Suddenly, Love

11

THAT NIGHT HIS WORDS WROTE THEMSELVES, INVOLUNTARILY, and in the first person.

More than we hated the religious Jews, we hated the rich Jews. Striking a blow against the owner of a factory who had withheld his workers’ pay was regarded as a good deed of the highest order. The owners of small factories, and even the owners of workshops that employed six or seven workers, were also regarded as exploiters, and their buildings were set on fire. “Justice must begin at home!” That was the slogan and the order.

At first every limb of my body rebelled against the violence, but in time I was convinced that if the rich and their armor bearers weren’t eliminated, injustice would never be corrected. Wealth and exploitation had to be rooted out.

During those years, I attended lectures in basements, and not only about Marx’s Das Kapital and about Freud on religion. I also read Gorky and Sholokhov and other works of Soviet socialist realism. This underground activity, which was most intense in those nighttime meetings, gave me the feeling that I was a partner in building a new world.

What were the Jews guilty of? The lecture started off with that question every time, and the answer came quickly: obstinacy. Their refusal to change, their clinging to the worthless old faith of their fathers. The new Jews were no better: wealth was their faith. In those years I hated the Jews, though most of the people handling me were Jews, as were their commanders.

Quite a few ideas were raised at those secret nightly meetings: to dismantle all the ghettos and transfer the Jews to agricultural colonies; to imprison the rabbis, the religious judges, the kashrut supervisors, and the heads of yeshivas in reeducation camps; to forbid studying in Jewish religious schools and in synagogue study halls. The fury of the commissars was directed especially at ritual baths. They were regarded as a symbol of ignorance and evil.

I left home at seventeen, when I finished school. Neither my mother’s pleas nor my father’s silences could keep me with them. The idea that from then on I would sleep in abandoned houses, live by stealing, and help my weak friends was more powerful than any feelings of guilt.

Of course the reality was different from what I had imagined. Abandoned houses weren’t ideal places to live. People fought over every bit of floor, over a rotten mattress, not to mention a slice of bread or a hunk of cheese. The commissars tried in vain to impose order on the mixed multitude. The police, who used to raid the buildings at night, did not inspire within us a desire for mutual assistance. Whoever was able to flee ran away, and the weak ones would be caught and put in jail. It was a violent, exhausting life. I would often fall asleep under a bridge or in the hallway of an apartment building, just to avoid the company of my comrades.

I never returned home. My mother’s pleas reached me from time to time: “Come home, son, my life is nothing without you.” They arrived in the form of short letters or in chance meetings with neighbors. I ignored them. Harden yourself! I would repeat during those times. I had to harden myself in preparation for the great struggles. Humanity came before the individual. The revolution came before everything.

I eliminated parts of myself. I regarded anything that didn’t contribute to the revolution as a luxury. I stopped reading the beloved poems of Rilke and the prose of Kleist. I didn’t permit myself to enjoy a melodious sentence or a special word, not to mention a phrase that contained mysteries of the soul.

I even denied myself strolls on the riverbank and visits to cafés. I took my meals in the soup kitchens of churches and synagogues.

I trained myself to be an ordinary soldier, one who receives orders and carries them out without thinking about them. Everything that I had learned in high school — doubts, hypotheses, comparisons, ambiguities — all that was like a sin for which I had to atone through exhausting labor.