All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (46 page)

I happened to be in Paris on the day of Mauriac’s funeral. My publisher Paul Flamand and I went to Notre-Dame, but there were too many people. We stayed outside in silence.

My friendship with Mauriac continued until his death. My liaison with Kathleen lasted but a few months. For one thing, there was her fiancé, who was Greek. Then there were the French classes she was supposed to be taking at the Alliance Française. In her spare time she evidently preferred something other than my philosophical monologues on love’s “essential purity.” During the time we were “together,” she also “saw” other men. To make me jealous? To force me to change? We broke up—painfully—in the summer of 1955.

I saw her again, years later, in the United States. She had read the review of my book
The Town Beyond the Wall
in
Time
magazine. Excited, she phoned me at the
Jewish Daily Forward
. She was passing through New York and invited me to join her at the Sherry Netherland. Having converted to Judaism to marry an industrialist from the Midwest, she treated me to a lively account of her new life: Passover seders, Bar Mitzvahs, fund-raising for Israel, receptions, cocktail parties, dinners. She offered to buy a thousand copies of my book to help it climb onto the best-seller lists. I asked her whether she had that many
friends or just that much money. She tactfully spoke of her marriage, but not of her husband. “Do you love him?” I asked. She blushed and moved to another subject, telling me of her conversion under the guidance of a reform rabbi, and she paid me a compliment: “In becoming a Jew, I felt closer to you.” In other words, it was to please me that she married her super-rich husband. What happened to the Greek fiancé? On that subject too she was discreet. But she took my hand. Here we go again, I said to myself. And yes, she was still attractive, and I was still receptive to her beauty. Our rediscovered “love” endured one afternoon.

Feeling once again the need for a change of scene, I decided to return to Israel. I had a reservation on an El Al flight but a friend of Bea’s from Montreal pleaded with me to yield my seat to her since she had had trouble getting three seats on that flight for herself and her two children. The plane was shot down over Bulgaria by the Bulgarian air force. I felt awful and vaguely responsible. I thought of the legend of the Grand Vizier and his escape to Samarkand. The same fate that saved me doomed them. Who had taken my place? Bea’s friend? One of her daughters? All I knew about them was the voice of the mother. It remained with me.

I went by sea. Despite my tendency to get seasick, I enjoy traveling by ship. The lure of the sea is such that desperate people often succumb to its promise of peace. It was the lure I had felt during my first crossing, and now, as I leaned against the railing, I was overwhelmed by the darkly powerful idea of letting go, of allowing all bonds to unravel once and for all. I was convinced that, rocked by the waves, I would at last be at peace.

I spent several weeks in Israel, staying with Dov and Leah but making many trips through the country. I went to Bnei Brak, the most religious suburb of Tel Aviv, which some call Israel’s least religious city. But I had a sudden desire to see the “young” Rebbe of Wizhnitz, for he represented an essential part of my past to which I needed to cling. I have spoken of the love and respect I felt for his father, Rebbe Israel.

Slumped in his armchair as if crushed by the weight of years, he gazed at me with a mixture of tenderness and frustration. Perhaps he was looking for the adolescent who had spent exhilarating shabbats under his roof.

“I look at you,” the Rebbe said, “and wonder who you are. I know who you were, but not who you are.” I didn’t answer. I was thinking of
his father. Had I really changed that much? Yet, like the adolescent who went on a pilgrimage to the neighboring town, Grossvardein, I contemplated the Rebbe with respect and devotion. All at once I forgot everything I had learned in philosophy about being and about the immanent forms of transcendence. I felt guilty, and I now understand why. In days past I had visited the Rebbe that he might question me; but this time I had come to question him, about such things as fate’s place in existence and about the all-powerful Creator and His devastated creation. But I didn’t know how to articulate my doubts and apprehensions. My lips stubbornly remained sealed. To put me at ease the Rebbe began to smile, as his father once had long ago. He invited me to explain how I had changed.

“Times, too, have changed, Rebbe,” I said.

“What of it? If times have changed, that’s their business, not yours. Times change because God, blessed be His name, makes them change. But you yourself are responsible for what happens to you. And for how you look. I liked you better the last time I saw you.”

