Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
The argument was trenchant. Nehemiah's reasoning was, of
course, ridiculous to the German. But despite all that, Kramer
found Nehemiah charming. Maybe he saw him as a crucified one
too miserable to worry about. He hated regretting pessimists and
historical thinkers. For him, history was something that happens
at this moment. He wanted to write to the German government, to describe the situation in the Holy Land, which monks
and cunning spies were tempted to depict too romantically. He
wanted to warn the government never to rely on the Jewish
Yishuv that had German or Austrian subjects. He told Nehemiah:
You've got a beautiful wife, and if I weren't a man of noble feelings, I would steal her from you. Afterward, Nehemiah went to
visit him. The houses with handsome roofs, fields measured as
with a ruler, the advanced agriculture, impressed Nehemiah. At
night, he visited Dr. Kahn's room. He advised Nehemiah not to
envy. He spoke with him about the splendid Jewish nation,
which was beaten by all the great nations that lit up and went
out, while it remained to tell that. He spoke with Nehemiah
about the savage Germans, who sometimes had a stroke of wis dom, but lacked a tragic quality. They're even afraid of themselves, he said. The Jews have a rebellious, sober, and sad, maybe
ironic, surely tragic deafness, he added, ultimately they will defeat the Kramer idea, just as your god overcame gods like Tamuz,
Apollo, Dagon and Ba'al. The field of defeat will always be the
hearts of men, he said sadly, and Kramer who heard the words
beyond the wall, scolded him and got in return the proud poetry
of an anthem and the finger held out to him as conciliation, and
then the doctor finished drinking a whole bottle of wine and
delivered confused speeches into the night.
Tape / -
In the evening, we went to the theater. The journalists had
raised great expectations for a long time, so there was a big and
curious audience. In the distance, I saw my publisher talking
with the charming attache. They stared at me in amazement,
but were afraid to come ask me what I was doing there. Lily and
Renate went backstage and Lionel took me into the gigantic
auditorium, with a semicircular stage at the end. Actors were
already sitting on the stage, chatting among themselves. Somebody was weeping. They sat in a big camp with a barbed wire
fence. A gigantic clock hung over the stage. A group of musicians played music composed of jazz elements, Hasidic melodies, and what astounded me more: I could hear through the
first tune-like a leitmotif-the fearsome and exciting anthem
of the Black Corps. It was a monstrous blend, and yet something pleasant was anchored in it. The musicians looked tired,
I remembered the sight of the small chorus in the Blue Lizards
Club in Copenhagen. Lily looked radiant. Her dress was light
purple, her hair was plaited into thin braids that crowned her
cascading hair. She smiled at me (now she returned with Renate
and sat next to Lionel), and said: I'm a disgusting woman and had
to challenge Sam. I'm scared of his Fourth Reich. Her beauty was
ingenuous and wicked, I tried to understand her desperate war.
Here I have to note something: In my youth, I tried to write
a description of the smell of a rose, and after many attempts, I
gave up. If I were able to describe the play, I would of course do it, but when I returned home and tried to do that for you, for
me, I couldn't. I have six drafts of a description of the play, and
not one of them touches the terrifying and exciting, bold and
fascinating phenomenon we saw that night. Never did I see
theater like that. But when I say that, I say something about the
smell of a rose. Maybe the gist of the play can be summed up in
a few flashes and leave things there, so if you saw it someday
you'd understand what I meant.
