Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
I want to mention a few numbers as an example of what is
written in Appendices 17 and 18. Five hundred forty-five pamphlets for schools were printed and distributed by the S.L.A.
Company without cooperation with other bodies. Pamphlets for
kindergartens (544); songbooks for youth (134); pamphlets
for preparing assemblies in grammar schools (524); pamphlets
for junior high schools and vocational high schools were printed
in hundreds of thousands of copies. Pamphlets such as "What to
Sing on "How to Arrange Flowers at the Ceremony of
" were printed in thousands of copies and distributed free.
Pamphlets for young people in the Diaspora were printed in six teen languages. The price list was high because of the costs of
translation, editing, and printing on quality paper. Records, help
in writing musical or dramatic works, radio and television programs, ninety-six films for the Diaspora in cooperation with the
Foreign Ministry and the Absorption Ministry. And if you add to
all that the postponed payments, an unstable calculation of the
rates of inflation and the cost of living, you will see the impossibility of a precise listing.
All the aforementioned does not take account of the personal
contribution of Boaz Schneerson, his private expenses with regard to those activities and others are enumerated in the appendices. His activity on behalf of the committees of parents, the
commemoration rooms, swimming pools in soldiers' homes,
seminar rooms, youth hostels and their upkeep, mobile libraries
in memory of the missing, and on this subject, see the letter of
Jordana Etzioni of the Ministry of Defense and the letter of Mr.
Obadiah Henkin, chairman of the Committee of Bereaved Parents and another letter of his vice chairman Isaiah Shimshoni.
Additional expenses with regard to lawsuits with artists, creators, craftsmen, committees of workers, the union of painters
and sculptors, the union of engineers and architects were more
than ten times more than a rough estimate. I attach to my letter the affidavit of Boaz Schneerson, given to attorney Bohan
Tsedek, the letters of Henkin, Shimshoni, Jordana Etzioni, and
others, and as a sign that these words are written innocently,
three letters are attached above by members of the Committees
of Bereaved Parents of World War II, the War of Independence,
and the Six-Day War, separate from the central and national
Committees of Parents. A letter from the Society of BergenBelsen in New York is also attached here, along with one from
the Union of Fifty in England, a letter by Professor Israel S.
Shauli on the sociology of bereavement, a letter by Mr. Nahum
Naftali who teaches widowhood in three high schools (experimentally), and letters from three well-known intellectuals who
have never taken part in any assembly or memorial book, and
whose material has never been printed in this context and thus they have no axe to grind, and they are A. Galbovski, Avinoam
Ha-Him, and D. N. Avigdor.
See also Appendices numbers 20-25-Commemoration,
What Is It? (Jarushka and Aviram). "Bereavement and Insomnia," published by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary
Judaism. "Poetry of Mourning, Revenge for Bereavement," by S.
Nahmiahu. "Songs and Hymns for Holidays and Celebration,"
by Even Hen and Atara Shaked, etc.
Sincerely, Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Tel Aviv
I have translated the contents for you, not the appendices. The
trial took place before a judge in the district court. Boaz pleaded
guilty. After you judged in his favor, Boaz wrote a letter to the
judge thanking him, he said he was writing on behalf of Menahem
Henkin, may the Lord avenge his blood. And I? I was silent.
Tape / -
Rebecca Schneerson's house, afternoon. On the table stands a steaming
samovar, on either side of the table sit an old woman and a man in a uniform, decorated with medals and sporting an unidentified military cap.
They're drinking tea. An Arab boy named Ahbed brings a plate with pistachios, sunflower seeds, halvah, biscuits, dumplings, and goat cheese; he
serves a pitcher of water and two glasses. The old woman puts a sugar cube
into her mouth and sucks the tea through the sugar.
Captain: Excellent tea.
Rebecca: Thanks for saying that, Captain, it's excellent even if you don't
say so.
Captain: I say the tea is excellent because it's excellent and also because I think it's excellent.
Rebecca: You've been saying my tea is excellent for forty-five years now,
Captain, you say it's excellent when it is excellent, and you say it's excellent even when it's not excellent. And always on Wednesday. I'm starting
to doubt if I can believe your honesty, Captain.
