By Paulo Blank[1]
A Carnival morning in the year
2012. It’s a hot, sunny day in Petrópolis, quite near to the place where Stefan
Zweig is buried, and by his side, Lote Altman, born in Katowice, granddaughter
of a Frankfurt rabbi, who, as a refugee in London, fell in love with the writer
to whom she gave herself for the remainder of eternity. Amidst crosses and
gothic cathedral shaped tombs, next to the graves of princes of the House of
Habsburg and far from the Europe he dreamt of seeing unified, Stefan was buried
in Petrópolis, despite having rather preferred Rio de Janeiro, as he expressed
on paper to his editor. Would it have been a reference to the Jewish cemetery?
On February
22nd 1942, a week after Carnival, a few blocks away from here, in the district
of Valparaiso, Stefan Zweig, the most read author of the early decades of the
20th century, suffering intensely from the war which destroyed his humanistic
dreams, in a haste to meet peace, had decided to take the shortcut of suicide
to leave History once more. Contrary to any kind of nationalism, he despised
international diplomacy, which eluded citizens, building wars beneath fine
linen cloths and, horrified before the destiny of his people for whom he suffered,
decided to leave. In a morning like today’s, seventy years ago, he concluded
the arrangements, organizing letters and documents, like a guest who tidies up
the room so as not to disturb the host.
In the
middle of the day with scorching sun, on a Tuesday fattened by Carnival street
parades, I went to visit Zweig in the company of my friend Jaime Leibovitch.
Jaime sheltered from the sun under a Panama hat, while I walked beside him
wearing the colored cap that serves me as a kipa, seeking to rediscover our way
to the writer’s tomb. I remembered it was near a pasture-covered ground with a
standing cross, resembling the picture of Brazil’s first Mass. Moving forth
through the labyrinth, I came upon a black rectangle that stood out among the
architectonic diversity of mausoleums of the local dead. Squeezed in the middle
of graves planted on their own soil, there were the foreign letters of my
childhood’s Hebrew writing. It was they. Stefan and Lote in their last exile.
My second
glance perceived over the marble piece the little stones, which indicated other
visits. Surprise. In the tropical paradise there still are those who remember
Zweig to the point of including him in the counting of those who count. Twelve
stones. Three people at least. A good number, considering the Eldorado of
hospitality with no discrimination that Stefan used to see through his
persecuted look. What he did not know is that we have a short memory,
characteristic that helps us build the illusion of the country with no
prejudice. Shortly after, I noticed there were only stones on Stefan’s side.
What about Lote, nothing? Effaced in death as she was in life? No one would
remember including her? I remarked this to Jaime and continued taking pictures,
until I noticed him approaching with three pebbles picked up on the way, and
putting them under Lote’s name, bringing her back to the roll of those who
count in Israel. Supreme moment, as Zweig thought. I was touched by the poetic,
symbolic, unique, decisive gesture. Jaime limited himself to an almost
invisible smile while I, enthusiastically, told him of the buried candelabrum
he had just lit in an unpretentious gesture.
The Buried
Candelabrum is a “legend” published by Stefan in 1936, in which he tells the
imaginary saga of the candelabrum seized from the temple of Jerusalem by Tito,
builder of the arch tourists contemplate in passing when they go to Rome. With
the fall of the empire, stolen over and over again by the victorious ones of
each moment, the candelabrum, Menorah in Hebrew, passes from hand to hand and
is followed by Rome’s Jews who don’t want to lose sight of it. A metaphor
unveiled by the author himself, the Jews survive all empires thanks to their
detachment from the earth and from fanatic and destructive nationalism. Keeping
together through the humanistic ideals that live in their thoughts and nourish
the feeling of belonging to a people on the sidelines of politics, they become
indestructible despite the Germans burning Zweig’s books in the public square.
Lingering throughout History, the Jewish become an example of how it’s possible
to live free from borders and fanaticisms, as he says in a letter to Martin
Buber.
Safe from
the barbarian hands of people who see only its gold, unaware of the brightness
of its humanistic light, the candelabrum after all returns to the land of
Israel, brought by a ninety-year-old hero who as a boy saw the Menorah leave
Rome in the conquerors’ ship. The old Jew arrives in Yafa bringing the treasure
disguised in a coffin to be buried in the Holy Land, according to the old
custom. Together with other dead it would await until a farmer could discover
it in its casket of time, making in “resuscitate” in a new era, with no mad
nationalisms or brutalizing radicalisms. An idea which brings up the Talmud, when
in a debate between sages one of them states that the difference between the
world we live in and the messianic time is no other than the domination of
empires. The empires, the wars and the oppression of one people by another mark
the difference between this world and that to come. Wise perception of those
wise Hebrews of blessed memory.
