All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [27]
I remember Itzu Junger—serious yet cheerful, thin and agile. His parents were rich, or so I supposed. They lived in a big, “luxurious” house with many rooms, near the great synagogue. I went often to their garden. Always pleasant and generous, Itzu may well have suffered from the same insecurity as I did: he was desperate to bond with his friends. For a year we had the same tutor. About ten of us would study together in a room set aside for us in Itzu’s spacious house. Sometimes we studied late into the evening, and then we would spend the night. This was a welcome diversion, for I detested routine.
A change of tutors separated us, but we continued to see each other at services, on Shabbat afternoon, and on holidays. Then came the tempest that separated us.
We ran into each other in Israel, where he loaned me his “room,” a windowless cell in a Tel Aviv suburb. I gave it back to him a few nights later, afraid I would suffocate there. I saw him again in Brooklyn in the early fifties, during my first visit to the United States. We went for long walks in Williamsburg, exchanging plans and memories. After that we corresponded regularly. He must have been sick already, but he didn’t know it yet, or at least there was no mention of it in his letters. He died of cancer of the liver. But nobody told me. I thought he wasn’t writing back to me because he was too busy, so I kept on writing for some time. Two or three years later I was in New York again and tried to get in touch, but his number had been disconnected. I called his sister in Brooklyn, and she burst into tears. I had been writing to a dead man.
As for Haimi, he died of a heart attack one Shabbat afternoon in 1989, at his home in Monsey, New York. We had seen each other again in Israel in 1949. I was giving classes in a children’s home, and a technician came to do some electrical work. He looked familiar. “You! An electrician?” He had learned the trade in the concentration camp. As a child Haimi had been a jack-of-all-trades who would willingly repair a leaky fountain pen, a broken lock, or an electrical short. His father, Reb Nokhum-Hersh, was the chief rabbi’s private tutor. It was to him that we turned for explanations of obscure Talmudic passages.
Haimi had uncommon physical strength. I felt safe when we went out together at night, for the thugs of our town feared him. Yet I never saw him fight or become violent. On the contrary, he was so good-natured as to seem somewhat phlegmatic. His older brother, Leibl, short and thickset, with herculean strength, was crushed by a tree in the camp. Haimi saw it happen.
Haimi went from a displaced persons camp in occupied Germany to Palestine, illegally of course. He passed through a detention camp in Cyprus, served in the Israeli army, and eventually went on to a new life in the United States. In Sighet he had been pious, and he became infinitely more so in America, where he grew an impressive beard. He worked as a jeweler on Forty-seventh Street, New York’s street of diamond merchants. On Shabbat he wore a shtreimel, a wide-brimmed fur hat, like his father in the old days. Close to the Rebbe of Sighet, as his father had been, Haimi apparently fell under the influence of Satmar, whose followers are known for their extreme hostility to Israel, Zionism, and any Jew less pious than themselves. In their eyes, I was doubly heretical: a lover of Israel and a liberal in matters of religious observance. Belonging as we did to two different, even opposing worlds, Haimi and I stopped seeing each other.
A few days before his sudden death, he asked Itzu Goldblatt, a fellow goldsmith, to get him a tape of my speech to the Bundestag. Why that particular speech? Perhaps because, for symbolic reasons, I had begun it with a few words in Yiddish. Haimi did not live to hear it.
In the old days Itzu Goldblatt and I tried to outdo each