Open Heart (3 page)

Am I ready?

IS ONE
ever ready?

Some of the ancient Greek philosophers, as well as some Hasidic masters, claimed to have spent their lifetimes preparing for death.

Well, the Jewish tradition, which is my own, counsels another way: We sanctify life, not death. “
Ubakharta bakhaim
,” says Scripture: “You shall choose life” and the living. With the promise to live a better, more moral, more humane life.

That is what man’s efforts should be directed to. To save the life of a human being, whomever he or she may be, wherever he or she is from, a Jew has the right to transgress the strictest of the Torah’s laws. That is what I learned in heder when I was very young, and later at the yeshiva, and later still by studying the sacred books. Death—any death—renders impure all who come in contact with
it. Even the death of Moses, which is why God undertook to bury him Himself.

Of course, we must accept the idea—the reality—that every man is mortal. But Jewish law teaches us that death is not meant to guide us; it is life that will show us the way. And the choice is never ours. All decisions are made up above on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year. On that day—this is what our prayers affirm—God inscribes in the Book of Life all that will happen to us in the year to come: who shall know joy and who shall experience sorrow; who shall become ill and who shall live and who shall die.

Evidently, I have prayed poorly, lacking concentration and fervor; otherwise, why would the Lord, by definition just and merciful, punish me in this way?

Hardly have I formulated this conclusion than I reject it: Were it valid today, how much more valid it would have been then,
there
.

SUCH ARE
the thoughts that the patient, a prisoner of his condemned body, confronting his fate, is experiencing with ferocious intensity. As I face the gravity of this moment, I feel the need to search my soul.

I am eighty-two years old. As it has often before, and now more so than ever, the fact that I am who I am leads me to look back: What have I done, and what have I toiled to do, during this long journey filled with dreams and challenges?

Strange, I suddenly remember Baudelaire’s outcry in his
Mon cœur mis à nu
(My Heart Laid Bare): “There exist in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous impulses; one leading toward God, the other toward Satan.” Have I distinguished the path to Good from the one leading to Evil?

My life unfolds before me like a film:
landscapes from my childhood; adventures in faraway, sometimes exotic places; my first masters, followed by my first moments of adolescent religious ecstasy as I and my friends at the yeshiva received from our old masters the keys that open the secret doors of mystical truths.

Have I performed my duty as a survivor? Have I transmitted all I was able to? Too much, perhaps? Were some of the mystics not punished for having penetrated the secret garden of forbidden knowledge?

To begin, I attempted to describe the time of darkness. Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald. A slight volume:
Night
. First in Yiddish, “
And the world remained silent
,” in which every sentence, every word, reflects an experience that defies all comprehension. Even had every single survivor consecrated a year of his life to testifying, the result would probably still have been unsatisfactory. I rarely reread myself, but when I do, I come away with a bitter taste in my mouth: I feel the words are not right and that I could have said it better. In my writings about the Event, did I commit a sin by saying
too much, while fully knowing that no person who did not experience the proximity of death there can ever understand what we, the survivors, were subjected to from morning till night, under a silent sky?

I have written some fifty works—most dealing with topics far removed from the one I continue to consider essential: the victims’ memory. I believe that I have done all I could to prevent it from being cheapened or altogether stifled, but was it enough? And if I often published works—articles, novels—on other themes, I did so in order not to remain its prisoner. My battle against the trivialization and banalization of Auschwitz in film and on television resulted in my gaining not a few enemies. To my thinking, it was my duty to show that the sum of all the suffering and deaths is an integral part of the texts we revere.

In my imagination, I turn the pages.

The Bible and the prophets, the Talmud and Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, mysticism and ethics: All that I received from my masters, present and gone,
I attempted to transmit. Involuntarily, unwittingly, my experience of what some among us so poorly call the Shoah, or Holocaust, slipped in, here and there, between the lines, into the silences that surround a text. Just as I inevitably situate my novels in the shadow of invisible flames. But have I been prudent enough?

My very first works of fiction are set not during the Event, but after. Why?

In
Dawn
—about the clandestine struggle of the Jews against the British army in Palestine—a survivor of the death camps is ordered to execute a British officer.

In
Day
, a young journalist is run over by a taxi in New York. Accident or attempted suicide?

The Town Beyond the Wall
? A book on man’s fascination with madness.

The Gates of the Forest
? An homage to friendship, and the story of a young orphan who pretends to be deaf and mute and who is given the part of Judas in a Passion Play at school.

I often think of these entirely fictional
works, losing myself in an elusive elsewhere, searching for my inner compass.

The Jews of Silence
, set in Communist Russia, derives from another source. That work makes me proud, for it helped brave men and women free themselves of dictatorship and join their brothers and sisters in the land of our ancestors.

The same is true of my novel
The Forgotten
, which deals with Alzheimer’s disease and the fear of forgetting. I compare the patient to a book whose pages are torn out day after day, one by one, until all that remains is the cover. I wonder whether this disease could strike an entire community. Or an entire era. In Jewish religious texts, there is great emphasis on the fact that the Lord forgets nothing. Is that because the possibility of divine neglect is not excluded from our subconscious? And so it is with our devotion to the Holy City. King David, in his Psalms, sings: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem …” I am his distant disciple, and I say it in my own way.

A Beggar in Jerusalem
—I shall bring the
title character along when I appear before the celestial Tribunal as a witness for my defense. I had met him in front of the Wall during the Six-Day War. There I stood, hands outstretched, my soul on fire, writing with my lips. I found him handsome, this beggar who sought to explain to me the miraculous aspect of the Jewish army’s great victory over its enemies. You see, he said, our army included another six million souls.… That evening, alone in my hotel room, I wrote down all I had heard and felt it with renewed fervor.

