The Sonderberg Case (2 page)

——

Actually, I had discovered journalism well before working in the field. My uncle Méir, early on, considered it the finest profession. It is he who made me appreciate, as an adolescent, the multifaceted world refracted by news and editorials in print. He ranked the committed journalist as the equal of writers and philosophers. In his youth, at New York University, he used to go to the corner coffee shop every day to read the morning papers and sip his cappuccino. If he didn’t go, it was because he was unwell or studying for an exceptionally difficult exam. He would then save press clippings for a later time. “See,” he used to say to me, “there you are, sitting at your desk or lying on the bed, and without lifting a finger you find out what’s happening in faraway countries. Isn’t it miraculous?” He was right: no need to travel anymore in order to be informed. The reporter acts as your ears and eyes. And sometimes as your compass or alter ego.

What was it in the press that so interested him? Current events, fleeting and elusive? Political and economic editorials, usually superficial with their respectable optimism or skepticism? The sports pages? Trivial news items in which the acts are more or less the same but the names are new? He was fascinated by the present: he believed in living it to the point of exhaustion. And that, he confessed to me one day, possibly laughing under his breath, was “for purely theological reasons.”

When Méir became nearly blind in his old age, one of us—I, Alika, or one of our sons—would read poetry or novels to him.

Méir had no children. To be more precise, he no longer had any. In love with his wife, Drora, a vigorous and rebellious blonde, he used to say, “She’s my child.” And Drora used to say of him, “He’s my lunatic.”

Why had he quarreled with my father? They had stopped seeing each other. Was it something about Drora? Or because of their break with family tradition? Admittedly, they were less religious than my grandparents, but was this a reason to stop being in touch?

One day, several years ago, I brought up the issue with my mother. She brushed me aside gently: “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me why.”

“Is it because of me? Because I have parents and they don’t have a son? Why do people refer to him as an unhappy recluse? What is his life all about?”

“Be quiet,” said my mother, after turning slightly pale. “One day you’ll find out.”

“Through whom?”

“Maybe through him.” This was when I felt for the first time that I had come upon a family secret.

My father read the newspapers, too, but not as assiduously. And my grandfather even less assiduously. “Trivial news events are the rage these days,” he used to say, stressing
the last words. To which he immediately added, “In the old days, major events
were.”
Actually, the past interested him more than the present. Only bound books interested him. Preferably yellowed pages, coated with the dust of the ages.

Good books led him to think about the men chosen by God: he almost resented their being too famous; he would have liked to discover them and keep them all to himself. Between information and knowledge, he used to say, he had a preference for knowledge. And the latter is not found in newspapers.

My grandfather loved contemplating the mystery of transience and the influence of time on language; what seems attractive, dazzling, and profound tomorrow won’t be so the day after tomorrow. All these so-called powerful and famous people, in every field, starved for glory and honors, are leading lights today, but sooner or later they are usually forgotten and sometimes despised. So what’s the point of ambition?

As for my mother, her hope, of course, was that I would become a lawyer—better yet, a great lawyer. In America, of course. My older brother, Itzhak, a future businessman, predicted I would have a career as an engineer, no doubt because I spent hours as a child taking apart cheap tools and expensive watches, to the great annoyance of our parents.

So, then, how did I become a journalist?

That’s another story.

——

The trial to which the young woman is alluding made a lasting impression on me. I wouldn’t be the man I am, trailing a host of ghosts, if I hadn’t been present at the deliberations with a mixture of frustration and enthusiasm.

At the time, the young Werner, accused of murder, and his burden of bloodstained memories, had exerted on me a fascination whose traces have yet to fade away. They even affected my relationship with my own family.

My father—like his father, but in a different area—a teacher of ancient literature in a Jewish high school in Manhattan, is a gentle dreamer and somewhat withdrawn. A storyteller but not talkative. I regret that he never brought up his parents’ memories from the old country, nor his own as the child of survivors. Was he even familiar with them? When someone mentioned the Tragedy in his presence—it had suddenly become a subject of conversation in social circles—he withdrew into a deep silence that no one dared penetrate.

