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

first saw the light of day, it proudly bore the name of Sighetul Marmaţiei and belonged to the Kingdom of Greater Romania. When I left it, it was Máramarossziget again, a Hungarian city of noisy patriotism. Today its capital is Bucharest once more, but Budapest demands its return in the name of God-knows-what.
    I will never forget having to learn the Hungarian national anthem overnight, the Romanian royal hymn having been tossed aside like a dirty old sock. Now we shouted “God save Hungary!” with the same enthusiasm with which we had earlier cried “Long live the king!”
    At home, of course, Yiddish predominated. But we also spoke German, Romanian, and Hungarian. At the store you might also hear Ruthenian, Ukrainian, and Russian. You had to be a born polyglot to communicate with the peasants, though often just a few words would suffice: hello, yes, no. Most of our customers could get along in Yiddish. Maria, our servant, spoke it fluently, with nearly no accent andwith great conviction. She knew our customs, mores, and laws. Sighet, after all, was pretty much a Jewish town, and all our Christian neighbors knew that a Jew could not light a fire on Saturday, eat leavened bread during Passover, or touch impure meat. The opposite was not the case: I knew nothing of the Christian religion, which inspired in me no curiosity, only fear. I would cross the street when I passed the church on my way to the synagogue or the House of Study. Was it the incense, liturgical processions, and icons that frightened me, or the crowd, whom I imagined filled with hate for the people of Israel? Perhaps I subconsciously recalled traumatizing stories about Jewish children kidnapped by monks and forced to convert.
    Yet I did have Christian friends—well, maybe not friends, but classmates. I can still see them playing in the schoolyard among themselves. Some came to the store to buy a kilo of sugar or flour. They smiled at me then, but at school they pretended not to know me. On Christmas Eve they wore masks with horns and carried whips, taking part in the hunt for Jews. No, not all of them. I remember one pallid, timid boy, an excellent pupil. When his comrades let us feel their hatred, Pishta would wink at me, as if encouraging me to hold on. Later, when the ghetto was created, he helped me carry our radio to a friend of my father’s.
    Outside
heder
, I was always terrified by exams, but I got good grades in elementary school, partly because I did my homework and learned my history and geography lessons by heart, but perhaps also because my teachers, including a gruff man named Muresan, were eager to please my parents. They were our, shall we say, special customers, and in exchange I was their pet pupil in class. They were kind enough to look the other way when I was absent, which was often, since I was less concerned with secular studies than with holy books. I was no more interested in the patriotic slaughters of Hungarians and Romanians than I was in legends about the birth of Remus and Romulus or Attila’s military exploits. Passing exams was no problem: I simply crammed for a month. During that time I did nothing else, neglecting the Talmud while begging its forgiveness and pledging to return as soon as exams were over, a promise I always kept. Within a week I had forgotten everything secular.
    Then there was the violin. My instructor was an officer of the gendarmerie. I would go to his quarters twice a week, a bottle of
tzuika
in hand. He drank, I played. When the bottle was empty I would stop.
    In high school I continued to learn, only to forget. My parentsenrolled me as a special student in Jewish high schools, first in Debrecen and later in Nagyvárad. My mother’s dream was for her son to become a
doktor rabiener
, a rabbi with a doctorate. Private tutors in Latin, algebra, and physics drilled me for a month before I set out to meet the big-city professors. My sister Bea went with me. I can see her now, wearing her beret, leaving