WHEN I GOT there, Vishnu gave me the message that Levi Furstenblum had called. He was having lunch at precisely 2:30 at the Indian International Center on Lohdi Road. If I wanted to meet him, I shouldn’t call back, just show up. Or not. If I did show up, I need only tell the host to lead me to his table.
My body sagged with exhaustion, but there was no way I was missing this opportunity. I took a short nap before Vishnu drove me over to the center, which is a cultural hub for the elite of Delhi with a fine library, restaurant, and living quarters, all of which you must be a member, or accompanied by a member, to use.
I arrived precisely on time. Furstenblum was easing himself into a chair at a nearly isolated corner table by a window inside the first-floor dining room. He spotted me walking behind the host and waved his cane.
“I thought you would come.” No happy hello from him. Only a stark expression and eyes hidden behind tinted glasses. “Please, sit down.”
I was nervous and felt tremors in my hands as I sat down and spoke at the same time. “I was out late and then had an emergency and I am supposed to meet someone at a lecture at Nehru University at 4:30, so forgive me if I seem …”
“Roberson’s lecture?”
“Yes. You know his work?”
“We’re kindred minds of a sort. Not in politics. I am meta-political,” he stated this sentiment with a challenging growl. I didn’t question his assertion. “In his true calling he is a modern Kabbalist, for when you are a Roberson, what is linguistics but a searching for god in words? But his quest is futile.”
I thought I understood what he was telling me, yet wondered if he wanted me to question him. I’d wanted this chance but was too scared right then to take it. I continued in the same verbal plane. “Are you going to his lecture?”
“It is on politics. I said I am meta-political.” His condescension was palpable as he shook his head and frowned. “He called me yesterday. Perhaps we will meet.” Delhi was getting to be too damn small a place. “We speak via email.” It surprised me that Furstenblum had email. But why wouldn’t he? Unlike most of us, he probably understood how it worked. “Besides, there will be too many people. My hearing aid is no good for groups.” He pointed to his ears. I saw a tiny hearing aid tucked in each ear. “Come. As good Jews, let us get serious.” He handed me the menu. “The Moghul chicken is excellent, though I am partial to the fish and chips.”
We ordered and then he got to the reason why he had called.
“Judah corrected my misimpression that you were here as a tourist. You work as a doctor at the embassy, but you are not Foreign Service or in the military?”
“No.”
“So, tell me, why are you here?”
I thought about being flip, even provocative—feeling embarrassed by my deep reverence for him—but decided to just say the truth. “I’m running away.”
“Yes, this seems like a good place for that. I cannot run and could not run when I came, the Nazis saw to that.” He spoke both literally and figuratively and seemed to be talking about himself while slyly talking about me. “I could not return to Prague for the friends I had were either not friends or dead. I tried America. Much too prosperous and self-satisfied. And soulless. Then I went to Israel. My friend Schneerman persuaded me to go there. You’ve heard of the great Rebbe?” Not reverence, but amusement lilted from his voice as he pronounced this title of honor. “To whom I am ineluctably bound because we survived summer camp together.”
Adolph Schneerman, born into a wealthy and assimilated German-Jewish family of whom he alone survived Auschwitz, immigrated to Israel, where he’d become a noted Kabbalist and head of a renowned sect of Orthodox Jews.
“I know the headline stuff.”
“As do most. He is more complex than his reputation and his farbissener kop belie. Before you judge from the headlines you should know that every day for two years he lamented, ‘What did we do to deserve this?’ Of course there was no answer. But when he survives, he thinks somehow he is Yahweh’s special envoy. So he leapt into total and absolute faith of his messiah’s eventual return. Which led him to his answer that those in the camps deserved to die for past sins as now do the Palestinians.” Schneerman’s proclamation made headlines in Israel and caused tremors in religious communities around the world. It made him a pariah in many of those communities. “He and I will never agree on his repugnant beliefs. Never. But I understand how he came to these beliefs.”
The waiter brought the food and we started to eat. I did not know his custom, so I remained quiet until he got halfway through his fish and chips, when he spoke again. His mind keen, he picked up exactly where we left off.
