The Time of the Uprooted: A Novel

  “Is that why he wants to see me? To tell me that along with everything else he’s a matchmaker? Before it was the Lord, and now it’s the Rebbe? Maybe he’s found a nice Jewish girl who was always intended for me? A second Colette?”

  Shalom, stroking his bushy beard, becomes serious. “Think about it,” he says gravely. “It may be that he has found your Esther. With our Rebbe, you never know.”

  Esther—alive? Esther—here? I feel my fever coming back. I’m relapsing into my sickness. Everything in me that was pushed away is reemerging. Esther and I, lovers, although neither she nor I ever spoke the word, except to postpone it until later, always later. Sharing kisses and awkward embraces but remaining chaste. Words whispered, promises offered, plans agreed to, holding each other close. David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Shulamit, Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura . . . I was floating with them in a luminous sky; then I sank into a dark well, where I found a still darker sun. And Shalom’s voice, his warm voice sliding over my face and chest: “Remember this, Gamaliel. Remember that the Rebbe knows what he’s doing. What’s more, he knows what you’re doing. The proof of that is he sensed you were sick . . . and he is going to heal you.”

  Suddenly irritated with him for intruding into my private hell, I deride him. “How about you, did he cure you, too? Are you happy?” Immediately, I regret the question. Why hurt his feelings? Is it not he and he alone who has cared for me day and night, who perhaps has rescued me from an illness whose name he does not know? Besides, is it his fault if the Rebbe wants to see me and is determined to make me give up my life as a single divorced man? Why should I blame Shalom? Yes indeed, I’m being unfair to my Moroccan friend. Have I ever shown an interest in his life? Is he married? No doubt. But I’ve never met his wife. Do they have children?

  “You still don’t understand our Teacher. Wish him long life,” Shalom says serenely. “First of all, healing has little to do with happiness. You have to deserve happiness. Healing also, but it’s not the same thing. Besides, the Rebbe doesn’t believe it’s his function to cure pain, but, rather, to combat it. Healing is secondary. And his battle takes place on so high a level that only he can wage it. You and I are here only to bear witness.”

  I hear him, but from far away. He is speaking of the Rebbe, but the voice I hear is the voice of Esther. She is a voice, a voice with a face, with eyes, a heart that beats, a controlled passion. On the eve of our arrival in Haifa, she told me about a dream: In the infinite silence of space, she and I were two stars lost among the galaxies. We were eternally seeking each other. We were separated by innumerable clusters of light, but we spoke to each other and, miracle of miracles, each voice found the other; they alone vibrated in the silence of Creation.

  It was all our happiness required.

  And you, Shalom, what voices are you hearing?

  The next day, we go to the Teacher, who knows how to separate and bring together, how to disturb and how to heal.

  “You’re too far away,” he tells me. “Come closer.” I step forward until I’m against the table. “Give me your hand.” I reach out. The Rebbe takes my hand in his. I feel its warmth on my skin and almost in my veins.

  “When one is sick, one calls out for help,” says the Rebbe. “As long as one is calling, it’s Life responding to Life.”

  “And when there is no response from anywhere?”

  “Then that is because your appeal wasn’t genuine.”

  “But it was, Rebbe. It was genuine.”

  Rebbe Zusya leans forward. “It was Death you called to, not Life. Am I right?” I am silent, so he continues: “By what right did you try to put an end to your days? Do they belong to you? Don’t you understand yet that each life is sacred and irreplaceable? That a single life, any life, yours as well as mine, weighs more and is worth more than all that has been written about Life. And you, you dare to prefer Death? What do you know about Death to be calling for it?”

  “How about God?” I ask weakly.

  The Rebbe looks up and studies me with curiosity. “A good question, but a bit late and insufficient. God? A Jewish writer said that ‘the silence of God is God.’ I say that God is not silent, although He is the God of Silence. He does call out. It is by His silence that He calls to you. Are you answering Him?”

  6

  GAMALIEL WAS LUNCHING WITH HIS PALS ON A DANK and gloomy autumn day. They were all about the same age, retirement age. Together, they were an informal rescue committee—to needle the anti-Semites, they called themselves the “Elders of Zion”—which helped out refugees and the neediest of immigrants, those who had no one they could count on and who counted for no one.

