by Elie Wiesel
“Feeling down?” Olga asked him one day as they left school.
“A little.”
“Why?”
“It’ll pass,” Grisha answered gloomily.
He had never told Olga about his mother. He changed the subject. “If your father knew we were—let’s say, close, he’d give you a thrashing.”
“He’d never dare. It’s against the law. The Soviet law is strict with degenerate parents who hit a member of the Komsomol.”
“Anti-Semitism too is forbidden by law,” said Grisha, “and yet …”
“Not the same. Weak, helpless minors have to be protected, that’s natural, but the Jews? The Jews are powerful, in fact, they’re supposed to be almighty.”
She burst out laughing. “Seriously, Grisha, all this is unimportant. Whether my father approves or not is his problem, not mine or yours. Your religion? You know what? I’m glad you’re a Jew—and it’s just too bad if it enrages my father. We all liberate ourselves as best we can. As for me, I liberate myself by loving you.”
For her, Grisha’s origins created no problem. As a Communist, she thought of inequality only in terms of social classes. Communists fight against discrimination, fine! Communists struggle against ignorance, superstition, obscurantism, fanaticism and religion in individuals as well as in society—wonderful! They struggle against the individual for the benefit of society—still better! Olga and her friends in the Komsomol firmly believed these slogans.
“You’re really a bore, you and your Judaism,” she would say, annoyed. “What is this Judaism of yours? A religion? You’re not religious as far as I can see. Are the Jews a race? You’re not a racist, thank God. Is it a sickness? Your health is fine. So—is it an excuse? That’s it: you want to break up, and you’re looking for an excuse—”
“Oh, no, Olga, no! You’re wrong about me and about Judaism. It’s … it’s more than an excuse—it’s something else.”
“Something else, you say, something else, but what? A culture? You know nothing about it. A civilization? You don’t live in it. A philosophy? You don’t practice it. A fatherland? You don’t live in Israel.”
Olga had a good head. How could one explain the Jews to her?
“Let’s say that for a Jew being Jewish is an act of conscience.”
“All that’s just poetry.”
“Let’s say that for a Jew being Jewish is creating poetry.”
“What do you know about it? You don’t happen to be a poet, do you?”
“No,” said Grisha. “But my father was.”
“May I read his poems?”
“No, they’re written in Yiddish.”
“But you could translate them for me, couldn’t you?”
He yielded once again. One May afternoon, sitting under a tree, he showed her Paltiel Kossover’s collected poems. He recited:
I dream of a cursed day
and I am afraid.
I dream of a fiery dawn
and I am thirsty.
I dream of a burnt-out sun
and I am aching.
I dream the dream of the poor
and I am hungry.
And cold.
And then I bless the day;
And turn dawn into an
offering.
For I shall light the sun’s fire again
with the spark
of my soul.
“Your father wrote that?” Olga asked.
“Yes, he did.”
“Well—was he crazy?”
“Perhaps.”
I listen to the wind
sweeping across
submerged continents.
I listen to the night
carrying away
children never to be born.
I listen to the prayer
of a condemned man
who can no longer pray.
I listen to life
deserting
the solitary man
about to die.
“That too is by your father?” Olga asked after a long silence.
“Yes, the whole collection is his.”
“Was he really so unhappy? And so alone?”
“He was a madman. And a Jew.”
Olga stopped asking questions. She took his hand in hers and lifted it to her lips. Grisha never forgot that gesture. During the next few days she asked him to read other poems to her. She knew how to appreciate them. She would listen with closed eyes, her head in her hands. For each poem she had a brief comment, half ironic, half affectionate, that brought her closer to Grisha.
Their reading sessions were interrupted by the accident that took place in Dr. Mozliak’s office. Olga did not see Grisha until a couple of weeks later, when he was already mute. Not knowing this, she asked him to read more Paltiel Kossover. Grisha shook his head. She wanted to know the reason for his silence. He went on shaking his head. Then, for the first time, tears filled her eyes.
“I don’t deserve that,” she said.
