For these millions are printed these books you see, for these millions Yiddish is written, translations are made into Yiddish, and Jewish theatre is performed. It’s a complete world, a complete people, with its own elite, without diplomas or universities. This elite wants to be informed, wants to know, wants to reflect.

‘There are Yiddish novelists, poets, critics and essayists. If you had any idea of the great beauties encompassed by this dialect-culture – which you ignorantly despise – you’d probably have many pangs of remorse. Not to mention the folklore of the ghetto – all in Yiddish – a still-living, creative folk-culture, with its roots deep in the periphery, with anonymous singers, unknown humourists, with heroes, with legends, with myths. And doubly alive. Once through the immediate presence of the life of the ghetto, and then through the more distant mystery of the life of the synagogue. The edgy, gritty urban realism of the ghetto and the mysticism of the synagogue unite in this folk-culture of the Jewish neighbourhood and together add up to something which, if you have an ear and a heart, is worth living and dying for.’

‘Dying, especially,’ I interjected, ‘because living through it is rather difficult. I can’t really see those millions of Yiddish speakers. And I don’t really see the Jewish ghetto either. But I do see a multitude of Jews passing definitively into the culture of the countries in which they live: French Jews, German Jews, American Jews and Romanian Jews. A hundred years ago they spoke in dialect. Today they’ve forgotten it. Tomorrow, their children won’t even remember that it once existed. And to such a precarious thing – however beautiful it may be – you want to bind a culture?’

‘Have you forgotten that, luckily, there are still anti-Semites? And, thank God, that there are still pogroms from time to time? However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.’

‘Why a ghetto and not a Palestinian colony? You speak about the ghetto with so much passion, as though it were a place of exile, and with so much love about dialect, as if it were not a borrowed language. If it’s a matter of returning to ourselves, why don’t we return to where we first started, the place we left two thousand years ago? It’s not easy, either way. But if it’s going to be hard, it might as well be for once and for all.’

‘Two thousand years? Do you think Zionism has something of those two thousand years in it? Do you think that these boys of Jabotinski’s who wear boots and salute each other like soldiers, who ride bicycles on Saturday and can say “Give me a cigarette” or “Let’s go to a football match” in Hebrew – do you think these boys have anything in common with those two thousand years of our blood? Two thousand years through flames, through disasters, through wandering come to us through the history of the ghetto. It’s a history lived under lamplight. “We want sunshine,” they shout. Good luck to them – and let them become footballers. They’ll get plenty of sunshine then. But this lamp by which I’ve read so many hundreds of years, this lamp is Judaism – not their sunlight.’

‘You’re old, Mr Sulitzer. That’s why you talk like that.’

‘I’m not old! I’m a Jew – that’s what I am.’

*

I was slightly mistaken. Abraham Sulitzer is a Monsieur Bergeret only as a husband to Madame Roza. As an intellectual, however, in his relationship with ideas, he becomes dogmatic and overbearing. In defending the ghetto, he is no less intolerant than Winkler defending Zionism or S.T. Haim cursing about both. Extremism is their common vice.

I visited him on a couple of evenings but avoided arguing. He reads beautifully and I asked him to read to me from his favourite books. Several good hours of reading from Sholem Aleichem. A wonderful fellow and probably untranslatable.