Legends of Our Time (3 page)

I had decided to change schools and I became the student of three successive teachers; they too were natives of nearby villages.

Their attitude was more humane. We already considered ourselves “grownups” who could take on a
sugya
, even a difficult passage, without assistance. Every now and then, when at an impasse, we would ask them to show us how to continue; the moment the problems posed in the commentaries of the
Marsha
or the
Maharam
were unraveled, their swift clarity dazzled us. To emerge suddenly from the entanglement of a Talmudic thought always brought me intense joy; each time I would find myself on the threshold of a luminous, indestructible universe, and I used to think that over and beyond the centuries and the funeral-pyres, there is always a bridge that leads somewhere.

Then the Germans invaded our little town and the nostalgic singing of the pupils and their teachers was interrupted. To hear it once more, I would give all I possess, all that has been promised me.

From time to time I sit down again with a tractate of the Talmud. And a paralyzing fear comes over me: it is not that I have forgotten the words, I would still know how to translate them, even to comment on them. But to speak them does not suffice: they must be sung and I no longer know how. Suddenly my body stiffens, my glance falters, I am afraid to turn around: behind me my masters are gathered, their breath burning, they are waiting, as they did long ago at examination time, for me to read aloud and demonstrate to the past generations that their song never dies. My masters are waiting and I am ashamed to make them wait. I am ashamed, for they have not forgotten the song. In them the song has remained alive, more powerful than the forces that annihilated them, more obstinate than the wind that scattered their ashes. I want to plead with them to return to their graves, no longer to interfere with the living. But they have nowhere to go; heaven and earth have rejected them. And
so, not to humiliate them, I force myself to read a first sentence, then I reread it in order to open it, close it again, before joining it to the next. My voice does not rise above a murmur. I have betrayed them: I no longer know how to sing.

With but a single exception, all my masters perished in the death factories invented and perfected for the glory of the national German genius.

I saw them, unshaved, emaciated, bent; I saw them make their way, one sunny Sunday, toward the railroad station, destination unknown. I saw “Zeide the Melamed,” his too-heavy bundle bruising his shoulders. I was astonished: to think that this poor wanderer had once terrorized us. And the “Selishter Rebbe,” I saw him too in the middle of the herd, absorbed in his own private world as if in a hurry to arrive more quickly. I thought: his face has taken on the expression of Shabbat, and yet it is Sunday. He was not weeping, his eyes no longer shot forth fire; perhaps at last he was going to discover the truth—yes, hell does exist, just as this fire exists in the night.

And so for the tenth time I read the same passage in the same book, and my masters, by their silence, indicate their disapproval: I have lost the key they entrusted me.

Today other books hold me in their grip and I try to learn from other storytellers how to pierce the meaning of an experience and transform it into legend. But most of them talk too much. Their song is lost in words, like rivers in the sand.

It was the “Selishter Rebbe” who told me one day: “Be careful with words, they’re dangerous. Be wary of them. They beget either demons or angels. It’s up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words.”

At times I feel him standing behind me, rigid and severe. He reads over my shoulder what I am trying to say; he looks and judges whether his disciple enriches
man’s world or impoverishes it, whether he calls forth angels, or on the contrary kneels before demons of innumerable names.

Were the “Selishter Rebbe” with his wild eyes not standing behind me, I should perhaps have written these lines differently; it is also possible that I have written nothing.

Perhaps I, his disciple, am nothing more than his tombstone.

My first friend was an orphan. That is about all I remember about him. I have forgotten his name, how he looked, what he was like. The color of his eyes, the rhythm of his walk: these too, forgotten. Did he like to sing, to laugh, to play in the sun, to roll in the snow? I cannot remember and, sometimes, I feel a vague remorse, as if it were a rejection.

I sometimes search my memory hoping to find him again, to save him, or, at least, to restore to him a face, a past: I emerge empty-handed. While I have no difficulty seeing myself as a child again, he, the orphan, remains
unreachable: an echo without voice, a shadow without reflection. Of our friendship, all that has been preserved is the sadness his presence inspired in me. Even now, discovering the orphan in each human being is enough to reopen an old wound, never fully healed.

