All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [143]
I often think of him with affection. I came close to sharing a few of his adventures, real or imaginary. Adventurers don’t always tell the truth; they prefer to invent it. But he did take me to lunch at the home of the Mendès-France family, didn’t he?
In those years Paris teemed with strange characters: genuine vagabonds and fake warriors, currency smugglers, impoverished princes, men intoxicated with holiness, others with debauchery, men of many trades and of none. Listening to their real or fabricated memories, I gathered stories for my novels to come.
Like most of my foreign colleagues in search of the exotic, I spent a lot of time in the Latin Quarter (remembrance of existentialism past) and Montparnasse (hoping to encounter starving artists on leave from their garrets). I would sit at an outdoor table at La Coupole and jot down ideas and impressions. Looking up from the page, I hoped to discover the next Soutine or Modigliani, or even Chagall. Some had talent but no luck, while some of the lucky ones were sadly lacking in talent.
I liked to wander around with my friend Avigdor Arikha, the painter. Born in Romania, he had endured the ghettos and camps in the Romanian-occupied territory of Transnystria. He often accompanied me on midnight visits to Radio France to send my dispatches. I tried to get him to talk about Mogilev, for not enough is known of the history of that ghetto that became the site of massacre. Arikha, a great artist (delicate drawings, stunning portraits), evolved from abstract expressionism to a classicism of rare originality. He was a man of great esoteric erudition. A friend and confidant of Samuel Beckett, he was interested in everything: philosophy and literature, science and history. At once naïve and arrogant, sweet and rigid, he was capable of losing his temper over nothing. You had merely to disagree with something he said. I envied him for having taken part in the war of independence in 1948. He had arrived in Palestine with the Youth Aliyah. Naturally, we often talked about the situation in Israel. He would have liked to have been able to rewrite history and live in a Jewish kingdom. He imagined himself as “Prince of Jerusalem,” and, in his magnanimity, he crowned me “Prince of Galilee.”
If there was a “Prince of Lithuania,” it would have been our friend Izis, an exceptional, inspired photographer, intimate of the poet Jacques Prévert and André Malraux. Nicolas, my friend from Ambloy and Versailles, helped research the text for his album on Israel, a masterpiece.
I also spent time with Mane Katz, an old friend of Yehuda Mozes, the owner of Yedioth, who had asked me to get in touch with him. Short and bubbly, astonishingly agile for his age, he skipped as he walked and talked. He liked to tell anecdotes (true or invented) about his vague resemblance to Ben-Gurion. A woman supposedly fell in love with him when she mistook him for the Israeli prime minister. A spy offered him Arab military secrets in exchange for a recommendation addressed to the Good Lord Himself, who, as everyone knows, lives somewhere in Jerusalem. A crook offered him a large sum of money for the treasury of the Jewish state. “Funny thing, the moment I reveal my true identity, they disappear,” he added with a chuckle.
His apartment looked like a storehouse of Jewish antiques. Ritual objects and ancient books were scattered everywhere, in indescribable disorder: on the floor, on the bed, and even under it. I wondered how he managed to sleep, live, and paint in such chaos, but somehow he did. There was always a bottle of whiskey or vodka under his blanket, and we would drink out of cups as we chatted. He told me of his childhood in Kremenchug, his nomadic adolescence, and his early years in Paris, where he came into contact with the greatest names in the art world. He was jealous of Picasso and especially of Chagall. He knew countless stories about the former’s