All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (9 page)

Haimi went from a displaced persons camp in occupied Germany to Palestine, illegally of course. He passed through a detention camp in Cyprus, served in the Israeli army, and eventually went on to a new life in the United States. In Sighet he had been pious, and he became infinitely more so in America, where he grew an impressive beard. He worked as a jeweler on Forty-seventh Street, New York’s street of diamond merchants. On Shabbat he wore a
shtreimel
, a wide-brimmed fur hat, like his father in the old days. Close to the Rebbe of Sighet, as his father had been, Haimi apparently fell under the influence of Satmar, whose followers are known for their extreme hostility to Israel, Zionism, and any Jew less pious than themselves. In their eyes, I was doubly heretical: a lover of Israel and a liberal in matters of religious observance. Belonging as we did to two different, even opposing worlds, Haimi and I stopped seeing each other.

A few days before his sudden death, he asked Itzu Goldblatt, a fellow goldsmith, to get him a tape of my speech to the Bundestag. Why that particular speech? Perhaps because, for symbolic reasons,
I had begun it with a few words in Yiddish. Haimi did not live to hear it.

In the old days Itzu Goldblatt and I tried to outdo each other in everything: piety, devotion, and even—don’t laugh—modesty. Each of us wanted to be closer to heaven than the other. Who would be the first to see the Prophet Elijah in his dreams? I told him mine and he told me his, and together we consulted the appropriate manual to decipher them. How could we ensure that we merited the ascension of our souls? Where Itzu recited the prayer of Shmoneh Esreh in ten minutes, I took thirty. Where he took an hour to absorb a passage of
Etz-Hahaim
(The Tree of Life), I took three. If I immersed myself in the ritual bath twenty-six times before the morning service, he was satisfied only with forty-seven. It was the same with secular studies. Where I learned Latin and modern Hebrew, he discovered English. In fact, it was Itzu who gave me my very first English lessons, and his English would be as useful to him as my modern Hebrew was to me. Interned in a camp in Cyprus with thousands of clandestine immigrants expelled from Palestine by the British, he held an important post in the camp administration. He probably could have pursued a university career, but I, with my two left hands, could never have succeeded as a goldsmith.

Then there was Moshe-Haim, the cantor’s son. And Hershi, whose sister drowned in the Iza a few days before Tisha b’Av; and Moishi, the precocious businessman; and Chaim-Hersh, with his mischievous eyes and lovely baritone voice. And Itzu Sheiner, shy, often meditating even when walking to the synagogue. I remember the defeated air of the Selishter Rebbe’s two sons. I should have shown them greater warmth.

I stress the role of friendship and its place in my life as an essential component of everything I do. I can work only in an atmosphere of understanding—in other words, of friendship. As a journalist I enjoyed the friendship of my employers; as a teacher I sought the friendship of colleagues. A single suspicious look could cause a sleepless night, one cold word and I became full of self-doubt. I often felt inferior to others and always to my image of myself—or to their image of me. I therefore had to redeem myself. As a child I gave away candy; as an adult I was always ready to do favors: translations, advice, recommendations, intercessions, prefaces. I needed not so much to please as
to feel useful and loved. Sometimes I made promises I knew I couldn’t keep. I know I shouldn’t have, but it eased my solitude to know that someone expected something of me, that I was sharing in someone else’s possible happiness.

The charge would later be made that I am often unfair to my female characters, failing to accord them sufficient scope or depth. Perhaps it’s true. My male characters are better realized. Is that because my relations with them have to do with the theme of friendship? Surely I was wrong to conceive of friendship only among men. I have written several novels—among them
The Town Beyond the Wall
—solely to celebrate friendship. I love the character of Pedro because he evolves in a world illuminated by friendship.

In
The Gates of the Forest
I wrote:

In the camp I thought of my childhood friends and of all those who had formed part of my inner landscape. Sadly, we did not stay together. They left with the first transports and I a week later, with the
last. In the camp there were no friends to remind me of my childhood. In the camp I had no more childhood. I had only my father, my best friend, my only friend.