How could he explain, how could he tell her what had happened? All he could do was shake his head.
“All right, then,” said Olga. “Till tomorrow, in school.”
But he never went back to school. From that day on he spent his free time with Zupanev, the night watchman, who showed an uncanny taste for Jewish poetry.
Yoram used to sing, you know why?” asks Katya in a constricted voice, as if every word is a struggle. “I’ll tell you—he sang because his parents never had any reason to sing. His parents, you see, had gone through the concentration camps. Yoram was their only son. They were lucky: they didn’t have to mourn his death. They died before him; they died knowing him to be happy; they took his happiness with them.”
She breaks off; she must stop. She must drive Yoram from her thoughts.
“Come, Grisha,” she says, “Come over here, to me.”
But Grisha, grappling with his own past, makes her understand that he cannot—not tonight.
Abruptly, a mad, delirious notion crosses his mind: Katya may be right. This night is unique: why not mark that uniqueness in a special way? What if I said yes? Yes, Katya, let’s make love. I’ll father your child, a son who will look like me, who will look like my father.…
Poor Yoram—he died without leaving an heir. With his death a whole line vanished. And what if I too die without leaving an heir? That would be the end of me, the end of my father and of his father.
Katya senses the change in him. She does not let the occasion slip by.
“Come,” she says.
As always, she pulls him into her untidy room, stretches out on the unmade bad and waits. And through his desire, through his madness, Grisha sees Olga. He knows he should not do what he is about to do, but he will do it anyway. Katya’s eyes are moist, so are her lips.
“Come,” says Olga.
And Grisha, facing the young virgin of his dreams, the anti-Semitic judge’s daughter he had coveted, can only obey. He lies down on Katya’s body without seeing it, without feeling it, thinking only of the young girl back in Krasnograd, whom he had followed with his eyes every morning, his heart beating impatiently, his blood in turmoil. He does not hear Katya’s little sounds of satisfaction or amusement. He hears nothing, nor does he answer when Katya asks him gently, softly, whether he is happy, whether he likes this or that, whether he sometimes opens his mouth when he makes love, whether the fact of being mute, of being unable to cry out in joy prevents him from feeling that joy. He loses himself in her, scorched by a sun of ashes.
THE TESTAMENT OF PALTIEL KOSSOVER V
Mad, carefree, anxiety-ridden and, above all, irresponsible, such were the years of the golden age of the wonderful, stormy Republic of Weimar. We were poor, we lacked material goods, but what did it matter? The future was calling to us, belonged to us. I wrote my parents: “More than ever I am convinced we are destined to save the world.” We who? My father must have thought, We Jews. My thought was, We idealists, we the young revolutionaries.
Ber
lin was sliding into a sea of grimaces and tears, dancing on the brink of the abyss, alternating between excesses of pleasure and poverty, goaded by absurd delights and approaching terrors. Which was more dangerous? The blindness of fanatics or the shortsightedness of free men? We refused to look ahead; we refused to look at all. Was that why Bernard Hauptmann killed himself?
Inge and I were now living together, but we went on seeing him. He was older than we, he was our guiding star; the comrades clung to him and so did we. We admired his prodigious gifts of analysis and intelligence. On the surface our relations had not changed. He showed us neither hostility nor resentment; he seemed to hold no grudge against me for stealing Inge from him. Nor did he seem angry with her for leaving him. He would often observe us with a benevolent, slightly mocking air.
He was known to have new liaisons, but none brought him happiness—that was obvious. He talked more but enjoyed himself less. Courses, students, comrades, public debates, brawls with the Nazis—he was everywhere. He took part in every operation, even the most insignificant, just to fill his days; he seemed afraid of being alone.
I confess that in his presence I felt ill at ease. He did not resent me, but I had betrayed him. It was no use for Inge to repeat that she had taken the first step and thus was responsible. I still felt guilty. And the more magnanimous Hauptmann was the more disturbed I became—and also the more I sought his company. Masochism, need to atone, to redeem myself? I had not yet freed myself from my Liyanov inhibitions.
