All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (49 page)

I love the Yiddish language, which I speak with the Lithuanian accent I picked up from Shushani. Before him, in Buchenwald, there was a boy from Kovno who told me of the experiences that had made him an old man. I loved his singsong intonation. It hurts me that I have forgotten his name, but I remember his bony face, creased cheeks, and feverish eyes. And that, too, hurts.

I love speaking that language. There are songs that can be sung only in Yiddish, prayers that only Jewish grandmothers can murmur at dusk, stories whose charm and secret, sadness and nostalgia, can be conveyed in Yiddish alone. I love Yiddish because it has been with me from the cradle. It was in Yiddish that I spoke my first words and expressed my first fears. It is a bridge to my childhood years. As they used to say, God writes in Hebrew and listens in Yiddish.

I need Yiddish to laugh and cry, to celebrate and express regret, to delve into my memories anew. Is there a better language for evoking the past, with all its horror? Without Yiddish the literature of the Holocaust would have no soul. I know that had I not written my first account in Yiddish, I would have written no others. To this day, perhaps more than before, Yiddish fills me with nostalgia.

To my great surprise, my Uncle Sam was suddenly proud of me. It seems some men at the synagogue had mentioned my articles, and their wives had praised my novel. Caught up in his enthusiasm, he blithely advised me to get married, and what’s more, he had a bride in mind: the daughter of a friend of his, a charming girl eagerly seeking a boy like me. “She’s a schoolteacher,” said Sam, all excited, “an intellectual from a good family. In short, made for you.” She often attended Shabbat services. “Why not come along with me on Friday night?” To avoid a long argument, I agreed. “I hope you have a hat,” Sam said. I told him I didn’t. I wore only berets. “Impossible,” he replied indignantly. “You can’t come to my synagogue without a hat.” He led me straight to a neighborhood shop, and properly fitted me out like a good Orthodox Jew in search of a bride. I presented myself at the synagogue on Friday night. Probably at Sam’s instigation, the president of the congregation asked me to officiate. Unfortunately, the audience was sparse, the women’s gallery nearly empty. I wondered where “she” was sitting and tried to picture her while chanting Psalms. But the girl of my uncle’s dreams either never showed up or left in the middle of
the service. Maybe she didn’t appreciate my style of prayer. Or maybe she didn’t like my hat.

I never went back to Sam’s synagogue. For one thing, it was too far. For another, except for the High Holidays and the Yizkor service, I now avoided public prayer, for I was mired in a religious crisis. I had no one to discuss such matters with—Shushani had disappeared, André Neher was far away, and I had not yet met the Lubavitcher Rebbe or my future teacher and friend Saul Lieberman—but the God of my childhood was tormenting me. As I mentioned earlier, it had started during my first visit to Israel, when I “forgot” to put on my tefillin for the first time. And it was in Jerusalem, most sacred and spiritual of cities, that I first felt the need to protest against divine justice and injustice.

In the meantime, I wasn’t at all depressed by Sam’s failure as a matchmaker. I had not yet forgotten Kathleen, and I had a feminine presence in Aviva, Yehuda Mozes’s private secretary. Tall and blond, she was the linchpin of the paper’s administrative staff. She could do anything, solve any problem. I had met her during a trip to Tel Aviv, and she was now vacationing in New York. We saw each other often: museums, concerts, walks in Central Park, sandwiches in a neighborhood deli.

One night she joined me for my regular trip to the
Times
office. It was July, in the middle of a stifling heat wave. The scene in Times Square was surrealistic: The usual human anthill of passersby now seemed to walk, laugh, and eat in slow motion. I bought the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
and flipped through them, certain words and names leaping out at me. In Egypt Nasser was waving nationalist banners before fanatical crowds, while White House spokesman James Hagerty called for calm in the Middle East. There was a speech by Adlai Stevenson, who would be the Democratic candidate in the presidential elections that November of 1956. Hammarskjöld was planning a trip abroad. In short, nothing earthshaking, but I decided to send a cable anyway, if only to say hello to the Old Man. Then Aviva and I would go to the movies. But once again the Yiddish proverb proved correct: Man makes plans, God unmakes them.

I can’t recall what film we had decided to see—it may have been
The Brothers Karamazov
. All I know is, we never got there.

