by Elie Wiesel
10
Back at the hotel, he had to face a large crowd of newsmen, both foreign and domestic. They showered him with provocative questions, which he dodged with tact and diplomacy. Several microphones were shoved under his nose and the national hero had to improvise the usual statements which all heroes of all revolutions must improvise in all languages, praising the same leaders and invoking the same principles. All things considered, it was not too difficult a task.
After the press conference, the bellhop came in, blushing like a schoolboy. “I should have known … guessed who you were … How stupid of me … Will you ever forgive me?”
For several days—or was it several weeks?—the hero could not go out without being mobbed by autograph-seekers. Women smiled at him, men greeted him with respect. Yet fame had no effect on him. It did not make him feel better. Or worse. He was carried from one celebration to another, from one political function to another, performing as in a dream.
More than once he almost left the tiny republic to return to his own country, his hometown. Since he had not succeeded in overcoming his apathy, he might just as well be living at home, surrounded by familiar objects. But each time he postponed his departure. Somehow he knew that this adventure had a sequel, an ending. It was this element of the unknown he loved and sought; he loved nothing else. And sometimes not even that.
11
Then one morning he had a nightmare: there was knocking at the door, they had come to arrest him. Again? Yes, again. Once more he went through the same motions. In the street below, the same unmarked black car was parked near the same corner. It made its way toward the same building. He was led into the same room and found himself face to face with the same woman, aged and ravaged, her hands tied. There was blood seeping from her mouth and emptiness in her eyes.
“You are accused of revolutionary activities against the government and the people,” said the officer, tall and serene, in a monotonous voice. “Guilty or not guilty?”
“Not guilty,” he replied mechanically.
“Too bad. Your denial makes it worse for you. We have witnesses. Look at this person. You know her, she knows you. And she confessed. You were her accomplice. A traitor’s accomplice, that’s what you are.”
“No,” said the stranger. “I am nothing of the kind. I am nothing and nobody.”
“Very well,” said the officer. “The witness will repeat her testimony.”
And the young woman obeyed: “Yes, he was my accomplice; yes, we did collaborate in armed attacks; yes, he knew it was a bomb he was carrying.” She stared at him and hissed: “Stop denying the obvious, friend. Why let yourself be tortured? They know everything. The revolution—yours and mine—has failed, and we have to pay the price: it’s part of the game, you know. So follow my advice: sign your confession.”
In his dream, he was going to shout that she was lying, that she was losing her mind, that he was not guilty—anything but guilty, at least of this crime—but in the face of so much absurdity, he chose not to humiliate himself. So, rather than protest, he began to laugh, gently at first and then with all his might.
Dumbfounded, the officer gaped at him in silence. Then he summoned a guard to take away the young woman. As she was being led past the stranger, she whispered: “I’m sorry, friend, but our movement will need martyrs, innocent martyrs especially.”
She went out, and the stranger’s eyes followed her. What a strange dream, he thought. What a strange life. One could die laughing.
THE DEATH OF MY TEACHER
“… mastering thirty ancient and modern languages, knowing by heart the Vedas as well as the Zohar, he felt at home in every culture, in every role. Always dirty, unkempt, he looked like a vagabond turned clown, or a clown turned vagabond. He wore a tiny hat, always the same, on top of his huge round head; his glasses with their thick, always foggy lenses only blurred his vision … For three years, in Paris, I was his disciple. And under his guidance I learned a great deal about the dangers of language and reason and about the ecstasies of wisdom and madness. I learned about the mysterious progress of thought through centuries and the equally mysterious persistence of hesitation through centuries of thought; but nothing about the secret which, though consuming him, protected him against a diseased humanity.”
That is how, in Legends of Our Time, I described without naming him, my master and teacher Rav Mordecai Shushani. If I reveal his name now, it is because he is no longer alive.
I received word of his death from another writer, Jean Halperin, who also considers himself his disciple. The news was given to me without details, because it was thought that I knew. I did not. I knew Shushani had settled in Montevideo, as mysterious as ever; nothing else.
