One Generation After (9 page)

She spoke to him until he turned the corner. Then, in a voice tinged with neither reproach nor regret, she cried: “What am I to do, dear God, what am I to do? I love everybody, it’s only myself I cannot love.”

And the young girl, both virtuous and beautiful, threw herself out of the window.

*

One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets preaching against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled ironically. Then they stopped listening: he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.

One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate preacher, approached him with these words: “Poor stranger. You shout, you expend yourself body and soul; don’t you see that it is hopeless?”

“Yes, I see,” answered the Just Man.

“Then why do you go on?”

“I’ll tell you why. In the beginning, I thought I could change man. Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.”

Like most Jewish parents of the
shtetl
, mine wanted their son to study the violin. Not as a profession, God forbid, nor as a hobby. Simply as part of my education. Like the Talmud. Or Latin. It made a good impression. And it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Without being overly enthusiastic, I was willing to try. I thought: What was good enough for King David will be good enough for me. Still there was the problem of finding a suitable instructor among the several in our town. Some were even ready to come to our house, except that we had no room. And then the neighbors might have raised understandable objections. To study with Miss Tudos was not a good idea either. Not only did she live too far, she was a woman. What would people say?

Finally, after many inquiries, my father found the ideal instructor in the person of a police captain quartered at the station nearby. I only had to cross the street.

Out of friendship for my father, he agreed to teach me without fee. Three lessons a week to begin with. Then a lesson a day, so that in a few years I could give my first concert—this was mentioned right away—on a Saturday evening at the Borsher
Rebbe’s during the traditional ceremony of escorting the Shabbat on its weekly journey into exile.

So I was given a second-hand violin, and the captain told my father he was expecting me.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The guard let me in, saluting as though I were an officer. I did not return his salute. I had my hands full: one was holding the violin, the other a bottle of
cuika
—a gift from my father. But even with my hands free I would not have known what to do: no one had ever taught me how a bashful little Jewish boy was to respond when saluted by a gigantic police sergeant.

The captain, seated at his desk, his knees crossed, welcomed me with a laugh. “Come closer. Don’t be scared. Let me look at you. So you’re our new Paganini.”

“No, sir,” I said, not knowing what he was talking about.

“How stupid of me,” he continued. “How can you be Paganini when you’re a Jew? No, you will be our Heifetz.”

I knew as little about the second gentleman as about the first, but I guessed he was Jewish and was reassured. But only briefly. For now he made me turn around to better examine me.

“First lesson,” he said. “We must do something about your
payoth.
”

“No,” I shouted with growing fear.

Nothing on earth could have made me give up the two side-curls which made my face look more Jewish.

“We must,” he repeated. “With those curls in your eyes, you won’t be able to play.”

“I don’t want to play,” I shouted. “Not if you have to cut my
payoth …
”

In my childish imagination I had visions of being forced to choose between my musical future and my Jewish faith, and I could hear myself accepting martyrdom.

“Don’t be silly,” the captain said. “Nobody will cut them off. Who needs them? You want your earlocks, keep them. However, before coming here, you’ll have to push them behind your ears. You can put them back in place when you go home. What do you say? Do you agree?”

“No,” I replied, trembling. “I am a Jew. A Jew has no right to wear disguises. A Jew who hides his
payoth
is a liar and a fake and should be ashamed of himself.”

He stared at me and shrugged his shoulders. “You’re stubborn, my little Jewish friend. Just like the rest of your people. Still, I think I’m going to like you anyway. I think you and I will get along.”

He was short and heavy-set. His strong features, low forehead and somber, heavy-lidded eyes were impressive. I was afraid to meet his gaze.

“Well,” he said. “Hand me that, let me show you what playing means.”

He seized the violin and began to play what turned out to be his favorite
doina
. Eyes closed as in a trance, he seemed to plunge back into his childhood, far away, among the gypsies. I was afraid to breathe, but I followed him and watched him make his memories dance. The experience left me wide-eyed and enchanted as never before.

“See?” he said, surprised at finding me still there. “That’s the way you’ll have to play.”

Then he showed me how to stand, how to hold the instrument in my left hand and the bow in my right, how to keep time and make of the violin an extension of my arm, an expression of my soul.

While I was practicing, he uncorked the bottle, lifted it to his lips and took several swallows. I shall never know whether he was as satisfied with his pupil as he evidently was with his
cuika
.

Two days later I came back, carrying the same violin and another bottle. From then on, it became a ritual. While he drank, I familiarized myself with the instrument and its sounds. Had he been as good a teacher as he was a drinker, I would perhaps be more than the amateur violinist I am today.

I can see him still: daydreaming, his elbows on the table, the bottle in front of him. He drank without opening his eyes. Sometimes a mysterious anger seized him and he would snatch the violin out of my hands and feverishly perform one of his savage tunes. Appeased, he would order me to play the piece again while he took another swallow from the bottle. As long as there was any
cuika
left, I could practice. The moment the bottle was empty, I had to leave; the lesson was over. Fortunately, his influence on me was limited to music.

