A Curable Romantic (82 page)

I WAS LYING
in bed in my room in the Zamenhofs’ house when I heard the first explosions. By the time the call rang out for all able-bodied men to report to the Vistula, the city was under attack. The German planes kept coming, one squadron after another, wave after wave, firing on anything they chose. The Zamenhofs’ house went up in flames after an incendiary bomb was dropped upon it. During the weeks of siege that followed the fall of the city, the Zamenhofs themselves were arrested, targeted specifically, I believe, as the Majstro’s children. (As incredible
as it may seem, upon their earlier entry into Vienna, the Germans took time out of a busy schedule of looting and murder to stop by Vienna’s Esperanto Museum in order to destroy the few childhood notebooks of Dr. Zamenhof’s that had survived his father’s auto-da-fé.) I ran to the Jewish Council, hoping to secure their release, but no help was forthcoming from there. “People are being arrested, Dr. Sammelsohn?” they screamed at me. “Of course, they’re being arrested! What did you expect? There’s a war on!” And so I made my way, recklessly perhaps, or recklessly indeed, to the occupier’s headquarters at Pawiak Prison.

It was there that I first encountered Rav Kalonymos Kalmish Szapira, the holy Piaseczna Rebbe, and though I didn’t know it then, he would shortly become the third of the father figures who haunt these pages, Drs. Freud and Zamenhof having preceded him. At that moment, he was descending the front steps of the prison with a young man in his arms, and he grabbed me by the elbow as I passed them, as though hooking me with a cane.

“I wouldn’t go in there, Dr. Sammelsohn, if I were you.”

A tallish man, he glowered at me from behind the elegant sable of his beard, his hat knocked onto the back of his head, his spectacles low on his nose. I had no idea who he was and assumed he was simply an ordinary rabbi. Judging, however, by the jubilant expressions passing between him and the young man, I could only surmise he had just done exactly what he was warning me against.

I stopped and smiled sheepishly. Embarrassed by my own theatrical heroics, I said, “Apparently you’ve managed it, however.”

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m not unarmed.”

Now it was his turn to give me an embarrassed smile. Indeed, he blushed, and although I’m certain he meant nothing of the kind, I found myself looking for a gun or a telltale bulge beneath his long frock coat.

“It’s not cowardice, you know,” Reb Kalonymos said kindly.

“No, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.”

“But who will save the Zamenhofs, then?”

He shrugged unhappily. “There’s only so much each of us can do.”

As this was not merely a consoling gesture, but a statement of fact, I turned from the prison’s façade. It wasn’t difficult, in truth, to lose enthusiasm for the task. “Very well then,” I said. As there was nothing more to do, I bid him good day, meanwhile congratulating the young man on his release. However, as I turned to descend the stairs, the rebbe lightly touched my arm. “A moment, Dr. Sammelsohn.”

“Yes, what is it?”

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said, “you’re a descendant of the holy Seer of Lublin?”

“On my mother’s side, yes, that’s correct.”

“As am I.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Which makes us cousins, I suppose.”

It was an odd thing to be discussing, I felt, given our circumstances. However, it proved to be considerably less odd than what the rebbe said next. “Perhaps this isn’t the time or the place,” he said, leaning into me and dropping his voice, “but I was wondering if you’d be kind enough to pay me a visit.”

“A visit?”

“Sooner might be better than later, I think.”

“At your home?”

“If it’s still standing.”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Excellent, as there’s a literary matter I wish to discuss with you.”

A LITERARY MATTER?

I couldn’t believe I’d heard him correctly. These were the days of house arrests and firing squads. Our lives were a chaos. People were being murdered in the streets. Against all codes of war, even after they’d conquered our city, the Germans kept firing on its civilian population. Rebbe Szapira knew this as well as anyone. After our meeting on the steps of Pawiak Prison, I’d made some inquiries and discovered that his son had been wounded only the day before when a German soldier let loose a riptide of shrapnel, and a small piece of it had burst through the
rebbe’s window. The poor man had bled so profusely, though it meant braving a storm of bullets and incendiary bombs, he was taken to the hospital. Or rather he was taken from hospital to hospital, as each was full, and none had any supplies. (Among the German’s übermenschliche achievements, it seemed that they had sped up time; the distance between the present and the future had collapsed; and we were dying too quickly to be accommodated.) Help was found at last at the hospital on Blonda Street, but the rebbe’s daughter-in-law and his sister-in-law were killed when an incendiary bomb exploded at the hospital entrance. The rebbe himself had only moments before gone off in search of a Dr. Binswanger, or he would have been killed as well. Upon his return, confronted by the terrible scene, he’d ordered one of his students to see that the women were taken to the cemetery, and another to gather up their jewelry, lest someone desecrate their bodies by robbing them. When this second student was captured by a German patrol and charged with looting from the dead, the rebbe put aside all other concerns and dashed to the prison to explain everything and to plead for the boy’s life.

