All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [116]
He kept his word and we had dinner together that very evening. “Call me Teddy,” he said. We liked each other. He made an interpreter’s life sound very fine indeed: well-paid trips, a good salary, exciting meetings with world figures. He said it was better than journalism. I protested. I loved my trade and would not let him disparage it. We had a lively discussion, arguments for and against. Teddy was a brilliant, funny man, a born raconteur. He told me of his life as a young Jew in Poland. He remembered Lvov with nostalgia, and seemed to have a great need to speak of his father, who had been an important lawyer there. He had had many protégés, among them a classmate of Teddy’s two years his junior for whom he bought books and clothing and for whom he paid tuition, with a generosity Teddy believed to be motivated by the friendship between the two adolescents. Years later he learned the real reason: The boy was his half-brother. They met again in Lvov after the war. “I’ll never forget how much I owe your father,” his friend said. And Teddy had corrected him gently: “You mean our father.”
Then it was my turn to talk, of Kalman the Kabalist, Shushani, Pedro. Of all my characters, it was Pedro he found the most fascinating. I was delighted to have met Teddy; we had much to talk about, many things to share. He asked me how well I knew Geneva. When I told him I had never been there, he described its tranquil mood, its serenity.
Finally, we talked about the job. Teddy filled me in on practical details and offered useful advice. When he gave me a letter confirming our agreement, I felt rich. This would pay the rent for months. I was still uneasy about whether I would be up to the task, but Teddy reassured me. “Don’t worry, most of the speeches will be in Yiddish, so you’ll have less work than the others.” At that point I confessed the trick I had played on him that morning. He burst out laughing. “I love it! What a lesson. That ought to teach me.” I promised not to do it again.
The conference opened two weeks later. I arrived by train, traveling first-class, in princely style. The eight interpreters (English, French, Hebrew, and Yiddish) were housed in a luxury hotel, along with our chief, who invited us to organize our work over coffee. “I have confidence in you,” he said. “Just make sure you don’t translate the opposite of what the speaker says. For the rest, we can always work it out.”
We worked it out by splitting up into four teams of two for each language, but so many of the speeches were given in Yiddish that my teammate and I had little to do. We therefore tried to help out the French team. That was when something happened that cost me quite a bit of money and caused considerable dissension.
It happened two days before the close of the conference, at a closed-door session of the executive committee. I was translating President Nahum Goldmann’s speech into French. He was reporting to the delegates on his negotiations with West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer about the reparations and indemnities the Bonn government was to pay Israel and the survivors of Nazi persecution.
Here I must explain that while Goldmann had a reputation