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By Root 2076 0

I could have been part of the heroic, historic war waged by the Jewish people against the British in the Holy Land. Then came the dramatic event at the United Nations, the passing of the resolution granting Jews the right to a sovereign homeland, the famous partition plan of November 29, 1947. I felt I could no longer remain on the sidelines. I looked up the address of the Jewish Agency in the phone book—183 Avenue de Wagram—and rushed over. When I rang the bell, the porter asked me whom I wanted to see. I told him I didn’t know. He asked whether I had an appointment. I told him I didn’t. When he asked what I wanted, I said, “To become a member of the Haganah.” He hesitated briefly between laughter and indignation, then slammed the door in my face. I was angry not at him but at myself. What a fool! I should have realized that the Haganah was an underground movement, not a football club. I needed a contact, but knew no one in official Zionist circles. By chance I came across a Yiddish weekly called Zion in Kamf, a newspaper of the Irgun. There was no editorial address, of course, since this was the organ of a Palestinian resistance group. But French law required that the address of the printer be given. The printshop, I soon learned, was owned by one Marc Gutkin, a leading militant of the movement led by Vladimir Jabotinsky. Gutkin was a cultured, athletic man who spoke Hebrew and who loved life and its pleasures, but his true passion was the Palestinian Jewish cause. I wrote a letter in Yiddish to the paper’s anonymous editor. In it I explained simply but clumsily—in a pompous, patriotic style—that my most ardent wish was to aid the Jewish resistance in Palestine. I mailed the letter to the printshop and instantly regretted it, certain it would only make me look ridiculous to some stranger. I was convinced nothing would come of it. Press barons surely had other fish to fry. Even if the letter reached the editorial office, a secretary would toss it in the trash; if it happened to get to the editor, it would wind up in his trash.

I was wrong. That very week I was invited to the newspaper’s secret editorial headquarters, in an undistinguished building on the Rue Meslay, near the Place de la République. I arrived at the prescribed hour, and an elegant gentleman with carefully combed hair and tortoiseshell glasses, who looked like the typical Middle European intellectual, rose and warmly shook my hand. “My name is Joseph,” he said. “Please have a seat. So, you’re a student and you want to help us, is that right?”

And that’s how I became a journalist.

JOURNALIST

I felt like singing. I considered myself the luckiest and happiest of all my comrades and friends, of all the brothers in misfortune I had met since the torment. I speak of happiness quite consciously, as if issuing a challenge to myself. I who detested drink felt like laughing and drinking, telling the world the good news, as if the world would care. I wanted to tell my sisters, François, Shushani. But of course I didn’t. Absolute discretion was the first rule of clandestinity. Anonymity was obligatory, as were caution and vigilance. You had to seem sad when you were happy, and if you were sad, you had to say it was because you were unlucky in love or had lost money gambling.

I was happy, but I knew very well why I should not have been: Was I not turning my back on the dead and on my studies and religious observance? Could a journalist have an inner life? Did a survivor have any right to be happy? But I also knew there was justification for my happiness. For one thing, my financial worries would soon be over. I was to receive a millionaire’s salary: about thirty thousand francs (sixty dollars) a month. Until then I had been living on a quarter of that amount. I would be able to move. The end-of-the-month worries were over, along with the discomfort that gripped me in my landlady’s presence. No more walking from Saint-Cloud to Odéon. I would now be able to live closer to the center of town. I found a room—with a sink, no less—on the Rue de Rivoli near the