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One day when he was in an especially good mood, he told me he had a present for me. “I’m alone in the world,” he explained, “for all practical purposes without an heir. The jackals will get their claws on my canvases. So why don’t you take a few?” Without waiting for an answer, he brought them out to me, and I don’t know which touched me more, his generosity or the atmosphere that permeated his work. His pictures were of old Hasidim and their young disciples, and resonated with the melodies that filled my memory. I needed the warmth that seemed to pour from his paintings, a warmth that carried me back to a world swallowed by history. “What about it?” Mane Katz asked. “This present will be worth millions someday, and you don’t even say thank you?” He laughed, while I was so gripped by emotion that I felt like hiding. “Thank you,” I finally managed to stammer, “a thousand thanks, but I cannot accept such an extravagant gift.” He was speechless. “What, are you crazy?” he said. “I offer you treasures and you turn them down? You don’t like my work? If Chagall or Picasso gave you some canvases, would you refuse them too?” He shook with anger. “I love your work,” I told him. “Really I do. It’s just that as a journalist I can’t accept gifts. It’s a question of professional ethics.” He exploded with indignation, telling me that ethics had nothing to do with it. We argued about it for a while. Finally, he sat down on his bed, legs folded under him, and pointed to a stool. “Okay,” he said. “Explain your ethics to me.” I tried to beg off, but he insisted. Citing ancient sources that had nothing to do with the matter at hand, some drawn from Scripture, others from my own imagination, I spoke for an hour or two, or perhaps until dawn. I talked about the duty of objectivity, the pitfalls of complacency, explaining that a reporter is both witness and judge, and that the Bible is scathing in its criticism of judges who take gifts. I don’t know if I convinced him, but I do know I wasn’t telling the truth. Actually, I turned down his gift because I was too poor; I had no place to put such valuable works. My only possessions were a typewriter and a suitcase. What would I do—hang the paintings in my suitcase?

Another “gift” I declined torments me to this day. The Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever and my colleague Léon Leneman were both close friends of Marc Chagall. One day they sent me a message from the artist. It seems he liked my book Souls on Fire and proposed that we collaborate on a book about the great masters and their disciples. He would do the illustrations.

I hesitated and procrastinated, delaying my response. Finally, I let this project, a chance to work with one of the century’s great painters, slip away.

One gift I was lucky enough to reject was a pair of shoes. At a Zionist meeting an elegant, seemingly educated man approached me. He spoke halting French but perfect Yiddish. He told me he was from my region and asked if we could have coffee together. We went to an outdoor café and he told me an interesting tale. He remembered Sighet, which he had passed through during the war. Drafted into the labor battalion, he had followed the Hungarian army through Poland and into Ukraine. Now he was an international businessman. Import-export—the magic words. He was making so much money he didn’t know how to spend it. “Listen,” he said. “I have a brand-new pair of expensive shoes. They’re too small for me, and I’d be delighted if you would wear them.” I refused. He insisted, but to no avail. No longer a starving Sorbonne student, I owned a perfectly good pair of shoes. But he refused to take no for an answer, acting as though his future were at stake. I therefore fell back on my standard argument: professional ethics. It sounded less convincing in Yiddish than in French, but I can be stubborn when I have to be. I don’t remember exactly how we parted, except that he asked for my card.

A few weeks later I was summoned to the Quai des Orfèvres, national police headquarters. My heart