Looking back on my life I see that all my qualities, good and bad, were with me then. Even my ideas about literature. I had often heard my mother and Joshua say that many misfortunes in the world resulted from human boredom. So painful is boredom that people would risk their lives to escape it. Nations tire from long epochs of peacefulness and try to create a crisis, a conflict, in order to start a war. Some men get tired of their family life and indulge in quarrels that lead to divorce. Youngsters from wealthy homes leave their parents and seek out adventures that do them harm. In my father’s courtroom I constantly heard tales of human ferocity and madness. Some men ran off to America with other women, leaving their families without bread. I heard of girls who began to live a life of shame (I didn’t know exactly what that was) because their days and nights seemed so dreary to them. When I began to read I saw that the good writers always had some surprises and twists which the reader could not have foreseen. My brother had said that Talmudic casuistry was developed among Polish Jews as a means to make the Torah more playful, to sharpen the students’ minds, to bring the joy into learning, and to increase the scholar’s competition. The cabalah from Isaac Luria, the belief in false messiahs like Sabbatai Zvi and Jacob Frank as well as Chassidism were all created to enliven Jewishness, which became stagnant under the rigid rules of the rabbis and the rigor of the law. I heard my brother say that the Baal Shem, who was born at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was afraid that the Enlightenment might seduce the Polish Jews. Chassidism preached that the way to serve God was through joy. Melancholy and boredom separated men from God.
At the time I began to fantasize about becoming a writer I had already realized that the masters always entertained the reader. Also, I could see that nothing engages the reader as much as a love story. I had read in the Gemara that for men and women to find their right mates is as much a miracle as the splitting of the Red Sea. A good marriage does not always happen and is different with each union. The various encounters of love could never be exhausted. Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love. My father’s courtroom was like a school to me where I could study the human soul, its caprices, its yearnings, its barriers. I was amazed to hear the strong complaints of the couples who asked for a divorce or to end an engagement or who just came to open their hearts to my father and my mother. Men and women craved happiness together, but instead they indulged in silly quarrels, spiteful accusations, various lies, and acts of treachery. Each wanted to be stronger than the other and often to belittle and denigrate the weaker. Sometimes I got a desire to give them advice myself, especially when the couples were young and good looking. I often fell in love with the young woman and her way of speaking about her troubles. Once an unusually elegant couple came to my father to end an engagement. The young man accused the young woman of becoming too familiar with his friends, and she said that he behaved the same way with her girl friends. Suddenly the young man slapped the girl. She tried to slap him back and they wrangled for a while like two youngsters. Later, after my parents made peace between them and they left, he took her arm and they both kissed. I remember thinking to myself, “This is what literature must be about.” I heard my mother say, “So beautiful and so crazy. It would be a sin for them to part.”
I remember one case where an elderly man accused his wife—she was his second—of oversalting his dishes. Doctors had forbidden him to eat too much salt, pepper, and other sharp spices. But no matter how much he pleaded with her to use less salt and pepper, she always put in a lot. My father asked the woman why she didn’t do what her husband asked of her. He quoted the Gemara that “a kosher wife fulfills the demands of her husband.” The woman said that she could not cook without salt and spices because then the food had no taste. My mother said, “You can always put salt in later. Salt has the same flavor whether you put it into the pot or into the plate.” But the woman said that was not so. I could see in that woman’s eyes the stubbornness of a peasant who has taken something into her head and can never free herself of it. She told my mother that, God willing, she would find a man who would not look into the pots. Her smile had evil intentions. Perhaps she wanted her husband to get sick and die.
My father was never in a rush to let people get divorced—he always told them to come back next month or even half a year later. He talked it over with my mother after they left, and I heard my mother say, “Human stupidity has no limit.” To which my father answered, “It is all the Evil One. His mission is to tempt people.”
I could see that every human being acted and spoke differently and found different excuses for his or her follies. For example: The Jews in the Radzymin study house all worshipped the same wonder rabbi, told of his miracles, quoted his sermons. But everyone did it in his own fashion. Some faces expressed blind faith and God-fearing fervor. In other faces I could see not more than the desire to belong to this particular group of Chassidim, to be one of the crowd. Some of these Chassidim were always berating their rabbi’s adversaries, trying to prove how ignorant and vicious they were. Some of the Chassidim were known to be men of their word, honest merchants, or artisans. Others were known to break their word or to swindle whenever they got a chance. My father and mother were both honest and charitable, but still what a difference between the two of them! My mother’s eyes were sharp and I could see in them impatience with the ways of the world, with men and women—a resentment toward life and all its tribulations. She always had to search for comfort in her morality books. I once heard her say, “I hate the human species.” I knew that no one could fool her. She saw through a person, behind all his or her masks. She could be sarcastic and biting. My father was the opposite; good-natured, full of faith in almost all people. He never seemed to have any doubts. His only desire was to have time and strength to serve God and to study His Torah. I had inherited some traits from my father and many from my mother. I can say that she suffered not only her own afflictions but also those of all mankind. I could see in her eyes great compassion when she read in the Yiddish newspaper about those who were run over, robbed, raped, beaten. Every news item made her wince in resentment against the Creator who could see all this misery and remain silent. Once I heard her say, “Newspapers are pure poison.”
