All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [233]
A special bond developed between us, as if I had somehow become a member of her fractured family, perhaps because we shared a nostalgia for our lost past. Or perhaps she was grateful to me for having guessed the secrets of her life. In January, after seeing Zalmen on television, she sent me a warm letter: “I wept throughout the broadcast, telling myself over and over that’s exactly how it was, exactly how it happened.” Then she returned to Israel.
Many months later I got a call from a rabbi in the New York metropolitan area. “I know you like stories,” he said, “especially stories about Russian Jews, and I’ve got one I’m sure you’ll appreciate.” I invited him over that same day. “You won’t believe what just happened to me,” he began. “Last week I was in Israel,” he went on, very excited. “First in Tel Aviv and then Jerusalem, where I have family …” Sensing my impatience, he quickly came to the point. A friend of his who worked for the government took him to Masada, the fortress where, according to Flavius Josephus, Judea’s last surviving insurgents decided to kill themselves rather than surrender to the Romans. “That day,” the rabbi said, “I had the privilege of attending a remarkable ceremony there. About thirty war orphans were bar-mitzvahed under the direction of a military chaplain. When I was introduced to the chaplain, I expressed my astonishment that there were so many children whose fathers had fallen in combat. Yes, he said, the cruel consequences of human folly were indeed hard to bear. Then his face brightened. He pointed to a boy in the front row. ‘But take a good look at him,’ he said. That boy is not a war orphan but the grandson of the late chief rabbi of Moscow.’ I thought I should tell you.…” I must have turned pale because the rabbi asked if I was all right. I felt like showering him with gifts and screaming at him at the same time. He had just shown me, once again, that a Jewish writer works under a handicap: He cannot invent anything.
Zalmen was performed in many theaters in Europe and the United States. The play contains two particularly painful monologues. In one the old rabbi, having gone “mad,” pleads with Western Jews not to forget their Russian brothers:
“I say and I proclaim that it is more than we can bear! You, our brothers who see us now, hear the last cries of a shattered community! To you I say: The sparks are dying and our heritage and our very destiny are covered with dust. Broken are the wings of the eagle, the lion is ill.… And know this, brothers … that so much silence is breaking my heart, that hope has deserted me. Know it is more than I can bear, it is more than I can bear.”
In the other the inspector (a KGB commissar) informs the shattered old man that his daring, mad revolt was in vain, that his sacrifice has been rejected:
“Poor hero, poor dreamer. You have lost, and I feel sorry for you; you have fought for nothing. Your offering was not accepted. Worse—it wasn’t even noticed. How could you have been so naïve? Did you really—really—believe that your gesture would shake the earth? … In your imagination you saw Jews marching in the streets of Paris, London, New York, and Jerusalem, shouting that you here are not alone? You thought their anger would explode and shatter human conscience? Well, it’s too bad. Your Jews have their own concerns.…”
The inspectors speech is hard and cruel. He reminds the rabbi that even during the war, when
“… day after day, night after night, hundreds of thousands were disappearing into mass graves or burning to cinders … holidays were celebrated; charity balls and dinners were organized; people went to concerts, to the theater.… Everything went on as if nothing were happening. And today? Life goes on. And those who don’t suffer refuse to hear about suffering