I must have been five, maybe a little older. I had scarcely begun to go to primary school, to
heder
. Among the children whom I did not know and did not want to know, I felt myself to be, like each of them, no doubt, the victim of my parents’ injustice. I made up countless illnesses so that I could stay home with my mother for just one more day, to hear her say she still loved me, that she was not going to turn me over to strangers.

Obstinate, I resisted the efforts of my old white-bearded schoolmaster, who gently persisted in wanting to teach me the Hebrew alphabet. I think it was because, like all children, I preferred remaining a child. I dreaded the universe of rigid laws which I sensed were inside those black letters whose mysterious power seizes hold of the imagination like a defenseless prey. Whoever says
a
will say
b
and before one notices it, one is already caught up in the machinery: one begins to find words satisfying, one makes gods of them. I had an obscure premonition that, once this threshold were crossed, it would be the letters of the alphabet that would, in the end, undo my innocence, impose itself between my desires and their realization.

The other pupils, as recalcitrant as I, showed the same distrust. Only the orphan was of a different breed. He never acted spoiled; he never tried the patience and kindness of our teacher. First to arrive, he was always the last to leave. He was not rowdy, he did not have tantrums. Diligent, obedient, in contrast to us, he did not feel uprooted in the narrow room with its damp walls, that room where we spent endless hours around a rectangular table, worn down by three generations of unhappy schoolboys.

His exemplary behavior could only annoy us: why did
he insist on being different? After a while, I understood: he
was
different. His mother had died giving birth to him.

I did not know then what it meant to die. In fact, to be an orphan had, in my eyes, a kind of distinction, an honor that did not fall to everyone. Secretly, I began to envy him. Yet my attitude toward him changed. To win his trust, I shared my possessions with him, my little snacks, my presents. At home no one understood: all of a sudden I, who refused to eat at every meal, began carrying off double portions.

My mother was alive and that seemed to me unjust. When I was with the orphan, I felt at fault: I possessed a wealth denied to him. And neither one of us had anything to do with it. I would have given everything to restore the balance. To redeem myself, I was ready to become not only his debtor but his admirer as well, his benefactor. For his part, he accepted my sacrifices, and I no longer remember if he thanked me for them, if he really needed them. I do not know why, but I thought he was poor. Or rather—yes, I do know why: spoiled child that I was, I saw every orphan as a
poor
orphan. I could not conceive of misfortune except in its totality: whoever lost one portion of affection, one possibility of love, lost everything.

His birthday coinciding with the anniversary of his mother’s death, I heard him saying
Kaddish
in the synagogue. I had to restrain myself with all my might to keep from tearing myself away from my father and rushing over to my friend to embrace him, weeping, and repeat with him word by word the prayer which gives praise to God, who must know what he is doing when he takes away the joy of little children.

Over the years our paths separated. The orphan went his own way. I made new friends, and today I have other reasons for assuming my share of guilt, but at the root of this feeling it is always him I find.

Still, I know very well that my first friend long ago ceased to be a unique case: we all belong to a generation of orphans, and the
Kaddish
has become our daily prayer. But each time death takes someone away from me, it is him, my forgotten friend, I mourn. Sometimes I wonder if he did not have my face, my fate perhaps, and if he was not already what I was about to become. Then I tell myself that I should set myself to learning the alphabet, diligently, if only to resemble him the more.

My memory proves more faithful to the other friends who followed the orphan: Haimi Kahan, Itzu Yunger, Yerachmiel Mermelstein, Itzu Goldblat. Yerachmiel disappeared in the war; Itzu Yunger survived him only to die a few years later in New York. From Paris I had written him of my intention to visit him; too late. I had mailed my letter to a dead friend.

Haimi Kahan now lives in Brooklyn. Itzu Goldblat has gone to live in Israel. We see each other rarely. We hardly write one another, except for banalities, the usual good wishes for the New Year. At times, I meet one or the other, and then the present vanishes:
do you remember?
Yes, I remember. A short, embarrassed silence and that is all. Actually, that is enough. Childhood, after all, is only a source which acquires depth with the years; the further away one is from it, the more one benefits from its purity if not its freshness. How can one remain forever thirsty? There is no answer anymore: that, too, has drowned in the source.