Yet Berlin was the ideal place for self-liberation. The capital, in continuous effervescence, was reminiscent of the sinful cities of the Bible. The Talmudist in me would blush and look away. Prostitution, pornography, debauchery of mind and body, perversions of every kind; the city disrobed, painted its face, humiliated itself, flaunting its degeneration like an ideology.
A few steps away from Chez Blum, in a private club, there was nude dancing: men with women, or women with women. Elsewhere, people took drugs, flogged one another, wallowed in mud, pushing back all accepted limits; it reminded me of the mores of the followers of Sabbatai Tzvi, the most notorious of the false messiahs. Values were reversed, prohibitions abolished. Did people sense the approaching storm? Before entering into the night they wanted to try everything, to give life and substance to all their hallucinations.
Our group did not follow the stream. We were more disciplined, we had other goals. Our social conscience saved us from corruption. Our experience was on another level: we played with ideas, we tried to strip them of their masks, yet we respected those who defended them. Among us, everything began and ended with words. We would discuss Tucholsky’s latest essay, Brecht’s latest play, the stage productions of Stanislavski and Wachtangov, Moscow’s new economic policy, the march of the Revolution. As for the Nazis, we spoke of them as of a disagreeable disease, not serious and surely not fatal. We told ourselves: Every society has its misfits, and so does ours; one day they would be discarded, thrown into the trash can of history. The threats, the ramblings, the obscene delirium of a Goebbels or a Goering or their ridiculous Führer did not even annoy us. We thought: They are barking, let them bark, surely they will wear themselves out. Hauptmann called Nazism a marginal sect. Lacking education and mass support, it could not possibly influence events. History cannot be changed by a few anti-Semitic speeches. Fighting them would give them too much importance, do them too much honor. Better not turn them into adversaries. Our real adversaries were much closer: the trade union movement, the Socialists, the Social Democrats. The Nazis were no more than a diversion.
The opposite thesis was formulated by an essayist called Traub, a specialist on both Master Eckhardt and Hegel. Tall, skinny, and as long as a day of fasting in prison, this friend of the famed revolutionary Paul Hamburger used to harangue us in his cracked, panting voice, trying to convince us that Nazism meant the decline of civilization, liberty and morality, and that it must be crushed before it could be organized, before it was too late.
In all honesty I must acknowledge that my own position was closer to Hauptmann’s. Traub’s warning sounded hollow. For me the Nazis were rabble, wretches who needed to hate in order to live. Where I came from, they were called pogromists, here they were Nazis. It was all the same. Sadists, yes. Disgusting, yes. Bloody, capable of any crime. But the idea of those people in power was unthinkable. What about the intelligence of the German people, its culture, its rationalism, its common sense, its contribution to the spiritual evolution of mankind. Never in the land of Goethe and Schiller could such uncouth bastards come to power.
The facts seemed to vindicate us. In the elections of 1928, the Nazi Party received only eight hundred thousand votes. Pathetic—and reassuring. Congratulations, Weimar. Congratulations, Germany. The Nazis had fallen on their faces.
Epecially in Berlin. Unlike Liyanov or Bucharest, Berlin seemed to be dominated by Jews like myself, or, rather, like Hauptmann. Newspapers and publishing houses, theaters and banks, department stores and literary salons. As far as Germany was concerned, French anti-Semites who saw Jews everywhere seemed right. The sciences, medicine, the arts: Jews set the tone, imposed it on others.
How different from Liyanov. At home Jews, in order to survive, had to lie low, hiding their talents, their accomplishments. In order not to die, we had to play dead. A Jewish cabinet minister, a university professor, or an editor in chief of an influential review: impossible even to imagine in Liyanov. To get a position in politics or the arts, Jews had to detach themselves from their Jewish origins and deny their Jewishness. To enter the Conservatory or the Academy, a Jew had to show a certificate of baptism. Not in Berlin, where Jews not only were part of the landscape but gave that landscape its color, its cultural texture. One could imagine Berlin without Nazis but certainly not without Jews.
