All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (2 page)

My father enjoyed considerable renown in the community. To this day old men stop me on a street in Brooklyn, or on the Rue des Rosiers in Paris, and ask, “Aren’t you the son of Reb Shloime Wiesel?” And I feel proud, delighted to be known as his son, for it means I come
from somewhere and that while I am but a branch, the trunk is sturdy, and the treetop stirs the clouds.

My father was famous for his intelligence, his perspicacity, and his kindness. People turned to him for advice. Patient and tolerant, he would see anyone, for any reason, listening with the same attentiveness to rich and poor, friend or stranger. His views mattered, his advice was invariably followed. I was not surprised that he was so sought after, but I never understood fully why he had time for everyone but me. Why did he seem so lost in thought when I spoke to him? Why were his answers so brief? How I wish he had told me of his own childhood, of his studies and experiences. How had
he
behaved at
heder
(elementary Hebrew school)? Had he been dutiful or headstrong? Who had been his friends? What games had they played? What about his father, whose name I bear? My paternal grandmother talked of him often, and always with a smile. But that wasn’t the same.

I can see Grandma Nissel now, with her pale, thin face, framed by the black scarf she never seemed to take off. And her eyes, I remember her eyes. When she gazed at me, she must have seen another Eliezer. To smile at me was to smile at him.

Friday was our special time. I would stop and see her on the way home from
heder
. “Eliezer, my boy, come, I’m waiting for you!” she would call out from her window. She would give me fresh buns from the oven and sit and watch fondly, her hands folded, happy and at peace, a glimmer in her blue-gray eyes, as I washed and recited the appropriate prayer. It was as though she wanted to say something, to ask me something, but never quite managed it. She was probably like that with her husband too: humble, respectful, always ready to receive his words as an offering. Strangely, her silence never troubled me. I would look at her as I ate and, fifteen minutes later, I would get up. “I have to go home and get ready, Grandma. Shabbat will be here any minute now.” But then, when I was already at the door, she would call me back. “Tell me what you learned this week.” It was part of the ritual. I would share a Bible story or, later, an insight of the Midrash (commentary on the Bible text). Once, I remember, I made her laugh. I was a little boy and had just learned that Moses fled out of Egypt. “Grandma,” I exclaimed, “I have great news for you. Moses is alive! Wicked Pharaoh couldn’t kill him. He’s going to get married, our Master Moses, and you know to whom? To Zipporah, the daughter of a priest called Jethro …”

Grandma Nissel lived alone in her widow’s house, just a few steps
from ours, though she certainly could have moved in with us. We adored her, our only grandmother, and she knew it.

On market days she helped out at the store. I can see her now, sitting motionless at the till, her lips sealed, giving change to peasants in vests and striped skirts of garish colors. But in the evening she went home to her own house, not wanting to be a burden. Maybe she was trying not to show favoritism toward any of her children. My father was the oldest, but she was just as close to my Uncle Mendel, who had a modest grocery store on the other side of town. I also had two aunts in Czechoslovakia: Aunt Idiss in Slotvino and Aunt Giza (whom we considered the more beautiful, since she used to bring us presents) in Ungvár. Aunt Giza survived deportation. When I saw her again in Israel in 1950, she wept with happiness, and with misery. She had lost her husband and children, but after the liberation rediscovered a childhood friend she had once loved and who had loved her. He, too, had lost his children and their mother in Birkenau. Ironically, years earlier their families had blocked their marriage. Now there was no opposition; the families were gone. Married at last, they seemed happy enough. Did they, in some illogical way, feel guilty? As for me, I am dogged by a feeling of remorse when I think of them. They gave me some money to buy and bring something back to Tel Aviv from Paris, but I never saw them again. They died before I was able to send what they had asked for. I had been too slow.

Grandma Nissel’s other two daughters lived in Sighet. Zlati, the youngest, was chronically despondent because people called her an old maid behind her back. She married late, you see—at twenty-one. I remember her husband, Nahman-Elye, as a distant, haughty man who paid no attention to those he considered beneath him, and these were many. They had two young daughters.

“Do me a big favor, will you, Grandma?” I asked during one of our weekly meetings, a Friday in June, between the holidays of Pesach and Shavuot. Zeide the melamed had let us out of
heder
earlier than usual, and I had time to kill.

“Ask me for the secrets of the forest and I shall lay them at your feet,” she said, her voice soft and tender. “Ask me for the world and its riches and they’re yours.”

I had never heard her speak so many words at once.