Seven
branches of the candelabrum, I read once more in the musty smelling book, until
the word jumps out from the yellowed pages and summons me to see it. Branches
are “zweigen”, tells me an inner voice, remembering the word said in Yidich by
the mother, bidding the boy to get a Zweigale, a loose branch for us to
scribble letters on the sandy ground of Campo de Sant’Anna. Malka was the first
person to tell me of Zweig: “he killed himself because he couldn’t stand the
filthiness of the world any longer”. What if Zweig were a branch of the
candelabrum? I comment with Jaime, thinking of the mother and the farewell
letter of the writer who put his faith in humanism, at a time when this word
still had some real value.
“…
exceptional forces would be necessary for a new beginning, and my hands are
exhausted from years of endless rambling. So I consider it preferable to put an
end, at the right moment and with my head up high, to a life in which the
intellectual work always represented the most genuine happiness, and individual
freedom, the supreme good on Earth. I salute all my friends! May you still see
the dawn after the long night! I, too impatient, will leave before.”
Impatient,
he leaves and precedes us. As the candelabrum, Stefan announces the light of
dawn after the long night which one day, he knew it, would come to an end. As a
Jew with no motherland nor boundaries, only words and ideals, such as Jeremiah,
with whom he identified so much to the point of remarking, in a letter to Buber
about the work in which he pictured the prophet during the destruction of
Jerusalem, that he was “the completeness of my profession of faith”. Defeated
at war but successful in principles, the prophet is left with the same belief
in words that allowed Zweig to enjoy the “absolute freedom among nations”. The
dream of a Jew from Vienna who wrote this theater piece during the First World
War, at a time when he could still affirm his nomad freedom. But this time it
was different. Rambling, but exhausted on a path that came a long way, he
decided to leave ahead, so anxious was he to find the deathless peace that
would survive his heritage of words. His intellectual work. Our readers’ legacy.
His friends.
Impatience.
A detail that almost escapes to those who read the farewell sentence: “I, too
impatient, will leave before”. Zweig does not leave as someone who longs to
kill unbearable life. Zweig announces that his hurried departure refers to the
impatience in waiting for the day when light triumphs. He does not flee, he
goes forth to a meeting. He wants to see it first, and because of that leaves
in the individual way he always wished for, apart from the collective time of
waiting. Like the candelabrum he withdraws to awake at the end of exile, when
Israel reencounters itself. A final settling with his positions, contrary to
Jewish nationalism? A new look upon Jewish history, considering the end of
exile as a contrary solution to his internationalist dream, equally inspired on
Jewish fate?
Recognizing
in Stefan’s gesture the suicide of a martyr who kills himself to assert the
rest of life he still has, Rabbi Tzekinosky of the Great Temple at Tenente
Possolo street, when he learns of the suicide, summons the members of Hevre
Kadisha, the Saintly Brotherhood that administered the cemetery, to go
altogether to Petrópolis with the intention of rescuing the dead and burying
him in the Vila Rosali Jewish cemetery, without the exclusions the ritual destines
for those who commit suicide. Influenced by the reading of the Buried
Candelabrum, as Alberto Dines tells us, the rabbi was willing to break the
Jewish practice of burying the dead “next to the wall”, that is, out of the
community.
But the
Vargas dictatorship wanted the writer’s body. Pressing him with antisemitic
threats of rancorous reactions from the population, the local chief of police
forced the rabbi to give up and comment on his way out, with Talmudic wisdom:
“it doesn’t matter, wherever there is a buried Jew becomes a holy field”.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Lemle of ARI, the Yekes synagogue, of the Jews of German
origin, also arrived on the spot, accepting to perform the burial at the city
cemetery. Putting himself above the circumstances, Lemle recited the same
kadish that Jaime and I made be heard among the sea of crosses beside Stefan
and Lote, out of sheer impulse for not letting those who count fall into the
forgetfulness of a fat Tuesday in Carnival.
Petrópolis, Ash Wednesday 2012.
References:
Alberto Dines:
Morte no Paraiso, Nova Fronteira, 1981, RJ.
Donaldd Prater,
Stefan Zweig, biografia, Paz e Terra, 1991.
Stefan Zweig:
Ed. Koogan, 1941 e 1942, Rio de Janeiro.
Jeremias
O candelabro
enterrado.
O momento supremo
Correspondance,
Grasset, Paris, 2000.
[1] Paulo Blank is a
Psychoanalyst, PhD in Communication and Culture by ECO-UFRJ. Independent
researcher in the area of Jewish thought, author of “Cabala: The mystery of
couples”, published by Relumedumará in 2005, among other published studies. He
represents the Community for Humanistic Judaism in Brazil.
