From the Kingdom of Memory (2 page)

They walk in the middle of the road, like urchins. They are on the way to the station, and they will never return. In sealed cars, without air or food, they travel toward another world; they guess where they are going, they know it, and they keep silent. They listen to the wind, the call of death in the distance.

All these children, these old people, I see them. I never stop seeing them. I belong to them.

But they, to whom do they belong?

People imagine that a murderer weakens when facing a child. That the child might reawaken the killer’s lost humanity. That the killer might be unable to kill the child before him.

Not this time. With us, it happened differently. Our Jewish children had no effect upon the killers. Nor upon the world. Nor upon God.

I think of them, I think of their childhood. Their childhood in a small Jewish town, and this town is no more. They frighten me; they reflect an image of myself, one that I pursue and run from at the same time—the image of a Jewish adolescent who knew no fear
except the fear of God, whose faith was whole, comforting.

No, I do not understand. And if I write, it is to warn the reader that he will not understand either. “You will not understand, you will never understand,” were the words heard everywhere in the kingdom of night. I can only echo them.

An admission of impotence and guilt? I do not know. All I know is that Treblinka and Auschwitz cannot be told. And yet I have tried. God knows I have tried.

Did I attempt too much, or not enough? Out of some thirty volumes, only three or four try to penetrate the realm of the dead. In my other books, through my other books, I try to follow other roads. For it is dangerous to linger among the dead; they hold on to you, and you run the risk of speaking only to them. And so, I forced myself to turn away from them and study other periods, explore other destinies and teach other tales: the Bible and the Talmud, Hasidism and its fervor, the
shtetl
and its songs, Jerusalem and its echoes; the Russian Jews and their anguish, their awakening, their courage. At times it seems to me that I am speaking of other things with the sole purpose of keeping the essential—the personal experience—unspoken. At times I wonder: And what if I was wrong? Perhaps I should have stayed in my own world with the dead.

But then, the dead never leave me. They have their rightful place even in the works about pre-Holocaust
Hasidism or ancient Jerusalem. Even in my Biblical and Midrashic tales, I pursue their presence, mute and motionless. The presence of the dead then beckons so forcefully that it touches even the most removed characters. Thus, they appear on Mount Moriah, where Abraham is about to sacrifice his son, a Holocaust offering to their common God. They appear on Mount Nebo, where Moses confronts solitude and death. And again in the
Pardess
, the orchard of secret knowledge, where a certain Elisha ben Abuya, seething with anger and pain, decides to repudiate his faith. They appear in Hasidic and Talmudic legends in which victims forever need defending against forces that would crush them. Technically, so to speak, they are of course elsewhere, in time and space, but on a deeper, truer plane, the dead are part of every story, of every scene. They die with Isaac, lament with Jeremiah, they sing with the Besht and, like him, wait for miracles—but alas, they will not come to pass.

“But what is the connection?” you will ask. Believe me, there is one. After Auschwitz everything long past brings us back to Auschwitz. When I speak of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when I evoke Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and Rabbi Akiba, it is the better to understand them in the light of Auschwitz. As for the Maggid of Mezeritch and his disciples, it is to encounter the followers of their followers that I attempt to reconstruct their spellbinding universe. I like to imagine them alive, exuberant, celebrating life and hope.
Their happiness is as necessary to me as it once was to themselves. And yet …

How did they manage to keep their faith intact? How did they manage to sing as they went to meet the Angel of Death? I know Hasidim who never wavered in their faith; I respect their strength. I know others who chose rebellion, protest, rage; I respect their courage. For there comes a time when only those who do believe in God will cry out to him in wrath and anguish. The faith of some matters as much as the strength of others. It is not ours to judge; it is only ours to tell the tale.

But where is one to begin? Whom is one to include? One meets a Hasid in all my novels. And a child. And an old man. And a beggar. And a madman. They are all part of my inner landscape. Why? They are pursued and persecuted by the killers; I offer them shelter. The enemy wanted to create a society purged of their presence, and I have brought some of them back. The world denied them, repudiated them: so let them live at least within the feverish dreams of my characters.