  Their usual table was off in a corner. All were present but Gad, the Israeli, who was suffering from angina. Yasha: athletic build, shaved head, bushy eyebrows over twinkling eyes. He’d made a name for himself on Wall Street. Often away on business trips, he was said to be a Don Juan. Diego: the fighter, especially for lost causes, and quick to anger, particularly when one didn’t agree with him that communism was as great a danger to the world as fascism. His friends would often raise their glasses and toast in Hebrew: “L’chayim!” And each time, Diego would reply in French: “Death to boredom! ” Bolek: bony features, high forehead, elegant, always dressed in a gray or blue suit with red pinstripes. A onetime lawyer, he was reticent with strangers, jovial with his pals. Gad and Bolek were married, more or less, had children, and were relatively happy. Gamaliel and Yasha were divorced, and Diego was a confirmed bachelor. Although they had become American citizens, they all remembered the past, the time when they were emigrants in search of paradise lost. They liked to gather together to celebrate the solidarity of the uprooted and the divine power of laughter.

  They enjoyed a cozy ambiance of camaraderie. Gamaliel, closed off in what was now a willful isolation, nursed a romantic faith in friendship. It was his passion, his anchor, his reason for living, his protective circle, his barricade. The tragedy of Moses and Socrates, he would often say, was that while they had disciples and lieutenants, they had no friends. He liked to recall the beautiful passages in Cicero about friendship, or quote the Sage in the Talmud who cried out, “Friendship or death!” Or he’d quote the Hasidic Teacher, according to whom “God is not only the Judge and the Father of His creatures; He is also their friend.” That was why, Gamaliel believed, no death was so awful as that of a friendship: God Himself would mourn it.

  “Hey there, you!” called out Diego, draining his wineglass and already tipsy. “You look to me as if you have the blues. What’s the matter, Gamaliel? Did the little boats in your bathtub sink?”

  Gamaliel replied only with a shrug.

  “I feel like laughing today,” Diego announced. “Come on, friends—I’ll buy a drink for anyone who makes me laugh.”

  So Gamaliel told a story he claimed to have heard recently from a Yiddish writer. “Do you know the one about the idiot father who told his son to close the door because it was cold outside? And the kid says, ‘So if I close the door, will it be warm outside?’ ”

  Yasha made a gesture of mock disgust. “Gamaliel, Gamaliel, what do you think we are—illiterates? We read Sholem Aleichem before you did.”

  “Let’s drink to the health of Sholem Alei-Alei,” broke in Diego, who pretended to have trouble pronouncing the name of the Yiddish humorist, author of Fiddler on the Roof.

  “But he’s been dead for almost a century,” Bolek observed with a laugh.

  “Then let’s drink to his resurrection,” Diego replied.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” Bolek went on. “A man dreams there’s a naked woman standing by his bed. ‘Who are you? And what’re you doing here?’ he asks her. And she says to him, as calm as you please, ‘You’re asking me? It’s your dream, isn’t it?’ ”

  “Here’s to the naked woman of our dreams,” Diego declared, raising his glass.

  Yasha spoke in turn: “There was a shtetl in Poland or Romania, where this poor guy finally got himself a
job as the official watchman who was to inform the community when the Messiah arrived. ‘Granted, it doesn’t pay much,’ they told him, ‘but it’s a lifetime job.’ ”

  Diego poured himself another glass of wine. “Drink to the health of the watchman! And . . . to the Messiah.”

  Gamaliel, who was not drinking, remarked, “Isn’t the Messiah right here, in all of us? Each time we help some poor refugee get his papers, isn’t each of us his Savior?”

  “So let’s drink to all of us,” said Diego. Then, wiping his mouth off with the back of his hand, he added, “I have a story, too. I remember it was in Marseilles, at the beginning of the war. We were a bunch of friends from the International Brigades, and we’d all escaped from French internment camps. We were standing in line for the various consulates. One of us, luckier than the rest, had just gotten a visa for Tierra del Fuego, in the south of Argentina. ‘But that’s far,’ people told him. He acted surprised: ‘Far from where?’ ”

  The story brought the four friends back to their agenda. As was their custom, they compared notes on their thoughts and plans, and on the status of the cases of refugees or asylum seekers for which each of them was responsible.

