Spinoza had warned me against the emotions, affects that darkened reason and actually constituted a form of madness. In the books of morals I had scanned during the nine months I had spent in my parent’s town, these same emotions were called evil thoughts, the persuasions of Satan. Rabbi Nachman Braclawer, a man in whom the emotions seethed and stewed, offered all kinds of advice on how to outwit and master them. Man was a pauper when it came to reason, but a millionaire when it came to emotions. I myself was a ferment of passions and doubts. Dreams assailed me like locust. My nights were filled with nightmares. I hadn’t yet been with a woman, but in my imagination I had already committed all the excesses that could only be fancied. I wanted to write and to study, but 90 per cent of my spiritual energy was squandered on yearning for the forbidden, that which would be harmful to me and to others. Like all tyrants of all times, I wanted to force my ideas upon others. I flew to the farthest galaxies with a speed a hundred or a thousand times faster than light. I discovered such potions that granted me Divine wisdom. Like the legendary Joseph de la Rinah, about whom I had read as a boy, I lured all the beauties of the world to my bed through magic. The summer had passed and it started to turn cold. I couldn’t stay on forever in Melech Ravich’s congested apartment, and I started to look for a room of my own. I suffered hunger, cold, sickness. The financial situation of the Literary Pages was such that they couldn’t even pay me the few groschen I had been promised. In my despair I allowed many errors to go by and stood to lose even this miserable job. My brother’s lot was no better than mine. In the midst of all my grandiose daydreams, a voice within me cried: “Put an end to it! You have nothing to wait for. With a rope or a razor you can free yourself of all this misery. There is but one redemption and that is death.”
That winter in Warsaw there were two institutions that kept me alive. One was the Writers’ Club, where I was allowed to come as a guest. It was warm there, one could read the Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers from all over the world or play chess, and the food at the buffet counter was reasonable. Occasionally, the waitresses even extended credit. Every few evenings a lecture was held, and I met many young writers—beginners like myself in the same dire straits as I. They all strove to have something published in the Literary Pages, and they may have assumed that I had some influence there. They heaped scorn on the established writers whose poems, stories, and articles I corrected. I realized something then that I had actually already known for a long time—that poor writers are often astute critics of other writers. Their criticism was sharp and accurate. Some even correctly pinpointed the errors of the great writers. But this didn’t stop them from writing with a clumsiness that astounded me. The same held true in the way they appraised the character of others. Egotists spoke with contempt of egotists, fools derided the stupidity of fools, boors demonstrated refinement in pointing out other men’s boorishness, exploitative traits, vanity. A mysterious chasm loomed between their estimation of others and of themselves. It seemed that somewhere within, each person was able to see the truth if only he was determined not to overlook it. Self-love was apparently the strongest hypnotic force, just as it is written in the Pentateuch: “For the bribe blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” The sage becomes blind and the saint will compromise with the evildoer when it suits his purpose, or when he thinks that it suits his purpose.
The other institution that sustained me was the libraries. For years I had suffered a hunger for books. In Warsaw I could get all the books I wanted. I went to the same Bresler’s Library and spent hours browsing there. There was a table where you could sit and read. I read and scanned through books on philosophy, psychology, biology, astronomy, physics. I went to the municipal library on Koszykowa Street and read scientific journals.
I didn’t understand everything I read, but I didn’t have to. Science offered me scant comfort. The stars were composed of the same matter as earth—hydrogen, oxygen, iron, copper, sulfur. They radiated vast amounts of energy that were lost in space or maybe transformed into matter again. From time to time a star exploded and became a nova. Enormous clouds of dust floated in space in the process of becoming stars billions of years hence. As far as the astronomers could tell, there was no life on the other planets of our solar system. As for probing the possibilities of life beyond the solar system, there was no hope for that. Neither Einstein’s theory nor any other theories held out any promise for the species of man. We already had radio sets in Poland, and when you put on the earphones you might hear jokes from vaudeville, a report on the political situation, or possibly even an anti-Semitic speech. Writers predicted television and airplanes that would cross the Atlantic, but these predictions did nothing to elevate my spirit ….
