All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [161]
Later I moved for a third time, into the Master Hotel on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street, where I lived until my marriage, in 1969. It was a small studio with a breathtaking view of the Hudson and the lights of Manhattan and New Jersey. I spent a lot of time looking out the window. As I wrote, I watched the city shake itself awake at dawn or sink into dusk while the luminous river of cars snaked by on the West Side Highway. More than a few visitors were so entranced by the view that they forgot the purpose of their visit.
It isn’t easy to put down roots in a new country. I had done reasonably well in Paris, but I wondered whether I could manage here. How long would it take me to adjust? Why did all those people in Times Square run so fast? Were they trying to gain time? What I wanted was to slow time down. I was going to have to find some milieu in which the refugee in me could feel comfortable.
David Gedailovitch (who became first Gedalya, then Guy in an effort to seem more American) was my constant companion. Born in Slatina, a Czech village across the Tisza River from Sighet, he, too, had been in Buna. I considered him both overly optimistic and devilishly resourceful. He could repair my electric razor and cook his dinner with equal skill. And if there was ever something he didn’t know, he always knew someone who did. A perfume merchant and restaurateur, lover of great wines and importer and exporter of all kinds of merchandise, he introduced me to his circle of friends and associates. It was he who helped me overcome the trivial obstacles in my daily life and who found my third studio for me. And Abe Biller, generous with his time and advice. How many hours a day have we spent together talking about Israel?
I had also run into two or three old friends from Sighet, who lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan. They didn’t appreciate my “serious” behavior. They had come to New York not to remake the world but to have a good time, and it was they who introduced me to the American custom of the blind date, by providing me with a list of phone numbers. I spent precious dollars in a thoroughly vain attempt to charm distant beauties.
Jacob Baal-Teshuva, the representative of an Israeli film weekly whom I had met in Paris the year before, showed me how foreign correspondents did their work in New York—a piece of cake. All you had to do was drop in at the editorial offices of The New York Times every evening at nine-thirty and pick through “all the news that’s fit to print” until one had what one needed for a dispatch. A Western Union office happened to be nearby. By midnight I was ready to go home.
Richard Yaffe, a correspondent for the leftist Israeli daily published by Mapam, helped me acquire a “desk” in the UN press room. A little older than I, with an open face, horn-rimmed glasses, and a warm smile, he took me under his wing. An excellent reporter and a generous man more interested in truth than in scoops, he passed his tips on to me and taught me to avoid the many pitfalls that lurked for members of the international press corps at UN headquarters. He knew many delegates and had entrée everywhere. He may also have suspected that my financial situation was less than ideal, for he took me to cocktail parties and receptions where I was able to save lunch money by downing petits fours and cheese sandwiches. I loved listening to his analyses and anecdotes. He never talked about himself, and so it was from colleagues that I learned his story. He had been a star reporter for CBS in Eastern Europe in the fifties, but was subpoenaed