All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [6]
One day, some twenty-five years later, I got an urgent phone call from a distant relative who told me my cousin Anshel Feig was gravely ill. He needed an operation, but had refused to sign the consent form until he could see me. Fearing the worst, I jumped in a cab. Anshel had owned a fish market on Amsterdam Avenue near Eighty-sixth Street, close to where I lived. Whenever I had seen him, he was modest and happy. A kipa on his head. He spoke in Manhattan just as he had in Sighet: in song.
“Thank you for coming,” Anshel said. “I need you. I need your blessing.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked, trying to hide my concern. “You want me to bless you? Your standing up above is surely a lot stronger than mine.”
Anshel, in fact, had retained his old Hasidic fervor, carefully observing all the commandments of the Torah, going to synagogue morning and evening, whereas I … But he insisted. “What are you waiting for?” his doctor—the relative who had called me—whispered in my ear. “His life is at stake.”
So I took the patient’s hand and gave him my blessing, the same one I had received when I was sick as a child: May everything turn out for good, may God bring a swift and total cure.
A few days later I went to visit Anshel. The operation had been a success and I could now speak to him freely. I asked him why he had insisted on receiving my blessing. He did not seem surprised by the question.
“Do you remember the last time the Rabbi of Wizhnitz visited Sighet?” he asked.
“Like yesterday,” I replied. “How could I forget?” The painful image of my mothers sobbing surged back. “It’s funny,” I told Anshel, “but I never found out why she came away from the Rabbi in tears.”
“I know why,” Anshel said with the hint of a smile.
“You know?” I jumped. Stunned, I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, even if it sent him back to the O.R. “You knew all along and you never told me?”
His eyes clouded, and he spoke as if in a dream. “I was one of the people waiting in the antechamber to see the Rabbi, but when I saw your mother crying I left to see her home. You were walking ahead of us and that was when she swore me to secrecy and told me what Rabbi Israel of Wizhnitz, may his memory protect us, had said to her. He said: ‘Sarah, know that your son will become a gadol b’Israel, a great man in Israel, but neither you nor I will live to see the day. That’s why I’m telling you now.’ And now you know why she cried.”
I stared at him. Neither of us spoke until finally he sighed deeply and said, “That’s why I wanted your blessing. If the Rabbi of Wizhnitz had such faith in you, your blessing must mean something in heaven.” Which only proves that even a great hasidic Master can be wrong.…
As for me, the only blessing that meant anything was my mother’s. Away from her I felt lost, surrounded by enemies. In my child’s imagination, my first teacher viewed me with scorn. To please him I had to work infinitely harder. There was another melamed who wore a heavy coat winter and summer. I was troubled by his cold and indifferent air, and tried to win him over by redoubling my efforts to explain a page of the Talmud. I was convinced that my classmates detested me, and I decided to mollify them with bribery. At first I shared my buttered bread, fruit, and snacks, and later I let them divide it all among themselves while I stood apart and watched. They would laugh and devour my treats without so much as thanking me, as though I didn’t exist. I should have been bolder, devised other ways of asserting myself, but years went by before I dared. Until my bar mitzvah, whenever I received a present, I gave it away to my classmates. Sometimes—though it shames me to recall it—I even dipped into the till at the store, not out of generosity but out of insecurity. I feared exclusion and isolation, but as much as I yearned to be part of the group, to be like the others and with the others, I