All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (53 page)

He had robbed us of our time, our energy, and our enthusiasm just for the fun of it. It seems I had learned nothing from my misadventures with Givon.

It took us a long time to pay off our debts. And to sell the Oldsmobile.

In 1957, during my convalescence, I received good news from François Mauriac: Jérôme Lindon of Éditions de Minuit was going to publish
La Nuit
(Night). The letter of confirmation opened a new chapter in the book of commentaries that is my life.

Lindon didn’t like the original title: “And the World Remained Silent.” He preferred a biblical phrase, perhaps something from the Book of Jeremiah. But after discussing various suggestions, we settled on
La Nuit
. Lindon also wanted me to tighten the text, given to him by Mauriac, though I had already pruned and abridged it considerably. He proposed new cuts throughout, leading to significant differences in length among the successive versions. I had cut down the original manuscript from to the 245 of the published Yiddish edition. Lindon edited
La Nuit
down to 178.

Lindon was unhappy with my probably too abstract manner of introducing the subject. Nor was he enamored of two pages which sought to describe the premises and early phases of the tragedy. Testimony from survivors tends to begin with these sorts of descriptions, evoking loved ones as well as one’s hometown before the annihilation, as if breathing life into them one last time. Lindon also preferred to open the story with the portrait of Moishele, the beadle of our synagogue.

The book ended this way (I only quote it for its relevance today):

By the time
Night
was published in France, I was at work on another book. One critic, René Lalo, expressed surprise; he was convinced I would write nothing more after
Night
. In one sense, he was right: There was nothing more I could say about Auschwitz, since words that seek to grasp its reality are doomed to fail from the start. But then, what to do with all this acquired knowledge? Is it not imperative to testify if only so as to leave a trace? For whom? For what? Who will decipher it? Understand? And yet …

Writing for me is a painful pleasure. The most difficult part is to begin. Once the first sentence appears on paper, the rest follows. The path is clear. “Somewhere a child began to cry.” That was
Dawn
. From those few words I knew my characters would live and die in Palestine. “Outside dusk fell upon the city like a vandal’s heavy fist.” Thus begins
The Town Beyond the Wall The Gates of the Forest
opened with a phrase suggesting encounter and parting, the gulf of forgetfulness and the discovery of sharing: “He had no name, so he gave him his own.” In
The Forgotten
it was Elhanan’s prayer that served as lure: “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, forget not their son who calls upon them now.”

There are some words I cannot bring myself to use; they paralyze me. I cannot write the words “concentration,” “night and fog,” “selection,” or “transport” without a feeling of sacrilege. Another difficulty, of a different type: I write in French, but I learned the language from books and therefore I am not good at slang.

All my subsequent works are written in the same deliberately spare style as
Night
. It is the style of the chroniclers of the ghettos, where everything had to be said swiftly, in one breath. You never knew when the enemy might kick in the door, sweeping us away into nothingness. Every phrase was a testament. There was no time or reason for anything superfluous. Words must not be imprisoned or harnessed, not even in the silence of the page. And yet, it must be held tightly. If the violin is to sing, its strings must be stretched so tight as to risk breaking; slack, they are merely threads.

To write is to plumb the unfathomable depths of being. Writing lies within the domain of mystery. The space between any two words is vaster than the distance between heaven and earth. To bridge it you must close your eyes and leap. A Hasidic tradition tells us that in the Torah the white spaces, too, are God-given. Ultimately, to write is an act of faith.

Spring 1958. The war in Algeria was at its height, gaining destructive momentum on both sides. Incredibly, some men invest more passion in killing than in living and bringing new life. At the UN France was on the defensive. Israel was among its few supporters. Yet many American Jewish intellectuals were pro-Algerian. Joseph Golan, a political adviser to Nahum Goldmann and the man who played an important role in the departure of Moroccan Jews for Israel, introduced me and others to prominent Algerians at UN headquarters. The Israeli delegation was displeased, and Golda later punished him for his contacts with Algerians by withdrawing his Israeli passport. Consequently, he left the Jewish arena and moved to Africa, invited by the president of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, to advise on his country’s economic problems.

It was around that time that I returned to France to promote
Night
. Mauriac’s stirring preface, reprinted on the front page of
Le Figaro Littéraire
, attracted attention, and his praise for the book aroused the reviewers’ interest. The work was favorably received, though this kind of literature was not yet fashionable. Neophyte that I was, I read and reread every review and wanted to thank each critic individually. I tried hard not to let the praise go to my head. Mauriac, whom I visited the day I arrived in Paris, had his own way of immunizing me: “One day the critics make us pay for the joy they have given us.” Of course, he was right. That day, too, would come. The moment you achieve visibility, you become a target, and often there are more arrows than compliments. I still remember my first negative review: that day, like a child, I wanted to run from newsstand to newsstand to buy up all the copies of the misguided newspaper—and burn them.

