All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (27 page)

But there was no hurry. Death drew back, and the dead wanted no part of me, perhaps because I had as yet done nothing with my survival.

I fell ill. I ate sardines without bread, and my stomach tormented me, my intestines burned. I vomited constantly. Rarely have I suffered so much. As a child I had enjoyed being sick, but now I was terrified by it. I was so ill my landlady didn’t dare come in. Then one morning, miraculously, François dropped in to see me. He may have suspected the state I was in. “Suppose we study
Le Malade imaginaire
today?” he suggested, but I lacked the strength to appreciate the joke. He went downstairs to call his mother the physician and returned with some medicine. Then he helped me claw my way out of my state day by day. I don’t know what would have happened without him. The pain gradually eased, and I was able to take an interest in something other than my own body.

The newspapers, which I devoured regardless of the expense, were filled with reports of clashes and turmoil in Palestine. My sole regret was that I had not emigrated clandestinely, with or without Kalman. I wished I could have been part of the heroic, historic war waged by the Jewish people against the British in the Holy Land. Then came the dramatic event at the United Nations, the passing of the resolution granting Jews the right to a sovereign homeland, the famous partition plan of November 29, 1947. I felt I could no longer remain on the sidelines. I looked up the address of the Jewish Agency in the phone book—183 Avenue de Wagram—and rushed over. When I rang the bell, the porter asked me whom I wanted to see. I told him I didn’t know. He asked whether I had an appointment. I told him I didn’t. When he asked what I wanted, I said, “To become a member of
the Haganah.” He hesitated briefly between laughter and indignation, then slammed the door in my face. I was angry not at him but at myself. What a fool! I should have realized that the Haganah was an underground movement, not a football club. I needed a contact, but knew no one in official Zionist circles. By chance I came across a Yiddish weekly called
Zion in Kamf
, a newspaper of the Irgun. There was no editorial address, of course, since this was the organ of a Palestinian resistance group. But French law required that the address of the printer be given. The printshop, I soon learned, was owned by one Marc Gutkin, a leading militant of the movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Gutkin was a cultured, athletic man who spoke Hebrew and who loved life and its pleasures, but his true passion was the Palestinian Jewish cause. I wrote a letter in Yiddish to the paper’s anonymous editor. In it I explained simply but clumsily—in a pompous, patriotic style—that my most ardent wish was to aid the Jewish resistance in Palestine. I mailed the letter to the printshop and instantly regretted it, certain it would only make me look ridiculous to some stranger. I was convinced nothing would come of it. Press barons surely had other fish to fry. Even if the letter reached the editorial office, a secretary would toss it in the trash; if it happened to get to the editor, it would wind up in
his
trash.

I was wrong. That very week I was invited to the newspaper’s secret editorial headquarters, in an undistinguished building on the Rue Meslay, near the Place de la République. I arrived at the prescribed hour, and an elegant gentleman with carefully combed hair and tortoiseshell glasses, who looked like the typical Middle European intellectual, rose and warmly shook my hand. “My name is Joseph,” he said. “Please have a seat. So, you’re a student and you want to help us, is that right?”

And that’s how I became a journalist.

I felt like singing. I considered myself the luckiest and happiest of all my comrades and friends, of all the brothers in misfortune I had met since the torment. I speak of happiness quite consciously, as if issuing a challenge to myself. I who detested drink felt like laughing and drinking, telling the world the good news, as if the world would care. I wanted to tell my sisters, François, Shushani. But of course I didn’t. Absolute discretion was the first rule of clandestinity. Anonymity was obligatory, as were caution and vigilance. You had to seem sad when you were happy, and if you were sad, you had to say it was because you were unlucky in love or had lost money gambling.

I was happy, but I knew very well why I should not have been: Was I not turning my back on the dead and on my studies and religious observance? Could a journalist have an inner life? Did a survivor have any right to be happy? But I also knew there was justification for my happiness. For one thing, my financial worries would soon be over. I was to receive a millionaire’s salary: about thirty thousand francs (sixty dollars) a month. Until then I had been living on a quarter of that amount. I would be able to move. The end-of-the-month worries were over, along with the discomfort that gripped me in my landlady’s presence. No more walking from Saint-Cloud to Odéon. I would now be able to live closer to the center of town. I found a room—with a sink, no less—on the Rue de Rivoli near the Hôtel de Ville, close to the editorial office. Long live journalism! Long live the future! Frantically I grabbed my valise, stuffed it with the few clothes and books I possessed and the tefillin from which I was never separated, and hurriedly settled into my room in the Hôtel de France. Bursting with energy, I felt like a future conqueror. Except I wasn’t sure what I wanted to conquer.

But I did know I was joining the fight, and that gave me a sense
of joy I had never felt before: the joy of action—even better, the joy of underground action.

For me the Resistance was the essence of everything that was ethical and noble in society. Physical courage, self-sacrifice, and solidarity could be found even in the lower depths; total compassion, rejection of humiliation either suffered or imposed, and altruism in the absolute sense were found only among those who fought for an idea and an ideal that went beyond themselves. Nobility of action was found only among those who espoused the cause of the weak and oppressed, the prisoners of evil and misfortune. In my eyes, the anti-Nazi Resistance embodied that kind of nobility, and it disturbed me that I had not been part of it. True, I was too young to join the underground Communist network that distributed leaflets against the bourgeoisie in Sighet, and in Buchenwald I was too fearful and apathetic to join the clandestine organization of whose existence I was in any case unaware. Still, I felt frustrated and deficient, not whole. Now I had the chance to redeem myself.

