Scars

STOP DREAMING, a voice in my dream tells me this morning. It is time to act. The voice repeats the last words: to act. I want to ask: Can one not act and dream at the same time? But I don’t dare open my mouth. I am afraid to wake up. I prefer to dream. Where is this voice coming from that breaks down the walls protecting my slumber?

Whose voice is it? It has fallen still, but I can hear it. A man’s voice.

That of my father? Too harsh. My grandfather? Too sharp.

Suddenly I remember: It is the voice of a beggar I once wanted to follow. I was young, a child still. He laughed, and I asked him why. “To make you laugh,” he answered. Then he changed his mind and began to shout: “Would you rather I make you cry?” Making myself small, very small, I said: “What I’d really like is for you to make me dream.”

What is more important, asks the Talmud, what is essential: thought or action? The opinions are divided, but in the end all the Masters agree: Study comes first, because study incites action.

As a Jew, I question myself about the role of the Jewish writer. Is it to make readers spill one more tear into the ocean? What must the writer express, and to what end? Which story should be told, and to what audience? Some are convinced that he must devote himself exclusively to his writings, that his influence and his power derive more from his art than from his deeds. This may have been a valid notion long ago. Poetry does not prevent the torturer from beating his victims, and the greatest novel in the world remains powerless before a fanatic. Thus the need to act. But in what area, and by what means? And where does one begin?

Of course, the fight against anti-Semitism remains a priority. It is, after all, the most ancient collective prejudice in history. Its virulence and its capacity to survive remain inexplicable. It is said to be as old as the Jewish people itself. The Talmud detects its first signs at the time of the Revelation at Sinai. Even in antiquity Jews were hated, especially in the higher echelons of society. What did Cicero and Seneca have against the Jews? If one is to believe Flavius Josephus, Apion the Greek reproached the Jews for “belonging to a tribe of lepers capable if not desirous of contaminating the entire world.” Tacitus is annoyed with them because they show for each other an “obstinate attachment, an active commiseration in contrast with the implacable hatred they feel for the rest of mankind. Never do they eat with strangers, never do they live with foreign women.” Apion and Democritus accuse them of ritual murder. Since then anti-Semitism has become more modern, though it retains the same irrational arguments. One has only to compare those of Pharaoh’s counselors in the Bible to those of Haman in the Book of Esther, of Torquemada, Hitler, and Stalin: Their delusions are the same. All were convinced that the Jews were always greedy, determined to achieve political and religious domination and thus to control the affairs of the world. They see Jews everywhere and ascribe to them terrifying mystical powers. At the same time, they have contempt for those who appear helpless. In other words, the anti-Semites hate the Jews because they believe them to be strong but despise them when they perceive them to be weak.

The anti-Semite resents the Jew both for what he is and for what he is not. He blames him for being too rich or too poor, too nationalistic or too universal, too devout or too secular. In truth, he simply resents the fact that the Jew exists.

Thus, for a Jew, anti-Semitism remains the enemy. But it is not the only one. There are other hatreds, other exclusions, other human communities targeted. There is misery on all continents—hunger, ignorance, intolerance, silenced political prisoners, nuclear proliferation: Which of these challenges requires our immediate intervention?

And war, which mankind seems incapable of eliminating or at least restraining, more than fifty years after World War II. What is war? A perverse lack of imagination, of memory? A fascination with the end, with death? How to understand this madness that leaves so many graves in its wake?

•   •   •

Having virtually given up journalism—not without regret—I turn to teaching.

Once again fate intervenes at a crossroads. I owe my appointment as Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the City College of New York purely to chance.

One evening in a Manhattan hotel, after a lecture on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg takes me aside. He speaks to me as head of the Jewish Studies department at City College. He wishes to recruit me. To teach what? Anything I want: Hasidic texts, Jewish or Holocaust literature, talmudic subjects. “Things that, in any case, you deal with in your work.”

I am very fond of Yitz. I have known him since the early sixties, when he was teaching at Yeshiva University. He is as tall as a basketball player, with a lively and open mind; his discourse is sharp but not aggressive. As he tries to convince me, I realize that if I accept I shall become a father and a professor in the same month.

I accept.

Two days later I find myself in the office of the young dean Ted Gross. He seems pleased, and so am I. It has all happened very fast. The contract has been drawn up; all that remains is the signature. Smiles, handshakes, congratulations. I am proud, I don’t deny it. City College is not just any college. It is a place of real distinction.

Is this a new career? Let us say it’s a new path. As for the goal, it will not change.

I prepare myself like a student, rereading texts I thought I had known and fully understood. At the same time I put the final touches on Le serment de Kolvillag (later translated as The Oath in the United States), which is due to be published by Le Seuil in France in 1973.

Also on the agenda, inevitably, are a few trips. With Elisha, of course. In Israel, we meet friends from the newspaper for which I worked from 1950 to 1972. Dov and Lea, Noah and Paula, Eliyahu and Ruth: peaceful, comforting moments. Nostalgic as well.

Elisha in Jerusalem. How can I describe my happiness, my pride, as I carry him in my arms walking with Marion through the narrow streets of the Old City? And as I place his tiny hand on the Wall?

For the editors of Yedioth Ahronoth these are heady times: Circulation is up from one week to the next, as are salaries. I make my old friends laugh when I point out to them my poor luck as a journalist: Since I left, Yedioth has become better and richer.

As a result of the “war of attrition,” the atmosphere in the country is heavy. The security of the state is not yet in question, but the euphoria of 1967 following the Six-Day War has dissipated. Five years have passed and there is ever more talk of Palestinian terrorism. Nobody has forgotten the attack at Lod Airport committed by the Japanese Kozo Okamoto, linked to the PLO: twenty-five killed, among them the internationally renowned scientist Aharon Katzir. That was at the end of May 1972.

In early September of that year, during the Olympic Games held in Munich, Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September movement assassinate eleven Israeli athletes. The public follows the tragedy live on television.

The Games continue the very next day. And the whole world applauds.

In a difficult address given a few weeks later, before the leaders of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), I speak of the implications of this wanton murder.

We must never forget that Munich is not only the capital of Bavaria, but also a symbol. Munich symbolizes the failure and cowardice of the West, its abdication before the powers of evil. It represents the triumph of paganism, of the gods of violence, of fanaticism and death. Munich equals shame. In 1938 the Munich agreements prefigured Dachau, the ghettos of hunger and fear, and the death ramp at Birkenau.

September 1972. The Jewish year begins badly—for Israel in general, for me and my family as well.

One morning, I am in the middle of teaching a class on Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav when a secretary rushes in to tell me of an urgent call waiting for me at the office. I run to the phone afraid to breathe, afraid to say the word that will force me to listen to what follows. On the other end, my brother-in-law Len is silent. Then he gives me the news: My sister Bea is ill, gravely ill; they have just operated; she has cancer. Len is sobbing. Frozen, I cannot speak for a long moment. Never have I heard my heart beat so loudly. I fall into a chair and ask: “What can be done?” The physician in Len is pulling himself together: “Nothing unfortunately, nothing.” I ask him whether Bea knows. No, she doesn’t. Besides, she is still in recovery.

I return to my class. My students look at me, perplexed. They can sense my distress. I tell them: “Let’s go on, shall we?” But they look at me and remain silent. I don’t know how, but I make them speak. “Where were we?” I don’t know and they, evidently, don’t either. Fortunately, the moment to conclude comes soon.

Back home, Marion places Elisha in my arms to console me.

I begin a series of shuttles between New York and Montreal. Bea knows she had a tumor but believes it to have been benign and thinks it was successfully removed. That is what she says to me.

But then why this shadow in her gaze?

And then comes another blow. My sister Hilda loses her husband, Nathan, a gentle, infinitely kind man.

Hilda tells me: They were on the road. Nathan was driving; suddenly he stopped and asked for a piece of candy—he who had not eaten sweets since childhood. The next moment he was dead.

Born in Tarnów, Poland, he had emigrated to France between the wars. A fervent Zionist, he dreamed of living in Israel. He will be buried there.

Bea calls me from Montreal; she does not feel up to attending the funeral. She asks me to understand; she is afraid. Of course I understand: Cancer is frightening, and so are cemeteries, even to someone as brave as my sister. “Explain to Hilda that …” No need to explain. Hilda understands. I accompany her to Israel; I am at her side at the cemetery. The entire Israeli family is there.

By chance, at the cemetery entrance I meet Moishele Kraus, the former cantor of Sighet. At my request he sings the prayer for the dead at the open grave. A distant relative gives a brief eulogy. It is my first time attending a burial in Israel. I didn’t know that here men are buried only in their talit, without a coffin. It is also the first time that I hear the Kaddish recited here, so different from the one said by the orphan every day of the first year of mourning. It seems heavier, harsher. It is frightening. I am glad Bea did not come.

