All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (6 page)

Still, Regent Horthy was anything but a democrat. He tolerated
no opposition. His police persecuted and tortured Communists—especially Jewish Communists—and terrorized their families. There was talk of this in the Houses of Study. I didn’t know it at the time. I only found out long after the war, when I was researching my book
The Testament
.

I am still fascinated by the phenomenon of religious Jews opting for communism. How could a Jew imbued with Moses and Isaiah adopt the theories—or the faith—of Marx and Stalin? In the course of my research I was stunned to discover that there were such people, among them some prestigious names, even in my small town. Strange as it may sound, these students of the Talmud gathered by night in a darkened Beit Midrash to analyze the works of Lenin and Engels with the same fervor they showed in the daytime when poring over the teachings of Maimonides.

I believe that even my mother, pious as she was, felt the attraction of the Communist ideal. I remember a laughing, mustached man who would visit her at the store when things were slow. They would talk in low voices. After the war I found out he was an underground Communist activist. Perhaps it was under his influence that at one point she abandoned the broadcasts of Radio London for those of Radio Moscow.

The fall of Paris, German victories in North Africa, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor—there was talk of all this, of course, and previously unknown names became current: Tobruk, El Alamein, Voronezh, Stalingrad. But the war itself seemed distant and unreal, almost mythical, coming home to us only when Italian troops passed through the city on their way to the front (strumming mandolins) or on their way back (silent, their heads hanging). It forced its way into our consciousness indirectly, when Polish refugees arrived. Assigned by the community to look after them, my father listened to their testimony and moved heaven and earth to get them money and false papers and to prevent the gendarmes from expelling them.

Once someone came to tell my father that a young woman had been seen being escorted by two gendarmes. He seemed to hesitate for a moment. Should he get up in the middle of the Shabbat meal? We quickly recited the customary blessings, and my father left. A few hours later he was back. “This is serious,” he said, looking gloomy. “More serious than usual. She told the investigating officer everything.
Her flight from a ghetto in Galicia, the murder of her parents. She should have kept silent.”

These officers, thank God, could be bribed with money and a few bottles of
pàlinka
, their underlings with a single bottle and a bit of small change. When the laws got stricter, my father had a new idea. Having discovered that anyone apprehended with foreign currency would immediately be transferred to the counterespionage bureau in Budapest, he arranged to supply refugees with a few U.S. dollars, Swiss francs, or pounds sterling, which prevented them from being sent back to Poland. In Budapest there was an underground network to help them, and almost all survived. One, however, was arrested in a raid, taken to the police station, and tortured. In his confession he named the person who had helped him.

I will never forget my father’s arrest, nor the look on his face after his release: all the things he never said could be read in his eyes. He spent weeks in prison, first in Sighet, then in Debrecen, and was released, thanks to his friends in Budapest, who managed to buy off either the prosecutor or the judge himself. Bea, the most resourceful of the family, took the train to bring him home. When he saw us waiting at the station, a sad, disenchanted smile I had never seen before flickered across his face. He seemed to have aged. Day after day I watched him. Had he been beaten, tortured? What had they done to him to give his face that grayish color, those lines of exhaustion and resignation? I didn’t dare ask, yet I yearned to know. “I know,” Bea told me years later. I begged her to share the secret with me, but she refused, simply repeating, “I know, I know.” She was already gravely ill, and I didn’t insist. I could have asked him myself in the camp, where we shared our grief and fear, but I was too shy even to mention his imprisonment. I told myself it wasn’t the time or the place. I was wrong.

Why is it that my town still enchants me so? Is it because in my memory it is entangled with my childhood? In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.

I often re-create my town, so like and yet so different from all others, refusing to accept that it ever changed. I stroll through it alongside my characters, who act as scouts, guides, and guardian angels. With their help, evil remains hidden and time suspended. I wrote
The Town Beyond the Wall
in 1961, before my return to Sighet. I wrote it because at the time that was the only way to bring it back to life.

