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By Root 2052 0

A Jew Today) I described my reaction, my indignation. Later I was angry at myself, for having said that I knew Jewish children who had suffered more than Jesus and of whom we did not speak. I had no right to hurt him, especially since he never sought to use his faith as a sword against mine. On the contrary, it was because he loved Jesus that he defended Jews, because he suffered at Jesus’s suffering, that he strove to assuage ours. But I came to understand that only later. In the end he didn’t get me an audience with Mendès-France (for the simple reason that I never asked him), but in the meantime we became friends, and that friendship meant more to me than all the scoops in the world.

A man of integrity whose personality was riddled with contradictions, he was by turns humble and ironic, acerbic and compassionate, a rich bourgeois but a friend of the dispossessed, charitable but fiercely polemical, a devout believer who understood those who doubted faith. “We should have met sooner,” he confided to me one day, a tinge of sorrow in his voice. “I’m an old man now, too old to start over.”

He wrote of our first meeting in his column of Saturday, May 14, 1955, referring to a “young Israeli who had been a Jewish child in a German camp.” Of course, I wasn’t Israeli. Perhaps in his mind, Jew and Israeli were the same thing.

I owe him a lot. He was the first person to read Night after I reworked it from the original Yiddish. He submitted it to his own publisher, promising to write a preface for the book, to speak of it in the press, and to support it with all the considerable means at his disposal. “No one’s interested in the death camps anymore,” he was told. “It won’t sell.” He then took my manuscript to Jérôme Lindon at Éditions de Minuit. The ever-daring Lindon ignored commercial considerations and gave my story a chance.

I don’t know how I would have fared without Mauriac. He kept a watchful eye on my literary efforts. During each of my trips to France I went to see him, just to talk. I needed his approval, his trust. He always began with a summary of what people had been talking about in France while I was away. I will never forget his account of a woman’s failed suicide against the background of an ill-fated love affair; she was a great journalist for whom he felt true tenderness. Then there was the story of his granddaughter’s marriage to a film director. But we also talked about such matters as his latest conversation with General de Gaulle, or the verbal thrashing he had administered to an insolent writer. He spoke often of his confessor, whom he considered a true confidant. Mauriac wept as he spoke of his brother Pierre, an ardent Pétainist accused of collaboration, who had been arrested and imprisoned in Bordeaux in 1944.

Excerpts from conversations with François Mauriac:

“But you were among the few who discerned the evil and refused to compromise.”

“Not at first, not at first. Like everyone else, I thought Pétain had the interests of France at heart. I believed that, and even wrote two articles that said so.”

“You were not alone.”

“No, I wasn’t. Others went further, longer, and deeper into error. But that’s no excuse.”

“Still. You stopped in time. Then there was Le Cahier noir.…”

“Yes, of course. But let’s tell it as it was, as it is. In those days no one was innocent—I mean entirely innocent.”

“Except those who resisted. And the victims.”

“The victims, yes. Their innocence was absolute.”

“You told me I had to speak, to write.”

“Yes, I suggested that. You belong to a people who has survived by and through the Word.”

“What word?”

“The Lord’s Word.”

“And the Lord needs men to communicate His will?”

“It would seem so. Otherwise He would not have done it. The Jewish people have been invested with His word, have they not?”

“We are supposed to testify for Him. But how? Christians say, through suffering. We say, through faith.”

“But is that enough? You are not the only ones to have suffered, nor to have rejected heresy. In what way are the Jewish people different from others?”

“All peoples are different,