Legends of Our Time (2 page)

So I do not know what he would have hoped to see me do tomorrow, the anniversary of his death. If only, in his lifetime, he had been a man intoxicated with eternity and redemption.

But that is not the problem. Even if Shlomo ben Nissel had been a faithful servant of the fierce God of Abraham, a just man, of demanding and immaculate soul, immune against weakness and doubt, even then I would not know how to interpret his death.

For I am ignorant of the essentials: what he felt, what he believed, in that final moment of his hopeless struggle, when his very being was already fading, already withdrawing toward that place where the dead are no longer tormented, where they are permitted at last to rest in peace, or in nothingness—what difference does it make?

His face swollen, frightful, bloodless, he agonized in silence. His cracked lips moved imperceptibly. I caught the sounds, but not the words of his incoherent memory. No doubt, he was carrying out his duty as father by transmitting his last wishes to me, perhaps he was also entrusting me with his final views on history, knowledge, the world’s misery, his life, mine. I shall never know. I shall never know if he had the name of the Eternal on his lips to praise him—in spite of everything—or, on the contrary, because of everything, to free himself from him.

Through puffy, half-closed eyelids, he looked at me and, at times, I thought with pity. He was leaving and it
pained him to leave me behind, alone, helpless, in a world he had hoped would be different for me, for himself, for all men like him and me.

At other times, my memory rejects this image and goes its own way. I think I recognize the shadow of a smile on his lips: the restrained joy of a father who is leaving with the hope that his son, at least, will remain alive one more minute, one more day, one more week, that perhaps his son will see the liberating angel, the messenger of peace. The certitude of a father that his son will survive him.

In reality, however, I do not hesitate to believe that the truth could be entirely different. In dying, my father looked at me, and in his eyes where night was gathering, there was nothing but animal terror, the demented terror of one who, because he wished to understand too much, no longer understands anything. His gaze fixed on me, empty of meaning. I do not even know if he saw me, if it was me he saw. Perhaps he mistook me for someone else, perhaps even for the exterminating angel. I know nothing about it because it is impossible to grasp what the eyes of the dying see or do not see, to interpret the death rattle of their last breath.

I know only that that day the orphan I became did not respect tradition: I did not say
Kaddish
. First, because no one there would have heard and responded “Amen.” Also because I did not yet know that beautiful and solemn prayer. And because I felt empty, barren: a useless object, a thing without imagination. Besides there was nothing more to say, nothing more to hope for. To say
Kaddish
in that stifling barracks, in the very heart of the kingdom of death, would have been the worst of blasphemies. And I lacked even the strength to blaspheme.

Will I find the strength tomorrow? Whatever the answer, it will be wrong, at best incomplete. Nothing to do with the death of my father.

The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet
been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough. That is no surprise. Those who lived through it lack objectivity: they will always take the side of man confronted with the Absolute. As for the scholars and philosophers of every genre who have had the opportunity to observe the tragedy, they will—if they are capable of sincerity and humility—withdraw without daring to enter into the heart of the matter; and if they are not, well, who cares about their grandiloquent conclusions? Auschwitz, by definition, is beyond their vocabulary.

The survivors, more realistic if not more honest, are aware of the fact that God’s presence at Treblinka or Maidanek—or, for that matter, his absence—poses a problem which will remain forever insoluble.

I once knew a deeply religious man who, on the Day of Atonement, in despair, took heaven to task, crying out like a wounded beast, “What do you want from me, God? What have I done to you? I want to serve you and crown you ruler of the universe, but you prevent me. I want to sing of your mercy, and you ridicule me. I want to place my faith in you, dedicate my thought to you, and you do not let me. Why? Why?”

I also knew a free-thinker, who, one evening, after a selection, suddenly began to pray, sobbing like a whipped child. He beat his breast, became a martyr. He had need of support, and, even more, of certitude: if he suffered, it was because he had sinned; if he endured torment, it was because he had deserved it.

Loss of faith for some equaled discovery of God for others. Both answered to the same need to take a stand, the same impulse to rebel. In both cases, it was an accusation. Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible; but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.

Many years have passed since I saw my father die. I have grown up and the candles I light several times a
year in memory of departed members of my family have become more and more numerous. I should have acquired the habit, but I cannot. And each time the eighteenth day of the month of
Shvat
approaches, I am overcome by desolation and futility: I still do not know how to commemorate the death of my father, Shlomo ben Nissel, a death which took him as if by mistake.

Yes, a voice tells me that in reality it should suffice, as in previous years, to follow the trodden path: to study a chapter of
Mishna
and to say
Kaddish
once again, that beautiful and moving prayer dedicated to the departed, yet in which death itself figures not at all. Why not yield? It would be in keeping with the custom of countless generations of sages and orphans. By studying the sacred texts, we offer the dead continuity if not peace. It was thus that my father commemorated the death of his father.

But that would be too easy. The holocaust defies reference, analogy. Between the death of my father and that of his, no comparison is possible. It would be inadequate, indeed unjust, to imitate my father. I should have to invent other prayers, other acts. And I am afraid of not being capable or worthy.

All things considered, I think that tomorrow I shall go to the synagogue after all. I will light the candles, I will say
Kaddish
, and it will be for me a further proof of my impotence.

For some, literature is a bridge linking childhood to death. While the one gives rise to anguish, the other invites nostalgia. The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

But for me writing is a
matzeva
, an invisible tombstone, erected to the memory of the dead unburied. Each word corresponds to a face, a prayer, the one needing the other so as not to sink into oblivion.

This is because the Angel of Death too early crossed my childhood, marking it with his seal. Sometimes I think I see him, his look victorious, not at the end of the
journey but at its starting point. He fuses into the very beginning, the first élan, rather than into the abyss which cradles the future.

