‘But that’s where your Zionists get it wrong. It’s not a case of a language that’s degenerated. It’s a case of another language altogether.
‘Yiddish is only ridiculous in the mouths of rich Jews with a Fräulein to take care of the kids who think that by speaking bad Yiddish they’re speaking good German. But real Yiddish, the straight Yiddish of a Jew without a Fräulein, is a living, breathing language. Millions of Jews speak it, millions live through it. For these millions are printed these books you see, for these millions Yiddish is written, translations are made into Yiddish, and Jewish theatre is performed. It’s a complete world, a complete people, with its own elite, without diplomas or universities. This elite wants to be informed, wants to know, wants to reflect.
‘There are Yiddish novelists, poets, critics and essayists. If you had any idea of the great beauties encompassed by this dialect-culture – which you ignorantly despise – you’d probably have many pangs of remorse. Not to mention the folklore of the ghetto – all in Yiddish – a still-living, creative folk-culture, with its roots deep in the periphery, with anonymous singers, unknown humourists, with heroes, with legends, with myths. And doubly alive. Once through the immediate presence of the life of the ghetto, and then through the more distant mystery of the life of the synagogue. The edgy, gritty urban realism of the ghetto and the mysticism of the synagogue unite in this folk-culture of the Jewish neighbourhood and together add up to something which, if you have an ear and a heart, is worth living and dying for.’
‘Dying, especially,’ I interjected, ‘because living through it is rather difficult. I can’t really see those millions of Yiddish speakers. And I don’t really see the Jewish ghetto either. But I do see a multitude of Jews passing definitively into the culture of the countries in which they live: French Jews, German Jews, American Jews and Romanian Jews. A hundred years ago they spoke in dialect. Today they’ve forgotten it. Tomorrow, their children won’t even remember that it once existed. And to such a precarious thing – however beautiful it may be – you want to bind a culture?’
‘Have you forgotten that, luckily, there are still anti-Semites? And, thank God, that there are still pogroms from time to time? However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.’
‘Why a ghetto and not a Palestinian colony? You speak about the ghetto with so much passion, as though it were a place of exile, and with so much love about dialect, as if it were not a borrowed language. If it’s a matter of returning to ourselves, why don’t we return to where we first started, the place we left two thousand years ago? It’s not easy, either way. But if it’s going to be hard, it might as well be for once and for all.’
‘Two thousand years? Do you think Zionism has something of those two thousand years in it? Do you think that these boys of Jabotinski’s who wear boots and salute each other like soldiers, who ride bicycles on Saturday and can say “Give me a cigarette” or “Let’s go to a football match” in Hebrew – do you think these boys have anything in common with those two thousand years of our blood? Two thousand years through flames, through disasters, through wandering come to us through the history of the ghetto. It’s a history lived under lamplight. “We want sunshine,” they shout. Good luck to them – and let them become footballers. They’ll get plenty of sunshine then. But this lamp by which I’ve read so many hundreds of years, this lamp is Judaism – not their sunlight.’
‘You’re old, Mr Sulitzer. That’s why you talk like that.’
‘I’m not old! I’m a Jew – that’s what I am.’
*
I was slightly mistaken. Abraham Sulitzer is a Monsieur Bergeret only as a husband to Madame Roza. As an intellectual, however, in his relationship with ideas, he becomes dogmatic and overbearing. In defending the ghetto, he is no less intolerant than Winkler defending Zionism or S.T. Haim cursing about both. Extremism is their common vice.
I visited him on a couple of evenings but avoided arguing. He reads beautifully and I asked him to read to me from his favourite books. Several good hours of reading from Sholem Aleichem. A wonderful fellow and probably untranslatable. What sad humour, what lucid laughter, what a fine, acute critical sense, all enveloped in a melancholy of misery, of terror …
9
Grandma has died. Ten hours after a heart attack. Summoned by telegram, I arrived in time to hold her living hands in mine: those small, thin, bony hands that haven’t rested in seventy years; even in sleep they signalled restlessness.
She died slowly, fighting until the end, suffering terribly and completely conscious until the final moment, her eyes open, searching. The merciless lucidity of the dying! A slight glaze to the eyes, but aware in the final struggle, not allowing a single gesture, sign or shadow to escape her attention.
Why such resistance? Death comes, let it come. Receive it.
I would have wanted this old woman of ours to understand the end with simplicity and to smile in friendship, with acceptance. I would have wanted her to remember the Bible she read to me, the patriarch-friends, their harmonious wives, I would have liked her to remember the candles lit on Friday night, the white headscarf she wore when among the brass candlesticks, the bread she kneaded with her hands all her life, all these simple things, all these gentle joys, and to pass away in their homely glow.
Why such resistance? Why so much questioning? She seemed to cling to every minute, struggling with each one.
