The Testament Read Online Free PDF Page B

will be the only one to know it. He himself, you see, must have thought the opposite. Admit it—I
was
a good Communist; one who repudiated his forebears.
    I made my father suffer, but in so doing, I suffered too. I tormented and tortured him. Yet, whenever he chose to answer me, to refute an argument, or simply to speak man to man, I listened without interrupting.
    Of his three children—I had two sisters—I was the only one who caused him worry. He dreamt of seeing me grow up to be a good Jew, and I spent my time distorting that dream. I am trying now, while writing this
Testament
, to return to the origins of that revolt of mine. How old was I? All I know is that it was sometime after my Bar Mitzvah and that by then Barassy was far behind me.
    I remember Barassy, I remember my childhood in Barassy. A Jewish home, on a small Jewish street in the Jewish quarter. If I may paraphrase our great poet Y. L. Peretz—in Barassy even the river spoke Yiddish; and the trees, month after month, preened themselves or lamented in Yiddish; the sun rose so as to send Jewish children to
heder
and kabbalists to the ritual baths. Time flowed in harmony with the rhythms and seasons of the Torah. We observed the repose of the Sabbath, we ate matzo during Passover, we fasted on the Day of Atonement, we drank to celebrate the Giving of the Law; we lit candles to illuminate victories and miracles thousands of years old; we prayed forthe reconstruction of the Temple, whose ruins still saddened us. King David and his Psalms; Solomon and his parables; Elijah and his companions; the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples: all of them lived in our midst. Rabbi Akiba, Rabbi Shimeon Bar Yohai, little Rabbi Zeira of Babylon were all intimate parts of our landscape: I listened to them, spoke with them, played with their children; we linked ourselves to the present while living in the past.
    When I was three, my father wrapped me in his immense heavy ritual shawl and carried me to Reb Gamliel-the-Tutor. He was a stern-looking man with bushy eyebrows and an unkempt beard, and he spread terror around him. There were a dozen or so of us children whom he taught how to chant the holy eternal letters, with whose help God was supposed to have created the universe—and with whose help you, his adversaries, fierce rationalists, think you can explain it. The dunces would tremble every morning, the others too; Reb Gamliel never hesitated to crack his whip over the backs of those whose thoughts wandered—he accused them of idleness, laziness, even banditry, why not?… How I could hate, at the age of three! But now, when I take stock of those distant years, I recall my old teacher with nostalgia and affection.
    Please don’t tell me that is natural; don’t tell me Jews like to suffer. We are not so stupid. If I feel tenderness for an old man who once used to hurt me, it is surely not because I love pain but because I love knowledge. I would even say that, at the time, I hated Reb Gamliel, the man and all he stood for—education by fear, forced study, stifling prisons where words were suffused with hostility, a hostility that scarred our minds.
    Every evening I came home in tears. But I let myself go only in front of my mother. Since my father often stayed late in the store—he sold piece goods—I had an hour ortwo to wipe away the traces of my torment. To calm me down my mother would sing sad lullabies: A Jewish child goes to sleep with a goat under his cradle and receives the tears of a sweet, lovely widow called Zion.… And my mother would tell me, “Learn these words that make you dream today; tomorrow you’ll make them sing.”
    Little by little I grew accustomed to the rhythm of that life: I would cry during the day, and smile in the evening. That lasted two years, two years of pain and repressed anger. The twenty-two letters of the alphabet mocked me; they fought me and I had to tame them.
    When I left Reb Gamliel for a more learned teacher, I realized I