And the Sea Is Never Full (14 page)

On Human Rights

The Jewish writer as activist is the theme of
The Testament
, whose original French title, literally translated, is “Testament of an Assassinated Jewish Poet.” Biographical novel? Bildungsroman? No: I am not the novel’s Paltiel Kossover, the Jewish Communist poet. I have never been attracted to Communism. Nor have I been a soldier in the Red Army or a prisoner of the NKVD. But I became fascinated with Paltiel’s story in 1965, on my first trip to the Soviet Union. I needed to understand the transformation of a young Talmudist into a fervent disciple of Marx and Lenin. The Holocaust is almost totally absent from this novel, except for half a page where I describe Paltiel going through Majdanek. Is that when he became a Jew again? Had he ever ceased to be one? He lived as a Communist but died a Jew. In this novel I explore the soul and conscience of the repressed Jew, one who has exiled himself to the margins of Judaism.

Kossover’s portrait is loosely based on the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish and the Yiddish novelist Der Nister, both executed in August 1952 on Stalin’s orders.

One day at the University of Geneva, after a lecture on Rabbi Akiba, a young professor shyly approaches me: “So you knew my father,” he says. He is Shimon Markish, the son of Peretz, who had recognized his father in Kossover. “I am so sorry,” I tell him. “I know and admire your father’s work, I wish I had had the good fortune to meet him.” We spend hours talking. He confirms what I had only imagined about the internal conflicts of a Jewish writer yearning for justice in an unjust society.

One of the main tenets of my life has been:
“Lo ta’amod al dam reakha….”
Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed inflicted on your fellow man (Leviticus 19:16). Not to take a stand is in itself to take a stand, said Camus. Moses rediscovered himself as a Jew and as a man when he defended a Hebrew beaten by an Egyptian and then one beaten by another Hebrew. Had he remained a neutral spectator, he would not have become God’s prophet and the leader of his people.

I take part in countless rallies for Soviet Jewry toward the end of the sixties. I go every time I am asked. I tell the mostly young audiences that the young Jews of Moscow are mad, completely mad. Do they really believe that they can defeat the Soviet dictatorship with their songs and their dances? And the rest of us, do we seriously believe that we have the power to influence Brezhnev’s policies? But, I tell the audiences, the great Moses Maimonides was right when he said that the world survives thanks to its madmen. The liberation of Soviet Jewry has become my most urgent cause.

A huge meeting takes place in Paris to protest UNESCO’s policy of discrimination against Israel. Isaac Stern, Abba Eban, Artur Rubinstein, Manès Sperber, and Mario Vargas Llosa take part. Delegates from some twenty countries express outrage that an international cultural organization would betray the very ideals it was created to serve.

The atmosphere is tense. When my turn comes to speak, I throw out an idea that I consider pragmatic if somewhat outlandish: “Let us adopt a resolution, here and now, declaring that this body will supersede UNESCO.” I explain with some bravado: “Since so many distinguished scientists and great writers and musicians are with us, doesn’t that signify that we
are
UNESCO?”

Of course, I am joking. But some of the participants take me seriously. Eban speaks up: He opposes my plan for foreign policy reasons. Others want to think it over. The distinguished French philosopher Raymond Aron takes me aside in the corridor: “Do you really want to do this?” I reassure him. He thanks me, laughing.

An hour later, a frantic phone call from an associate of the director general of UNESCO: “Don’t do something that could ruin us…. Let’s negotiate…. Everything will fall into place.” Some time later we organize another meeting, this time to save Jews in Arab countries. Same participants, same arguments. I ask Raymond Aron: “So, we are starting over again?” He answers: “No. We merely continue. It is they who are starting over again.”

In the early eighties, the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun asks me to use my influence to help free Abraham Sarfati, a Jewish political prisoner whom the king of Morocco refuses to release. I discuss the matter with President Carter’s staff, with senators, journalists, friends. All my efforts are in vain. When Sarfati is finally freed in 1991, I am pleased. Though I do not share his political convictions—he is a Communist—I admire his courage. Soon after, I am saddened by his declaration: “Israel and the Jewish people are a mythical state and people. The Western Left deludes itself; to achieve peace, Zionism must be fought.”

I ask myself: Had I been aware of his anti-Israel position, would I have tried to help him? I hope I am not deluding myself when I answer in the affirmative. Whether I agree with Sarfati’s ideology has nothing to do with my duty to fight for his civil rights.

Still, I am bitterly disappointed.

In 1980, on the 18th day of the Jewish month of Sh’vat, I find myself in the dusty village of Aranyaprathet, on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, looking desperately for nine Jews. This day marks the anniversary of my father’s death. I need a minyan, a quorum of ten men, to recite Kaddish in his memory.

