The Story of a Life (21 page)

“You never talked with your father about it?” One hears this from time to time.

“We spoke, but always in passing, never in depth.” One hears this, too.

I am very familiar with that feeling of superficiality. When you’re finally ready to speak about those days, memory grows faint and the words stick in your throat. So you wind up saying nothing of value. Sometimes, by chance, the words start to flow, and then you go on and on as if a blocked channel has been cleared. But you immediately realize that this is a superficial, chronological recounting that does not come from the depths of your being. The words flow, but they reveal nothing. When you’ve finished, you feel confused and embarrassed.

I told T.’s son about the last autumn that we had spent hiding in the forest, about our efforts to preserve our body heat, and about the bonfire we lit when the cold threatened to freeze us, even though we knew that it might give us away. For a moment it seemed to me that if I could succeed in
telling T.’s son the story of the forest as it should be told, he would understand everything that followed. But as if in spite of myself, the words failed me. Everything in my head seemed to evaporate, and I could only repeat what I had already said. “It was cold, and despite the danger we made a bonfire.”

“Two children in the forest, it’s unbelievable,” T.’s son said, as if grasping it for the first time.

And so it was, unbelievable. Whenever you speak about those days, you are gripped by a sense of how
unbelievable
it all is. You relate it, but you don’t believe that this thing actually happened to you. This is one of the most shameful feelings that I know. The son of my friend T. was sensitive and attentive, and I really wanted to tell him more. But I just could not begin. The story of my life and the story of T.’s life now seemed like one story—distant, complicated, almost impossible to penetrate. Though I described some things, they sounded banal and, even worse, irrelevant.

“And your father didn’t tell you anything?” I kept asking like a fool.

“Almost nothing.”

T.’s son knew that his great-grandfather was a renowned physician, a fine man who was devoted to the poor with his heart and soul. But he knew nothing of the bitter, complex struggle that was waged for years between the famous doctor and his father, the famous rabbi. To the doctor came people for examinations or for free medication; to the rabbi came wretched people to be healed from their afflictions. One believed in medications and surgery, the other in prayer and charity. In the forest, between one escape and the next, T. had told me many details about that bitter struggle. Even then I sensed that a similar struggle was being waged within him. To his son he apparently told none of it. This chapter remained T.’s secret, sealed within him.

I sat opposite the son of my friend T., filled with a familiar
fear: that the story of our lives—of mine and of T.’s, of our parents’ and grandparents’—will soon vanish without a trace. I decided to tell him about the Carpathians, the land of the Ba’al Shem Tov, where our families had lived for generations. He had heard about the Ba’al Shem Tov in high school. Even though he’s an engineer, immersed in the practical world, I could tell from his face that I could speak to T.’s son about spiritual things. The words “God,” “faith,” and “prayer” did not put him off. On the contrary, he seemed to want to know more, but I was having trouble mustering the facts, extracting a single illuminating detail from a mass of generalizations.

I felt my knees shaking, as if I had failed a simple test.

“Your great-great-grandfather was a very famous rabbi,” I began. But I immediately felt that I had placed an unnecessary burden on T.’s son, and I regretted it. This young engineer, engaged in research at one of Israel’s elite institutes, was already living his own life. His father hadn’t known how to communicate his life and the lives of his ancestors to him, yet here was I, in my foolishness, trying to awaken in him some interest, some curiosity. How inappropriate.

Out of politeness, or perhaps to please me, T.’s son asked me something about his great-great-grandfather, the rabbi. I stuttered, feeling cruel and foolish.

THERE WAS A CHANGING of the guard at the New Life Club, which was established in 1950 by Holocaust survivors from Galicia and Bukovina. Survivors who for many years had energetically managed the club had grown old and wanted to hand the responsibility over to those survivors who had been children during the war.

The handing-over ceremony was both festive and tense, with speeches given by both sides. Feelings ran high, and of course there were interruptions. The older survivors made the “children” (they were called this even though they were already in their thirties) pledge to look after the place, but, above all, never to forget. The “children” were more restrained. Though they spoke about the need for continuity, they didn’t commit themselves. There were a few short speeches, very much to the point, that actually made one shiver because of the painful facts that they recalled.

I remember the club almost from its inception. I was twenty years old and had just completed my army service.
There was no one with whom I was close in Israel, so I’d go there to drink coffee, play chess, or listen to a lecture. In the club we spoke Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, and Romanian. I understood these languages, and the place was a kind of substitute home for me. Although I never took an active role, over the years I would often return to it. I knew what went on there, who was sick, and who had died. The members of the club also followed what I was doing; they read my stories in the newspapers and read what the reviewers wrote about me.

During the 1950s, fierce ideological arguments raged throughout Israel—not only on the kibbutzim but also in private clubs, which sprang up like mushrooms in the cities. Clichés were bandied about, and grandiloquent slogans were dredged up from the distant past. People who had been communists in their youth became more fervent in their beliefs. Revisionists forgave neither the communists nor the left-wingers. The arguments were not confined to the tables where people drank tea or played chess. Even outside, in the street, the members of the New Life Club continued arguing, sometimes far into the night.

Like any other organization, the club had a chairman, a vice-chairman, a secretary, and a treasurer, as well as chairmen of various committees. People wanted to wield a bit of authority and to be given a little respect. And as in any organization, the purpose for which the club had been established was sometimes forgotten. Members became preoccupied with assigning various honorary positions, bickered about who would be what, leveled accusations at one another, and eventually there were dismissals and resignations, as if this were a regular social club and not a club for Holocaust survivors.

