism came up, Heschel turned to me and said, ‘Do you really think God wants His blessed people to be shamed, persecuted, and perhaps even wiped off the face of the earth? Do you think God would be pleased with a world without Jews?’ To which I replied: ‘Do you think it was God’s desire to see His son persecuted, humiliated, and repudiated by the very people He had come to save? Do you think the Father was happy to see His son rejected by His brothers?’ Heschel smiled: ‘Here I admit your questions pose a problem.…’” Everyone else at the table seemed to enjoy the anecdote, but I didn’t. I said to Coffin: “I don’t believe Heschel could have said that. Jesus would have posed no problem for a faithful Jew like Heschel.”

As in Buber’s case, the more Christians admired Heschel, the more certain Jewish circles distanced themselves from him and his teaching. He spoke of disappointments at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which had welcomed him during the war, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where until his death he held a chair on mysticism and ethics. He also taught human rights—by example.

In Paris I discovered Manès Sperber. It was inevitable that one day our paths would cross, though Manès did not believe in fate. A freethinker, his credo was liberty, a subject I loved to hear him talk about. In fact, I loved to hear him talk about anything. A peerless dialectician armed with Socratic irony and encyclopedic knowledge, he could move from Pushkin to the Besht to Adler almost without transition.
Like a Tear in the Ocean
is a dazzling work. Not even Itzhak Leibush Peretz, his hero and mine, could have written it. I remember with pleasure the hours I spent with him: they were always serene and soothing. We were never complacent.

Manès was important in my life. His intellectual rigor, literary talent, humanist vision—rarely have I found these qualities united in a single individual. Yet outwardly we were worlds apart. He had been a Communist, I had not; he was drawn to psychology, I to mysticism;
he rejected religion, I had returned to it. But what bound us to each other was profound. I treasured his counsel. I was constantly asking for his views. After his death Jenka, his wife, told me he thought of me as a kind of younger brother. He was always critical, especially of those he loved, and never sentimental. I emerged from every encounter with him more lucid. I would not have written
The Testament
had I not read and heard his accounts of the years he spent working for the Comintern in Yugoslavia. I heeded his advice and warnings: not to go after success, not to let myself be swayed by honors. He never flattered anyone, never uttered an insincere phrase, never wavered in his analyses. He instinctively rejected facile popularity.

It was through him that I came to know the writer Jean Blot and the German Jewish novelist Eric Kästen. It was Manès who introduced me to Paul Celan, ever subdued, turned inward, as though listening to his magnificent
Todesfuge
(Fugue of Death).

I devoured Manès’s works:
The Burned Bramble, The Abyss
, his essays on Communist betrayal and on the Holocaust. They are masterpieces that will endure.

Of course, we had our differences. He did not share my unconditional loyalty to Israel; he wished I could be more critical. One day he chided me privately, for having publicly stated that the destiny of the Jewish people depended on that of the state of Israel. In his view, the national catastrophes that had befallen our people, though causing much bloodshed and filling many a cemetery, did not truly endanger its existence.

My friend Manès was an excellent professor and an eloquent speaker. He was a close friend of André Malraux, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Koestler (whom he published in France). But few know that it was thanks in part to him that French readers discovered Anne Frank’s
Diary
. His observations about contemporary literature will stay with me always, as will his comments on the moral and philosophical richness of shtetl humor. He loved the places and people of his childhood as I love mine.

His trilogy will endure, as indispensable testimony to the ideological and political turmoil of our century. It contains it all: a yearning for justice, a passion for humanity, a deep love for the Jewish people. There is not a wasted word or unrealized scene. Drawn to characters whose destiny appears gloomy, he chose a style that is pure and spare. They are painfully intense, strikingly exemplary. They
seem to be drawn from life, from Communists and devout Jews alike. He wrote only of what he knew, of what he had lived.

I loved to hear him recount the mysterious stories and legends of his shtetl of Zablotov. He wandered easily among its lightless cottages and through the Houses of Study where, morning and night and especially on Shabbat and during holidays, the faithful chanted their prayers. Other Jewish writers have tried to portray the myriad colors of the shtetl, but none has ever written with such authority, or such tenderness.

In 1964 I decided the time had come to visit Sighet once again. I set out for Sighet by way of Budapest, Bucharest, and Baia-Mare. In Budapest I visited the Jewish quarter, seeking traces of its past. I wondered what I would do if I ran into one of those gendarmes who had added an extra measure of sadistic brutality to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, using the tragedy to unleash their own ancestral anti-Semitism. I wanted to consult official archives, to determine who was present, where, in which office, when the decision was made to deport the Jews of Sighet and the surrounding villages. I wanted to see the ghetto, the houses protected by Raoul Wallenberg and the Swiss consul. I wanted to know why humanitarian aid from the so-called free world was so late in coming. On the Lánczhid, the suspension bridge guarded by fierce stone lions, I looked for a worried-looking woman taking her frail young son to the Jewish hospital to be examined by a great specialist. Why did he suffer from so many headaches? The boy had grown up, and the headaches had not left him. I went to the synagogue and spoke to the faithful. One of them wanted to know if I was married. Not yet, I told him. Why do you ask? There was a girl he was trying to get out of the country, and a pro forma marriage would do the trick. In Bucharest the former general Zvi Ayalon, now Israel’s ambassador, issued empty statements. I was wrong to condemn and ridicule him in my articles. (At the time, inexperienced in dealing with totalitarian regimes, I had trouble understanding his caution and distrust.) I went to the Yiddish theater. There was a large audience. Not all the actors were Jewish. Some were Romanians who spoke perfect Yiddish. No surprise there. Our Maria, too, had been fluent in Yiddish.

