Free And the Sea Is Never Full by Elie Wiesel

Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at the City College of New York purely to chance.
    One evening in a Manhattan hotel, after a lecture on behalf of Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg takes me aside. He speaks to me as head of the Jewish Studies department at City College. He wishes to recruit me. To teach what? Anything I want: Hasidic texts, Jewish or Holocaust literature, talmudic subjects. “Things that, in any case, you deal with in your work.”
    I am very fond of Yitz. I have known him since the early sixties, when he was teaching at Yeshiva University. He is as tall as a basketball player, with a lively and open mind; his discourse is sharp but not aggressive. As he tries to convince me, I realize that if I accept I shall become a father and a professor in the same month.
    I accept.
    Two days later I find myself in the office of the young dean Ted Gross. He seems pleased, and so am I. It has all happened very fast. The contract has been drawn up; all that remains is the signature. Smiles, handshakes, congratulations. I am proud, I don’t deny it. City College is not just any college. It is a place of real distinction.
    Is this a new career? Let us say it’s a new path. As for the goal, it will not change.
    I prepare myself like a student, rereading texts I thought I had known and fully understood. At the same time I put the final touches on
Le serment de Kolvillag
(later translated as
The Oath
in the United States), which is due to be published by Le Seuil in France in 1973.
    Also on the agenda, inevitably, are a few trips. With Elisha, of course. In Israel, we meet friends from the newspaper for which I worked from 1950 to 1972. Dov and Lea, Noah and Paula, Eliyahu and Ruth: peaceful, comforting moments. Nostalgic as well.
    Elisha in Jerusalem. How can I describe my happiness, my pride, as I carry him in my arms walking with Marion through the narrow streets of the Old City? And as I place his tiny hand on the Wall?
    For the editors of
Yedioth Ahronoth
these are heady times: Circulation is up from one week to the next, as are salaries. I make my old friends laugh when I point out to them my poor luck as a journalist: Since I left,
Yedioth
has become better and richer.
    As a result of the “war of attrition,” the atmosphere in the country is heavy. The security of the state is not yet in question, but the euphoria of 1967 following the Six-Day War has dissipated. Five years have passed and there is ever more talk of Palestinian terrorism. Nobody has forgotten the attack at Lod Airport committed by the Japanese Kozo Okamoto, linked to the PLO: twenty-five killed, among them the internationally renowned scientist Aharon Katzir. That was at the end of May 1972.
    In early September of that year, during the Olympic Games held in Munich, Palestinian terrorists belonging to the Black September movement assassinate eleven Israeli athletes. The public follows the tragedy live on television.
    The Games continue the very next day. And the whole world applauds.
    In a difficult address given a few weeks later, before the leaders of the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), I speak of the implications of this wanton murder.
    We must never forget that Munich is not only the capital of Bavaria, but also a symbol. Munich symbolizes the failure and cowardice of the West, its abdication before the powers of evil. It represents the triumph of paganism, of the gods of violence, of fanaticism and death. Munich equals shame. In 1938 the Munich agreements prefigured Dachau, the ghettos of hunger and fear, and the death ramp at Birkenau.
    September 1972. The Jewish year begins badly—for Israel in general, for me and my family as well.
    One morning, I am in the middle of teaching a class on Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav when a secretary rushes in to tell me of an urgent call waiting for me at the office. I run to the phone afraid to breathe, afraid to say the word that will force me to listen to what follows. On the other end, my brother-in-law