Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
But while Boaz was completely sunk in his new creation, Henkin suddenly gaped out of the thoughts from his starched suit, became serious,
grave, the teacher I met on the Tiberias Tsemakh road, that gentle savage
who read us poems and quarried and knew how to love this body of mine
with hands full of softness and honor, and he said: The poem, Boaz, what
about the poem?
What poem?
The poem Menahem wrote.
Oh.
I want it.
But...
No but.
Boaz came back to reality and once again found himself sitting in the
cafe. The waitress was sitting in a corner humming to herself. The rain
subsided and strips of blue sky appeared between the clouds.
The poem disappeared.
Find it.
Where?
You'll find it, Boaz Schneerson, and you'll bring it. You know where I
live, you came once, and now I know why.
Henkin leaned forward, his eyes cold, Henkin's dead son, says Boaz with
restrained fear, is indifferent now, his dead son wrote him a poem. What
does he want from me, fucking Henkin?
Bring it!
I'll look for it, said Boaz. Henkin observes him seriously, Boaz is terrified in the chair.
You will bring it.
A teacher's grammar: I shall bring, you will bring, we shall bring, where
shall I bring it from?
Bring it from wherever you bring it, says the teacher of Hebrew language
and literature.
I'll look for it.
You'll find it, says Henkin and starts to get up, and then he turns to
Boaz: Tomorrow afternoon. I can't, said Boaz.
Tomorrow afternoon, said Henkin and all the softness disappeared, no
poet was written on his brow ... a father's acquisitiveness, Boaz didn't take
it into account. Tomorrow afternoon. Deliverance Street, near Singer's store.
I'm waiting for you, his voice is cruel, rigid. He wants to pay, but Henkin
doesn't let him. I'll pay, says Henkin. He counts the coins, puts the wallet back in his pants pocket, puts on his coat, his hat, repeats: Tomorrow
afternoon. When Teacher Henkin goes outside the wind scatters the fastsailing clouds. Across the street, on the wall of the house, gigantic wet
spots appear, the street is gleaming with the sudden sun, Boaz remains on
the corner, lights a cigarette, puts the match in his mouth, and tramples on
the cigarette.
Tape / -
Report 5/677-E. S.-(The Last Jew)
By 1946 we found out about Ebenezer Schneerson. We had been tracking him for about a year and in January 1946, we created an initial contact
with him. His impresario-as Samuel Lipker was called-presented us
with unacceptable conditions. He demanded that the material to be published be recorded in his name, and that in exchange for every hour of
debriefing the aforementioned (Samuel Lipker) would be paid ten dollars.
Our then modest institution could not have accepted those demands and
henceforth the meeting with Ebenezer was postponed until the year nineteen fifty-six 1956. When he came to us, Ebenezer was fifty-six years old.
He suffered from pain in the pelvis, his fractures are patched up but are
abnormal, his body is scarred from the blows he received, and even though
the scars have healed he urgently needed treatment. His heart is abnormal,
his pulse is too rapid, his blood pressure is high, he was borderline diabetic.
This report does not constitute research but is an introduction to research that will be documented forthwith, and is to be seen only as an interim report. When Ebenezer Schneerson came to us, we discovered that
during the years since his release from the camp his intellectual activity
had been reduced to a minimum. Only after long conversations did he
become free for what he himself called "the need to do something in this
life." He could not say explicitly "this life of mine." The word "mine"
wasn't clear to him. His life was reduced to words he guarded. The body
was only a tool to protect what his brain preserved. In conversations we
held with him at the time of awakening (seventeen recorded conversations) when he was in a non-alert condition, he talked a lot about being the
only survivor of the Jewish nation. In sixteen of the conversations, he repeated the sentence: "All the Jews died and I have to tell the world what
they knew."
