“We too had our madmen,” Elhanan said. In Brooklyn he was reminded of Feherfalu. In the American version of a shtetl, Jews lived in a sealed-off world. No business on the Sabbath, no school on Jewish holidays. They taught Talmud and mathematics in Yiddish. Life proceeded by the ancient Jewish calendar.
Once Malkiel took his father to the home of a great Hasidic master, who received visitors only after midnight. Impressive and even majestic, radiating strength and faith, arms stretched out before him on a bare table, the rabbi listened to Malkiel but gazed steadily at Elhanan.
“Rabbi,” Malkiel cried, “I turn to you because ordinary medicine is powerless.”
“Doctors are only God’s messengers,” the rabbi replied calmly. “I, too, am only His messenger. Men may be powerless; God is not.”
Anxious, tormented, Malkiel crossed and recrossed his legs, trying to catch the master’s gaze, which was fixed on Elhanan. “Isn’t it a rabbi’s duty to speak to God in our name?”
“God needs no intermediaries.”
“But
we
need them!”
“Why do you speak for your father? If he has something to say, let him say it himself.”
Elhanan heard and understood all of this. He opened his mouth, looked for the right words, found them. “Rabbi,” he said, “I’m going under.”
The rabbi’s gaze remained steadfast. Abruptly he looked away.
“Is it hopeless?” asked Malkiel.
“God commands us to hope,” said the rabbi, straightening his shoulders before hunching again in concentration. Outside, a drunk sang out his woes while policemen shouted, chasing a thug. Would the world’s violence break and enter this room? The rabbi’s voice deterred it: “Elhanan son of Malkiel, listen to me. In our prayers on the high holy days we beg the Lord to remember the near sacrifice of Isaac. What an idea! We beg God to remember? Can you imagine the God of Abraham as an amnesiac? The truth is, we make such requests in the name of memory to prove to Him that we ourselves remember. Next Rosh Hashanah you will go to synagogue; I command it. And you will remember. That too I command.”
Outside, thirty disciples besieged them. “What were
your impressions? What did he say to you? Which of his words struck you particularly?”
“It’s confidential,” Malkiel said.
Next day Malkiel told Tamar about the visit.
“You should have taken me along. I’ve never seen a Hasidic master.”
“Next time you’ll come.”
Tamar pondered what Malkiel had told her. “I have every confidence.”
“In him?”
“In your father. If he believes in the rabbi, that can only help.”
On Rosh Hashanah father and son attended synagogue. Tamar was with her parents in Chicago. Elhanan followed the long service as always, with a prayer book in his hand. Then they invited him to the Torah. Malkiel panicked: how could his father recite the blessings without stumbling? Elhanan recited them from memory. Malkiel’s happiness was unbounded. But it lasted only until the day after Yom Kippur.
“Let’s see your rabbi again,” Tamar suggested.
They were admitted at four in the morning. Malkiel stood near the table, Tamar in the background. The exchange between the reporter and the rabbi took on an unreal character. “My father’s slipping again,” said Malkiel. “We need more help.”
“Help does not come from the mortal that I am. How many times must I tell you that?”
“Plead with God in our name.”
“And why don’t you plead with Him yourself, young man?”
“I’m sure my prayers don’t reach heaven.” Malkiel had to explain himself: he was too busy at the newspaper, too tormented
by his father’s illness, too harassed from too many sides.
The rabbi sighed. “Your father has priority. All the rest can wait. He cannot wait. Your father gave you everything; it is your turn to give it back to him.”
“How should I go about it? The student can teach; the apprentice can become independent. But what can a son do for his sick father?”
“Speak in his place; pray in his name. Do what he is incapable of doing; let your life be an extension of his. Learn, since he no longer learns. Be happy, since he no longer laughs.”
His throat dry, his head burning, Malkiel murmured his answer. “You’re asking the impossible of me, Rabbi. How can I be happy, when my father …”
Laugh? Give himself over to life’s pleasures? By what right could he be happy? He had never seen his father happy. An inconsolable widower, an uprooted man, Elhanan had never seemed carefree, capable of gaiety. Sometimes Malkiel was even angry with him for that; I’m here, he would think spitefully, I exist, I live, I love him and he knows it, isn’t that enough for him? Doesn’t he understand that when he wallows in melancholy and mourning he’s putting space between us and condemning me?
“Rabbi,” Malkiel said, “perhaps my father was happy once, in Palestine, before I was born—”
“All the more reason for you to be happier longer and more often! Will your father’s sadness be less heavy, less burdensome, if it weighs the more on you? It is your duty to resist it. The person with you tonight will help you, I know. Who is she? Your fiancée? Marry her. Invite your father to the wedding. He will lead you to the
huppah
, I promise. He will recite the seven blessings; I promise that, too. It will be
the happiest day of your life, and of mine. I shall remember it, and so will you.”