Maria, the kitchen, the yard, Shabbat,
heder
, the landscape of my childhood—dream long enough and the dream becomes obsession. I
related my return to Sighet in
The Town Beyond the Wall
. Except for the chapter on the childhood of Michael, the protagonist, this was a fictional work. When he goes home, he finds no one there. He opens the door of his father’s store and a stranger asks him what he wants. Candles, Michael replies, taken aback. Why candles? He doesn’t know. When the Communist police arrest him, they are intrigued by these candles. Inspectors slice them into pieces, certain they will find coded messages and microfilm inside. Disappointed, they torment the suspect. What did he mean to do with these candles? Why had he bought them? Michael has no idea what to say—for I didn’t know myself. I had made him buy candles without thinking about it, simply because he had to account for his presence in the store. I could have had him ask for buttons or scissors. And yet …

When I finally did return to Sighet, the cemetery was the first place I wanted to visit, to meditate at my grandfather’s grave. As is customary, I would have to light candles. I found a store and bought two candles. So it was that I had the feeling I was following a scenario written by someone who existed only in my imagination. Michael was my precursor, my scout. I followed his every step. I saw through his eyes, felt what he felt as I wandered the streets among passersby who didn’t recognize me or even glance at me, and as I entered my home, a stranger in my own house.

Though it hadn’t changed, I found it hard to orient myself in the little town. It seemed not to have endured a war. The streets were teeming with people. The park was as it had been, the trees and benches still in place. Everything was there. As before. Everything except the Jews. I looked all over for them, looked for the children whose joyous laughter once filtered through from the garden near my home, looked for the Talmudic students whose melodious chanting had always filled me with happiness and nostalgia. I looked for a sign of the exhausted porters who leaned against the wall at dusk to recite the minha prayer, and for the princes disguised as madmen. And I looked, too, for my comrades possessed of the messianic dream. But all were gone, swallowed by the night. Yes, they do live on—for a time—in the survivors’ memory. And then? Primo Levi may have been right: Perhaps they go on living in the memories of the dead.

I roamed the streets, stopped at the movie house, went to the hospital. No one paid attention to the prodigal returning home from afar. It was not only as though I didn’t exist, but as though I had never existed. Had there really been a time when Jews lived here?

Friends had given me the phone number of Leibi Bruckstein, a Communist Yiddish writer who lived on what used to be “my” street. I called him. He was afraid to see me alone. It was 1964, and the walls had ears. But we did manage to walk together for an hour or two. “I’m going to have to file a report,” he warned me. I understood his concern. My visit threatened to cause him trouble with the Securitate. He would have to be careful.

We walked around. Here was the house where my friend Dovid’l had lived, and there was Itzu’s, and further on Yiddele’s, whose grandfather I remembered well. He had been the
dayan
, or rabbinical judge, always elegant and pleasant. Across the street was a former House of Study. “Can I go in?” I asked. My companion hesitated, then nodded: “Yes, but it will be in my report.” I asked him, very softly, “How can you live like this?” He looked over his shoulder. No one was following us. “I would love to leave for Israel,” he whispered, “but it’s complicated. Asking for an exit visa makes you suspect. You instantly become isolated and targeted. And then, what would I do there? I’m too old to start from scratch.” I shuddered. My father had spoken almost exactly those words. “Don’t stay here,” I begged this Jewish Communist writer who, though not religious, was more Jewish than Communist. “Don’t let this regime crush you.” I offered to help him get an exit visa. I would speak to Dr. Moshe Rosen, the chief rabbi of Romania, and to Israeli friends who dealt with questions concerning Eastern European Jewry.

Eighteen years later I found myself at the Wall in Jerusalem. And there was Leibi Bruckstein. What was the atheistic Communist doing in the midst of this praying throng, stuffing a piece of paper into the interstices of the Wall? What could he be requesting? Only later did I understand: Both he and his wife were gravely ill.

I continued my rediscovery of Sighet. Walking down the Street of Jews—almost every town in Eastern Europe had one—I saw nothing but sealed shutters and doors nailed closed. All those apartments, with their tiny, gloomy, poorly ventilated rooms, now stood empty. How could my friends and their families have lived that way? It struck me how poor they had been, those Jews of Sighet so dear to me. That was true of all of us, though as a child I had been unaware of the poverty that prevailed in the Jewish neighborhoods. Fragments of memories resurfaced: a widow coming to the store on a Friday begging for more credit; an old man accosting me at the entrance to the synagogue on the morning of Tisha b’Av, a day of commemoration,
saying, “You’re fasting today? Well, think of it. I fast every day.” I saw my father looking gaunt and anxious; and my mother, tenderness personified, her face lined by long days and evenings at the shop. There they were, late one winter night, huddled in a corner, whispering about a debt that had come due. From whom could they borrow? A wave of pity engulfed me. As for everything else, it was too late.

I set out to see the synagogues again. Most were closed. In one I found hundreds of holy books covered with dust. The authorities had taken them from abandoned homes and stored them here. In a frenzy, I began to look through them. I was rewarded when I discovered a few that had belonged to me. I even found some yellowed, withered sheets of paper in a book of Bible commentaries: a commentary on the commentaries I had written at the age of thirteen or fourteen. The handwriting was clumsy, the thoughts confused. I rushed out into the street, and in my madness I saw a scene of unkempt beggars—men with dazed expressions, ageless women with their hair hidden under black scarves, cripples leaning on crutches. They were all there, waiting for me, palms extended. Were they the last, the very last Jewish remnant of what had been the flourishing community of Sighet? Had they felt the presence of the writer whose every page welcomes them? Surely I was hallucinating. I gave them everything I had with me: cigarettes, candy, money. They murmured words I could not comprehend. Suddenly I felt in danger again. I began to run, like a fugitive.