His failing? Attracted by the imaginary, he sometimes couldn’t distinguish the real from lived experience. He asked himself questions by probing his fantasy with an almost painful sincerity. “Had I been one of Socrates’ judges, would I have condemned him?” Or: “Had I been a
colleague of Rabbi Eliezer, son of Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua’s opponent, would I have voted for his banishment?” Or: “Had I lived in the Spain of Isabella the Catholic, would I have chosen conversion like Abraham Senior, or exile like Don Itzhak Abrabanel?” This tormented him. But, if you think about it, was this really a failing?

Did he imagine himself in his father’s position, in that cursed time and place? Did he wonder how he would have behaved in the face of the daily trials, over there, when the whim of a killer sufficed to make an entire family or community vanish from the face of the earth?

A few more words about my grandfather, who did return from there. He didn’t talk about it very much, either. Perhaps for the same reasons, or for others. He may have talked about it through his readings of and commentaries on the other great catastrophes in Jewish history, in ancient and medieval times.

With a face marked by the years, with a haunted gaze, he was handsome and majestic. In his presence I felt intelligent. Attractive. And unique. Always available for my impromptu visits, he never gave me the awkward impression of being disturbed.

A great lover of the Apocrypha literature, as my father would later be. He had taught it intermittently for starvation wages at the Institute for Jewish Studies. He supported his family by working in a modest publishing house that put out an encyclopedia of biographies and Judaic quotations. He also gave private courses in Yiddish and Hebrew
to candidates for conversion. Oddly enough, he bought lottery tickets every month. “I’m not a fatalist as was Ibn Ezra in Spain,” he used to say. “He was so convinced that he would remain poor all his life that he thought if he were a candle salesman the sun would never set; if he were an undertaker no one would ever die.” That’s why he bought lottery tickets—to prove his theory. He was also a gambler. Did he sometimes win? The fact is my grandmother never complained of being out of pocket.

Was he religious? Devout? Yes and no. Let’s say he was a traditionalist. Out of respect for his parents, his ancestors, particularly Rabbi Petahia, he observed the Sabbath, put on phylacteries in the morning, and studied the Talmud, not because he saw it as a holy and immutable document, but because he found correspondences and points of reference in it that related to his curiosity about some officially marginalized or concealed book that didn’t have the good fortune of being included in the canon.

My mother, when she’s not in the company of others, is timid, overly prudent, anxious. She often sits motionless with a book on her knees, barely swings her hips when she moves about. The daughter of parents born in New York, she wasn’t traumatized by the war. A homemaker, she kept house and dreamed of having grandchildren. Itzhak was barely thirteen and she already teased him: “So, son, when will you be getting married?” She left me in peace. Actually, I think she wanted to keep us by her side, my brother and me, for as long as possible.

As for the theater, it was my grandfather who mentioned it to me, perhaps unwittingly.

He had been my confidant since childhood. At ten, I used to tell him about my dreams, my doubts, my disappointments. Sometimes he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answers were never the same. One day it was gardener, the next day sailor, mathematician, parachutist, silversmith, musician, painter, banker, snake charmer: the list was inexhaustible. Then, smiling in his beard, my grandfather would say, “You really want to be all these things?”

“Yes,” I replied, naively. “Is it impossible?”

“No. For a child your age, everything should seem possible.”

“Everything? At the same time?”

“At the same time, if …”

“If what?”

“If you accept a profession that includes them all.”

“What could that be?”

“Writer. Novelist.”

“What’s that?”

“Someone who writes. Someone whose life is writing. Then, man is a book: all the stories can be contained inside. It’s a world that exists in your head, inhabited by all men. Words that make one sing.”

“Do you want him to write fiction?”

“Why not?”

“And what if that man doesn’t write?” asked the little boy.

“If it isn’t his vocation? Then he talks.”

“And he can still do as many things?”

“Yes. And many more.”

“How?”

“There’s the stage,” he said—he of all people, for he had never set foot in a theater and yet knew it thoroughly.

The word had been uttered, and it carried me into the faraway landscape of illusions, lived and shared.