Thus, I evoke the solitary victor with nostalgia, almost without fear. Perhaps this is because I belong to an uprooted generation, deprived of cemeteries to visit the day after the New Year, when, according to custom, we fall across the graves and commune with our dead. My generation has been robbed of everything, even of our cemeteries.

I left my native town in the spring of 1944. It was a beautiful day. The surrounding mountains, in their verdure, seemed taller than usual. Our neighbors were out strolling in their shirt-sleeves. Some turned their heads away, others sneered.

After the war I had several opportunities to return. Temptation was not lacking, each reasonable: to see which friends had survived, to dig up the belongings and valuable objects we had hidden the night before our departure, to take possession once again, even fleetingly, of our property, of our past.

I did not return. I began to wander across the world, knowing all the while that to run away was useless: all roads lead home. It remains the only fixed point in this seething world. At times I tell myself that I have never really left the place where I was born, where I learned to walk and to love: the whole universe is but an extension of that little town, somewhere in Transylvania, called Màrmarosszighet.

Later, as student or journalist, I was to encounter in the course of my wanderings strange and sometimes inspiring men who were playing their parts or creating them: writers, thinkers, poets, troubadours of the apocalypse. Each gave me something for my journey: a phrase, a wink, an enigma. And I was able to continue.

But at the moment of
Heshbon-Hanefesh
, of making an
accounting, I recognize that my real teachers are waiting, to guide and urge me forward, not in awesome, distant places, but in the tiny classrooms filled with shadows and with song, where a boy I used to resemble still studies the first page of the first tractate of the Talmud, certain of finding there answers to all questions. Better: all answers
and
all questions.

Thus, the act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

My teachers were among them.

The first was an old man, heavy-set, with a white beard, a roguish eye and anemic lips. His name escapes me. In fact, I never knew it. In town, people referred to him as “the teacher from Betize,” doubtless because he came from the village of that name. He was the first to speak to me lovingly about language. He put his heart and soul into each syllable, each punctuation mark. The Hebrew alphabet made up the frame and content of his life, contained his joys and disappointments, his ambitions and memories. Outside the twenty-two letters of the sacred tongue, nothing existed for him. He would say to us with tenderness: “The Torah, my children, what is it? A treasure chest filled with gold and precious stones. To open it you need a key. I will give it to you, make good use of it. The key, my children, what is it? The alphabet. So repeat after me, with me, aloud, louder:
Aleph, bet, gimmel!
Once more, and again, my children, repeat with force, with pride:
Aleph, bet, gimmel
. In that way the key will forever be part of your memory, of your future:
Aleph, bet, gimmel
.”

It was “Zeide the Melamed” who later taught me Bible and, the following year, Rashi’s commentaries. Eternally in mourning, this taciturn teacher, with his bushy black beard, filled us with uneasiness mixed with fear. We thought him severe if not cruel. He never hesitated to rap the knuckles of anyone who came late or distorted the meaning of a sentence. “It’s for your own good,” he used to explain. He was quick to fly into a rage and whenever he did we lowered our heads and, trembling, waiting for the lull. But he was, in truth, a tormented and sentimental man. While punishing a recalcitrant pupil he suffered; he did not allow it to show because he did not want us to think him weak. He revealed himself only to God. Why was so much slander spread about him? Why was he credited with a meanness he did not have? Perhaps because he was hunchbacked, because he lowered his eyes when he spoke. The children, who unwittingly frightened him, liked to believe that ugliness is the ally of meanness if not its expression.

His school was in a ramshackle house, at the end of the court, and consisted of only two rooms. He held forth in the first. In the other, his assistant, a young scholar named Itzhak, opened for us the heavy doors of the Oral Tradition. We began with the tractate of
Baba-Metzia:
it dealt with a dispute between two persons who found a garment, to whom did it belong? Itzhak read a passage and we repeated it in the customary
niggun
. By the end of the semester we were able to absorb an entire page a week. Next year came the study of the
Tossafot
, which comment on the commentaries. And our brains, slowly sharpening, pierced the meaning of each word, released the illumination it has contained for as long as the world has been world. Who came closest to that light: the school of Shammai, the intransigent? or that of Hillel, his interlocutor and rival? Both. All trees are nourished by the same sap. Yet I felt closer to the House of Hillel; it strove to make life more tolerable, the quest more worthwhile.

At the age of ten I left Itzhak and became a student of the “Selishter Rebbe,” a morose character with wild eyes, a raucous, brutal voice. In his presence no one dared open his mouth or fall into daydream. He terrorized us. Whenever he distributed slaps—which happened often, and often for no reason—he did so with all his strength; and he had strength to spare. That was his method of enforcing discipline and preparing us for the Jewish condition.

At twilight, between
Minhah
and
Maariv
prayers, he used to force us to listen as he read a chapter from the literature of
Mussar
. As he described the tortures suffered by the sinner in his grave, even before appearing before the heavenly tribunal, sobs would shake his entire body. He would stop and bury his head in his hands. It was as if he experienced the pangs of the last judgment in advance. I shall never forget his detailed descriptions of hell which, in his naïveté, he situated in a precise spot, in the heavens.

On the Sabbath he became a different person, almost unrecognizable. He made his appearance at the synagogue opposite the Little Market. Standing next to the stove to the right of the entrance, looking hunted, he lost himself in prayer, seeing no one. I would greet him but he did not respond. He would not hear me. It was as if he no longer knew who I was, or that I was there at all. The seventh day of the week he consecrated to the creator and he saw nothing of what surrounded him, not even himself. He prayed in silence, apart; he did not follow the cantor, his lips scarcely moved. A distant sadness hovered over his distracted gaze. Weekdays, I was less afraid of him.