In the United States, the presidential campaign is in full swing, noisy as ever. And this time around, mean.

Robert Bernstein, head of Random House, is intent on my meeting one of the candidates for the Democratic nomination, the senator from South Dakota, George McGovern. Marion and I are invited to dinner in a quiet restaurant.

The senator makes a good impression. He appears to be a man of integrity, obsessed not with power but with the use he might put it to. He speaks softly without moving a muscle in his face.

I ask him: “Why do you want so much to be president? The campaign is harrowing; it depletes you. After all, you are an influential and respected senator. Wouldn’t it be wiser to strengthen that position, which is unanimously respected?”

McGovern responds: “Nixon must be defeated. He is evil incarnate. And I am the only one who can beat him.”

How naive of McGovern. He did not realize that he was the only one who could not defeat Nixon.

Moreover, the sitting president is doing rather well. The Watergate scandal is still to come. Foreign policy dominates the news. Sure planes are bombing Hanoi and Haiphong, but isn’t it Nixon who, together with his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, makes historic visits to China and Moscow? Not only will Nixon take the elections, he will win by a large margin.

The night the results are announced, I see young students weep.

It was in 1973 that Le serment de Kolvillag (The Oath) was published in Paris. It is a bleak novel, devoid of hope. With the exception of the later novel The Forgotten, it is without doubt the most depressing fictional tale my pen has ever committed to paper. While working on it, I am deep in a depression that on the surface seems unwarranted. Things are going well, both professionally and personally. Marion has become my translator, so I no longer worry about the English-language editions of my work. Our one-year-old son’s smile delights me. Teaching is exciting; my books are being bought by an increasing number of publishers abroad. Robert McAfee Brown at Stanford University, John Roth at Claremont, Harry Cargas in St. Louis, Lawrence Langer in Boston, and Irving Halperin in San Francisco all incorporate my books into their programs. And yet I sense disaster. As the writer Cynthia Ozick observes: “It is as though, in your novel, you foresaw the Yom Kippur War and the exasperating solitude of Israel.” In truth, never has the Jewish state been so close to catastrophe.

Why did I set the action of this novel at the beginning of the twentieth century? To dissociate it from my personal experience, to distance it from the era of Night?

The theme: A young stranger wishes to die, and it falls to a wandering old man named Azriel to dissuade him. What can he tell the young stranger that will renew his will to live? He tells him a story—his own, the one he had vowed never to reveal.

Through this story Azriel describes the life and destiny of an annihilated Jewish hamlet. It is all there: friendship and hatred; fanaticism and terror; the chroniclers and their fate; the tensions between societies, religions, and generations; testimony and silence; silence above all; silence as means and as end.

October 5, 1973. The Yom Kippur War, terrible and shattering. We learn the news during services. Rabbi Joseph Lookstein, dressed in white as was the high priest of long ago, asks the congregation to pray with increased fervor. In the middle of the Musafservice I am called outside: I must urgently call the Israeli Mission. I remove my talit and go to the synagogue office. A diplomat requests a statement for the press. Is it true that the Germans often chose the Day of Atonement to heighten their campaigns of brutality against the inhabitants of the ghettos? As a rule I am wary of such analogies. But today I say: Yes, the Germans knew the Jewish calendar and used it against us. I return to my seat. The congregation is deep in prayer, reciting the Amidah. And I realize that this is the first time since liberation that I have violated the sanctity of the holiest day of the year.

The year 1973 contains more bad omens than promises. Yasir Arafat is reelected to head the PLO. In Chile, Salvador Allende is assassinated by the enemies of democracy. In Southeast Asia the war continues: Tons of explosives fall on Laos and Cambodia. In Paris the negotiations between Henry Kissinger, representing Nixon, and Le Duc Tho, Ho Chi Minh’s emissary, seem to be going nowhere. In America, the general public follows the news from the various fronts with resignation. But there is a new interest: Watergate. And the forced resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, indicted for accepting bribes from private companies.

And now, the war against Israel.

This one is unlike the others. In past wars, the Israeli army had always imposed its own rhythm, its own strategy. In this war, the adversary managed to deliver the first blow, unleashing a striking offensive.

Depressing days, oppressive nights. I have trouble concentrating as I face my students. Rebbe Nahman and his princes, the Besht and his legends, no longer hold my thoughts, which leap toward Suez and the Golan on fire. The news reports from Israel are crushing. What am I to do? How could I help? Write articles, make speeches? The time for that is past.

As always, when Israel lives through a crisis I feel like the medieval poet Yehuda Halevy, who said that his heart was in the East though he himself lived far away, in the West. Though I reside in Manhattan, my thoughts are elsewhere, across the ocean, in the land of our ancestors.

I spend hours listening to the radio, reading the newspapers, watching television. I play with Elisha, sing him his favorite melodies, drink in his smile, but not even he can lighten my mood.

Less than a week before the start of hostilities, Palestinian terrorists had attacked an Austrian train transporting Russian-Jewish emigrants. Was it meant as a diversion? There were rumors to that effect. The incident forced Golda Meir to make a quick, unpleasant trip to Vienna to meet Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who, she told us, didn’t offer her so much as a glass of water. Another rumor: An Israeli spy in Egypt was said to have sent secret information about a planned Syrian-Egyptian invasion. Were his Israeli handlers too preoccupied with the crisis in Vienna to react? Third rumor: The same spy or another highly placed agent of the Mossad was said to have sent on Yom Kippur eve even more precise information, specifying that the offensive would be launched on the afternoon of Yom Kippur. It appeared that a low-level officer, having misinterpreted the information, took the initiative to designate 6 p.m. as zero hour, which was four hours too late. It was whispered that the staff generals were still with Golda and Moshe Dayan when the Egyptian artillery opened fire on the defenses along the Suez Canal.

At the time these rumors were not known in Israel, at least not by the public at large. Overwhelmed by the gravity of the news coming from the battlefields, Israelis felt, once again, isolated and abandoned.

Western Europe was a disappointment. Not a single country—not even France, Great Britain, or Germany—authorized the giant American planes, crammed with arms, to refuel at their airports. An unforgivable stance. On every front the war favored the aggressors. There were terrible battles on the Golan, a bloody retreat in the Sinai. On land and in the air, Tsahal (the Israeli army) was enduring unprecedented losses in human lives and equipment. And the world let it happen.

One more rumor, a persistent one: It was said that Golda had given the order to ready the ultimate option. That was why the White House suddenly gave in to the Israeli government and established an aerial bridge for military use between America and Israel … to prevent the first nuclear conflict since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, Israel has always denied possession of atomic weapons.

A Socialist leader told me that he had witnessed a London meeting of the Socialist international leadership urgently called by Golda Meir, shortly after the Yom Kippur War. A frosty silence hung over the hall when she began to settle accounts with her ideological and political comrades: How could they have betrayed the only democratic state in the Middle East? How could they have turned their backs on the sole Socialist government of the region? She ended with a few words that sent shivers through the audience: “What did you think?” she asked. “That confronted with death, Israel would go down alone?” It seems nobody applauded Golda. Nobody came to pay their respects. Had she shamed or frightened them by alluding to the nuclear capacities of Israel?

In the end, after the tragic failures of the early days, Tsahal astounds the world with its military genius. The invading armies are defeated. After crossing the Suez Canal, Ariel Sharon’s tanks advance toward Cairo. And in the north, Israeli troops push to within thirty-seven kilometers of Damascus.

And yet the mood in Israel is oppressive. The evening news shows the handsome faces of the many fallen soldiers and officers. Never before has the State of Israel suffered such losses. Sadat’s surprise attack has shaken the Jewish state to its core.

At the very onset of hostilities I decide with Sigmund Strochlitz, my survivor friend from Connecticut for whom Bendin remains as alive as Sighet is for me, to show our solidarity by organizing a trip to Israel for a group of influential American Jews. The plan is to bring along medical supplies for the army, which, according to press reports, are dwindling fast. We draw up a list of some hundred names among the wealthiest and most respected of the American Jewish community. Forty decline immediately. Twenty promise to think about it. Thirty say: Maybe. In the end, Sigmund and I are the only ones. Marion would like to go, but then decides to stay with Elisha.

The El Al flight is filled with Israelis going home. The first rows are occupied by Abba Eban and his entourage. They work throughout the flight. From time to time a crew member brings them radio dispatches.

Silence falls over the plane as we land. Our first visit is to Sigmund’s relatives, children of survivors. He rings the doorbell. The door opens and, not expecting his visit, they almost faint. They mention names: This one is in the Sinai, another is en route to the Golan. As for me, I go to see no one: I call no cousin, no friend. I would be ashamed to tell them that I have come for just one day, one night.