Once as I browsed in Bresler’s Library, I came across a complete translation or an abridgment of Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living. I took to this work with an eagerness that astounded even me. If even a hundredth part of the cases described there was true, all values would have to be reassessed. The writers were men who hadn’t the slightest reason to lie or falsify. Almost all the incidents had been thoroughly investigated. I learned of the English Society for Psychical Research. Even here in Poland such investigations were being conducted. Each day brought me some fresh news. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion had investigated hundreds of cases of mind reading, clairvoyance, true dreams and had written works about this that had been translated into Polish or German. Poland had a Professor Ochorowicz and a world-famous medium, Kluski. The Italian scholar Cesare Lombroso, who had been a materialist all his life, in his old age had become a spiritualist and participated in séances. I got the opportunity to read the works, or fragments of works, of Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the creator of Sherlock Holmes, which I had read as a boy in Yiddish translation and which had so enthralled me. In the science taught at the universities, man was ashes and dust. He lived out his few years and became lost forever. But the psychical researchers stated directly or indirectly that the body contained a soul. The twenty million people who had perished in the war were somewhere about. I read cases of dogs, cats, and parrots coming back to their owners after death and giving signs of their love and devotion.
I was inclined to believe that which I read without further guarantees, but I recalled what I had told myself only two weeks earlier—that self-love and self-interest were a colossal hypnotic force. I had read a translation of William James’s The Will to Believe. Every kind of fantasy nourished itself upon this will. The fact that official science offered me no comfort was no proof that it lied. As much as I yearned to believe the psychical researchers, I realized full well that all their contentions were based on what this or the other person had related to them. I also got hold of books by writers who denied all the assertions of spiritualists and psychical researchers. Even at that time they had already unearthed many swindlers among the mediums. I didn’t dare let myself be bribed by my own desires! I had to investigate personally and reassure myself that I wasn’t paying myself off to close my eyes to the truth.
I became so deeply engrossed in these matters that I forgot all my troubles. I read books about psychical research well into the night until my eyes closed. In the morning I rose with renewed curiosity. I had rented a room that was unheated and had bedbugs to boot. My clothes had grown tattered, nor did I get enough to eat, but I didn’t let these petty annoyances get me down. I no longer played chess at the Writers’ Club nor waged debates about literature. I took along books and read them at the club. The writers made fun of me. To this day elderly writers from Warsaw remind me of how I sat at the club reading books. The writers used to glance at the titles of these books and shrug. In the Yiddishist circles they virtually didn’t know that such reading matter even existed.
The winter passed—I rightly didn’t know how—and spring came. My room was no longer so cold. At this time I met a man and a woman who came to influence my life.
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Ten
Even before coming to Warsaw I had heard of Hillel and Aaron Zeitlin. Two giants—father and son—had evolved in Yiddish literature in the radical, atheistic atmosphere of a Jewish culture that was ignorant and provincial besides. The father, Hillel Zeitlin, who was learned in philosophy and a cabalist, had come to the early conclusion that a modern Jewishness (whether in nationalistic or socialistic form) that lacked religion was a paradox and an absurdity. Hillel Zeitlin lived in a milieu that dictated worldly Jewishness. Bialik the Hebraist and Peretz the Yiddishist both maintained that the Jews could be a people even without religion. Bialik contended that this could be possible only in a Jewish land, whereas Peretz advocated that Jews should fight for national autonomy in the lands where they lived. But Hillel Zeitlin postulated powerful arguments that Jewishness without religion—a Jewishness based on a language or even upon a nation—lacked the force to keep the Jews united. What’s more, such Jews wouldn’t be Jews but Gentiles who happened to speak Yiddish or Hebrew. Even prior to Zeitlin, Ahad Ha-am had offered similar opinions, but Ahad Ha-am had himself been an agnostic, a doubter of the religious truths, one for whom religion had been merely a means of keeping the Jews together. It’s needless to say that such a religiousness would hold no appeal for anyone. On the other hand, Hillel Zeitlin was a deeply religious man whose religious convictions mounted with the years. Hillel Zeitlin was a genuine mystic, a man who perceived the vanity of vanities that made up the world as well as its contradictions and illusions. He bore within him the religious fervor of the Jews of yore. It’s a fact that the extreme Orthodox didn’t look up to him. To them, he was a heretic. Hillel Zeitlin had studied philosophy and had published a book in Yiddish, The Problems of Good and Evil. I found more philosophy in this book than in all the other books of this kind put together. He didn’t quibble over details but went straight to the essence of things. Even the ice-cold philosophers turned hot in the glow of his light. His son, Aaron Zeitlin, was a great religious poet, in my opinion one of the greatest in world literature. Like his father, he was a mystic and a cabalist; he actually formulated his own concept of the cabala. I had read his poems while still in Bilgorai and had grown enchanted by them. In his early years his style was a bit too muddled and “modernistic,” but later on he realized that one can be both deep and clear. Although Aaron Zeitlin had received a modern education and knew languages and world literature, he remained essentially a Yeshiva student, a bookish man and an intellectual in the truest sense of the word. We became acquainted at the Writers’ Club. There was a windowless room there where the lights were always on, one wall always stayed warm. It was connected to the oven of a restaurant that was kept constantly heated. In winter I often sat by this wall and read. I apparently suffered from low blood pressure, since I often felt cold even in the summer. The Gemara has a word for it: “A donkey stays cold even in the month of Tammuz.”