It reminded me of Grandfather’s agony, which was even more terrible, as in addition to physical suffering it was a quarrel with God and destiny, a final protest, a cry.
But she, Grandma, looking like a child disguised as a grandmother, should have died differently, more calmly, more easily …
*
How badly we die! We haven’t even learned to do that from the centuries of death we’ve passed through. We live badly, but we die even more badly, in despair, struggling. We miss our last chance to make peace and be saved. The sad Jewish death of people who, not living among the trees and the beasts, haven’t been able to learn the beauty of indifference in death, its simple dignity. The greatest Jewish sin – perhaps.
… And the terribleness of Jewish mourning. The vigil from the night before the burial, the tired, unbelieving shaking of heads of the women keeping vigil, the lament of the Kaddish.
A single beautiful thing: the white death shroud. There could be something regal in this return to the earth, a good, generous solemn fact. But we mutilate it with our despair, which is suffocating. We call ourselves sceptics, but we don’t deserve such praise. I’ve seen how they cry at a Jewish funeral, and I know nothing more unrestrained, more awful. To cling so stubbornly to this life, to renounce all else so as not to give it up, to choke it with your desperate love, to believe yourself lost when you have lost it – such a terrible inability to rise above it.
Whoever has ever leaned against a tree, who has ever thought with melancholy of his loneliness, can’t fail to meet death without a feeling of being a bit above it, and smiling at it nonchalantly and indulgently, with friendliness, with gentle farewell, with a certain sensual thrill.
Our grieving is visceral, tyrannical, uncomprehending. And, more seriously, it is lacking in love. Of the many trivial aspects of the Jewish sensibility, this unrestrained mourning is the most unworthy. I think, however, that it is something we have accustomed ourselves to do here, in the ghetto. Death in the Bible is a glorious event.
Mama’s pain saddens me. It irritates me, in fact, as I’d like her to
be accepting rather than resigned. There were moments when we almost quarrelled. ‘She was my mother and I want to mourn her,’ she snapped, defending her right to grieve. (I sometimes have the mean impression that her mourning is a new form of indulgence and that she deliberately seeks it.)
Of course, I’m unfair. I know how much love wounds, without forgetting Grandma’s death. But that’s exactly what I don’t want to forgive – this love which has greater rights than death. This love that struggles to tie down and preserve a shade that has passed on. Such rights don’t and can’t exist.
And there’s something else that disturbs me. I feel that my personal freedom is affected. I can’t accept that someday, when my turn to die comes around, I will leave in my wake such wild, desperate, pointless suffering. I don’t want to be loved so unrestrainedly.
If I were asked one day to give up my life for something – for a revolution, for love, for whatever nonsense – the idea that Mama would suffer for me the way she’s suffering now horrifies me. Does she have any right to suffer in this way? Doesn’t this trespass on matters which are mine to deal with? Isn’t this an obstacle to me fulfilling my destiny? Isn’t it a terrible moral pressure? She loves too unfairly, too oppressively, to the point at which it becomes suffocating and undignified. There is too much devotion in the Jewish family, too many gushing emotions, too many sacrifices made. Terrible advantage taken of good children and mothers prepared to sacrifice themselves. There is no reticence, no coolness. This leads inevitably towards a sense of obligation. I envy the cool and dignified reserve of the peasant: a formal farewell and off they go into the world. And when death comes, it comes like a relative.
The only person at home not shaken by Grandma’s death is Grandmother. At ninety years of age, there she is outliving the other grandparents, who were so much younger and more passionate to live than she. ‘God doesn’t choose. Today it was her, tomorrow it will be my turn.’ I think living and dying is all the one to her. Grandmother is of father’s tribe, a people that dies late, in old age, at a hundred years old, placidly, without regrets. Their deaths are simple and good. But my mother’s branch of the family has a completely different way of dying, and this was how Grandma passed away. They die by burning up swiftly, with short agonies, in which you feel the last shudder of pointless struggle. Their health is tenuous, nervous, maintained through unflagging effort and hard-won daily victories over a weary body. It’s more than an intellectual resistance, a continual act of will. One day, the inner arch that holds them suspended in tension suddenly collapses. It’s a Jewish death.
Father’s side of the family haven’t known it, and I think this is something of a family rule, as there are no examples there of any grandparent or great-grandparent who has passed away before they were in their nineties. Their blood is strong, not thinned by Talmudism or poisoned by the lights of lamps and late evenings in synagogues. They lived by a river, among boats, among grain. Grandma looked down on them, when in their company. Their excess of good health probably struck her as a sign of vulgarity.
*
Several times this morning I went down to the port, to see the new tugs that have started to arrive. The light is cold and lively, washed by wind and rain. It smells of wet willow bark, the young shoots emerging from under the freshly melted snow. In the distance, the blue Măcin Mountains, their peaks still white.
From time to time, the call of a boat’s siren, its adolescent pitch like the whinnying of a foal.
