All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (33 page)

This crossing was very different from the last one. I had a comfortable cabin larger than my hotel room, a private shower, fruit and flowers on the table. But all the luxury was lost on me. Seasickness kept me in bed most of the time. I didn’t even get up to see Mount Carmel.

When we disembarked in Haifa I caught a bus for Tel Aviv and
arrived unannounced at the editorial offices in Re’hov Finn, near the teeming central station. The warmth of Dr. Rosenblum’s welcome was worth more than a star reporter’s monthly salary. He was happy with my articles, though he would have been happier had they come from Moscow or Tashkent. He introduced me to his colleagues, few in number at the time, and now I was part of the team, the youngest member. Everyone gave me advice, for they all knew the ropes better than I. Over coffee they let me in on their “secrets”: who was on the way up, who was in trouble. One editor urged me to be careful. The enemy, he said, was everywhere. I thought he was talking about the Arabs, but it turned out he meant our rival. Everyone warned me.
Yedioth Ahronoth
had one and only one enemy, and that was the usurper, the traitor,
Maariv
. Our paper was so short of funds that people must have worked there for the honor and pleasure of it—or because they couldn’t find anything better.

Devoted as he was to Russian ways, Dr. Rosenblum offered me tea instead of coffee, along with another masterly lecture on literature and politics. He invited me to his home. His apartment breathed culture. He informed me that “the Old Man,” Yehuda Mozes, the paper’s owner, wanted to meet me, right away. Wondering if I had done something wrong, I hurried to Sderot Rothschild, climbed the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened and a woman silently showed me in. A man in a white goatee and a black kipa came toward me, his hand extended. I remember the clarity of his blue eyes. We sat down in the living room and looked at each other in silence for a long moment, I because I didn’t dare open my mouth, he because he was weighing my character and temperament. Then he, too, began to tell me about “our” newspaper. He would have liked nothing better than to be able to pay me well, but unfortunately since the “coup” …” On the other hand, there was more to life than money, wasn’t there? What is money, after all? It is an illusion, nothing more. You make it, you lose it. Besides, as we all know, it corrupts. But enough of that, because in any case, between you and me, everything was about to change. “They” (the competition) would soon find out what we could do. He was convinced of that, and he wanted me to be convinced as well. Injustice cannot endure eternally. There is a God in heaven, and it is He who rules the world. God is just, God is good, God will set things straight. I wondered whether God was a banker. I preferred to think of Him as a philosopher.

The Old Man soon put me at ease. He asked about my life, my
studies, my plans. He talked about his own past, in Kalisz (whose Jewish cemetery, it seems, is the oldest in Poland) and in Lodz. I wondered what, if anything, he knew about me or my story. Suddenly he asked me a question that stunned me: Did I believe in God?—an intrusive inquiry that would have pained me coming from anyone else. I blushed as I answered, and a bond was forged between us—not professional, but personal and human. Then the Old Man changed the subject. We spoke of the Talmud, the Midrash, Hasidism. He cited a passage, which I timidly corrected. To demonstrate my error he rose, left the room, and returned with a volume. He opened it, glanced inside, closed it immediately—I was right. But he wasn’t offended; on the contrary, he seemed pleased. To use an ancient Hebrew expression, “I had found grace in his eyes.”

He insisted I stay at his home, which was a real help, since the hotel would have cost me three months of my wretched salary. I ate at his table and participated in the discussions after meals. While under his roof I formed a friendship with Dov, his nephew, also a camp survivor, and later with his son Noah. The Old Man took me to Jerusalem in a
sherut
(collective) taxi. On the way he told me of his childhood and youth and of his encounters with the poets Shneur and Bialik, the painters Soutine and Mane Katz, and one Mrs. Reid, former owner of the
New York Herald Tribune
. He shared with me his disappointments, joys, and aspirations, and I became a member of his family. The Old Man set the tone. Everyone feared him except his wife, but to me he was unfailingly courteous. Later he would sometimes phone me in Paris, often on a Friday afternoon to wish me a peaceful Shabbat, to share a Hasidic saying, or simply to chat. There were times when I wished he would give me the money he spent on those calls, but money isn’t everything, is it?

