All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [155]
The last time had been in Antwerp. He had arrived from Romania. A Hasid had told me that it was my cousin Avrom Feig of Arad who in 1944 had saved the Rebbe from deportation by sending a guide to lead him and his family across the border. In Antwerp he was as lonely and melancholy as I. But he was probably thinking of a time long before that.
“You liked me better before, Rebbe? Why? Because I wore side curls and feared heaven?”
He did not reply. Instead, he leaned forward, as if to examine me more closely. “Tell me,” he asked, “what is the relation between the man you are and the man I see?”
I fell back on philosophical double talk: “Being is not necessarily visible, and that which is visible is not necessarily part of being.”
He was silent. He looked unhappy, disapproving. “Where did you learn that?” he asked, his voice muffled.
“In books, Rebbe.”
“What books?”
I didn’t know what to say. He understood or he guessed. Profane works had displaced the sacred texts on my desk. The Talmud was no longer my sole concern.
“And if your grandfather, may he rest in peace, could see you, what would he say?”
The blow registered. “And you, Rebbe, who do see me, what do you say to me?”
His next question was one I asked of myself as well: What would I like to hear him say? Was I seeking his blessing? He closed his eyes, then opened them.
“The great Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav,” he said, “tells the story of a child lost in the forest. Gripped by panic, he cries, ‘Father, father, save me!’ So long as he cries, he can hope his father will hear him. If he stops, he is lost.”
All trace of severity was gone from his face and from his voice. I looked at him and saw his father, and suddenly I felt better.
“Rebbe,” I said, “believe me, I have never ceased to cry out.”
A smile brightened his face. He seemed relieved, perhaps even happy, happy to have brought me back.
“May the Lord be praised,” he said. “Then there is hope.”
The conversation became more relaxed. He asked me about my work. He wanted to know if the stories I told in my books were true, had they really happened. I answered not too convincingly: “In literature, Rebbe, certain things are true though they didn’t happen, while others are not, even if they did.”
I would have loved to have received his blessing.
In Jerusalem, as always, I climbed the towers of Notre Dame and the YMCA to look at the Old City, peering through binoculars at Jordanian soldiers strolling in the city of David. Later Yehuda Mozes (my employer and friend) and I revisited Galilee. Safed and Tiberias were now regular destinations in our personal itinerary.
My friend Paula Mozes kept me informed of developments at the paper. She was the confidante of all the journalists. Anyone in need of help or advice turned to her. The poet Uri-Tsvi Grinberg, whose work is among the most powerful in Israel, owed the comfort of his last years to her.
Paula was an exceptional woman, intelligent and courageous. During the Occupation she had escaped from her native town, Zhdanov-Lubelsky, and reached Smolensk, where she joined a unit of Russian partisans. Disguised as a peasant, she kept house for the local Kommandantur. Having convinced the Germans that she did not understand their language, she was allowed to remain present when officers chatted among themselves. She risked her life often and her information contributed to the success of many acts of sabotage, especially those that targeted railroad tracks. After the war she made her way to Budapest, then to Vienna. When she left for Palestine, she brought four hundred orphans with her.
Today a great sadness comes over me when I think of Paula and Noah and the tragedies they suffered. Their twelve-year-old son Adi was hit by a car and killed in Ramat Gan. The following year they had another son, Nonni. As a young adolescent he was in a car that skidded and killed a neighborhood boy in the very spot