All Rivers Run to the Sea_ Memoirs - Elie Wiesel [70]
Menashe attended his courses for a while, but eventually gave up. “Be careful,” he warned me. “This man wants to shake our faith. He scares me.” Menashe emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, where he became a rosh yeshiva, the head of an academy, and one of the great Halachic arbiters of his generation. Nevertheless, I stayed with Shushani.
I couldn’t leave him and didn’t want to. He was one of those men who stay with you, inhabiting you and troubling you long after they have gone. Few people have so disconcerted and fascinated me. Clearly, in his role as teacher and master he was intent on transmitting and sharing something, but to this day I don’t know what. His certainties? I don’t know if he had any. Perhaps his doubts. He used his abilities to perturb established truths.
What were his complaints about man? What did he demand of Jewish thought and history or of man’s destiny? On his lips the words “yes” and “no” were equivalent. He developed his own theories and systems in one bold sweep, and used the same arguments to defend or destroy them, leaving the subjugated pupil feeling as though he had been led to the threshold of an adventure that now might cast him into an abyss or take him to towering heights. He was contradiction personified, with all its allure and danger. How to explain his apparent poverty, when his suitcase (which I once chanced to glimpse open) contained a quantity of jewels and foreign currency? What accounted for his taste for wandering? Was he one of those Hasidic masters who must wander in exile before revealing himself, one of the thirty-six hidden Just Men thanks to whom the world exists as a world? I knew of no country he hadn’t visited. He had been seen in Algiers, heard in Casablanca, spotted in Nepal. Like the na-venadnik of legend, he never slept in the same place two nights in a row. Was he a vegetarian? He refused to take his meals in public. How did he sustain his strength? He could speak for eight hours at a stretch without showing the slightest physical or intellectual fatigue.
During the Occupation he was arrested by an officer of the Gestapo. In perfect German he declared that he was Alsatian, Aryan, and a university professor to boot. The officer guffawed at the sight of this vagabond. “You, a professor?”
“Yes, me.”
“And what do you teach?”
“Higher mathematics.”
“No luck. It just so happens that I myself am a professor of higher mathematics in civilian life.”
Shushani was unfazed. “Well,” he replied, “you can of course test my knowledge if you like. But I have a better idea. Let me pose a problem to you. If you can solve it, shoot me. If you can’t, let me go.” Released, Shushani slipped into Switzerland, where the chief rabbi became one of his most devoted admirers.
Later, having heard that the Rebbe of Satmàr had arrived in Paris, he decided to visit him at his hotel. The hallway was crammed with followers waiting to present their requests to the tzaddik. Before entering the room in which the Rebbe was enthroned, everyone lined up to give the secretary the traditional pidyon, a banknote. But Shushani tore a leaf out of his notebook, scribbled a few words, and told the secretary, “I order you to bring this message to the Rebbe; otherwise I cannot be responsible.” The terrified secretary obeyed. Suddenly the door opened and the Rebbe himself emerged, looking for the visitor in vagabond’s garb. They spent several hours alone together, and the content of their discussion was never divulged. But the Rebbe was heard to murmur: “I grant that a human being can know so many things, but how do you manage to understand them?”
Yet I never actually saw him with an open book. Was that because he knew them all, even those he hadn’t read? Perhaps it was when he closed his eyes that he could read nonexistent books, or at least books not yet