The Sonderberg Case - By Elie Wiesel & Catherine Temerson Page 0,3

child of survivors. Was he even familiar with them? When someone mentioned the Tragedy in his presence—it had suddenly become a subject of conversation in social circles—he withdrew into a deep silence that no one dared penetrate.

His failing? Attracted by the imaginary, he sometimes couldn’t distinguish the real from lived experience. He asked himself questions by probing his fantasy with an almost painful sincerity. “Had I been one of Socrates’ judges, would I have condemned him?” Or: “Had I been a colleague of Rabbi Eliezer, son of Hyrcanus, Rabbi Yehoshua’s opponent, would I have voted for his banishment?” Or: “Had I lived in the Spain of Isabella the Catholic, would I have chosen conversion like Abraham Senior, or exile like Don Itzhak Abrabanel?” This tormented him. But, if you think about it, was this really a failing?

Did he imagine himself in his father’s position, in that cursed time and place? Did he wonder how he would have behaved in the face of the daily trials, over there, when the whim of a killer sufficed to make an entire family or community vanish from the face of the earth?

A few more words about my grandfather, who did return from there. He didn’t talk about it very much, either. Perhaps for the same reasons, or for others. He may have talked about it through his readings of and commentaries on the other great catastrophes in Jewish history, in ancient and medieval times.

With a face marked by the years, with a haunted gaze, he was handsome and majestic. In his presence I felt intelligent. Attractive. And unique. Always available for my impromptu visits, he never gave me the awkward impression of being disturbed.

A great lover of the Apocrypha literature, as my father would later be. He had taught it intermittently for starvation wages at the Institute for Jewish Studies. He supported his family by working in a modest publishing house that put out an encyclopedia of biographies and Judaic quotations. He also gave private courses in Yiddish and Hebrew to candidates for conversion. Oddly enough, he bought lottery tickets every month. “I’m not a fatalist as was Ibn Ezra in Spain,” he used to say. “He was so convinced that he would remain poor all his life that he thought if he were a candle salesman the sun would never set; if he were an undertaker no one would ever die.” That’s why he bought lottery tickets—to prove his theory. He was also a gambler. Did he sometimes win? The fact is my grandmother never complained of being out of pocket.

Was he religious? Devout? Yes and no. Let’s say he was a traditionalist. Out of respect for his parents, his ancestors, particularly Rabbi Petahia, he observed the Sabbath, put on phylacteries in the morning, and studied the Talmud, not because he saw it as a holy and immutable document, but because he found correspondences and points of reference in it that related to his curiosity about some officially marginalized or concealed book that didn’t have the good fortune of being included in the canon.

My mother, when she’s not in the company of others, is timid, overly prudent, anxious. She often sits motionless with a book on her knees, barely swings her hips when she moves about. The daughter of parents born in New York, she wasn’t traumatized by the war. A homemaker, she kept house and dreamed of having grandchildren. Itzhak was barely thirteen and she already teased him: “So, son, when will you be getting married?” She left me in peace. Actually, I think she wanted to keep us by her side, my brother and me, for as long as possible.

As for the theater, it was my grandfather who mentioned it to me, perhaps unwittingly.

He had been my confidant since childhood. At ten, I used to tell him about my dreams, my doubts, my disappointments. Sometimes he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answers were never the same. One day it was gardener, the next day sailor, mathematician, parachutist, silversmith, musician, painter, banker, snake charmer: the list was inexhaustible. Then, smiling in his beard, my grandfather would say, “You really want to be all these things?”

“Yes,” I replied, naively. “Is it impossible?”

“No. For a child your age, everything should seem possible.”

“Everything? At the same time?”

“At the same time, if …”

“If what?”

“If you accept a profession that includes them all.”

“What could that be?”

“Writer. Novelist.”

“What’s that?”

“Someone who writes. Someone whose life is writing. Then, man is a book: