Free All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel Page B

child prodigy, impossible to tear away from his books. We became friends much later, when he was professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and I was professor of Jewish studies at City College.
    Yerahmiel Mermelstein, the son of a melon merchant, had his whole career set out for him. An ardent Zionist, he was indefatigable in his efforts to “convert” us to the ideas of Theodor Herzl. On Saturday afternoons, when we were supposed to be at the synagogue, he insisted on treating us to socioeconomic disquisitions on Palestine. He decided to learn modern Hebrew and argued that we should all follow suit. But the poor boy got nowhere. None of us was tempted until my father persuaded us to learn it. My father found us a teacher and Yerahmiel managed to come up with a grammar—the only one in town—which he loaned to me. I learned it by heart, as though it were a chapter of the tractate of
Sanhedrin
.
    When I first went to Israel, in 1949, my father and Yerahmiel were both in my thoughts. It was thanks to their obsession with modern Hebrew that I was able to become the Paris correspondent for an Israeli newspaper. I asked myself, over and over again, why I, more than Yerahmiel, deserved to know the country and speak the language for which he had fought so ardently in our little, far-off town.
    I remember Itzu Junger—serious yet cheerful, thin and agile. His parents were rich, or so I supposed. They lived in a big, “luxurious” house with many rooms, near the great synagogue. I went often to their garden. Always pleasant and generous, Itzu may well have suffered from the same insecurity as I did: he was desperate to bond with his friends. For a year we had the same tutor. About ten of us would study together in a room set aside for us in Itzu’s spacious house. Sometimes we studied late into the evening, and then we would spend the night. This was a welcome diversion, for I detested routine.
    A change of tutors separated us, but we continued to see each other at services, on Shabbat afternoon, and on holidays. Then came the tempest that separated us.
    We ran into each other in Israel, where he loaned me his “room,” a windowless cell in a Tel Aviv suburb. I gave it back to him a few nights later, afraid I would suffocate there. I saw him again in Brooklyn in the early fifties, during my first visit to the United States. We went for long walks in Williamsburg, exchanging plans and memories.After that we corresponded regularly. He must have been sick already, but he didn’t know it yet, or at least there was no mention of it in his letters. He died of cancer of the liver. But nobody told me. I thought he wasn’t writing back to me because he was too busy, so I kept on writing for some time. Two or three years later I was in New York again and tried to get in touch, but his number had been disconnected. I called his sister in Brooklyn, and she burst into tears. I had been writing to a dead man.
    As for Haimi, he died of a heart attack one Shabbat afternoon in 1989, at his home in Monsey, New York. We had seen each other again in Israel in 1949. I was giving classes in a children’s home, and a technician came to do some electrical work. He looked familiar. “You! An electrician?” He had learned the trade in the concentration camp. As a child Haimi had been a jack-of-all-trades who would willingly repair a leaky fountain pen, a broken lock, or an electrical short. His father, Reb Nokhum-Hersh, was the chief rabbi’s private tutor. It was to him that we turned for explanations of obscure Talmudic passages.
    Haimi had uncommon physical strength. I felt safe when we went out together at night, for the thugs of our town feared him. Yet I never saw him fight or become violent. On the contrary, he was so good-natured as to seem somewhat phlegmatic. His older brother, Leibl, short and thickset, with herculean strength, was crushed by a tree in the camp. Haimi saw it happen.
    Haimi went from a