The Old Man encouraged my friendship with Dov, and to this day I wonder why. Perhaps he hoped it would make Dov more Jewish, more involved in Jewish life. At the time Dov was more interested in the latest issue of
Time
than in the Torah reading of the week. For a while Dov and I shared a room, and after his marriage to Leah they invited me to live with them. The Old Man magnanimously allowed me to accept their hospitality, or Noah and Paula’s, but no one else’s. When I happened to be in the country for the High Holidays, I had to go to services with him. I remember a Rosh Hashana in Jerusalem in his wife’s absence. I recall the solemn service with the Hasidim of the Rebbe of Guer. The Old Man wept as he recited certain litanies,
and I averted my eyes respectfully. During meals we discussed liturgy and repentance.

The Old Man, I now realize, was not all that old. Today I have the strange feeling that the whole world is younger than I.

Foreign correspondents move around a lot, and I loved to travel. I was always ready to accept an invitation to go anywhere, to change habits and time zones, to discover new lands, court adventure, and seek impromptu encounters.

By chance in Paris I met an official of the Jewish Agency who invited me to accompany him on an automobile trip to Morocco. I hurried to the Préfecture for an exit visa, then to the Spanish consulate for a transit visa. Luckily, I had enough photos on hand and quickly obtained the necessary papers. But what about money? I had one month’s rent on my room saved up. I took the money, stuffed everything I owned into an old valise, and that was that.

There were three of us in the car. The first stop was Marseilles, where we stayed in the transit camp near Bandol. Things had changed since I had passed through the year before. Now it was Moroccans who were waiting to “ascend” to Israel. I questioned them about their abandoned homes and told them of the land of their dreams, of the joy of feeling Jewish and of living free of anti-Semitic threats, of the beauty of dusk in Jerusalem. Since I spoke fluent Hebrew, they thought I was Israeli and didn’t ask why I had chosen to remain in the Diaspora. The camp director was so pleased with my little speeches that he insisted on paying me ten thousand francs (two hundred dollars). At first I refused, but I finally said thank you and put the money in my pocket.

We set out for the Spanish border. I was terrified of the police and customs officials who examined my stateless person’s travel permit. Would they take me for a Communist agent, a veteran of the International Brigades? True, I could tell them I was only eight to ten years old during their filthy civil war, but did fascists know how to count? I pictured myself in a Spanish jail. I should have taken a different route, I thought to myself. But it was July, and they seemed to be in a state of lethargy. They let me pass without a problem.

Spain enchanted me—the landscape, the singing, the dancing, and especially the women, the Spanish women with their sensual lips and their dark, passionate eyes. Since childhood I had dreamed of this country where our greatest poets and philosophers had lived and
sung, where the Inquisitors tortured and humiliated my people in the name of a bizarre love of God. I recalled reading their manual. They thought of themselves as God’s protectors punishing the enemy.

Haunted by tales of the Marranos, I searched for their descendants. Any passerby I encountered on the
ramblas
of Barcelona could be one of them. Barcelona and its crowds, Barcelona and its ghosts. I was strolling down a deserted street when suddenly a young boy stood before me. Perhaps he had come from some neighboring hovel. He held out his hand, palm open, and said, very softly, “Señor, I’m hungry.”

Instinctively I reached into my pocket for a few pesetas to give him, but my hand refused to obey. The boy’s words—and, more than that, his voice—paralyzed me. I froze, unable to take my eyes off the hand that seemed to accuse me of all the sins committed since the first man turned his back on his brother, not far from paradise.

“Señor,” the boy repeated, “I’m hungry.” I wanted to ask him his name, but didn’t know how. Juanito, Alfonso, José? Once again I tried to give him what I had in my pocket, and once again my fingers refused to move.

The scene lasted but a few seconds. Time had stopped, all Creation concentrated in the motionless Spanish boy. Believing that I was refusing to help him, he dropped his hand and disappeared. Only then did I emerge from my trance, my heart pounding so loud it might have roused the slumbering city.

I began to call the boy, crying out for him to come back, telling him I wanted to give him what I had, that I wanted him to understand how much I hated societies in which children have to beg strangers for bread. But it was no use. Discouraged, he must have gone off to try his luck elsewhere.