  Bolek read them a letter he had received from a village near Berditchev. One Zalman, the last Jew left of his community, wanted to emigrate to Israel or the United States so his children could have a Jewish education, but this was the dilemma: “If we stay here, the children will probably grow up separated from our people, but if we leave, what’s to become of the cemetery and our dead, of whom I’m the only custodian?”

  Yasha knew Berditchev: As an adolescent, he’d visited there with his parents. His grandparents, murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppen, were disciples of the Hasidic movement, of which Rebbe Levi Yitzhak was one of the most brilliant figures. “My grandfather wrote a paper about him,” said Yasha, a confirmed atheist, in a voice half-amused, half-melancholy. “I read his paper. It was a kind of Song of Songs in honor of this Teacher who dared to bring suit against the Creator of the world for the suffering endured by His people. Once, at the Yom Kippur service, he threatened not to blow the shofar unless the Lord put an end to their suffering. He was quite a man, that Rebbe. I could believe in him, without that making me believe in his God.”

  Diego raised his glass. “Let’s drink to his health!”

  Gamaliel felt the need to speak up. “How could a Jew not love so daring a man as that Rebbe? But there’s more to your story, Yasha. After having told God what was in his heart, the Teacher chanted the most beautiful, the most moving of our prayers: the Kaddish.”

  A long silence followed. Then Bolek asked, “What should I say to that last Jew in the village near Berditchev?” There was a long discussion among the Elders of Zion. Yasha made the case for the right of the dead to be protected, Gamaliel for that of the children to be educated. Diego proposed a compromise: They should tell the Jew to hire a local Gentile to look after the cemetery. The committee would underwrite the cost, and that of the man’s emigration.

  Bolek presented another case: In a small town in Georgia, a mother in distress was asking for advice and help. Her only daughter could not find a Jewish boy there to marry. If only one could be sent to her . . . She promised that her daughter would accept the boy, and so would she, her mother.

  Yasha suggested they put her in touch with representatives of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. They knew everybody. Their networks operated with perfect efficiency and they were experienced in this sort of situation. If need be, they would send over a groom from Israel or from Brooklyn. It was out of the question for a Jewish girl from a good family to be left without a husband. “Who knows,” said Yasha, “with God’s help, their progeny might someday bring consolation to our people scattered among the nations.”

  If only it would be that easy to track down the whereabouts of Eve, Gamaliel was thinking.

  Yasha’s voice roused him from his reverie. “I don’t know where your thoughts are, but they’re not with us.”

  “Yes, I guess you’re right,” Gamaliel confessed.

  “Don’t you have a funny story to tell us? You don’t like to laugh?”

  Gamaliel looked down. He felt like saying he enjoyed laughter only when it was in despair, but he chose a less theatrical reply: “Yes, I like to laugh . . . but I never know when.”

  EVE, ATTENTIVE. EVE, HER THOUGHTS ELSEWHERE. Gamaliel’s first true love? She, not Esther? The two were entirely different. Esther was an idea, a mirage. Nothing could really happen with her. Eve was serious, smiling, interested. She gave you the impression she was living a dream set in the real world, that she would draw you away from the daily routine to a kind of intensity you had never known, where you would experience an anxiety bordering on ecstasy.

  Love at first sight? Well, why not? It must happen, since it’s written about in the Bible and in novels. Gamaliel was coming to believe that now his own identity was changing: He was turning into a fictional character.