What we saw was a combination of Ebenezer in a nightclub
and an attempt to convey with movement, music, acting, and
monologues the story of Joseph de la Rayna. The big clock was
set backward. We lived in two different times: a camp in the
last hours before the surrender and a person haunted by demons who goes to Safed in the late sixteenth century to bring
deliverance. The play was opened by Samuel Lipker, or more
precisely, an actor who played him, who explained a few things
about Ebenezer to the audience and announced that at the end
of the play, baskets would be passed around, and every spectator
would be entitled to contribute as much as he could for
Ebenezer's hungry dead daughters. The story of Joseph was
played in full: Joseph mortifies himself, leaves with his students
to bring deliverance, prophets warn him, snow on the mountains
of Safed, an intentional sin is greater than an unintentional good
deed, Joseph's wedding ceremony, also a Frank, the false messiah
with a Torah scroll and a whore on horseback. Destruction is
essential. Joseph burns down a synagogue. Rabbis mourn at the
throne, which is a stove in the middle of the camp, where soldiers
without hands clap their lips at other recruits going to die and
there sit Lilith and Ashmodai. They love the smell of divine incense. Joseph chews tallow. Smears himself with tallow. The students follow their teacher. Their tribulations, told by Ebenezer,
are sung by a chorus, danced by dancers, and then Ashmodai and
Lilith are caught. When the arrogant Joseph offers Lilith incense, a spark goes out of her mouth and burns the cords. Gigantic dogs assault the students. Joseph runs away. God yearns
for Lilith and Ashmodai. The synagogue burns down. A woman translates for a lad the things said to him by a young woman who
doesn't speak his language. Metaphysical pornography, Renate
said to me. Joseph is flogged. All is lost. Salvation doesn't come.
Ebenezer moves the clocks. A woman brings a dead baby into the
world and actors sing numbers of death. Uniting with one another in human perversion. A bakery with a protesting woman
put into an oven. Dogs metamorphosed into souls. Words incomprehensible at first and then blood-curdling. Silence, some
epic of silence and movement, like animals who learned the annals of horror from the amoeba to SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer
who sits and laughs, blinking at Ebenezer at the throne of God,
in the middle of a camp with a human barbed wire fence. I'm
trying and not succeeding. I know, but a seventh draft won't be
hidden anymore. A dog's head on a tray. Ebenezer recites. Tells
the history of the Jews from their end to their beginning. The
Fourth Reich, says Lily, and tears flow on her cheeks, history of
Joseph de la Rayna, Joseph Rayna, his sons and daughters, that
horror, Henkin, descending to the dark depths to discover light,
some catastrophe in the order of the universe. To save objects,
the captain throws the ship into the sea and drowns. And during the play I felt I was in fact participating, acting in the play
while sitting, the actors were acting me, I them, and we, one
another, and between the silences movement and sorcery, as in
some magic rite, sitting heavy, an awful silence broken only by
the nervous laughter of the audience, a laughter at pictures
from the present blended with the camp, Kramer, Ebenezer,
Joseph de la Rayna living in Safed, then and now, as if all times
were desecrated and the clock starts going forward and backward and the awful terrifying music and yet more beautiful, the
increasing movement, a very thin freeze prevailing, so thin there
are no words. Four hours passed and we didn't even go out during
the intermission. The woman who gave birth to a dead son did
that when some of the audience went to the bathroom. The actors eat and drink onstage. They themselves also constitute part
of the set and they dance. Licinda is Lilith, and also the woman
who lets some boy crush her breasts, as he reads the numbers of trains that went there in the voice of a stock market announcer
reading stock prices and she's indifferent, her eyes extinguished,
Joseph flies from Sidon to Greece and enters the dream of the
Queen of Greece, who orders him killed. Deliverance doesn't
come and won't come, there's only death which all of you, says
Samuel, all of you are in and it is with you. The Fourth Reich, says
Lily. Lionel hears parts of his Laments, Ebenezer recites with his
eyes shut, the clocks are broken, words are lopped off, until it all
ends in a thin silence. Only Ebenezer stands there and then falls.
And then he laughs. He doesn't know who he is. Maybe he's dead.
The actors start applauding the stunned audience and only then,
Henkin, only then, does the audience wake up from a state I'd call
hypnotic and come out of the role it has played: a spectator of its
own execution, and applauds.
Never did I hear such applause ...
We went outside. A cold wind was blowing. We bundled up. In
the distance I saw the charming Kristina waving a flaccid goodbye to me and disappearing into a cab. My publisher came, shook
my hand, and didn't say a thing, looked at me, for a moment he
forgot why he had come to me, and he left. We went to Lionel's
house. Later, somebody brought the reviews. We also heard the
review on television. Sam closed himself in his room and didn't
come out. I went to him. He was sad and quiet. A spark of anger
flickered in his eyes. I don't like art, he said, I don't make art,
what do they want from me, everything they saw was truth,
somebody showed them, what's the big deal. But I couldn't pity
him. He created a great work and he was suffering because of
that. To create something great is to touch painful nerves, it's
to try to create, to challenge, to change a world, and they come
and say: Oh, it was awfully beautiful, I understood it.
