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By Root 2114 0

a rather gloomy room in the “Talmud Torah” building. I was elected gabbai, or president, perhaps because my father provided wood to fuel the stove all winter. We were delighted to have a place of our own to celebrate the holidays, recite psalms, study the sacred texts, and pray among ourselves. Like the adults, we now followed the disquieting developments of the war. Yiddele Feldman, grandson of the rabbinical judge, was our skilled strategist of the Russian front. He had hidden a large map covered with colored arrows inside a Talmudic folio, and we would lean anxiously over his shoulder to listen to his account of German victories in Ukraine and in White Russia. Sucking pensively on a pencil, he would describe the situation: tanks, armored vehicles, infantry, air support, troop movements. Yiddele was a budding general. “The German advance is like lightning,” he said, “a fearsome, unstoppable tactic. The Red Army won’t be able to halt the invader. Not yet. Later it will, but by then it’ll be too late. We’ll have to find other ways to escape catastrophe.” What other ways? Leave for Palestine? Kalman the Kabalist advised his disciples to meditate, to pray in deeper contemplation. The divine response lay in the human quest for mystery.

Why not in the occult? Kalman was inclined to oppose “practicing the Kabala” as such, for he was concerned exclusively with messianic enlightenment. But that didn’t stop me from trying. I began reading Hebrew, Aramaic, and Hungarian works on the irrational in all its diversity. Astrology, magic, morphology, hypnotism, graphology, parapsychology, alchemy. In short, I became entranced by what lay beyond reality. With a little luck, I thought, I would learn how to turn dust into gold, danger into security, harmless gestures into acts of war against war. I was fascinated by the mystical experiences, or alleged mystical experiences, recounted in these books yellowed by the centuries. Could Satan really be driven beyond the mountains by mixing vinegar with the blood of a ritually slaughtered rooster while uttering magic formulas? Could the repetition of certain “names” at certain times repel the forces of evil, bring down planes, drive back tanks, vanquish and humiliate the horsemen of Death? Fifty years later I can reveal the truth: It doesn’t work, and I say that from experience. Countless times I tried to thwart Hitler, visiting myriad evils and maladies upon him.

And I will confess another failure as well—one that will not surprise anyone—in a domain in which my competence is found wanting even now: financial investments. I had read in some work on occult sciences that you could make your savings grow by burying money after invoking the protection of a heavenly spirit with special expertise in the field. I decided to risk a meager fifteen pengös. Every morning I would dig up my investment just to check, and one day it was gone. I discontinued these unprofitable practices.

To make my father happy I agreed to sing in the choir of the great synagogue, under the direction of Akiva Cohen. It was thanks to what he taught me that I was later able to lead a chorus in the O.S.E.—the children’s rescue society—orphanage in France. One night, in the late seventies, during an address at a university in Connecticut, I mentioned my musical debut and the name of my first choir director, paying homage to his abilities. “That’s me!” someone in the audience exclaimed. He was then the cantor in a local synagogue.

I saw Cohen only rarely, for music lessons and before the High Holidays, but I met with my master of mysticism every evening. Under his vigilant eye three of us decided to venture into the Pardes, the orchard of forbidden knowledge. We began our quest for the absolute by fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. We would stay at the House of Study until midnight, poring over the Sefer Yetzirah (which is attributed to Rabbi Yehuda Hechasid) and the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Vital, favorite disciple of the founder of Lurianic mysticism. I was insatiable, captivated by the dazzling theories of creation: the shattering