  For years, as he wandered about, young and innocent, going where the wind took him, Gamaliel had believed that having lost Esther, he would never again fall in love. Colette: That was in another life, and it wasn’t love. A marriage of convenience, of the moment? An unfortunate, unhappy experience. Sometimes since his divorce, he had let himself be attracted to a woman, especially if she had dark hair and a serious demeanor. He courted women, possessed them, or was possessed by them, finding in their bodies such joys that he would weep with guilt. But to reach that point, he had to deny Esther, or at least put her out of his mind for the moment. It was different with Eve. He could love her without parting from Esther, without betraying her. Thus his love for Eve was true and pure and—why not?—holy. He would never forget their first night. All was harmony, but within Gamaliel a storm was raging. Like a man possessed, unable to contain his desire, he longed to take wing and fly, to dance, to weep, to laugh, to run riot with his friends both living and dead, to get ready to die in his turn, to bid farewell to a life that from now on could only go downhill. Early the next morning, he turned to Eve and said, “I didn’t realize I could still surprise myself. Just say the word and at dawn I’ll light the sun; another word from you at evening and I’ll put it out again.”

  They had met at a traditional Passover Seder at the home of Bolek and Noémie, who for the occasion had invited all their friends who lived alone. Seated next to his hostess, Gamaliel had a chance to look over the other guests as they each in turn recited the dramatic account of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt and the miraculous events that had made of them a free and determined people. His eyes were caught by a woman soberly dressed in blue. She was reciting in a low, melodious voice, which brought back distant memories.

  “She has a nice voice,” he whispered to Noémie. “Who is she?”

  “Didn’t I introduce you? True, you came late, when we were just sitting down. Her name is Eve. She’s a remarkable woman but wounded. Don’t try to seduce her; she’s not for you. She doesn’t look it, but she’s a little older than you. She lost her husband and her daughter in a car accident. I wouldn’t want you to hurt her.”

  Gamaliel almost said, What do you take me for? but then he thought better of it. In any event, it was now his turn to read a page of the Haggadah, where God is speaking. “ ‘And I will pass through the land of Egypt, I, and not an angel. And I will strike down the firstborn in the land of Egypt, I, and not an angel of fire. And I will execute judgment against all the gods of Egypt, I, and not a messenger. I the Lord, I, and not another.’ ” At this point, Gamaliel stopped and, according to custom, commented on what he had read. “I don’t understand that passage. God seems to be congratulating Himself on His actions in Egypt. But just what is He boasting about? Causing the death of all those Egyptian babies? Having used their suffering and dying to force the pharaoh to concede? And He expects us to thank Him for that? No, I don’t understand it.”

  Everyone around the table was silent. They hadn’t expected so critical and per
haps blasphemous a statement from Gamaliel, whose usual comments were moderate and reserved. Noémie, embarrassed, was trying to think of a quip to relieve the tension, but Eve spoke up first. “I find this passage attractive for its wisdom and its common sense. God isn’t speaking just to the Hebrews in the desert, but to all their descendants, and to everyone like them. Therefore, He’s speaking to us also. And what is He saying to us? He’s telling us that to kill children is a crime so dreadful that only He can commit it. I mean just that: He and no living being. Looking at it that way, this short verse strikes me as very beautiful.”

  Surprised, the guests all applauded her. Eve, taken aback, looked at her plate, as if regretting she had spoken. Now there began a learned discussion of the relation between God and man, God’s presence in history, His ability to transform immanence into transcendence. Bolek took Gamaliel’s side, citing a Sage in the Talmud to illustrate a Jew’s audacity in addressing the Lord. He believed you could say anything to God. Did Gamaliel hear his friend’s statement? He remained silent, wondering what he found attractive about this young widow. Nothing about her was particularly beautiful, not her roundish face, not her generous breasts. And yet she had a certain glow, a delicacy, a quiet femininity, qualities that Gamaliel was finding irresistible. Besides, there were her eyes, which were a glittering blue-gray. And her voice: inviting, low, measured, reassuring, caressing.

  Noémie brought him back to earth. “Stop it, Gamaliel, stop it. Are you staring at her because you love her, or to make her love you? Take my advice: Look elsewhere.”

  “Too late,” Gamaliel replied.

  Noémie shook her head, smiling, both to indicate disapproval and as a warning.

  Gamaliel enjoyed Noémie’s company. She and her husband were part of his inner circle. As a couple, they were wonderfully generous and understanding; both refrained from criticizing or making judgments about him. The most they would do to indicate disagreement was to frown at him, as if surprised at what they had just heard.