The Testament
represents my attempt to unmask communism—in particular, the liquidation of the great Jewish novelists and poets during the Stalin era. Begun as a messianism without God, invented as a marvelous message of comradeship, a noble concept of brotherly humanism, communism was transformed by Stalin into a gigantic laboratory for deception, torture and murder.

What to say about “Ani Maamin”? “I believe in the coming of the Messiah,” declared Maimonides, and we repeat it with him. “Even though he may be late—and he
shall be so indefinitely—I shall go on waiting for him every day.” It is a song of deep and gracious beauty. It speaks of a secret hope without which life would become but a handful of dust. It is a song I learned at the Rabbi of Wizsnitz’s court, to which my mother and I had journeyed to celebrate the Shabbat Shira, the morning service during which we read of the miraculous Red Sea crossing.

On that day, we had met the Rabbi’s nephew, who had escaped, no one knew how, from a ghetto in Poland. At that time, Hungarian Jews had no inkling of the tragedy that was about to befall their communities. Auschwitz and Treblinka were unknown names to us.

This nephew, what is he doing in my hospital room? Why do I see him now just as I did long ago at his uncle’s? On that day, this small, skinny, melancholic young man, who seemed locked in his solitude, never stopped moving his lips as he prayed in silence. What made me think of that afternoon, between the service of Minha and the Third Mystical Meal, when
the students surrounding him asked him to tell us what happened to him? He had refused to answer. We insisted. But he remained huddled in a corner, a shadow among so many shadows, and remained silent. Until, in the end, he shook himself and gave in: “Fine,” he said very softly, “I shall tell you.” And he began to sing “Ani Maamin,” the most beautiful, most moving
nigun
I had ever heard. He added nothing: For him, the song said it all.

Shall I be able to sing up above? Shall I too be able to intone this
nigun
that contains all that I have tried to express in my writings?

THE YEAR 2011
will forever remain for me a year of malediction.

In mid-January, Marion and I were in Florida. For several years I have been co-teaching a class in philosophy, history and literature with a local colleague at a small, prestigious college.

Ten days after I arrived in Florida, I became ill. The doctors diagnosed double pneumonia and ordered what we thought would be a week of hospitalization. After I’d been at the hospital for a few days, my condition worsened. I asked Marion to do everything, anything, to convince the doctors to allow me to leave. She argued that she was afraid I would become seriously depressed and begged them to find a way to care for me at our hotel.

At first the doctors would not hear of it.
They said that neither of us had any idea of the gravity of my condition. “Pneumonia, and what’s more, double pneumonia, requires constant supervision. The patient requires medications that need to be administered intravenously. Impossible outside the hospital.”

In the end, Marion proposed turning our hotel room into a veritable hospital room, complete with round-the-clock nurses. Even I was surprised when the doctors accepted.

But I was growing weaker and weaker. Ridiculously, all I was concerned about was that, for the first time in my professional life, I had to interrupt my courses, and my students were taken over by my colleague. I felt unhappy and guilty, for teaching and writing remain my true passions. When I miss a class, I am probably more disappointed than anyone else.

Only later did I learn that during those days and nights, my life had been in danger. In truth, I had not given it any thought. In spite of the difficulty I had breathing because my lungs were filled with fluid, I was still able to read, reflect, dream.

After a few months back in New York, I resumed my “normal” existence. If someone had suggested to me that the real ordeal still lay ahead, hidden in my chest, I probably would have called him a nasty prophet.

YES, I
have written much, and yet, at this stage of my life, at the very threshold of the great portal, I feel that I have not even begun.

Too late?

Similarly, I question my many other activities. For example, in my combat against hatred, which I wished to be unrelenting, did I in fact invest enough time, enough energy, in denouncing fanaticism in its various guises? Evidently not, since all of us who have fought the battle must now admit defeat.

At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there
any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia …?

I have initiated many actions, in countless locations, with many companions. And fought so many battles. Was it all in vain?

What shall I say to God? That I was also counting on His help? Shall I have the nerve to reproach Him for His incomprehensible silence while Satan was winning his victories? While my father, Shlomo son of Eliezer and Nissel, lay dying on his cot?

Suddenly, here is my father; he too is in my room.

I see three images in one: my father in Buchenwald, my father in the present and one image from my visit to the camp two years ago. There are other people around us, mostly unknown except for one: President Barack Obama, who had invited me to accompany him to Buchenwald. Had he been told that there were in fact two camps, known as
large and small? In any case, we visited the small one, the more lethal one. When I left New York to meet him and his entourage on their official visit in Germany, I didn’t think I would have to make any formal remarks. Marion thought that I would, and I was convinced that, for once, she was wrong, since my name did not appear on the program. She was right. As he was about to begin his speech, the president leaned toward me and whispered, “In this place, it is you who must have the last word.” I improvised, speaking about a son’s duty to visit his father’s grave to meditate. I remember saying that my father has no grave, that his grave is in the largest cemetery in history, the one that is in heaven. That he died not far from here, in this camp, and that I was there too, close to him and yet so far. When he called me, I had neither the strength nor the courage to go to him. It was the first time I had disobeyed him, and I confessed that I was paralyzed by fear.

And now, on my hospital bed, it is my turn to call him.

And of course my father responds.

IN TRUTH
, my father never leaves me. Nor do my mother and little sister. They have stayed with me, appearing in every one of my tales, in every one of my dreams. In everything I teach.