All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [10]
In general, I accepted outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred as endemic to our condition. If they beat us on Christmas Eve or threatened us at Easter, it would pass soon enough. If drunks insulted us, cursing us for having “profaned the Host,” “poisoned the wells,” or “killed the Lord,” it was only natural, to be expected. I faced these ordeals without astonishment, almost without sorrow, as though telling myself, it’s their problem, not ours.
But during the darkest times, I would ask myself simple, perhaps simplistic questions: Why do they hate us? Why do they persecute us? What did we do to arouse such cruelty? I would discuss it with my teachers, and even more often with my friends.
My teachers’ response was to have us read and reread the Bible, the prophets, and martyrological literature. Jewish history, flooded by suffering but anchored in defiance, describes a permanent conflict between us and the others. Ever since Abraham, we have been on one side and the rest of the world on the other. Hence the animosity. “Abraham, the first of the patriarchs, was a better Jew than you,” said one of my tutors, a tense and agitated man with eyes that burned with rage. “He was a thousand times better than all of us, but the Midrash tells us that he was cast into a burning furnace. So how do you expect to breeze through life without a scratch? Daniel was wiser than you and more pious, yet he was condemned to die in a lion’s den. And you dream of living your life without suffering? The children of Jerusalem were massacred by the soldiers of General Nebuzaradan, and you complain?” Later Kalman, my Kabalist Master, had me recite aloud the litanies and chronicles of the afflictions of Jewish communities dispersed during the Crusades and ensuing pogroms. The communities of Blois and Mainz, York and Reims, all perished by sword and fire for refusing to renounce their faith. And he would conclude by quoting the Talmud: “Better to be among the victims than among the killers.”
I thrived on these stories, proud of these Jews whose fidelity to the Covenant made them both vulnerable and immortal. I felt drawn to the prisoners of the Inquisition. Each of them recalled Isaac, though no angel intervened to extinguish the flames that were to consume them. I was haunted by their ordeal. Would I have had the strength to endure? I dreamed of Rabbi Hanina ben Tradyon, the Talmudic sage condemned by the Romans to die slowly on the pyre because he had taught the law in the public square. How had he and his disciples and theirs managed not to yield? I thought of my own ancestor Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann, author of the Tossafot Yom-Tov, who was imprisoned in Prague and Vienna during the Thirty Years’ War. Would I, too, be able to remain Jewish under my jailers’ eyes? I liked to invoke the memory of another ancestor, the Sh’la Hakadosh: at the supreme moment would he come to help me follow him without fear or shame?
Today, half a century later, these questions remain open. My people’s survival leaves me perplexed even now, just as the undying hatred for it continues to preoccupy me.
Guided by my teachers, I hoped to find the answer in books. I read assiduously, perhaps too assiduously. Hence my disdain—surely a failing—for sports. Football, skiing, tennis: none of them was for me. Certain rich young Jews of assimilated families engaged in these sports, but I didn’t even know how to swim. For relaxation I played chess, and sometimes cards on Christmas Eve, when even ultraorthodox Jews played cards rather than show themselves on the street. Other evenings I spent with friends among the Hasidim, who always found some occasion for celebration. On Saturday afternoons in spring I would go for walks in the Malompark or along the banks of the Tisza and Iza, our town’s two rivers. One summer evening I followed a crowd to the main square and spent hours