All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (8 page)

Visiting him was a festival for the heart and mind. I would lose sleep preparing myself physically and mentally, and in his presence I felt purified, uplifted, and secure. At his house no one looked at me askance, and no one judged me. I was free and at ease. Everything belonged to me, and I was given everything. The sun’s rays playing in the branches of the fruit trees, the river that carried my secrets to the next village, the blue, gray, and purple carpet of sky stretching to the horizon—nature seemed to exist only for my grandfather to tell me of its eternal beauty.

He was a marvelous singer, with a warm, melodious voice that
could conjure worlds near and far. He knew the songs of the Wizhnitz court, those sung on the eve of Shabbat and those murmured at dusk the next day, at the hour of its departure. He knew the romantic, mystical songs the Rebbe of Kalev sang in Hungarian, and the nostalgic tunes of Romanian shepherds, slow and thundering
doinas
that were calls to glorious dreams and the love of broken hearts. When he stopped to catch his breath, I would beg him for more, and with an ever more gleeful smile he would recall a new song attributed to this or that
tzaddik
. Once he stopped in the middle of a
niggun
. Eyes closed, he seemed asleep. Afraid of waking him, I didn’t budge. But he wasn’t sleeping. “I’m dreaming,” he said. “I’ve never sung so much. Thanks to you, I think I can rise to
Haikhal Haneggina
, the celestial sanctuary where words become song.”

He told stories too. Stories of miracle-makers, of unhappy princes and just men in disguise. It is to him I owe everything I have written on Hasidic literature. The enchanting tales of Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav, the parables of the Rebbe of Kotzk, the sayings of the Rebbe of Rizhin, and the witticisms of the Rebbe of Ropshitz: he knew them all, and he taught me to savor them. Suddenly I would find myself on the boat that carried Rebbe Nahman to the Holy Land. I followed the Rizhiner into exile, waited at the Kotzker’s door to glimpse him in his terrible isolation. I saw them all, and saw myself before them. I felt exhilarated, inspired, and enriched from moment to moment, from tale to tale. “I’ll never forget these stories,” I told him, and he answered, “That’s why I’m telling them to you. So they won’t be forgotten.”

For the High Holidays he would come into town to attend the service of Rebbe Pinhas, the Rebbe of Borsha. He would always stay with us. Since my father prayed at the Great Synagogue, I would accompany my grandfather to the Hasidic Beit Midrash across the street. As a privileged guest, he would stand near the Rebbe, and so would I. During those special prayers that are recited with fear and trembling, he would draw me under his talit to protect and comfort me. I would feel his heavy hand on my head and follow the words that soared to the highest spheres, interceding on my behalf and on the people of Israel’s.

We used to have an open house on Rosh Hashana. After the reading of the Torah and before the particularly solemn service of Musaf, the Borsher Rebbe’s faithful were invited to have a glass of tea in our yard. The children acted as waiters. For my grandfather
it was a moment of pride: he would watch us and bless us with his eyes. Then we would stay with him for the second half of the service.

Later, dressed in his caftan and his wide-brimmed fur hat, the yellowed
Makhzor
under his arm, a prince among princes, he would sing all the way back to our house. “Happy New Year!” he would call out joyfully. And he exuded so much confidence, so much grace and love, that I knew the year would be good. Yes, even 1943. And yet. That was his last Rosh Hashana.

In April 1944 my parents invited him and his wife to live with us. “Let’s stay together,” they proposed. There was already talk of a ghetto in Sighet. “Let’s be in it together,” they said. But he refused. He preferred to stay with his three sons, Israel, Chaim-Mordechai, and Ezra, and their children. I don’t know what his last weeks and days were like. I have been told they were all forced into the ghetto of a nearby city and that their transport was attached to the third convoy out of Sighet.

I try to picture him in the ghetto, and to picture myself at his side. How did he express the joy, the Hasidic joy, he drew from Creation and its Creator? I try to picture him in the sealed cattle car. How did he say his prayers? To whom did he entrust his testament? I try to imagine him walking with the sick and the old toward the fiery site from which there was no return, and … No, I don’t want to imagine that. I cannot. It would be indecent. A man’s encounter with death must remain private. I prefer to avert my eyes, or to close them, and thus to remember him full of spirit, ecstatic, preparing to chant the songs of Judgment Day. “Grandpa,” I ask him, “what is the Sanctuary of Song like?” And he answers: “The Sanctuary blazes and illuminates; its flame warms the most frigid hearts.”