But this was only one aspect of it. The club also arranged memorial services for small towns and remote villages that had been wiped out during the war, published memorial
books, held symposiums, and brought in wealthy survivors from the United States and Canada to sponsor the club’s activities. There were evenings of Yiddish poetry, and the club even established a literary prize to encourage those who wrote.

During those years at the club, I met some wonderful people—ordinary people who didn’t take part in the arguments, didn’t seek honors, and demanded nothing for themselves. As they sat at the tables, their eyes radiated a simple love for their fellow man. They spent hours visiting the sick in the hospitals and in various facilities, but they also found time to come to the club, to bring memorial candles for commemorations or refreshments for festive occasions. The catastrophe that they had lived through, rather than crushing their innocence and honesty, had left them unscathed. And more than that, it had actually added a glow to the light that they already carried within them.

So it continued, month after month. And then the German reparations money began to arrive, and again the club was thrown into turmoil. Ben-Gurion was accused by some of having sold his soul to the devil; others argued that the murderers mustn’t be allowed to reap profits from the goods and property they had confiscated from their victims. The club seemed about to break apart, but for the intervention of one of the members, who had been head of the Judenrat in his hometown and had come out of the experience without a blot on his character. Although most of the Jews in his town had been murdered, he had managed to save about a quarter of the Jewish population. By virtue of this success, and not this alone, people honored him and listened respectfully to what he had to say. Although the split did not occur, the rancor lingered on. Members formed groups and subgroups, and some people avoided other people, calling them “disgusting” and other rude names.

Those were the years when I would come to the club
almost every evening. Most of the members were some twenty to thirty years older than I was, and yet I still felt at home there. I loved the poetry evenings, conversations, and lectures, but more than anything I loved the faces. The faces reminded me not only of the life I had lost in the Ukrainian steppes, but also of the years before the war. Here I had parents, grandparents, uncles, and cousins. It was as if everyone had gathered together just to be with me.

During that period I wrote some poems, and from time to time I was asked by the board of directors to read them aloud at memorial services. Most of the members of the club liked me and encouraged me. I even won a small grant that covered part of the tuition for my first year at university. But even then, some members were opposed to my writing, claiming that when it comes to the Holocaust one shouldn’t play with poetry or weave stories, but should just set down the facts. These arguments had some validity—though perhaps an unnecessary degree of nastiness—and they hurt me, because I already realized that there was a long road ahead of me and I was only at the beginning of it.

Had the proponents of “the facts” been willing to listen to me, I would have reminded them that I was only seven at the outbreak of World War II. The war was etched inside my body, but not in my memory. In my writing I wasn’t imagining but drawing out, from the very depths of my being, the feelings and the impressions I had absorbed because of my lack of awareness. I do realize that, even had I known how to articulate these it wouldn’t have helped. At that time, people wanted only facts, detailed and accurate facts, as if these facts had the power to reveal all secrets.

I had already learned that people don’t change. Even the most devastating wars don’t change them. A person becomes settled in his beliefs and his habits, and it’s hard
for him to shake them off. Moreover, all the moral weakness, the base impulses—the cheating, the undermining, the scheming—not only do they not disappear after catastrophes, but sometimes, I’m embarrassed to say, they seem strengthened by them. In 1953, during the struggle for the position of the club’s vice-chairman, this was confirmed. Contending for the position were two wealthy businessmen. They were prepared to stop at nothing, and even resorted to bribes. The members’ protests fell on deaf ears: “This is so unpleasant—shame on you! Remember where we’ve come from; there are standards we should maintain.” But passions are always stronger than values or beliefs; it’s not easy to accept this simple truth.

AS THE YEARS passed, some members fell ill and were hospitalized, and the board established a schedule for visiting them. Some members passed away, and the board put up plaques in their memory inside the club. Then one of the members, someone who was extremely wealthy, died and left all his property to the club. Immediately a brass plaque was fixed to the entrance, and the club was renamed in his memory. There was a bitter argument over this, too. Some claimed that it would be inappropriate to name a place that had been established in memory of victims of the Holocaust after a rich man who had made his fortune through means that were far from kosher. The board’s position was unequivocal: if we scratch deep enough below the surface, we’ll find that everyone is flawed.

During the early years of the club, the members would bring their children, particularly on the Sabbath and on Jewish holidays. Many thought there should be a special classroom for the children, so that they could learn about the Jews
of Bukovina and Galicia, and about what they had contributed to Judaism and to the world. But for some reason this project was never carried out. The children grew up and stopped coming, and the members eventually realized that it would be pointless to force them. They wouldn’t have understood, anyway. And perhaps it was for the best that they didn’t know what had happened to their grandparents and uncles and aunts.

There was, however, a boy of around seven—his name was Shmuel—who would join us and listen to the conversations with great curiosity. It was clear that he would continue coming when he grew up. He resembled his father, but, in contrast to his father, who was an alert and active man, the son had a quiet, wondering gaze. It was hard to know if this was a look of curiosity or of simplemindedness. Shmuel, at any rate, did not look like an Israeli child but as if he had been transported from a little town in Galicia.

When my first book,
Smoke
, was published in 1962 to good reviews, most people at the club were very happy and congratulated me. Club members read newspapers with a religious fervor, but not books—particularly not books that touched upon the Holocaust. Those who did read books were not happy with mine. My characters seemed grayish and shadowy to them, obsessed with the past, and living a banal existence. Where were the heroes? Where were the ghetto uprisings? And then there were the more vulgar members who seized this opportunity to remind everyone that I had twice been given a grant for my studies. If this was the result, then surely it was better not to support me … But most members did stand by me, encouraged me, and even promised to buy a copy. Only later did I understand: it was hard for some people to be taken back to those places and forced to relive those experiences. The moment I understood this, I was no longer angry.