And the Sea Is Never Full Read Online Free PDF

sketchily, with generational conflicts and also the fate of children of survivors, their dramatic confrontation with their parents’ past. There is the tragic story of one young man, the son of a distant cousin from Queens. He was twenty, a student of literature, filled with literary dreams. One morning he rose, took his typewriter, and walked into the sea.
    •   •   •
    Years after the publication of
One Generation After
, I am invited by Yossel Rosensaft’s son, Menachem, to address the first meeting of “the Second Generation,” that is, the children of survivors. Facing these young men and women, some of them now fathers and mothers themselves, all caught between their parents’ wounded memory and their own hopes covered with ashes, I have difficulty hiding my emotions. For these people belong to my internal landscape: I look at them and see them through the prism of the past. Some of them were my students at City College. They affect me deeply because every time I see them, I cannot help but see other children through them, behind them, marching in the distance toward the blazing abyss.
    I look at these young people and tell myself, tell them, that
they
were the enemy’s target as surely as were their parents.
They
were the ones he had hoped to annihilate. By killing Jews, he hoped to prevent their children from being born.
    I tell them the talmudic legend of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and his son Eleazar. Fleeing the Romans, they found refuge in a cave and stayed there twelve years. When they emerged they were unable to conceal their astonishment: The world outside had not changed. So angry were they that their eyes burned down all that they looked upon. As a result, a celestial voice ordered them back into the cave for another year, at the end of which the son was still angry, though the father was not. And the Talmud comments: “Whatever the son’s gaze wounded, the father’s gaze healed.”
    Rembrandt’s beautiful painting of Abraham and Isaac comes to mind. It shows them, after the test, embracing with a tenderness that must have moved the Creator and his angels.
    Is there a tenderness more profound, more intense, more human than the one that links the survivor to his child? What goes on in the mind of a son who watches his father praying or simply staring into space? What are the thoughts of a daughter who senses the pain of her mother, who has lost two infants to the executioner? Surely there comes a moment when such children become their parents’ parents.
    My thoughts turned toward them once again when I wrote
The Fifth Son
and
The Forgotten
. I speak to them even when I think I am speaking to others.
    In
One Generation After
, I try my hand at a new literary genre. My wish: to convey the essential in the form of dialogue alone. Dialoguesbetween individuals separated by death—or life. Brief questions and clipped answers. I wanted these dialogues to be anonymous. Voices. No, I wanted them to be echoes that reach us from far away. I strain to hear the last conversation between a young boy and his little sister, a grown man and his mother, a Hasid and his grandfather. He is a witness who grasps at scraps of dialogue with the dead man inside him. He wants every word to contain a sentence, every sentence a page, every page a book, a life, a death, and the history they share.
    —Hey you! You look like you’re praying!

—Wrong.
—Your lips don’t stop moving!

—Habit, no doubt.
—Did you always pray that much?

—More than that. Much more.
—What did you ask for in your prayers?

—Nothing.
—Forgiveness?

—Perhaps.
—Knowledge?

—Possibly.
—Friendship?

—Yes, friendship.
—The chance to defeat evil? The certainty of living with truth, or
   living, period?

—Perhaps.
—And you call that nothing?

—I do. I call that nothing.
    *
    —Will you remember me?

—I promise you.
—How can you? You don’t even know who I am, I myself don’t know
.
—Never mind; I’ll