We take rooms at the Tel Aviv Hilton. It looks empty and dark. In the morning we join a group of foreign journalists heading for the northern front. Our escort is a young officer I know only by name, the future minister Amnon Rubinstein. On the bus someone calls out my name. I look up and see André Schwarz-Bart. By a strange quirk of fate, we are always together, André and I, whenever there is reason to testify for those who live within us.

I whisper my impressions into my pocket recorder. They are meant for Elisha. If he listens well, he’ll also hear the sound of mortars.

I want to go up to Jerusalem to meditate at the Wall. Impossible. A quick trip to the Sinai? Impossible. Ask friends to intercede? Surely they are mobilized. The only planned visit of our lightning trip is to the military hospital Tel-Hashomer, to hand over the medical supplies to my friend Dr. Bollek Goldman, codirector of the hospital. Bollek takes us on his rounds. Before the severely wounded, he describes their heroic military feats. He introduces me to an officer from a prestigious tank division. From between his bandages his eyes are scrutinizing me. He whispers unintelligible words. Bollek leans over him. “He has read your books,” he says. “He wishes to shake your hand.” I hesitate. “Go on,” Bollek urges me. I step forward and hold something resembling a hand. The wounded man’s lips are moving. He whispers to me and no words have ever moved me so much.

Back in New York, I intently follow the aftermath of this war that the Israeli press has dubbed Hamekhdal, the war of incompetence. People are angry. Golda wins the elections but loses the confidence of her party. As a result she must resign to make room for her young ambassador to Washington, General Yitzhak Rabin.

The wounds of this conflict have never healed. Headed by Justice Agranat, president of the Israeli Supreme Court, a High Commission of Inquiry was named to assess the responsibilities of those who failed to foresee and prevent the aggression. This commission responds to a real need; the country is confronting a crisis of confidence. Every day it is shaken by a new “affair.” Politicians accuse one another, generals justify themselves. Israel no longer trusts its leaders. Did it also lose pride in its army?

•   •   •

Two years later, Marion, Elisha, and I are staying at the Sharon Hotel at the beach in Herzliyya. One day I get a call from General Eleazar, “Dado,” as Israelis fondly call him. I had met him at the home of General Haim Bar-Lev, his predecessor and faithful companion during the Six-Day War, but I hardly know him. The Yom Kippur War had marked the end of Eleazar’s glorious military career, the Agranat Commission having forced him to resign as commander in chief of the army. “Are you also avoiding me?” he asks. “Of course not,” I protest. “I respect your privacy, that’s all.” He wants to meet. “When?” I ask. “Right now,” he says.

Dado arrives a half hour later. It is the first time I see him in civilian clothes. He has an open face with deeply etched features. His gaze is direct. We sit down in a corner of the lobby. He comes straight to the point: “I don’t know whether you know what is going on here. But you should.” From his briefcase he pulls several files and lays them out on the table. “Here are a few documents. Top secret. If any one of these had been submitted to me at the time, I would have had a clearer view of the situation. And the danger. These documents were received during the weeks preceding the start of hostilities by subordinates at Military Intelligence who gave them little credence. According to their chief, General Eli Zeira, the Arabs were neither ready nor capable of launching another war against Israel. I am not saying that he and his team should be blamed. I was their superior; I assume full responsibility for what they did. But why were my superiors whitewashed?”

For three hours, he pleads his innocence. Finally he bursts into sobs. After he leaves I tell Marion: “I have just seen a man with a broken heart.”

For a whole week I am ill, shaken by violent bouts of fever. My body aches; I hallucinate. What is wrong with me? Bollek Goldman, who has become a devoted friend, comes running from Tel-Hashomer. He can find no medical explanation for my ailment. Could it be psychosomatic? He comes to see me every day. His presence does me more good than his medications.

A short time later, swimming in his pool, Dado has a heart attack. He dies instantly. His military funeral is almost a state funeral. Did the government suddenly feel guilty? In Israel as everywhere else people mistakenly believe it is possible to make up for injustices with pomp and circumstance.

Later I question several members of the Agranat Commission: Why had they been so severe with Dado and so indulgent with his superiors? If one is to believe them, the commission’s charter forbade them to go beyond the military and to implicate the politicians. This was mined and dangerous terrain. I insist: “Was it just? Was it fair?” Their embarrassed replies do not satisfy me.

As for Golda, I saw her only one more time. Bitter, frail, she did not forgive those who had pushed her out. As a rule, Golda never forgave. As Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel observe in their excellent book Le siècle d’Israël: “Everything she believes in is white, everything she rejects is black.”

Now that she had fallen, did she expect me to defend her against her many political adversaries? Unfortunately, I could not. For I believe that because I am not an Israeli citizen, I must not interfere in Israel’s internal affairs. Moreover … Golda had not convinced me. Surely she was not the only one responsible for the disaster of the early days, but she should have borne some of the onus. The Agranat Commission should not have whitewashed the government. One day I said to Golda: “At war’s end, why didn’t you offer your resignation? The people of Israel would not have accepted.” Golda did not see it that way. She resented my question. In any case, since the Eban affair we had been less close.

I ask Moshe Dayan if he had agreed with the Agranat Commission’s conclusions. Yes, he had. And does he not feel responsible for what happened? No, he does not. And after a moment he adds very quietly: “If I had felt guilty, I would have put a bullet through my head.”

Dayan remained a stranger to me as long as he was commander in chief or minister of defense. Only later did ties develop between us. With rare exceptions I tend to appreciate political men and women more when they are out of office. I felt closer to David Ben-Gurion after he left office to live at Kibbutz Sde Boker. He seemed more human, more vulnerable. The man who had hated the “Stern Gang” to the point of throwing its leaders into prison now became a close friend of Yehoshua Cohen, the old Stern Gang member with a legendary “terrorist” past.

I remember my first encounter with Moshe Dayan. He was in the United States on a lecture tour and called me from Miami to invite me to lunch. “Just you and me,” he said. “We’ll be able to talk quietly.” We made an appointment at the Regency Hotel in New York. The purpose? He explained: “As you know, all my life, I have fought against the enemies of Israel. Now I want to work on behalf of the Jews outside of Israel.” He told me his plan: to study from multiple angles this Jewish community that had survived, to understand the reasons for its endurance. If it were possible to discover which elements had saved it from extinction, we could apply this knowledge whenever the Diaspora found itself in difficulty.

The idea was bizarre. The destiny of a people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical, factors. But he believed in it. He gave up this project only when Menachem Begin, acceding to power in 1977, named him minister of foreign affairs. Later, if Begin was able to conclude a peace treaty with Sadat, it was largely due to Dayan.

The annual UJA conference is to take place in late 1973. For the second time its director, Irving Bernstein, invites me to give an address. His argument is almost the same as in 1972, after the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich: “The Jewish community is going through a moral crisis. It is therefore important that …” He is right; the Yom Kippur War still weighs heavily on our individual and our collective consciousness. What to say to our distraught friends from Israel? The theme becomes clear: “Against despair.” To be a Jew means not to despair, even when it seems justified.

An example: In a sealed cattle car an old Jew cries out: “Today is Simhat Torah, the festival of the Law. We must rejoice.” He pulls a small Sefer-Torah from his bag and begins to sing. Another example: In a barracks, over there, men are wondering how to celebrate the festival of the Torah without a Sefer-Torah. One of them glimpses a young boy and signals him to come over: “Do you remember what you learned in heder?” “Yes, I remember Shma Israel,” the boy replies. “Then recite it.” “Shma Israel, adoshem elokhenu, adoshem ekhad….” Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One…. “Good,” says the man, lifting up the boy, as if he were the Sefer-Torah itself, and he begins to dance and sing the traditional prayers.

In our tradition celebrating life is more important than mourning the dead. The law is strict: When a wedding procession crosses a funeral procession, the former has the right-of-way.

Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav—you may remember my love for his teachings—often said: “Gvalt yidden, seit eich nisht meyaesh….” For the love of heaven, Jews, do not despair…. In his memoirs, the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum refers to a Bratzlav shtibelinside the Warsaw Ghetto. Over its entrance was the same inscription: JEWS, DO NOT DESPAIR. For a Jew, who bears a four-thousand-year-old memory, despair is equivalent to blasphemy.

Invited soon after to address the annual FSJU (French UJA) conference in Paris, I develop the same theme: the struggle against despair. The speaker who follows me to the podium is the Israeli ambassador, Asher ben Nathan. I did not know that he had just lost a son in battle. Had I known, I would have remained silent.

