One Generation After (14 page)

So I know that he read it. But I shall never know what he thought of the portrait I had drawn. One thing is certain: he recognized himself.

Others recognized him despite my efforts to disguise the image. His disciples of one year, or one night, took pains to tell me they were not fooled: “The Wandering Jew, in your book, is Rav Shushani, isn’t it?”

I myself thought I had exaggerated; yet I had told the truth. Yes, he did visit faraway countries; yes, he did receive unusually high fees for his lectures, fees he then gave to charity; yes, he did behave like one of the hidden Just Men who enter exile and anonymity before offering salvation to their fellow men; yes, he was greater than the legend surrounding his person.

A famous Yiddish novelist told me:

In the early fifties I happened to be in Boston for a lecture. I was going to begin when a small dirty-looking man, wearing a ridiculous hat, pushed me away from the microphone and shouted: “Ladies and gentlemen, your guest tonight has no right to address you, you or any other audience!” In the commotion that followed, the chairman angrily rebuked him: “Are you out of your mind? Who are you, anyway?” “Never mind who I am,” answered the heckler. “But I know who he is. A faker, that’s who he is. I read an article he once wrote in a Yiddish newspaper in Paris. And he misquoted the Midrash. Anyone who misquotes the sources has no right to speak in public!” I thought he was mentally disturbed, and so did everyone else. True, I had served as editor of a Yiddish daily in postwar Paris. But that was long ago—in the late forties—I published articles five, six times a week. How could I remember? But he, Rav Shushani, remembered and forced me to remember. I had to apologize before
being permitted to speak that evening. Several years later I came to Montevideo, also for a lecture. I was about to begin when I noticed a familiar face in the audience. Terror-stricken, I announced that I would not speak unless Rav Shushani left the room. Since the community didn’t know him yet, they thought I had gone mad. But despite their efforts to soothe me, I stuck by my decision. That evening, there was no lecture.

Recently, during a weekend in Oslo, I visited a childhood friend, Herman Kahan. We compared our postwar adventures.

He reminisced: “For a time, while waiting for my Norwegian visa, I lived in Paris. I often would visit an unpretentious synagogue where I met …”

He was remembering and smiling. So I continued for him: “… a mysterious character who possessed all the keys to all the gates and his name was Rav Shushani.”

“How did you know?” my friend exclaimed in total bewilderment.

“There is something about all those who ever met him. They can recognize each other. But tell me your story.”

“We studied every evening. It went on for weeks. One day he told me his trade: gold merchant. Soon afterwards he disappeared. When next I heard from him he was in Australia. With some of my money.”

By the time my friend received Rav Shushani’s letter from Australia, Rav Shushani was already in a kibbutz in Israel.

When did I see him last? A year ago, in Paris. As I left my hotel on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I noticed a familiar-looking vagabond; he was engaged in lively discussion with a pretty girl who was trying to sell him one of the new-left publications. It’s him, I thought. No, it can’t be; he is in Montevideo. The man standing there in front of the hotel only looks like him. Yet the resemblance was so striking that I felt the urge to ask him a direct question: “Aren’t you Rav Shushani?” But I didn’t want the girl to think I was really interested in her. And so I circled around them again and again until I remembered I had an appointment. Returning to my hotel, I told myself it couldn’t possibly have been him.

That same evening, in Strasbourg, Claude Hemmendinger, editor of the
Tribune Juive
, casually remarked: “By the way, did anyone tell you that Rav Shushani has reappeared in Paris?”

So he did see me. And wanted me to see him and miss this last opportunity to speak to him again. He wanted me to go on carrying inside me the same remorse and nostalgia as before.

He was buried in Jerusalem. His admirers and disciples all over the world had been ready to raise funds to take his earthly remains to the Holy City. But there was no need for that. After his death, it was discovered he was rich, richer than many of his followers.

Also discovered among his belongings were several manuscripts, probably containing what might well be his most important ideas and opinions. Except that nobody could decipher
them. It was his way of leaving behind still another mystery, a final one.

Having in my possession several letters in his handwriting, I wanted to try my luck with the manuscripts. A few pages were given to me. I read them several times and had to give up: I could read them but could not understand their meaning.

Several months after his death I received a letter from a man claiming to be Shushani’s closest living relative: “Since Rav Shushani concerns and haunts you that much, and since he is no longer with us, let me tell you the truth about him.”

And he did tell me what he claimed to be the truth about Rav Shushani: his name, his origins, his secret voyages. The mystery was solved.

But the letter contained a postscript: “I am telling you all this because I think you ought to know. However, you are not to disclose the facts to anyone, not now, not ever.”

If I choose to obey, it is because I am sure that this is what Rav Shushani himself would have wanted.

