All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [193]
At his home I met Jewish and non-Jewish notables, among them Israeli politicians and Yiddish writers. It was a varied group: Nahum Goldmann; Meyer Weisgal, one of the founders of the Weizmann Institute of Science; Levi Eshkol, a prime minister of Israel; and, for contrast, the actress Angie Dickinson. Some came to ask for money (I saw him hand an emissary of the Rabbi of Guer a thousand dollars in cash), others (among them collectors and art historians) to admire his pictures.
Like everyone else, he had enemies who expressed many reasons for their hostility (especially his wealth, which I suppose he flaunted) and friends who found as many reasons to defend him, including his commitment to the memory of the Holocaust.
Attached as he was to the Belseners, for whom he functioned as banker, lawyer, and a Jewish variety of father confessor, he was even more devoted to his wife and their son, Menahem. He admitted to spoiling him. After all, “he’s a Jewish child of Belsen,” he often said, perhaps too often. “You must help him to …” For me it was an irresistible argument. For obvious reasons, the children of survivors are particularly precious to me.
Nobody seems to have known it, but one day Yossel found himself ruined. Shortly thereafter he collapsed in the lobby of Claridges in London, and died. It probably was a heart attack, but there were rumors that he had killed himself. I never believed it. It wasn’t his style.
The funeral took place in the synagogue of our mutual friend, Rabbi Joseph Lookstein. It was the eve of Yom Kippur. In my eulogy I took leave of him in Yiddish: “When your soul rises to heaven, six million of our brothers and sisters will come to greet you.…”
I stayed in close contact with many survivors, among them Manes Schwarz, Berl Laufer, Max Zilbernik, Itzik Guterman, Mendel and Dora Butnik. Gena and Yossele Tenenbaum, Sam Bresler from Toronto. Also, the Halperins, the Zuckermans, the Pantirers, the Bukiets, the Wilfs and Siggi Wilzig from New Jersey, as well as Felix Lasky and Dr. Hillel Seidman … every one of them active for Israel and the cause of remembrance in their communities. There was also a couple, Vladka and Ben Meed. Vladka had been a liaison agent for the (Bundist) Jewish Resistance in occupied Warsaw. In her autobiography (for which I wrote a preface) she recounts the socialist dreams of her adolescence. In 1944, living clandestinely in the crushed Polish capital, she celebrated May Day with a group of comrades by sending a message of solidarity to the “workers and proletarians” of the free world. A significant detail that is often overlooked: It was the hunted men and women, the humiliated and oppressed Jews, who encouraged their free, armed comrades, and not the other way around.
But of all the survivors it was Sigmund Strochlitz who became my closest friend and confidant. With his wife Rose, also a survivor, he lives in New London, Connecticut, where he is the éminence grise of local political life, and the owner of a Ford dealership. Nothing has ever divided us since we first met in 1965. Whether defending a Jewish cause or protesting against Israel’s enemies, we rarely act without consulting one another. Sigmund possesses both common sense and loyalty to the highest degree. His kindness and generosity are legendary. A valuable associate, he came to play a central role in many of my future projects.
During the eventful years of the 1960s I spent much time in the editorial offices of the Jewish Daily Forward. Like Yedioth, it was a place where people lived in the past. Once, headed by the legendary Abe Cahan, the paper had boasted a circulation in the hundreds of thousands.
My work consisted of editing agency dispatches and translating news items from the Times. Sometimes I wrote unsigned editorials.
In those days the paper was still the world’s most influential Yiddish daily, a gathering place for poets and actors, Zionist militants and Bundist activists, all of them angling for a review. A Yiddishist in poet’s garb would corner you in the elevator and make you listen