THE fire in the title of this book is Nazism. The ice is Siberia. The air is the freedom to breathe in the United States of America.
The book is an autobiography of Rabbi Simcha Shafran of Baltimore. He lived the fire and the ice, and still thrives in the air.
At the age of 14, he insisted on leaving home.
I realize now, 70 years later, how reasonable my parents were that autumn day, and how irrational and stubborn I was.
I cannot imagine what made me so determined to board that train and go off to yeshiva. I was 14 years old and had with me only the clothes I was wearing, my tefilin and a few apples my mother had given me.
How had I managed to convince my parents to let me leave them and go my own way a mere month after the outbreak of the Second World War, after we had been forced to flee our town and were almost burned alive?
Whatever it was that pushed me, it was the last time I would see my mother and father, and it was my refusal to be sensible that saved my life . . .
Shafran did not actually go off to yeshiva. When he got to the train station and asked which train was for Bialystock, the city in Poland where the yeshiva was, he was informed that there was no more yeshiva in Bialystock.
It, too, had fled, and so young Shafran found the train to Vilna.
Bombs drop all around, and this irrational 14-year-old figures that since he has to take a train to the yeshiva anyway, what difference does it make whether he takes the train to Bialystock or Vilna?
What difference does it make whether he studies in this city or that?
He found the yeshiva in Vilna, whose entire student body later fled to a nearby village, Birzh, and for a year or so he fulfilled his dream of studying Torah.
The Nazis the fire caught up with him and he escaped to Siberia. There he survived the minus 40 degree weather, tuberculosis, slave labor and still managed to absorb a little Torah.
He absorbed it from Rabbi Judda L. Nekritz, who gathered around him a few young men and together they survived years in Siberia, not knowing whether they would ever live anywhere else.
Rabbi Nekritz, reports Shafran, never lost his leadership, his composure, his spiritual confidence, despite the circumstances. In Rabbi Nekritzs case, these included constant interrogations by the NKVD (precursor of the KGB).
This same composure comes through in Shafrans own personality. Here he is, for example, fallen in deep snow, all but dead, yet summoning a last ounce of energy to catch up to his horse that had run ahead, then miraculously stopped. Here he is, 20 years later, learning that he had had tuberculosis.
What comes through is a very quiet, self-effacing determination, together with a capacity to see the world the way he wanted to, not the way it conspired to make him see it. His way was to see the possibilities of spiritual growth, even in Siberia, not the suffering.
A Polish citizen, Rabbi Shafran was repatriated after the war and ended up, of all places, in Germany, where a yeshiva opened. Ever the seeker, he enrolled and picked up another two years of full time study. He also picked up the tunes for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Thus, when he finally settled in the US, he had the tools to lead a synagogue. He studied more, became ordained, married a Baltimorean and opened a small synagogue in Baltimore.
I REMEMBER those immigrant survivor types from own youth. They did not fit in, they had an earnestness and a gentleness and, above all, they persevered.
In the case of Rabbi Shafran, he built that synagogue, picked up an accounting degree because there was little livelihood for an immigrant rabbi, and served as the secretary of the beth din in Baltimore.
He managed to transcend the immigrant barrier and reach American families and youths. His wife was a true helpmate. Along the way, he encountered African Americans, with some of whom he enjoyed a wonderful relationship, while others shouted Heil Hitlerin his presence.
Still, he knew America was different, and he persevered, raising a family, making a new life.
And preserving the old.
In truth, this vivid and open autobiography cannot capture the man. Yes, it is beautifully framed. The closing story, for example, tells of the 85-year-old survivor picking up his 14-year-old grandson at the Baltimore train station and telling him:
There isnt the time, but one day, remind me to tell you about my own first train trip.
I was just about your age.
Yes, the book includes short takes by former students, friends and congregants of Rabbi Shafran. What they convey is his altruism, his dedication to teaching the Torah and inspiring the people, Jew and non-Jew, who crossed his path, even as the recompense was minimal.
Still, no book can capture a person like this. Had I not met him, I would not have believed that such a person still existed.
I was reminded of a story about the late pietist, Rabbi Elya Lopian, who moved from London to Jerusalem when he was 65. He paid his respects to the preeminent Rabbi Isaac Z. Soloveitchik on Sukkos. Rabbi Lopian entered Rabbi Soloveitchiks sukkah. He sat for half an hour and did not say a word. He simply radiated. His very being communicated integrity.
The somewhat severe Rabbi Soloveitchik uncharacteristically, accompanied Rabbi Lopian not only out the door but down the street. Why?
I did not know a person like that still existed, said Rabbi Soloveitchik.
The one time I met Rabbi Shafran, I was carried back, well, not 70 years, but 35 years back to my early adulthood in Jerusalem, when I studied with masters who stemmed from pre-Holocaust East European circles of piety.
Rabbi Shafran took me back. His spiritual seeking, his simplicity and joie de vivre reminded me of what I had witnessed in Jerusalem. I did not know that someone like him still existed.
NO book can bring to life the inner spiritual world of a tzaddik. However, a book can take us up to the barrier, enabling us to glimpse beyond it, if we want to. Fire, Ice, Air: A Polish Jews Memoir of Yeshiva, Siberia, America, lovingly crafted by Rabbi Shafrans son Avi Shafran, takes us as close to the barrier as literature allows.
It is just as well.
In matters of the spirit, it is up to the individual to make the leap. Chemistry, grammar or law may be communicated by teacher to student. In matters of the spirit, even a master teacher can take the pupil only so far. In the end, the pupil must make the leap on his own.
Or not.
Fire, Ice, Air is a master teacher.
Read it. Then, if you can, leap you will glimpse between the lines an earnest seeker from a world now gone, a person of genuine humility and striving, for whom age and circumstance are no measure of such things.