It is for them that I write.

And yet, the survivor may experience remorse. He has tried to bear witness; it was all in vain.

After the liberation, illusions shaped our hopes. We were convinced that a new world would be built upon the ruins of Europe. A new civilization would dawn. No more wars, no more hate, no more intolerance,
no fanaticism anywhere. And all this because the witnesses would speak, and speak they did. Was it to no avail?

They will continue, for they cannot do otherwise. When man, in his grief, falls silent, Goethe says, then God gives him the strength to sing of his sorrows. From that moment on, he may no longer choose not to sing, whether his song is heard or not. What matters is to struggle against silence with words, or through another form of silence. What matters is to gather a smile here and there, a tear here and there, a word here and there, and thus justify the faith placed in man, a long time ago, by so many victims.

Why do I write? To wrest those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death.

To Believe or Not to Believe

S
OMEWHERE
in the Carpathian Mountains, at the other end of my life, a Jewish child is saying his daily prayers. He closes his eyes to concentrate better, swaying to and fro as if to break out of the rhythm of his daily pursuits. Just before concluding, he repeats the Thirteen Principles of Faith exactly as a certain physician from Cordoba, the great philosopher and codifier Moses Maimonides, the Rambam, formulated them eight centuries earlier—clear and immutable principles which serve to buttress all who need them.

“I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, Blessed be His name, is the author and guide of everything that has been created … I believe that the Creator is the first and last … He rewards those who keep His Commandments and punishes those
who transgress against them … The Torah will not be changed and there never will be any other Law … I believe in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he may tarry, I will wait daily for his coming.…”

I look at that Jewish child who prays and is afraid to look; I listen and envy him.

For him, for me, it was once so simple. I feared God while loving him. I came to terms with exile while regretting it. I loved my parents and admired my teachers. I was a believer, as they say. And if I questioned my belief at all, it was only for fear that it might not be sufficiently perfect.

As for my place in an uncertain world, my aim in an ephemeral life—I had no doubts on that score. It was up to man, as God’s creation, to make the universe more welcoming. To bring redemption closer. Wasn’t this inordinately ambitious? So what? For us, in the Diaspora, being a Jew meant bridging the summit and the abyss, reconciling the worst torment with the most sublime hope. Imprisoned up there in divine time, the Messiah could expect deliverance from none other than man, below. Although a work of God, the Torah is not within God’s grasp: those who study it, and they alone, are qualified to interpret the Law. Do these seem dangerous paradoxes? For us, life itself was a paradox, and danger did not frighten us.

In those days I simply could not conceive of a Jew who did not define himself through his faith. Jews
had the choice: loyalty or denial. A faithless Jew was a renegade, outlawed from the community of Israel, therefore despicable. And dangerous. I had read enough on the subject to know how much distress was caused by renegades; they were to be found at more than one crossroad of Jewish suffering.

If you had asked any Jewish mother, from the Dnieper to the Vistula, what she most wished for her children, she would invariably have replied: “All I want is that they grow up to be good Jews.” What, precisely, did being a good Jew mean? It meant taking upon oneself the entire destiny of the Jewish people; it meant living in more than one period, listening to more than one discourse, being part of more than one system; it meant accepting the teachings of Hillel as well as of Shamai, and following Rabbi Akiba no less passionately than one followed his adversary, Rabbi Ishmael; it meant summoning joy on festive days and retreating into sadness when in mourning; it meant being ready to sacrifice oneself to sanctify the Name without even being sure that the Name desired the sacrifice, or that it was not He who conferred upon the executioner his might, if not his right.…

For the child I was, that last question did not arise. I was convinced that everything emanated from God. If He punished us, He had a reason: All we had to do was trust in Him and thank Him. Who was I to dare to chart the paths of heaven? I was obliged to
choose between good and evil but not to define what they were: their definition was the province of the Supreme Judge. It was often through chastisement that He showed us the significance and consequences of our actions; we may have thought we were doing good while we committed evil. Was this process unjust? It is a good question, but one which brooks no answer.

