And the Sea Is Never Full (4 page)

Some scholars contend that I was the first to give the term “Holocaust” a modern usage by introducing it into our contemporary vocabulary. Why did I choose that word over another? At the time I was preparing an essay on the
Akeda
, the sacrifice of Isaac; the word
ola
, translated as “burnt offering” or “holocaust,” struck me, perhaps because it suggests total annihilation by fire and the sacred and mystical aspect of sacrifice, and I used it in an essay on the war. But I regret that it has become so popular and is used so indiscriminately. Its vulgarization is an outrage.

In truth, as I have said over and over, there is no word for the ineffable.
Shoah?
This biblical term, now officially used in Israel, seems equally inadequate. It applies to an accident, a natural catastrophe striking a community. As such it has appeared in official speeches and in the press since the very beginning of anti-Jewish persecutions in Nazified Europe, long before the implementation of the Final Solution. Clearly the same word should not be used to describe both a pogrom and Auschwitz.

After the liberation, Yiddish-speaking survivors referred simply to “the war” or the
Churban
, a word that signifies destruction and recalls the ransacking of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Yet with the passage of time I become more and more convinced that no word is strong enough or true enough to speak of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, … And yet.

In
The Town Beyond the Wall
, I divided society of that time into three
categories: the killers, the victims, and the spectators. Later, in my first speech at the White House, I observed that if we allow the victims to be relegated to oblivion, we would in fact be killing them again.

As the years go by, this witness grows increasingly weary of correcting “experts,” of trying to limit the trivialization of memory, of fighting public indifference. Hate crimes, religious wars, ethnic conflicts, collective violence, the rise in xenophobia and anti-Semitism—to think that we had imagined that the demons would no longer come howling in the night.

These may be the reasons for the pervasive feeling that a grave error has been committed, that something has gone awry. We must have been wrong to trust mankind, wrong to hope that we could defeat death by remaining faithful to its victims. Perhaps we should have remained silent, so as not to violate the secret entrusted to us by the dead. Perhaps we were wrong to expose the mystery of Auschwitz to the inevitable profanations we are forced to witness more and more frequently.

In Israel, the so-called war of attrition is devastating. In Munich, where an El Al plane is attacked by Arab terrorists, killing one and wounding eleven, the Jewish Center is set on fire. A Swissair plane explodes: Forty-seven people, passengers and crew, lose their lives. Violence becomes more frequent, more intense. Planes are hijacked. We witness the massacre of Palestinians by the Jordanian army and the birth of the Black September movement.

One evening, having been invited to Golda’s home, Marion and I arrive to find her distraught. The army has just shot down five Soviet MiGs that had violated Israeli airspace. Golda fears reprisals. Chainsmoking as usual, she complains: “These Russians, what do they want from us? Why are they always against us, always on the enemy’s side? Why do they provoke us? Is it war they’re looking for? With a small state like ours?”

Next day, in the restaurant at the Knesset, we chat with Ezer Weizman, the former air force commander, a minister without portfolio in Golda’s government, and the future president of the State of Israel. “Everybody is worried,” I say to him. “Aren’t you?” No, he is not. The enfant terrible of Israeli politics is, as General de Gaulle would say, “sure of himself” and of
Tsahal
, the army. “The next war will not last six days but six hours,” he tells us. “The plans are ready, success guaranteed.” “Then why is Golda so worried?” I ask. Weizman shrugs as if to say: What can you expect of a woman who has never done military service?

An hour later we have coffee with General Bar-Lev, commander in chief of the army, and famous for his strategic genius. I first met this brilliant military man in New York, where he was doing postgraduate work at Columbia University. He is a fine man—intelligent, reserved, sophisticated, and loyal. His speech is slow and deliberate; his gaze, penetrating. He inspires confidence and is admired by the military, respected by the politicians, trusted by the public.

We discuss the current tensions. He is nearly as optimistic as
Weizman. He whips out his pen and scribbles numbers on a paper napkin. Of course, he says in his low, halting voice, there are those who are afraid—not of the Arabs, naturally, but of the Russians. Those Russians are powerful. Their numbers are overwhelming. But they are far away. What would be dangerous for us would be a war with infantry and armored vehicles…. If the Red Army sends more than a hundred thousand soldiers, that might pose a problem…. But they would need transport planes…. And, yes, their pilots are good. But ours are better.