I had arrived a few days earlier to participate in a march for the survival of Cambodia, organized by the International Rescue Committee and other humanitarian organizations. A hundred or so men and women represent the United States and Europe. Among them are intellectuals and civil rights activists. Bayard Rustin is here, as are Liv Ullmann and Joan Baez; and journalists, countless journalists. I wish I
could ask my fellow inmate from the camps, Reb Menashe Klein, what one does in a case like this. Does one have the right to postpone the prayer? Surely he would say: “What are you doing so far away on a day when you should be in synagogue?” For Reb Menashe, a Jewish prayer or a page of Mishna takes precedence over all else.

As for me, I believe that when human beings suffer I have no right to be elsewhere. How could I have refused to go to the place where the refugees from the Cambodian massacres were dying of hunger and disease? I had seen them on television: skeletons with terror-stricken eyes. They had left behind parents, brothers, or children. All were imprisoned, tortured to death.

The atrocities committed by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge had reached new lows even in the bloody annals of Communism. In the name of a perverse “progressive” ideology, an entire country had turned itself into a slaughterhouse and sealed the gates.

The dazed survivors stare into the cameras. I see nothing but hunger, despair, and resignation. Just weeks before, they had faced their torturers, beaten and humiliated.

“What are
you
doing here?” asks Henry Kamm, a former refugee from Hitler’s Austria and a Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
correspondent. There is no need to respond to his rhetorical question; he knows the answer: We are both here to see what we can do for these victims of American bombs, Vietnamese rifles, and most cruelly, torture at the hands of their own people, for whom the teachings of Pol Pot had replaced those of Moses, Jesus, Muhammad,
and
Buddha. It was the Jew in us who, since the discovery of the mass graves in Cambodia, felt the need to tell these survivors that we understood.

I have encountered obstacles both real and imagined when I have had to recite Kaddish, and I often wondered how it was possible to sanctify God’s name inside the kingdom of the dead. I recall my father, his features distorted by pain and anguish. I recall other fathers, other children. I watch them fly toward the gaping heavens and wonder: Who is saying Kaddish for them?

Finally I succeed in gathering the nine men I need: Henry Kamm, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, the writer Guy Suarès, Bernard-Henri Lévy, several Israeli doctors…. Surrounded by chaos, a few steps from the Cambodian border, we say the
Minha
prayer. My voice trembles as I say the prayer for the dead.

Suddenly I hear behind me a young doctor who repeats the prayer after me. His eyes are filled with tears. Afterward I ask him:
“For whom are you saying Kaddish?” He looks at me and doesn’t answer. “Is it for your father?” “No.” “For your mother?” “No.”

He points to the border: “It is for them.”

I am reminded of something from the Talmud: “Be proud, Abraham, be proud of your descendants. Look: they do not forget anyone.”

A rescue mission at the Nicaraguan border. I am to meet Miskito Indians expelled from their homes by Daniel Ortega’s repressive regime, the latest “forgotten” in our society, which often practices apathy and selective solidarity.

To reach them is complicated and exhausting. There are no direct flights. The New York–Tegucigalpa connection is via Miami. At the suggestion of John Silber, president of Boston University, I am accompanied by Professor Joachim Maître, who knows the region well. We meet foreign diplomats, we have secret encounters with the opposition. Then we cross the jungle, the last stretch by kayak. I can
hardly believe I am doing this, I who have been known to lose my way in my own neighborhood and don’t know how to swim.

Why has this leftist regime uprooted these peaceful Indians? Because they live too close to the border? Is that a reason to extract them from their native environment? And why do so many civil rights activists look the other way? Because Daniel Ortega is of the left and violently anti-American, anti-imperialist, and therefore untouchable? Still, the Miskito Indians have succeeded in arousing the sympathy of a few journalists and intellectuals in Europe and America. I discuss the situation with François Mitterrand, who listens well. I do believe that he interceded. In the end, the Miskito were allowed to return to their homes.

My extraliterary activities take more and more of my time and energy. But I feel I have no right to turn away from them. Clearly I have less time to work on my novels, but there are more important things. I explain this when, in 1982, I refuse to take part in a colloquium whose subject is close to my heart. Organized by two Israeli professors of psychiatry, this symposium on genocide, which I am to chair, is scheduled for early June in Tel Aviv. Everything is set. Scholars and historians from several continents have accepted our invitation, among them Armenians. After all, they have ideas on this subject which has touched them closely. How could one forget the massacre of their parents and grandparents at the hands of the Turkish army?