All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a thousand times better than all of us, but the Midrash tells us that he was cast into a burning furnace. So how do you expect to breeze through life without a scratch? Daniel was wiser than you and more pious, yet he was condemned to die in a lion’s den. And you dream of living your life without suffering? The children of Jerusalem were massacred by the soldiers of General Nebuzaradan, and you complain?” Later Kalman, my Kabalist Master, had me recite aloud the litanies and chronicles of the afflictions of Jewish communities dispersed during the Crusades and ensuing pogroms. The communities of Blois and Mainz, York and Reims, all perished by sword and fire for refusing to renounce their faith. And he would conclude by quoting the Talmud: “Better to be among the victims than among the killers.”
    I thrived on these stories, proud of these Jews whose fidelity to the Covenant made them both vulnerable and immortal. I felt drawn to the prisoners of the Inquisition. Each of them recalled Isaac, though no angel intervened to extinguish the flames that were to consume them. I was haunted by their ordeal. Would I have had the strength to endure? I dreamed of Rabbi Hanina ben Tradyon, the Talmudic sage condemned by the Romans to die slowly on the pyre because he hadtaught the law in the public square. How had he and his disciples and theirs managed not to yield? I thought of my own ancestor Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann, author of the
Tossafot Yom-Tov
, who was imprisoned in Prague and Vienna during the Thirty Years’ War. Would I, too, be able to remain Jewish under my jailers’ eyes? I liked to invoke the memory of another ancestor, the Sh’la Hakadosh: at the supreme moment would he come to help me follow him without fear or shame?
    Today, half a century later, these questions remain open. My people’s survival leaves me perplexed even now, just as the undying hatred for it continues to preoccupy me.
    Guided by my teachers, I hoped to find the answer in books. I read assiduously, perhaps too assiduously. Hence my disdain—surely a failing—for sports. Football, skiing, tennis: none of them was for me. Certain rich young Jews of assimilated families engaged in these sports, but I didn’t even know how to swim. For relaxation I played chess, and sometimes cards on Christmas Eve, when even ultraorthodox Jews played cards rather than show themselves on the street. Other evenings I spent with friends among the Hasidim, who always found some occasion for celebration. On Saturday afternoons in spring I would go for walks in the Malompark or along the banks of the Tisza and Iza, our town’s two rivers. One summer evening I followed a crowd to the main square and spent hours watching an acrobat perform on two enormous stilts, his head touching the roofs. Another time I saw a tightrope walker. I still remember the crowds cry of fright when he fell. “That’s human life,” someone remarked, “a tightrope.” A Jewish theater troupe from Vilna, I think, came to put on several performances. I don’t remember which plays. Once my mother took me to the movies to see a Yiddish film about Jewish settlements in Palestine, or was it Birobidzhan? Boys and girls were shown working in the fields, laughing and singing. Another time a Hungarian film,
Girl of the Night
, was shown. I remember the face and the name of the star, the beautiful Karády Katalyn, from a poster. But I never saw the film. After all, a good Jewish boy, religious to boot, did not waste his time—and lose his soul—watching women doing God-knows-what.
    From the pedagogical point of view, of course, my parents were making a mistake. Though I hadn’t seen the film, the actress occupied my thoughts. Considerable efforts were required to drive her out, especially at night, just before I went to sleep. And she was not alone. Despite (or because of) the prohibitions, there were times when my glance roamed where it shouldn’t have, in the direction of a young