In the period he stayed with us, he created a genuine and first contact
with a stranger. Traveling to the nearby hospital to treat his burns, he met
Mrs. Fanya R. (Debriefing File Number F.R./6/444). Fanya R. was hospitalized in various institutions and when Ebenezer met her, she was in
the small hospital then financed by a fund called the Fund for the WarDamaged, whose origin is not clearly defined. These were people sent to the
camps for obscure reasons, or whose postwar status is not clear. Mrs. Fanya
R. was sent to the camp because she was the lover and mother of the daughters of a Jew named Joseph Rayna, and later it turned out that Ebenezer
thought this Joseph was his father. Joseph Rayna was shot to death in
Dachau. The aged Joseph Rayna met Fanya R. under circumstances that the
abovementioned is not interested in telling. She gave birth to twins named
Danka and Toleda. When the girls were five years old, Fanya R. learned that
her mother, Kathe nee Prausen, married her husband Mr. Prausen when
Fanya R. was a year old. Before that, her mother lived for some time with
another person. To make a long story short, note that Fanya R. discovered
that Joseph Rayna was her mother's lover and that she was not only the
mother of his daughters, but also their sister. Her emotional condition,
which was bad in any event, grew even worse and in the camp she cleaned
latrines. Her daughters were taken away from her and when the war was
over, she went in search of them. They were killed by Dr. Mengele, whose
experiments on twins are widely known. Only when she met Ebenezer did
something stir in Fanya R. that had previously been dead. After a certain
period, her condition improved, her attempts to hurt herself almost stopped, and in March nineteen fifty-eight, Ebenezer Schneerson and
Fanya R. were married in a modest civil ceremony.
Ebenezer claimed that he was the stepfather of both his wife and her
daughters. As far as he was concerned, he was the brother of his daughters,
his own uncle, and even his mother's brother. I'm almost my own father,
he smiled at us. In a ceremony held in our institution, Ebenezer adopted
Fanya R.'s dead daughters, and, the two were retroactively named Danka
and Toleda Schneerson.
Ebenezer claimed to us that he had married Fanya R. out of sympathy.
He loved, he said, only one woman, whose name was Dana and his mother
murdered her. Samuel Lipker, he said, was searching for him because they
had gotten separated from one another in a heavy fog in the port of
Marseille.
After he started opening up to his past (for example, his recall of Joseph
Rayna and his relation to him), it became clear from things he dredged up
from inside himself with difficulty (we spent several days on that) that he
had wandered in Europe and searched for somebody he thought was his
father and on his way he came to Russia. After the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, he was expelled (as a Pole)
from the Polish territory that had stopped being Russian and was then
expelled to Russia as a Ukrainian. In the struggle between the Belarussians
and the Ukrainians for German sympathy, he was caught in a maze of
schemes and this is not the place to describe them, and in the twists of the
cosmos he discovered that the Jews were glad when the Russians came,
but were bitterly disappointed. The Poles in the area were landowners who
had previously been moved there by the Polish government to hinder the
progress of the Belarussians who were expecting the Germans, while as for
the Germans, they disappointed them too after they came. Crossing the
border to German Poland (along with a group of Jewish youths returning
to organize the Pioneer Youth there), he was captured by the Germans. He
managed to run away and came to a Polish village. The Poles who thought
he was a Ukrainian turned him over to the Belarussians who judged him for
what they called "despicable Polish subversion." Naive and uneducated, he
didn't understand the delicate subtleties in those relations of nations, and
in Operation Barbarossa he was captured again. When he ran away (he
was swift and strong), he was tortured by Yugoslavian partisans who were searching for a way out to the Russian forests and thought he was a hostile
Jewish-German spy. He was caught in a tight net-and this is not exactly
the place to go into detail-of Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Belarussian,
Ukrainian, and Polish schemers, and at any rate, his Judaism was only one
more pretext for abusing him, and a millstone to hang accusations of identity on him of which he was ignorant. Lacking an ideological background,
it was easier for him when he was captured by the Germans as a Jew. The
Sonderkommando caught him and this time he couldn't run away. Now his
pedigree was clear. No importance was ascribed to the fact of his birth in
Palestine.
What stands out in Ebenezer is the lack of individuality in the accepted
sense of the word. One of our investigators called him "a man without
qualities" from Musil's well-known book. But that of course is only one
aspect and does not characterize his personality. His love for his wife Dana
and for Samuel Lipker is not the love of a man without qualities. His life
is made of too many libels for him not to be aware of some of them. After
he spent time in several camps, he was taken to Hathausen and was the
first prisoner there and even helped build the camp. From what we know,
it was his skill in the art of carpentry that kept him alive.
For a few weeks we observed his work and although at first he refused
to get involved again with carpentry, he eventually agreed to show us his
handiwork. He was ordered by our investigator to build a small pipe rack.