However, when I embarked on my studies in the dramatic arts and told him of my anxieties and joys as I learned to perform Aeschylus and Pirandello, Racine and Tennessee Williams, he constantly warned me not to entertain extravagant hopes, even in this area. As for me, the only thing I thought about was the emotion you feel onstage.

“Grandfather, it’s an experience that summons all the senses of the body and engages it completely: you look at a performance, you listen to it, you absorb it. Painting, sculpture, music, and movement merge in front of your eyes. Imagine, every night on a platform as narrow as a garret, the actors partake in the creation of a world with its passions, ambitions, sorrows, and moments of enlightenment.”

“And afterward, when the performance is over, what do they do?” my grandfather retorted. “Where do they go? To the restaurant? The bar? And they repeat the same thing, exactly the same thing, the following day?”

“That’s exactly it, Grandfather. That’s the miraculous side of theater. Repetition itself becomes creation.”

He took his time thinking it over. Had my argument convinced him? Did he consider himself defeated? He changed
his strategy and gave me advice that turned out to be valuable to me in the future.

“Still, don’t forget, son, theater is just theater and nothing more. An illusion lived in the present. Once the doors close, another life takes up where you left it, another truth, more enduring perhaps, indeed irrevocable; in the end, the actor who dies onstage will not get back up again.”

“Will I have to choose between the two lives, Grandfather?”

“No, my child. You have to integrate one into the other. The actor who pretends to be weeping today will burst out laughing tomorrow. Just as the philosopher’s truth is tested and created in doubt, the actor finds his truth in metamorphosis. You’re surprised I’m using these words? You shouldn’t be. I like to read and I like words. I watch some words get old and others die young. They, too, are in theater, in their own way.”

He also used to say to me: “Furthermore, don’t forget that in our tradition the book is more important than the stage. It teaches us that God is King as well as Judge: man is His subject, His servant, His tool, and His cornerstone, but not His plaything. For the Jew, living in His collective memory, the world is not a spectacle. I knew a time when cruel individuals usurped the power of God and perverted it with unfeigned cruelty.”

As I said, my grandfather had known the camps. Grandmother, too, somewhere in Hungary. They never spoke about
it. When people referred to them, Grandmother would turn pale and set her lips. They had met on a refugee boat on the way to America.

For me, a little Jewish-American boy, disoriented and awkward, Hungary and Romania, Poland and Austria belonged to a distant, obscure mythology.

In spite of my timidity and bouts of sadness, which worried my parents, I was a happy child. I liked eating my meals with them, did my homework with care, laughed when I heard a funny story—in short, my life felt comfortable.

With hindsight, I realize that as far as my vocation was concerned, my mother wasn’t completely wrong. A few years in law school would have helped me in my work as a journalist. Particularly when I was covering the trial that would have an impact on my destiny, though not as much as on young Werner Sonderberg’s, Hans Dunkelman’s nephew on the paternal side. I know, you’re puzzled by the different names. Why did the nephew decide to change his last name? You might even find the answer upsetting. Be patient. We’ll get to that when the time comes.

Itzhak made my mother happy early on: no sooner had he graduated from university than he married a fellow student, Orli, the most beautiful young woman in his class. She was cheerful, had a kindly face, a shapely body. Her father, a Wall Street stockbroker and a very Orthodox Jew, laid
down two conditions before consenting to their union: that the marriage be celebrated in the Hasidic tradition and that his son-in-law work with him.

On the day of the wedding, hundreds of guests assembled in the reception rooms of a large hotel. Three rabbis officiated at the ceremony. Dozens of students from the yeshiva subsidized by the family sang and danced in honor of the young couple. Just seeing the fiancé and his beloved carried on the shoulders of the dancers to the sound of two orchestras filled me with joy, though it became tinged with a vague melancholy when I noticed my grandfather weeping under the huppah: I felt a pang of anguish without understanding why. My grandmother was weeping, too, but tearlessly. I heard her whisper into my grandfather’s ear, “Do you think they see us?” Whom did she mean by “they”? The members of the family who had remained in Europe. Lost in the turmoil.