All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [23]
Perhaps we took no vacation that year because of money problems, or because the news was becoming more troubling. Everyone knew that the Warsaw ghetto had been destroyed, but we were completely unaware of the Final Solution. Other families set out for the countryside, but I was happy to stay home. My master needed me. Jewish history needed our dreams, our dreams of children gone mad. On the night of Tisha b’Av, after the service in which the Lamentations of Jeremiah are recited, I went to my master’s and we stayed up all night, repeating passionate verses laden with mystery. I felt a terrible force pulling at me, dragging me down one precipice, then another. Near four in the morning I thought I saw a being with a hidden face chained to an enormous dead tree. As in the tale of Rabbi Joseph della Reina, a thousand dogs were baying, spitting flames, but the being remained motionless, his head supporting the heavens. “It’s him!” I cried. “Master, look! It’s him! Let’s free him!”
“Careful,” he answered. “Be careful, for …”
I awoke drenched in sweat, delirious, unable to tell dream from reality, not knowing who or where I was. My master sat on the floor in apparent despair, his body racked by sobs, hitting his head against a wall. At that moment I felt madness lurking, menacing us both, but I was determined to continue our quest at any cost. Even today I remain convinced that if the Germans hadn’t entered Sighet the following spring, I would have suffered the same fate as my two unfortunate comrades and would have awakened in the depths of the abyss. Thus it was the killers who “saved” me. Woe unto me, it is to them that I owe the fact that I was spared. Olivecrona did not make a third visit, and the Messiah did not come.
Anything but a good little boy, I was subject to phobias, outbursts of anger and jealousy, frivolous envy, and childish rebellion. If two friends seemed too close to each other, it would keep me awake at night. If one of the faithful looked at me askance in the House of Study, I wished I were buried alive. Meanwhile, the demon of eroticism visited me often. When Hilda and Bea had their girlfriends over to the house, I became too tongue-tied to answer their questions. And then of course there was the judge’s daughter: pretty, blond, her hair spilling shamelessly over her shoulders. I would wait for her to walk by in midafternoon, my cheeks flushed, breath halting, and even that made me feel guilty. One night I saw her close-up—smiling, beckoning me toward something I couldn’t yet manage to name—and I awoke in hell.
The time has come to take a last look at one of the villages near Sighet. It was called Bichkev (in Yiddish), Bocskó (in Hungarian), and Bochkoi (in Romanian), and it was there that my maternal grandfather, Reb Dovid (Dodye) Feig, lived until … But no, let us not yet speak of his death. First I need to see him alive.
And how alive he was, my grandfather, alive and magnificent. Yes, I know, most grandchildren adore their grandfathers. But mine was truly special. If that makes you smile, so be it, for it is with a smile that I recall him. He allowed me—obliged me—to love life, to assume it as a Jew, to celebrate it for the Jewish people. A devout follower of the Rabbi of Wizhnitz, he was the embodiment of Hasidic creative force and fervor. His father, Getzl, a man who loved to go into the forest at night to play his violin under a tree, with God his only audience, lived to be ninety-four. My grandfather surely would have reached that age too …
A burly man with broad, powerful shoulders, Reb Dodye Feig knew how to work the land, impose respect on tavern drunks, and break recalcitrant horses. But he was also a man of broad knowledge, respected in the village and the surrounding hamlets. He was a notable. When a rebbe of the Wizhnitz dynasty came to visit, he would stay at Reb Dodye Feig’s.
A cultured and erudite man, an avid reader of the Bible and of the Rashi and Ramban commentaries, and especially of