I had four uncles on my mother’s side: Chaim-Mordechai was the most dynamic and resourceful, Ezra the most timid, Israel the most authoritarian, Moshe-Itzik the most romantic.

Chaim-Mordechai, a tall, slim redhead with sharp eyes and a melodious voice, charmed me with the moral fables of the Maggid of Dubno. Here is one: A woman has just died, leaving a husband and a little boy too young to comprehend his tragic fate. He doesn’t know that he is now an orphan, doesn’t cry during the funeral, and plays with the black cloth draped over his dead mother’s coffin. “Now, isn’t that what so many Jews are doing today?” my uncle asked. “They ought to be in mourning, but instead they’re having fun.”

Ezra, poor Ezra, was the neediest. Reserved and withdrawn, a sad smile fluttering on his lips, he was always murmuring inaudibly, probably praying, perhaps begging pardon for bothering someone, though he never disturbed anyone at all.

Israel, the oldest, came to Sighet only rarely. To see him we had to go to his house, in the village of Krechnev, where he owned a tiny grocery store. Wearing his patched caftan, the Book of Psalms always within reach, he served his customers, peasants who lived in the neighboring small towns.

Moshe-Itzik had tuberculosis. When you talked to him, you wanted God to take pity on him. But I admired him. He walked with a nervous, rapid gait, and always seemed to be leaving soon after he had arrived. He traveled constantly, though in search of whom or what I don’t know. When asked, he would shrug. I loved to see him smile. His was the smile of a man unafraid of distance or of death. We were afraid for him, yet he outlived his brothers and sisters. Perhaps he was so familiar with the prospect of death that the enemy had no hold on him. I found him in Israel in the early fifties. Spry and ambitious, he was beginning to travel in Europe again. Then one day I received a letter from a lawyer in Berlin: My uncle had recently died there and had left me his estate of about a hundred dollars. I can see him now, hovering eternally between two fits of coughing, two absences. I would have liked to have known his story better.

My cousins’ stories, the few who survived, are more or less similar to my own. On my father’s side there were Leizer, Yanku, Velvel, Reshka, Aigyu; on my mother’s Voïcsi, Dvora, Leibi, Shiku, Sruli, Eli. Some live in Belgium, others in California. One female cousin settled in Buenos Aires, another in Sao Paulo, but most abandoned the Diaspora for the Land of Israel. Among my cousins and their children you will find doctors, rabbis, diamond merchants, teachers, businessmen, scribes. I keep up with them through Hilda. The husband of one cousin died in Argentina after having both legs amputated. Another’s went mad during the Gulf War.

I often think of those who did not survive—the youngest, the smallest. I remember their visits to our house, and mine to theirs. During holidays we would sit under the trees and trade long-forgotten secrets.

Even more often I think of my friends of those days: Itzu Junger, Haimi Kahan, Itzu Goldblatt, Moshe Sharf, Hershi Farkas. For me friendship has always been a necessity, an obsession. Later I would
come to love Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who posited friendship as an ethic.

Friendship or death, the Talmud says. Without friends, existence is empty, sterile, pointless. Friendship is even more important in a man’s life than love. Love may drive one to kill, friendship never. Cain killed Abel because Abel was only his brother, whereas he should also have been his friend. David shines in history not only because of his territorial conquests but because of the true friendship, noble and indestructible, that bound him to Jonathan. A man capable of such friendship could only be exceptional.

The Hasidic movement owes its success to its emphasis on friendship among the faithful as well as to fidelity to the master. Friendship is indispensable, essential. The Hasid comes to the rabbi’s court not simply to see him, hear him, and spend Shabbat under his roof, but also to meet with friends who come for the very same reasons. He feels an attachment to each and every one of them, through what Hasidic literature calls “the root of the soul.” Together they form a community whose members are equal before God, as before the rebbe. Granted, there are more poor than rich among them, and more are unhappy than fulfilled. But it is incumbent upon the rich to aid those in need, as it is incumbent upon the poor to accept without envy those more fortunate than they. In Brooklyn as in Paris, Hasidic solidarity is real. Whoever is in need, his friends come to his aid. A refugee arriving out of nowhere is immediately taken in, given food and lodging, a loan and a network of support.

