All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [164]
To alleviate my financial problems I did freelance work for the Yiddish daily Morgen Journal, filling in for its UN correspondent when he was away. The weekly Der Amerikaner accepted a few of my articles but would have preferred a serialized novel, which I did not have. “A pity,” said David Mekler, its editor in chief and a great lover of fiction, one day when we met. “I have a respectable budget for a novel.” I looked at him, a small, nervous man with thick glasses and an ironical expression. Apparently, he was not joking. “In that case,” I said, “I think I may have something stuck in a drawer somewhere.” I sat at the typewriter that very night, and in a week or two I churned out (under the pseudonym Elisha Carmeli) a romantic spy novel of which I remember only the premise: A man and a woman, both Israeli intelligence agents, are desperately in love, and one or the other is sent on a mission to Egypt. I can’t recall if the operation was a success, but I do know that all my characters died at the end, since I wasn’t sure what else to do with them. Mekler was as nonplussed as I was, but he published my novel anyway, under the title Silent Heroes. I am convinced he never read it all the way through. I didn’t read the printed version either, but Simon Weber, news editor of the Jewish Daily Forward (popularly known as the Forverts), noticed it. He also knew I had written articles for the competition, and he invited me to lunch. A brilliant, cultivated journalist, Weber was proud both of his craft and of belonging to a prestigious team (Leon Crystal, Isaac Bashevis Singer, R. Abramowicz, Hayyim Ehrenreich), headed by Hillel Rogoff. We got along well, and when he offered me a job, I accepted without a second thought. The Forverts was, after all, the world’s biggest, richest, and most widely read Yiddish daily. I started there as a translator and rewrite man assigned to the general news pages.
I love the Yiddish language, which I speak with the Lithuanian accent I picked up from Shushani. Before him, in Buchenwald, there was a boy from Kovno who told me of the experiences that had made him an old man. I loved his singsong intonation. It hurts me that I have forgotten his name, but I remember his bony face, creased cheeks, and feverish eyes. And that, too, hurts.
I love speaking that language. There are songs that can be sung only in Yiddish, prayers that only Jewish grandmothers can murmur at dusk, stories whose charm and secret, sadness and nostalgia, can be conveyed in Yiddish alone. I love Yiddish because it has been with me from the cradle. It was in Yiddish that I spoke my first words and expressed my first fears. It is a bridge to my childhood years. As they used to say, God writes in Hebrew and listens in Yiddish.
I need Yiddish to laugh and cry, to celebrate and express regret, to delve into my memories anew. Is there a better language for evoking the past, with all its horror? Without Yiddish the literature of the Holocaust would have no soul. I know that had I not written my first account in Yiddish, I would have written no others. To this day, perhaps more than before, Yiddish fills me with nostalgia.
To my great surprise, my Uncle Sam was suddenly proud of me. It seems some men at the synagogue had mentioned my articles, and their wives had praised my novel. Caught up in his enthusiasm, he blithely advised me to get married, and what’s more, he had a bride in mind: the daughter of a friend of his, a charming girl eagerly seeking a boy like me. “She’s a schoolteacher,” said Sam, all excited, “an intellectual from a good family. In short, made for you.” She often attended Shabbat services. “Why not come along with me on Friday night?” To avoid a long argument, I agreed. “I hope you have a hat,” Sam said. I told him I didn’t. I wore only berets. “Impossible,” he replied indignantly. “You can’t come to my