“No,” I stammered, embarrassed. “All I want is for you to tell me about Grandpa.”

Her face darkened.

“Why?”

“Just because. I mean, since I’m named after him …”

She was silent for a long moment, her eyes wandering in the distance. Was she praying, or remembering how it was when she was young and beautiful? She still seemed beautiful to me.

“Your grandfather, my boy, your grandfather … How can I explain it? … He loved God and His Torah. He never lived apart from or outside God, apart from or outside the holy Torah. From morning to night, even at the store, his nose was buried in the holy books. I sometimes wonder if he even noticed me.”

There was no rancor or complaint in her voice. On the contrary, she seemed proud and happy to have been married to such a pious man.

“But what about you, Grandma? Did you notice him?”

“Constantly. I would watch to be sure he was well and lacked for nothing, to make sure his shirt wasn’t torn or his caftan didn’t need mending. When he smiled his light brightened my darkness. When he sang, the whole world answered him. Shabbat with him was paradise. The house and garden were bathed in an indescribable heavenly purity and I could hear angels singing with us, in his honor. I wonder if I was worthy of it. But I felt elevated, yes, elevated to the divine throne.”

I knew that Grandpa Eliezer had been killed in World War I not far from our city, in a savage battle. A stretcher-bearer, he was trying to help a wounded man. He died for the Fatherland, for the glory of His Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef.

“When they told me,” my grandmother said, “I learned what catastrophe meant, and I knew my mourning would never end.”

Motionless, her hands still folded, she began to weep in silence, tears flowing down her cheeks and disappearing into the knot in her scarf. I felt stupid and clumsy. I didn’t know what to say to make her stop. I stared at her, transfixed.

“Remember, little one,” she finally whispered. “Remember the name you bear. Try not to dishonor it.”

Many years later, when I returned to my town, I went to the cemetery in search of my grandfather’s grave. The stone, overgrown with weeds, loomed over its neighbors, but it was hard to decipher the inscription. An emotion I had never felt before took hold of me. I saw Grandma Nissel again, and her words echoed in my memory. I recited a psalm and began to talk to the man whose presence had sanctified a
small piece of the universe. “It’s me, Grandpa, Eliezer ben Shlomo ben Eliezer, your grandson. I would like to say Kaddish for your soul’s salvation, but there’s no minyan. I’m alone. But I would like to tell you of the man who bears your name, that you might judge whether he is worthy of it. And since you’re with Grandma Nissel again, say hello to her for me. Tell her I remember our Friday visits. I remember her smiles and her silences.”

And I began to weep, as she once had, like a desperately hungry child who would always remain hungry. Mute tears flowed down my face, onto my chin, my neck, my chest. I did nothing to stop them.

A moment later I went on. “If Grandma had a grave, I would go to the ends of the earth to visit it. But as you know, she doesn’t. Did you know she expected that? Did you know, Grandpa, that Grandma Nissel was the only one in the family, almost the only one in the whole community, who guessed it all? She knew she would never come home. She left this wretched town in her funeral dress. Yes, she wore her shroud under her black dress. She alone was ready. In the train, she alone was silent. Am I worthy of her silence, Grandpa?”

The child within me refuses to let go of his grandparents, as the man I am refuses to be separated from his father. My companion, my judge, or simply my guide, he never leaves me. It is to him I turn at times of doubt. I fear his verdict, I seek his approval. His encouragement is essential to me, and his reproaches hurt. How often have I changed course solely in order not to disappoint him?

I was hardly a model child. I complained easily. My concentration wandered. I spent too much time daydreaming with my friends instead of studying. I didn’t eat enough and my parents worried constantly about how thin I was, and how pale. Lavish sums were spent dragging me from doctor to doctor, city to city, to treat my migraines. (It was thanks to my illnesses that I discovered Satu-Mare and Budapest. Had my parents been richer, I would have been taken around the world.)

For the most part I was not too bad a pupil. My tutors liked me. I learned my lessons, did my homework. Perhaps they thought me spoiled. My illnesses kept me home for days on end, but for my teachers that was no excuse. The body may be ill, but that should not prevent the mind from pursuing its quest to come nearer to God.

