Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Henkin the teacher, thinks Teacher Henkin, is sitting in a house that
is both familiar and unfamiliar, he is looking at the subject of his investigation and his ears are surely burning, Hasha Masha looks at him, does
she feel compassion? Henkin investigated the history of the Falashas.
The story of Joseph de la Rayna, Masada and Yavneh. Survival versus the
fever of revolt, wrote about the greatest heroic speech written in the history of Judaism, the patriotic speech every Israeli student learns by heart,
the speech of Eleazar ben Yair about Masada, written by Josephus Flavius,
that is, Yohanan the Traitor who commanded the siege of Yodfat, sur rendered, joined the Romans and wrote the history of their war against the
Jews and with his own hands wrote the speech of great hope, the dying
speech of Eleazar ben Yair. Only if you steal the victory from the Romans
will you be remembered and that's how the Jewish memory was born, and
the Last Jew is its last product, or perhaps not the last ...
Some time ago I read in the paper that they were seeking soldiers at a
salary of two hundred pounds a day for the Roman army. They were making
a movie about the Masada revolt. And they really did set their watches back.
In the Land of Israel, written time didn't exist then, Henkin, Hebrew time
has its own logic. That attempt of mine to write about Ebenezer is my last
attempt. And now it was stolen from me, too, a good writer doesn't have to
be a commander of a bad camp.
I look at the big cabinet to the left of Ebenezer. Three squares constitute the center of each door of the cabinet. Made of veneer, so many
shades of brown and beige and yellow and black that isn't exactly black but
isn't brown either, woven into one another, etched with wonderful acrobats, winding and cunning, lacquer backgrounds, delicate work of stripes
and slats, some intelligent musicality, for with his own hands Ebenezer had
built that cabinet just as he had built the grandfather clock, and all the
other furniture of the house, and had even carved the birds.
Who would have wasted days and nights to bring the wood to such a
charming and complex decadence, to rinse the lacquer to lechery like some
artificial rain, like a sweet psalm to wood, subdue the tones to a marvelous
harmony, and he stands here before me, the father of Boaz who destroyed
my life and recites not to me, not to his great investigator, but to a German
who tossed into the fire the last of the blacksmiths, the last of the carpenters, the last of the great artists, the last of the kings where a single violin
played on the millions of their graves, Jewish entertainers in Warsaw, the
electricians, the physicians, the great adulterers, that sadness that was
thrown into the fire, two-fifths of an American cent, I look at the cabinet,
who will still build such cabinets? You, Ebenezer? The world that wanted
you to disappear comes to applaud you in nightclubs ... And soon it's morning, they drink tasty, cold borscht, with a little sour cream, chilly, a pleasant wind blows from the sea, and the German says, Henkin brought me, he
doesn't even know who you are!
I knew and I didn't know, I stammered pensively.
He knew and didn't know, said my wife with a laugh that was not devoid of warmth.
And Boaz, said my neighbor.
A fine dog, said my wife, a purebred, green and gold eyes, charm and
devilishness.
A purebred, said my wife, son of a father who fled from him to be a Last
Jew, took a great lust to kill a Jew, took Noga and Menahem Henkin, and
Obadiah, my dear doesn't understand, the love that was suddenly kindled
in her.
Renate got up and gave Hasha Masha a cookie. Hasha Masha gnawed on
the cookie from Renate's hand. The German was silent, took a pack of papers out of his pocket and leafed through it, then he said: These are letters
you wrote me, Ebenezer, and Ebenezer scanned the letters in the glow of
the neon light and my wife fell asleep or perhaps only shut her eyes with a
cookie in her mouth. Renate stroked my wife's head and started conducting
an invisible chorus as if we were now to hear the singing of dead angels.
That was an awful night, said the writer. Three hours you spoke, in the
Blue Lizards Club. You hypnotized yourself, and then I heard the melody,
the rhythm. You prayed a distant prayer I didn't know. Then we talked.