One day in spring as we both stood by this wall warming ourselves, we struck up an acquaintance which soon turned into a friendship that was to last a lifetime. Zeitlin was some six or seven years older than I and by then already a well-known, mature poet and essayist, and I was an unknown beginner. It’s obvious why I should have been eager to know him, but I can’t understand to this day why he should have taken an interest in me. We were very much different in character, and this difference intensified over the years. I saw his faults clearly, as he did mine. I liked women; from the very first I wrote about sex in such a way as to shock the Yiddish critics and often the readers, too; he was decidedly monogamous and a romantic. Books were only a part of my life, but to Zeitlin a book was virtually life itself. As restrained as he was in his own behavior, so wise was he to all the human passions. I waged a private war with the Almighty, but Zeitlin always defended Him. He might have easily been a recluse or a monk. We disagreed occasionally, but we remained friends.
The Yiddish writers who for years were nearly to a man infected with leftism castigated the Zeitlins, both the father and the son. When I grew older and they read my writings, it sent them into a rage. Neither Aaron Zeitlin nor I fitted into Yiddish literature with its sentimentality and clichés about social justice or Jewish nationalism. Both Zeitlin and I were deeply interested in psychic research. We both (actually all three—the elder Zeitlin, too) realized that the writers whom the Yiddish and Hebrew critics considered major figures and classicists were in fact often inept provincials. It didn’t take us long to realize that what prevailed in Yiddish literature held true in all the world literatures, too. Every true talent was an oasis in a desert of tastelessness. When he is still young, he assumes that he can push back the sands and transform the desert into a paradise, but as he grows older, he realizes that he should thank God that the desert didn’t swallow him up the way it already had many others. What’s more, since God had created the desert, the desert had every reason to exist. Where did it say that green grass was more important or even prettier than brown sand? …
We often sat for hours then—and years later, too—conversing. We both believed in God, in demons, evil spirits, in all kinds of ghosts and phantoms. In those days Aaron Zeitlin was deeply concerned that the Yiddish critics cut him to pieces, and he often railed against them bitterly. I observed with shame that when a critic occasionally did praise him, Zeitlin changed his opinion of the critic virtually on the spot. This, as far as I know, was Zeitlin’s only fault. I had many other, bigger faults, but I couldn’t tolerate this particular weakness in Zeitlin, even though he made no mention of my shortcomings.
That spring I also met a woman who in her own fashion was a mystic, too, and who came to influence my life and my writing. By then I had already had some doings with women—but always in a hurry and in an atmosphere of fear. I might say that I snatched a taste of love here and there which inevitably left me unfulfilled, confused, and occasionally ashamed as well. Older people often said they envied my youth, but I knew that there was nothing to envy. A day didn’t go by that I didn’t contemplate suicide. My biggest torment was my lack of success in my writing. I would write something that seemed to me good, but I soon picked it apart and tore it to pieces. I searched about for a criterion by which to judge literature, but I couldn’t find it. I frequently awoke filled with doubt and went to bed in the same state of mind. I often had the feeling that someone had bewitched me. I wanted to write one thing, but what emerged was something else altogether. I formulated a plan for a story, but the plan slipped through my fingers.
Spring had come and balmy breezes blew outside. I had to find another place, since the people from whom I subleased wanted the room for themselves. I spent weeks looking for a place, but the rents were too high all over and the rooms seemed cold, damp, insufficiently lighted. My feet hurt from climbing endless flights of stairs. I might have laid the whole burden on my brother’s shoulders, but it’s not in me to whine. Besides, my brother had problems of his own.
On that particular day I didn’t go looking for a room. I got up late and went to the Writers’ Club. On the way there I bought a bagel, and I ate it right in the street. The sun was shining, but I felt cold and shivered. I sat down by the warm wall and began to read some book on hypnotism, occultism, magnetism, or however the author described the hidden powers. It told of a man over whom his dead mother had been keeping watch for many years. Each time he faced danger he heard her voice warning him. She gave him advice, even brought him together with the woman he married. The man told this story himself and provided names and addresses of witnesses who corroborated everything he said. If this story was true, I told myself, it behooved me to lead a different kind of life. I had to dedicate myself to disseminating these truths, to convincing mankind that there was no such thing as death. That being the case, it made no sense whatsoever to commit suicide ….
Love and Exile Page 8
