And Todros explained it to me this way—millions of dreams that made no sense or that predicted things that didn’t happen were ignored. Among all those dreams it happened sometimes that one became true, and that was the one that was noticed. Many miracles could be explained this way.
Several years went by. Poland had become independent again. My brother Joshua had come back from Russia with a wife and a child. I was straining to go back to Warsaw. I was writing then, too, but neither my brother nor I was pleased with the results. My father had accepted a rabbinate in a small town in Galicia. I had gone to Warsaw a few times with the hope of getting some job there, but I came back each time after a few weeks to Bilgorai. My brother had already written some of his best short stories by then, but he had no job either, and he lived in an alcove at his in-laws. Neither of us was good at any other kind of work, but to draw a living from Yiddish literature at that time was impossible. Literary Warsaw was dominated by the communists. A great number of the young writers and readers believed that communism would once and for all put an end to the Jewish problem. In a communist order there would be no Jews or Gentiles, only a single united humanity. Religion and superstition would become a thing of the past. Neither my brother nor even less I fitted into this kind of ideology. I often spoke with great rage against God, but I had never ceased to believe in His existence. I wrote about spirits, demons, cabalists, dybbuks. Many Yiddish writers and readers had cut loose from their Jewish roots and from the juices upon which they had been nourished. They yearned once and for all to tear away from the ghetto and its culture—some as Zionists, others as radicals. Both factions preached worldliness. But I remained spiritually rooted deep in the Middle Ages (or so I was told). I evoked in my work memories and emotions that the worldly reader sought to forget and factually had forgotten. To the pious Jews, on the other hand, I was a heretic and blasphemer. I saw to my astonishment that I belonged neither to my own people nor to any other peoples. Instead of fighting in my writings the political leaders of a decadent Europe and helping to build a new world, I waged a private war against the Almighty. From my viewpoint, the literature produced at that time in Soviet Russia, in Warsaw, and wherever the radicals held sway was fashioned to suit party resolutions rather than to express artistic truths. In the name of alleged progress, writers turned into liars and destroyed the little bit of talent God had bestowed upon them.
I lived on what I made by giving private lessons in Bilgorai. Actually, I suffered extreme privation during those years, but I didn’t take this to heart. I stopped reading the new literature and to the best of my ability read all the popular science books I could obtain as well as the magazines that described in everyday language what went on in the world of science. I speak here of the so-called exact sciences. I was less interested in works of psychology. Neither Freud, Adler, nor Jung seemed to touch on any truths that were previously unknown. The astronomers had rejected the cosmology of Kant and Laplace, but as far as I could determine, they hadn’t come up with a better theory. Each time I read an article about the origin of the universe, I found that the author sooner or later came to the concept of a cosmic explosion that had erupted billions of years ago and made the universe flee from us with great rapidity. With each article I read, the universe grew larger, older, loaded with rays or particles that vibrated with fantastic frequency. Matter and energy had become one and the same. Those who studied the atom soon began to realize that the protons and electrons were insufficient to maintain the atom in balance. Long before neutrons were discovered, conjectures were made that the atom was more complicated than it had been assumed. Discoveries were made in chemistry and biology, too, but the mystery of the world and my own puzzlement grew no smaller. I myself was a collection of innumerable miracles—my skeleton, my flesh, my brain, my nerves. When I light a match, its light rays radiate at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometers a second. When I unwittingly step on a worm, I destroy a divine masterpiece. I myself was such a worm that could be squashed at any moment. I wanted to hope, but I had nothing to hope for. I wanted to resign, but I couldn’t do that either. I read Tolstoi’s sermons about Christian love and the nobility of the Russian peasant, but I knew that Tolstoi had never managed to acquire this Christian love himself and that the Russian muzhik wasn’t so noble and honest as Tolstoi pictured him. His proposals that the land be divided among the peasants had come to naught. Millions of Russians starved to death; others had been sent to Siberia, rotted in prisons, or been stood against the wall by the GPU. I read the literary idols of the day—Romain Rolland, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Mann. What I was searching for I could not find in their work.
