All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (48 page)

After feverishly scouring the classifieds for a week and conducting full-fledged searches (accompanied by Israeli colleagues who served as real-estate advisers), I found a room on the ground floor of a five-story building on Seventy-sixth Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. It was a quiet street, a quiet building. I signed a one-year lease without reading it. But if my eyes were closed, my ears were open, and I was awakened the next morning by a feminine voice coming from the floor above. As much as I love music, the relentless scales finally began to annoy me. I responded by pounding my typewriter keys so loudly that my singing neighbor complained. I offered her a deal: If she would stop singing, I would stop typing. Regrettably, she rejected the proposed truce. It seems she was a student at the Juilliard School of Music and of course she had to practice. She suggested I write my articles longhand. I decided to move, thereby forfeiting my security deposit. I found a cheap room on the eleventh floor of a hotel. The important thing was to be able to work in peace.

Later I moved for a third time, into the Master Hotel on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, where I lived until my marriage, in 1969. It was a small studio with a breathtaking view of the Hudson and the lights of Manhattan and New Jersey. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. As I wrote, I watched the city shake itself awake at dawn or sink into dusk while the luminous river of cars snaked by on the West Side Highway. More than a few visitors were so entranced by the view that they forgot the purpose of their visit.

It isn’t easy to put down roots in a new country. I had done reasonably well in Paris, but I wondered whether I could manage here. How long would it take me to adjust? Why did all those people in Times Square
run so fast? Were they trying to gain time? What I wanted was to slow time down. I was going to have to find some milieu in which the refugee in me could feel comfortable.

David Gedailovitch (who became first Gedalya, then Guy in an effort to seem more American) was my constant companion. Born in Slatina, a Czech village across the Tisza River from Sighet, he, too, had been in Buna. I considered him both overly optimistic and devilishly resourceful. He could repair my electric razor and cook his dinner with equal skill. And if there was ever something he didn’t know, he always knew someone who did. A perfume merchant and restaurateur, lover of great wines and importer and exporter of all kinds of merchandise, he introduced me to his circle of friends and associates. It was he who helped me overcome the trivial obstacles in my daily life and who found my third studio for me. And Abe Biller, generous with his time and advice. How many hours a day have we spent together talking about Israel?

I had also run into two or three old friends from Sighet, who lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan. They didn’t appreciate my “serious” behavior. They had come to New York not to remake the world but to have a good time, and it was they who introduced me to the American custom of the blind date, by providing me with a list of phone numbers. I spent precious dollars in a thoroughly vain attempt to charm distant beauties.

Jacob Baal-Teshuva, the representative of an Israeli film weekly whom I had met in Paris the year before, showed me how foreign correspondents did their work in New York—a piece of cake. All you had to do was drop in at the editorial offices of
The New York Times
every evening at nine-thirty and pick through “all the news that’s fit to print” until one had what one needed for a dispatch. A Western Union office happened to be nearby. By midnight I was ready to go home.

Richard Yaffe, a correspondent for the leftist Israeli daily published by Mapam, helped me acquire a “desk” in the UN press room. A little older than I, with an open face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a warm smile, he took me under his wing. An excellent reporter and a generous man more interested in truth than in scoops, he passed his tips on to me and taught me to avoid the many pitfalls that lurked for members of the international press corps at UN headquarters. He knew many delegates and had entrée everywhere. He may also have suspected that my financial situation was less than ideal, for he took me to cocktail parties and receptions where I was able to save lunch
money by downing petits fours and cheese sandwiches. I loved listening to his analyses and anecdotes. He never talked about himself, and so it was from colleagues that I learned his story. He had been a star reporter for CBS in Eastern Europe in the fifties, but was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities because of his liberal opinions. When he refused to inform on his friends, he was fired from his job. Paranoia was at its height, and his former colleagues shunned him. For several years he was barely able to feed his family. Finally, he was hired by the
Jewish Chronicle
of London and the leftist
Al-Hamishmar
of Tel Aviv. I once asked him why he never spoke of this tragic period of his life. “Why reopen old wounds?” he said. “I felt ashamed. Ashamed of my country and of the people I had worked with and regarded as friends.”

