by Elie Wiesel
As I read, my mind strayed: to my father praying in Liyanov, to Inge running through the streets of Berlin; I saw my mother’s disapproving eyes and the resigned look of my former girlfriend. Read, said a strange voice. I read without knowing what; I was elsewhere. Read, don’t stop, read, read, said a panting mouth … vast and deep, inviting me to explore and devour it. A mad idea: that mouth was an opening to a secret world where I would find my people.
Then, in the middle of a bad poem, in the heart of a dream in ruins, I lost my head. And my voice was extinguished in the dark.
Paris: city of encounters, of furtive and painful discoveries. All isms converge there, including the anti-isms, all the revolutionaries too, including the counterrevolutionaries. Nowhere else on earth is there so much talk about so many subjects with so much passion, if not sincerity. Bergson and Breton, Blum and Maurras, Drieu and Malraux, Stalin and Trotsky: I spent my evenings at Le Chénier in Montmartre with the editors of Dos Blättel, listening to their talk about political, poetical, philosophical events as seen from the Communist angle. A speech of Daladier’s excited us no less than Davidson’s latest review in the Pariser Haint of a work by one of our authors.
I didn’t take part in the debates; I preferred to listen, learn and absorb. I felt too young, too much of a beginner, to take a position. There was only one subject on which I allowed myself an opinion—Hitler Germany. Unfortunately there was no lack of experts on the subject, and they all talked louder than I.
I finally met Paul Hamburger, and that meeting changed my life once more.
Hamburger received me in his hotel room. Yes, he remembered Traub. He also knew Inge and kept in touch with her.
“I am glad you’ve come,” he said. “Stay with me. We’ll do good work together.”
He had the style of a business manager. People came to ask him questions and went off with his instructions. They brought him slips and messages, to which he gave brief answers. Everyone spoke German—so did I. An immediate, intimate contact was established.
“But what sort of work do you do?”
“You’ll know soon enough.”
“When, Paul?”
“You’ll know, believe me.”
Paul Hamburger was a giant. Like Aboulesia, but more heavyset. His was an intelligence that was rare, cultivated, generous and bold. He could do anything. He organized networks, selected emissaries, wrote pamphlets and propaganda manuals, supervised the liaison agencies, those already existing and those about to be set up among the various underground movements in Germany; everyone knew him and he knew everyone. Though a Communist, his influence reached beyond the Party structure. People loved working with him, for him.
He immediately assigned me the “poetry” column in the multilingual journals he published. In this way I made some friends and not a few enemies. I used the little power I had reluctantly: to praise a work, denounce an author. I was as loath to flatter as to demolish. Still, it had to be done. Paul often said, “We’re at war; your personal feelings and tastes are useful to us only insofar as they help us fight the Nazis.”
I had his confidence, and yet I was not a Party member. I had actually implored Pinsker to propose my candidacy to the Yiddish cultural section, but Paul had advised me against this while scolding me affectionately.
“What do you want? A card? What for? A piece of paper with your picture on it, like an identity card from police headquarters; I have a dozen of them. The name changes but not my picture. That’s how it is.”
“You don’t understand.…”
“I don’t understand what? Your need for membership, your desire to belong to a fine loyal brotherhood? But that’s romanticism, my poor Paltiel. With or without a card, you’re one of us, isn’t that true?”
It was true. Paid out of the Party’s secret funds, I was working for the Party, taking risks for the Party, living for the Party. I even suffered for the Party: the editors of the reactionary Pariser Haint never lost a chance to shoot poison arrows at me. The war was on. My writings irritated them, my poems sent them into a fury. Nor did we handle them with kid gloves in our own newspaper. Our public fights were ferocious and transcended our political differences. Everything they preached was evil; everything we did was sublime. We were defending truth and justice; they were practicing falsehood and idolatry.
Bizarre: we were Jews, they too; we spoke Yiddish, so did they; we came from Central Europe, so did they; our parents were brought up on Torah, theirs too; and yet, and yet—an abyss separated us.