Let us forget, old man. Let us forget what needs be forgotten: look, the season is turning.
10
Labouring in the workshop gets harder every day. This spring is unbearably beautiful. It bursts forth violently, as if in revenge for the five months of winter and the eighty days of snow it has tolerated. I continue to endure the morning classes, awaiting the reward of the noon bell of freedom. The streets seem wider, the houses white, the women glowing. There’s a sense of nakedness everywhere.
But on returning to the workshop everything goes dark, the season is blotted out. The modelling clay is sticky and strong-smelling, the air has the chill of a damp cellar. We work sullenly, irritably, unproductively. For four hours I worried away at a ball of clay and got absolutely nowhere. Towards evening Marga came by and took me out for a stroll, which made up for everything, and we walked long and far, towards Băneasa. We watched planes practising taking off and landing. Marga, who had never seen a plane up close, enjoyed it immensely, as though watching some miraculous spectacle.
She ran through the fields after the shadows of the planes, the wide shadow of a big bird, flying low, several metres above the ground, and let out a cry of victory whenever she managed to step on the tail of one of these fleeting shadows with the toe of her shoe.
Then, tired, she fell into my arms, flushed and breathless, her hair blowing loose in the gentle evening breeze – unable to laugh as much as she wanted, but happy. Exuberantly, noisily happy.
The evening fell slowly, like a fluttering flag, and we turned back towards the city, tired after so much fresh air.
‘Come and sleep with me, Marga.’
I said this to her so simply that she knew I was not joking. She let go of my hand. Not brusquely, but decisively. She is a virtuous girl, after all – and there’s nothing anybody can do about that.
Her moral resistance is more powerful than the most miraculous April dusk.
‘Moral resistance’ is overstating it. Really, it’s something more than a virtue: it’s an inability to cede. Somewhere in the mind of that sensual, loving girl is a voice that asks, ‘And, after that, what will become of you?’ That’s called foresight, and is also called mediocrity.
I don’t doubt either her sense of shame or her passion. But they are both equally modest. She doesn’t have enough of a sense of shame to resist embraces. Or sufficient passion to surrender to them completely. There is always a final line of caution, marking where the effusion must cease.
I’ve watched people playing roulette, contorted with suffering – but those who threw themselves into the game, losing everything, money, honour and life, didn’t seem as abject as the frightened players who trembled for every chip, made endless calculations every five minutes and bowed out the moment they’d lost a ‘reasonable’ amount. I think mediocrity in vice is the most dishonourable kind of mediocrity.
There is something of this fearful moderation in Marga’s way of hesitating. And the feeling that, even in our closest moments of understanding, she has taken, as they say, ‘all the necessary measures’ discourages me.
I know that from this point on any spontaneous action is out of the question.
I’d like to be a vulgar king of the slums, a charming rake, who could seduce his love and be indifferent thereafter. Marga’s excuses would be of the highest order and yet insufficient. Then the issue would not be me and what I can give in exchange, but what she can light-heartedly give away, with a total lack of precaution. In love you’re only worth as much as you can afford to lose.
*
I’m tired of myself, fed up with her. We’re splitting up. She’s a good girl and will make an excellent wife. She’s part of a race of wives.
I can’t recall: is there a female beloved, a lover, in the Bible? Seems there are only mothers, sisters and wives. It’s very nice, but stifling somehow.
I think from here, from this slow slipping into too many attachments, comes the Jew’s taste for solitude, a nostalgia for being on your own, like a stone. I envy the supreme insensibility of objects, their extreme indifference.
PART THREE
* * *
&
nbsp; 1
I walked back to the site from the station, after accompanying the master, who was taking the train to Braşov.
‘Who’d ever think they’ve been working here five years,’ he said to me on the way, at the corner by the river Ursu, from where you still see, among the tops of the oil derricks, some of the tops of the roofs of our buildings. It was an offhand comment and I didn’t sense he was looking for a sentimental reply from me. He’s not the kind.
‘Five years, indeed,’ I agreed.
At the station, awaiting the train, we again went over the work schedule for the coming week. I gave him some documents to sign and tried to reopen the discussion about the Rice villa, hoping to catch him in a more conciliatory mood in the moment of departure.
‘We might at least wait a few days, until old Ralph gets back.’
‘No, not an hour’s delay. Work will continue as planned. Understood? You’ll answer for any delay and I’ll brook no excuses. The work will continue, even if it rains. Tell Dronţu that.’
Then, because he’d spoken rather harshly, he took my arm and suddenly lowered his voice:
‘That’s how we work. If Rice doesn’t like it, he can demolish it. But all the same, that’s how we work.’
We separated, agreeing.
The day was still bright and I felt the need to wander about on my own. I told the driver to go on ahead and to tell Dronţu I’d be late for dinner.
For Two Thousand Years Page 9