If you add up all the victims and victimizers, they form such a small percentage of the world population. What are the others engaged in? We victims and victimizers, we’re part of the same humanity, colleagues in the same endeavor to prove the existence of ideologies, feelings, heroic deeds, religions, obsessions. And the rest of humanity, the great majority, what are they engaged in?
—Jacobo Timerman
ED ASNER WANTED to play Jacobo Timerman in a film version of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. I don’t know why he didn’t, but he certainly would have been better than Roy Scheider in the misbegotten 1983 TV movie that wasted the talents of Liv Ullmann, about whom more in a minute, and Budd Schulberg, who insisted his name be deleted from the credits after they butchered his script. Not only does Asner look more like the Argentine editor, but he has generally behaved more like him, too, making trouble and waves.
Timerman, who died last week at age seventy-six, was a Renaissance troublemaker—something he carried with him in his Jewish-diaspora DNA from the Netherlands, from which his family fled in the sixteenth century to escape the Spanish Inquisition, to the Ukraine, from which they fled in 1928 to escape the pogroms. Growing up in Buenos Aires, he became a socialist and a Zionist in a country that was pro-Hitler in World War II. As editor of La Opinion from 1971 through the 1976 military coup until his kidnapping in April 1977, he was equally opposed to state violence and sectarian terrorism, and insisted on publishing the names of the “disappeared” every day on his front page. And so he was seized, for thirty months, by neo-Nazi hoodlets who actually seemed to believe in a Zionist plot to gobble up Patagonia—chained to a concrete bed; beaten while blindfolded (“boarded up”); smashed against the wall by cops linked in single file pretending to be a locomotive (“the choo-choo shock”); chanted at (“Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick”); and obliged at regular intervals to “chat with Susan” (a machine that applied electrodes to his genitals). International pressure by everyone from Amnesty and Solzhenitsyn to Kissinger and the pope finally secured his release, after which he was stripped of his newspaper and his citizenship and shipped off by bloody parcel post to Israel.
Where he wrote Prisoner… (1981). Had it been only a witness to torture and deranged anti-Semitism, it would still have been a noble document on humanism at the end of its tether and the pornographic intimacy of violence, where “memory is the chief enemy of the solitary tortured man,” “hope is synonymous with anxiety and anguish,” and “goodness is madness”: “Do I not, I ask myself, wind up being suspect in my own eyes for having undertaken that impossible choice, that permanent vigil of my own despair, experiencing a kind of omnipotence in being the victim? The Victim. Didn’t that hatred of all those who’d caused me to surrender the best of myself, my courage and sacrifice, didn’t that hatred wind up asserting itself within my fear, leading me at times to believe that perhaps there was indeed some underlying motive, something that had escaped me—some vague guilt hidden behind my principles… ?” But troublemaking Timerman was just as hard on his fellow Jews, three hundred thousand of them in Argentina, whose silence he saw as an acquiescence in his torture. They were, he suggested, as fearful, obedient, and tongue-tied as the Judenrat during the Holocaust. Well: Hannah Arendt all over again.
To compound his offenses, from Tel Aviv he had a clear view of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in which his son, Daniel, was a soldier. Timerman expressed his sorrow and anger at Israel’s “messianic concept of geopolitics,” first in a dispatch to The New Yorker and then in The Longest War: “Now history is Palestinian,” he wrote after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, this man whose first Hebrew teacher in Buenos Aires had been murdered in the Negev by a Palestinian terrorist. Those of us who happened to be in Israel in the spring of 1983 can testify that, for his black ingratitude and moral presumption, Timerman was as much reviled as Arafat, even at Peace Now cocktail parties during Jerusalem’s Book Fair. How dare he bad-mouth the country that gave him sanctuary? After all, he hadn’t lived through the Holocaust, or 1948, or 1967. (“But does the key to it all lie in the scale?” he asked in Prisoner.) Obviously, he had been tortured in the wrong language.
Upon the restoration of democracy in Argentina in 1983, Timerman returned and went to court to accuse his tormentors. But he wasn’t done stepping on toes and minefields. In 1987, he visited Chile for the first time since the assassination of his friend Allende. In Chile: Death in the South, he told us the usual horror stories of Pinochet’s dictatorship—brutalization; rape as an instrument of state policy; murder as a norm—but also spoke of the numbed psychology of the afflicted, of the powerfully destructive grip of nostalgia on the imagination of the liberal parties, and of the impotent romanticism of the exiles who’d gone helplessly home again. Besides saying outrageous things about writers as various as Neruda, García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, he declared (correctly, it turned out) that Pinochet would not be dislodged by “phantom armies” of the left, “pseudo-guerrillas” who had persuaded themselves they could overwhelm the military when all their violence did was “grease the wheels of the killing machine.” Left extremists trying to make themselves appear more dangerous than they were had managed to motivate the armed forces in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina “to genocide.”
This was news, from a man of the left: You can’t hate torture while at the same time rooting for, or excusing, terrorism. It is news that seems not yet to have reached Colombia.
Worse was to come, in 1989, from Cuba. He’d known Fidel since 1959. A reacquaintance after thirty years appalled him—brainwashing, alienation, and hypocrisy; megalomania at the highest levels and informers on every city block; “re-education camps” for homosexuals and the suicide of old revolutionary comrades like Haydee Santamaria and Osvaldo Dorticos. In the arts community, toadyism; among journalists, self-censorship and despair. In Havana in 1989, you couldn’t even buy a Soviet magazine that might be full of news of glasnost and perestroika.
Language consumed this bad-news bear, because the corruptions of language and the corruptions of power were joined like monstrous Siamese twins. Why were so many Cuban writers in prison or exile: Carlos Franqui, Herberto Padilla, Cabrera Infante? He was especially hard on García Márquez, “one of the greatest writers of our time,” who had helped Padilla get out of the country alive, but who was otherwise complicit in his buddy Fidel’s dictatorship, even disgusting in “his public eulogies with their byzantine hyberbole.” Personally, Timerman identified with an ex-journalist who prefered to work as a fumigator instead of a reporter: “He’d rather poison garden insects than Cuban minds.”
The death of his wife and the bottom of a bottle slowed him down in his last decade and now we will probably never get those memoirs. Never mind the offense he gave to the caudillos, to the left-romantics, to Sharon and Likud, to some of my favorite writers, even to me. (I only met him once, at lunch in 1981 with the publisher of the New York Times, where he was as full of impatience and reproach for me, at my having insufficiently emphasized in my review of Prisoner the silence of the Jews, as he was for Hilton Kramer, who suspected him of being somehow soft on Tupemaros. In 1983, in Tel Aviv, he didn’t answer the phone.) But what about Liv Ullmann?
He met her in New York only a month after his release, in the backseat of a big black car on a rainy night after a lecture by Elie Wiesel. And he explained to her that she, of all people, had done him the most harm while he was in prison. Her autobiography had arrived behind their bars—on the outside enhanced by a photograph of her gentle face, in that ungentle place; on the inside so full of tenderness toward her daughter, when he couldn’t see his sons. Even its title, Changing, had been offensive to him, because he couldn’t. The very “tenderness” of which Ullmann seemed so proud in her book was the “enemy” of a victim of torture. In the “biology” of his survival, “the intoxication of tenderness is tantamount to death, madness, suicide.”
Timerman didn’t tell Liv Ullmann that he had hated her, but he wanted to. This seems to me so radical an opposition to our habit of ingratiating ourselves to anyone, our licking of the boots of war criminals and egomaniacs and psychopaths, as to amount to a new religion with its own liturgy: Always the truth. After “a chat with Susan,” we speak a different anguish.