Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
On the way back to the hotel I saw a crowd of Wehrmacht soldiers
marching along those ancient and beautiful streets in the winter gloom. At
the hotel, I drank more wine. Renate wept at night, wrote a postcard to a
woman she had met in Israel, fortunately I love Renate too much to give
my opinion on her foreignness. After thirty years of marriage she told me
that night of all times about her youth in those days when you and I would
shoot at low-flying planes, did you know, that when Renate heard that the
Fuhrer committed suicide she wounded herself and had to be put in the
hospital, and back then the hospitals were crammed to the gills, weren't
they? The next day, the sky cleared up and we flew home.
I had a strange dream. I was waiting for my father at the railroad station.
Renate came arm in arm with an old Jewish woman. A man who may have
been a Jewish pimp from a Sturmer cartoon asked me what side the snake
pees on.
I'm sitting at home now, in the room you know well. Behind me is the
beautiful picture of the black horse. You write that my last book sold three
million copies. I was glad to get the nice articles you sent me. The depth
of the article from the New York Times amazed me, I never heard of the
author of that article, Lionel Secret, but the name does ring a bell only I
can't decipher or locate it on the map of my memories. I loved the thin
irony of the article seeing my book as my most successful suicide attempt,
the one you can photograph and go on looking at it. I remember my father
telling me that the film he took in the Warsaw Ghetto was a beautiful film.
When I saw the film afterward I understood what he meant. The book I've
been trying to write all those years about the Last Jew doesn't interest you.
But in addition, it also refuses to be written. I'm now rewriting a novella I
wrote a few years ago but my heart is given to "The Last Jew" that's stuck
in my craw. In Israel, I met Ebenezer. The meeting didn't do me any good.
I met a man named Henkin who's also investigating the Last Jew (he's not
a writer) and his wife is the woman that Renate loved in Israel. Ebenezer's
mother, Rebecca, I didn't meet. She's very old, they say she's still beautiful.
For some reason, I was afraid to go visit her in her settlement.
Since you're not only my editor and publisher, but also my close friend,
I must explain to you clearly where I stand now. I know, you've worked
hard for many years to promote me. You published my books when nobody
else wanted them, you believed in me despite the bad or indifferent criticism or the thousands of copies you had to bury because nobody wanted to
buy them, and I, I of all people, now sit and write what our reader won't
want to read and our critic will trash, and the most awful thing of all,
what is hard even for me to write. The book can be written by two different people, my dear, by me and by that Henkin. And then it won't be the
book you wanted, will it? I am my father's son and Obadiah Henkin is the father of Menahem Henkin, who fell in Israel. Someplace, an ancient battlefield is stretching between us, and in that battlefield is a person devoid of
memory of his personality who is also part of me and part of him. It's like two
men trying to beget a son together. There's a nice saying: The best poem is
a lie. What is the German lie and what is the Jewish lie that can create on
paper the existing character, painfully existing, of Ebenezer Schneerson, son
of Rebecca and father of Boaz Schneerson, stepfather of Samuel Lipker, a man who hoarded knowledge to remain a last Jew in a war that you, I, and
he were in together on both sides of a death that's now being forgotten?
Grief is banal. Life is banal. Death is banal. Everything is banal. The tormented and monstrous words. What to do? I have to prophesy Ebenezer
through Henkin and he has to prophesy him through me. What will come
out of all that may be bad but necessary. I know how much these words
upset you.
What I can't grasp in that banality is the symmetry. Boaz and Samuel
Lipker are the same age, born the same day, one in Tarnopol in Galicia and
the other in a settlement in Judea. They look alike. When Ebenezer met
Samuel in the camp he didn't know that Samuel was the last son of Joseph
Rayna whom he went to Europe to seek and came to us. He didn't know
that Samuel and Boaz are alike because he had left Boaz when he was a
year old and hadn't seen him since. So isn't it funny that, when Ebenezer
returned to Israel forty years later and met Boaz (and Samuel whom he
hadn't seen for many years), he said: Samuel! And Boaz was offended to
the depths of his soul. I have to understand Ebenezer, his mind, the words
he hoards and then sells to foreigners in seedy nightclubs. I understand
that you want another book, you want a different story, but I, I have no
other way, I have to live in the stammering attempt to write a book that
doesn't want to be written ...
