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By Root 2144 0

other in everything: piety, devotion, and even—don’t laugh—modesty. Each of us wanted to be closer to heaven than the other. Who would be the first to see the Prophet Elijah in his dreams? I told him mine and he told me his, and together we consulted the appropriate manual to decipher them. How could we ensure that we merited the ascension of our souls? Where Itzu recited the prayer of Shmoneh Esreh in ten minutes, I took thirty. Where he took an hour to absorb a passage of Etz-Hahaim (The Tree of Life), I took three. If I immersed myself in the ritual bath twenty-six times before the morning service, he was satisfied only with forty-seven. It was the same with secular studies. Where I learned Latin and modern Hebrew, he discovered English. In fact, it was Itzu who gave me my very first English lessons, and his English would be as useful to him as my modern Hebrew was to me. Interned in a camp in Cyprus with thousands of clandestine immigrants expelled from Palestine by the British, he held an important post in the camp administration. He probably could have pursued a university career, but I, with my two left hands, could never have succeeded as a goldsmith.

Then there was Moshe-Haim, the cantor’s son. And Hershi, whose sister drowned in the Iza a few days before Tisha b’Av; and Moishi, the precocious businessman; and Chaim-Hersh, with his mischievous eyes and lovely baritone voice. And Itzu Sheiner, shy, often meditating even when walking to the synagogue. I remember the defeated air of the Selishter Rebbe’s two sons. I should have shown them greater warmth.

I stress the role of friendship and its place in my life as an essential component of everything I do. I can work only in an atmosphere of understanding—in other words, of friendship. As a journalist I enjoyed the friendship of my employers; as a teacher I sought the friendship of colleagues. A single suspicious look could cause a sleepless night, one cold word and I became full of self-doubt. I often felt inferior to others and always to my image of myself—or to their image of me. I therefore had to redeem myself. As a child I gave away candy; as an adult I was always ready to do favors: translations, advice, recommendations, intercessions, prefaces. I needed not so much to please as to feel useful and loved. Sometimes I made promises I knew I couldn’t keep. I know I shouldn’t have, but it eased my solitude to know that someone expected something of me, that I was sharing in someone else’s possible happiness.

The charge would later be made that I am often unfair to my female characters, failing to accord them sufficient scope or depth. Perhaps it’s true. My male characters are better realized. Is that because my relations with them have to do with the theme of friendship? Surely I was wrong to conceive of friendship only among men. I have written several novels—among them The Town Beyond the Wall—solely to celebrate friendship. I love the character of Pedro because he evolves in a world illuminated by friendship.

In The Gates of the Forest I wrote:

What is a friend? More than a brother, more than a father: a traveling companion with whom we rebuild the route and strive to conquer the impossible even if only to sacrifice it later. Friendship stamps a life as deeply as—more deeply than—love. Love can degenerate into obsession, but friendship never means anything but sharing. It is with friends that we share the awakening of desire, the birth of a vision or a fear. It is to friends that we communicate our anguish at the setting of the sun or the lack of order and justice: is the soul immortal, and if so, why does fear sap our strength? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its origin and its end? And what, exactly, is death? The mere closing of a parenthesis? And life? Among philosophers such questions often ring false, but raised among friends during adolescence they trigger a change of being: the glance begins to burn, the everyday gesture strives to reach beyond itself. What is a friend? The person who first makes you aware of your own