All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [209]
I spent hours among them, dazed and excited, agitated by an ancient dream. I forgot the depression that had been building up over the past weeks. I forgot everything except the present and the future. I have seldom felt so proud, so happy, so optimistic. The purest light is born in darkness. Here there is darkness; here there will be light.… I wanted to laugh, to laugh as I have never done before. To hell with the fears of yesterday, to hell with the dread of tomorrow. We have already triumphed.
My attention was drawn to a lovely young woman who seemed to dominate the crowd. She was shouting, “Who are we?” and they all responded, “Evrei, Jews, we are Jews!” And she called out again, “Who were we yesterday?” and again they all responded, their faces flushed, “Evrei, Jews, we were Jews, and Jews we want to be!” It was a delirious dialogue in which all the Jews of all exiles and all times seemed to participate. At one point I found myself next to the young woman. I asked her what she knew of Judaism. “Not much,” she said. “Only what my grandparents told me.” Then why was she so determined to be Jewish? She shrugged and did not reply. But when I turned to leave her for another group, she caught me by the sleeve of my raincoat. “You asked an important question,” she said, “and I owe you an honest answer. Why do I so want to remain Jewish? Well, it’s because I love to sing.” Her answer dazzled me and I felt like embracing her. Yes, a Jew is someone who sings. He even sings a few steps from the Lyubianka Prison. And he sings when he is joyful and when he is not. A Jew is someone who turns his suffering into a song, his solitude into a chanted prayer. I thanked the young woman: “I will not forget the lesson you have just taught me.”
Years later, during extended stays in Israel in 1971 and 1972, I would go as often as possible to a remote section of Lod Airport to witness the arrival of the first Soviet Jewish immigrants. They came in on predawn flights from Vienna. I would watch the stirring reunion of the young and the old, the religious and the freethinkers. They would kneel to kiss or just touch the ancestral soil. There was weeping and laughter, hugging and silent embracing. Their joy was contagious. One morning a handsome young woman came down the passageway. She looked vaguely familiar. Then I realized who she was, but she didn’t recognize me. Probably mistaking me for an official of the Jewish Agency, she said something to me in Russian. I was about to remind her of Moscow, 1965, when suddenly a broad, lovely smile lit her face. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “imagine how much singing I’ll do now!” And for the second time I felt like taking her in my arms to thank her.
It is through song that the Jewish soul expresses itself best; it is melody that keeps it alive when there is every reason for sadness. I am told that during the funeral of the great Yiddish theater director Solomon Mikhoels, in the middle of a Moscow winter, a violinist appeared on the roof of a nearby building and began to play Kol Nidre.
Meir Rosenne, Ephraim Tari, and Izso Rager were among the earliest and most effective advocates for Soviet Jewry and all three became my close friends. All three have had interesting careers. Meir and Ephraim were appointed ambassadors, Izso was elected mayor of Beersheba. Sometimes we meet in Paris, New York, or Jerusalem, and sooner or later the conversation always turns to the days when we were young and enthusiastic and ready for anything. We were determined to help the Jews left behind the Iron Curtain, even if we had to defy the Kremlin and all its police. We had been privileged to make the surprising discovery that with a number of notorious exceptions, even Communist Jews had remained Jewish.
A journalist friend told me that Zinoviev—Lenin’s companion and ill-fated admirer/adversary of Stalin—faced execution with the Shma Yisrael on his lips. All his life he had clung to his atheism. For a