Eight
In 1923 my brother Joshua became coeditor of the literary journal Literary Pages, and the mail brought me the news that I was given the post of proofreader. I had spent nine months in the half-bog, half-village where my father was rabbi. I had gone there because I had gotten sick in Bilgorai. In this village there were no worldly books, and all I had with me were some old algebra textbooks and a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. I came to this village so broken in spirit that I was ready to give in to my parents, let them arrange a match for me (my love for Todros’ daughter involved so many complications that I had to abandon all hopes), and become a storekeeper, a teacher, or whatever fate held in store for me. I stopped shaving my beard and let my earlocks grow. The inhabitants of the village were semi- or total peasants. Many Jews owned land in Galicia. I had no other company but my parents and my brother Moishe, who had become exceedingly pious during the time I had been away from home. The Jews there were all Chassidic, followers of the rabbi of Belz, but my brother had discovered that great Jewish mystic Rabbi Nachman Braclawer, and he became what was then called a Dead Hasid, which is to say, the disciple of a rabbi who no longer lived. I had heard of Rabbi Nachman Braclawer while we were still living in Warsaw. I had read his wondrous tales years before I had glanced into his other works. My brother Moishe had obtained all of Rabbi Nachman’s works, and since I had so much time on my hands, I began to read them. Rabbi Nachman was one of those blessed thinkers and poets whom—no matter how often you read or reread them—you always come away from with something new. As I’ve already mentioned, Rabbi Nachman didn’t write these stories himself. He offered words of wisdom and told stories, and his pupil, Nathan the Nemirover, wrote them down. No one will ever know how much was lost in this process of transcription, but that which has remained is both great and deep. The famous Martin Buber discovered Rabbi Nachman Braclawer in his own fashion and translated his tales into German. Spirits such as Rabbi Nachman Braclawer cannot be forgotten. In each generation they are discovered anew.
Outside of his stories and maybe his prayers, Rabbi Nachman cannot be translated. His wisdom is closely bound up with passages in the Torah, in the Talmud. He ascribed to the Torah and the Gemara things that their writers never dreamed of. He often warped the meaning of their words, but what he had to say was always grand, fantastic, and full of psychological insight. I can firmly state that although Rabbi Nachman was a true saint, his spirit shouted a protest against the cruelties of life. To the best of his ability, he tried to justify the Almighty and to show that only good and mercy issued from Him, and that we ourselves were in great measure responsible for the sufferings that were visited upon us. At the same time he constantly wrestled with the dilemma of the good who suffered and the malefactor who enjoyed the best of everything. Like all great men, Rabbi Nachman was full of compassion. Each of his followers came to him with his own bag of troubles, and he had to comfort each one in turn while he himself was terribly ill and suffering unbearable pain. Rabbi Nachman died young, a victim of consumption.
I had lots of time in my father’s town. I went through Spinoza’s Ethics again and again. Out of Rabbi Nachman Braclawer’s works screamed a kind of saintly hysteria, an exultation that often goes hand in hand with a deep melancholy, whereas Spinoza’s Ethics was allegedly cold, pure logic. Spinoza didn’t believe in feeling
s, in emotions, or, as he called them, affects. But it is obvious that beneath this cold logic lurks a person with a strong feeling for justice and truth. Just like Rabbi Nachman, Spinoza was a victim of consumption and died young. Both Rabbi Nachman and Spinoza suffered persecution. Other rabbis and their followers agitated against Rabbi Nachman for years. They even sought to excommunicate him. His worst enemy was a rabbi called the Spola Grandfather. In one of his better moments Rabbi Nachman said: “They’ve invented a person and they wrangle with him.” The Jews of Holland actually excommunicated Spinoza. He was also in constant danger from the Inquisition, which was very powerful at that time. Rabbi Nachman found solace in a God who was full of benevolence and love, even though we humans could not comprehend His goodness. Spinoza found solace in a God who lacked will and feelings and possessed only great power and eternal laws. According to Spinoza, feelings, suffering, and justice were human concepts, passing modes.
I could find solace neither in Rabbi Nachman’s God nor in Spinoza’s. I had concluded that man had every right to protest against the violent acts of life. Man wasn’t obliged to thank God for all the plagues and catastrophes that assailed him virtually from the cradle to the grave. The fact that God possessed immeasurably more knowledge and power than we did not give Him the right to torment us even if His motives were of the purest and wisest. The argument that the Lord presented to Job that He was wise and mighty while Job was a mere ignorant human was no answer to Job’s anguish. Even the fact that toward the end of his life Job had more donkeys and camels and prettier daughters was little reward for his prior sufferings. I said to myself: I believe in God, I fear Him, yet I cannot love Him—not with my whole heart and soul as the Torah commands nor with the amor Dei intellectualis that Spinoza demands. Nor can I deny God as the materialists do. All I can do is to the best of my limits treat people and animals in a way I consider proper. I had, one might say, created my own basis for an ethic—not a social ethic nor a religious one, but an ethic of protest. This ethic of protest, I told myself, existed in all people, in all animals, and in everything that lived and suffered. Even the evildoers protested when things started going badly for them and other malefactors did to them what they had done to others. As his diaries indicate, Napoleon, who sent millions of people to their deaths, protested bitterly on the island of St. Helena because he wasn’t fed decently or tendered the proper respect. The moral person protests not only when he is personally wronged but also when he witnesses or thinks about the suffering of others. If God wants or feels compelled to torture His creatures, that is His affair. The true protester expresses his protest by avoiding doing evil to the best of his ability.
