Regrowth: Seven Tales of Jewish Life Before, During, and After Nazi Occupation

An Acquaintance of Mine

✦ 243 ✦ An Acquaintance of Mine i got to know him while still in my youth. He captivated me with his good-natured, almost-sweet smile—that of a clever person , someone who was an expert at everything. But beneath the smile, one sensed the bitterness of someone for whom things weren’t going well—who wasn’t meeting with success in some real purpose. It was the smile of a person who, though still young, already carried age within him—one who anticipates a not at all successful destiny, which now, later, or at one point or another he will encounter. Out of his eyes, there peered a quietly muted sadness—from seeing too much in advance, it seems; therefore, he was constantly wiping them—so that no one would notice that he was not living, but only surviving, and that, with every minute and passing instant, he already stood a little farther away from where he was now. And just as he himself was a little worn-out and odd, he also dressed strangely: in a little hat with a short brim that wouldn’t stay on his piled-up hair (like a carriage driver’s, which never stayed combed); every time people saw him—him in his hat— it was impossible to understand how it stayed on at all and why it didn’t fly off, even when there wasn’t any wind outside. Moreover, people always saw him in a floppy coat, an airywindy cape, which he wore almost the whole year through, except maybe in the winter; before the cold got too severe, he exchanged it for a heavy coat, but it, too, was of a kind that 244 ✦ der nister wasn’t at all in keeping with fashion. With his thin, tallish build and his slightly bent back, in his big clothes (and especially when there was wind), he always looked like a ship from an earlier age—one from Columbus’s times—toiling and struggling to pass the waves on the sea; that’s what he looked like, with his head poking into the air, when the flaps of his cape inflated him, like sails. He wasn’t old at all yet—just twenty-five or twenty-six— when I got to know him in a former Russian county seat in the southwest—a pretty provincial one (despite its honorable administrative functions); a town with narrow, winding streets, full of orchards and gardens, with quiet boulevards for retired officials and military men strolling between the high poplars —leafy in the summer and barren in winter—with loudscreeching cranes’ nests in one season and empty ones during the other. There, we met. He was already a known personality in the very brainy Hebrew literature of the time—in which he had acquired a solid reputation the moment he set foot there. I was still a youth. He had already been invited to collaborate in the thriving publications of the day, which were edited by someone who was very famous then (it was around the fifth year). The latter was a writer and critic with a sharp pen, who had great esteem for his own person but also enjoyed respect among others. From that editor, he, my acquaintance—the first time he took the pen in hand, when he submitted his first work, although he was still so young—received a response that welcomed him very courteously. The salutation read: “The gates of The Century are open to you.” There was more: “Your name will be counted among the collaborators featured in our journal. . . .” And I, as mentioned, was a youth who could never even have dreamed of such an exalted reception. Being associated with someone like that certainly inspired great honor and respect—to the point that my thoughts followed his alone. an acquaintance of mine ✦ 245 My acquaintance stayed in that provincial, administrative city. He didn’t go off to where his proper place of residence would have been, where his profession demanded him to be— one of the big literary centers, where men like him normally congregate. This was on account of a lone love affair, which tore at him for a long time and ended unhappily. It stamped his face with the traits of an ascetic. Externally, it made him smile good-naturedly, yet a bitter deposit sat beneath the smile. It made him capable of sincerely valuing another to...