A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [135]
For two and a half hours Elbaum and the cantor chanted, periodically walking over to the press to tell them to put down their cameras. Then the blond American bar mitzvah boy was brought up and read his passage. He then signaled for Emily Korzenik to come down from the balcony. Korzenik could stand it no longer in any case, and she pushed her way downstairs through the media to the bimah, the reading area. Elbaum physically stopped her from putting on a prayer shawl. A woman wearing a prayer shawl was too much for him. But he had to retreat when the bar mitzvah boy threatened not to recite anymore. Korzenik shouted from Isaiah, while Elbaum shouted “Ladies cannot speak in the synagogue!” which made Korzenik shout Isaiah even louder. As the service ended, “Violence shall be heard no more in thy land” was the passage she was screaming over ElbaunVs insistent voice. The few Cracow Jews watched in dismay.
P A R T F I V E
THE
SILENCE
April 14, 1987, Miami Beach, conversation between the author and Isaac Bashevis Singer:
MK: Do you think that the Holocaust was an anomaly of history?
SINGER: No. It's a part of human history. The whole of human history is a holocaust.
MK: If that is true and there is a God, what is God doing?
SINGER: (shouts with real anger in his voice): He did it! HE did it! I didn't do it! He created a world in which animals and man and God knows what else fight like hell all of the time. Fight! They fight for sex. They fight for territory. They fight for all kinds of cultures. They fight about religion.
MK: What is it like to be 83? What does the world look like?
SINGER: The same like 23 because I am the same man. I have the same troubles. I have the same passions. I have even somehow, although I don't have as much, hope as I had at 20, but more or less the same. Maybe I'll write another good story.
MK: But you mean all of the questions you have been asking all of your life, none of them have been answered?
SINGER: No. No question can be. Of course if I ask what time it is and someone gives me the time, a question has been answered, but when it comes to the so-called eternal questions, none of them were answered.
MK: So you keep asking them?
SINGER: I was always compelled to. We always say what did God do. And God is silent as ever. We have to make peace with it or else.
23
Belgium,
On a Bank
of the Yser
IN THE 1970S, WHILE JEWISH LIFE WAS PROSPERING IN Antwerp's diamond district, something very different was happening sixty miles away by a bank of the Yser River along a flat, muddy stretch to the North Sea. In the Flemish language it was called the IJzerbedevaart, the pilgrimage to the Yser. An annual event that began in 1920, the IJzerbedevaart was the kind of internecine Belgian affair that had rarely interested Belgian Jews. It had to do with the animosity between the Flemish, who are essentially Catholic ethnic Dutch, and the French-speaking Belgians. It was a dispute between Catholics.
The pilgrimage was supposed to be a demonstration for peace, a ceremonial march to a dank and stark monument, a 150-foot-high tower with a bulky Celtic cross on the top. The words “no more war” are written on the tower in four languages. But it has never been a very peaceful pilgrimage. In the beginning, the Flemish made the pilgrimage to commemorate their staggering losses in the World War I trenches under the leadership of French-speaking officers. Why had the frontline troops been 80 percent Flemish without any Flemish-speaking officers? The IJzerbedevaart quickly turned into an expression of Flemish nationalism—the desire of the Flemish to have a separate country. Flemish nationalism is not popular with Belgian Jews because Antwerp is in the Flemish region and because, while Antwerp Jews claim to have a generally good relationship with their Flemish neighbors, those who lived through the German