Mail to the Promised Land

Old Levi turned his face away that was so easily stained by tears. Again, he felt a twinge of longing for his terrestrial home. How strange it was, this longing for a miserable land where one had lived through nothing but humiliation and suffering. The blurry faces of the old men who had meanwhile converged around him, drawn to the garden by the news of the letter, fused into the faces of still older men that had been washed out by time. Old Levi was puzzled because his father-in-law, with his thin, stringy beard, had made the journey here. The teacher, Rosenzweig, had also arrived, angrily waving his hands about, spoiling for a fight. The seamstress’s brother who had taught Hebrew letters to his little boy in Paris when no one as yet had any inkling what fame the boy would win for himself. But that fame now eluded the father’s comprehension, not as if it had already passed, but as if it had not yet begun. Now the tailor was pushing into the circle, the one who had his shop in the courtyard of the synagogue in St. Paul. He was a rail-thin little man, misshapen, with a wispy white cloud for a beard. All together they began to mumble passages from the letter to each other. Above them the narrow, grimy, eternally shady alleyway was edged by the towers and merlons of the decaying palace.

Unsure of himself, he stepped into the court. The misshapen little man with the wispy white cloud of a beard took from his hand the candle he had been carrying so carefully. He stuck it into one of the free holes in a sheet of tinny metal that already held several candles. The father-in-law said the prayer and lit the candle. The shiny, pale, tender face of his wife who had died during the pogrom in the cellar appeared in the glow of the flame. It was so lovely that the face of his daughter-in-law was diminished in comparison. She was as fine and thin as the candle itself, and everything that came afterward was transient and ungraspable like the few wax drops that were also melting away.

The young widow had not left in time. The Nazi army occupied all of France. The French friends in Algiers were running in vain from ship to ship. After awhile they received only the news that the woman and her sick child had been deported to some place. She had, as these things usually go, delayed departure to nurse the child and thus prepared merely their destruction. The friends no longer entertained hopes of a reunion. From time to time the two Frenchmen, man and wife, talked only about whether a letter to Old Levi ought not to be composed. They even found a refugee who was capable of writing the kind of letter that might match the letters that the old man had been used to. Since at that time Old Levi was already buried it was no longer possible to find out whether or not the letter was a success. It did not, in any case, satisfy the other residents in his house. They had already gotten so used to the arrival of the letters that even now, after Levi’s death, they read this letter together in their accustomed place. Perhaps it was only due to the absence of the recipient that they did not feel quite as soothed and refreshed as before.