The last time had been in Antwerp. He had arrived from Romania. A Hasid had told me that it was my cousin Avrom Feig of Arad who in 1944 had saved the Rebbe from deportation by sending a guide to lead him and his family across the border. In Antwerp he was as lonely and melancholy as I. But he was probably thinking of a time long before that.

“You liked me better before, Rebbe? Why? Because I wore side curls and feared heaven?”

He did not reply. Instead, he leaned forward, as if to examine me more closely. “Tell me,” he asked, “what is the relation between the man you are and the man I see?”

I fell back on philosophical double talk: “Being is not necessarily visible, and that which is visible is not necessarily part of being.”

He was silent. He looked unhappy, disapproving. “Where did you learn that?” he asked, his voice muffled.

“In books, Rebbe.”

“What books?”

I didn’t know what to say. He understood or he guessed. Profane works had displaced the sacred texts on my desk. The Talmud was no longer my sole concern.

“And if your grandfather, may he rest in peace, could see you, what would he say?”

The blow registered. “And you, Rebbe, who do see me, what do you say to me?”

His next question was one I asked of myself as well: What would I like to hear him say? Was I seeking his blessing? He closed his eyes, then opened them.

“The great Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav,” he said, “tells the story of a child lost in the forest. Gripped by panic, he cries, ‘Father, father, save me!’ So long as he cries, he can hope his father will hear him. If he stops, he is lost.”

All trace of severity was gone from his face and from his voice. I looked at him and saw his father, and suddenly I felt better.

“Rebbe,” I said, “believe me, I have never ceased to cry out.”

A smile brightened his face. He seemed relieved, perhaps even happy, happy to have brought me back.

“May the Lord be praised,” he said. “Then there is hope.”

The conversation became more relaxed. He asked me about my work. He wanted to know if the stories I told in my books were true, had they really happened. I answered not too convincingly: “In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.”

I would have loved to have received his blessing.

In Jerusalem, as always, I climbed the towers of Notre Dame and the YMCA to look at the Old City, peering through binoculars at Jordanian soldiers strolling in the city of David. Later Yehuda Mozes (my employer and friend) and I revisited Galilee. Safed and Tiberias were now regular destinations in our personal itinerary.

My friend Paula Mozes kept me informed of developments at the paper. She was the confidante of all the journalists. Anyone in need of help or advice turned to her. The poet Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, whose work is among the most powerful in Israel, owed the comfort of his last years to her.

Paula was an exceptional woman, intelligent and courageous. During the Occupation she had escaped from her native town, Zhdanov-Lubelsky, and reached Smolensk, where she joined a unit of Russian partisans. Disguised as a peasant, she kept house for the local Kommandantur. Having convinced the Germans that she did not understand their language, she was allowed to remain present when officers chatted among themselves. She risked her life often and her information contributed to the success of many acts of sabotage, especially
those that targeted railroad tracks. After the war she made her way to Budapest, then to Vienna. When she left for Palestine, she brought four hundred orphans with her.

Today a great sadness comes over me when I think of Paula and Noah and the tragedies they suffered. Their twelve-year-old son Adi was hit by a car and killed in Ramat Gan. The following year they had another son, Nonni. As a young adolescent he was in a car that skidded and killed a neighborhood boy in the very spot where Adi had died. Many years later Noah himself was struck by a truck near the newspapers offices in Tel Aviv. An ambulance brought him to the hospital, where he was operated on by the same doctor who had tried to save the two adolescents. But it was too late. I miss Noah. He was a character; as smart as he was, he loved to act the fool; wealthy, he loved to pass for being penniless. The journalists adored him. Paula died some ten years later in early 1994, just before Passover. The holiday became a time of mourning.

