The Story of a Life (20 page)

In the heart of the Sinai Desert, we spoke of the relationship between Jewish tribalism and Jewish universalism, and whether it was possible to bridge the two. The soldiers, most of them in their twenties, were already equipped with professions and trades and a secular worldview, but they were
aware that the roots of our culture are in the world of faith. Without noticing it, we moved from the general to the personal, speaking in groups of two or three. Among the soldiers I found one whose father had been in the camp with me.

The three days that I spent with that unit not only brought me close to the young soldiers, but also gave me a deeper insight into my own life. As in every war, there hovered above us a sense of fate hanging in the balance. Who knew what awaited us?

The voices of the soldiers became more lighthearted and jovial toward the end of my stay. The cease-fire appeared to be holding. I found it hard to part from this unit of young people on whose shoulders rested the fate of a people welcome neither in Europe nor in this part of the world. As different as the struggle was here, it was, nevertheless, the same ancient curse pursuing us.

I KNEW MORDECHAI many years ago, when I was in my thirties and a teacher at an evening high school. He had a small grocery store opposite the school. During the afternoon he would close it and prepare sandwiches and coffee, and we would sit by the window and play chess. Chess was his great passion, and it brought out interesting aspects of his personality: logical thinking that was without deviousness. When he lost, a soft glow of embarrassment would spread across his face.

He was my age, but since he was completely bald, worked in a grocery store, and had married early, he already looked forty. Yet the moment he closed the shutters and set out the chessboard on the bench, his appearance would change and a youthful eagerness would sparkle in his eyes.

The game would usually go on for an hour and a half, sometimes two. This shadowy time beside the drawn shutters was intoxicating, making us forget everything, and yet I would notice some movements in him that could not be seen
when Mordechai was behind the counter. In particular, there was his way of lowering his head as if he had once known how to pray. Sometimes he would close his eyes, summoning his thoughts. His fingers were long and slender and did not suit his line of work, and for this reason they were frequently injured or bandaged. When the game was at its height, his eyes had a wonderful sharpness. As with many naturally gifted chess players, he was not an open man and spoke little; his expression was alert.

Only after I’d known him for a year did he reveal to me that in his childhood, from age five to age nine, he had lived in a monastery—a very strict one where there were compulsory prayers even at night. His parents had handed him over to the monks and promised that they would soon return to collect him. He waited for them for a few days, and when they did not come, he cried uncontrollably. The monks warned him not to cry, but when their admonishments were ignored, they shut him up in an attic. Mordechai cried until he was completely exhausted. When he finally stopped crying, the monks opened the attic door and served him a cup of warm milk. Since then, he said, he has never cried again.

Mordechai was a man of few words; anything he said appeared to cost him dearly. Had I been more considerate, I would have sat and played chess and asked him nothing. One could see that those years still lurked within his body.

Who were his parents? Up until a few years earlier, he was still waiting for them. He had believed that they were alive in Uzbekistan. This false hope was planted in him by a survivor who swore to Mordechai that he had seen them in one of the communes there. It turned out to be untrue, but he was not embittered. A tranquil air surrounded his movements. He would say only the bare minimum, unhurriedly and to the point.

He told me once that one time, at a moment when great panic had seized him, one of the monks—Father George—told him that there was nothing to fear. Fear was imaginary; it is imagination that creates demons. Only our Father in heaven should be feared. The more one clings to him, the less the fear.

Did it help? I almost asked. I tried to avoid asking. I sensed that a question would hurt him.

Once he told me distractedly, “Life’s only a parable.”

“A parable for what?”

“For our illusory existence.”

“So where isn’t life illusory?”

“With God,” he said, and smiled.

He, of course, observed neither Christian ritual nor our
mitzvot
, and yet his entire being was suffused with a religious devotion acquired in the monastery. Sometimes it seemed to me that he was waiting for the time when he would be allowed to pray once again. It was the monks who had taught him how to play chess. He played with a quiet, focused concentration that intensified as the game progressed. It was obvious that his years in the monastery endowed him with qualities that I lacked.

At half past three, the alarm clock would bring us back to the reality of Mordechai’s store. He would unlock the front door and open the shutters, and the first customers would immediately appear. I would remain seated, watching his movements. Standing behind the cash register, he would keep his remarks to an absolute minimum—numbers and more numbers.

Once he told me that after the morning prayers he would work with the monks in the garden. He loved that work.

“And while you were working you didn’t talk?” My tongue wouldn’t keep still.

“At the monastery there was no talking.”

“And if you wanted to speak?”

“You closed your eyes and said, ‘Lord Jesus, save me from sinful thoughts and hide me in the shadow of your wings.’”

Sometimes it seemed to me that his real life was buried in the monastery, and what came afterward was nothing but a form of retreating inside himself. This hiding did not bury his previous life. It in fact preserved it; when he spoke of his childhood, he did not use the past tense. In this way, and not only in this way, we were similar. I, too, have the feeling that one day I will be able to pray. Mordechai’s religious sensibility had a solid basis. When he said “prayer” or “fast,” he spoke from experience.

He also told me about a stream that flowed alongside the monastery. In the summer, he would go down to it and swim. Everything he related to me or implied had a similar tangible and earthly basis, even when he spoke of spiritual matters.

In 1972, Mordechai left Jerusalem and settled on a farm. I don’t know why he left the city. Sometimes I feel that some of his mannerisms have become a part of me, such as when I use words that he used to use. Mordechai never completed high school, nor did he study at the university, but his education at the monastery was absorbed into his soul. His life there put him on the path of self-abnegation, and even now this was his rule: less and less speech. It was as if he felt that original sin is rooted in speech.

