All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [199]
Yet his fortnightly articles were stunning successes, especially among female readers. He was fond of recounting his amorous exploits and did so with great exuberance and talent. What his colleagues reproached him for most of all was his lack of solidarity. They accused him of maneuvering to prevent their own writings from being translated, and of posing as “the last writer in this dead language.” That kind of attitude enraged Yiddish writers: “He’s trying to bury us alive.” Many felt, as I do, that among living Yiddish novelists Chaim Grade surpassed him; others whispered that any one of them surpassed him (I disagree).
He aroused such animosity inside the Yiddish world because he appeared to be distorting and caricaturing the image of the Eastern European Jew. Without denying or minimizing Singer’s talent, the purists among Yiddish writers complained that his protagonists were frequently ugly and morally deficient, charming but unbalanced, clever but perverse. He painted a picture of Polish Jews as sex maniacs, of pious rabbis who dreamed of nothing but adultery on Yom Kippur eve. Yes, I know it is fiction, but still …
The more the general public admired him, the more Yiddish authors rejected him. He was well aware of this. One evening, at a dinner at the home of a well-known rabbi, he said, “Jews are never satisfied. Whatever I write, they say it wasn’t what they expected of me. I’ve never seen such ungrateful readers.” He laughed about it, but it annoyed him. In fact, he was easily annoyed. Yet his admirers are legion, and they remain faithful to him.
As for myself, I like his short stories most of all. He was a superb storyteller; his strength lay in his compression. I appreciate his imagination and taste for the occult. His world was inhabited by sprites and demons, in whom he truly believed. He invited a rabbi friend to his Nobel Prize ceremony in order, he said, to ward off the evil eye: with so many mischievous spirits everywhere, a rabbi’s presence couldn’t hurt, which nobody could dispute.
His funeral was pathetic. There were few mourners, the Yiddish literary world was virtually unrepresented. A rabbi delivered a eulogy in English with a phrase or two of Yiddish thrown in.
Though I was not among his admirers, I felt sad. It should have been different.
The Yiddish (and Hebrew) author to whom I felt closest was Aharon Zeitlin, a childhood friend of Singer’s. I loved him as a man and as a writer. His father, Reb Hillel Zeitlin, produced a literary and philosophical corpus I reread with ever-renewed emotion and amazement. They say he left the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942 wrapped in his talit, the Zohar under his arm, along with several thousand other Jews who were taken to the Umschlagplatz, where sealed cattle cars were waiting to carry them to Treblinka.
Once a month I visited Aharon, the last survivor of a long line of sages and scholars. Bald, with a thin, almost transparent face and blue, limpid eyes, he spoke rapidly in a voice of great clarity. I loved listening to his memories of literary Warsaw, sayings of his father’s, reflections on his contemporaries. Singer publicly acknowledged how much he owed him, but refused to help him find an American publisher. Zeitlin was not bitter.
Reb Aharon died of a heart attack. At his funeral this is what I wrote in my notebook.
Aharon Zeitlin believed that the Angel of Death has no grip on man, who is in essence immortal. Two of his works sought to demonstrate this. The dead, according to him, live on in the other world, maintaining contact with ours. They speak to us and warn us, but the living are too busy with their own terrestrial concerns to understand the language of the world of truth. The science of parapsychology, Zeitlin maintained, is proof of this. He believed that God did not create man in order to kill him. Death is but a transition: another world awaits on the other side,