All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [202]
It was through him that I came to know the writer Jean Blot and the German Jewish novelist Eric Kästen. It was Manès who introduced me to Paul Celan, ever subdued, turned inward, as though listening to his magnificent Todesfuge (Fugue of Death).
I devoured Manès’s works: The Burned Bramble, The Abyss, his essays on Communist betrayal and on the Holocaust. They are masterpieces that will endure.
Of course, we had our differences. He did not share my unconditional loyalty to Israel; he wished I could be more critical. One day he chided me privately, for having publicly stated that the destiny of the Jewish people depended on that of the state of Israel. In his view, the national catastrophes that had befallen our people, though causing much bloodshed and filling many a cemetery, did not truly endanger its existence.
My friend Manès was an excellent professor and an eloquent speaker. He was a close friend of André Malraux, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Koestler (whom he published in France). But few know that it was thanks in part to him that French readers discovered Anne Frank’s Diary. His observations about contemporary literature will stay with me always, as will his comments on the moral and philosophical richness of shtetl humor. He loved the places and people of his childhood as I love mine.
His trilogy will endure, as indispensable testimony to the ideological and political turmoil of our century. It contains it all: a yearning for justice, a passion for humanity, a deep love for the Jewish people. There is not a wasted word or unrealized scene. Drawn to characters whose destiny appears gloomy, he chose a style that is pure and spare. They are painfully intense, strikingly exemplary. They seem to be drawn from life, from Communists and devout Jews alike. He wrote only of what he knew, of what he had lived.
I loved to hear him recount the mysterious stories and legends of his shtetl of Zablotov. He wandered easily among its lightless cottages and through the Houses of Study where, morning and night and especially on Shabbat and during holidays, the faithful chanted their prayers. Other Jewish writers have tried to portray the myriad colors of the shtetl, but none has ever written with such authority, or such tenderness.
In 1964 I decided the time had come to visit Sighet once again. I set out for Sighet by way of Budapest, Bucharest, and Baia-Mare. In Budapest I visited the Jewish quarter, seeking traces of its past. I wondered what I would do if I ran into one of those gendarmes who had added an extra measure of sadistic brutality to the deportation of the Hungarian Jews in 1944, using the tragedy to unleash their own ancestral anti-Semitism. I wanted to consult official archives, to determine who was present, where, in which office, when the decision was made to deport the Jews of Sighet and the surrounding villages. I wanted to see the ghetto, the houses protected by Raoul Wallenberg and the Swiss consul. I wanted to know why humanitarian aid from the so-called free world was so late in coming. On the Lánczhid, the suspension bridge guarded by fierce stone lions, I looked for a worried-looking woman taking her frail young son to the Jewish hospital to be examined by a great specialist. Why did he suffer from so many headaches? The boy had grown up, and the headaches had not left him. I went to the synagogue and spoke to the faithful. One of them wanted to know if I was married. Not yet, I told him. Why do you ask? There was a girl he was trying to get out of the country, and a pro forma marriage would do the trick. In Bucharest the former general Zvi Ayalon, now Israel’s ambassador, issued empty statements. I was wrong to condemn and ridicule him in my articles. (At the time, inexperienced in dealing with totalitarian regimes, I had trouble understanding his caution and distrust.) I went to the Yiddish theater. There was a large