Nine

The new Polish republic was barely four years old, but in that brief time it had already gone through a war with the Bolsheviks, party struggles that led to an assassination of a President, attacks upon Jews in a number of towns, bitter disputes with the Ruthenians who had become part of the new Poland, and a rising inflation. Lenin still lived, but he was already paralyzed, and Comrade Stalin was beginning to make a name for himself. In Germany a former paper hanger named Hitler had launched an abortive Putsch. In Italy Mussolini forced castor oil down his opponents’ throats. The typhus epidemics and hungers had decimated who knows how many people, but the streets of Warsaw still swarmed with pedestrians and you couldn’t get an apartment. All cellars, all garrets, were jammed with tenants and subtenants. From all the provinces people tore to come to Warsaw, but there was no work to be had there. Even as the Polish Socialist party trumpeted that the proletariat of all nations must unite, its professional unions barred Jewish workers. Actually there wasn’t even enough work for the Gentile workers. The Bundists, the Jewish socialists, sharply criticized their Christian comrades for their nationalistic and capitalistic deviations from Karl Marx’s teachings. The Warsaw communists, Jews nearly all, heaped brimstone and fire upon all the parties and insisted that only in Soviet Russia did true social justice prevail. The Zionists argued that there was no longer any hope for Jews in the lands of the Diaspora. Only in Palestine would the Jew be able to live freely and develop. But England held the mandate and wouldn’t allow any Jewish immigration. The Arabs had already begun to threaten the Jews with pogroms.

From my very first day in Warsaw I had no place to stay, since my brother lived with his wife and child in a tiny room at his in-laws and in the direst poverty. Melech Ravich, one of the editors of the Literary Pages, took me into his apartment for free, an apartment which consisted of several attic rooms on the fifth floor. Just as I was a skeptic, so was Ravich a believer. He believed in the redeeming power of literature, in socialism, in humanism, in the philosophy of Spinoza. At that time I wasn’t yet a vegetarian. How could someone who had nothing to eat be a vegetarian? But Melech Ravich was already a vegetarian. He was tall, stout, eleven years older than I, and handsome. I actually could speak nothing but Yiddish, even though I could read several languages. But Melech Ravich spoke good Polish and German. He had spent years in Vienna working in a bank. His wife had a good voice and aspired to a singing career. Outside of my brother, Melech Ravich was my first contact with the literary world and with the so-called big world. We began our discussions immediately. Ravich believed with absolute faith that the world of justice could come today or tomorrow. All men would become brothers and sooner or later, vegetarians, too. There would be no Jews, no Gentiles, only a single united mankind whose goal would be equality and progress. Literature, Ravich felt, could help hasten this joyous epoch. I respected his talent and his worldly knowledge, yet at the same time I wondered at his naiveté. All the omens pointed to the fact that the human species had learned nothing from the war that had cost twenty million lives, if not more. In all the cities of Europe people did the latest dances—the Charleston, the fox trot, or whatever they were called—dances over graves. Sociologists propounded theories that were allegedly new, but they exuded the evils of generations. Poets babbled their empty verses. The Literary Pages, of which I was proofreader, was radical, socialistic, half communistic, full of bad articles, poor poems, and false criticism. My brother soon turned away from the editorship. The one who had top say there were Nachman Maisel, who had for years flitted between socialism and communism before becoming a full-fledged communist, and Peretz Markish, who sang odes to Stalin until Stalin had him liquidated. Peretz Markish and Melech Ravich were also the editors of an anthology called The Gang, which flattered the rabble and catered to its basest instincts. It cast aspersions upon Jewishness and Jewish history; it denigraded the classicists of world literature, and as an example of the new literature, it featured the hollow phrases of Mayakovsky. Although I was young and far from being a mature writer, I wasn’t fooled by all these lies and flatteries. Behind this gabble lurked the urge to destroy, the will for a new mass violence. Malthus’ God wasn’t yet sated. The emissaries of Moscow called for a world pogrom upon all the bourgeois and middle classes as well as upon all socialists who dared deviate from Lenin by even a hair. Provincial youths—yesterday’s yeshivah students who never in their lives had done a lick of work nor had been able to do so—spoke in the name of the workers and peasants and condemned to death all those who wouldn’t stand on their side of the barricade. I looked on with alarm and astonishment at how a few pamphlets could transform into potential murderers the sons and daughters of a race that hadn’t held a sword in hand for two thousand years. It had become the fashion among the girls to wear the leather jackets worn in Russia by the female members of the Cheka. The mothers and fathers of these murderers were scheduled to become their first victims ….

Spinoza had warned me against the emotions, affects that darkened reason and actually constituted a form of madness. In the books of morals I had scanned during the nine months I had spent in my parent’s town, these same emotions were called evil thoughts, the persuasions of Satan. Rabbi Nachman Braclawer, a man in whom the emotions seethed and stewed, offered all kinds of advice on how to outwit and master them. Man was a pauper when it came to reason, but a millionaire when it came to emotions. I myself was a ferment of passions and doubts. Dreams assailed me like locust. My nights were filled with nightmares. I hadn’t yet been with a woman, but in my imagination I had already committed all the excesses that could only be fancied. I wanted to write and to study, but 90 per cent of my spiritual energy was squandered on yearning for the forbidden, that which would be harmful to me and to others. Like all tyrants of all times, I wanted to force my ideas upon others. I flew to the farthest galaxies with a speed a hundred or a thousand times faster than light. I discovered such potions that granted me Divine wisdom. Like the legendary Joseph de la Rinah, about whom I had read as a boy, I lured all the beauties of the world to my bed through magic. The summer had passed and it started to turn cold. I couldn’t stay on forever in Melech Ravich’s congested apartment, and I started to look for a room of my own. I suffered hunger, cold, sickness. The financial situation of the Literary Pages was such that they couldn’t even pay me the few groschen I had been promised. In my despair I allowed many errors to go by and stood to lose even this miserable job. My brother’s lot was no better than mine. In the midst of all my grandiose daydreams, a voice within me cried: “Put an end to it! You have nothing to wait for. With a rope or a razor you can free yourself of all this misery. There is but one redemption and that is death.”