Since I have just used the word “ashamed,” let me dwell on it for a moment. On the instructions of Dov, who had apparently read a report on the subject in
Time
magazine, I researched an article on organized crime in America: the Mafia, and in particular the hired killers of “Murder Incorporated.” As I sifted through the archives of various newspapers and visited the Public Library, I was stunned to come across some Jewish names. In the twenties and thirties there were Jews who offered their services to the criminal underground, murdering men and women who had done them no harm. One of them reportedly boasted of being an observant Jew who wore his kipa to “work” and scrupulously respected the day of rest, the Shabbat. It was also reported that two members of a gang suggested to a Palestinian Zionist leader that they eliminate delegates who planned to vote against the UN partition resolution in 1947. Regrettably, it is also a fact that some Jewish gangsters considered themselves Jewish “patriots.” In his memoirs the writer Ben Hecht told of having been “kidnapped” by persons unknown and taken to a garage where, in the presence of various gangsters, he was given a suitcase stuffed with dollars for the Irgun.

These revelations came as a shock to me. I simply could not imagine a Jew becoming a hired killer. Yes, I had too idealistic a view of Jews, but the fact is that in Eastern Europe my people might have been criticized for just about anything, but not involvement in murders. Jews may have been guilty of lying or cheating, fraud or smuggling, theft or perjury, but murder was unimaginable. Very long ago there had been in my region one case of a Jew who had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for murder. His name was Reinitz, and it became common to call criminals “Reinitzes.”

I like to think that what accounts for this virtual absence of blood crimes in our communities was perhaps related to the commandment revealed at Sinai: Thou shalt not kill. The voice of God sounds and resounds in our collective memory. But then what accounts for the present reality? The fact is that in modern Israel acts of murder do occur. True, there are few such cases, but even one is too many. It seems we are finally becoming a people like any other, neither better nor worse. Does this mean we are not “the chosen people”? No, we are, but only in the sense that Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill attributes to the term: “the people that chooses itself, its destiny and mission.” And as important, in the sense of teaching all peoples that they, too, must aspire to reach beyond themselves, to lift themselves ever higher, and to see themselves as unique.

It was in America in 1956 that I met David Ben-Gurion, when I was assigned to cover his visit with President Eisenhower. The first time I saw him I could not help thinking of the tragic episode of the
Altalena
. Was this the same man, the same ruthless leader, who now spoke of prophetic ethics as often as of world politics, and who said it was Israel’s mission to serve as “the light unto the nations”? Despite such thoughts, in the end I fell under his spell.

Working alongside the American and foreign journalists accredited to the White House, I discovered the power of the news media. Indeed, the immense American machinery of state often seemed to function only to mollify them. Today the power of the media is even greater.

Along with the prime minister’s advisers (among them Teddy Kollek, future mayor of Jerusalem, and Yitzhak Navon, future president of the Jewish state), the press waited on the White House lawn for Ben-Gurion to emerge from the Oval Office. We amused ourselves by placing bets on how long his meeting with Eisenhower would last. Scheduled for thirty minutes, it had already lasted an hour. Finally they came out. Ben-Gurion was so short that Eisenhower looked gigantic beside him. Seeing them side by side, we felt as though we had been lifted from the realm of politics into that of history.

American current affairs absorbed me day and night, in a way that French affairs had not. To be a foreign correspondent in America is to be ever on the alert. The most extraordinary events occurred at a frenzied pace on this vast and turbulent continent. Barely had I arrived when I began to cover the civil rights struggle. All the world’s newspapers
spoke of young Autherine Lucy, the first black student admitted to the University of Alabama, and of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was imprisoned for organizing the Montgomery bus boycott.
My Fair Lady
was the big hit on Broadway. Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. That was surely worth an article.