With this view of life and in this mood I went to Warsaw to become the proofreader of the Literary Pages.
Already on the train I had opportunity to witness the depths of human degradation, of Jewish anguish. A bunch of hooligans had boarded the third-class wagon that was filled with Jewish passengers—paupers traveling with sacks, bundles, and crates. The hooligans promptly turned their attention to these Jews. First they abused them with every kind of foul name. Every Jew, they insisted, was a Bolshevik, a Trotskyite, a Soviet spy, a Christ-killer, an exploiter. By the light of the tiny lamp hanging there I could see these “exploiters”—ragged, broken people, most of whom were standing or squatting atop their belongings. The hooligans had earlier pushed the Jewish passengers off their seats and had sprawled themselves across the benches. One of them boasted that he had been an officer in the war. Several young Jewish men tried to defend the Jews and to point out that Jewish soldiers had fought at the front and suffered heavy casualties, but the hooligans hooted them down and heaped them with abuse. Soon, words turned into deeds. They grabbed the Jews’ beards and yanked them. They tore the wig off an elderly Jewish woman. They began to stomp the Jews’ belongings. The Jews could have easily beaten the hooligans to a pulp, but they knew how this would end. There were soldiers riding in the other cars, and it could have easily led to bloodshed.
After a while the hooligans demanded that the Jews sing “Come, My Beloved,” the hymn celebrating the coming of the Sabbath. It was a form of stigma and humiliation that many Polish hooligans had learned from the time when General Haller’s soldiers had had their way with the Jews, had shaved off their beards often along with a piece of the cheek. I stood there frightened in a corner of the carriage near the toilet, gripping my bundle that consisted almost entirely of manuscripts and the few books that I possessed. Something inside me laughed at my own illusions. I knew full well that what I was seeing now was the essence of human history. Today the Poles tormented the Jews; yesterday the Russians and Germans had tormented the Poles. Every history book was a tale of murder, torture, and injustice; every newspaper was drenched in blood and shame. The two most pessimistic philosophers I had read, Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, both condemned suicide, but at that moment I knew that there was only one true protest against the horror of life and that was to hurl back to God His gift. It was entirely possible that had I had a pistol or poison with me at that time, I would have killed myself.
After much talk and pleading, the Jews began to sing “Come, My Beloved.” It was a half-song, half-lament. Until that night I had often fantasized about redeeming the human species, but it became obvious to me then that the human species didn’t deserve redemption. To do so would actually be a crime. Man was a beast that killed, ravaged, and tortured not only other species but its own as well. The other’s pain was his joy, the other’s humiliation his glory. The Torah tells us that God regretted having created man. Adam’s son murdered his brother. Ten generations later, God caused the Flood because the world had grown corrupt. There isn’t a book that so candidly and clearly tells the truth about man and his nature than the Scriptures. Even the allegedly good people are evil. Yesterday’s martyrs often become today’s bullies. Man, as a species, deserves all the whippings he gets. It is not mere chance that most of the monuments man is erecting are to murderers—be it patriotic murderers or revolutionary murderers. In Russia there is even a monument to Bogdan Chmielnicki. The real innocent martyrs on this earth are the animals, particularly the herbivorous.
After a while the hooligans grew tired, leaned their heads against the backs of the seats, and began to snore. The little storekeepers in this car were obviously innocent, but I knew for a fact that Jewish youths in Russia also tortured and killed innocent people in the name of the Revolution, often their own Jewish brothers. The Jewish communists in Bilgorai predicted that when the Revolution came, they would hang my uncle Joseph and my uncle Itche for being clergymen, Todros the watchmaker for being a bourgeois, my friend Notte Schwerdscharf for being a Zionist, and me for daring to doubt Karl Marx. They also promised to root out the Bundists, the Poale Zionists, and naturally, the pious Jews, the Orthodox. For these small-town youths it had been enough to read a few brochures to turn them into potential butchers. Some of them even said that they would execute their own parents. A number of these youths perished years later in Stalin’s slave camps.