The rabbi broke off; someone had knocked at the door, a discreet knock. An uneasy, fragile smile dawned in his bright, sharp eyes, but vanished immediately.
F
or Elhanan, Palestine was Talia. And Itzik. But while Talia was tenderness, Itzik meant violence. Talia or love. Itzik or friendship. During the last months of the war Itzik had but one purpose: revenge. For him it was as important as victory.
Born of sighs and sacrifices, the friendship between the two partisans was bound to last. And yet. As they said in Feherfalu, man acts and God laughs. No; in this case God would not laugh. God does not like to see friendship torn apart. God weeps for a parting as He weeps for a death. And in fact this friendship ended with a murder.
A few weeks after the attack on Stanislav came the liberation of Feherfalu. Summer sunshine warmed the red-brick roofs, the trees in bloom and the cottages with their closed shutters. The remaining villagers, sick with terror, awaited the invader. Some had fled to the mountains, others as far as Budapest. Still others went to hide in the cellars of abandoned Jewish homes. As always, great fear preceded the first offensive. Fear of falling into the hands of the last German unit, which, beaten, would kill before meeting death. Fear of bombs, artillery, stray bullets. Fear of Russian soldiers; propaganda said appalling but likely things about them.
Evacuated by the Germans and Hungarians, Feherfalu was a ghost town that day. Empty, the houses. Shut, the shops. Closed, the blinds. Deserted, the offices. The town was dead, breathing only in its grave. There was anguished silence, a wait heavy with foreboding.
Preceding the Red Army, David’s partisans entered the town. The shooting lasted a solid hour. It was in fact pointless: the enemy was gone. Then again, you could never tell. They might flush out some stragglers. So the assault group moved in as if there were Germans in every building and Hungarians behind every window. Exploding grenades, the clatter of submachine guns—and then the terrified cries of women dragged by their hair and men shoved against a wall.
Elhanan said nothing and heard no one, but headed straight for his house. The gateway to the courtyard was open. The kitchen door, too. He rushed inside and ran from one room to another: no one. He cried out, he shouted, “Where are you?” No answer. Suddenly he noticed a muffled sound, a kind of scratching, from down below. They’re in the cellar, he thought. “Come on out!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Come out! It’s me, Elhanan!” The cellar door creaked open. An old woman’s face appeared: it was the widow Starker. Elhanan knew her. She lived two streets over. What was she doing here? He told her to come up. “What are you doing in our house, Madame Starker? Where are my parents? Quick, don’t stare at me like that, tell me, tell me, for the love of heaven! Where are my parents?”
She fell to whimpering and sniffling and hiccuping. “Then you don’t know—”
“Know what? Come on, tell me! What don’t I know?”
“Your parents, sir. They’re not here anymore. They’re—”
“Where are they?” Elhanan was out of patience and suddenly weak.
“They took them away.…”
“Where did they take them?”
“I don’t know. They took all the Jews.”
Elhanan wanted to scream, to strike out at someone, more than ever before in his life. He collapsed into a chair and stared into space. Madame Starker asked, “Would you like a glass of water?” He hardly heard her, he was not there, all this was happening to someone else. He, Elhanan Rosenbaum, was not armed; the woman before him was not a neighbor; the catastrophe had never occurred. Yet Madame Starker was talking. “I came to your house to hide … to hide in the cellar.… I said to myself that your shelter was safer than mine … especially since there are so many Jews in the Red Army.” When Elhanan only sat there, she shouted down the cellar. Other heads appeared. Several women and some children. Frightened and obsequious, they kissed his jacket. “Thank you,” they said, “thank you for letting us come to your house. Can we stay another day, another week? Until everything calms down … and the Russians get tired of looting and raping?” Elhanan stood up and walked out. In the house across the way—it belonged to the Cohen family—he ordered the living out. Terrified, they obeyed him, babbling explanations: “We had to hide. The Russian soldiers, they’re capable of anything, everybody knows that.” And why in Jewish homes? It seemed reasonable to them. Elhanan went to inspect the house next door: there the new inhabitants had been shrewder, affixing an old mezuzah to the door.
The synagogue: transformed into a stable by the Germans. The Hasidic house of study: a military brothel. The yeshiva: a museum of anti-Semitism.
