All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [194]
The editor in chief, Hillel Rogoff, was a kind, talented man who was capable of passionate involvement in causes. Curiously, he preferred to address his collaborators in English rather than Yiddish. His assistant, Lazar Fogelman, a dreamer with a penchant for sudden outbursts of humor, had common sense only in his dreams. The number-three man was my friend Simon Weber. When I worked in the news bureau he was my supervisor, although it was to Rogoff and Fogelman that I submitted my articles for editing and approval.
Weber was a man of culture, thoroughly involved in both Jewish and American politics, an excellent journalist with great ironic wit. He had begun his career on the staff of the Communist Party’s Yiddish daily newspaper, but had quit the party as soon as he grasped the extent of its lies and horrors. He could tolerate anything from his colleagues except lack of talent.
The Yiddish literary and cultural world was dwindling, living its final hours of glory. One by one its lights were extinguished. If the language wasn’t dying, its speakers were barely hanging on. Like everything else, including nostalgia itself, the Second Avenue Jewish theater in Manhattan was not what it used to be. Nor was the Jewish press. Yet prestigious bylines still appeared in Der Morgen Journal, Der Tog, and the Forverts. I admired Jacob Glatstein, whose poem “It was in Sinai the Torah was given to us, it was in Lublin that it was taken back” moved a whole generation of readers. I loved the Judeo-Romanian reminiscences of Shlomo Bickel and the religious polemics of Chaim Lieberman. I soaked up knowledge and wisdom: S. Margoshes and his political editorials; Chaim Grade and his essays on the world of the Mussar; A. Leyeles and his lyrical verses; Almi and his pessimist philosophy; the poems of Itzik Manger, as beautiful and enchanting as a minstrel’s songs. I thirsted for learning and, God knows, I had a lot to learn. At first I wrote articles in Yiddish without any real knowledge of the giants of its literature. In my ignorance, I made a regrettable mistake. Writing about Isaac Bashevis Singer (whom we called, simply, Bashevis), I struck a tone of unforgivable condescension as I compared other Yiddish writers to him. Not only was I wrong to cause them grief, I was wrong in my assessment.
Yiddish novelists, essayists, thinkers, ideologues, theorists: they knew one another and were jealous of one another. Since I was younger and completely unknown, and therefore no threat to them, I was the exception. I loved listening to them talk about their past.
Zalman Shneur was a great Yiddish and Hebrew novelist whose conversation both unnerved and amused me. Today his poems are studied in every Israeli high school. Like Bialik and Tchernichowsky, he is considered a classic author. He had a carefully trimmed beard, drooping moustache, bow tie—the appearance and the substance of a nineteenth-century writer. He would speak French to his wife in front of me until he realized I understood. Fiercely intelligent, he was especially adept at deflating celebrities. I spent an entire afternoon listening to him mock Ben-Gurion, who, regrettably, had shown him a lack of respect.
I spent a weekend in Montreal, where my sisters rabbi, David Hartman, had organized a colloquium on the principle of tolerance in the Jewish religion. The guests included rabbis, professors, and intellectuals of the Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches of the community. The aim of the meeting was to bring them together in an atmosphere of tolerance and camaraderie by emphasizing Judaism’s pluralist aspect. There I made the acquaintance of the young theologian Yitz Greenberg, the philosopher