Nine
The new Polish republic was barely four years old, but in that brief time it had already gone through a war with the Bolsheviks, party struggles that led to an assassination of a President, attacks upon Jews in a number of towns, bitter disputes with the Ruthenians who had become part of the new Poland, and a rising inflation. Lenin still lived, but he was already paralyzed, and Comrade Stalin was beginning to make a name for himself. In Germany a former paper hanger named Hitler had launched an abortive Putsch. In Italy Mussolini forced castor oil down his opponents’ throats. The typhus epidemics and hungers had decimated who knows how many people, but the streets of Warsaw still swarmed with pedestrians and you couldn’t get an apartment. All cellars, all garrets, were jammed with tenants and subtenants. From all the provinces people tore to come to Warsaw, but there was no work to be had there. Even as the Polish Socialist party trumpeted that the proletariat of all nations must unite, its professional u
nions barred Jewish workers. Actually there wasn’t even enough work for the Gentile workers. The Bundists, the Jewish socialists, sharply criticized their Christian comrades for their nationalistic and capitalistic deviations from Karl Marx’s teachings. The Warsaw communists, Jews nearly all, heaped brimstone and fire upon all the parties and insisted that only in Soviet Russia did true social justice prevail. The Zionists argued that there was no longer any hope for Jews in the lands of the Diaspora. Only in Palestine would the Jew be able to live freely and develop. But England held the mandate and wouldn’t allow any Jewish immigration. The Arabs had already begun to threaten the Jews with pogroms.
From my very first day in Warsaw I had no place to stay, since my brother lived with his wife and child in a tiny room at his in-laws and in the direst poverty. Melech Ravich, one of the editors of the Literary Pages, took me into his apartment for free, an apartment which consisted of several attic rooms on the fifth floor. Just as I was a skeptic, so was Ravich a believer. He believed in the redeeming power of literature, in socialism, in humanism, in the philosophy of Spinoza. At that time I wasn’t yet a vegetarian. How could someone who had nothing to eat be a vegetarian? But Melech Ravich was already a vegetarian. He was tall, stout, eleven years older than I, and handsome. I actually could speak nothing but Yiddish, even though I could read several languages. But Melech Ravich spoke good Polish and German. He had spent years in Vienna working in a bank. His wife had a good voice and aspired to a singing career. Outside of my brother, Melech Ravich was my first contact with the literary world and with the so-called big world. We began our discussions immediately. Ravich believed with absolute faith that the world of justice could come today or tomorrow. All men would become brothers and sooner or later, vegetarians, too. There would be no Jews, no Gentiles, only a single united mankind whose goal would be equality and progress. Literature, Ravich felt, could help hasten this joyous epoch. I respected his talent and his worldly knowledge, yet at the same time I wondered at his naiveté. All the omens pointed to the fact that the human species had learned nothing from the war that had cost twenty million lives, if not more. In all the cities of Europe people did the latest dances—the Charleston, the fox trot, or whatever they were called—dances over graves. Sociologists propounded theories that were allegedly new, but they exuded the evils of generations. Poets babbled their empty verses. The Literary Pages, of which I was proofreader, was radical, socialistic, half communistic, full of bad articles, poor poems, and false criticism. My brother soon turned away from the editorship. The one who had top say there were Nachman Maisel, who had for years flitted between socialism and communism before becoming a full-fledged communist, and Peretz Markish, who sang odes to Stalin until Stalin had him liquidated. Peretz Markish and Melech Ravich were also the editors of an anthology called The Gang, which flattered the rabble and catered to its basest instincts. It cast aspersions upon Jewishness and Jewish history; it denigraded the classicists of world literature, and as an example of the new literature, it featured the hollow phrases of Mayakovsky. Although I was young and far from being a mature writer, I wasn’t fooled by all these lies and flatteries. Behind this gabble lurked the urge to destroy, the will for a new mass violence. Malthus’ God wasn’t yet sated. The emissaries of Moscow called for a world pogrom upon all the bourgeois and middle classes as well as upon all socialists who dared deviate from Lenin by even a hair. Provincial youths—yesterday’s yeshivah students who never in their lives had done a lick of work nor had been able to do so—spoke in the name of the workers and peasants and condemned to death all those who wouldn’t stand on their side of the barricade. I looked on with alarm and astonishment at how a few pamphlets could transform into potential murderers the sons and daughters of a race that hadn’t held a sword in hand for two thousand years. It had become the fashion among the girls to wear the leather jackets worn in Russia by the female members of the Cheka. The mothers and fathers of these murderers were scheduled to become their first victims ….
Love and Exile Page 7