48
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Why not?" Father asked.
"Something terrible has happened to me: I have forgotten the
nightly prayer- which I have said every night of my life, and now
suddenly, it's gone! So would you say it, but very slowly. I am not so
sober as I should be."
And I heard how my father slowly intoned the great night
prayer, not the short one used by children. Urtschy repeated it with
effort.
If
he went wrong on a word, he corrected it until it sounded
right. As soon as he had spoken the last amen, he slumped over like
one of the dead. Father covered him.
How far behind me all that lies! Yet no matter how far I have
moved from people who say prayers, prayers in any religion, it is
only with effort that I contain the emotion aroused in me by U rt–
schy, who could not let himself go to sleep before he had said every
last word of the long night prayer.
It
was not out of fear of God's
anger but out of that strange Hassidic love of God, who is like a
generous, comforting older brother to him who prays....
. . . Scarcely two years after our flight, from which we never re–
turned, my interest in the village, in its inhabitants, even in the Urt–
schys, was totally extinguished. I hesitate to write the next sentence:
Vienna swallowed me up. No, I do not like that way of putting it; it
is an exaggerated expression for something exaggerated.
•
•
It
may be that I would not have had the feeling of rootlessness if
Hitler's victories had not had the catastrophic consequences which
even today remain as present as though twenty-seven years had not
passed since his downfall .
If
the Jewish shtetl still existed, they
would belong, for me, to a distant past. Since they were wiped out so
that nothing of what they were and might have become can pass into
the future, Zablotow belongs to my present.
It
has found a home in
my memories.
Yet before I became aware that Zablotow and the other shtetl
no longer existed, I experienced an overwhelming sense of loss,
which at first I could give no name. I was living then in Paris; it was
a Friday evening in March 1938. I had turned on the radio, above
all to hear the latest bulletins on the fighting in the Spanish Civil
War. Then, totally unprepared, I heard the announcer say that
Austria's hour of destiny had struck, that German troops would be
entering Vienna within a few hours. I found the Vienna station and
