Legends of Our Time Read online

  2.

  My Teachers

  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.

  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.

  3.

  The Orphan

  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.