All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [165]
I never went back to Sam’s synagogue. For one thing, it was too far. For another, except for the High Holidays and the Yizkor service, I now avoided public prayer, for I was mired in a religious crisis. I had no one to discuss such matters with—Shushani had disappeared, André Neher was far away, and I had not yet met the Lubavitcher Rebbe or my future teacher and friend Saul Lieberman—but the God of my childhood was tormenting me. As I mentioned earlier, it had started during my first visit to Israel, when I “forgot” to put on my tefillin for the first time. And it was in Jerusalem, most sacred and spiritual of cities, that I first felt the need to protest against divine justice and injustice.
In the meantime, I wasn’t at all depressed by Sam’s failure as a matchmaker. I had not yet forgotten Kathleen, and I had a feminine presence in Aviva, Yehuda Mozes’s private secretary. Tall and blond, she was the linchpin of the paper’s administrative staff. She could do anything, solve any problem. I had met her during a trip to Tel Aviv, and she was now vacationing in New York. We saw each other often: museums, concerts, walks in Central Park, sandwiches in a neighborhood deli.
One night she joined me for my regular trip to the Times office. It was July, in the middle of a stifling heat wave. The scene in Times Square was surrealistic: The usual human anthill of passersby now seemed to walk, laugh, and eat in slow motion. I bought the Times and the Herald Tribune and flipped through them, certain words and names leaping out at me. In Egypt Nasser was waving nationalist banners before fanatical crowds, while White House spokesman James Hagerty called for calm in the Middle East. There was a speech by Adlai Stevenson, who would be the Democratic candidate in the presidential elections that November of 1956. Hammarskjöld was planning a trip abroad. In short, nothing earthshaking, but I decided to send a cable anyway, if only to say hello to the Old Man. Then Aviva and I would go to the movies. But once again the Yiddish proverb proved correct: Man makes plans, God unmakes them.
I can’t recall what film we had decided to see—it may have been The Brothers Karamazov. All I know is, we never got there.
As we crossed Seventh Avenue at Forty-fifth Street, I was hit by a taxi. The impact hurled me through the air like a figure in a Chagall painting, all the way to Forty-fourth Street, where I lay for twenty minutes until an ambulance came to take me to the hospital. Aviva later told me that on the way I regained consciousness several times and gave her precise instructions: what to say to Dov, whom to call to replace me, what meetings to cancel, how to tell my sister Bea, whom to borrow rent money from. Then I passed out again. She also told me that the first hospital refused to admit me. Having examined my wallet, an employee found it outrageously, desperately empty. Without money or insurance I was unworthy of treatment. Business is business. Besides, I was considered virtually hopeless, and since there seemed to be no point in keeping me, I was carried back to the ambulance, which took to the streets again, sirens wailing, in search of a more charitable hospital. The orthopedic surgeon on duty at New York Hospital decided to admit me. His name was Dr. Paul Braunstein, and he saved my life.
My entire left side had been shattered. A ten-hour operation was required to reconstruct it, leaving me in a cast from neck to foot. All I