And
when, in the detention camp I was listening to the young “Galerist,” refugee
(parroting my speeches), I felt exposed to my own mockery. Instead of weaving
on the “loom of time,” I had become one of the innumerable voluble kibitzers
who were, in the taverns and family circle, wining battles fought by others. I
resolved to consider from then on how my actions, my writing, and my speaking
might appear in caricature. I did not stop analyzing the events and discussing
their consequences, but I listened to myself he way a caricaturist observes the
face of a pompous speaker before he unmasks it by drawing it.
But
if anyone ever distracted me from politics, it was some of my “epistolary
clients”. What they had to reveal to me about their and their families lives so
that I might write exactly what they wished to express included hardly anything
that I did not already know about their miserable everyday life, a life filled
not only with need worry, and fear but also with many great and small hopes,
joyous surprises and fulfilled expectations. And yet I learned far more about
them than they learned about me –but what was that? I learned that one must
never stray to far or too long from concrete things, from details that succeed
one another, intermingle, and in the end simply determine the substance and for
of one’s daily existence. More clearly than before I discovered that under all
living conditions a principle of order develops, a system of outer and inner
certainties. In none of the organizations to which I had ever belonged had I
really met the common people but here, in this motley crew of volunteers, I met
for the first time since leaving the shtetl, though this time as an adult who
knew what misery and worry about one’s daily bread are.
When
I bent forward in absolute quiet, it sometimes seemed to me as though I heard a
voice in addition to my own – no, not the voice of the “common” man but one
that probably as not changed in a thousand years, the weak voice of a heavily
breathing person who walks with too heavy a load on his back, walks and walks
and never arrives.
When
I was a child, I used to listen in the pauses between religious services to the
students of the Talmud as they read the text, its translation, and the
commentary sotto voce in singsong fashion. They sat in the dark corners of the
prayer room in front of desks that held tomes dimly lit by a candle. The
melodies of these recitations were not substantially different from one
another, but in me they aroused a strangely relaxed feeling of patient
expectancy. On many occasions Aramaic sentences were repeated, and in between
there was a recurrent question in Yiddish: “Un tomer farkert?”[And perhaps the
other way around?] This is what the student asked when, after a great deal of
deliberation, he had reached a conclusion. However, this satisfied him for only
a moment, and he immediately began to consider whether an entirely different
conclusion, even
a diametrically opposed one, might not
just be valid, or perhaps the only valid conclusion…
as
I listen to another person in a serious discussion or speak myself, the question
“Un tomer farkert?” often comes up. Thus the source of my occasionally
impatient tolerance might be this childhood experience, for as a deeply
impressed child I. repeatedly admired those young men who, having reached their
goal, looked back and asked themselves whether they had not missed the right
path and their goal.
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