Captain: I say the tea is excellent on Wednesday because only on
Wednesday do you invite me. I say the tea is excellent even when it's not
excellent for three reasons: One, I can't bear tea and I drink tea only be cause of you, so whether it's excellent or it's not, it tastes the same. And
the second reason, I say it's excellent is because I know only one kind of
tea and it's the tea I drink with you, and so it has to be excellent even
when it's not excellent. Another reason is that I've been drinking tea with
you for forty-five years now and you still stir strong feelings in me, if I were
allowed to marry you, I would start drinking coffee also on Wednesday afternoons or continue drinking tea, and that would surely amount to the same
thing, because I would be too happy to distinguish, just as the hope that
you'll still deign to marry me allows me to enjoy your tea even when I
loathe it. In South America, we're used to drinking coffee.
Rebecca: And when were you last in South America, Captain?
Captain: To be precise, I'm a colonel. And second, you're evading again.
Rebecca: I'm now over eighty, Captain. You won't be a colonel to me
now, children you won't make me now, what good will it do you to marry
me? Money you don't need and even if you did, I'd leave everything to
Boaz and not give you a cent.
Captain: You don't appreciate the force of my love, Madame.
Rebecca: I'm not fond of that word, Captain.
Captain: I know, but I also know you wouldn't have drunk tea with me
for forty-five years if you hadn't found something in me.
Rebecca: You didn't stop amusing me, Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. You
remind me of Michael Halperin in the lion's cage. You remind me of the
of the splendid and absolutely needless way my husband died on the shores
of Jaffa.
Captain: May he rest in peace.
Rebecca: As a Christian you don't have to say such things.
Captain: I also have memories.
Rebecca: Years ago you didn't have memories. You've changed with
time, once you didn't have a childhood because you couldn't have been
born in all the places you said you were born in. You're Argentinean, Jewish, Christian, Swiss, American, and you're also a spy and write for a French
newspaper in Cairo.
Captain: The newspaper was closed thirty years ago. I've always admired you, Madame, and your late husband, too.
Rebecca: That's because you didn't know him, he wronged me.
Captain: He was a brave man.
Rebecca: He was innocent and beautiful, not brave. I'm brave.
Captain: You're very brave, Madame.
Rebecca: I'm also beautiful and lately you've been forgetting to say that.
Captain: You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known.
Rebecca: You say that so I'll agree to marry you. But this week is out of
the question.
Captain: I've been waiting forty-five years now, Madame.
Rebecca: Another few days won't change anything.
Captain: At our age, it can change a lot. But I told you twenty-five years
ago, in February, if you change your mind on a day that isn't Wednesday,
you can always wake me up, I'm a light sleeper and I hear everything.
Rebecca: You're a light sleeper in my grandson's house.
Captain: In your son's house, Rebecca. Didn't you adopt him?
Rebecca: In your church and that's not legal.
Captain: It was legal in your eyes then and it's legal in the eyes of God.
Rebecca: God doesn't live here.
Captain: But you talk with him.
Rebecca: That's because of something else, not faith.
Captain: Your grandson or son worries me.
Rebecca: My son.
Captain: He worries me even though I love him.
Rebecca: My son died in the Holocaust. Boaz doesn't have to interest you.
Captain: I'm his godfather.
Rebecca: You're right, will you have some more to drink?
(She pours him another cup, he drinks with polite reluctance.)
Captain: Good.
Rebecca: What worries you?
Captain: He sells poems and monuments. He refuses to build me the
Dante monument and he's got a girlfriend.
Rebecca: He's got me!
Captain: He's got one. She was the girlfriend of somebody who died.
He killed her boyfriend. That's what Mrs. Hazin from the grocery store
told me.
Rebecca: Her father was also a fool. I didn't know you went to the grocery store.
Captain: Once I went, I don't go anymore.
Rebecca: You insult him, Captain. Ever since he's been working in the
burial society he hasn't been the boyfriend of any girl.
Captain: Yes he is, and I'm worried.
Rebecca: Stop worrying, I know everything, he's my son and my grandson.
Captain: Maybe he's also your father and husband? What about me?
Rebecca: You're starting to be sentimental again, Menkin. Now you'll
start weeping on me. You're eighty years old now.
Captain: Even old men are allowed to cry, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Not to us.
Captain: I'm going now. Take it under advisement, I'll wait for you all
my life, but my life now isn't something that will take much time.
Rebecca: I'll think about it. (Smiles sweetly.)
