All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (57 page)

The editor in chief, Hillel Rogoff, was a kind, talented man who was capable of passionate involvement in causes. Curiously, he preferred to address his collaborators in English rather than Yiddish. His assistant, Lazar Fogelman, a dreamer with a penchant for sudden outbursts of humor, had common sense only in his dreams. The number-three man was my friend Simon Weber. When I worked in the news bureau he was my supervisor, although it was to Rogoff and Fogelman that I submitted my articles for editing and approval.

Weber was a man of culture, thoroughly involved in both Jewish and American politics, an excellent journalist with great ironic wit. He had begun his career on the staff of the Communist Party’s Yiddish daily newspaper, but had quit the party as soon as he grasped the extent of its lies and horrors. He could tolerate anything from his colleagues except lack of talent.

The Yiddish literary and cultural world was dwindling, living its final hours of glory. One by one its lights were extinguished. If the language wasn’t dying, its speakers were barely hanging on. Like everything else, including nostalgia itself, the Second Avenue Jewish theater in Manhattan was not what it used to be. Nor was the Jewish press. Yet prestigious bylines still appeared in
Der Morgen Journal, Der Tog
, and the
Forverts
. I admired Jacob Glatstein, whose poem “It was in Sinai the Torah was given to us, it was in Lublin that it was taken back” moved a whole generation of readers. I loved the Judeo-Romanian reminiscences of Shlomo Bickel and the religious polemics of Chaim Lieberman. I soaked up knowledge and wisdom: S. Margoshes and his political editorials; Chaim Grade and his essays on the world of the Mussar; A. Leyeles and his lyrical verses; Almi and his pessimist philosophy; the poems of Itzik Manger, as beautiful and enchanting as a minstrel’s songs. I thirsted for learning and, God knows, I had a lot to learn. At first I wrote articles in Yiddish without any real knowledge of the giants of its literature. In my ignorance, I made a regrettable mistake. Writing about Isaac Bashevis Singer (whom we called, simply,
Bashevis), I struck a tone of unforgivable condescension as I compared other Yiddish writers to him. Not only was I wrong to cause them grief, I was wrong in my assessment.

Yiddish novelists, essayists, thinkers, ideologues, theorists: they knew one another and were jealous of one another. Since I was younger and completely unknown, and therefore no threat to them, I was the exception. I loved listening to them talk about their past.

Zalman Shneur was a great Yiddish and Hebrew novelist whose conversation both unnerved and amused me. Today his poems are studied in every Israeli high school. Like Bialik and Tchernichowsky, he is considered a classic author. He had a carefully trimmed beard, drooping moustache, bow tie—the appearance and the substance of a nineteenth-century writer. He would speak French to his wife in front of me until he realized I understood. Fiercely intelligent, he was especially adept at deflating celebrities. I spent an entire afternoon listening to him mock Ben-Gurion, who, regrettably, had shown him a lack of respect.

I spent a weekend in Montreal, where my sisters rabbi, David Hartman, had organized a colloquium on the principle of tolerance in the Jewish religion. The guests included rabbis, professors, and intellectuals of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches of the community. The aim of the meeting was to bring them together in an atmosphere of tolerance and camaraderie by emphasizing Judaism’s pluralist aspect. There I made the acquaintance of the young theologian Yitz Greenberg, the philosopher Emil Fackenheim, and Maurice Friedman, the Buber specialist. For three days and nights I listened to discussions on subjects like our relationships to the Laws of Sinai, attitudes toward the non-Jewish world, and the limits of the interpretation of tradition. Not a single word was uttered about the Holocaust.

Since then, that has changed. For some time now the event has been central to the reflections of all three branches of Judaism.

Armed with a precious green card and later an American passport, I traveled a lot during the sixties. In 1960, two Israeli colleagues and I were invited to Cuba by Fidel Castro. At the time he simply referred to himself as a revolutionary, nothing more. Hence the popularity of his message. We were greeted by young men, barely more than teenagers, all of them high officials: department heads, ambassadors, and even cabinet ministers. We spent three weeks meeting with the charming young revolutionaries who had overthrown President Fulgencio Batista and his corrupt regime. Factory workers
greeted us with the cry
“Venceremos!”
(We shall win!). The same promise was voiced in Fidel’s speeches, which could last all night, while the excited, mesmerized crowd periodically chanted
“Venceremos!”
Magnificent young machine-gun-toting militiawomen repeated the phrase with a smile as they guarded the entrances to government offices and the big hotels, stopping all who entered and searching (though none too seriously) those they found suspicious. We wondered how to arouse their suspicion in order to be searched by one of them, for some of Castro’s militiawomen were lovely indeed. Still, we all have priorities and I yearned to get back to New York for Rosh Hashana. Unfortunately, the official in charge of us at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed us that all flights were fully booked—for at least two or three weeks. I protested, shouted, begged. Even the Israeli embassy could do nothing. I was eventually offered a seat on a flight from Havana to Prague. That was when I almost panicked. The situation awoke my old anxieties. In the end I got back to New York in time to celebrate Rosh Hashana in my
shtibel
among the Hasidim of Guer.

I felt as though I were back in Sighet when I went to that
shtibel
. All the congregants were survivors. They prayed with a fervor I have encountered nowhere else. It was as though they were trying to persuade the Lord to once more become a Father to His people instead of their Judge.