Tape / -
Attached below, another chapter of the draft, the third copy. If you compare it to the previous copy (that you disliked so much) you'll see that in
principle I didn't change things, I just cooled them a little, I distanced
myself, I let people shape themselves a little in view of the words that
didn't stick to them. And so ...
Bent over he was at the barbed wire fence, maybe more than bent over,
he was leaning forward, and his whole life would pass in that second like
a flash with nothing except memories of others, and he won't know if what
passed through his mind was his life.
A woman in rags passed by on the other side of the fence. She said: Are
you all right, Schneerson?
I'm looking at you through a fence we haven't passed through for years,
he said, I look and I see. He didn't know how he knew they hadn't passed through it for years if he didn't remember who he was and what happened
to him.
I'm eating, said the woman.
And then a slice of bread she held in her mouth dropped. The bread fell
on the ground covered with bone dust that flew in the wind. She bent over
in alarm, picked up the slice, cleaned it with her hand and put it back in
her mouth. At that moment, Samuel appeared, touched Ebenezer, and said
to her: See how much food they brought, sausages, cheese, bread, and she
smiled, the slice of bread in her mouth, and then she fled wildly.
Ebenezer stood still because he had nowhere to go. Everything was in
motion. Bonfires were lit. A tank was slowly squashing the drooping roof of
a gigantic block that had previously collapsed. Imagined shapes of human
beings, staggering, dressed in pajamas or tatters. A soldier vomits. Hands
of a dead man leaning on a wall, like a skeleton who started walking and
stopped, the hands are stretched forward, clenched into fists, the skin is
flayed. A Spitfire was circling in the air and dropping paratroopers full of
food and medicine and uttering a purity of distances no longer unimaginable. For a moment Ebenezer sensed the stench that had been with him
for three years.
April fifteen, nineteen forty-five. Five hours and five minutes after noon.
A long twilight, whose long faded shadows, twined with fiery hues, create
calculated uncertainty and solid vagueness, an hour with no boundaries,
until the dark that may really descend again. On the horizon blue mountains, treetops and silence. A gleaming gold of a tank tramps to the block.
Behind Ebenezer the blocks still stand in a long line, a ditch perpendicular to them, its banks concave. A second glimmer of a passage from one
planet to another. In the distance, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer is seen.
Tied with a coarse rope. Two British soldiers guard him. One of them
touches him, almost pushes him, and Kramer tries to wave his hand, as if
he wanted not to wave the white flag, his eyes keep revealing contempt
and at the same time keep surveying the destruction, the tanks crushing
his blocks, their sloping roofs, and those people in pajamas. The impulse
is mechanical, his hands are bound and he can't wave them, he drops his
hands and once again straightens his hands behind, Ebenezer sneaks a look
at him from the distance, and very slowly turns his back to him. Ebenezer
feels a stab in his back, as if he were shot, but Samuel's hand is stroking him, Samuel doesn't see what Ebenezer sees, he's already far away from
here, in a future that's almost solid and bound to reality, Kramer doesn't
interest him anymore. Ebenezer wants not to see the humiliation, he
didn't want it. A British officer who had previously been seen chatting
with the tall, ruddy Red Cross representative then asked Ebenezer something and Ebenezer said: It's true that I was almost the first one in this
camp. But I'm not the last! And he blushed at the sound of his words. The
"but" sounded arrogant and coarse. The architect Herr Lustig made them
a stylized roof, Kramer requested, Weiss approved, and so he got sloping
roofs with a unique angle for that camp. The originality of their slope is an
interesting modular plan, said Herr Lustig. Concentrating vertical force.
The arc on which the roof is set doesn't have to be a concrete support but
only its bottom half, you can learn from these dimensions in the Alhambra,
for example, he added. A city isn't houses, Herr Lustig then said, camp
and city, town and future concentration of human beings will constitute
a planned texture and not some accidental combination of beautiful or ugly
structures, streets or squares, it will be a unit in itself!