The Irgun, of course, had nothing to do with the French Resistance. For one thing, the enemy was not the same. For another, I was quickly disabused of any romantic ideas about secret meeting places, passwords, nighttime journeys, pretty girls serving as liaisons. There may have been some of this in the Irgun, but I didn’t experience it. Nor was there in my experience any intrusive interrogation, detailed examination of my past, or oath with one hand on the Bible and the other on a revolver. There was just a friendly conversation and a handshake, nowhere near enough for a suspense film. If I imagined that I would be living a life of danger, I was soon disappointed: I was risking neither death nor imprisonment. Even deportation from France was unlikely. Stateless persons were rarely deported; that was one of the few advantages of the status. In the worst case, I would join Bea in the displaced persons camp. But underground or not, I was happy, for I was now part of a Jewish resistance movement.

Overnight I had a job, a way of life I would grow to love—for was there any more absorbing vocation or fascinating prospect for a boy of nineteen in this time of postwar turmoil? I read Joseph Kessel’s news reports, Camus’s editorials in
Combat
and Altman’s in
Franc-Tireur
, François Mauriac’s polemics in
Le Figaro
. I wanted to follow in their footsteps, stand at the nerve center of events, live in the midst of life, inform, explain, and participate in the planet’s upheavals. I pictured myself as a star foreign correspondent taking planes and ships, penetrating
the Sahara or the jungles of Africa, making contact with lost tribes anxiously awaiting discovery. Only, reality did not tally with the dream.

The following Monday I presented myself at the editorial office. Joseph, the boss, showed me to a desk, handed me an article in Hebrew, and asked me to translate it. The article, published in the Irgun’s newspaper in Israel, was a denunciation of David Ben-Gurion and the Haganah and a paean to Menachem Begin, commander in chief of the Irgun. I translated the Hebrew words into Yiddish without grasping their meaning. I knew that the Haganah was fighting the British as hard as the Irgun was, and I couldn’t understand why the two movements hated each other so much. The article also mentioned the Lehi (the so-called Stern Gang), but what was its role? Perhaps I was too politically naïve to understand. I pictured the Jewish fighter as an idealist striving for the redemption of our people, a man of purity, motivated by the poetry of his dreams, almost a Just Man who would give his life to save a brother or a comrade. But then why accuse Ben-Gurion and the Haganah of “collaborating” with the British police by turning in Irgun patriots? I translated and retranslated, but did not understand. The article talked about a certain “season” during which atrocious acts were allegedly committed by the Jewish political establishment. I didn’t dare ask Joseph about this. He probably assumed that the political situation in Palestine held no secrets for me and that I had deliberately chosen to work for the Irgun. But he was wrong. I didn’t know one underground group from another, and if the gatekeeper at the Jewish Agency hadn’t turned me away, I might have been sitting at a desk working for the Haganah, translating an insulting article about the Irgun. Obviously I had to find out what was going on. For the moment, however, I simply translated, the need for translators apparently also being part of the underground patriotic struggle.

The task was far from easy. I read Hebrew well and spoke fluent Yiddish, but my Germanized written Yiddish wasn’t good. My style was dry and lifeless, and the meaning seemed to wander off into byways lined with dead trees. That was not surprising, since I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar and its vast, rich literature. I had not yet read—except for a few fragments—the works of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, or Mendele. The names Leivik and Markish, Bergelson and Der Nister, Glatstein and Manger, were still unfamiliar to me. I had a lot to learn.

Joseph edited my translation and told me he was ready to teach
me. He soon became my professor of literature and political science, explaining that Yiddish had its own grammar and idiosyncrasies, with countless nuances and as many pitfalls. “If you want to hold the readers attention,” he said, “your sentence must be clear enough to be understood and enigmatic enough to pique curiosity. A good piece combines style and substance. It must not say everything—never say everything—while nevertheless suggesting that there is an everything.”

I learned that Polish Yiddish differed from Lithuanian Yiddish, and that Romanian Yiddish had a rhythm distinct from Hungarian Yiddish. The Yiddish of the Hasidim was not the same as that of their adversaries, and the Yiddish of intellectuals was not that of fairground workers and lumberjacks.

I talked about this with Shushani—whom I was still seeing in the evening—and once again he astonished me. His own accent was Lithuanian, but he knew all Yiddish variants except Hungarian. On the same occasion he asked about my work, but, faithful to my oath, I evaded his questions. He wasn’t offended. “I love secrets,” he said. “Think of the alchemists trying to turn sand into gold in their underground hideouts. All great projects are conceived in secret.” Though he abhorred violence, he was hardly indifferent to the Jewish struggle in Palestine. Whenever the British arrested a member of an underground organization, Shushani tried to get information about his fate. One day he seemed extremely agitated. He interrupted our lesson, pacing back and forth, bumping into walls, blowing his nose, panting, and wiping his forehead with the biggest handkerchief I had ever seen. It was the day a member of the Lehi and a member of the Irgun committed suicide together just a few hours before their scheduled execution.

I also continued to meet with François. Joseph allowed me to pursue my studies with him and at the Sorbonne. But we spoke less about
Hernani
, Victor Hugo’s play that marked a turning point in French theater, than about the fighting ravaging the Holy Land. How and why did François suddenly decide to join the struggle for an independent Jewish state? Had he, too, knocked on the Jewish Agency’s door on the Avenue de Wagram? Though he joined the Lehi, and I belonged to the Irgun, our friendship was unaffected. In any case, each of us kept his activities to himself. We both agreed that the less we knew about each other, the better.

I confess I enjoyed my “clandestine” life. To be the bearer of a secret
gives your life purpose and intensity. You play the part of a potential hero and feel vaguely superior to those around you. No one asked questions at the synagogue I attended on the Rue Pavée. To them I was a student like any other. If only they knew.