All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (37 page)

The next day he put a bullet in his head.

Alfred and I had talked often about the question of forgiveness. Should—could—the Jews forgive their former enemies? Years later I was asked the question directly after a speech to German students: “Do you forgive us?” I replied that Ivan Karamazov was right: I could conceivably forgive the evil the Germans did to me personally, as an individual, but not the suffering and death they inflicted on my parents, on all the dead Jewish parents and all their murdered children. No one could grant forgiveness in their name. It must be noted that in any case, the German people never asked it of us.

I was now working full-time. Israel was increasingly in the news. Israeli government officials visited Paris, and so did actors, colleagues, and members of the Knesset. They kept me busy. The Israeli economy was improving, and so was the paper’s position. I was writing more articles, on more varied subjects: the funeral of André Gide, the death of Charles Maurras, the work of Gérard de Nerval.

And then—don’t laugh—there was Miss Israel, who filled my
evenings and my daylight hours, in the apparent belief that my time belonged to her as much as I did. I guess I should explain. The Miss Israel contests were organized by
La’isha, Yedioth Ahronoth’s
women’s weekly. The lucky winner was awarded not only a crown but also a trip to Paris, where she needed a guide, if not a chaperon. Naturally, the task fell to me.

It must be said that I had some limited experience in the field. A few weeks before Miss Israel was elected, the Old Man asked me to interview Miss Europe. I remember her well: dark, thin, and beautiful the way some Spanish women are beautiful. She graciously received me in her apartment near the Champs-Élysées. Sitting with me, hands poised delicately on her knees, she was delighted to answer my questions. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any. I had no idea how to interview a beauty queen. What was I supposed to ask her? Her views on German disarmament, her favorite authors, what she thought of the winner of the Prix Goncourt? I fidgeted, and she waited, serenely at first and then with mounting impatience. I was so confused I couldn’t see straight, and in the end I opted for frankness. “Mademoiselle,” I stammered, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to ask you. Could you give me a little help?” She burst into applause, as though she had just heard the best joke of her life. “You really don’t know? Well, that’s the first time this has ever happened. Okay, take this down.…” She proceeded to tell me about her diet and exercises. Then she cited some figures. I asked if it was a phone number, and that produced a fresh burst of laughter. “You claim to be a journalist? And in Paris?” It wasn’t my fault. How was I supposed to recognize her measurements? I wrote it all down like a student and, sweat running down my face, pieced together an article I hoped no one would read, or whose byline, at least, no one would notice.

Fortunately, I would not have this problem with Miss Israel; I wasn’t supposed to write anything about her. But she did cause trouble of another kind. The paper had forgotten to send me the money required to show a young Jewish beauty queen the hospitality due to one of her exalted status. I had to borrow left and right, for, unfortunately, this queen was cultured and intelligent. She wanted to see the real Paris, not just the Eiffel Tower and the Folies-Bergère. She wanted to go to the theater, to concerts, and so on. My various press cards came in handy. I must also admit that I rather enjoyed the envious glances; it wasn’t so bad being the attentive escort of Israel’s most beautiful woman, especially since Miriam (that was her name) had
plenty of character and spirit. She asked many questions about Paris, which I was delighted to answer, improvising with an aplomb that I am ashamed of today.

Perhaps this is the moment to make a confession. In those days I often made up stories about Paris, descriptions you won’t find in any guidebook. The problem was that too many Israeli visitors insisted I show them the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde, Montmartre and the Russian cabarets. At first I was a conscientious guide, telling only what I knew, but then I realized that my tourists were disappointed. They wanted more interesting stories. The façade of Notre-Dame, with its Jews in pointed hats, was not enough for them. Nor was the Palais de Justice, where, in 1240, by order of King Louis IX, the first disputation on Judaism between Rabbi Yehiel and the convert Nicholas Donin was held.