On one occasion he had invited me to resume our studies together. From time to time I felt—and resisted—the urge to take the first plane leaving for Uruguay, to see him at least one more time, to compare him with the image I had retained. Also I wanted to be roused again; suspended between heaven and earth and permitted to see what brings them together and what sets them apart. But I was afraid. I wrote: “… I tremble each time I think of him in Montevideo, where he still awaits me, where he still calls to me; I am afraid to plunge into his legend which condemns us both, me to doubt and him to immortality.”
A young man in Montevideo wrote me describing his last hours: sitting on a lawn, surrounded by students, he was teaching them Talmud when suddenly he paused in mid-sentence; a moment later he had stopped breathing. In Jewish tradition, such death is called mitat neshika: the angel comes and embraces the chosen one like a friend and takes him along without inflicting pain.
And in his pockets they found my tale about my encounters with him.
So I know that he read it. But I shall never know what he thought of the portrait I had drawn. One thing is certain: he recognized himself.
Others recognized him despite my efforts to disguise the image. His disciples of one year, or one night, took pains to tell me they were not fooled: “The Wandering Jew, in your book, is Rav Shushani, isn’t it?”
I myself thought I had exaggerated; yet I had told the truth. Yes, he did visit faraway countries; yes, he did receive unusually high fees for his lectures, fees he then gave to charity; yes, he did behave like one of the hidden Just Men who enter exile and anonymity before offering salvation to their fellow men; yes, he was greater than the legend surrounding his person.
A famous Yiddish novelist told me:
In the early fifties I happened to be in Boston for a lecture. I was going to begin when a small dirty-looking man, wearing a ridiculous hat, pushed me away from the microphone and shouted: “Ladies and gentlemen, your guest tonight has no right to address you, you or any other audience!” In the commotion that followed, the chairman angrily rebuked him: “Are you out of your mind? Who are you, anyway?” “Never mind who I am,” answered the heckler. “But I know who he is. A faker, that’s who he is. I read an article he once wrote in a Yiddish newspaper in Paris. And he misquoted the Midrash. Anyone who misquotes the sources has no right to speak in public!” I thought he was mentally disturbed, and so did everyone else. True, I had served as editor of a Yiddish daily in postwar Paris. But that was long ago—in the late forties—I published articles five, six times a week. How could I remember? But he, Rav Shushani, remembered and forced me to remember. I had to apologize before being permitted to speak that evening. Several years later I came to Montevideo, also for a lecture. I was about to begin when I noticed a familiar face in the audience. Terror-stricken, I announced that I would not speak unless Rav Shushani left the room. Since the community didn’t know him yet, they thought I had gone mad. But despite their efforts to soothe me, I stuck by my decision. That evening, there was no lecture.
Recently, during a weekend in Oslo, I visited a childhood friend, Herman Kahan. We compared our postwar adventures.
He reminisced: “For a time, while waiting for my Norwegian visa, I lived in Paris. I often would visit an unpretent
ious synagogue where I met …”
He was remembering and smiling. So I continued for him: “… a mysterious character who possessed all the keys to all the gates and his name was Rav Shushani.”
“How did you know?” my friend exclaimed in total bewilderment.
“There is something about all those who ever met him. They can recognize each other. But tell me your story.”
“We studied every evening. It went on for weeks. One day he told me his trade: gold merchant. Soon afterwards he disappeared. When next I heard from him he was in Australia. With some of my money.”
By the time my friend received Rav Shushani’s letter from Australia, Rav Shushani was already in a kibbutz in Israel.