I must admit that I was frightened by his calm. I thought to myself: The entire world is afraid of the Soviet Union, but he is not. France fears the Russians, Washington is wary of them, China distrusts them, and the tiny Israeli nation is fearless. If Bar-Lev’s equanimity had been based on a belief in divine intervention rather than in strategic arguments, I would have better understood his attitude.

Let us stay another moment with
One Generation After
, whose French title,
Entre deux soleils
, was suggested by Manès Sperber. What does it mean, “Between two suns”? It means dusk, the mystical hour worshipped by Hasidic dreamers. At that hour on the first Friday of Creation, according to
Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of Our Fathers
, ten things were introduced into human history: the abyss that swallowed Korah and his accomplices; Miriam’s well, which accompanied the Children of Israel into the desert to heal them; the mouth of the ass that answered Balaam; the rainbow in Noah’s time; the manna; the staff used to effect the biblical miracles in pharaonic Egypt; the
shamir
, the tiny worm that split the stones used in the construction of Solomon’s Temple; the rectangular shape of the letters engraved in the Tablets of the Law; their capacity to be read at four different angles; and the tablets themselves. Certain sages add the demons, who were also created at this hour between daylight and darkness. And the tomb of Moses. And the ram Abraham sacrificed instead of his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.

This title reflects, less clearly than the American, the content of this work, which deals, however sketchily, with generational conflicts and also the fate of children of survivors, their dramatic confrontation with their parents’ past. There is the tragic story of one young man, the son of a distant cousin from Queens. He was twenty, a student of literature, filled with literary dreams. One morning he rose, took his typewriter, and walked into the sea.

•   •   •

Years after the publication of
One Generation After
, I am invited by Yossel Rosensaft’s son, Menachem, to address the first meeting of “the Second Generation,” that is, the children of survivors. Facing these young men and women, some of them now fathers and mothers themselves, all caught between their parents’ wounded memory and their own hopes covered with ashes, I have difficulty hiding my emotions. For these people belong to my internal landscape: I look at them and see them through the prism of the past. Some of them were my students at City College. They affect me deeply because every time I see them, I cannot help but see other children through them, behind them, marching in the distance toward the blazing abyss.

I look at these young people and tell myself, tell them, that
they
were the enemy’s target as surely as were their parents.
They
were the ones he had hoped to annihilate. By killing Jews, he hoped to prevent their children from being born.

I tell them the talmudic legend of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his son Eleazar. Fleeing the Romans, they found refuge in a cave and stayed there twelve years. When they emerged they were unable to conceal their astonishment: The world outside had not changed. So angry were they that their eyes burned down all that they looked upon. As a result, a celestial voice ordered them back into the cave for another year, at the end of which the son was still angry, though the father was not. And the Talmud comments: “Whatever the son’s gaze wounded, the father’s gaze healed.”

Rembrandt’s beautiful painting of Abraham and Isaac comes to mind. It shows them, after the test, embracing with a tenderness that must have moved the Creator and his angels.

Is there a tenderness more profound, more intense, more human than the one that links the survivor to his child? What goes on in the mind of a son who watches his father praying or simply staring into space? What are the thoughts of a daughter who senses the pain of her mother, who has lost two infants to the executioner? Surely there comes a moment when such children become their parents’ parents.

My thoughts turned toward them once again when I wrote
The Fifth Son
and
The Forgotten
. I speak to them even when I think I am speaking to others.

In
One Generation After
, I try my hand at a new literary genre. My wish: to convey the essential in the form of dialogue alone. Dialogues
between individuals separated by death—or life. Brief questions and clipped answers. I wanted these dialogues to be anonymous. Voices. No, I wanted them to be echoes that reach us from far away. I strain to hear the last conversation between a young boy and his little sister, a grown man and his mother, a Hasid and his grandfather. He is a witness who grasps at scraps of dialogue with the dead man inside him. He wants every word to contain a sentence, every sentence a page, every page a book, a life, a death, and the history they share.