Incidentally, I must admit he was a good instructor; I realize it now. In turn severe and forgiving, attentive and absent-minded, patient and intolerant; his mood changed according to the need. In initiating me into the secrets of his art, he communicated its rhythm and fire. And with the years the projected concert at the Borsher Rebbe’s became a possibility.

Naturally it never came to pass. My little town was annexed by Hungary, and my Rumanian police captain was transferred before I was quite ready to perform in public.

Father tried hard to find someone to replace him. Five or six potential successors were approached; none appealed to me. In the meantime I had become involved in other studies and other passions. Mute in its case, the violin was relegated to the rank of object, to the sharp displeasure of my parents. Father was to remind me reproachfully of this not long thereafter.

We had just arrived at the camp. Both of us were immediately assigned to the orchestra commando. Being a novice, my father naïvely believed that professional musicians had a better chance for survival. And so he told me: “See? If you had listened to me, if you had not given up the violin, you would not only be in the commando, you would now be a full-fledged member of the orchestra.”

It was as if he were scolding me for having missed an important career elsewhere, on the other side, among the rich and powerful.

In truth, I was glad then not to possess the mastery required for admission to the orchestra. I could not have played, not there. Or: I could have played, which would have been worse.

Besides, my father was wrong: the musicians in our commando, so envied by us, did not survive.

If someone had told me when I was a child that one day I would become a novelist, I would have turned away, convinced he was confusing me with someone else.

For the pattern of my future had then seemed clear. I would pursue my studies in the same surroundings with the same zeal, probing the sacred texts and opening the gates to the secret knowledge that permits fulfillment by transcending self.

Novels I thought childish, reading them a waste of time. You had to be a fool to love the fictitious universe made of words when there was the other, immense and boundless, made of truth and presence. I preferred God to His creation, silence to revelation.

As for France—whose language I chose for my tales—its name evoked visions of a mythical country, real only because mentioned in Rashi and other commentaries on the Bible and Talmud.

It took a war—and what a war—to make me change my road, if not my destiny.

The story of that change might not have been mine. And I might not have written it.

My first royalties were two bowls of soup, awarded me for a creative work never set to paper. The taste of that soup still lingers in my mouth.

 … It happened a long time ago, in a place where all persons wore the same mask beneath the same face, and all faces had the same blank stare.

I was young, barely out of yeshiva, too young to have become accustomed to the tephillin’s leather straps. My left arm still bore their imprint. In my imagination, I was still running after my teachers; I was their disciple, though not their heir. While carrying on my shoulders stones heavier than my body, I saw myself surrounded by flickering candles, pondering questions formulated centuries earlier in other places, on the other side of the world and perhaps even of history.

In the beginning, I had enough strength left to resist. Also it was my luck—yes, luck—to work next to a former Rosh-Yeshiva from Galicia. I don’t remember his name; perhaps I never knew it. As for his face, I never really looked at it. Only his voice has stayed with me, unforgotten and unforgettable, deep and sepulchral, the voice of a friend, a sick friend.

“You are new here? Instead of welcoming you, let me tell you your first duty: you must hold on. Do you hear? Hold on at any cost. You must not allow yourself to be tainted by evil, yours or anyone else’s.”

Bent over, without looking at me, he continued in a voice weaker but gentler than before: “Think of your soul and you’ll resist better. The soul is important and the enemy knows it;
that’s why he tries to corrupt it before destroying us. Do not let him. The soul counts for more than the body. If your soul maintains its strength, your body too will withstand the test. I tell you this because you have just arrived; you are still capable of listening. In a month it will be too late. In a month you will no longer know what having a soul could possibly mean.”

“Isn’t the soul supposed to be immortal?” I asked innocently.

We were digging. He stopped, lowered his voice, as if unwilling to hear his own words, and replied: “You will soon learn that this is neither the place nor the time to speak of immortality.”

Afraid lest I had offended him, I was about to apologize, but he was quick to resume: “To hold on, little brother, take my advice: protect your soul and it will protect you. You have the means. It’s simple: all you have to do is study.”

“Study what?”

“Torah, naturally. What else is there to study? It is the only road leading anywhere. Take it and follow it. As before, better than before, with even greater zeal than when you were at home.”

“That’s insane,” I said in disbelief. “How do you expect me to study here? Without teachers or books?”

“You’ll soon learn to get along without them. You’ll leap two thousand years back into the past. Here too the Talmud will serve as refuge. You’ll study it the way it was taught long ago in Sura and Pumbedita: from memory. In this place, little brother, we have no choice. Whether we want it or not, each one of us owes it to himself to be, all at once, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Yehuda …”