For two weeks we observed his production. Clearly the final shape wasn't
clear to him; the rack resulted from a need called in this report "particular," that is: to be this rack and no other, and that a metaphor of a wellknown concept. Ebenezer built drawers for pipecleaners, matches, of
various sizes, he lined the concavity with green cloth, he used forty-two
different lacquers he created from solutions of glue powder and other
materials. He skillfully planed tiny pieces of wood and interwove them
in a marquetry: the rack was the product of many combined details (things
Ebenezer apparently imagined, but didn't know) and the product was a
rack of restrained beauty and uniqueness. We sent the rack to four different museums (in Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, and London), and the unanimous opinion was that this is an excellent rack, the handiwork of an early
nineteenth-century artist. Dr. Rosenberg of Vienna, the greatest expert in
European cabinetry of the period 1795-1838, mentioned the names of only two artists who were capable of building that rack and claimed that we had
presented him an absurd riddle, since he knew every rack made by those
artists, while an imitation of the rack of those artists was impossible. Thus
it is hard to argue that Ebenezer Schneerson is a man without qualities.
After we collected other works by Ebenezer, in the homes of former SS
officers, we made a small exhibition of his works. The exhibition was presented only in our research institute. We wanted to print a modest booklet in honor of the event, but Ebenezer refused, saying that only Samuel
Lipker had the right to do that.
His story in the camp (and his survival as a carpenter, if what he produced can be called carpentry) is told in the expanded research. What can
be said positively is that there was a certain moment when Ebenezer decided to give up being the Last Jew in the world. Out of an empathy he
developed for his imprisoned companions, fear that many geniuses and
scholars, writers, and researchers would die without leaving a trace of their
knowledge. In our work with him we have penetrated to only a certain area
of investigation of his memory. In his hallucination under hypnosis he told
us how he once sat in a woman's house, a woman he apparently respected
and maybe even had relations with, and hated himself for what he called
his betrayal of Dana. At night he sat in a little room, he told us, and tried
to recall Dana. Her precise image eluded him. All he could remember was
a vague form of a woman. He felt a need to remember her exactly as she
had been, something that's hard for the human memory to do. He had no
photos. So he sat, stared at the burning oven, concentrated and very slowly
remembered a small dimple in Dana's right cheek. He meditated on the
dimple for a long time until it was completely clear in his memory. Then,
he left it and meditated on her nose. When the nose was clear, he left it for
a while and the mouth began to be drawn in his mind and only then he
connected the dimple in the cheek and the cheek to the nose and the
mouth and did he connect the throat to the orbits of the eyes and come to
the hair, which at first was separated from the other parts of the face and
joined to them, and so, very slowly, Dana's image was drawn like a crossword puzzle that became a precise photo he'd see before his eyes. Her
legs, for example, he recalled when he thought about the hike they had
once taken to the desert and Dana tripped and he smeared the wound
with medicinal leaves he had learned from the Bedouins. Ever since then, he said, Dana appears whenever I need to remember her, he shuts his eyes,
thinks of the stove and Dana's image rises in his mind. He claims he has
many keys he remembers dimly but when he needs them they appear in
the back of his mind and through them he remembers things. For example,
Einstein's theory of relativity depends on thinking of the smell of roasted
coffee. A pince-nez raises before him the entire Pentateuch.
Did he learn to photograph knowledge? It's hard to say since he didn't
read the knowledge and if he photographed it, he photographed the voice
that recited the knowledge. If so, the word "recorded" will be more appropriate. But that doesn't explain anything. At most it can describe a process
whose source remains blocked. According to a representative sample, we
measured about nine million words that Ebenezer knew orally. For instance, in nightclubs where he appeared with Samuel Lipker, he often
recited lists of those killed in the pogroms of 1915-1919. The knowledge
was divided by towns (the key to that knowledge was drummed out by the
fire department orchestra in Livorno). Many of the towns he mentioned
were wiped off the face of the earth and there is no longer a trace of them
on maps. In a forgotten Jewish book titled The Scroll of Slaughter, we found
one section he recited almost completely. Of the two hundred pages we
copied of our tapes I shall present a few examples: Garbatishi, Kortivo district, Minsk Gubernia, six Jewish families. Granov, Haysen district, Podolia
Gubernia (attack of Petlura's Cossacks) eight families, etc....