When did I see him last? A year ago, in Paris. As I left my hotel on Boulevard Saint-Germain, I noticed a familiar-looking vagabond; he was engaged in lively discussion with a pretty girl who was trying to sell him one of the new-left publications. It’s him, I thought. No, it can’t be; he is in Montevideo. The man standing there in front of the hotel only looks like him. Yet the resemblance was so striking that I felt the urge to ask him a direct question: “Aren’t you Rav Shushani?” But I didn’t want the girl to think I was really interested in her. And so I circled around them again and again until I remembered I had an appointment. Returning to my hotel, I told myself it couldn’t possibly have been him.
That same evening, in Strasbourg, Claude Hemmendinger, editor of the Tribune Juive, casually remarked: “By the way, did anyone tell you that Rav Shushani has reappeared in Paris?”
So he did see me. And wanted me to see him and miss this last opportunity to speak to him again. He wanted me to go on carrying inside me the same remorse and nostalgia as before.
He was buried in Jerusalem. His admirers and disciples all over the world had been ready to raise funds to take his earthly remains to the Holy City. But there was no need for that. After his death, it was discovered he was rich, richer than many of his followers.
Also discovered among his belongings were several manuscripts, probably containing what might well be his most important ideas and opinions. Except that nobody could decipher them. It was his way of leaving behind still another mystery, a final one.
Having in my possession several letters in his handwriting, I wanted to try my luck with the manuscripts. A few pages were given to me. I read them several times and had to give up: I could read them but could not understand their meaning.
Several months after his death I received a letter from a man claiming to be Shushani’s closest living relative: “Since Rav Shushani concerns and haunts you that much, and since he is no longer with us, let me tell you the truth about him.”
And he did tell me what he claimed to be the truth about Rav Shushani: his name, his origins, his secret voyages. The mystery was solved.
But the letter contained a postscript: “I am telling you all this because I think you ought to know. However, you are not to disclose the facts to anyone, not now, not ever.”
If I choose to obey, it is because I am sure that this is what Rav Shushani himself would have wanted.
Even if all his disciples, everywhere, were to begin speaking about him—and nobody else—we would not know more about who he really was, about what shadows he fled or sought, or the nature of his power and torment.
POSTWAR: 1948
It was a Friday afternoon. Israel had just declared its independence. The world, poised between amazement and anguish, held its breath: Would the Jewish people, in realizing its ancient dream, finally change course and destiny?
I was a stateless student living in Paris, but in my imagination I was a soldier in Jerusalem. Filled with tension and disbelief, I devoured the special editions that succeeded one another hourly. I wanted to be part of the event unfolding far away.
At nightfall I made my way to the synagogue for Shabbat services. Not so much to pray as to enter a dialogue and be part of a community. Prayers had not yet begun. It was getting late, but the excited worshippers were discussing politics and strategy: Could the Jewish state stand, could it survive against so many odds? Would the Great Powers come to its defense, if only to redeem themselves? Or would Israel be nothing but a spasm in history? The enemy had proclaimed a holy war and six hundred thousand Jews were already fighting, without arms or experience, against six armies at once, demonstrating a desperate, lucid courage two thousand years old.
The discussions were long and inexhaustible. My teacher, an old man famous for his Talmudic knowledge, pulled me into a corner and asked me point-blank: “From now on will you believe in miracles?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“And you’ll no longer deny God’s blessings?”
“No.”
His piercing eyes were watching me, his voice had become harsh and insulting: “Well, then, young man, it takes very little to please you.”
“The rebirth of a sovereign nation extinct for twenty centuries, you consider that little?”
I had never seen him so angry with me. “You don’t understand,” he said, enunciating each word carefully. “There is Israel and there is your reaction to Israel. I am thankful to Israel, but you disappoint me. The present and the future make you forget the past. You forgive too quickly.”
I blushed. Four years earlier I had left my town and my studies to enter night. Like many Jews from many towns in occupied Europe, I had gone carrying the name of the Messiah on my lips, the very same name which, according to legend, had preceded creation. I believed in man and even more in what transcended him. Then, abruptly, all my ties were cut. Overnight I was robbed of even the smallest point of reference and support. I was confronted with emptiness. Everywhere. To avoid sinking, I needed a miracle, or at least a sign.