Even when I tell Biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic tales, it is from my town that they take flight. It is in the gardens of Sighet that the Sages compose the Talmud, in the flickering light of its candles that they weave legends for the Midrash, along its rivers that exiles hang their harps and weep when they remember Zion. It is in the darkness of its forests that Rabbi Itzhak Lurie and his disciples dream of ultimate redemption. That’s how it is, and there is nothing I can do about it: I left Sighet, but it refuses to leave me.

The closer I come to my native town, the farther away I am. The better I know it, the more I strive to discover it. For I do not know it well. I thought I did, but I was wrong. It had a secret life I never suspected. I never knew, for instance, that respected members of the community engaged in smuggling and illegal currency trading. Nor that there was a bordello in Sighet. According to stories I heard from Sighet’s inhabitants after the war, a few of the Jewish working girls spoke a highly literary Yiddish. One in particular liked to discuss religion with her customers. So yes, I freely admit that many things escaped my notice. Yet I loved to look and listen. I was interested in everything. A Hasidic quarrel? I was determined to learn the reasons, ramifications, and stakes. A young Jewish woman converted to marry a Hungarian officer? I worried about the tragedy of her shame-struck parents. Everything aroused my curiosity: a beggar who might be a
tzaddik
, a just man, in disguise; an abandoned wife scouring the province for the hundred rabbinical signatures that would allow her to remarry; a rich trader gone bankrupt; a novelist whose book described the turmoil in heaven when the Angel of Death went on strike; an apostate excommunicated by the community. Not only the people but also the trees, the birds, the clouds interested me. And I was taken most of all with the visionaries. Moshe the madman, whose laugh haunted my dreams; Kalman the Kabalist, whose veiled glance darkened mine; Schmukler the prince; my friend Itzu, with whom I studied the siddur—prayer book—of Rabbi Jacob Emden; my friend Yerahmiel, with whom I learned modern Hebrew—of course, I remember them all. Just as I remember the silent beggar who put his finger to his lips to show me how much he distrusted speech. And the family of five—or was it seven?—dwarfs, whom people came from far and wide to see; all of them survived Mengele’s selections and tortures in Birkenau.

•   •   •

My bar mitzvah was celebrated by the Rebbe of Borsha, across the street from our house. Called to the Torah, I recited the appropriate blessings and silently read a passage of the Prophets. After the service the faithful were invited to a Kiddush. I can see myself now, as Rebbe Haim-Meir’l, successor to old Rebbe Pinhas, helped me strap the phylacteries onto my left arm and forehead for the first time, as the Bible tells us to do. And here I was a responsible adult, a full-fledged member of the community of Israel.

A new life began for me. I was now so obsessed with God that I forgot His creation. Was it Ernest Renan who wrote that the Greeks had reason, the Romans power, and the Jews the sense of God? I sought God everywhere, tracking Him especially to holy places as though He were hidden there. Was Giordano Bruno right when he said that light is God’s shadow? I sought Him everywhere, the better to love Him, to enjoy His gifts, to share His suffering in our exile: in the chapels of tailors and of shoemakers, in the great synagogue of the rich, and in the Houses of Study where the poor gathered.

In Sighet they used to say that everyone had his own synagogue, even atheists. We young people created the Tiferet Bachurim, a rather gloomy room in the “Talmud Torah” building. I was elected
gabbai
, or president, perhaps because my father provided wood to fuel the stove all winter. We were delighted to have a place of our own to celebrate the holidays, recite psalms, study the sacred texts, and pray among ourselves. Like the adults, we now followed the disquieting developments of the war. Yiddele Feldman, grandson of the rabbinical judge, was our skilled strategist of the Russian front. He had hidden a large map covered with colored arrows inside a Talmudic folio, and we would lean anxiously over his shoulder to listen to his account of German victories in Ukraine and in White Russia. Sucking pensively on a pencil, he would describe the situation: tanks, armored vehicles, infantry, air support, troop movements. Yiddele was a budding general. “The German advance is like lightning,” he said, “a fearsome, unstoppable tactic. The Red Army won’t be able to halt the invader. Not yet. Later it will, but by then it’ll be too late. We’ll have to find other ways to escape catastrophe.” What other ways? Leave for Palestine? Kalman the Kabalist advised his disciples to meditate, to pray in deeper contemplation. The divine response lay in the human quest for mystery.