“I had to leave Israel after a disheartening experience in a bank in Tel Aviv. I was waiting on line when a Yemenite Jew screamed at a European Jew, ‘Hitler should have gotten you all.’ I could not stay in another place with so much hate and bigotry. I remain angry. But I am beyond hate.”
“But there is plenty of bigotry here with the caste system and the problems between Hindus and Moslems.”
“Yes, but I found a certain quiet here. So, in a sense, I, too, was running away.” He did not smile at his admission. “I did not understand Hindi. Even fewer spoke English then. I found it easy to be foreign.” I understood exactly what he meant. “And then I met Hannah, a Jew, oddly enough—her family fled Germany in the thirties and went to Iraq. In the fifties, they came here. In the sixties, the rest went to Israel. Hannah stayed with me. She died two years ago.”
He recited this matter-of-factly while drinking his beer. I wanted to say “sorry” or something, but his presence forbade any gratuitous offerings.
“Why do you still go to temple?” I asked.
“Because I am a Jew and whether I believe in Yahweh or not, the Germans and the Czechs and the French all proved my Jewishness. And,” he spoke with an uncommon, Tevya-like zestful irony, “they need a tenth for the minyan.”
I had read his books and seen him in the temple, and this didn’t jibe. Feeling a bit bolder I voiced my skepticism. “I don’t know if I can accept that answer.”
He gave out a muffled, almost encouraging laugh. I felt OK about challenging him. Then he bowed his head, slid his glasses slightly down his nose and gazed at me above the frame. “I go because I need to look in the eyes of those who believed as I once believed. Because you cannot run away.”
“And in my eyes?”
He stared in my eyes but did not answer my question. “You know that when I was a student I was a physicist?”
“Yes, you wrote a little bit about that in Mystical Mistakes.”
“Correct. And I thought I was much better than I was. I theorized that I alone could reconcile the seeming irreconcilable contradiction between Heisenberg and Einstein.”
He had written about that with great humor. He answered Einstein’s declaration that “God does not play dice” with his own challenge “Yahwehna make a bet?” As far as I knew Einstein never accepted.
“I even had a name for my theorem before I had a solution: the Furstenblum Paradox. Through the beauty of math I believed I would find my god. Before I found the solution, came another solution and my world was taken apart.” Because of his abilities as a physicist, the Nazis had offered to spare the lives of his wife and child if he had aided their weapons program. He had refused. He believed the Nazis would kill them either way. “And I came to a completely different conclusion about god in any form.”
I listened, awed by the almost wrath-like self-analysis without any forgiveness for the hubris of youth or the impossibility of his choices.
“Now, something happened to you and the question arose that all of us face, some very simply, some very abstractly. And the question is always, in one form or another, this: How much must you love god to accept Auschwitz? Or whatever happened to you? To accept that god exists after that? There is only one answer to that question. The answer you have come to. And then you must find another answer.”
His surety of my torment left me too intimidated to ask more questions. He finished his food. “I am tired. My knees hurt.” I could see the pain as he crossed and uncrossed his legs.
“There are surgeries and medications that might help you. They are expensive but something could be arranged.”
“I have money. I made sure the Germans paid me. And my books, though not big sellers have never been out of print in twenty-five languages.”
His voice and words said he did not want to mend his knees, end that pain.
He paid the bill. I knew better than to protest. I thanked him for his generosity and I meant not only in buying me lunch. As we walked slowly outside, he told me that he came there every Saturday after going to Bahrisons, the bookstore at Khan Market. “Join me anytime,” he offered.
Despite my despair, I was flattered and pleased and said I would, and offered to give him a ride, but he said he had his own driver. “Why shouldn’t I?” He gave me a stern, tight-lipped nod in response to my look of surprise. “If you don’t want me to renege on my offer, you must understand that I wrote and I speak from my essence. I was not and I am still not a good person, but people like you don’t want to believe that I wasn’t a sweet-souled mensh before Auschwitz or that I didn’t metamorphose into a nice boychik after.” He spit out the word “nice” with such bite that I shivered. Even at his decrepit age, with his aching, crumbling knees, I thought this man would kill me for a last piece of bread.