During our rare meetings, Haimi Kahan and I like to recall an adventure into which we once threw ourselves with all the ardor of our thirteen years. We had decided to found our own synagogue, our own school, where young people could pray and study among themselves. At six o’clock every morning, Haimi’s father—Nochem Hersh, the Chief Rabbi’s secretary and tutor—gave us instruction in the Talmud, revealing to us its rigor and dazzling beauty. For us, the written law and the Oral
Tradition represented the only possible safeguard. As long as we were engaged in the deep study of the tractates of
Baba-Kama
(the First Door) or
Baba-Batra
(the Last Door), as long as we earnestly read a few chapters of Psalms before and after the morning prayer, nothing bad could happen to us.

Events took it upon themselves to demonstrate the opposite. The Germans occupied the town and we had to close down our meeting room. Nochem Hersh left us for the ghetto. But his melodious voice still vibrates in my own every time I open the Talmud and submit to its laws, breathe within its closed system and steep myself in its splendor. Today, I would be inclined to admit that Nochem Hersh was right, but not entirely: the Torah contains the reflection of truth if not its flame; but it does not constitute a safeguard, especially not in terms of humanity. Today I believe I have proof that the Torah itself has become an orphan.

With Itzu Goldblat, a goldsmith and the son of a goldsmith, I shared an ambition as naïve as it was boundless: to hasten the coming of the Messiah. We were obsessed by it. Caught up in the Kabbala and its practices, we used our free time to mortify our bodies by fasting and our thoughts by silence. Determined to obtain in dream the “Gilui Eliyahu,” a meeting with the prophet Elijah, the herald of deliverance, we came to forget the reality of a world at war. Only internal fulfillment concerned us. Our incantations went on for hours. In the street they took us for sleepwalkers. Before every service, we made our way to the
mikvah
, to the ritual baths, to purify ourselves, otherwise our pleas would never reach their destination. Sometimes, seized with mad exaltation we thought we could almost hear the footsteps of the Messiah: soon the goal would be reached, the sound of the
shofar
, the prophet’s own trumpet, would shock the very heart of history and the blood of victims would no longer flow; soon our enemies, struck with humility and repentance,
would realize that they would never succeed in annihilating the people of the covenant by slaughtering its children. Soon, but when? We were burning with impatience, time pressed, we had to hurry. Once again the German occupation put an end to our dream and—who knows?—perhaps to our work as well. The executioner arrived before the Messiah and somewhere, under the peaceful skies of Silesia, the eternal people with all that it embodied was consumed in flames, day and night, especially night, for nothing.

Of all my friends, Yerachmiel, was the one who refused to live on illusions. He fastened on to concrete things, tangible, realizable. He had discovered political Zionism and from then on he could not hold himself back. Without neglecting his Talmudic studies, he found the time to collect money for the Jewish National Fund, and never missed an opportunity to propagate his ideas among the young. A talented agitator, he appeared wherever he could find an audience. He got excited when he spoke, but in his speeches he appealed to reason rather than to that sense of nostalgia which every Jew must feel for Zion.

On Saturday afternoons, for the third traditional meal of Shabbat, he came to our small synagogue and spoke to us not about the Bible or the weekly
Sedra
, but about the situation in Palestine. That is how I learned that the Holy Land was under British mandate and that an underground Jewish movement had taken up arms to win independence.

Although I remained closed to the political aspects of his talks, I was won over by his enthusiasm. Every time he mentioned the name of Jerusalem, of Safed, of Mount Carmel, the blood rushed to my head: was it really possible, then, to reconstruct the Temple and the kingdom of David other than through penitence and tears? And God, what was his place in all this? Yerachmiel had an answer for everything. At his instigation, I began to learn modern
Hebrew. He had managed to dig up, I have no idea where, a grammar book and he was never without it. He lent it to me for a week and I had to swear to him that I would watch over it as though it were the apple of my eye. Before returning this precious work to him, I had learned it all by heart and still today I can remember whole pages.