Just the same she read the newspapers daily and even stealthily leafed through my brother’s books. I heard her express opinions. She would say, “People don’t speak that way.” Or, “This is wooden talk. This writer really does not know how people behave.” Once I heard her say about the Yiddish writer David Berglson that he tried to imitate Knut Hamsun. I had not read either of them, but I saw my brother’s eyes light up and he exclaimed, “Mother, you understand literature better than all our critics!”
My mother was, even at that time, an ardent feminist, or a suffragist as they called them then. Whenever she read about the cruelties in war, she would say that only women could end these murderous events. Her recipe was that all women should unite and decide not to live with their husbands until they had resolved to make peace once and forever. My mother elaborated on this idea many times, and my brother answered her, “Neither men nor women will ever unite. Nature always accomplishes what it had intended, that all life must fight for its existence.” My mother’s narrow face became pale, and she said, “In that case, there will never be peace in this world.”
I dedicate this book to her and my father’s sacred memory.
A LITTLE BOY IN SEARCH OF GOD
* * *
One
Those who have read my works, particularly my autobiographical volume, In My Father’s Court, know that I was born and reared in a house where religion, Jewishness, was virtually the air that we breathed. I stem from generations of rabbis, Chassidim, and cabalists. I can frankly say that in our house Jewishness wasn’t some diluted formal religion but one that contained all the flavors, all the vitamins, the entire mysticism of faith. Because the Jews had lived for two thousand years in exile, been driv
en from land to land and from ghetto to ghetto, their religion hadn’t evaporated. The Jews underwent a selection which has no parallel in any of the other faiths. Those Jews lacking strong enough religious convictions or feelings fell to the wayside and assimilated with the Gentiles. The only ones left were those who took their religion seriously and gave their children a full religious upbringing. The Diaspora Jew clung to only one hope—that the Messiah would come. Messiah’s coming was not some worldly redemption, a recovery of lost territory, but a spiritual deliverance that would change the whole world, root out all evil, and bring the Kingdom of Heaven to earth.
In our house the coming of the Messiah was taken most literally. My younger brother, Moishe, and I often spoke about it. First, the sound of the ram’s horn would be heard. It would be blown by the Prophet Elijah, and its sound would be heard round the world proclaiming the news: “Redemption came to the World! Salvation came to the World!” All the malefactors and enemies of Israel would perish leaving only the good Gentiles whose privilege it would now become to serve the Jews. According to the Talmud, the Land of Israel would extend over all the nations. A fiery Temple would descend unto Jerusalem from heaven. The Kohanim, or priestly class (we were Kohanim), would offer sacrifices—possibly fiery sacrifices—because already then the slaughter of oxen, sheep, and turtledoves seemed to me not conducive to redemption. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their tribes; Moses, King David, all the prophets, sages, geonim, and saints, would be resurrected along with the rest of the Jewish dead. My father had published a book in which there was a family tree tracing our descent from Shabatai Cohen, from Rabbi Moshe Isserlis, from Rashi, until King David. My brother Moishe and I would enter the palace where King David sat with crown on head on a golden throne and call him “Grandpa! …”
How poor seemed the Gentiles with their kings, princes, soldiers, and wars in comparison with what awaited us! But in order to achieve all this, we had to be pious Jews, study the Torah, do good deeds, pray with fervor, and obey our parents ….
All this would have been good and fine except that at an early age I already started asking myself: “Is it true?”
The only proof my parents could offer me was the holy books, which said that it would be so. But books were only paper and ink and written by people. I knew already that the Gentiles had books, too, in which it was written that the Jews were a sinful race and that on Judgement Day they would be condemned to eternal damnation for having failed to accept Jesus. I also knew of heretical books which denied both Moses and Jesus. My brother Joshua, who was eleven years older than I (two girls in between had died of scarlet fever), often discussed this with my mother. These modern books claimed that the world was millions of years old, hundreds of millions. The people stemmed not from Adam, but from apes. God hadn’t created the world in six days; the earth had torn away from the sun, and after taking millions of years to cool, it developed living creatures. Traces of ancient creatures were found in stones and in amber. Bones and horns were found of animals that had lived forty and fifty million years ago. Moses hadn’t parted the Red Sea, Joshua hadn’t stopped the sun in Gibeon, and the Messiah would never come. My brother spoke not of God’s wonders, but of the wonders of nature. How mighty and magnificent nature was! There were stars whose light reached our eyes after millions of years. Everything that existed—people, dogs, pigs, bedbugs, the sea, the rivers, the mountains, the moon—was part of this nature. But for all its greatness, nature was blind. It couldn’t differentiate between good and evil. During an earthquake, saints perished along with sinners. The floods inundated synagogues and churches, the mansions of the rich and the shacks of the poor. The pious and the heretics both died during the epidemics. This nature had never begun and could never end. It followed its own laws. It was sand, rocks, electricity, light, fire, water. Our brains were part of this nature, too. Our heads thought, but nature did not. Our eyes saw and our ears heard, but nature was blind and deaf. It was no smarter than the cobblestone in the street or the refuse in the large garbage bin in our courtyard.