I finally met Jérôme Lindon. In his unprepossessing office he explained his opposition to his government’s policy. He was fighting for an independent Algeria. To put me at ease he spoke of his family (his father had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials) and his childhood. He made me a present of his lovely translation and commentary on the Book of Jonah. In short, we had a good meeting. It was later, much later, that he adopted political positions that created a rift between us. His preface to the book
Pour les Fédayin
(For the PLO) hurt me and many of his friends, as did his virtually unconditional adherence to the Palestinian cause. But on a personal level, the contact between us was never severed.

I owe him my encounter with Samuel Beckett. One day he said, “He’d like to meet you.” I was thrilled at the prospect. We made an appointment at a restaurant, Chez Francis. As is my custom, I arrived half an hour early, taking a seat in the corner without noticing the elegant man seated across the terrace. An hour went by. I wondered if I had been told the wrong day or time. I looked at my watch, and that was when I saw him looking at his. Our eyes met, and we smiled at the same moment. I got up and went over to him. We shook hands. I sat down across from him and waited respectfully for him to initiate the conversation. He waited too. I don’t know how long the silence lasted, but I do remember it was he who broke it. Delicately, as if in a whisper, he began to talk—but not about himself or about me. The manuscript of
Molloy
had just been returned to him, and he realized that the epigraph had been omitted from the printed book. “It was a simple phrase: ‘in desperation.’” He fell silent again. We sat there for an hour,
silent but not mute. We would see each other again, and he would speak to me of the tragic role of the witness.

In the 1960s Lindon sent me a message of friendship through Marguerite Duras, then in New York for a brief visit. She was already known, but not yet famous. I knew nothing about her except her connection to
nouveau roman
circles. I liked her book
Un Barrage contre le pacifique
, but didn’t know how to tell her.

We went for a walk in Central Park and along Fifth Avenue. I took her to the UN. She tried to get me to talk about my latest book, my work, and especially the experiences I had described in
Night
. But I was too bashful. We never saw each other again.

For the first time in my life, I was a beneficiary of the luminous boon of television. France’s star cultural journalist Pierre Dumayet interviewed me for his program “Lectures pour tous.” Israel Adler drove me to the studio on the motorscooter of which he was so proud. His excitement was such that we almost had an accident. “Don’t you have stage fright?” he asked. Of course I did. “Try to think about something else.” Fair enough. “But be careful of your hands,” he added. “On this program they show hands as much as faces.”

The next day people recognized me in the street. They didn’t know who I was or what I had written, just that I had been interviewed on the small screen by one of its stars. I didn’t have the impression that
La Nuit
was selling well, but it was being talked about here and there.

They say Borges insisted on writing personal thank-you notes to everyone who bought his first book. I might well have done the same.

An anecdote for writers just starting out. Franz Kafka was ill and decided to recuperate in Marienbad. “Your name seems familiar to me,” the innkeeper said, glancing at the registration card.

“Impossible,” Kafka replied. “I’ve never been here before.”

He took his valise and went up to his room to rest. He had barely dozed off when someone knocked softly at the door. It was the innkeeper. “Excuse me for disturbing you, but I have a question: Are you a writer?”

Astonished, Kafka replied, “Not really. Why do you ask?”

“Because my son says you are.”

“Tell him he’s made a mistake.”

The innkeeper left, and Kafka tried to go back to sleep. He was awakened again. “It’s my son,” the innkeeper said. “He claims you’re a
very great writer. He wants to meet you. It’s important to him. If you want to get some rest, you’d better say yes and get it over with.”

Reluctantly, Kafka agreed, and the innkeeper went to fetch his son. The young man could only stammer, “What an honor, what a pleasure!”

“But why?” Kafka asked.

“Because … because … you’re Kafka.”

“So?”

“So? Mr. Kafka, don’t you realize who you are? You’re a great writer, the writer I admire most in the world.”

“Have you read anything of mine?”

“Of course. Your work changed my life.”

“Which work?”

“Metamorphosis.”

“You
read it?”

“Of course I did. I read it and reread it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“What do you mean, where did I find it? I bought it.”

“So
you’re
the one!” Kafka exclaimed.

Despite the praise I received as the author of a first book, I felt a gnawing doubt. I wondered if I had said what needed to be said in the way it needed to be said. The more enthusiastic the reviews, the more anxious I became. In the end I decided that if people liked what I had written they had not understood. Testimony like mine should have aroused anger.

Around the same time, in the spring of 1958, Bea happened to be in London, where an acquaintance of hers was gravely ill. All his friends had gathered at his bedside. Dreaming of a reunion with both my sisters, I invited Bea to Paris, but she phoned to suggest I come to London instead. She was engaged to be married. I assumed she was about to marry the dying man, and exclaimed, “Are you mad?” (I had never stopped urging her—affectionately—to find a husband.) She hastened to reassure me: It was the doctor, not the patient, whom she planned to marry. I caught the first plane to London, where I had dinner with her and her fiancé, Dr. Leonard Jackson. Bea seemed so happy that on a sudden impulse I took off my watch and gave it to my future brother-in-law as an engagement present. Later Bea and her husband settled in Montreal, where they lived happily with their two children, until the day it was discovered that she had lung cancer.