I never saw him again. But no—he has a hundred faces and as many names, and he is always hungry.

Madrid: I wondered whether all those people in the streets found what they were looking for. They seemed to spend more time outside than at home or at work and to be suspicious of strangers. One definitely felt the dictatorship, but no one followed us, or at least that’s what we believed. Later we learned we were mistaken. In a police state everyone is suspect, tourists most of all.

We visited the Prado. The madness depicted by Goya, so human and yet so grotesque, would long haunt me, as would the dignity in the portraits of Velázquez. We visited Arias Montana, an institute of
Jewish studies. I wanted to read and reread all the documents and archives on Spain’s Jewish past, but there wasn’t time.

On Friday night I went to synagogue. A small minyan gathered in a cellar. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was back in the age of Ferdinand and Isabella, the days of Torquemada. The worshippers prayed in soft voices. I mingled with the congregation and listened to their remarks in Yiddish. Almost all were refugees. To my astonishment, they praised Franco. True, he was a fascist; true, he had strangled the republic; true, the Jewish religion was not recognized in this country, but … But what? During the war Franco had treated Jews honorably. A conscientious reporter, I conducted a minor inquiry, interviewing Spanish officials, foreign diplomats, and American and British colleagues. The evidence was clear: Unlike “humanist” Switzerland, Spain never rejected Jews fleeing persecution. The philosopher Walter Benjamin had been wrong to commit suicide: The Spanish would not have handed him over to the Vichy police. In fact, Franco had instructed his legations in the countries occupied by Germany to issue Spanish passports to Sephardic Jews. “And yet,” a high official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs complained, “Israel refuses to establish diplomatic relations with us.” For David Ben-Gurion, Spain was a fascist country, and that was enough to disqualify it. Later Israel would change its position, but then it was Spain that demanded concessions. Nevertheless, as I walked through the streets of the capital, I was annoyed at myself for feeling so content in this land. The memory of the victims should have affected me more.

We spent unforgettable hours in Toledo. A beautiful old synagogue had been turned into a church, but the Hebrew letters refused to disappear from the walls. (In 1992 and 1993 the banker and philanthropist Edmond Safra tried to buy the building back from the Church to restore it to the Jewish community.) The former residence of Shmuel Hanagid—where El Greco had also lived—had its own underground tunnel. If the priests broke in, the Jews could escape toward the sea.

Saragossa: city of the renowned mystic visionary Rabbi Abraham Abulafia, who in the late thirteenth century conceived the idea of hastening the ultimate redemption by converting all humanity to the Law of the Torah. It was a perfect idea and a fine solution, but where to begin? In Rome, of course, with Pope Nicholas III, no less. After that, things could only go smoothly. Sadly, the poor dreamer died before he could bring about redemption.

While visiting the immense cathedral, I was approached by a thin, middle-aged man with an angular face and deep-set, somber eyes. We conversed in French, which he managed with difficulty. He asked me where I was from and what I was doing in Saragossa. I told him I was a Jew living in Paris but that I worked for an Israeli newspaper. He was astonished. Do Jews still exist? Yes, they do. And Israel—that has something to do with the Bible, doesn’t it? Yes, I said, but with history as well, including contemporary history. He listened to me intently then invited me to his home to show me something he thought might interest me. I went with him, and when we got to his house he handed me a small, rolled parchment. It took me some time, but eventually I managed to decipher the Hebrew text: One Moshe ben Abraham called upon his descendants to remember their origins. I wanted to buy the document at any price, but the man refused to sell. And when I persisted, he became angry. This parchment, he explained, was an heirloom, handed down from father to son; it had never left his family I was so overcome by emotion that when he began asking me questions, I couldn’t answer. Then, standing with him at the window, I read and reread for him the contents of the testament, first in Hebrew, then in French.

Years later I met him again by chance in Jerusalem, where he was living modestly with his family. As I was leaving, he said to me with a smile, “By the way, I never told you my name. It is Moshe ben Abraham.” Whenever I think of Saragossa, it is him I see.

We continued our travels, which became a pilgrimage to the sources of our collective memory. Every stop was marked by a discovery, an encounter.