All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [102]
In Tel Aviv I tried to contact Nicolas, but he was in the army. I did manage to locate the two sisters of André Bodner, a former OSE counselor. In Haifa I ran into my cousin Leizer Slomovic, a future professor of Talmud in Los Angeles who had married a girl from Sighet. I spent a Shabbat with them, and their happiness was contagious. They gave me the address of our cousins Reshka and Leibi Feig in Tel Aviv, and I spent another Shabbat with them. Reshka knew my taste for latkes, which I had not eaten since the ghetto. They were happy, though their material circumstances were difficult, but so were everyone else’s. Individual problems didn’t seem to matter much, given the historic events the country was living through. My cousins talked like Zionist propagandists: A good Jew, a real Jew, ought not to spend even one day more than necessary in the Diaspora. Everyone here said the same thing. I was in no mood to argue and couldn’t have even if I had wanted to. I was conditioned to see only the good side of Israel. Call it sentimental, but I was moved when I spoke to a Jewish official, questioned a Jewish politician, saw a Jewish policeman or a Jewish army officer, or listened to a Jewish cabinet minister.
I loved the Galilee, so much so that I felt like settling down in Safed, city of mystic visionaries, or perhaps in Tiberias, of whose charms the Talmud boasts. But then, why not settle in the Negev, a desert unlike any other, of which so many poets ancient and modern had sung? And Jerusalem, most beautiful, most silent and inspired of cities—why not spend the years remaining to me there? Of course, I could not visit the Old City, the true Jerusalem; it was still in the hands of the Jordanian army. To see it I climbed the tower of Notre Dame, the Lamentations of Jeremiah ringing in my mind: How solitary, how abandoned, is the city of God.
For the first time since its founding in the days of King David, there was no Jewish life nor any Jew within its walls. Even after the Temple’s destruction, not everyone had deserted it. But now the Israelis seemed to have forgotten it, an inexplicable, disconcerting phenomenon I decided to investigate. But it wasn’t easy, for the witnesses to Jerusalem’s tragedy refused to speak. Faces went blank when I asked questions. I did not write on the subject, at least not yet. Much later I would speak of it in A Beggar in Jerusalem (1967) and The Forgotten (1989).
The fall of Jerusalem in 1948 haunts me still. Can it be compared to its fall in the year 70, after the Tenth Roman Legion, commanded by Tiberius, nephew of Philo of Alexandria, laid siege to the city? Who were the men who defended her to the last? What happened during her last hours of sovereignty? I was riveted by the merest detail.
In my notebook I recorded what I managed to discover about her more recent fall. Here are excerpts from a chronicle:
… And that morning a strangely sad scene unfolded beneath Jerusalem’s blue sky.
Two old rabbis, Minzberg and Hazzan, approached the Zion Gate, in the Old City, bearing a large white sheet stretched between two poles.
It was Friday, a luminous Friday, the twenty-ninth of May 1948, nine-fifteen in the morning.
On the other side the Arabs …
When the Jordanians occupied the Old City, defended by a tiny group of poorly armed Jews, they vented their frustration. “Had we known how few you were, we would have driven you out with sticks.”
Why were the Old City’s defenders so few in number and so poorly armed? At the start of the siege, two thousand Jews lived there with