“No!” my teacher was shouting. “I have no right to refuse salvation, though it does indeed come too late for too many. I am prepared to welcome it and open for it as many doors and hearts as possible. That, yes. But call it miraculous, that I refuse. We have paid too dearly for it. To be a miracle, it would have had to happen a little sooner.”
And, with clenched teeth, he began to pray, while in Israel blood was already flowing.
I often think of that conversation. I think of it each time I visit the Holy Land, each time I hear of an intrinsic link connecting the national resurrection of Israel to the era of Auschwitz. Everything inside me rebels against such a juxtaposition, particularly when viewed not as a purely chronological consequence but as a compensation or process of cause and effect. Actually, the two experiences have in common only those who lived through them. Thence their relationship on the level of conscience and sensitivity, perhaps even of memory, but not in any pattern of history. To impose a logical sequence on Auschwitz and Jerusalem, or a design other than dialectical, would be to diminish both.
Israel, an answer to the holocaust? It is too convenient, too scandalous a solution. First, because it would impose a burden, an unwarranted guilt-feeling, on our children. To pretend that without Auschwitz there would be no Israel is to endow the latter with a share of responsibility for the former. And second, Israel cannot be an answer to the holocaust, because the holocaust, by its very magnitude, by its essence too, negates all answers. For me, therefore, these are two distinct events, both inexplicable, unexplained, mysterious, both staggering to the mind and a challenge to the imagination. We shall never understand how Auschwitz was possible. Nor how Israel, scarcely a few years later, was able to draw from itself the strength and vision to rebuild its home in a world adrift and in ruins.
Certainly, after Auschwitz, the Jews needed a call to consolation, or at least a diversion. To breathe. To regain courage. But the world at large needed it even more. To make us forget its silence, its overwhelming complicity. To buy itself a clear conscience, and thereby, perhaps, escape its own destruction. In other words: the Jewish people would have continued to exist even if it had had to wait fifty more years to reclaim its state. Not so the world. The world, crushed with guilt
, could not afford to wait.
Let us be more specific: had Zionism and its demands not existed, what would have become of the survivors of the ghettos and the camps, the partisans emerging from the forests and mountains who, according to all logic, should have scorned the human race and dedicated themselves to hating and despising it. Outraged, betrayed, these men and women, disowned and victimized by society, had the right and also the means to pledge themselves to nihilism and let their anger explode—come what may. They had nothing to lose, no one to spare. No ties to country or life. No more illusions about the trend of history or man. They could easily have become social misfits, even criminals. Had they set fire to all of Europe, no one would have been surprised. But they did not.
They did not even take the opportunity to wreak vengeance on their avowed executioners. This cannot be repeated often enough: after the German debacle, the survivors wished to be neither avengers nor inquisitors. They might easily have become one or the other by releasing their pent-up rage. Instead, they let themselves be caught up in the great political and messianic adventure held out by Palestine; they devoted to it all their energy, all their ambition. Nothing else mattered any more. The struggle demanded all their passions, all their dedication. That is why there was no settling of accounts.
This also explains the almost unanimous sympathy shown to the newly created Jewish state at that time. In a vague way, people were grateful to Israel for having come into being just in time to divert the lightning. This was equally true for Western countries and the so-called people’s democracies: Israel transcended the Iron Curtain. Stalin and Truman each claimed the honor of being first to establish diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv. Prague gave Israel arms and planes. At the United Nations, Andrei Gromyko, Russia’s seasoned tactician, was on hand at every critical moment to support Israeli positions. France granted free passage to immigrants and volunteers. Public opinion was favorable, enthusiastic: people saw in Israel a promise, a symbol and an encouragement. The intelligence of its farmers, the courage of its fighters, its determination to conquer the desert and build there a new bastion of hope, a new city of sunshine and reward: one admired its work, one blessed its vision and pioneering spirit; not to love it meant to diminish oneself.