We faced the same enemy; the same danger threatened us. In the eyes of the Fascists, we were Jews—Yids. Hateful, all of us, and contemptible, fit only to be driven out of the country, expelled from society, eliminated. We answered—but not together. It was impossible to come to any agreement on organizing joint meetings, demonstrations, or acts of solidarity and protest. Impossible to unite our strengths and wills. We were fighting our battles separately; one might have thought we were fighting against one another much more than against the German or French anti-Semites.
An article of mine, appearing at the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936, brought down on my head an avalanche of hateful replies in the Pariser Haint. In that piece I explained my opposition to the principle of Zionism. A choice must be made: either you are religious and are forbidden to rebuild David’s kingdom before the coming of the son of David; or you are not religious, in which case Jewish nationalism would jeopardize the Jews it claims to safeguard. And I was specific: a Jewish state in Palestine would be a ghetto; and we are against ghettos. We are struggling against walls, against discrimination, against divisions everywhere. We view the phenomenon of the ghetto as a defect, a mark of shame; we favor a humanity without frontiers. Religious beliefs arouse distrust and rancor among peoples; rather than cutting Jews off from humanity, we are trying to integrate them, to weld them together. It’s not enough to liberate the Jew, let us liberate man, and the problem will be resolved.…
For a whole week the Zionist paper would not let go. They called me a propagandist in the pay of Moscow, a renegade, a traitor. The more moderate critics chided me for my ignorance, not to say stupidity. Poets who mix into politics, declared the polemicist Baruch Grossman, are like sleepwalkers who apply for jobs as guides.
Secretly I was jubilant: Baruch Grossman had recognized the poet in me. That was worth all the insults in the world. Nevertheless, I responded. Why should poets stay out of politics? What about the prophets? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Amos and Hosea: they were poets, weren’t they? And they mixed into politics, didn’t they? And what about the French revolutionaries of 1789?
For a week the Yiddish world of Paris was plunged into real tumult. The two camps quarreled with a verbal violence unprecedented even in our annals, and all because of a few lines signed by a certain Paltiel Kossover. I was the only topic in the cafés and clubs. In the leather-goods workshops, among the tailors and pressers, the only discussion was of the battle opposing the two Jewish dailies. We were graded, criticized, congratulated; one day I won, the next I lost; my stock went down, up, then down again. One might have thought nothing else, nothing as important, was taking place in the world.
Echoes of the polemic reached as far as Liyanov. My father, in one of his short, moving letters, wrote: “It seems there is a man in Paris with your name; he is a poet, a writer; our local weekly has reprinted excerpts from an article he wrote about our people.… What a pity he’s sullying your name and your family’s.… Perhaps you ought to insist on a statement in the paper saying you are not the author.…” He ended by reminding me that I had sworn to put on my tephilin every morning.
Of all the reactions to my article, his was the only one that hurt.
A painful irony, admit it, Citizen Magistrate: today it is Dos Blättel that disowns me and the Zionist press that comes to my defense. The newspaper clippings you showed me last week—or was it last month or last year? I have lost all sense of time here—made me laugh: Pinsker saying I
had always been an agent provocateur. That was why he had opposed my joining the Party at the time. And another colleague, Alter Yoselson, writing his political confessions in the columns of the same paper: “I admit the snake really took me in.” And in a New York Yiddish Communist newspaper, someone named Schweber covers me with mud, when only ten years earlier he praised me to the skies. Yes, it is painful: my comrades, my friends of yesterday, so quick to judge me, to condemn me.
Why did you show me those articles, Citizen Magistrate? To prove the extent of my isolation? You have succeeded. Not one of your other arguments has caused me such grief. “So, prisoner Kossover, you think I am the only one to consider you a traitor? Are you perhaps expecting some testimony in your favor from Paris? Just take a look at these newspaper clippings. You’ll see what your ‘friends’ think of you. They’re accusing you of treason—and they do so with more venom than we. Look and look well, prisoner Kossover: they justify your condemnation even before your trial opens.…”
That hurts—yes, that hurts.
You let me see the Zionist articles too, for tactical reasons, right?—to be able to say later, “But look, prisoner Kossover—who is coming to your defense? Reactionaries, imperialists, the worst enemies of Soviet Russia—and you persist in denying you were their accomplice? But then, tell us, why would they be trying to save your skin?”
