The Sonderberg Case Read online

  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.

  Itzhak and Orli had four children, two girls and two boys.

  On a holiday evening, when the whole family was assembled around the table, I heard my mother whisper to my father, “Look, in spite of it all, we’ve defeated Hitler. Our happiness is his hell.”

  And then again, I saw tears well up in my grandfather’s eyes, he who was so good at hiding his feelings. He seemed absent, very far away, lost in the past, no doubt.

  He had told us that Rabbi Petahia was born in the Carpathian Mountains, near the village where the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov used to take solitary walks dreaming of the mysteries of Creation. Unusual powers were attributed to him: by sub
tly combining the letters in some mystical prayers and in the names of the angels by the side of the Creator, it was said he could change the fate of individuals.

  One day, when he was still in his youth, Rabbi Petahia was approached by a woman in tears. She had been wandering on the road for two days and two nights looking for help. Her husband was sick; he was going to die. She would be left with their six little children. They were hungry. No one in the world was prepared to help her. “Have pity on us,” the woman lamented. “Save my children. You, Rabbi, who arrange so many things, arrange for my husband to stay alive.” And Rabbi Petahia, moved to tears, could not ignore her request. But he had been warned about the heavens: man is not allowed to change the laws of nature, laws created and willed by God. Rabbi Petahia did not listen to the heavenly voice. “I’m prepared to accept my punishment, provided the sick man is not summoned to the world of truth and can remain with his family. I’m aware that the miracle will be done at my expense, and I say: Amen, so be it.” And he said to the woman, “Go home, your husband has his children by his side; they are joyfully awaiting you.” Of course he was deprived of his powers. For a month. And to mankind’s misfortune, he made the decision that from then on he would never again rebel against God’s will.

  Several months later, he got married.

  AS FOR ME, I waited a long time before getting married. Out of fear of life, of not being able to support a family? Yet I hoped to have a close relationship with a beautiful and intelligent woman. And Alika possessed these attributes, or virtues. But, for reasons that escaped me, I wasn’t ready.

  It was she who insisted that I put an end to my bachelorhood. After three years of living together, she decreed that it was time for her to become, as she put it, “an honest woman.”

  We met at the university, where we were both studying drama. No other area attracted me. The sciences? Inconceivable. Mathematics had always been a terrifying mystery for me. Theology? My relations with God left a lot to be desired. But why not geography, economics, anthropology, architecture, or psychology? Why theater? Was it because it occupies a minor, virtually nonexistent, position in the Jewish tradition? Yet the tradition offered thousands of examples of eloquence. Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos: these prophets’ words were fiery and impassioned. Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Ishmael, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai: masters of language. Rashi and his commentaries, Maimonides and his philosophy, Nahmanides and his disputations with the convert Pablo Christiani. The Gaon Elijah of Vilnius: “The goal of redemption is the Redemption of the Truth.” Interpreters, visionaries, precursors. All erudite men in search of meaning. Still, for them, the world was not a stage, nor was life a performance. Was their universe too serious? Lacking in humor and fantasy? Incapable of arousing laughter and nurturing the imagination?

  Perhaps I simply wanted to take my grandfather’s advice. I often used to recall the conversation we had had. Was life a string of roles? A series of rough drafts? A kaleidoscope? As for my professor at the university, he believed in theater. He made us read, read, and read—in this he was like my grandfather—whatever came into his head. Aristotle’s rules on drama, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Euripides, Ionesco, the Bible, and the Vedas. Psychology and theological treatises, Strindberg, Anski, Goethe, Pirandello, Shaw, Beckett: I devoured them and they devoured me. We had to study the methods of Stanislavski, Vakhtangov, Jouvet, and the Actors Studio. He admired Meyerhold not for his theories but for his ultimate fate: shot in 1940 on personal orders from Stalin. Attentive to every word, watching every movement of the arms and lips. I never stopped wondering: How can the enactment of representation be changed into living truth? How does the actor manage to make a thousand spectators believe, for two hours, that he is another person? He recites borrowed words and appropriates them as though they originated in his own brain and heart, and they move me as if they were just being formulated in my presence. This miracle of metamorphosis inherent to art, I was living it intensely enough to devote my dreams to it, my ambitions, my escapes, my needs—in short: my youthful years.

