All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [25]
I try to picture him in the ghetto, and to picture myself at his side. How did he express the joy, the Hasidic joy, he drew from Creation and its Creator? I try to picture him in the sealed cattle car. How did he say his prayers? To whom did he entrust his testament? I try to imagine him walking with the sick and the old toward the fiery site from which there was no return, and … No, I don’t want to imagine that. I cannot. It would be indecent. A man’s encounter with death must remain private. I prefer to avert my eyes, or to close them, and thus to remember him full of spirit, ecstatic, preparing to chant the songs of Judgment Day. “Grandpa,” I ask him, “what is the Sanctuary of Song like?” And he answers: “The Sanctuary blazes and illuminates; its flame warms the most frigid hearts.”
I had four uncles on my mother’s side: Chaim-Mordechai was the most dynamic and resourceful, Ezra the most timid, Israel the most authoritarian, Moshe-Itzik the most romantic.
Chaim-Mordechai, a tall, slim redhead with sharp eyes and a melodious voice, charmed me with the moral fables of the Maggid of Dubno. Here is one: A woman has just died, leaving a husband and a little boy too young to comprehend his tragic fate. He doesn’t know that he is now an orphan, doesn’t cry during the funeral, and plays with the black cloth draped over his dead mother’s coffin. “Now, isn’t that what so many Jews are doing today?” my uncle asked. “They ought to be in mourning, but instead they’re having fun.”
Ezra, poor Ezra, was the neediest. Reserved and withdrawn, a sad smile fluttering on his lips, he was always murmuring inaudibly, probably praying, perhaps begging pardon for bothering someone, though he never disturbed anyone at all.
Israel, the oldest, came to Sighet only rarely. To see him we had to go to his house, in the village of Krechnev, where he owned a tiny grocery store. Wearing his patched caftan, the Book of Psalms always within reach, he served his customers, peasants who lived in the neighboring small towns.
Moshe-Itzik had tuberculosis. When you talked to him, you wanted God to take pity on him. But I admired him. He walked with a nervous, rapid gait, and always seemed to be leaving soon after he had arrived. He traveled constantly, though in search of whom or what I don’t know. When asked, he would shrug. I loved to see him smile. His was the smile of a man unafraid of distance or of death. We were afraid for him, yet he outlived his brothers and sisters. Perhaps he was so familiar with the prospect of death that the enemy had no hold on him. I found him in Israel in the early fifties. Spry and ambitious, he was beginning to travel in Europe again. Then one day I received a letter from a lawyer in Berlin: My uncle had recently died there and had left me his estate of about a hundred dollars. I can see him now, hovering eternally between two fits of coughing, two absences. I would have liked to have known his story better.
My cousins’ stories, the few who survived, are more or less similar to my own. On my father’s side there were Leizer, Yanku, Velvel, Reshka, Aigyu; on my mother’s Voïcsi, Dvora, Leibi, Shiku, Sruli, Eli. Some live in Belgium, others in California. One female cousin settled in Buenos Aires, another in Sao Paulo, but most abandoned the Diaspora for the Land of Israel. Among my cousins and their children you will find doctors, rabbis, diamond merchants, teachers, businessmen, scribes. I keep up with them through Hilda. The husband of one cousin died in Argentina after having both legs amputated. Another’s went mad during the Gulf War.
I often think of those who did not survive—the