The truth is, it was not illness that kept me in bed, at least not at first. I stayed in bed because I didn’t feel like leaving the familiar walls
of my room, or the windows from which I could survey the life of the street and gaze upon our garden and especially my mother. Smile all you want, Dr. Freud, but I was attached to my mother, maybe too attached. When she left me to help out at the store, I would tremble under my blanket. When she was away, however briefly, I felt rejected, exiled, imperiled. I search my mind for my earliest memory, and I see a little boy sitting on his bed, calling for his mother. At the age of three, four, or five, I felt unhappy and harassed by my classmates at
heder
. I would count the minutes that separated me from my mother. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t spend all morning and afternoon with me. Had she been present, I would have learned the Hebrew alphabet and the Pentateuch—the first five books in the Scriptures—in no time flat and vanquished all the enemies of Israel. My dream was never to leave her. I would cling to her skirts even when she went to the ritual baths. I would sit on the stairs, hold my breath, and wait for her. “How come I can’t go in?” I would ask. “Because it’s forbidden,” she replied. “Why?” I persisted. “It says so in the Torah.” That stopped me. The Torah demanded silence and a kind of sacred respect. All prohibitions came from the Torah.

With time, however, study became a true adventure for me. My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the twenty-two holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with love, for they will be your links to life. And to e ternity.”

When I read the first word aloud—
Breshit
, “in the beginning”—I felt transported into an enchanted universe. An intense joy gripped me when I came to understand the first verse. “It was with the twenty-two letters of the
aleph-heth
that God created the world,” said the teacher, who on reflection was probably not so old. “Take care of them and they will take care of you. They will go with you everywhere. They will make you laugh and cry. Or rather, they will cry when you cry and laugh when you laugh, and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into hidden sanctuaries where all becomes …” All becomes what? Dust? Truth? Life? It was a sentence he never finished.

There was something terrifying and fascinating about reading ancient texts, something that filled me with awe. Without moving I could ramble through worlds visible and invisible. I was in two places
at once, a thousand places at once. I was with Adam at the beginning, barely awakened to a world streaming with light; with Moses in Sinai under a flaming sky. I seized upon a phrase, a word, and distances vanished.

Yet reading isolated me. My classmates were no longer beside me. I no longer saw or heard them, for I was elsewhere, in far-off kingdoms ruled by the word alone. Even my mother remained behind, as if on the far side of a river. To rediscover her at home was always a joy, but how could I ease that wrenching feeling that preceded my return? I found a solution: take her with me. All I needed was determination and imagination. When I went to see Adam, Eve wore my mothers sensitive face. When I followed Moses in the desert, his sister Miriam became my mother. Now nothing could separate us. Even at
heder
. I had only to open a book and I would see her. Only when I paused, when there was no book before me, did I feel alone and abandoned.

Once, however, we made each other suffer. But the suffering came neither from her nor from me, but from Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz when he came to Sighet.

I was eight years old. As usual, my mother took me with her to seek the Rabbi’s blessing: good health for her family, success and respect for the head of the family, good husbands for her daughters, fear of God for her son. A large crowd thronged the antechamber, spilling out into the corridor and onto the street. As the daughter of Reb Dodye, my mother did not have to wait on line. She herself, not the secretary, wrote out her request to the Rabbi, who talked with her about countless family matters as I stood holding my mother’s hand, not understanding everything they said, focused as I was on the beaming face of this rabbi, whose
ahavat Israel
(love for Israel, and therefore for every being in Israel) was legendary. I was captivated by his eyes, his eyebrows, his beard. Suddenly the Rabbi told me to approach. He put me on his lap and asked me tenderly about my studies. I answered his easy questions as best I could, stammering, almost incoherent. At which point the Rabbi asked my mother to leave us alone. “Good,” the Rabbi said when she closed the door behind her. “Now we can speak calmly.” About everything: the sidra of the week (a portion of the Torah read on Shabbat), the Rashi commentary, the chapter of a Talmudic tractate I was studying at the time. We were alone a few minutes. Or was it a few hours? At last he kissed me on the forehead and told me to wait outside. “Tell your mother to come back,” he said.
When she reemerged from talking with him, what seemed like days later, I froze. I tried to run to her, but my legs would not obey. She was a changed woman. Violent sobs shook her body. People stared at her in commiseration. The Rabbi must have said terrible things to her, terrifying, painful things—about me. I must have shamed her with my bad behavior, or by giving wrong answers to the Rabbis questions. “Why are you crying?” I asked. She refused to answer. I repeated my question again and again, but in vain. I tried the next day too, and the day after that, to no avail. All I got were those same tears. I persisted stubbornly, desperate to know what evil I might have done to cause such sorrow. It went on for weeks, until finally I gave up, exhausted. By then she had stopped crying.