I remember Shimon Zucker and his tales of the Lodz ghetto: the raids, the hunt for Jewish children, the cries of their parents. He fought to hold back his tears when he told of his own little boy who wanted so much to live.

And then there was Reb Avraham Zemba, the gentle, reticent nephew of the chief rabbi of Warsaw. He was quite old and would regularly take me aside and ask whether I knew the Talmudic saying according to which we are not alone when we bring sacrifices to God. Just as regularly, he would answer himself that the angel Michael, who is in heaven, is also bringing sacrifices to God, though his souls are those of the Righteous. “So it continues even on high!” Reb Avraham Zemba would exclaim.

Having tracked down Menashe Klein, my old friend from Buchenwald, Ambloy, and Taverny, I now saw him regularly. He looked older, but I could have picked him out in a crowd of a hundred rabbis. I could not have forgotten his determined glance, his stately bearing, the way he leaned over a tractate of the Talmud.

Never give in, never give up: that had been his motto. He repeated over and over that our people had seen other ordeals. Granted, this one was unique, but it was incumbent upon us to surmount it, as our ancestors had surmounted theirs. They rebuilt their sanctuaries, reopened their schools, helped one another resist the wicked. May we be worthy of their strength and their faith; otherwise the enemy will be victorious.

To this day I see Menashe at least once a month, sometimes more often. We share a project: to build a Beit Hamidrash (House of Study) in Jerusalem in my fathers name.

I made several trips to Europe and Israel. In London my publisher was concerned about
Night:
It was not selling well—in fact, it was not selling. In Paris I attended the summit conference at which de Gaulle brought Eisenhower, Macmillan, and Khrushchev together. The latter was enraged by the U-2 spy planes flight over Soviet territory.

Friends told me of a novel that had created quite a stir: André Schwarz-Bart’s masterpiece,
The Last of the Just
. Schwarz-Bart and I first met in a corridor at Le Seuil. When we eventually lunched together, I at last discovered a novelist more timid than I. An immediate alliance was forged. I admired his writer’s talent and his poet’s intuition. There was a curious mixture of fervor and reticence in the way he spoke of himself. Jealous colleagues had falsely accused him of plagiarism and ignorance. It hurt him, and I tried to soothe him by telling him what friends would later tell me when bad reviews of my books appeared: “Pay no attention, the book will survive its critics.” André smiled skeptically.
I asked him what he would work on next, and he said he wasn’t sure. He felt he needed to study Jewish texts, but he lacked access to sources. I suggested he either come to New York or go to Jerusalem. I gave him the names of several teachers who would be delighted to take him under their wing. He was tempted by the idea, but between two appointments with me he met Simone, a beautiful young woman from Guadeloupe, who later became a novelist in her own right. Eventually, he followed her to her island.

In Israel I covered the Eichmann trial, writing reports for the
Jewish Daily Forward
. I also wrote an essay for
Commentary
and
l’Arche
. Day after day I went to the Beit Haam, the “People’s House,” to listen to survivors’ depositions. The prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and his colleagues evoked the Crime and the Tragedy with a chilling intensity that sent shivers through the audience. Some sobbed, others merely seemed dazed. The three judges were living embodiments of moderation and dignity. They listened well.

I could not take my eyes off the defendant, who sat in his glass cage impassively taking notes. He seemed utterly unmoved by the recitation of the crimes against humanity and the Jewish people of which he was accused. He looked like an ordinary man. I was told he ate heartily and slept normally. Considering the crushing pressures of the trial, he seemed to bear up well. Neither the prosecutors nor the judges were able to break him.

I thought I remembered him. I knew that he had been in Sighet to supervise the deportation, and I wondered whether he was the man I had seen at the station, visibly saddened because there were no more convoys to send out of this town now emptied of its Jews.

I spent my evenings with Israeli correspondents covering the trial: Haim Guri (lyric poet of the Palmach, who later translated
Night
and
The Jews of Silence
into Hebrew); Shmuel Almog (future television boss), and my friend Eliyahu Amiqam (for
Yedioth)
. Their reports were classics of their kind. I talked with them about Israel’s destiny, upheavals, and dramatic turnabouts. Who could have dreamed in the years from 1941 to 1945 that Eichmann would one day stand trial in an independent Jewish state? For the Jews, their rediscovered sovereignty imposed the ethical duty of shaping history rather than enduring it. Justice and truth, power and understanding, needed to be reconciled. And what of the Eichmann trial in all that?

Hannah Arendt was surrounded by her coterie. Many Israeli journalists avoided her, finding her arrogant and condescending. She
knew everything before and better than everyone else. I met her only later, at her home, where we discussed her theories of “the banality of evil,” which some survivors found simplistic and offensive and which I was invited to refute in print. She greeted me amiably, telling me she had read and liked my work. Was she being sincere or merely courteous? I found her disconcerting and chillingly aloof. How could one delve into the tragedy and still retain that hardness in one’s eyes? The question I asked her was simple: “I was there, and I don’t know. How can you possibly know when you were elsewhere?” Her reply: “You’re a novelist; you can cling to questions. I deal with human and political sciences. I have no right not to find answers.” My essay “A Plea for the Dead” was an attempt to refute her accusations against Israel and to respond to the disdain she exhibited for the dead. In a famous letter Gershom Scholem scolded her for her lack of love for the Jewish people.