I recall a Sabbath in summer following the holiday meal. Mother and Father took a nap as was the custom on Sabbath day; my younger brother, Moishe, had gone down to play in the courtyard; my older brother, Joshua, had gone off somewhere to “those streets” where there were libraries with heretical books, museums, and theaters, and where students carried on affairs with rich, pretty, and educated girls. Who knows what sins my brother committed there? Maybe he rode the streetcar despite the Sabbath, handled money, or kissed a girl. According to the holy books I had studied, he would roast in hell or be reincarnated as an animal, a beetle, or maybe even as the sails of a windmill. Joshua was already writing stories that he called literature and painting portraits.
I went out onto our balcony—a boy with a pale face, blue eyes, and red earlocks—and I tried to think about the world. I pondered and at the same time observed what went on in the street below. The passers-by were as divided in their beliefs and attitudes as were the children in our house. Here, a bearded Jew with earlocks walked by in a fur-lined hat and satin gabardine—probably one of the Chassidim late after services—and soon a dandy came by in modern clothes, yellow shoes, a straw hat, clean-shaven and with a cigarette between his lips. He smoked openly on the Sabbath demonstrating his lack of faith in the Torah. Now came a pious young matron with a bonnet on her shaven head, to be closely followed by a girl with rouged cheeks, a kind of blue eye shadow, and a short-sleeved blouse that revealed her bare arms. She stopped to talk to the street loafers and even exchanged kisses with them. She carried a purse, even though this was forbidden on the Sabbath. A few years before, such boys and girls had tried to launch a revolution and overthrow the Tsar. They threw bombs and shot a grocer on Krochmalna Street for allegedly being a bourgeois. Some of the rebels had been hanged; others were in prison or exiled to Siberia. This crowd laughed at my father and his piety. They predicted that after the revolution there would be no more synagogues or study houses, and they called the Chassidim fanatics. Other young men and women on our street felt that the Jews shouldn’t wait for the Messiah but should themselves build up the Land of Israel, which they called Palestine. They argued that all peoples had their countries and that Jews being a people, too, needed a land of their own. The Messiah would never come on his donkey. Their leader, Dr. Herzl, had died the year I was born. There were also thieves on our street, gangsters, pimps, whores, fences who bought stolen goods. The fact was that not all Chassidim were such honest people themselves. Some of them were known to be swindlers. They went bankrupt every few months and settled for a half or for a third with the manufacturers.
“What does all this mean?” I asked myself. “Wherein lies the truth? It must be somewhere, after all!”
At first glance, my brother Joshua seemed to be right. Nature demonstrated no religion. It didn’t speak or preach. It apparently didn’t concern nature that the slaughterers in Yanash’s Market daily killed hundreds or thousands of fowl. Nor did it bother nature that the Russians made pogroms on Jews or that the Turks and Bulgarians massacred each other and carried little children on the tips of their bayonets. Well, but how had nature become that which it was? Where did it get the power to watch over the farthest stars and over the worms in the gutter? What were those eternal laws by which it acted? What was light? What was electricity? What went on deep inside the earth? Why was the sun so hot and so bright? And what was that inside my head that had to be constantly thinking? At times Mother brought brains home from the market—brains were cheaper than beef. Mother cooked these brains and I ate them. Could my brains be cooked and eaten, too? Yes, of course, but so long as they weren’t cooked, they kept on thinking and wanting to know the truth.
Two
There were a number of holy books in my father’s bookcase in which I sought the answers to my questions. One was the Book of the Covenant, which I believe was already at that time a hundred years old and full of scientific facts. It described the theories
of Copernicus and Newton and, it seems, the experiments of Benjamin Franklin as well. There were accounts of savage tribes, strange animals, and explanations of what made a train run and a balloon fly. In the special section dealing with religion were mentioned a number of philosophers. I recall that Kant already figured in there, too. The author, Reb Elijah of Vilna, a pious Jew, proved how inadequate the philosophers were at explaining the mystery of the world. No research or inquiry, wrote he, could reveal the truth. The author of the Book of the Covenant spoke of nature, too, but with the constant reminder that nature was something that God had created, not a thing that existed of its own power. I never tired of reading this book. Things had already evolved in my time of which the author of the Book of the Covenant could not know. In the delicatessen near our house there was a telephone. From time to time, a car drove down our street. My brother said that rays had been discovered that could photo-graph the heart and the lungs and that an instrument existed that revealed the stuff of which stars were made. The Yiddish newspaper read in our house often printed articles about Edison, the inventor of the phonograph. Each such account was for me like a treasure find. Because of my deep curiosity about science, I should have grown up a scientist, but I wasn’t satisfied with mere facts—I wanted to solve the mystery of being. I sought answers to questions which tormented me then and still do to the present day.
Love and Exile Page 3