There you have failed. For, you see, I am glad I finally have a good press among the Zionists—among committed, dedicated Jews, among Jewish Jews. Their attitude comforts me. This time your ruse did not work, unlike the first, which filled me with disgust. Even now, when I think about it, I feel nauseated. To cleanse my thoughts, I think of my father’s face, his voice, his request. The tephilin, oh, yes, my phylacteries. I had forgotten about them, tucked away in a drawer, beneath my shirts, at Sheina Rosenblum’s. Because of your tricks I almost forgot about her—her too.
You’ll laugh: I speak to you and think of her, and it is her mouth I see—nothing else. She drove me crazy. She had only to open her lips and my body arched toward her. Sometimes I would come home late, after exhausting days of meetings; I would see Sheina, sleeping in her bed or mine. And despite my fatigue and need for sleep and rest, I would lie down beside her—to embrace her, embrace her until morning.
At the paper I saw other girls who pleased me. There were always beautiful, mysterious women around Paul Hamburger. I remember Lisa: delicate, angelic; she was liaison to a secret group in Germany. I desired her; she never knew it. I remember Claire: tall, full of laughter, she flirted with everyone, told spicy stories and gave the impression she spent all her time making love and yet … it was said she was a virgin. There was Madeleine, one of Paul’s secretaries, who translated his articles into French, scowling as she worked. She was not pretty, but I liked the way she concentrated. I could have initiated some short-lived affairs, but I lacked the time—and the courage. The little I had of both I devoted to my landlady. Our ritual never varied. She made me recite a poem and closed her eyes. She understood nothing—so what? She paid me royalties all the same.
Did she love me? Perhaps. Did I love her? Sometimes. I insisted on paying rent; symbolic amounts. I addressed her with the formal vous, at least in the beginning. She never called me by my first name but by fanciful nicknames. It was “my poet” here, my “great poet” there … “Is my little genius hungry by any chance?” or “Is my great Rimbaud cold?”
From Pinsker I knew she had had many lovers, but she never alluded to them. The past is the past, she would say, shaking her finger at me: don’t touch it.
It was the future that fascinated her. Had she needed it, she could have made her living as a fortune-teller. The accuracy of her premonitions alarmed me. She got up one morning and said, yawning, “I feel I’ll be going to a funeral soon.” That same week one of her aunts died. Another time: “We’re going to have something to celebrate.” The next day a comrade escaped from a German prison. Hence the fear I had of deceiving her. She would have guessed.
I suppose she was faithful to me; otherwise I would have stumbled on another poet in the house. I never did. Sometimes I would glimpse an anonymous visitor sent by the Party, who stayed a night or two; I gave him my room and shared Sheina’s.
I seldom “went out” with her, for lack of funds. Under no circumstances would I have let her pay the check in the restaurant or the café. Pride? Vanity? Both. And while we’re at it, we might add self-respect and the remnants of a bourgeois education: in Liyanov a well-bred young man would never have let himself be supported by a woman, however rich and impassioned by Jewish poetry.
One evening, however, I invited her to dinner. I had just cashed a check for a long novella published by my paper and translated into French by a contributor to Ce Soir. It was the first time I was to be published in French; I was feeling somewhat exuberant. We were drinking to that, Sheina and I, when Paul appeared at the door of the restaurant. He knew Sheina; she motioned to him to join us. Paul was my closest friend, but for some inexplicable reason his presence embarrassed me. Would he judge me? Did he resent my living with a rich woman? I was still a puritan. I became surly. Sheina was in top form; superb and enticing with her resonant laugh, she attracted attention. A doubt: Paul and she … was it possible? Surely Paul would have told me. His style was to be forthright, open; truth above all, on the same level as friendship. He would have sat me down in front of him, in his office; he would have closed the door, and, looking me straight in the eye, would have said, “Listen, friend, I know you’ve living with Sheina; that doesn’t bother me as long as you do your job.” Also: “I want you to know that Sheina and I used to be intimate but it’s been over for a long time.” That’s how Paul Hamburger would have handled the matter. No, there had been nothing between them.