In 1974, after the Yom Kippur War, Israel is constantly shaken by revelations of scandals linked to the military debacle of the early days of the war. In the United States it becomes impossible to open a newspaper without feeling shame and distress. Israeli morale is at its lowest, and it affects ours in the Diaspora. Irving Bernstein comes to see me several times, accompanied by other leaders of the Jewish community, urging me to speak up. One morning Irving arrives with an invitation to address the board of governors of the Jewish Agency, which is about to meet in Jerusalem. “It is a kind of a superparliament of the Jewish people,” explains Bernstein. “It includes Israelis and non-Israelis. For you, for us, it is the ideal platform.” I ask Golda’s advice and that of my Master, Saul Lieberman. Both urge me to accept, though Lieberman warns: “They will be sure to criticize you. But that is the price one pays for living in the Diaspora.”

As I prepare my speech I strive to be frank without hurting my listeners. How am I to put my questions so as not to offend them?

After arriving in Jerusalem the same day as President Nixon—you can imagine the traffic!—I call Golda and read her my text. She is not pleased and admonishes me: “Is that all you have to say to them? Why don’t you remind them of what they did to me?” Taken aback, I reply: “Golda, I haven’t come here to fight for you, but for those of us in the Diaspora.”

To say that my words were well received would be not an exaggeration but a lie. Of course the listeners applauded, but out of courtesy, with little enthusiasm. The next day the Israeli press settled its score with me: “How dare someone who lives in America tell us what to do! Since when is a Jew from the Diaspora entitled to preach to us?” The following is part of what I managed to say:

There are questions we must ask ourselves at times, and we must do so without complacency. They may well irritate you; would you prefer self-censorship? Pushkin claims that a beautiful lie is superior to a debasing truth. I don’t agree: Truth alone elevates man, even when it hurts. The task of the writer is, after all, not to appease or flatter, but to disturb, to warn, to question by questioning oneself.

All this, as you may have guessed, is the prelude to a few criticisms. I dislike having to articulate them; it is a role that does not suit me. Yes, such is the price I must pay for living in the Diaspora: I never criticize Israel outside Israel.

We are Jews, you and I. You are Israeli; I am not. You represent a state, a group, a nation, with its structures and institutions; I represent no one but the characters I have created or who have created me. You have found; I am still seeking. You have been able to make the break; I have not. As a Jew assuming his Judaism, why have I not settled in the land of our ancestors? That is a question you have asked me often. It annoys you, and I understand why. The Diaspora troubles you. Just as Israel challenges its validity, it represents a challenge to Israel. We are united by the past, divided by the present. Whose fault is it? We blame nobody. We each have our contradictions. Each solves them or claims them in his own way. Yet you show your disapproval in periods of crisis, while we tell you of our concern in periods of calm.

What is this all about? Our arguments are well known. Let us start with yours. Opposed as you are to the Diaspora—historically, philosophically—you say that its Jews are riddled with complexes and paradoxes. In spite of being personae non gratae for centuries in numerous countries, they still choose to stay there—to cling to what? What was it that prevented us in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from following a Rebbe Gershon Kitiver or a Rebbe Mendel of Vitebsk to the Holy Land? Between one pogrom and the next, one massacre and the next, we knocked at exile’s every door rather than return to our home.

Later, during the emancipation, our newly acquired civil rights led us to dilute or even shed our Judaism rather than use it to fulfill ourselves. The historian Simon Dubnow stresses the point that upon contact with individual liberties, Judaism weakened. Once admitted into the Christian milieu, the Jew often came to look upon his Judaism as a blemish, an obstacle. Emancipation drove us to assimilation, not to nationalism; it brought about a setback rather than a rebirth of our spirituality. Instead of revolutionizing our own history, we set out to change that of others. We absorbed every culture, excelled in every tongue, interpreted all the signs, and took part in every battle; no other people has, either by necessity or vocation, been as universal or as universalist. We hoped to save humanity even as it was bent on our destruction. We were determined to accept nothing less than absolute salvation for all nations; we exerted ourselves more for others than for ourselves.

Israel belongs to all Jews. But is the reverse true? How, then, is one to explain our reticence to join you there permanently? You condemn us. At worst, you consider us hypocrites; at best, you consider us weaklings. Nor do we think that you are entirely wrong. Israel exists, and we live elsewhere; therein lies an anomaly. Of course, there are all sorts of alibis, excuses, justifications to be invoked: We help you, we act, we use our influence on your behalf. What would Israel do, what would Israel be, without the Diaspora? Yet the fact remains: The Jewish people, dispersed as it is, does not live in a state of siege, while you, in Israel, have made your homes on the front lines; your children, not ours, confront perils every day; you, their parents, not we, endure anguish every night.

If you reproach us for our failings, you are right. We don’t deny them. As we stand before you, we feel inadequate.

As for us, for what do we reproach you? This may sound absurd and surely unjust to you: We blame Israel for having happened too late. Too late to save the millions and millions of Jews who needed its protection the most. I know it is not Israel’s fault. And yet it hurts. Not only do I wish to love Israel, I want to admire it, hold it up as an example, find there what cannot be found elsewhere: a certain sense of justice, a certain sense of dignity. I want to find there a society ruled by a vision of probity, justice, and compassion.

It is a paradoxical yet understandable demand. The more we in the Diaspora fall prey to materialism, the more we yearn to see idealism flourish in Israel; the more passive we are, the more we would like Israel to be creative; the more earthbound we are, the more anxious we are that Israel be ethereal and sovereign. In short, we would like Israel to be what we are not. And if we sometimes voice our disappointment, it is because its reality dangerously resembles ours. Perhaps Kafka was right: Man’s weakness lies not in his inability to obtain victories, but in his inability to make use of them.

We follow your current events and frequently fail to understand them. The tone of your debates, the recriminations, the animosities remind us of other societies, other lands. Is it wrong of us to expect so much of Israel? To place you on what amounts to a pedestal?

Try to understand us as we try to understand you. In a world gone mad from feeding upon falsehood and greed, we look upon Israel as a haven where the cycle of cynicism and nihilism will be broken. As people who live in a discredited, disintegrated society, we see in Israel proof that man can and must win the battles within himself. Call me romantic or naive, but I see Israel, surrounded and besieged by hatred, as an ancient laboratory eternally renewed. I see Israel as a country in which victory does not necessarily signify the defeat of the enemy and in which true triumph means triumph over oneself. And in which friendship is possible and irrevocable. And in which everything that is tainted by banality, by vulgarity, is outside the law.

Are we wrong to raise you so high, thus asking Israel to be a model nation? Are we wrong to seek there signs heralding a social messianism or a messianic humanism? And to ask you—though we dislike interfering in your internal affairs—to disagree less frequently and less noisily? And to prepare a friendlier welcome for new immigrants? And to treat Russian Jews as brothers, even when they change their minds on the way and decide to settle in America? Are we wrong to ask you to adopt a more Jewish attitude toward Palestinian Arabs and, particularly, toward Israeli Arabs? To be less intransigent, more receptive? From Israel we expect no more, no less than the impossible.

Let us open our eyes, my Israeli brothers. As a Diaspora Jew, I live the life and the destiny of Jerusalem. And I should like you to understand us. We are responsible for each other; you do not deny it. If the principal task of the Diaspora is to protect Israel, yours should be to become a new source of life to the Diaspora. Let us assume the dialectics of our so singularly Jewish and so Jewishly singular condition: that we both live on two levels simultaneously; that we both lead a double life; that we be each other’s heart and conscience, constantly questioning and enriching each other. Without the Diaspora, Israel would have no one to question and no one to be questioned by. Without Israel, the Diaspora would know nothing of victory but the anguish that precedes it.

In these extraordinary times our generation is at once the most blessed and the most accursed of all. Some thirty years ago Jewish heroes wept every time a courier brought them a weapon; today strategists marvel at the Jewish army’s military genius. Fifty years ago nobody imagined that Russian Judaism could survive Communist dictatorship; today we are witnessing its rebirth. A generation ago we discovered the ruins of the world and the dark side of God; today it is on them that we are building future Jewish history.

This speech of 1974—which in my mind remains valid even now—was one I had prepared with great care. I weighed every word, every question mark. I knew that I was treading on mined terrain. But, I did not deliver the speech … at least not in its entirety. For a strange thing happened: During the first half, while I was saying mea culpa for myself and my fellow Jews in the Diaspora, the Israeli officials were listening, their faces beaming approval. As soon as I began the second part, suggesting that Diaspora Jews also had a few reproaches, the mood in the hall turned. It was as if a wind from Siberia had frozen my listeners’ features. The contact had been broken to the point that I asked myself what good it was to continue, to hurl myself against this human wall. In any case I would not be heard … and so I, too, broke the connection. I set aside my prepared text and improvised a different conclusion. I needed to finish. I had to get out of there.