You knew exactly who I was. Then I didn't yet understand that you didn't
have what the experts call "self-consciousness" and I didn't know you were
a man without a history. For hours I interrogated you in the small hotel
where you and Samuel were staying. I paid Samuel two marks for every half
hour. He sat with a watch in his hand, and every half hour he asked me for
money, and I paid, even for one minute not more, did you know then that
Boaz Schneerson and Samuel Lipker were born on the same day at the
same time? Did you know then that Boaz your son, whom you abandoned
in a settlement, and Samuel, whom you found in a camp, were two sides
of the same coin, almost the perfect image of one another? You told me
then that Boaz was your bastard son! That Boaz and Samuel were identical twins born in different places to different mothers and maybe, maybe
also to different fathers! Here's another irony. Here sits Obadiah Henkin,
who meets Boaz who brings him a new son, Henkin investigates your history, and you live next door to him while I'm in Cologne, today I live there,
no longer in Kanudstrof in Zeeland in an old schoolhouse, I live in a nice
house and write a story, the title of the story is "The Last Jew."
I've got a new typewriter, no longer a shabby typewriter, a perfect IBM
that can almost write by itself like that fish that once started singing to
itself on the Baltic shore and we threw stones at an unseen enemy and
warships cruised along the frozen shore toward Norway and then thawed the
ice there on the sea, and we carved names in the ice ... And you, Henkin,
what's with your investigation? Are you able to understand? In an investigation there is no retrospective prophesy as in fiction, no poetic license!
Henkin investigates and doesn't know that Ebenezer is Ebenezer, that
Boaz is his son, and Samuel Lipker today is Sam Lipp and adopted in America
by a Jewish poet who wrote laments on the death of the Jews, he betrayed
you, Ebenezer, from the pile of corpses you pulled him out, supported him
in nightclubs in Europe, led by him like a dog and today he got rich from
you and disappeared and left you Boaz, Henkin, and you don't know what to
say to Boaz, who lives with a girl named Noga who was Menahem Henkin's
lover, what would have happened if my son had lived and came here to feel
remorse, as he used to do in the not-so-distant past, what would have
happened to him if he had met Noga? Would Jordana from the Ministry
of Defense have matched him with her? My wife was dancing before to
distant music from an old-fashioned radio, and I understood, suddenly I
understood the German's lost rage, that was our book, Henkin, yours and
mine, he'd look at me and his eye wandered a moment, each one by himself alone can't write it, together, maybe ... I was maybe supposed to
write about my father, not a bad man, didn't throw children into the fire,
didn't shoot children with a gold ring, Henkin, all together he was in
charge of propaganda. He photographed the burning Warsaw Ghetto, photographed for history. You know what he once said, he said: They didn't
want to hear. He meant the world. He said, We took one step, he said,
and we waited, there was no shout, and we took another step and another, and then we thought, in fact they're waiting, that whole big world
was waiting for us to succeed, and my father photographed the silence,
photographed propaganda films, wrote a few monographs on the Jewish
race, who didn't write? My son Friedrich didn't forgive. Maybe he agreed
and so he committed suicide? Maybe he found too much understanding
in the depths of his heart? Can I guess? Through Ebenezer I thought I'd
find an answer, but I haven't found anything yet, my father told me: six
days the destroyed ghetto burned and it was possible to read a newspaper two kilometers from the ghetto, maybe three, with a father like mine, a
grandson commits suicide.
Who knows why your son died, said Renate without raising her head.
How can I write the story I can't not write? I asked you then, Ebenezer,
why Denmark of all places, and you said there's a reason, my stepfather,
that's what you told me after Samuel looked at you and you shut your eyes
a moment, my stepfather, that's what you said almost loved a woman here
who died on him.
Joseph Rayna maybe wasn't my father, said Ebenezer.
Maybe?
Maybe, yes, he said.
I remember, then, on that night, in the club, you recited the books of
the disappeared Warsaw writers, the stories of Kafka, the poetry of a poet
named Idah ibn Tivon, I tried to understand, there was no relation between things, everything was desolate, shrouded in some stinking glory, I'd
say, and then you came down. The musicians crept to the stage, and played
again. Samuel distributed baskets, in perfect order, as in church, and everybody passed the basket left or right, depending on the number of the row,
and they contributed their funds to the basket and Samuel looked at them
with his magnetic charm, that was a shameful drama, Ebenezer ... And I
want to read you an interesting document. In my father's cell was a man
whom three countries wanted the right to kill. In his favor it can be said
only that, as for him, he loathed all three countries to the same extent.