March 19, 1944. Cursed be that day, Jeremiah and Job would have said, a day of malediction, of punishment and grief. Why was it born? Who sired it? Why was it marked by a star of ashes? From that day on, the shadows, din, and flames of enemy destiny would rule the rhythm of our existence. To paraphrase the Bible: By night we yearned for dawn; at dawn we prayed that night might come. From that day on I was like a man who feels blindness overtaking him: I looked and stared, desperate to retain it all.

I remember I was at services. It was a Sunday. We had just joyfully celebrated Purim. At the House of Study we were still talking about the traditional play the children had put on at the home of the Borsher Rebbe. We paid no attention to the vagabond who stood near the door and refused to laugh. The Rebbe of Krechnev played the violin longer and in a tone more heartrending than usual. Why did tears stream down his face into his bushy beard?

Suddenly a man burst in, interrupting the service: “Have you heard the news? No? Are you deaf? Stupid? Don’t you know what’s going on? You sit here praying while …”

“While what?” we asked. He took a deep breath and shouted, “While the Angel of Death stands at the city gates!” Like Kierkegaard’s clown, he cried “Fire!” and his audience thought he was joking or raving mad. Hands were waved in disdain: let him get out and let us continue our prayers in peace. But then we heard a voice behind him. “He’s right. I heard it on the radio: The Germans have crossed the border. They’re occupying the country.”

A heavy silence fell over the congregation. People looked at one another. “What does it mean?” someone asked. Someone else replied, “Just that the front is getting closer.” “And the war will soon be over,” an optimist added. The madman, Moshe the Beadle, said nothing
more. His gaze lingered on those who had spoken. Then he shrugged and walked to the door, hesitated, then left, hands in his pockets, his disgust apparent. Someone called us to order. “What about the Aleinu, the final prayer?” We had forgotten the prayer without which orphans could not say Kaddish. We recited it and absently listened to the Kaddish.

Back home I found the family gathered around the radio. I wanted to announce the news, to tell them of Moshe’s outburst, but I was told to keep still. “Ssh,” my little sister said, finger to her lips, her face uncharacteristically grave. The table was set for breakfast, but no one had eaten. “The Germans …” Bea whispered. “I know,” I said. My father frowned in concentration, as if trying to foresee the future or thwart fate. If they were afraid, they didn’t show it. I don’t know what I felt, but it wasn’t fear. Curiosity, perhaps? I sensed that this was a crucial moment, that a new chapter in history was opening. Soon we would hear its roar as it changed humanity. The distant monster would finally show his savage, howling, bloodstained snout. At last we would cease to live on the sidelines. Spectators no more, we would be actors, with no further need of emissaries to tell us what was going on.

“This does not augur well,” my father said as he turned off the radio. “Yes,” my mother replied, “but we’ve seen bad omens before. Come. Breakfast is waiting and the customers will be here soon.” The store was closed on Sunday, but our neighbors knew they could come in through the kitchen. I hurriedly downed some steaming coffee and a slice of buttered bread, then went to tell my grandmother. “The Germans are coming. Yes, the Germans. They’ll be here soon.” My grandmother’s face collapsed. “May the Lord have mercy on my children,” she murmured, wringing her slender hands. “I think … I think I should go to the cemetery … meditate at your grandfather’s grave.” I left her and ran to “my” House of Study.

My friends were there, and we talked things over. Everyone agreed that the German occupation would be bad for the Jews, but that was as far as our imagination went. After all, the Red Army was so near, just across the mountains. Yerahmiel, the ardent Zionist, suggested we take the opportunity to escape to Palestine. “Let’s go, right now! Take advantage of the fact that the Germans aren’t here yet.” Someone reminded him that there was a war on. “Exactly,” he retorted. And how were we supposed to get across the border? “Never mind, we could do it if we wanted to.” Everyone but me was skeptical.
I was secretly convinced that we would soon meet again in the Holy Land, and that the Messiah himself would lead us there. The war was the climactic battle between Gog and Magog—“the torments of redemption,” it’s called. The enemy now preparing to invade us would be vanquished, and his defeat would mark the Savior’s triumph. “You and your mystical hallucinations,” my friends said.

Elie Wiesel’s childhood home in Sighet, Romania, as it looked in 1965.

Elie with his mother and his sister Tziporah, shortly before the Nazis entered Sighet.