He gets up, kisses her cheek, salutes, exits. She sits, and the greatgrandson of Ahbed enters with a tray. She looks at the window and sees
Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg's splendid back walking proudly toward
Ebenezer's house.
Rebecca: That fool Dana!
Tape / -
Frustrated, unkempt and crimson, reminded, a whiskey in his hand, how
to forget, in a bombastic letter to a judge consulting with a serial thief
who sat with him in a bar and said an apple no longer symbolizes joy,
Boaz. They lend envy today with interest, I'm drunk. The thief climbed on
the balcony to make love to two lighted trees that had been brought here
from civilized countries. A thick-bearded Anglo-Saxon from North Africa
drew partitions on a map of a city that had been invented that morning
with a joy that looked to experts more bored than it was supposed to be between three wars in which sympathy for Israel was almost uprooted along
with the knowledge of forgotten courage. People were already drawing
maps of cities where they were almost born and which had been annihilated long ago and they did that with chilly amazement, and then with a
thief of flowerpots, on the balcony, above a ticking tranquillity, a fabric of
tan tones and crumbling, filed in a nailed file cabinet with sorting tags that
look like the homemade jam of a woman of a soldier's dreams, stood Boaz
Schneerson and wrote a letter to the district court judge, chief judge, and
an account of the days with him, and on him, and under him, and the thief forgives him and says: The arrow, sir, is no longer a symbol of regret just as
the apple isn't a symbol of joy, and Boaz asks what is regret, he doesn't
know, and then he recalls. He always recalls that there were days when he
gave his temples the importance they craved, well-shorn temples, the best
Middle Eastern tradition here on the shore of yearning. Shower, laced-up
dresses of local charmers, lacking the lace of laciness for a person like me,
a system in himself, hoodwinking eye and sin, a sin that isn't his sweet
crimson air flowing and glowing, poets, and I am for the judge and he is for
me, leather case with silk leather case of wild lexical melange of a lecherous word-thief, never let it be forgotten, he said with a glass of liquor in his
hand, the face of a judge you can see only on unnecessary waking, yours,
Boaz Schneerson! Women will stand in line, will learn birth and death in
retrospective reconstruction, waving a smell of sour balsam who rises in
that house of quarrels to die with me drink himself to death, and here,
after they turned the maps into scattered tombstones and the present to
an arrow sent to what almost was, his mind was swallowed up, his tongue
was glued to the table of an overly enlightened woman's lap, Noga's here,
Noga's there, Henkin will bite, Henkin will sing to me, to exclusivize the
root and uproot the exclusive, the gray ancient preserved and choked, everything was spilled out, destroyed like the riddle of cities that don't exist,
will here become the intercity mourning with drivers attached to the index,
sucking the marrow of stone, we will die in a noontime nap, shame on the
meek, horrible and terrible, a record of nothingness, the last rain abundantly and I rain from my own abundance, in the language of darkness,
grace of whisper plowed and traps drought, this is how the sum of all roots
routed in you, son of a bitch, was born ...
Noga, Noga. Noga, who was a stranger to the hut on the seashore even
before Boaz Schneerson moved to the attic apartment, she sat-and this
is something that happened long before that-padded in a sheaf of light
that shone on her, and she defended herself from her feelings. She didn't
know what to do when they knocked on the door: to open, not to open, she
worried, the sea spread out through the window, and she waited for Boaz
to tell her. He didn't tell and she got up, hugged her shaking body in her
hands, stretched them, went to the door, was a little amazed, and opened
it. There stood a solid man wearing a beret who said something about how
Boaz knew Menahem and maybe he also knew his son who fell in Ramle and loved to read the poems of the poet Ratosh. He wants to know if Boaz
can arrange a meeting for him with the poet Ratosh. The poet Ratosh can
explain to me, said the man, and Noga trembled because she knew that
Boaz would bring him Ratosh the poet, to explain his son to him, then he
showed the letters of the son and asked for an expert opinion, maybe to
make a pamphlet of them? Letters full of names, Ratosh and the poems
of his black wedding canopy and the night road from Mesilot to Sadeh
Nahum and Belt She'an at night when the Arab dogs are barking and he
quoted an excerpt from the book Pampilov's Men. The man measured the
rectangle of sea in the window and smiled. Then, maybe about a month
later, a child also came with a letter and Boaz said too loudly: If a woman
comes here, give her coffee, I'm going down to swim in the sea.