The following year I receive a call from Pinhas Sapir, former finance minister and acting chairman of the Jewish Agency: He would like to pay me a visit at my home in New York. I tell him that I will gladly come to his hotel; after all, he is someone I respect, and he is my elder. Nothing doing. He insists on coming to my home, accompanied by his entourage. Without preamble he tells me: “I heard you last year, but I was not present at the debate your speech provoked. I know that my colleagues attacked you severely, and I know that they were unjust. That is why I wanted to come and see you today. To offer you our official apologies and, especially, my own.”

Sadly, this remarkable man died shortly afterward during a ceremony in an immigrant village, clasping the holy scrolls in his arms.

In spite of his soothing words, the incident in Jerusalem stays with me. I still don’t understand my inability to criticize Israel. Perhaps I am guided by the readings of the biblical and talmudic commentaries. Is it not said that even our teacher Moses was punished for having been too harsh with our people?

It is a troubling subject. I shall return to it.

It was only in 1995 that I discovered that the Six-Day War was not as noble as I had thought.

I had been so proud of the moving simplicity of “our” officers, the bravery of these soldiers who, to quote my friend André Schwarz-Bart, “fired and wept.” But in August 1995 the Israeli press is filled with articles describing assassinations allegedly perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and officers at the beginning of June 1967.

Yedioth Ahronoth, which by now has become the leading paper in the country, prints an article by Gabi Baron. He reports on what he himself saw near the airport of El ’Arīsh, which had just been won. In a hangar, 150 prisoners waited on the ground, their hands behind their necks. I read:

Next to the fence guarded by the military police, there was a table at which two men dressed in Israeli military uniforms were seated. They wore blue helmets and their faces were hidden behind antisand goggles and khaki kerchiefs. Military policemen went to fetch a prisoner and led him to the table. There ensued a brief conversation we could not overhear. Then, the prisoner was led one hundred meters from the hangar and one of the policemen handed him a shovel.

I saw the man dig a hole for fifteen minutes. Then one of the policemen ordered him to throw the shovel out of the hole. And then, one of them took his machine gun and fired three or four shots. The prisoner fell and died. A few minutes later another prisoner was taken to the same hole and shot. A third died in the same way. I myself was present at ten or so executions.

Military specialists have explained that the army had no choice: It feared the fedayeen, those terrorists who wearing the Egyptian military uniform operated behind the Israeli lines. Or then: In the desert, in the midst of a campaign, what is one to do with “useless mouths” …?

How I regret today not having known these facts, this horror, when I met with Moshe Dayan. Had he not been minister of defense during the Six-Day War?

Bad news from Canada. Bea is not doing well. My poor sister is still fighting, but she tires quickly. The treatments exhaust her. She is suffering terrible pain. She spends the High Holy Days at the hospital. I visit her often. She is coughing a lot. She bites her lips as she tells me slowly how she had been able to hear the sound of the shofar on both days of Rosh Hashana. What is she thinking? That the heavenly court’s judgment on “Who shall live and who shall die” must have been pronounced? She is pale and weak, my wounded, generous sister. She speaks in a broken, staccato voice. Her gaze is veiled. Whenever she removes her oxygen mask to speak to me, she gasps for breath. But she must confide in me how much she worries about her young children, Sarah and Stevie. I beg her: “Don’t speak; I understand you without words.” Oh yes, I do understand her. And I ache.

1973. On November 13 and 14, at Carnegie Hall, “Ani Maamin, a Song Lost and Found Again” is performed by an orchestra and choir under the baton of Lukas Foss. I had conceived this cantata, for which Darius Milhaud composed the score, for the centennial celebration of American Reform Jewry. It was commissioned by Al Ronald, a German Jew and former member of the Office of Strategic Services. I loved to listen to his tales of espionage, of parachuting into Germany. The victim of a fatal heart attack, he had pursued happiness with such zeal, my special friend Al.

I have never worked at such a pace. In less than a week the prose poem was completed and sent to the composer in Paris.

Ensconced in his armchair near the window in his Paris apartment, Milhaud asks why I chose this theme, this legend, over others. I tell him that since childhood I have felt a special tenderness for this twelfth article of faith proclaimed by the great Rabbi Moses Maimonides.

As children we had sung the original melody at heder and at the yeshiva on every holiday. For me it was a call to faith and an affirmation that even though he was late, the Redeemer would make his appearance one day.

Later I learned that Jews on their way to Treblinka and Birkenau had sung that song, as if to defy death. And I failed to understand: How could they believe in the coming of the Messiah over there? From where did they draw their faith in divine kindness and grace?

Then I sometimes question the child within me: What in the world was the Good Lord doing while His people were being massacred and incinerated? When He veils his face, as in the times of the biblical Malediction, what does he see? And then I ask myself: What were our ancestors, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, doing while their descendants were humiliated and sent to their death? Were they not, according to our tradition, our protectors and intercessors? Why didn’t they shake the celestial throne with their prayers and drown it in their tears?

God. Of all the characters in Scripture, said Saul Lieberman, God is the most tragic. It is not sacrilegious to feel sorry for Him. He, too, needs Redemption. Thus it is for Him, too, that we recite Ani Maamin—yes, I believe with all my heart in the coming, however belated, of the Messiah. Ani Maamin? I believe? In what? In whom? In the coming of the Messiah? Whom will he deliver? Who is there sufficiently worthy to make him come and save a humanity that has doomed itself?

These are thoughts that come to my mind every year as we commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The speakers recall the heroism of the fighters and the faith of the martyrs. And to conclude the ceremony the Ani Maamin is sung as if to emphasize that the dead, at the moment of dying, had maintained their faith.

Is it possible that in the midst of hell the victims kept their faith in a better world? Some witnesses answer affirmatively; I have no right to contradict them. We know that a principal goal of the fighters was to show the world that Jews were capable of taking up arms “to defend and save Jewish honor.” This expression often appears in their letters and testaments. We also know that those who were lucky enough to escape from the ghettos cared more about alerting their unfortunate brothers outside than about their own survival. All were filled with ahavat Israel, love for their people. That was why these young Jews risked their lives. And in the death camps there were Jews who took it upon themselves to become chroniclers and historians, writing and collecting testimonies so that future generations would remember and judge.

And yet there are other documents that reflect total despair. In their solitude Jews realized they could count on no one, that they counted for no one. The free and “civilized” world had handed them over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers—and there were those who remained silent. Does that explain the so-called Jewish passivity during the Holocaust? Perhaps Jews refused to fight for a world that had disappointed and betrayed them? Such pessimism is irreconcilable with Ani Maamin.

But then which approach is more justified? Both are, equally. There were Jews who prayed for the Messiah, and others who were ready to send him away. There were those who clung to the belief that all was not lost, and others who proclaimed that humanity was doomed. To say, as I do in my cantata, that the silence of God is God, is both an admission of resignation and an affirmation of hope.

The whole question of faith in God, surely in spite of man and perhaps in spite of God, permeates this cantata:

In those days, even as the heart of the world was being consumed by the black flames of Night, three angry old men appeared before the celestial court, asking to be heard.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the three forefathers of a people consecrated to God by God—were desperate. Their mission had been to roam the lands near and far, gathering the echoes of Jewish suffering in the world, and make them known in heaven. They wanted to bring it to an end.

Abraham tells what he sees on an earth drenched in blood, and the choir responds: “Pray for Abraham.” Isaac describes what he sees, and the choir responds: “Pray for Isaac.” Jacob tells us what he observes, and the choir responds: “Pray for Jacob.” And God? The choir concludes:

Ani maamin, Abraham,

Despite Treblinka.

Ani maamin, Isaac,

Because of Belsen.

Ani maamin, Jacob,

Because and in spite of Majdanek….

Ani Maamin, a song found again? This subtitle implies that I had found it, lost it, or at one time rejected it. This is what happened: One Passover evening in the seventies, my childhood friend Moshe-Chaim Berkowitz turns to me and asks: “Do you remember the melody for Ani Maamin, the one we used to sing at the Wizhnitzer Rebbe’s?” Suddenly it comes back to me. Winter 1943. We are spending Shabbat Shira—whose biblical readings remind us of the Red Sea crossing—at the Rebbe’s court. Toward the end of the afternoon I become aware of a man, small in stature, wearing shtreimel and caftan. He stands alone in a corner, near the stove. I know he is a relative of the Rebbe’s. He comes from Galicia. How did he manage to cross the border? I don’t dare ask. Suddenly he begins to hum Ani Maamin, it is a melody I have never heard before, and I find it both beautiful and heartbreaking. I close my eyes. In the huge study hall there is silence. Like everyone else I hold my breath. The men draw closer, forming a circle around the singer. We all wait for him to repeat the melody. That is the custom; that is how Hasidim learn new songs.