  One day, the professor surprised us by citing Augustine: “God is close to those who flee from him, and flees from those who seek him.” And he added the following comment: “In a way this is true of the actor, too. I am close and far at the same time. My body can be touched, but I remain mentally inaccessible: the spectator sees me, but he can’t enter my thoughts. The body is present and so is the soul, in a different way. To perform is a bit like making the invisible visible, but only for an instant. That’s the grandeur and trap for the actor. If I want to be too detached, I will be bad; if I overidentify with the character, I will be bad, too. On the stage, self-effacement is sometimes necessary in order to acquire another self. But more often, the two selves quarrel, make peace, share their daily bread; and that becomes a work of art.” To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre: in a play you must lie to be true.

  From the first day, Alika and I formed not a couple but a duo. It was our professor—a short, bearded man with a quavering, mischievous voice, a face furrowed in perpetual astonishment and, perhaps, a skeptic’s self-mockery—who had wished it. Without knowing our names yet, just our faces, he had pointed to the two of us: “You and you, you’re going to read page twelve of the play.” For a while afterward, I jokingly called her “you” and she called me “you.”

  Oh, the good-hearted professor with the bushy beard and inquisitive gaze. His every word counted. His influence weighed on my every step, and on my decisions, too.

  I remember our first sessions. Fervor, a feverish desire to learn, intense excitement: simple words became rich and sacred; innocuous gestures took on a meaning that sublimated them. Every day brought a revelation about human nature, its ugliness, and made us discover the whims of fate and of men.

  “Theater is not a profession,” said our professor with a solemn and grave air. “Remember: it’s a vocation, a mission. An initiation. Better yet: a form of asceticism. When you’re playing Othello, or you, Phaedra, you’re not operetta heroes but princes, gods; you expect the spectators to bow before you in order to receive from your lips, if not from your hands, not the punishment of the earth but a fiery offering.”

  With his calm and firm voice, he emphasized that we should each take account of our own morphology and determine how to extract from it the essence of words and the magic of gestures. But above all he was a spiritual guide; what he tried to fashion was our souls. He taught us how to read in depth, how to assimilate a text and savor it before making it into sheer song, the song transmitted to us by generations of guides and students.

  In one of our first classes, with a facetious look on his face, he kept us standing and silent for an hour in order to teach us how to emphasize presence in absence and movement in motionlessness.

  “Fear,” he remarked. “How can fear be incarnated? By trembling? No. By laughing and dancing a certain way. I’d almost be tempted to say by experiencing a great joy. A hidden but all-consuming fear, repressed but enveloping: that’s what you show the audience. Everything within you is afraid: your thought processes are afraid of being too slow or too quick, too visible or not visible enough; your soul is afraid of wanting to be too free or not really a prisoner. At that moment, onstage, you are fear itself.”

  On another occasion: “Onstage, you must know how to laugh and cry as if for the first time. Think about Nietzsche’s madness celebrating the virtue of laughter. And of Dante, who pities the damned in the ninth circle because they can’t weep. And above all, think of Virgil, who says fortunate is the person who can understand the secret causes of things. From all three, the actor has much to learn.”

  And on another occasion: “In his rigor as much as in his vulnerability, the actor develops in his temporary role a role that defies and overwhelms him before it liberates him. Admittedly, he knows his part from the start, just as he knows his partner’s lines, nothing is improvised, and yet his words and movements must not seem spontaneous but be spontaneous.”

  Fascinat
ed, the students were riveted to everything he said.

  He continued in his deep voice tinged with ironic melancholy: “You won’t be surprised to hear me say that for human beings life is often a game: whether princes or beggars, rich or poor, erudite or ignorant, they all have one thing in common: they more or less feign sincerity. And among them, of course, I like the actor best. He will be alone when the day comes that he will have to leave the stage. In politics as in business, nothing is more distressing than the sight of an old man refusing to give up the privileges of his position. For the actor, it isn’t the same: even when he is old, he will have a part to play, the part of the old man. But whether young or not, the art of leaving the stage, when the time comes, is the hardest one to acquire; arriving is simple, leaving is not. You’ll learn that here.”

  Alika whispers to me in an aside: “You got that, right? If one of us decides to break up, he will have to do so with artful delicacy.”

  Born in California, an only daughter, Alika came from a well-to-do, liberal family, secular if not atheist. She had her first real Sabbath meal in our house at my mother’s invitation. And she only began to fast on Yom Kippur to please me. We saw a great deal of each other for weeks on end, in our courses and for occasional rehearsals in her studio apartment in Greenwich Village, or in mine, which wasn’t very far from hers. It was a comfortable camaraderie, with ordinary meetings between friends, a relationship with no physical contact. In fact, she had warned me quite frankly: “I’ve known men before you, both older and younger, so please don’t fall in love; it could ruin our relationship.” I promised her. It was easy, particularly since I was recovering from an unhappy love affair and I wasn’t ready to embark on a new romance.