A Talmudic legend: Moses, impressed by Rabbi Akiba’s erudition, wanted to know what would happen to him. God showed him the tragic end of the great master who, in a market square in occupied Judea, suffered the torture the Romans reserved for rebels. Moses cried out: “O Lord, is this Thy justice? Is this the reward for having studied Thy Law?” And God replied: “Be silent, you cannot understand.”

Moses was silent. But my teachers asked: “What was good enough for Moses is not good enough for you?” I was obliged to respond that, in effect, it was sufficient for those who believed in Moses. “For a believer,” said a Hasidic rabbi, “there are no questions; for an unbeliever there are no answers.”

All this seemed irrefutable, then. And today? I have written and I have spoken but have I said all I wanted to say? Have I learned to distinguish between the essential and the frivolous? What is the meaning of history? What is the future of mankind? I have a son, I have students. Why should they be responsible for a world they did not create? In the name of what belief shall I attempt to inculcate on them the notions
and precepts which were taught me when I was their age?

Before emphasizing what I believe, perhaps I should point out what I do not believe, or what I no longer believe: I no longer believe in the magic of the spoken word. It signifies not order but disorder. It does not eliminate chaos, it only conceals it. It no longer carries men’s hopes but distorts them. It has ceased to be a vehicle, only to become an obstacle. It does not signify sharing but compromise.

Yet, through my tradition, and also my vocation, my relationship with language was a solemn celebration. Indispensable to the development of man, language is his ultimate expression; there were those who attributed mystical powers to speech. Life and death are dependent on the tongue, according to Ecclesiastes. The destiny of the world depends on it. The name of the Messiah precedes the Messiah. The spoken word preceded creation itself. Because of that word, the world emerged from nothingness and light parted from the dark. Before acting, God spoke. Language introduced mankind into history, not the reverse.

Jewish youngsters knew the lullaby
Oif’n pripitchik
, which women in the ghettos sang to their children. It tells of a rabbi who is teaching his small pupils the
aleph-bet:
“When you grow up, you will come to understand how much pain and how many tears these letters contain.” And joy. And majesty.

The Midrash describes how Moses, pleading for
his people, called on the letters of the alphabet as witnesses for the defense: “My people have done enough for you, now it is your turn to show your gratitude.” The Bible and its commentaries, the Talmud and its interpretations—the infinite indeed exists and is to be found in words, words which sooner or later will be made to explode. A strange, primal, unique light traverses them and causes them to vibrate with life and truth. The Baal Shem Tov, it is said, used to read the
Zohar
while his eyes surveyed the earth from end to end; we Jewish children would listen to this legend and, in our imagination, we would see the rabbi stopping to smile at us and show us the way.

Few other ancient cultures or living civilizations are so imbued with a passion for words. As the Hasidic tradition has it, it was not the Ark that saved Noah—but eloquence. In Hebrew,
teva
denotes both “ark” and “letter.” In order to save him from the Flood, God commanded Noah to construct a language which would serve as both shelter and refuge. When they were driven out of their country by the Babylonians, and then by the Romans, the Jewish people took with them only a few laws, some memories and various customs consigned to a book, but this book enabled them to resist temptation and defeat danger. Thanks to the Talmud, they could continue to inhabit Jerusalem from afar. Murderers might be sharpening their knives in the marketplace outside, but in the house of prayer and study just a few steps away, the sages and their
disciples would be engaged in a debate that began a thousand years before. Linked to David’s kingdom by the language of memory, the exiles kept it alive by featuring it in their stories and praying for it to be rebuilt. The third Temple, says a Midrashic text, will be indestructibly fashioned of fire; we preferred to think that words would contain the fire.