When I went to see my father, right after I met you, he asked me what I
was doing in Denmark and I told him I was writing. He said to me: Don't
tell them too much, they won't believe you anyway. Then that man was
extradited to Poland and hanged there. Before he was hanged he wrote his
journal. I want to read a part of it now.
Kramer?
Kramer, said the German, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, he muttered. He
muttered something about a cunning race and my father said, Why write
about people who can't create and I slapped my father, not Kramer, he told
me that Ebenezer Schneerson was his dog. He was born in Willhelma and
then moved to Sharona. Today your capitol hill is located there, said the
German, but then it was a village of German Templars! No?
It was.
Kramer and Ebenezer were natives of the same land. When Kramer
came to Germany he was considered an expert on Jewish matters, along
with the Mufti of Jerusalem who was to establish the army of the Greater
Third Reich. But he didn't get to that.
Tape / -
And I thought about Sharona. It was there I saw Menahem for the last
time. He came then from Caesarea. They gathered them in one of those
beautiful gatherings. I went to him. I sat facing him and my son sat there
and drank cold water. His face was tanned and a glimmer of apostasy
flashed in it. He knew where he was going, but he refused to tell. I told
him to be careful, and he said: Henkin, I'm a big boy now and I know how
to kill and to be careful. He didn't offer me a drink from the canteen of
cold water as if I too were part of the enemy he was about to fight. We
didn't know what to say to one another. On the rifle he held, a new rifle
he had just cleaned from the oil and kerosene and that wafted a pungent
odor, a swastika was etched. Those rifles meant for the German army
were produced in Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, from Czechoslovakia they came here. I resented that. My son was indifferent, he said:
It's good for war like any other rifle, you can't choose your enemies just
as you can't choose your friends, I prefer to fight the Swiss, but they aren't
shooting at me. The Czechs sent me a rifle, he said, what do I care who it
was meant for before? I told him, There are myths, there are words, that
has a value, and he said, No value, no symbol, you're too old to understand,
Henkin.
After he died you understood him, said Hasha Masha, who opened her
eyes wide for a moment.
I was silent. I was thinking, we all were thinking. The light in the window was bittersweet. Bluish, a pleasant wind blew, a fragrance of sea and
lemon trees.
Germanwriter asked for a glass of water, Fanya R. who lost two daughters for Ebenezer brought the writer a glass of water. The German
wore deerskin shoes. Renate looked as if all her stars had died, what happened to the chorus of dead angels she had conducted before, why isn't
she singing? Ebenezer sits and waits. The writer puts on his glasses and
reads ...
... I met Ebenezer Schneerson in the winter of 'forty-three, it was after
Christmas. I remember exactly the argument between me and SS Uber-
sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss. I told Weiss I was destined to establish a splendid
Arab army, or else to fight on the front like a hero and not to serve throughout the war as the deputy commander of a camp, and he told me: You were
wounded in the leg, my dear Kramer, you were stationed in a place that
suited you. No matter how sad and conservative my feelings were, my scale
of values had always been consistent and stable and so I was silent. I knew
that as deputy I had to supervise my commander. Weiss and I would watch
one another, as they once said about the Germans and the French on the
front in World War I, like two china dogs on a cabinet and on the prowl.
Being a patriotic worshipper by nature, strong yearnings were rooted in
me for my ancient homeland, I was graced with a stubborn aspiration to be
the heir of Heydrich and Muller, but the world didn't have to know about
that. After a long and stormy struggle in which I was demoted to a position
of a covered scarecrow with an aluminum lapel on his coat collar and wearing shiny boots, what I had left was the ability to detest. I did that abstractly. Solid and hidden carefully. Hence, my manners were perfect and
thus I also hated Weiss. Commander Weiss's work forced him to stay in his
office late at night. The food in 'forty-three was still good, our cook, at
least, was French. The French did steal the Italian cuisine but they improved it immeasurably. And so, on my way to his office at seven twenty in
the morning I often had the privilege of seeing Weiss tired from his sleepless nights in his bed in the office.