I RECENTLY RAN into the son of a friend whom I’ll call T., with whom I had wandered through Europe toward the end of the war and right after it. We came to Israel together, and we spent some time together in the youth movement. His son so closely resembles him that for a moment I was sure it was T. who was standing before me.

A twenty-seven-year-old electrical engineer, T.’s son had just spent two years in the United States completing his studies. I invited him for a cup of coffee. He’s a tall young man, refined and polite. As a youth, he excelled at his studies, and he is now busy doing research. I hadn’t seen him since he was in high school, so I was very glad to have run into him.

Fate linked his father to me. The time we were together during our childhood was spent in almost complete silence. We were afraid to speak in our mother tongue, and it felt strange to talk in another language. So for the most part we were silent, or we communicated with gestures. In any event, even though we didn’t talk much we were very close friends,
and when we talked a bit between one silence and the next, T. told me a lot about his family.

The years of war and the years spent wandering through Europe afterward were years when we children were surrounded by darkness. Life battered us from all sides. We learned to keep our heads down, and if we found shelter we would crawl toward it. We were like animals, though without their daring and aggressiveness. After every beating we would flee. We did not even know how to cry out.

After two years of wandering, we reached the coast of Italy. The sun and the water welcomed us; they were our first friends. On that vast and empty shore the winter within us began to thaw. My friend T. was so excited that he refused to get out of the water, even at night. It was in the warm sea water that we felt the first sensations of freedom, and that the first words burst out of us. And it was there that I saw a Jewish merchant who, with a single gesture of his thin, pale hand, managed to express the essence of the war: What is there to say?

For three months we lived on that beach. We saw and heard a lot, but it was as if our souls were closed. Only with time, and deep in our dreams, did the memories of the things we had seen begin to return in a slightly clearer form. My friend T. and I kept busy fishing. We made nets from rags. And, wonder of wonders, every day we managed to catch a few fish. At night we would light a bonfire and roast them. The night, the water, and the fire flowed through us like a thick, dark stream, and we covered ourselves with it. At the time we didn’t know that what we were experiencing was a form of rebirth.

When we arrived in Israel, my friend T. distanced himself from me and seemed to withdraw into himself. When I tried to approach him, he would brush me off. He was struggling
with himself and with the demons within him. “Leave me alone,” his face seemed to say. “I need to be alone with myself.”

Eventually T. left the youth movement and went to work in a shoe store in Tel Aviv. I saw him a few times, but we didn’t speak much. It was hard to know if he was happy in his new position, but I did notice some telling signs in his face—a slightly clenched jaw and a kind of pent-up anger.

After our army service the links between us faded even more. Each of us was battling his own demons, and our meetings became more infrequent. T. came from a family of converted Jews. His grandfather had cut himself off from his roots, repudiated his father, and adopted another culture. He went off to study medicine. But during the war no distinction was made between Jews and those who had converted. Converts, too, were imprisoned in the ghetto and sent to the camps. When I met T. during the war he was also eleven years old and, like me, without parents. Like me, he had spent the summers wandering in the forests and sought shelter in winter with any peasant who needed an extra pair of hands. When he told me his name I was astonished; his family had created quite a stir in our town.

My friend did extremely well in business. I was not surprised. Most of us who came to Israel as children after the war met with material success. I am continually astonished by the extent of our accomplishments. There are industrialists, lawmakers, army officers, and scientists among us—most at the top of their professions. Few people would guess that the director of that large factory is a man who was a child survivor, because he is unlikely to speak about it, and in fact tends to hide it. T. is the owner of a shoe factory. They say that his exports have taken off in recent years. He has a house in Herzliyya and an apartment in Jerusalem. I have been a distant
observer of his remarkable ascent. During the initial years of his success we hardly saw each other. T. was completely preoccupied by his factory, and nothing else interested him. But in recent years we have begun to talk more about the past—not in a deliberate way, but along with other, more mundane concerns. At one of these meetings T. revealed that he had considered studying at the university and had even registered for a night school that prepares one for the matriculation exams. But it was just at this point that his business started to take off, so he canceled his plans. There is, however, a large library in his home. He is interested in philosophy, literature, the arts, and medicine, and he frequently surprises me with his knowledge. He competes with me, I suppose, and perhaps also with his father and his grandfather, as if to prove that it’s possible to be knowledgeable as well as rich.

T.’s son is an engaging young fellow, more like a European Jew than a native-born Israeli. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and he expresses himself with precision.

I told him—I really don’t know why—about the forests in which I had spent time with his father. I assumed that his father had mentioned something to him about that period. It turned out that I was mistaken. His father had not told him anything at all. He knew absolutely nothing about the land of our birth, about the place to which we had been exiled, or about what had happened to us there. I was astonished.

“Didn’t you ask?” I inquired, rather foolishly.

“I asked, but Father didn’t really want to answer.”

“Were you told about your grandfather?”

“A little,” he said, blushing.

His father had indeed told him very little. This fine young man knew nothing about the mountainous homeland where his father and his father’s father had been raised, and where generations before them had flourished. One would
have hoped that a remnant of his ancestors dwelt in the soul of this son, but he had no way of knowing it. And there was little chance that his father would now sit down and tell him. Were they to have this conversation now, it would have been strained and out of context. What had not been related at the proper time would not ring true at some other time.

My generation told their children very little about their birthplaces and about what had happened to them during the war. Their life stories had been buried deep inside them before the scars had a chance to heal. They didn’t know how to open the gate so as to allow some light into the darkness of their lives; instead, a wall was slowly being put up between them and their children. It is true that in recent years members of my generation have tried to breach this wall of their own making, but their efforts are relatively weak and the barrier is solid; it’s doubtful that it can ever be dismantled.