Hauptmann said this, and I supported him. I remember his measured words and their effect on Traub. This friend of Paul Hamburger’s shouted like someone possessed. Stormy discussions, passionate debates were held on all the current subjects: pacifism or war? patriotism or internationalism? Where would salvation come from? The official Communists defended Moscow’s changing theses; their fellow travelers, cautious and clear-minded, looked to Paris, the traditional haven of political exiles. Hauptmann took the Moscow line; so did Inge. I did not. I belonged to no party. I leaned toward Communism because of Ephraim, and even more because of Inge. Had Inge known how to speak of the Messiah, I would have followed her straight to the Kremlin.
Hauptmann was the typical faithful, unyielding Communist. He had known Kurt Eisner and Ernst Toller at the time of the Red Republic of Bavaria, in which he had been involved. How had he managed to escape? At the moment of the debacle he had taken refuge with some workers, who had hidden him during the critical months. “I trusted the masses,” he would often repeat to us, “and I was right.” He still believed in the masses; they were his religion. This elegant intellectual felt a deep harmony between himself and the anonymous, shapeless masses; he was totally taken with them and believed that they had invested him with a lofty mission. Thus, his resolution reflected theirs. Whenever he pronounced the words “the masses” his voice became grave and solemn.
Inge was a Communist like Hauptmann and just as fervent and ready to sacrifice herself for the party of the Revolution. Where did they differ? Hauptmann could, on occasion, speak about the Party in a relaxed way; not so Inge.
I used to accompany them, with some of our cronies, to public meetings where speakers would preach, lecture, teach, thunder, vociferate, condemn and make demands depending on the slogans of the day. I liked to look at the throngs and merge with them. I liked the composed and confident atmosphere of “the masses,” I liked their way of accepting the Communist gospel with raised fist; I liked the brotherhood, the sense of common destiny they radiated; I envied them.
I had asked Inge whether she could help me become a Party member. She advised against it. “Later,” she said. “You’re not mature enough.” “Later�
�but when?” I wanted to know. “Later,” she decreed. And once she made up her mind, there was no way to change it.
She may have been right. I was still too attached to my parents, to Liyanov. I no longer practiced the religion of my ancestors, but I missed it. Sometimes on a Sabbath I found myself humming a Hasidic air, or quoting an old parable or conjuring up some mystical figure in whom to confide my distress or bewilderment. Inge knew this.
I seemed to be leading the life of a Communist, but appearances deceive. Inge often reminded me of that. “You’re not a Communist; I mean, not really.”
“That’s true. I think too much about the Messiah. Some people wait for him; the Communist runs toward him. You’re helping me run.”
Talk like that enraged her: the Messiah, for her, was a sort of rabbi and she hated rabbis. She hated them as much as she hated priests.
“You see?” she would say, upset. “You’re not ready yet.”
“Because I mention the Messiah? Do you know, Inge, that there’s a tradition of messianic surprise? It speaks of the redeemer emerging unexpectedly, just when mankind least expects him.”
“I don’t like that kind of surprise, nor that kind of redemption. Communism is something else. It means working in the here and now, it means provoking upheavals not by dint of magic formulas but by work and political action. You still have a lot to learn.”
To please her I worked hard. I shared with the Party—that is, with some Party members—the money my father sent to meet my needs and pay for my “studies.” To be more precise, I subsidized needy pals and comrades. If on rare occasions I had any money left, I gave it to Inge, who handed it over to Hauptmann, who added it to his special fund.
The 1932 elections were approaching. I turned that campaign into a personal matter, as though my future depended on it. I hardly ever slept. I wrote articles and edited tracts in Yiddish, which Inge helped translate into German; I ran from meetings to demonstrations; I shouted with the masses so dear to Hauptmann, demonstrated with them, fought for them with slogans, and soon, even with my fists. Leading their march, I carried the red flag just as my father, in Liyanov, used to carry the sacred scrolls—with love and resolution.