But the Rebbe’s relative prefers to speak. He tells a story, his own, of what he has seen and endured on the other side, in occupied Poland. After every episode he stops and sings anew the same haunting tune of Ani Maamin, as if to tell us: Remember not only my stories but also my song. In the end we learn it. But since Auschwitz it had eluded me. Yes, I had forgotten it, as had Moshe-Chaim. And it was at the same moment, one Passover eve, in the middle of the Seder, that we both found it again. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful Hasidic tunes I know. To this day, when I sing it I close my eyes.

Does this mean that I have made peace with God? I continue to protest His apparent indifference to the injustices that savage His creation. And the Messiah? He should have arrived earlier, much earlier. Perhaps Kafka was right: The Redeemer will come not on the last day but on the day after.

And what about my faith in all that? I would be within my rights to give it up. I could invoke six million reasons to justify my decision. But I don’t. I am incapable of straying from the path charted by my ancestors. Without this faith in God, the faith of my father and forefathers, my faith in Israel and in humanity would be diminished. And so I choose to preserve the faith of my childhood.

Did I say “choose”? In truth, it is not a real choice. I would not be the man that I am, the Jew that I am, if I betrayed the child who once felt duty-bound to live for God.

I never gave up my faith in God. Even over there I went on praying. Yes, my faith was wounded, and still is today. In Night, my earliest testimony, I tell of a boy’s death by hanging, and conclude that it is God Himself that the killer is determined to murder. I say this from within my faith, for had I lost it I would not rail against heaven. It is because I still believe in God that I argue with Him. As Job said: “Even if He kills me, I shall continue to place my hope in Him.” Strange: In secular circles my public statements of faith in God are resented.

From Montreal, another urgent call. Bea: Is there a nobler soul, a more charitable spirit? Though gnawed by cancer, my beloved sister never complains. She repeats over and over: “Not to be afraid, not to be afraid.” But I am afraid for her. As long as she did not know the nature of her illness, she seemed to hold fast. She remained active, went to her office between treatments. Why did the oncologist have to tell her the truth? She continues to repeat that all will be well, that we should not worry. But now when I visit the hospital I notice that she can barely smile. The last time I saw her, she spoke of her two children, Stevie and Sarah, more passionately than ever.

We are in Italy when, at the end of August 1974—according to the Hebrew calendar, the twenty-ninth day of the month of Ab of the year 5734—I receive the news. My brother-in-law Len is crying into the phone. I remain mute until I pull myself together to call Hilda but am still unable to move my lips. “What is it? What is it?” she asks. I finally whisper: Bea. Hilda cries out. A foolish thought crosses my mind: Just today I recited the prayer for the coming month; I must have prayed badly.

Marion is with me. So is Elisha. Does love console? I am inconsolable. Does love soothe? It soothes and is indispensable. We speak of Bea—her last visit with us, our last conversation. Language is cruel: We are already speaking of her in the past tense.

I fly to Montreal via New York. At La Guardia Airport, all the flights are booked. I run from one counter to the other, imploring the airline clerks. Finally I secure a seat.

Steve and Sarah have arrived from Israel, where they had been vacationing. Hilda is here too. I see people I know, others I do not. Bea had many admirers and friends. She was loved for her kindness, her compassion, her sense of humor. One of her friends tells me that a few days before her death, Bea had told her that she was terrified. She had seen our parents in a dream. They were expecting her.

And that was it. Life. Death. Three children from Sighet had been reunited after the war, and now only two of us are left. A thought tears through my brain: We had never spoken of her experiences over there. Now it is too late.

I tear my clothes as is the custom. I recite the traditional prayer: “Blessed art Thou, our God and King of the Universe, Judge of Truth.” The family slowly follows the coffin. I see nothing, nobody. All is dark around me, darker still inside me. I speak to Bea, entrusting to her messages and tears for our parents. “You will see them again. In three days your soul will rise to heaven, tell them …” The eulogies. The interment. The sense of irreparable loss. And later, traditional meals: How to touch them? The services, morning and evening. How to hold back the sobs as Steve recites the Kaddish? The ancestral rites. The condolences. It is the first time I am able to observe a week of mourning.

Seated on a low stool sitting shivah, I listen to the visitors who come to comfort us with the traditional words: “May God comfort you together with the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” Each has a story to tell about Bea. Her altruism, her integrity. No one had ever seen her angry. As for me, I remember her at home, in Sighet. When she fell ill with typhus, she had stayed in a room that was off-limits to us. Later I admired her resourcefulness, her courage. She was always ready to undertake missions most men considered too dangerous. Her work in the displaced persons camp. A walk through Paris with her: I look at the photograph. She wears a beret.

Certain midrashic texts suggest that the soul of the dead floats through the house during shivah. And I can indeed feel my sister’s presence.

Often, when I lecture in Montreal, I go to her grave to recite a psalm. Engraved on her tombstone are the names of those dear to us who never had a grave of their own.

For Israel and the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, 1974 ends on a note of defeat. Yasir Arafat’s appearance before the U.N. General Assembly was an indecent spectacle. The sight of this terrorist in uniform preaching morality to all of mankind—“In one hand I hold an olive branch, in the other, a gun!”—was distressing. Has the world forgotten the attacks, the assassinations committed by him and his minions?

I publish an article in the New York Times and Le Figaro, “Why I Am Afraid: Ominous Signs and Unspeakable Thoughts.” Here are excerpts:

I admit it sadly: I feel threatened. For the first time in many years I feel that I am in danger. For the first time in my adult life I am afraid the nightmare may start all over again or that it has never ended, that since 1945 we have lived in parentheses. Now they are closed. Could the Holocaust happen again? Over the years I have often put the question to my young students. And they, consistently, have answered yes, while I said no. I saw it as a unique event that would remain unique. I believed that if mankind had learned anything from it, it was that hate and murder reach beyond the direct participants; he who begins by killing others, in the end will kill his own. Without Auschwitz, Hiroshima would not have been possible. The murder of one people inevitably leads to that of mankind….

… There are signs, and they are unmistakable: the sickening sight of a diplomatic gathering wildly applauding a spokesman for killers. The scandalous exclusion of Israel from UNESCO. The arrogant self-righteousness of certain leaders, the cynicism of others. The dramatic solitude of Israel. The anti-Semitic statements made by America’s top general. Anti-Semitism has become fashionable once more both in the East and in the West…. Is it conceivable that Hitler could be victorious posthumously?

… And so, the idea of another catastrophe is no longer unthinkable. I say it reluctantly. In fact, it is the first time I say it. I have chosen until now to place the Holocaust on a mystical or ontological level, one that defies language and transcends imagination…. If I speak of it now, it is only because of my realization that Jewish survival is being called into question….

… And so I look at my young students and tremble for their future; I see myself at their age surrounded by ruins. What am I to tell them? I would like to be able to tell them that in spite of endless disillusionments one must maintain faith in man and in mankind; that one must never lose heart. I would like to tell them that, notwithstanding the official discourses and policies, our people does have friends and allies and reasons to advocate hope. But I have never lied to them; I am not going to begin now. And yet….

Despair is no solution. I know that. What is the solution? Hitler had one. And he tried it while a civilized world kept silent. I remember. And I am afraid….

Some twenty years later, as I transcribe this text, I wonder whether I was right to be so wary of Arafat. Yes, he was responsible for deadly terrorist activities, which it was my duty to denounce. But at the same time, he was a freedom fighter in the eyes of his people. I was asked to meet Arafat many times. Was I wrong to refuse? Are those who claim to have chosen peace over terror not to be believed? Is Arafat, therefore, to be looked upon as a moderate, a peacemaker, the head of a nascent state rather than of a clandestine military organization?

Summer 1974. We are on Long Island, in the Hamptons, the village of Amagansett, where Marion has transformed a ruin into a beautiful country house. I work badly and fitfully because I spend hours in front of the television watching the Senate and House investigations into the Watergate affair. What we are seeing is the vitality of the nation’s democratic institutions at work. The once-powerful witnesses stand humbled before the investigators. Isolated from his faithful and arrogant lieutenants, the President of the United States seems to be alone in his fight for survival. The dismissal of his attorney general for having refused to fire the prosecutors is dubbed the “Saturday Night Massacre” by the media. Nixon makes an astounding statement on television, that he is “not a crook.” The Supreme Court orders him to hand over the tapes of his conversations with his aides. The threat of impeachment. This is the stuff of Greek tragedy: the fall of a “hero” who has displeased the gods. All we can do is watch. His last speech. His farewell to the weeping White House staff. His flight to California, his arms raised in a sign of victory. The bland confirmation of his successor, Gerald Ford.