And then there was Jewish life in the United States, more animated and varied than in France, and so highly structured that it was easy to follow. Each organization was headed by a personality influential in the business world. Hence the importance of public relations. As it happened, my newspaper was expanding: its circulation and number of pages were both on the rise. World decisions were increasingly made in Washington rather than London. President Eisenhower was keeping an eye on the Middle East. John Foster Dulles and his team brought back reports and proposals, and drafted accords on which Israel’s fate would depend. The slightest border incident brought reactions in Washington and at the United Nations. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s press conferences were grandiose performances. Eloquent and authoritative, speaking of himself in the third person, he charmed the press. I liked him because he was said to be an admirer of Martin Buber. Might he admire Hasidism as well? His mysticism was fully revealed only after his tragic death in a plane crash in the Congo. He considered the UN’s true mission to be theological in nature, and Israel feared him because he saw himself as a kind of messiah or global sovereign. Indeed, Israel, being the only country that belonged to no bloc and had never held a seat on the Security Council, feared anything coming from the United Nations. One political cartoon of the time showed an Israeli delegate at a cocktail party. Standing alone in a corner with no one to toast, he raises his champagne glass and says, “Lehayyim, Lord.” Listening to speeches in the Security Council or General Assembly was enough to remind me of what the Bible calls Israel’s solitude.

At first I loved the days I spent in the UN’s glass palace, center of world diplomacy. In the vast hall of delegates (where free phone service was provided) you might run into India’s Krishna Menon or the Soviet Union’s Andrei Gromyko or buttonhole a high-powered visitor for a quick interview on the problems of the Middle East. When that happened, I knew my articles would make the front page.

The delegate with whom I spoke most often was Abba Eban, Israel’s young ambassador to the UN, known for his keen intelligence
and dazzling oratorical skills. His mastery of English was legendary (when Golda Meir named him foreign minister and Henry Kissinger was American secretary of state, she jokingly told President Nixon, “Mine has a better English accent than yours”), and he made fine use of his talents in defending his nation’s policies and honor. The Jewish community adored him. I admired him, though I recognized his weaknesses. His opponents in Israel chided him for the elegance of his Hebrew, his pomposity, and his tendency to repeat himself. But it’s difficult to be original when you’re making three speeches a day. Years later we were to have a distasteful, painful confrontation which I regret to this day, but at this time our relations were correct though infrequent. After all, for him I was but a newly arrived correspondent, the representative of a poor newspaper, and therefore less influential than the other journalists.

To alleviate my financial problems I did freelance work for the Yiddish daily
Morgen Journal
, filling in for its UN correspondent when he was away. The weekly
Der Amerikaner
accepted a few of my articles but would have preferred a serialized novel, which I did not have. “A pity,” said David Mekler, its editor in chief and a great lover of fiction, one day when we met. “I have a respectable budget for a novel.” I looked at him, a small, nervous man with thick glasses and an ironical expression. Apparently, he was not joking. “In that case,” I said, “I think I may have something stuck in a drawer somewhere.” I sat at the typewriter that very night, and in a week or two I churned out (under the pseudonym Elisha Carmeli) a romantic spy novel of which I remember only the premise: A man and a woman, both Israeli intelligence agents, are desperately in love, and one or the other is sent on a mission to Egypt. I can’t recall if the operation was a success, but I do know that all my characters died at the end, since I wasn’t sure what else to do with them. Mekler was as nonplussed as I was, but he published my novel anyway, under the title
Silent Heroes
. I am convinced he never read it all the way through. I didn’t read the printed version either, but Simon Weber, news editor of the
Jewish Daily Forward
(popularly known as the
Forverts)
, noticed it. He also knew I had written articles for the competition, and he invited me to lunch. A brilliant, cultivated journalist, Weber was proud both of his craft and of belonging to a prestigious team (Leon Crystal, Isaac Bashevis Singer, R. Abramowicz, Hayyim Ehrenreich), headed by Hillel Rogoff. We got along well, and when he offered me a job, I accepted without a
second thought. The
Forverts
was, after all, the world’s biggest, richest, and most widely read Yiddish daily. I started there as a translator and rewrite man assigned to the general news pages.