Why not in the occult? Kalman was inclined to oppose “practicing the Kabala” as such, for he was concerned exclusively with messianic enlightenment. But that didn’t stop me from trying. I began
reading Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hungarian works on the irrational in all its diversity. Astrology, magic, morphology, hypnotism, graphology, parapsychology, alchemy. In short, I became entranced by what lay beyond reality. With a little luck, I thought, I would learn how to turn dust into gold, danger into security, harmless gestures into acts of war against war. I was fascinated by the mystical experiences, or alleged mystical experiences, recounted in these books yellowed by the centuries. Could Satan really be driven beyond the mountains by mixing vinegar with the blood of a ritually slaughtered rooster while uttering magic formulas? Could the repetition of certain “names” at certain times repel the forces of evil, bring down planes, drive back tanks, vanquish and humiliate the horsemen of Death? Fifty years later I can reveal the truth: It doesn’t work, and I say that from experience. Countless times I tried to thwart Hitler, visiting myriad evils and maladies upon him.

And I will confess another failure as well—one that will not surprise anyone—in a domain in which my competence is found wanting even now: financial investments. I had read in some work on occult sciences that you could make your savings grow by burying money after invoking the protection of a heavenly spirit with special expertise in the field. I decided to risk a meager fifteen pengös. Every morning I would dig up my investment just to check, and one day it was gone. I discontinued these unprofitable practices.

To make my father happy I agreed to sing in the choir of the great synagogue, under the direction of Akiva Cohen. It was thanks to what he taught me that I was later able to lead a chorus in the O.S.E.—the children’s rescue society—orphanage in France. One night, in the late seventies, during an address at a university in Connecticut, I mentioned my musical debut and the name of my first choir director, paying homage to his abilities. “That’s me!” someone in the audience exclaimed. He was then the cantor in a local synagogue.

I saw Cohen only rarely, for music lessons and before the High Holidays, but I met with my master of mysticism every evening. Under his vigilant eye three of us decided to venture into the Pardes, the orchard of forbidden knowledge. We began our quest for the absolute by fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. We would stay at the House of Study until midnight, poring over the
Sefer Yetzirah
(which is attributed to Rabbi Yehuda Hechasid) and the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Vital, favorite disciple of the founder of Lurianic mysticism. I was insatiable, captivated by the dazzling theories of creation: the
shattering of the vessels, the emanations of first light, the scattered sparks. How could the purity of the beginning be recovered? How to liberate the Lord, prisoner of Himself and of our own actions? How to join the first breath to the last, to master the source and that which overflows it? For an adolescent thirsting for knowledge and dreams, there is nothing more romantic and alluring than the Kabala. Within its gates, higher than heaven, prayer and meditation are driven to their limits and allow apprehension of the mystery of human power as manifested in good and evil alike. Sitting on the floor, we would recite the litanies attributed to Rachel and Leah. Cautiously, the master guided us toward the propitious moment at which, through the pronouncing of occult formulas, it was given to man to hasten events and to advance the coming of the Messiah. “This is the only way,” our master said. “To save our people, we must save all humanity.”

Of course, it was dangerous. We knew the tragic story of Rabbi Joseph della Reina, disciple of Ari Hakadosh and friend of a mysterious old man, Natala Natali of Safed, and of an “Italian madman.” This poor and daring young dreamer had set about to realize man’s most sublime dream. Having triumphed over countless dangers on land and sea, he very nearly succeeded. Satan was disarmed, bound hand and foot, reduced to impotence, humiliated. Another instant and humanity would have entered the light and joy of truth. But at that last moment the Rabbi made a mistake, allowing himself to be moved by Satan, who broke his chains, whereupon the whole edifice crumbled, and man’s hope was extinguished anew. If Rabbi Joseph della Reina had failed, how ought we to proceed? Would we be able to avoid the same pitfalls? We told ourselves that if we, too, failed, we would begin anew. After all, the Besht, punished for having attempted the same experiment (being deprived of his gifts, his knowledge, and even his memory), nevertheless refused to abandon hope. And were we not all his disciples?