The officer who sees the corpses all around wipes sweat from his brow
and thinks he has no choice but to bow to Ebenezer and he does, as if he
were viewing a natural force, gallops on a horse, Jehu King of Israel a chariot
too fast, and Ebenezer stands up too fast, pickling for four years, and yet too
fast, and he thinks, Toward what? They lived in those blocks? He has no satisfactory answer. To what? Hard to know. He has to organize a journey of
dying people. To bring them quickly to some sanity. So they won't eat with
their fingers and won't be so alarmed. Kramer is sitting there, he could have
shot him.
A waste of a bullet, thought the officer.
I'm a carpenter, aren't I? said Ebenezer as if continuing innocently, I
understand wood, huts, screws, nails. These are excellent huts but they're
not meant to accommodate a thousand people in one hut without heat or toilets. I'm not complaining, he added, and the Red Cross man tried to laugh.
Why not? asked the officer.
I don't know, said Ebenezer.
Beyond the grove appeared people in civilian clothes. Their faces furious, led like a rebellious flock, kicking and cursing. Farmers brought to
German Poland at the beginning of the war, one of them dressed like a rich man, bags under his eyes, tall and pale. British soldiers are leading them.
A few of them stand still and the soldiers urge them on. Then they stop
and wait for instructions. A mixture of orders from a microphone in English, German, Yiddish, makes that unreal moment concrete. The orders
are barked out unreliably, thinks Ebenezer, they haven't imagined where
they're going, they should put Kramer in charge! The civilians, who had
lived in the area for years, are expecting a salvo of shots that will destroy
them. They're shaking before the rifle barrels in the hands of the soldiers.
Nobody bothers to explain to them. They're led to the giant pits that were
dug a few days before and they think that here they'll be shot here. But
instead of burying themselves they're assigned to bury those they didn't
have time to burn. Abomination appears on their faces, so some of them
were filled with indifferent heroism; not to yell or plead. In silence they
worked, in silence they vomited, in silence they understood the respectinducing sight of Kramer. When they passed by Ebenezer Schneerson they
saw the first person in their life who lived in peace on an alien planet. Until
today, they hadn't seen such human beings up close, but only as miniaturized
geometric shapes. They had to lower their eyes. Kramer didn't hesitate to
sneer at their look. Ebenezer still thought they were only lords with bad timing. That was a perplexing moment from Samuel's point of view, who's the
stumbling block here and who would change places with whom?!
Ebenezer thought: Never did they know a real shame of humiliation, if
they had known they would go into those graves and not come out. But
Kramer knew them (and Ebenezer) very well, thought Samuel, Ebenezer
is trying to locate himself: I'm the memory of things. I'm a crapper of the
Poles. I'm a hidden light Gold told about before he died. I'm an electromagnetic equation. I hover in the wind. A music room of symbols. The
culture room where Bronya the Beautiful was shot with an apple in her
mouth. The girlfriend of entertainers from the east. Barefoot, almost tired,
they fell asleep trying to make Kramer laugh. He stood, in his hand a gun
aimed at them and they tried to sing comic songs. In the searing cold of the
evening, in the light of the nearby glow of the explosions, but then Kramer
fell asleep standing up, the gun in his hand and bliss on his face. How do
you understand that sight?
A week before the end, Sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss agreed to fix the Fuhrer's
frame. And Ebenezer was assigned to fix it. Ebenezer tries to locate things. The entertainers were killed in an air raid on the way from the camp to
Hathausen. Everybody kept Jewish prayer books in their cases to sell after
the defeat. Like Samuel, they're also living in the future already. Ebenezer
hasn't yet moved, Kramer is sitting and watching his Jew. Samuel is lusting for the wallets of the British soldiers. Kramer's Jew doesn't understand
why they tied the commander's hands, Kramer isn't used to being tied.
And then a Jewish soldier of the British army barked, at Kramer he barked,
to emphasize the gravity of the moment, to defend himself with hostility,
because of the need to disguise himself as a dog, and Kramer smiled, calm,
he knows Jewish dogs, an inflexible and inelegant race, the soldier can't
see what Ebenezer saw, the twilight darkened now and only Ebenezer,
who had learned in childhood to see the eyes of jackals in the dark, saw
Kramer's glowing eyes.