Elhanan encountered acquaintances, who told him in breathless staccato about the ghetto and the cruelties inflicted
on it by the Nyilas chief, a man called Zoltan. Here was Kovago, his old schoolmaster, saying to him, “Your parents left two candelabras and three ritual silver chests; they are yours.” Vasaros, a former judge, told him, “Before the transports, I suggested to your father that they leave the ghetto.” The transports. They described them to him, and he thought he must be living in a nightmare: the town betrayed all its Jews, and these men, these women, who looted their homes afterward, dared now to lament the Jews’ fate in his presence.… He wanted to tell them of his revulsion but knew he could not. God, teach me wrath! Make me an avenger! But God did not will it so. Elhanan shrugged and went off to find other witnesses, other clues, other guilty parties. A voice called to him: Lianka, her cheeks aflame, was asking him if anyone in his family was alive. “Not one Jew survived,” Elhanan said. “The town sold them all to their killers.”
“Not all,” Lianka said. “We turned up two. Come and see.” He found them in the once stately home of Gershon Weiss, the manufacturer. The partisans surrounding them saw Elhanan and opened a path. “Do you know them?”
Yes, he knew them vaguely. They’d worked for the Weiss family.
“A Christian family hid them,” David explained.
“Risking their lives,” the survivors added.
“Are you the only ones left?” Elhanan asked.
“Yes,” said one.
“There’s a third,” said a partisan. “The gravedigger.”
Elhanan grew dizzy. The gravedigger? Why would God have spared the gravedigger? The two survivors turned to him: “If you have questions, go ahead. Ask them.” Questions! No end to them, Elhanan thought. Why didn’t the Jews flee to the mountains or the nearby villages? Why didn’t their honest Christian neighbors take them in? The
two survivors answered calmly point by point, adding details about this family or that, but each time ending with a sigh: “It happened so fast, so fast.” As for Elhanan’s parents, they had seen them in the ghetto. “Your mother told anyone who’d listen that she thanked God for saving her son. She consoled herself with thoughts of you, Elhanan; you were alive.” Could she have guessed that he’d come back? “Ah,” the survivors said, “if only she’d been able to see you like this, carrying a weapon, conqueror, avenger …” The word spoken aloud at last: avenger.
“Right,” said a partisan. “We’ll have to take revenge.”
A brief discussion followed. Was that the way—the Jewish way—the way a Jew should go? To shed blood? Whose? Starting where?
Elhanan was lost in a vision of his parents and did not join the debate. Nor did Itzik. Itzik, who looked fierce. The others piled argument upon argument (most of them in favor of revenge) and interrogated the two survivors about collaborators and the Nyilas. One name popped up often: Zoltan, head of the Nyilas. Itzik made a note on a scrap of paper and stuffed it into his pocket. Then the partisans broke up. “Meet tomorrow morning at seven in the synagogue courtyard,” David said. “Stay out of trouble. And don’t forget, the war isn’t over. We go where the Red Army goes. They’re counting on us.”
Torn between fury and despair, Elhanan paced the town’s streets like a sleepwalker. At every corner he expected to stumble upon some childhood friend or cousin, or one of his parents. Constantly he saw his father or his mother beckoning him closer.… He wanted to speak to them, but no sound escaped him. He was alone. Yes, he had friends, comrades, and he would have more in the future, but it was not the same. Nothing can interrupt an orphan’s solitude.
A Russian soldier called to him in Yiddish. “You want a
watch? I have three. The watchmaker won’t need them anymore. He was a fascist.”
The soldier went off. Elhanan continued on his way but stopped abruptly. He thought he had heard a cry. A woman’s cry. From where? He listened intently. He was wrong; his nerves were frayed. No, there it was again! A woman was shouting for help. Elhanan knew where the cry had come from. Suppose it was a Jewish woman being attacked? He burst into the house. The inner doors were wide open. A small room, all shadows, and two bodies intertwined on the floor. The woman was struggling, and the man was covering her mouth. Elhanan went to the window and threw back the curtains. “Are you crazy?” Itzik shouted. “Get out.” Shocked and nauseated, Elhanan stared at his friend forcing the woman down with the weight of his outstretched body. Elhanan gazed upon the woman and was ashamed to do so. He knew that he ought to clear out, but his legs would not obey him. “Get out, Elhanan! Can’t you see I’m not finished? Wait for me outside, unless … unless you want some too.” Elhanan stared at the woman, stared into eyes that shone with indescribable shame, pain and protest, and he did not know what to do. Now Itzik’s hands were rising on the woman as if to clutch her breasts, and she cried in horror as if she were possessed. Elhanan started toward his friend, went to touch his arm, changed his mind. “Itzik, my friend, come on. Please. Stop it. What you’re doing is wrong.” Itzik rebuked him: “You want to be a saint? Go to the synagogue—and leave us alone!” Itzik went at the woman fiercely; her mouth stopped again, she begged Elhanan with her anguished and anguishing eyes, as if he were her savior, as if he were almighty. But Elhanan was not. He stepped backward out of the room. In the street, he leaned against a wall and vomited.