Even if all his disciples, everywhere, were to begin speaking about him—and nobody else—we would not know more about who he really was, about what shadows he fled or sought, or the nature of his power and torment.

It was a Friday afternoon. Israel had just declared its independence. The world, poised between amazement and anguish, held its breath: Would the Jewish people, in realizing its ancient dream, finally change course and destiny?

I was a stateless student living in Paris, but in my imagination I was a soldier in Jerusalem. Filled with tension and disbelief, I devoured the special editions that succeeded one another hourly. I wanted to be part of the event unfolding far away.

At nightfall I made my way to the synagogue for Shabbat services. Not so much to pray as to enter a dialogue and be part of a community. Prayers had not yet begun. It was getting late, but the excited worshippers were discussing politics and strategy: Could the Jewish state stand, could it survive against so many odds? Would the Great Powers come to its defense, if only to redeem themselves? Or would Israel be nothing but a spasm in history? The enemy had proclaimed a holy war and six hundred thousand Jews were already fighting, without arms or experience, against six armies at once, demonstrating a desperate, lucid courage two thousand years old.

The discussions were long and inexhaustible. My teacher, an
old man famous for his Talmudic knowledge, pulled me into a corner and asked me point-blank: “From now on will you believe in miracles?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And you’ll no longer deny God’s blessings?”

“No.”

His piercing eyes were watching me, his voice had become harsh and insulting: “Well, then, young man, it takes very little to please you.”

“The rebirth of a sovereign nation extinct for twenty centuries, you consider that little?”

I had never seen him so angry with me. “You don’t understand,” he said, enunciating each word carefully. “There is Israel and there is your reaction to Israel. I am thankful to Israel, but you disappoint me. The present and the future make you forget the past. You forgive too quickly.”

I blushed. Four years earlier I had left my town and my studies to enter night. Like many Jews from many towns in occupied Europe, I had gone carrying the name of the Messiah on my lips, the very same name which, according to legend, had preceded creation. I believed in man and even more in what transcended him. Then, abruptly, all my ties were cut. Overnight I was robbed of even the smallest point of reference and support. I was confronted with emptiness. Everywhere. To avoid sinking, I needed a miracle, or at least a sign.

“No!” my teacher was shouting. “I have no right to refuse salvation, though it does indeed come too late for too many. I am prepared to welcome it and open for it as many doors and hearts as possible. That, yes. But call it miraculous, that I refuse.
We have paid too dearly for it. To be a miracle, it would have had to happen a little sooner.”

And, with clenched teeth, he began to pray, while in Israel blood was already flowing.

I often think of that conversation. I think of it each time I visit the Holy Land, each time I hear of an intrinsic link connecting the national resurrection of Israel to the era of Auschwitz. Everything inside me rebels against such a juxtaposition, particularly when viewed not as a purely chronological consequence but as a compensation or process of cause and effect. Actually, the two experiences have in common only those who lived through them. Thence their relationship on the level of conscience and sensitivity, perhaps even of memory, but not in any pattern of history. To impose a logical sequence on Auschwitz and Jerusalem, or a design other than dialectical, would be to diminish both.

Israel, an answer to the holocaust? It is too convenient, too scandalous a solution. First, because it would impose a burden, an unwarranted guilt-feeling, on our children. To pretend that without Auschwitz there would be no Israel is to endow the latter with a share of responsibility for the former. And second, Israel cannot be an answer to the holocaust, because the holocaust, by its very magnitude, by its essence too, negates all answers. For me, therefore, these are two distinct events, both inexplicable, unexplained, mysterious, both staggering to the mind and a challenge to the imagination. We shall never understand how Auschwitz was possible. Nor how Israel, scarcely a
few years later, was able to draw from itself the strength and vision to rebuild its home in a world adrift and in ruins.

Certainly, after Auschwitz, the Jews needed a call to consolation, or at least a diversion. To breathe. To regain courage. But the world at large needed it even more. To make us forget its silence, its overwhelming complicity. To buy itself a clear conscience, and thereby, perhaps, escape its own destruction. In other words: the Jewish people would have continued to exist even if it had had to wait fifty more years to reclaim its state. Not so the world. The world, crushed with guilt, could not afford to wait.

Let us be more specific: had Zionism and its demands not existed, what would have become of the survivors of the ghettos and the camps, the partisans emerging from the forests and mountains who, according to all logic, should have scorned the human race and dedicated themselves to hating and despising it. Outraged, betrayed, these men and women, disowned and victimized by society, had the right and also the means to pledge themselves to nihilism and let their anger explode—come what may. They had nothing to lose, no one to spare. No ties to country or life. No more illusions about the trend of history or man. They could easily have become social misfits, even criminals. Had they set fire to all of Europe, no one would have been surprised. But they did not.