As we crossed Seventh Avenue at Forty-fifth Street, I was hit by a taxi. The impact hurled me through the air like a figure in a Chagall painting, all the way to Forty-fourth Street, where I lay for twenty minutes
until an ambulance came to take me to the hospital. Aviva later told me that on the way I regained consciousness several times and gave her precise instructions: what to say to Dov, whom to call to replace me, what meetings to cancel, how to tell my sister Bea, whom to borrow rent money from. Then I passed out again. She also told me that the first hospital refused to admit me. Having examined my wallet, an employee found it outrageously, desperately empty. Without money or insurance I was unworthy of treatment. Business is business. Besides, I was considered virtually hopeless, and since there seemed to be no point in keeping me, I was carried back to the ambulance, which took to the streets again, sirens wailing, in search of a more charitable hospital. The orthopedic surgeon on duty at New York Hospital decided to admit me. His name was Dr. Paul Braunstein, and he saved my life.

My entire left side had been shattered. A ten-hour operation was required to reconstruct it, leaving me in a cast from neck to foot. All I could move was my head. Confined to bed and condemned to immobility, one dreams, one thinks about and sees the world in a whole new way. A simple painkiller is worth more than a dozen wondrous poems. I was more grateful to the nurse who came to turn me onto my back or stomach than I would have been to the most ravishing of creatures granting me her all. The most astonishing world news affected me less than the doctor’s smile. I later discovered, for example, that Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal while I was in a coma. Ordinarily, I would have leaped to the telephone, turned on the radio, done something. But now I didn’t even care.

After a few days my curiosity revived. Colleagues kept me informed. There were even some funny moments. My battered, imprisoned body ached, and yet all the visitors who came to console me said the same thing: “You’re lucky, it could have been worse. You could have lost your sight, your legs, your mind.” It reminded me of the old joke about the man reciting a litany of woes to his friend—he has lost his job, his house, his money, his fiancée—and his friend keeps saying, “It could have been worse.” Finally the man screams, “How the hell could it be worse?” and his friend mutters, “It could have happened to me.”

Haim Isaac, correspondent for the Labor daily
Davar
, replaced me for daily dispatches, but I was afraid my readers would forget me. I therefore decided to resume working, dictating a first-person account of the accident, followed by several commentaries and background pieces. Dictation wasn’t easy for me. Dov congratulated me,
though he may have been more impressed by my determination than by my writing. (He did say I deserved a Pulitzer Prize, but neither he nor anyone else at the paper ever mentioned the mounting doctor and hospital bills.)

In time my room became a meeting place. Of course, Bea and Aviva visited every day. Nurses came to watch baseball games. Before the television set was hooked up (more for them than for me), it had been impossible to get their attention; now they never left. Colleagues held consultations in my room instead of going to the press club at the UN. They talked politics and exchanged news and gossip. The number one subject was Gamal Abdel Nasser, the young Egyptian colonel who dared to defy Britain and France on Suez. The Security Council was virtually in permanent session. Israel was on the alert. Nasser got bad press in the West, but not in the Third World. The Muslim countries hailed him as a glorious hero destined to reconquer the former empire, a modern-day Saladin. Western reporters wondered whether he would be allowed to violate accords between Egypt and the European powers with impunity. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles counseled moderation and patience, Dag Hammarskjöld preached morality. A new war threatened to erupt. Suddenly the center of gravity for international news had shifted from Washington to the Middle East.

One morning I was visited by a lawyer who said he represented an insurance company. He had a proposition for me: If I signed a certain document, a simple piece of paper, he would hand me a quarter of a million dollars on the spot. I asked him to repeat what he had just said. The vastness of the sum made my head spin.

I was ready to sign that document and any others in his bulging briefcase. But my journalist friend Alexander Zauber screamed, “Are you crazy? Don’t sign anything!” I told him to think of the fortune involved. I would never make as much in twenty or a hundred years. He lost his temper: “You really want to let this crook ruin us? Tell him to get the hell out of here! I’ll get you a lawyer who defends victims instead of swindling them. You’re going to be a millionaire, I guarantee it!” How could I turn down such a treasure?

Zauber showed the insurance company’s emissary the door and phoned his lawyer. I was introduced to the supposedly eminent attorney that very afternoon. He seemed serious and professional, and he examined me as if he were a doctor. He also talked to Dr. Braunstein, who confirmed that I was in truly bad shape. The lawyer concluded
that this diagnosis was worth at least a million dollars. “At least!” a jubilant Zauber repeated. “See? And you were going to let yourself get fleeced by that insurance bastard! You’re lucky I was here to protect you.” He was so jubilant that if I hadn’t been encased in plaster, he probably would have pulled me out of bed for a dance.