It is a turbulent year in every sector of American society. The public is repeatedly shaken by bizarre happenings, both at home and abroad. The young heiress Patty Hearst, abducted by terrorists, appears to have embraced their cause: You see a photo of her in the act of robbing a bank! There is talk of brainwashing, of rebellion against the class loyalties of her parents.

The greatest of Soviet writers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is forced into exile and finds refuge with the German writer Heinrich Böll. In France, Georges Pompidou dies in office and is succeeded by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. He has beaten the Socialist candidate, François Mitterrand, by 1 percent of the vote. In West Germany, Helmut Schmidt replaces Chancellor Willy Brandt, one of whose advisers had turned out to be an East German spy.

Northern Israel is under attack. The children of the villages and kibbutzim near the Lebanese border sleep in shelters; Arab shells kill eighteen inhabitants of Kiryat Shmona. Saboteurs are infiltrating the country from Lebanon and Jordan. There are far too many casualties on both sides. The worst of the attacks, the most heinous: eighteen children assassinated in the village of Maalot. Why do the terrorists target defenseless civilians? Their cowardice evokes horror. Is there ever a victory when the victims are children? I tell myself that though one day there may be peace between Israel and its neighbors, those responsible for the monstrous crime at Maalot will never be forgiven.

Notwithstanding the Syrian artillery’s attacks, the northern villages refuse to evacuate their children. Members of the elite units of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) track down the saboteurs. Marion and I spend an afternoon on a military base, and at nightfall watch the soldiers depart for the nearby border. We wonder how many will return.

Nonetheless, there does appear to be some progress in the Middle East. The “step-by-step” policy of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is praised in Israel when things go well, decried when things go poorly. It is around this time that I meet Kissinger, the first Jew to hold the premier U.S. cabinet post. His cold intelligence, monotonous voice, heavy German accent, and amazing analytic powers seduce and disturb. Foreign policy experts and Hollywood stars do everything and anything to be counted among his intimates. The Orthodox Jewish community is wary of him. They resent his having married a non-Jewish woman on Shabbat and his having taken his oath of office on a King James Bible.

Golda Meir likes him—though the story goes that she jokingly told Nixon, “My minister of foreign affairs speaks better English than yours.” She was, of course, referring to Abba Eban.

Kissinger is annoyed with Yitzhak Rabin, Golda’s successor as prime minister, for refusing to make certain territorial concessions in the Sinai that had been requested by Sadat. Two observation posts at the Mitla Pass are at issue. Israel does not realize the gravity of the situation, he says with great conviction. After a round of fruitless negotiations in Jerusalem, Kissinger, before boarding his plane at Lod, makes a statement to the press expressing his concern about the future of the Jewish state. For the first time in his career, he is seen shedding tears.

Back in Washington he reports to President Ford, who, apparently at the secretary’s urging, decides to reassess American policy toward Israel. It is easy to imagine the uproar in Israel. The fanatics accuse Kissinger of treason. He claims to wish to save Israel in spite of itself; he claims the very survival of the Jewish state is at stake. One day, much later, he confides in me that toward the end of the Yom Kippur War, as Ariel Sharon’s tanks surrounded the Egyptian Third Division, the Red Army had five thousand paratroopers ready to intervene.

In the summer of 1975, Marion and I board a military helicopter with Arthur Goldberg. The former Supreme Court justice and U.N. ambassador during the Six-Day War has been invited by the Israeli government to conduct an inspection of the contested zones in the Sinai. The general and colonels on board detail Rabin’s position, namely, that it is necessary to keep the two strategic passages until peace agreements have actually been signed. I understand nothing about military strategy, but I trust Rabin. As for Goldberg, he advises caution. A few years later, Menachem Begin gives back all of Sinai to Anwar Sadat, who at the time might well have settled for less.

•   •   •

In Southeast Asia, the hostilities cease: the first military defeat in American history. I happen to be in Secretary Kissinger’s office when an aide brings him a message. His face turns somber as he reads: The last American soldier has just left Saigon. He remains silent a long moment, then mutters something about the price of hostile public opinion and the restlessness on American campuses.

It is the start of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime under its leader, Pol Pot. Strangely, many leftist intellectuals offer the regime their support.

Early July 1976. America readies itself for its bicentennial. There are official ceremonies, parades, military processions, hundreds of tall sailing ships. The past is evoked to better appreciate the present. But on this Fourth of July, Americans are less preoccupied with their nation’s history than with the events taking place in the distant land of Uganda, where an incredible surprise operation is being carried out successfully by an elite commando unit of the IDF.

It all began on Sunday, June 27, when a band of Arab and German terrorists diverted an Air France plane en route from Paris to Lod via Athens and forced the crew to land at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. There were 230 passengers on board, 83 Israelis among them.

The world’s eyes turn to “Dr. Marshal Idi Amin Dada,” the outrageous dictator of this impoverished country. Will he help the hostages or the terrorists? Nobody knows. For this fat, jovial, but ferocious character—rumor has it that he throws his enemies into crocodile-infested waters—it is the perfect opportunity to star on the international stage.

It seems he has some indebtedness to Israel, where he trained as a paratrooper. This does not prevent him from siding with the hijackers, who demand the liberation of forty-seven of their comrades who are imprisoned in Israel and Western Europe.

Whose idea was this hijacking? Was it the PLO’s initiative? Then how does one explain the participation of several young Germans of the Baader-Meinhof group?

Israelis are tense. Should they negotiate with the terrorists? That would be contrary to Israeli policy, which is never to validate terrorists’ status by dealing with them directly—yet sacrificing the hostages was unimaginable.

Meanwhile, the terrorists proceed with the help of Idi Amin to separate the Israelis from the other hostages. They free the French but hold the Israelis.

Rabin asks his cabinet whether to negotiate. There is tension between him and his defense minister, Shimon Peres. The vote is unanimous: Yes, but only if a military option is excluded. The leaders of the opposition, including Menachem Begin, share this point of view. Human lives count more than principles. Rabin consults General Motta Gur, the army’s commander-in-chief and liberator of the Old City of Jerusalem, as to whether a military operation is feasible.

In New York, with our Israeli friends Raphael and Dina Recanati, we discuss our concern that a military move is not viable. We wonder how the army could possibly transport units that far—some 2,200 miles—into hostile territory. And even if a commando unit reached Entebbe Airport, how could one prevent the terrorists from killing the defenseless hostages? In the end, we all agree: A military rescue is out of the question. None of us is prepared for Israeli logic: that because the operation seems impossible, it will be undertaken—and brilliantly executed.

What was the Mossad’s role? To provide information and photographs. And whose idea had it been to load into the giant plane a black Mercedes identical to the one in which Idi Amin liked to parade? Carried out with clockwork precision, the mission is successful. Tragically, there are four casualties: three hostages and the Israeli colonel Yoni Netanyahu. Four families are in mourning, but there is dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv. Begin, the opposition leader, congratulates Rabin.

It meant much to me when, months later, Yoni’s father, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, author of a superb volume on the Inquisition, brought me letters from his son in which my work is mentioned. I then read in his posthumously published diary references to my novels.

In America there is less talk of the bicentennial than of Entebbe. Not since the Six-Day War has there been such a show of admiration for the Jewish state.

Among the hostages was a survivor of the camps. At one point he walked up to one of the German terrorists and showed him the tattoo on his arm: “It may have been your father who did this to me; the Germans wanted to murder me and my family. Now youwill do the job?” The terrorist did not answer. But when the Israeli attack started, the hostage saw the terrorist aiming his gun at him. “I am convinced that in that final second, what I had said kept him from pulling the trigger,” said the survivor.

In 1977, the arrival of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in the Israeli capital turns history on its head. By then Yitzhak Rabin is no longer prime minister and Shimon Peres is no longer in charge of defense. Astonishingly, Menachem Begin has been elected to head the new government and selects Moshe Dayan as his minister of foreign affairs. Who could have imagined that the hawk from the right and the military man from the left would bring about a peace that the left had pursued unsuccessfully since 1948?

It all begins on November 9, when Sadat addresses the People’s Assembly in Cairo and states: “I am ready to go to the end of the world if it will prevent one of my sons, be he soldier or officer, from being wounded. I repeat: wounded, not killed. Israel will be surprised to hear me declare before you that I am ready to go to them, to the Knesset, in order to speak to them….”

That very day, Yossi Ciechanover, at that time a high official in the Defense Department and a friend of Dayan’s, is in my home. We discuss Sadat’s speech. I tell Yossi that Dayan must take Sadat at his word. Let Israel invite him to Jerusalem. Yossi rejects the idea, saying it won’t work. In retrospect, I think he may already have been aware of secret negotiations between the Israelis and the Egyptians.

