One Generation After Read Free Page A

for the dead, no one has the power to make them speak. No image is sufficiently demented, no cry sufficiently blasphemous to illuminate the plight of a single victim, resigned or rebellious, walking silently toward death, beyond anger, beyond regret. With pity perhaps.
    Therein lies the dilemma of the storyteller who sees himself essentially as a witness, the drama of the messenger unable to deliver his message: how is one to speak of it, how is one not tospeak of it? Certainly there can be no other theme for him: all situations, all conflicts, all obsessions will, by comparison, seem pallid and futile. And yet, how is one to approach this universe of darkness without turning into a peddler of night and agony? Without becoming other?
    About Yonathan ben Uziel, the Talmud tells us that he studied Torah with such fervor that flames encircled him—the flames of Sinai—blinding and scorching the birds who flew too close, wanting to see or be warmed. This is true also for the writer grappling with the theme of the holocaust; he will inevitably burn his fingers, and sometimes more.
    Still, the story had to be told. In spite of all risks, all possible misunderstandings. It needed to be told for the sake of our children. So they will know where they come from, and what their heritage is. The past carried away by clouds needed to be brought back, and so did the clouds. We needed to face the dead, again and again, in order to appease them, perhaps even to seek among them, beyond all contradiction and absurdity, a symbol, a beginning of promise.
    But from here on, there will be a change. Like it or not, a quarter of a century marks a turning point, a line of demarcation. From now on, one will speak differently about the holocaust. Or not at all. At least not for a long time. Other exploits, other explorations even now compete for our attention. The era of the moon opens at the very moment that, reluctantly, the age of Auschwitz comes to a close.
    Still, though we already know the dark secret face of our satellite,we will never fully know the other face of Auschwitz. The concentration-camp man will try to seal his memory, the witness promises never again to call him to the stand. The inventory is closed. The ghosts will have to accept the inevitable. Soon there will be no one left to speak of them, no one left to listen.

JOURNEY’S BEGINNING

    A man’s last vision of what was his beginning is like no other, for like that beginning, it becomes part of him, irrevocably and unalterably. God Himself cannot change man’s past, though man can alter his vision of God. Both are bound by one beginning.
    Will I ever forget mine? I look at it and know that it is for the last time. I shall never recapture that look in my eyes. And I shall carry it away like a tune never to be sung again, a secret never to be shared. For the last time I remember.
    Twenty-five years separate the witness from the object of his testimony: his native town. Twenty-five years of wandering in a disjointed, often hostile, always irreducible world—searching, questioning, disturbing others and being disturbed himself. And all that time I was looking for something without knowing what it was. Now I know. A small Jewish town, surrounded by mountains. A little town I wanted to enter one last time and leave there all I possess: my memory.
    That town. I see it still, I see it everywhere. I see it with suchclarity that I often mock and admonish myself: continue and you’ll go mad; the town no longer exists, it never did. But I can’t help it, I see nothing else. Its
tzaddikim
and troubadours, its sages and their noisy children, its poverty-striken visionaries and almost equally poor merchants: I see them on the main square, drenched in sweat, rushing to the market, to school, to religious services, to the ritual baths, to the cemetery. I even see the cemetery, though I set foot there only once.
    Neighbors, acquaintances, friends: at times their presence becomes so real that