One General Allenby, said Sam, wanted to scare the Sudanese
and told them: I command you with a telegram, I sit here with
weapons and supervise the wires. What does it mean to create? I
translate dreams into theater. By the same token, I could have
been a professional murderer or an undertaker, I've got no compassion, Melissa-Licinda is an open wound, I need her and Lily, that's all. I smiled at him and he looked at me, and then he confessed to me about the letter I had once sent him. Lily smiled
the honeyed smile of a jungle queen in a Walt Disney movie, and
Sam said: Did you see how my naked parents lay there! You must
know, your wife could have been an excellent Jewish shawl,
there's no future for that stupid past, trying to teach actors to act
"it," not "about," what comes out? A review in the Times: Powder
and milkshake. A crooner and a football player understand better.
Who am I doing theater for and why? I don't have electricity in
my hands and I don't have flames. I have to do theater. What
does art do? Except that one man I knew built beautiful boxes to
stay alive and then I too, because of him, and the life I have left
isn't the life I wanted, you know how many came out of
Auschwitz alive? Thirty thousand, another two days of war and
not even one would have come out alive to tell.
Henkin my friend, a malicious thought came to me: The next
time I'm asked about the heroes of my fiction, I'll tell whoever
asks that he really should ask the characters about the author
and not the author about the characters. I thought about that as
a result of something that happened to me and that I'll tell you
now. I'm not a person who acts impulsively. I stayed in New
York to meet Sam, Lionel, and Lily. The meeting with Sam was
disappointing to some extent. The night after the party, I invited him to a small bar, we sat and drank. He didn't talk about
anything but his hatred for the play he had worked on for years.
He didn't open up to me. I couldn't really make him talk, even
when I gave him some information that should have interested
him. When I tried to talk with him about Ebenezer, he shut up,
then he said to me: For me Ebenezer is dead! And didn't go on.
When I told him about Boaz he was silent a long time and I saw
three things at the same time. He envied Ebenezer, whose existence he didn't admit, he envied Boaz, and he felt a profound fear.
He said: That's nonsense! I was the only son of the Last Jew.
Licinda is the incarnation of Melissa. Melissa is the love of my
stepfather's youth. He said that, since he knew very well that I
know they're brothers. But he chose not to relate to that and I didn't press him. I'm afraid of those combinations, he said, those
crossroads, of you and of me. The real world doesn't exist anymore
and we're its last witnesses. Why embellish them? Melissa is dead
so we'll act for her the death of the Jews as she sits at the throne
of honor and sells lampshades for ten percent profit. If God were
dead, said Sam, we wouldn't have to suffer so much, but He's not
dead, He exists as long as Jewish suffering exists. And then I did
the irrational act I alluded to earlier, I write you now, and my hand
shakes. I did something like Ebenezer's request, when he told
you to ask me for his two daughters, something like Renate's desperate attempt with the fortuneteller, I went to Connecticut.
I came to Washington Depot at noon and went to the official
Ford dealer. Mr. Brooks was sitting behind a glass wall reading
a newspaper. When I looked at him, he turned his chair around,
took off his reading glasses, and tried to see me. I walked
around the gigantic show room and a smiling woman came up to
me, and said: Aren't you the German writer we saw on television? I read your last book, she said after I said yes. You want to
buy a car? At that moment, Mr. Brooks came out of his office
and approached us. An old man dressed meticulously, his hair
white, his nose thick and some thread of taut harshness around
his eyes, he introduced himself to me, and said that an honored
guest like me-he had also seen me on television-warranted
special attention, and I said: That's fine, your assistant was
friendly and generous, and she smiled, maybe even blushed. I
looked at him, I spoke, but I tried to think of my son. What
arose in the back of my mind was an impossible blend of Boaz,
Sam, Friedrich, and Menahem. He looked at me as he spoke
and I'm not sure I heard what he said, I tried to understand his
mourning, but his mourning was hidden under so many masks
that I could almost see myself in his eyes. I was moved to pity
for him, I can't explain why, never did I pity you, Henkin, or
myself, or even Renate. I said: I came to meet you Mr. Brooks,
and please forgive me, I wanted very much to see the house
where Melissa grew up, but I can't explain why to you.