At the end of my stay in Israel, Dov proposed that I leave Paris and go to New York, not just to write a few articles, but as a permanent correspondent. “That way Leah and I will be able to visit the United States,” he said with an impish smile. But I had no desire to leave France. I didn’t know anyone in America and wasn’t sure I could make enough money to get by there. Dov told me they would raise my salary to $160 a month. When I politely inquired whether he thought I could make ends meet on that, he replied, “No, but you can do what other people do.” I asked what other people did, and he said, “Make speeches.” That was a fine idea for someone who broke into a cold sweat whenever he had to open his mouth in public. “You’ll learn,” Dov said. I told myself he couldn’t be serious, but decided to wait and see.

When was it that I realized I was not in control of my destiny? It was by chance that I had survived, by chance that I had followed one road rather than another. It was by chance that I had become a journalist. Events unfolded outside me and beyond my will. Very often I simply let myself be carried along.

Back in Paris I began to prepare my move. I arranged for Shaike Ben Porat, a young Israeli intellectual who wrote for one of the ideological weeklies, to cover Paris in my absence. At Dov’s request I set up a whole network of European correspondents. In Geneva I appointed
Edwin Eytan, a likable bon vivant who gave up his medical studies to assume the post. Alfred Wolfmann kept the position in Bonn, and Abraham Rosenthal his in London. They were all happy, and so was I. In my new capacity as chief foreign correspondent, I paid them visits, feeling not only useful and influential (with Dov) but also vaguely superior, though why or to whom I couldn’t say. I had never given anyone an order and wouldn’t have known how to.

In December I received from Buenos Aires the first copy of my Yiddish testimony “And the World Stayed Silent,” which I had finished on the boat to Brazil. The singer Yehudit Moretzka and her editor friend Mark Turkov had kept their word—except that they never did send back the manuscript. Israel Adler invited me to celebrate the event with a café-crème at the corner bistro. He was wearing my raincoat. Why? One day I had gone into a store to buy a bathing suit. They didn’t have my size, but since I was too shy to say no to the salesgirl, I had left with an ill-fitting raincoat. So I had passed it on to Adler, half-price. “Tonight,” he announced, “you’re coming with me to hear some Brazilian music.” I told him I couldn’t. I had an appointment with Amos K., a young, wooden-faced journalist who was for many years the
enfant terrible
of the Israeli press. I knew he wanted to see me because he was hoping I would intercede with Yehuda Mozes on his behalf. He wanted to write for
Yedioth
, but the Old Man wanted no part of him, for reasons both ideological and personal. “Bring him along,” Adler expansively suggested. Amos said he would come if there would be drinks.

A lover of food and drink, Amos was a tireless talker who became brilliant when drunk. But when he was sober, his smile was forced. In fact, everything about him seemed forced. He aroused discomfort the way some people spread warmth. That night he complained steadily about the service, the singer, the food, the drinks, even the cigarettes. By two in the morning he was not so much unpleasant as grim and incoherent. He was shouting obscenities at shuttered windows on a street behind the Boulevard Saint-Germain when suddenly he noticed two young women approaching. “What do you say we go for them?” he suggested. My cowardly heart sank. “I’m exhausted,” I said. Whereupon Amos turned to Adler. “What about you?” he asked, challenging him. Israel wasn’t tired. They accosted the two women and the four of them walked off without so much as saying good night to me. One of the women became Amos’s longtime companion. The other—Michelle—became Israel Adler’s wife in Jerusalem.

My intercession with the Old Man worked. He withdrew his veto against Amos, who then made a career at the paper that hadn’t wanted his byline. His pieces were original to the extent that they were hurtful. In
Yedioth Ahronoth
he wrote on Chinese cuisine, pornography (political and otherwise), abstract painting, the greatness of his friends (who feared him), the stupidity of his enemies (who were legion), the ambitions of leaders and the frustrations of their critics. He liked to hit, and he hit hard. As it happens, he was often right. But why did he detest all those who wrote about the Holocaust when he himself referred to it more frequently than they did?

Over the years he would drop in on me during his visits to New York, downing a bottle of whiskey while asking me to find him an American publisher. Once he mentioned in an article that he had never seen me laugh, and it’s true that in his company one really didn’t feel like it.

Later I will have occasion to come back to this eternal adolescent who aged so badly. Our paths have not crossed since 1986. My friendship with Israel Adler, on the other hand, has withstood time.