I remember: It is Shabbat. Marion and I are with our friends the Recanatis. Transfixed, we watch television, tears running down our cheeks. In Israel, night has fallen. Lod Airport is brightly lit. Egyptian flags line the tarmac. It all seems surreal. The presidential plane, escorted by Israeli military planes, appears. It lands. We are silent, afraid to breathe, afraid to wake up. The plane’s door swings open. Is it really Sadat, who only four years earlier had ordered the attack on the Jewish state on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur? He slowly walks down the steps and reviews the honor guard. The military band plays the two national anthems. And here is Sadat saluting Menachem Begin, Arik Sharon, Ezer Weizman—and Golda, who not so long ago on her hospital bed had told me that she did not want to live to see the day when Begin would be in the cabinet. But it is Begin who welcomes the enemy leader in order to make peace. Begin, the man of the right, and not she, the former head of a leftist government.

We stay there for hours watching the live telecasts. Commentators describe what they see without seeming to believe it. At a loss for words, they hide behind their own incredulity. I scan the faces of the crowd shown on the screen—anonymous faces, looking awed. The warmth of their welcome moves me as much as the illustrious visitor’s arrival. After all, among them there must be orphans, widows, bereaved parents of the Yom Kippur War. And yet there appears to be no anger. On the contrary, they welcome Sadat as a friend come from afar, a brother who has overcome dangerous obstacles.

The next day: Sadat in the Old City, Sadat entering the El Aksa Mosque, Sadat addressing the Knesset.

I admire his instincts, his courage, and I refuse to think of the difficulties that await him and his Israeli counterparts on the road to reconciliation. Will we finally learn to celebrate peace just as our ancestors glorified war?

A leap into the future. Nearly a decade later I invite a young woman to speak on the Koran to my students at Boston University, where I now teach. She is Camelia Sadat, the daughter of the Egyptian leader. I eventually become her Ph.D. adviser and she becomes my friend.

Let us take a few steps back. The year 1977 started badly. In January the French government freed the Palestinian terrorist Abu Daoud before Israel could start extradition proceedings. Throughout the world this scandal provoked an unprecedented wave of protest. In the United States there were calls for a boycott of French products. With the financial help of a few friends I arranged for a full-page ad in the New York Times, in the form of an open letter to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of the French Republic:

Dear Mr. President:

It is because of my love for France, and my respect for its people, that I feel compelled to express to you my sadness and my indignation—shared by many other Americans—over your handling of the Abu Daoud affair.

Although born in Eastern Europe, I owe France more than I owe my own native land. I owe France my secular education, my language, and my career as a writer.

Liberated from Buchenwald, it was in France that I found compassion and humanity. It was in France that I found generosity and friendship. It was in France that I discovered the other side, the brighter side, of mankind.

I was proud of France.

France, to me, represented humanity’s highest values in a sterile and cynical society. It evoked Rousseau and Bergson, Proust and Zola, Camus and Mauriac. It symbolized an inspiring quest for justice and brotherhood. In France, I thought, the word humanism does not make people laugh.

Yes, I was proud of France.

France, the birthplace of revolutions against tyranny. France, the ally of our American independence. France, the herald of human rights. France, haven for the persecuted. France and its freedom fighters. France and its Resistance. France and its response to Dreyfus.

No nation had so much prestige. No culture was as readily accepted. No example as universally extolled.

And now, Mr. President?

Now, what has become of France?

Its moral leadership is gone, and its luster tarnished in the eyes of men of conscience. In fact, few countries have lost so much prestige so quickly. What has become of France?

It has betrayed its own traditions.

France has become as cynical as the rest of the world.

Why did your government free Abu Daoud?

And why so hastily?

He lied under oath about his false identity.

Why wasn’t he held until Germany or Israel would offer evidence of his crime?

Why was he allowed to leave Paris in the comfort of a first-class airline seat, when 11 Israeli athletes left Munich in coffins?

Your prime minister claims that the courts were not politically motivated. Does anyone believe him in your country? Not in mine.

In my country we believe that France quite simply, and quite shockingly, yielded to killers’ blackmail, oil merchants’ bribery, and the chance to sell some fighter planes. And in doing that, France deliberately humiliated the victims’ widows and orphans, and insulted the memory of their dead.

Are you surprised the world responded with dismay and outrage? Your own people rose to speak out against you.

Because while you have visited Auschwitz, you have forgotten its lesson.

But then, in truth, one should have expected nothing else from France today. In recent years the signs have multiplied. Offensive statements. Sneering remarks. Sudden policy reversals. Strange alliances. Broken promises. Onesided embargoes. The Cherbourg affair. The Mirage sale. French governments have rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate their hostility to Israel and the Jewish people.

France even abstained on the infamous resolution equating Zionism and racism.

For ideological reasons?

Much worse: purely for money.

Yes, Mr. President, I used to be proud of France and what it stood for. I no longer am.

Written in the heat of the moment, this letter, regrettably, contained one error: I was wrong to reproach France for having abstained from voting during the infamous resolution equating Zionism to racism. I quickly corrected the error subsequently: France had actually voted against this resolution.

In 1993 on a Paris–New York flight, I find myself sitting next to the former president of France. He asks me what I am working on. I tell him: my memoirs. And I add: “I am afraid it contains pages that may displease you.” He asks why. I say, “Abu Daoud.” “You must let me explain,” he replies. “We were ready to extradite him to Germany, since it was there that he committed his crime. But Bonn didn’t want him.”

In late 1995 the American press reports that Abu Daoud has sold his memoirs for a substantial price. In the book he admits to having participated in the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich. Where is he now? In the West Bank.

I write every morning. I take notes, I make entries in my personal diary. I sleep less. I read a lot—on planes, in cars. I read very few novels, preferring essays on contemporary history, especially World War II; also, the new philosophers, deconstruction in literature, semiotics.

Writing, teaching, lecturing. Every evening, every morning, I tell myself: The danger lies in trying to do too much. Tomorrow I shall be more prudent, more parsimonious with my time. I never am.

Writing becomes more difficult, more exhausting, more pressing. I need solitude. Silence. I become acutely aware of the ambiguity of words. Always the same questions, the same doubts: How to express that which eludes language? I erase, I rewrite. I fill the waste-basket with superseded drafts. Will I be discerning enough to know when the well runs dry? I redo a single page again and again, until, in the end, I decide on the first draft.

When man is witness to the alienation of his language, when, to quote Rabbi Israel of Rizhin, the parable and its meaning no longer have anything in common, a door has been closed. Literature ceases to be a beacon of salvation or even a means of introspection.

Aesthetics or ethics: Does literature belong to either realm? If one is to believe the Midrash, Adam, when he composed a song for Shabbat, was already making literature. But didn’t Eve anticipate him by telling stories about forbidden fruit and snakes? What is certain is that this couple, the first in history, opened the way to future creators. In the end, they could not escape ethical imperatives. Knowledge compels man to choose between good and evil, life and nothingness. Moses—who was as great a writer as he was a legislator—told his brother Aaron to remain “bein hakhaim vehametim,” between the living and the dead, and death backed off. The writer creates a link between the living and the dead; he protects one from the other.

A writer cannot detach himself from his story: He is responsible for it to the end. Jeremiah feels guilty for the destruction of the Temple: He is not sure of having found the words needed to change man and revoke the decree.

In New York, at the 92nd Street “Y,” I continue my annual lecture series, begun in 1966, on the Bible, the Talmud, Hasidism, and Jewish tradition.

I remember my first lecture at the “Y.” There were two of us on the program, the novelist Jean Shepherd and myself. The auditorium was nearly full, but after she spoke many people left. Never mind, I told myself, while counting the few friends and strangers scattered through Kaufmann Hall; so they won’t invite me again.

In truth I was disappointed, because this center is among the most prestigious in New York. Resigned, I walk onstage. I sit down at a carved wooden table. I read a page from Les Juifs du Silence, the original French edition of The Jews of Silence. Does anyone in this hall speak French? No matter; they probably won’t stay anyway. I read and comment in English on a passage from The Town Beyond the Wall. Please God, make this torture come to an end. In desperation, I evoke Beethoven, of whom it was said that he not only composed his symphonies but also the silence that followed them.

Finally it’s over.

Only it wasn’t. Since then, over more than thirty years, I have given more than 120 lectures at the “Y”.

I am invited to speak at the Sorbonne. My lectures on Rebbe Nahman and the talmudic Master Elisha ben Abuya are given in the very amphitheater where, long ago, I listened so intently to my professors. I still have trouble overcoming my stage fright. My migraines don’t help. Before every speech I remember the words of our sages which Saul Lieberman used to quote: “It takes less than three years for man to learn to speak, and seventy to learn to remain silent.”