That winter in Warsaw there were two institutions that kept me alive. One was the Writers’ Club, where I was allowed to come as a guest. It was warm there, one could read the Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers from all over the world or play chess, and the food at the buffet counter was reasonable. Occasionally, the waitresses even extended credit. Every few evenings a lecture was held, and I met many young writers—beginners like myself in the same dire straits as I. They all strove to have something published in the Literary Pages, and they may have assumed that I had some influence there. They heaped scorn on the established writers whose poems, stories, and articles I corrected. I realized something then that I had actually already known for a long time—that poor writers are often astute critics of other writers. Their criticism was sharp and accurate. Some even correctly pinpointed the errors of the great writers. But this didn’t stop them from writing with a clumsiness that astounded me. The same held true in the way they appraised the character of others. Egotists spoke with contempt of egotists, fools derided the stupidity of fools, boors demonstrated refinement in pointing out other men’s boorishness, exploitative traits, vanity. A mysterious chasm loomed between their estimation of others and of themselves. It seemed that somewhere within, each person was able to see the truth if only he was determined not to overlook it. Self-love was apparently the strongest hypnotic force, just as it is written in the Pentateuch: “For the bribe blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous.” The sage becomes blind and the saint will compromise with the evildoer when it suits his purpose, or when he thinks that it suits his purpose.

The other institution that sustained me was the libraries. For years I had suffered a hunger for books. In Warsaw I could get all the books I wanted. I went to the same Bresler’s Library and spent hours browsing there. There was a table where you could sit and read. I read and scanned through books on philosophy, psychology, biology, astronomy, physics. I went to the municipal library on Koszykowa Street and read scientific journals.

I didn’t understand everything I read, but I didn’t have to. Science offered me scant comfort. The stars were composed of the same matter as earth—hydrogen, oxygen, iron, copper, sulfur. They radiated vast amounts of energy that were lost in space or maybe transformed into matter again. From time to time a star exploded and became a nova. Enormous clouds of dust floated in space in the process of becoming stars billions of years hence. As far as the astronomers could tell, there was no life on the other planets of our solar system. As for probing the possibilities of life beyond the solar system, there was no hope for that. Neither Einstein’s theory nor any other theories held out any promise for the species of man. We already had radio sets in Poland, and when you put on the earphones you might hear jokes from vaudeville, a report on the political situation, or possibly even an anti-Semitic speech. Writers predicted television and airplanes that would cross the Atlantic, but these predictions did nothing to elevate my spirit ….

Once as I browsed in Bresler’s Library, I came across a complete translation or an abridgment of Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore’s Phantasms of the Living. I took to this work with an eagerness that astounded even me. If even a hundredth part of the cases described there was true, all values would have to be reassessed. The writers were men who hadn’t the slightest reason to lie or falsify. Almost all the incidents had been thoroughly investigated. I learned of the English Society for Psychical Research. Even here in Poland such investigations were being conducted. Each day brought me some fresh news. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion had investigated hundreds of cases of mind reading, clairvoyance, true dreams and had written works about this that had been translated into Polish or German. Poland had a Professor Ochorowicz and a world-famous medium, Kluski. The Italian scholar Cesare Lombroso, who had been a materialist all his life, in his old age had become a spiritualist and participated in séances. I got the opportunity to read the works, or fragments of works, of Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Crookes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—the creator of Sherlock Holmes, which I had read as a boy in Yiddish translation and which had so enthralled me. In the science taught at the universities, man was ashes and dust. He lived out his few years and became lost forever. But the psychical researchers stated directly or indirectly that the body contained a soul. The twenty million people who had perished in the war were somewhere about. I read cases of dogs, cats, and parrots coming back to their owners after death and giving signs of their love and devotion.

I was inclined to believe that which I read without further guarantees, but I recalled what I had told myself only two weeks earlier—that self-love and self-interest were a colossal hypnotic force. I had read a translation of William James’s The Will to Believe. Every kind of fantasy nourished itself upon this will. The fact that official science offered me no comfort was no proof that it lied. As much as I yearned to believe the psychical researchers, I realized full well that all their contentions were based on what this or the other person had related to them. I also got hold of books by writers who denied all the assertions of spiritualists and psychical researchers. Even at that time they had already unearthed many swindlers among the mediums. I didn’t dare let myself be bribed by my own desires! I had to investigate personally and reassure myself that I wasn’t paying myself off to close my eyes to the truth.

I became so deeply engrossed in these matters that I forgot all my troubles. I read books about psychical research well into the night until my eyes closed. In the morning I rose with renewed curiosity. I had rented a room that was unheated and had bedbugs to boot. My clothes had grown tattered, nor did I get enough to eat, but I didn’t let these petty annoyances get me down. I no longer played chess at the Writers’ Club nor waged debates about literature. I took along books and read them at the club. The writers made fun of me. To this day elderly writers from Warsaw remind me of how I sat at the club reading books. The writers used to glance at the titles of these books and shrug. In the Yiddishist circles they virtually didn’t know that such reading matter even existed.

The winter passed—I rightly didn’t know how—and spring came. My room was no longer so cold. At this time I met a man and a woman who came to influence my life.