The Sonderberg Case - By Elie Wiesel & Catherine Temerson Page 0,2

cappuccino. If he didn’t go, it was because he was unwell or studying for an exceptionally difficult exam. He would then save press clippings for a later time. “See,” he used to say to me, “there you are, sitting at your desk or lying on the bed, and without lifting a finger you find out what’s happening in faraway countries. Isn’t it miraculous?” He was right: no need to travel anymore in order to be informed. The reporter acts as your ears and eyes. And sometimes as your compass or alter ego.

What was it in the press that so interested him? Current events, fleeting and elusive? Political and economic editorials, usually superficial with their respectable optimism or skepticism? The sports pages? Trivial news items in which the acts are more or less the same but the names are new? He was fascinated by the present: he believed in living it to the point of exhaustion. And that, he confessed to me one day, possibly laughing under his breath, was “for purely theological reasons.”

When Méir became nearly blind in his old age, one of us—I, Alika, or one of our sons—would read poetry or novels to him.

Méir had no children. To be more precise, he no longer had any. In love with his wife, Drora, a vigorous and rebellious blonde, he used to say, “She’s my child.” And Drora used to say of him, “He’s my lunatic.”

Why had he quarreled with my father? They had stopped seeing each other. Was it something about Drora? Or because of their break with family tradition? Admittedly, they were less religious than my grandparents, but was this a reason to stop being in touch?

One day, several years ago, I brought up the issue with my mother. She brushed me aside gently: “I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me why.”

“Is it because of me? Because I have parents and they don’t have a son? Why do people refer to him as an unhappy recluse? What is his life all about?”

“Be quiet,” said my mother, after turning slightly pale. “One day you’ll find out.”

“Through whom?”

“Maybe through him.” This was when I felt for the first time that I had come upon a family secret.

My father read the newspapers, too, but not as assiduously. And my grandfather even less assiduously. “Trivial news events are the rage these days,” he used to say, stressing the last words. To which he immediately added, “In the old days, major events were.” Actually, the past interested him more than the present. Only bound books interested him. Preferably yellowed pages, coated with the dust of the ages.

Good books led him to think about the men chosen by God: he almost resented their being too famous; he would have liked to discover them and keep them all to himself. Between information and knowledge, he used to say, he had a preference for knowledge. And the latter is not found in newspapers.

My grandfather loved contemplating the mystery of transience and the influence of time on language; what seems attractive, dazzling, and profound tomorrow won’t be so the day after tomorrow. All these so-called powerful and famous people, in every field, starved for glory and honors, are leading lights today, but sooner or later they are usually forgotten and sometimes despised. So what’s the point of ambition?

As for my mother, her hope, of course, was that I would become a lawyer—better yet, a great lawyer. In America, of course. My older brother, Itzhak, a future businessman, predicted I would have a career as an engineer, no doubt because I spent hours as a child taking apart cheap tools and expensive watches, to the great annoyance of our parents.

So, then, how did I become a journalist?

That’s another story.

——

The trial to which the young woman is alluding made a lasting impression on me. I wouldn’t be the man I am, trailing a host of ghosts, if I hadn’t been present at the deliberations with a mixture of frustration and enthusiasm.

At the time, the young Werner, accused of murder, and his burden of bloodstained memories, had exerted on me a fascination whose traces have yet to fade away. They even affected my relationship with my own family.

My father—like his father, but in a different area—a teacher of ancient literature in a Jewish high school in Manhattan, is a gentle dreamer and somewhat withdrawn. A storyteller but not talkative. I regret that he never brought up his parents’ memories from the old country, nor his own as the