Did my visitors know that the king and queen attended the event and that it was Donin who persuaded Pope Gregory IX and King Louis IX to order the Talmud burned? “We learned all that in school,” they said. “We want to hear about other things.” So I began inventing anecdotes for every statue, stories for every square, memories for every monument. I didn’t see how rearranging the capital’s past for an hour or a morning could do France any harm. Until one day the inevitable happened. I was at the Place de la Bastille addressing a small group of French speakers who listened raptly to my description of the Revolution. I was in top form. I even gave them the names of the officer who first threw open the prison gates and the prisoner who fell to his knees to beg for mercy. In the next cell a princess awaited death. She was ready to die, but changed her mind at the sight of the officer. Suddenly, to her friends’ chagrin, she began to shout of her love of life and the living. I could easily have gone on until the next revolution but for the cry that then came from a gentleman unknown to me. He was, unfortunately, a professional guide, and he proceeded to tear me apart. “How dare you!” he blustered. “How dare you tell such lies in my presence, I who know this city and the history of each stone?” We slipped away as quickly and quietly as possible. “Pay no attention to him,” one of my charges hastened to console me. “He’s just jealous. Nothing could be more obvious.”

Dr. Rosenblum and his wife visited too. I met them at the airport and would have loved to have taken them to dinner, but I had no money. They guessed as much, so instead they invited me to their
hotel room for anchovy sandwiches. It was the first time I ate anchovies.

Paula Mozes, the Old Man’s daughter-in-law, was the next to inform me of her impending arrival by train from London. She came with a compliment: “I read the article in which you said that Paris is the only city in the world where the first day of spring is front-page news, so I came to see.” I would have liked to have shown her the hospitality she deserved, but I was still broke.

I was having increasingly violent migraines, and if that was not enough, a toothache was killing me. I found a dentist on the Place de l’Opéra, a royalist who regularly flew into a rage at the mention of the word “democracy.” While working in my mouth, he preached the virtues of monarchy unopposed.

At about that time I discovered the vast resources of the film industry. I wrote Hebrew subtitles for the film
Clochemerle
and was paid for each line approximately what
Yedioth
paid for an entire article. Through Marc Gutkin, I found yet another job to make ends meet. He introduced me to Aaron Poliakoff, a Yiddish actor originally from Warsaw, who wanted Marc to publish a Yiddish monthly to be called “The Mirror of the Theater.” He suggested I work with him on the project. “For the moment we’re not exactly Rothschild, so we can’t pay you a real salary, but …”

“But what?”

“You’ll have a real title: editor in chief.”

“Who else is on the editorial board?”

“Very prestigious names, I promise you.”

“Like who?”

“Well, you. And maybe me.”

I liked Poliakoff. He had charm and a sense of humor that reminded me of all that was most appealing in Eastern European Judaism. In fact, he was so persuasive that I agreed to become the new monthly’s secretary, typist, reporter, commentator, critic, and editorialist. There was just one outstanding practical question: Had he rented editorial offices? “Of course.” Where? “Come with me.” We went to a corner café, took an outside table, and ordered a café-crème. We talked about Yiddish culture and literature, Yiddish playwrights (of whom I knew little) and actors (of whom I knew even less). After about an hour I grew impatient. When were we going to the office? Poliakoff laughed. “We’re here.”

Once a week we met at the same café to plan the next issue. Poliakoff and his wife belonged to a famous family of actors, and they initiated me into their world with tact, talent, and tenderness. I loved hearing their anecdotes, amusing or sad, about the stars of the Yiddish stage. I read the plays of Ansky and Leivik, Pinski and Hirschbein, became familiar with the names of Adler and Granach, Kaminska and Schwartz. And so I became the head of a Yiddish theater review, even though I had attended perhaps three Yiddish productions in my life. It’s amazing what one will do for a “real” title.

