All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [171]
There was Las Vegas and its slot machines, available even in the rest rooms. Men and women were standing in dazzlingly bright casinos, betting a year’s salary or more on a little ball that leaps and dances about indifferently, stupidly, before coming to rest on a number, any number. Wherever you turn, you see frozen faces and trembling hands. The casino in Monte Carlo is the playground of the rich, who seem burdened by their wealth. In Las Vegas one sees ordinary people fed up with not being rich.
At the Sands Hotel we dined with Hank Greenspun, a powerful man in the city who was the owner of the daily Las Vegas Sun, who told us of his clandestine activities in support of Israel. In 1948 he was involved in an illegal arms shipment, for which he was indicted and sentenced to several years in prison. Of this he was very proud.
One morning we came upon an enormous sign under the Arizona sun: “Indian Reservation 100 Miles.” Instantly we decided to take the detour. None of us had ever met an Indian, our knowledge extending no further than the movie stereotypes of young savages and wise old men. The Indians were always the ones on the attack, shrieking and killing. But why not? In their eyes, the white man was nothing but a rapacious armed invader seeking to drive them from their lands and reduce them to dependency by imposing his language and culture. And all with a revoltingly clear conscience.
The man who greeted us in a tent decorated with feathers and other tribal insignia might have stepped out of a movie. Tall, erect, impassive, and majestic, he had a slow, dignified walk and a weathered, angular face. We hung on his every word as he explained the Indian concept of life and death. He was respectful, and he inspired respect. At one point he asked us to sign his visitors’ book. Dov urged me to go first. I don’t know why, but I signed in Hebrew, and the Indian rewarded me with a hearty pat on the back. “Sholem aleichem,” he said in Yiddish. Dov and Leah nearly collapsed in surprise and laughter.
It turned out our host was Jewish, a camp survivor from Polish Galicia who had first emigrated to Mexico. When things went badly there, he moved to Arizona and made his living as an Indian by day while remaining a Jew by night.
In my diary I wrote: “America is truly a wonderland. Even the Indians speak Yiddish.”
It was around that time, in 1957, that I first met Golda Meir, who had succeeded Moshe Sharett, whom Ben-Gurion considered too moderate, as minister of foreign affairs. She had come to the United Nations to negotiate the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Initially known only in Jewish circles, she soon became world famous for her impressive strength of character, the depth of her convictions, and an obstinacy unanimously acknowledged by friend and foe. Though she lacked Eban’s eloquence, she possessed the gifts of sincerity and simplicity, hence her great power of persuasion. Severe, sometimes even cruel toward those she didn’t like, she was boundlessly generous toward those she did. I was lucky enough to be among the latter, not because she thought me more talented than other correspondents, but because she took a kind of maternal interest in me. When she saw me on crutches, she evidently decided to take care of me. At first she may have thought I was a wounded veteran with glorious exploits to his credit, for she asked about my military record. I quickly set her straight. Far from being a war hero, not only had I never been in uniform, I wasn’t even Israeli. I was just a simple Jewish correspondent working for an Israeli newspaper, my wounds courtesy of an ordinary accident. She was incredulous. “But you speak perfect Hebrew!” I explained that I owed that to my father. “And