His son died from his wounds on the second day of Sukkos, and the rebbe, in strict conformity with the Law, put off his mourning until the holy day was done. Then tearing his garment and sitting, he cried, “The war is already lost for me. May God have mercy on the people of Israel.”

Could a man really write a book under these circumstances?

NONE OF OUR
Yiddish writers ever thought to translate Proust, nor had his monumental novel been written when I was a child reading stolen books in my father’s gazebo, and yet, each time I encountered an Hasidic rebbe, I felt I’d gorged myself on madeleines. I could never enter Rav Szapira’s study without feeling the hand of Reb Yudel on my neck, and the creeping resentment I continually felt in the rebbe’s presence, I knew, had little to do with the man himself.

“Ah, good afternoon, good afternoon, Dr. Sammelsohn!” he said the first time I visited him, rising to greet me. “You’ve come at last! Just as I knew you would! Tea?” He rubbed his hands together as though he were a nervous waiter.

“Thank you, no,” I said. I had no wish to take anything from the rebbe’s precious stores.

“Oh, please don’t deprive me of the joy of caring for a guest. If you must deprive me of something, let it be tea but not that.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “If the rebbe insists,” I said.

“If the rebbe insists! He insists! The rebbe insists!” He opened a door behind his desk and called out to someone in another part of the house, “Darling?” To me, he said, “My daughter will be only too happy to see to our needs. She’s all I have now, really.” He reseated himself and folded his hands together before him. “Now, so tell me — how is our illustrious doctor?”

“The times are difficult for everyone, I suppose.”

“Of course, of course, though not the worst we’ve seen.”

“No?” I shot him an incredulous look.

“Perhaps not ourselves personally, but our people.”

“Oh. That,” I said. “Yes.”

It was a grim subject, and so I let it drop.

“You’re still at … ?”

“The Zamenhofs’,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Though I’m back on Dzika Street, the new house on Królewska having been blown to bits.”

“You knew the father, I believe?”

“Dr. Zamenhof was a friend of mine, yes.”

“I don’t wish to be harsh …” He hesitated. “But a man will always pay for his blindnesses.” He shook his head. “Hilelismo, Homaranismo. Nariŝkajtismo is more like it: nonsensismo. Though I had nothing personally against the man.”

“Indeed, no one did,” I said with a tight smile. I wasn’t going to argue with the rebbe. I knew from long experience that one can’t win with these fanatical pietists.

“Dreaming of his useless utopias.” He made a little clicking sound with his tongue. “He wanted to do away with national borders and now: look! the borders have fallen. He wished to do away with religion, and now: look! our religion is illegal. As a physician, I’d diagnose it as a classic case of premature messianism. At times, a man will rush so passionately that all he accomplishes is smashing his head against the doorjamb.”

As a physician.
This is as good a place as any, I suppose, to mention that, in addition to his other many accomplishments — according to his Hasidim, the rebbe was the wonder of his generation, a brilliant theologian, and a ladder of piety whose topmost rung reached to the Heavens — he was not only a violinist of professional caliber but a self-taught doctor whose prescriptions were, nevertheless, recognized by all the pharmacists in the city.

“In any case,” I said, hoping to change the subject, “the rebbe wished to speak to me about a literary matter?”

“Ah! Yes!” His face brightened. “Though may I show you something first?”

“Certainly,” I said, and I followed him to a cabinet, where he unlocked first one drawer and, not finding what he was searching for, the next.

“Yes, here it is.” He handed me a stack of papers. “Well?” he asked expectantly, looking over the rims of his spectacles at me.

I examined the sheets, but could see nothing out of the ordinary. “It appears to be a religious treatise of some kind.”

“A treatise, yes, but as you can see, there’s one remarkable feature. If you’ll look carefully, you’ll notice that the handwriting changes exactly here, right in the middle of this sentence.”