But I was more concerned with the present than the future. The hospital had to be paid. The private room was expensive, and the newspaper, though responsible for its correspondents, would pay me nothing more than my meager salary. Where would I find the funds to pay for my rent and all the other bills? For the moment I was assigned this private room because of the seriousness of my condition and Dr. Braunstein’s kindness, but in a few days, when I was feeling better, I would have to share it with one or several other patients. This was a terrifying prospect. Ever since the war the idea of sleeping in the same room with a stranger had panicked me. My sister Bea would help out all she could, but she was almost as poor as I was. None of my friends was rich, and for reasons known only to Himself, God had decreed that none of my colleagues was either. The insurance lawyer’s proposal seemed the only way out. If I accepted, I would get the money right away; otherwise I would have to wait months or even years. Zauber was furious. He insisted I was about to commit the most idiotic act of my life, but I had made my decision. I would ask the first lawyer to come back late that evening, after Zauber had gone. Better a bird in hand than a mirage in the brain.

I had forgotten to allow for the possibility of a miracle. Among my visitors that day was Hillel Kook, who asked Aviva and other friends to leave us alone. He was an unusual man, the archetypal Central European intellectual in demeanor and looks: nearsighted, thin, tense, and curious. I had interviewed him several weeks earlier. He had just founded a political organization to combat Soviet interference in the Middle East. I knew him by reputation only. A member of the Irgun high command under the alias Peter Bergson, he and the writer Ben Hecht had directed the Committee of Hebrew National Liberation during the war. Their main objective was to save European Jews. In fact, no one had done more than Bergson to alert the American public to the tragedy of the Jews under the Nazis. Consequently, he was thoroughly disliked by the American Jewish establishment, which consistently fought and slandered him. During the
Altalena
affair he was even imprisoned by Ben-Gurion. “I heard what happened to you,” he said, coming straight to the point. “As you’ve probably discovered
by now, being sick in New York costs money. You don’t have any, but I do. So I brought you a few blank checks. Fill them out as the need arises, and let me know when you need more.” Hillel’s manner was matter-of-fact, as though he made gestures like this every day.

I was so overcome by his generosity that I was unable to utter a word. I gaped at him as though he were a
tzaddik
or an emissary of the Prophet Elijah, most unpredictable of prophets. Finally, I managed to ask him how I would ever repay him. “Don’t worry,” he replied, as nonchalant as a banker addressing a colleague. “I have plenty to live on. You can pay me back when the insurance company pays you off.”

He then reached out as if to shake my hand, thought better of it (since he could have grasped only plaster), said goodbye, and left.

When Aviva and the others came back in, I told them of the miracle. Zauber cried: “It’s a sign from God. He wants you to listen to me. Don’t be a fool. Now you can stay in your own room and you can hire
my
lawyer.” With that, he leaped toward my bed and planted a burning kiss on my forehead. “You’re going to be a millionaire,” he said.
“My
friend the millionaire. I warn you, if you sabotage my plans, I’ll kill you. And
my
lawyer will defend
me
.”

Every week Hillel called to find out if I needed more checks. In the meantime, the lawyer filed the suit that he and Zauber assured me would change my life for good. I made statements, signed documents and depositions. A month, a year went by. I returned to my hotel. Zauber returned to Israel, Bea to Montreal. From time to time I asked the lawyer how things were going. He was a patient man, and he advised me to follow his example. Eighteen months after the accident he accompanied me to court. This was not yet the trial, but a simple procedural matter. Two years after the accident, there was Still
nothing
. One day Hillel called me, and we had coffee together. He asked me about the trial. Wall Street, it seemed, had not been kind to him, and he was short of cash. But not to worry, he would work it out. He would wait. That day I instructed my lawyer to settle the matter within the week. He tried to talk me out of it. That was just what the insurance company was hoping for, he said. If they knew we needed cash, they would offer us peanuts. I replied that I didn’t care and that if he stalled I would replace him. The next day he informed me of the result of his negotiations: He would receive 30 percent of my payment and from the rest Hillel would be paid back.