The Time of the Uprooted Read Online Free Page B

he had calmed down, to seek him out and demand another masterpiece.
    He did not have long to wait.
    THUS, WRITING BECAME A JOB FOR GAMALIEL: A way to live better and to pay for comfortable lodgings. As a trade, it was fairly interesting, and it paid pretty well. No sooner had he finished an assignment than he would forget it: The sorry collections of clichés that he ground out as a writer for hire were of no further interest to him. He would return to his one true passion, the
Book of Secrets,
which made him forget all his frustrations. In it he would put everything he could draw from his memory and from his soul. In the characters he created, was he not unconsciously putting himself in the story? The Jewish painter Chaim Soutine used to say, according to a close friend of his, that for some paintings he did not have to call on memory, and yet those paintings portrayed nothing but his memories. Gamaliel sometimes wondered if the same was true of words. Words could be a writer’s best friend, but they could also be formidable opponents. He suffered like a sick man when the words would not submit, would not let themselves be tamed. But when his imagination was on fire and the words allowed themselves to flow, he would bless his happiness and all Creation. At times, his words would take root in a reddening sky; at others, they would sink into a cemetery haunted by malevolent shadows, as in the brain of a madman. Why did Gogol, back from Jerusalem, weep when he had finished
Dead Souls
? Piotr Rawicz tasted ashes as he was writing “The End” on the last page of his novel
Blood from the
Sky.
Does a writer love the words he writes, or does he reject them when they part company? Gamaliel believes, most of the time, that a word has a shadow that accompanies and stretches out from it; and the pain he suffers is inflicted by that shadow. But if he separates the word from its shadow, he will expose it in all its nakedness, and that is dangerous: Once on display, it will attract too many ears, too many knowing looks.
    ONE DAY, BOLEK INTRODUCED GAMALIEL TO A sturdy old shopkeeper from Brooklyn. The man kept looking around suspiciously, as if he thought every passerby might be an informer. He was more straightforward than Lebrun:
    “They tell me you know how to write. I don’t. Matter of fact, I hardly know how to read. Not surprising. My school was the ghetto, the war, the camp. I was a partisan in Russia. In the forest. Saw a lot, did a lot. Fighting the Germans, of course. Also their collaborators. I had my reasons, twelve of them. Twelve members of my family butchered in one morning. Right in front of our home. So write my story as best you can, if you can; write it your way and, of course, put your name on it. I’ll pay you well.”
    A tempting offer. But though peace can be told in words, war cannot. Words can incite the murderous hatred that is war, but words cannot describe it. In principle, one should not be able to put it into words, this horror that is war, this blasphemy that is war, this grotesque agony, this licensed slaughter, this glorified butchery that is war. James Joyce knew that, as did Franz Kafka; neither wrote about the First World War. War kills the dream along with the dreamer: It blinds the mind’s eye so it cannot see the horizon.
    Thus it was that although Gamaliel was moved to write the man’s story, he had to tear it up. He told him by letter:
    “I do not know how to write your story. I do not know how to revive those haunted faces, those silent voices who, through you, would summon us to hear them tell of their deaths and perhaps our own. All I can do is tell you that I can’t do it—and shake your hand.”
    A few years later, he sent the Brooklyn shopkeeper this quotation from a book by Maurice Blanchot he had just read: “And how can we agree not to know? We read the books about Auschwitz. The last wish of those who were there, their last charge to us, was: know what happened here, never