Then why was I so troubled? What irritated me was not knowing what irritated me. As for Paul, he behaved very naturally. He commented with humor on current events, described the situation in Germany: anecdotes, predictions, rumors. He was more brilliant and fascinating than ever. The meal over, he had the tact not to come with us. “I have some things to take care of in the neighborhood,” he said, kissing Sheina on both cheeks. He shook hands with me and vanished in the direction of the Opéra. I was grateful to him; I was happy.
Was I really? In this cold, barren cell where the sun never penetrates, not even on orders from on high, the answer seems obvious to me. Yes, I was happy, free, without care, blessed with love and companionship. Moreover, I knew I was doing good useful work, fighting the good fight. Everything seemed simple. In a sick society we represented the only chance for a remission. We were raising the banner of revolt against complacency and resignation. I knew where I was going, I knew what I wanted and from whom and how I was going to get it. I knew my enemies and was exposing them. And I knew my allies too. Is that true happiness? Today I say “yes” without hesitation, without qualification. At the time I would have said “I don’t know.” I would have said, “Happiness? I am much too busy to think about it; happiness, gentlemen, is for the bourgeoisie; we the proletariat have something better to do just now.”
And yet I experienced moments of happiness—conscious and fully felt—and I remember them. There was that visit with a family in the north, then in the middle of a strike. A miner and his children receive me. Sad but proud, they invite me into their home. “We have nothing to offer you, we have nothing.”
“But you do,” I say to them. “A good word or two, a story will be enough. I’ll put them in the paper.”
They consult each other silently, then the father turns to me and says, “Ordinarily we don’t speak about ourselves. But since you’re our guest, this will be our way of offering you hospitality.”
I ask questions, they answer. How do they live, how are they managing? The mother’s illness and death, the solidarity of the fellow miners … I listen, I take notes and I am ashamed. I am ashamed of not being hungry, of not being unemployed. And what if I went to the grocer’s now? I
am afraid of embarrassing them. I’ll do it later.
The grocer opens his eyes wide, astonished at the size of my order. I tell him where to deliver the food. “All that?” asks the grocer. “Yes, all that.” I pay and walk toward the station. The train is not leaving for an hour. Suddenly, I hear footsteps. My miner sits down next to me on the bench and says, “What you did there is—how can I say it?—it’s beautiful.”
His familiar way of talking moves me. Awkward like myself, he has difficulty hiding his emotion.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
“What didn’t you know?”
“That Santa Claus was a Communist.”
“Santa Claus? I am a Jew, comrade. Our Santa Claus is called Elijah the Prophet. He variously disguises himself as a peasant, a beggar or a coachman.”
“And he’s a Communist?”
We burst out laughing at the same time. That is what I call happiness.
Another example: a demonstration from the Place de la République to the Bastille. The Popular Front is the rage. Leon Blum and Maurice Thorez are beaming; Socialist and Communist embrace. We shout our hopes at the top of our lungs. With fists raised, I march past the platform; I am every workingman’s brother, and like him, bubbling with enthusiasm. Together with our comrades from the paper and our aid societies, we march, heads held high, joyous, confident, inspired by an unshakable faith in our power: we shall triumph over Nazism. I am not a Frenchman—so what? I am part of an immense family that carries history on its shoulders. Behind us, in front of us, all around us, intellectuals and stevedores, winegrowers and bricklayers advance with firm and equal step, irresistible, ready to conquer the earth, and the sun too, if necessary. Forgive me, Citizen Magistrate: a sally of Trotsky’s comes to my mind: “And if they tell us that the sun shines only for the bourgeoisie, well, comrades, then we’ll extinguish the sun.” No, Trotsky—what’s the good of extinguishing the sun? We’ll turn it around to our side, that’s more practical.… Suddenly, I see some Zionist groups in the crowd. They, too, have Socialists in their ranks. Come to think of it—their paper stopped attacking me weeks ago. Once again my thoughts go to Elijah the Prophet: there’s no end to his miracles! And while marching and shouting the usual slogans, I address a silent prayer to the most democratic, most political and most militant of our prophets: I thank him for involving himself in our affairs. My thoughts also go to my father; I am grateful to him for having taught me to pray and give thanks. If he ever comes across my picture in a Jewish or Romanian newspaper, he’ll surely write me a letter that will not hurt.