I peered more closely at the work. “Yes, I see it now.”

“The rebbetzin and I were very close.” Reb Kalonymos pushed his spectacles onto his forehead. “And once, I was in the middle of recording a talk I’d given, when, for reasons I can no longer remember, I was called away. A medical emergency or a spiritual one of some kind. In any case, when I returned, though the hour was quite late and I was quite exhausted, I wished to finish the work, lest I forget some of the ideas that had come out of my mouth when I’d delivered the talk, you see? However, sitting down at my desk, I discovered there was no need, no need at all. In my absence, the rebbetzin had picked up my pen and finished it herself, beginning exactly where I’d left off. I read it through and saw that nothing needed changing. On the contrary, everything was as I had intended it, or even better.”

His eyes glistened with the memory. He smiled apologetically and, with a trembling hand, reached for the pages, which were clearly dear to him.

“I haven’t touched my violin since the day of her death. And you?” he said, tucking the manuscript back into its drawer as carefully as if he were tucking a child into bed. “You’ve never been married, isn’t that right?”

“No, I have actually. More than once, in fact.”

He appeared momentarily puzzled. “Oh, yes. The little retarded girl. I’d forgotten.”

“Forgotten?”

“And the Bernfeld daughter, and the first one as well — what was her name? Hindele? — when you were a child.”

“I don’t recall ever mentioning any of this to the rebbe.”

“To the rebbe!” he said. “Let us do away with this tedious third-person address, shall we? We must learn to speak in complete honesty for what I have in mind.” Gesturing with his hand, he invited me to return to our chairs at his desk. “Shall we get down to cases, then?”

“Fine,” I said. “But if we’re to speak with each other in complete honesty, please tell me how it is you knew about my wives.”

“Oh!” The rebbe took off his glasses and gave me a flirtatious look. “I made some inquiries, that’s all. After we’d encountered each other on the prison steps. Oh, surely, Dr. Sammelsohn, you don’t believe that a rebbe can read a man’s life story in the lines of his face, do you?”

“Can he?”

“Can you?” he said, laughing.

“No,” I said.

“Then how could I? I’m not the Szibotyer Rebbe, after all. No, in these modern times, Dr. Sammelsohn, so much has been lost. I can’t, for example, remember any past lives, nor the sonnets I wrote when I was an Italian rabbi.”

He smiled mischievously at me. If I didn’t misunderstand him, he was referring to the fantastical story the Szibotyer Rebbe had told my friend Shai and me the night he’d exorcised the dybbuk from Khave Katznelson.

“But there’s no one you could have asked about that!” I protested.

“No, as a matter of fact, there isn’t. In any case, moving on.” He cleared his throat, coughing into his hands. “As I’ve indicated to you, I’m writing a book.”

My head was spinning.

“A book?” I have to admit that this was as flummoxing as anything he’d yet said.

“You’re amazed?” he said.

“Amazed? No,” I lied.

“Astonished?”

“Well …” I demurred.

“Astounded …”

I squinted at him.

“… to the point of muteness perhaps?”

I got up and walked to the window.

“Out with it, just out with it, Dr. Sammelsohn! Just tell me what it is you’re thinking.”

I turned to him and, as gently as I could, I said, “Is this really the time for books?”

He looked me in the eye, smiling beneath his mustache. “Oh, Dr. Sammelsohn, it’s clear you haven’t thought the matter through.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it at all beyond my initial confoundment.”

“Yes, that’s clear.”

“Then perhaps the rebbe will enlighten me.”

“Your reaction is a purely emotional one.”

(I suppose he was right. Like a good diagnostician, he’d put his finger on my most sensitive wound. From the books Reb Sender stuck beneath my nose before I could even read, to the novels Avrum the Book Peddler had forced upon me, to Dr. Freud and Dr. Breuer’s
Studies on Hysteria
and Dr. Fliess’s
On the Causal Connection between the Nose and the Sexual Organ
, to Dr. Esperanto’s
Unua Libro
and Professors Couturat et Leau’s
Histoire de la langue universelle
, I’d been driven nearly mad by books. For personal reasons, I’d exclude the copy of Dr. Albrecht’s
Mysteries of Females or, The Secrets of Nature
Loë brought with her to Boulogne-sur-Mer, but otherwise I couldn’t remember when a book had ever done me any good.)