To praise God the famous Rebbe Pinhas of Koretz said: God is not only the Father of our people, the King of the Universe, and the Judge of all men. He is also their friend.

As a child I needed friendship more than tenderness to progress, reflect, dream, share, and breathe. The slightest dispute with a friend gave me a sleepless night as I lay wondering whether I would ever again know the excitement of a nighttime walk, of discussions about happiness, humanity’s future, and the meaning of life. Disappointment in this domain caused me greater pain than a failure in school.

Shortly before my twelfth birthday I began to feel more sure of myself. I no longer sought to “bribe” my friends. Our bonds were strengthened by our common projects. A thousand memories tie me to them.

I would have loved to have deserved the friendship of young Dovid’l, grandson of the legendary Reb Shaye Weiss. A precocious
Talmudist, he seemed destined for a dazzling future. Unfortunately, he was even more studious than I. In our community he was the child prodigy, impossible to tear away from his books. We became friends much later, when he was professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and I was professor of Jewish studies at City College.

Yerahmiel Mermelstein, the son of a melon merchant, had his whole career set out for him. An ardent Zionist, he was indefatigable in his efforts to “convert” us to the ideas of Theodor Herzl. On Saturday afternoons, when we were supposed to be at the synagogue, he insisted on treating us to socioeconomic disquisitions on Palestine. He decided to learn modern Hebrew and argued that we should all follow suit. But the poor boy got nowhere. None of us was tempted until my father persuaded us to learn it. My father found us a teacher and Yerahmiel managed to come up with a grammar—the only one in town—which he loaned to me. I learned it by heart, as though it were a chapter of the tractate of
Sanhedrin
.

When I first went to Israel, in 1949, my father and Yerahmiel were both in my thoughts. It was thanks to their obsession with modern Hebrew that I was able to become the Paris correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. I asked myself, over and over again, why I, more than Yerahmiel, deserved to know the country and speak the language for which he had fought so ardently in our little, far-off town.

I remember Itzu Junger—serious yet cheerful, thin and agile. His parents were rich, or so I supposed. They lived in a big, “luxurious” house with many rooms, near the great synagogue. I went often to their garden. Always pleasant and generous, Itzu may well have suffered from the same insecurity as I did: he was desperate to bond with his friends. For a year we had the same tutor. About ten of us would study together in a room set aside for us in Itzu’s spacious house. Sometimes we studied late into the evening, and then we would spend the night. This was a welcome diversion, for I detested routine.

A change of tutors separated us, but we continued to see each other at services, on Shabbat afternoon, and on holidays. Then came the tempest that separated us.

We ran into each other in Israel, where he loaned me his “room,” a windowless cell in a Tel Aviv suburb. I gave it back to him a few nights later, afraid I would suffocate there. I saw him again in Brooklyn in the early fifties, during my first visit to the United States. We went for long walks in Williamsburg, exchanging plans and memories.
After that we corresponded regularly. He must have been sick already, but he didn’t know it yet, or at least there was no mention of it in his letters. He died of cancer of the liver. But nobody told me. I thought he wasn’t writing back to me because he was too busy, so I kept on writing for some time. Two or three years later I was in New York again and tried to get in touch, but his number had been disconnected. I called his sister in Brooklyn, and she burst into tears. I had been writing to a dead man.

As for Haimi, he died of a heart attack one Shabbat afternoon in 1989, at his home in Monsey, New York. We had seen each other again in Israel in 1949. I was giving classes in a children’s home, and a technician came to do some electrical work. He looked familiar. “You! An electrician?” He had learned the trade in the concentration camp. As a child Haimi had been a jack-of-all-trades who would willingly repair a leaky fountain pen, a broken lock, or an electrical short. His father, Reb Nokhum-Hersh, was the chief rabbi’s private tutor. It was to him that we turned for explanations of obscure Talmudic passages.

Haimi had uncommon physical strength. I felt safe when we went out together at night, for the thugs of our town feared him. Yet I never saw him fight or become violent. On the contrary, he was so good-natured as to seem somewhat phlegmatic. His older brother, Leibl, short and thickset, with herculean strength, was crushed by a tree in the camp. Haimi saw it happen.