Around the same time another idea occurred to me. Why not launch a French-language Jewish weekly patterned on
Time?
This would be nothing like “The Mirror of the Theater,” in which I wrote under ten different names, but a real magazine, with a real editorial team. I discussed the plan with Ilan, an Israeli friend, a sound engineer by trade, as ignorant of my craft as I was of his. I sounded him out simply because we happened to cross paths that evening. For my sake he declared himself enthusiastic, and we sat over our café-crèmes dreaming of years to come, when Henry Luce would be knocking at our door seeking advice. All we needed was a millionaire backer ready to invest in youth.

Interviewing an Israeli industrialist, I summoned up the courage to raise the subject. He was interested, but wanted to see something in writing—a prospectus, a budget, and preferably a dummy issue. I hurried to see Gutkin. Sam helped out, and a dummy issue was soon ready. But in the meantime my visionary potential angel had left France. I later tried the experiment in the United States, with no less disappointing results.

Of course, I continued to cover current events. There was fighting in Indochina, strikes in France, and we learned with dismay of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, where “cosmopolitanism” was treated as a crime against the people and the state. Trials were held in Moscow, Prague, and Sofia, with supposedly freely given confessions. Laszlo Rajk confessed in Hungary, Rudolf Slansky in Czechoslovakia. Their submission seemed inexplicable. How could all these glorious Communist leaders be spies, saboteurs, and traitors? We tried to understand. Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon
offered the simplest of explanations: In the USSR the end justified the means. Then came the arrest of Jewish doctors, state anti-Semitism. And the Communist press hit new lows. How could they parrot
Pravda’s
lies about Zionism, cosmopolitanism, and the Jewish charity organizations without disqualifying
themselves? There were even some Jewish Communists (such as André Wurmser) among the propagandists, and they showed special zeal. Had they no shame? As yet we were unaware of the murders of Solomon Mikhoels, Peretz Markish, Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, Der Nister, and other Jewish writers and poets. Stalin signed their death warrants personally. Among the leading Jewish intellectuals arrested, only academician Lina Stern was spared. She later described her encounters with her codefendants in prison—Itzik Fefer, for one: unrecognizable, doubled over, half mad, his hands bloodied and trembling, he had urged her to confess. There were disturbing, murky rumors about others who were driven mad. Only Peretz Markish was not broken by torture. “I am not guilty,” he shouted at his accusers. “None of us is guilty. You are trying us only because we are Jews.”

Even before these revelations we knew that Jews had been publicly denounced, threatened, persecuted, and humiliated. Yet Communist writers in Paris continued to glorify Stalin. What were they afraid of? Did they really believe that Slansky and London had sold out? It was in an effort to understand the Communist mentality that I later wrote
The Testament
. Was I right to advance the hypothesis that communism was a kind of religion, a messianism without God? It is enough to examine its vocabulary: expiation, confession, redemption—the words sound like entries in a dictionary of mysticism.

One day I went to a Communist demonstration. Its aim was to mobilize the party of the workers against “filthy bourgeois Zionist intellectuals” who dared to criticize Stalin, father of all oppressed peoples, of the poor yearning for peace and freedom, and probably of an illusion or two as well. The truth be damned! Tirelessly—ecstatically—they repeated the same slogans, the same gestures. The crowd applauded frantically. At the end they stood tall, fists raised, and sang the “Internationale.”

I was never attracted to communism. And yet, had I been born at the beginning of the century, I might have succumbed to the lure of its original prophetic message. In the thirties I was too young and too religious, and after the war I had other problems. I often wondered, had I joined the movement, would I have had the courage to break with it in 1952–53? I think Soviet anti-Semitism would have forced me to do so. I have discussed this more than once with the writer Howard Fast, who tried to explain his long delay in leaving the party by explaining how difficult it was to break with an ideal, a religion,
and a family, and that communism had been all those things to him. I was not convinced. Communism, like Nazism, ended in inhumanity. And Stalin hated Jews almost as much as Hitler had.

Whether it was a mere coincidence or a consequence of my disillusionment with things European, I decided to turn over a new leaf. I set out for India.