The Woman from Hamburg (13 page)

“So, what draws me to Poland?” he wrote in that computer printout. “A dybbuk. My half-brother, my father’s son from his first marriage, born before the war and bearing my name, who somehow was lost in the ghetto. He has been inside me for a long time, throughout my childhood, my school years.…”

The word “dybbuk” is borrowed from Hebrew; it signifies a connection. In Jewish tradition it is the soul of a dead person inhabiting a living human being.

Adam S. realized quite early that he was not alone. He would be visited by outbursts of inexplicable fury, another person’s fury; at other times sudden laughter, not his own, would overcome him. He learned to recognize these moods, acquired fairly good control over them, and did not betray himself in the presence of other people.

From time to time this subtenant would say something. Adam S. didn’t know what he was saying, because the dybbuk spoke in Polish. Adam S. began studying the language; he wanted to understand what his younger brother was telling him. When he had learned enough, he came to Poland. That was when he developed an interest in the architecture of the wooden synagogues that had existed only in Poland, for three hundred years. Heavenly gardens, marvelous beasts, the walls of Jerusalem or the river of
Babylon were painted on their walls. Their domes, invisible from the outside because they were concealed beneath ordinary roofs, created a feeling inside of infinite, vanishing space.

Those gardens and walls had long since disappeared; Adam S. viewed them in old, damaged photographs, but he wrote beautiful essays about them. Eventually, he earned a doctoral degree and got a position at a better college. He married. Bought a house. Lived like any normal, educated American. Except for that double life of his—his own life, and that of his younger brother, who had been named Abram, and who, when he was six years old, “somehow was lost in the ghetto.”

In April 1993 Adam S. came to Poland. He hadn’t been here in several years, so first he visited Połaniec, Pińczów, Zabłudów, Grójec, and Nowe Miasto. Who knows why. Maybe he hoped that this time he would see the river of Babylon in the synagogue in Grójec, and the willow trees upon which “we hanged our harps … in the midst thereof.” Maybe in Zabłudów he hoped to rediscover the gryphons, bears, peacocks, winged dragons, unicorns, and water snakes.

As was predictable, he found grass and a few pathetic trees.

He returned to Warsaw. The ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the uprising in the ghetto were just getting started. We went out for dinner during a break between scholarly panels.

I congratulated Adam S. on the birth of his first-born son, looked at his photographs, and asked, “What about … him?”

I didn’t know what word to use—brother? Abram? the dybbuk?

“Is he still there?”

Adam S. understood immediately.

“He is. He sticks with me, although I’d be happier if he left. He butts in, kicks up a fuss, doesn’t know himself what he wants. He’s unhappy living with me and I feel worse and worse with him.

“I found out,” Adam S. continued, “that there’s a Buddhist monk living in Boston. An American Jew who converted to Buddhism and became a monk. My friend told me, ‘This man might be able to help you.’

“I went to the monk. He had me lie down on a couch and massaged my shoulders. At first I didn’t feel anything, I just lay there, but after half an hour I suddenly burst out crying. I had never cried like that in my adult life. I listened to that cry and I knew that it wasn’t my voice. It was the voice of a child. It was the child crying in me. The crying grew stronger and I started screaming. The child started screaming. He was screaming. I could see that he was afraid of something, because it was a scream of terror.
He was terrified, he was in a rage, he thrashed about, waving my fists. Obviously, he was exhausted; he’d quiet down for a few minutes, but then he’d begin again. This was a child who was out of his mind from exhaustion and terror. Samuel, the monk, tried to speak to him, but he wouldn’t stop screaming. This went on for several hours. I thought I would die; I didn’t have any strength left. Suddenly I felt that something was happening inside me. Something was rocking in my innards. The scream subsided and a shadow flickered over my abdomen. I knew that all this was only in my imagination, yet the monk must have noticed it, too, because he addressed him directly.

“ ‘Leave here,’ he said calmly. ‘Go to the light.’

“I don’t know what that was supposed to mean, because all this was taking place in ordinary light, during the day.

“ ‘Go …’

“And the shadow began moving off. Samuel didn’t stop speaking; it was just a couple of words, always the same: ‘Go to the light … Go on … Don’t be afraid, you’ll feel better there.…’

“And he went. He didn’t so much walk, as slip away, further and further, and I understood that in another minute he would be gone completely. I felt sad.

“ ‘Do you want to leave me?’ I asked. ‘Stay with me. You are my brother; don’t go away.’

“It was as if he’d been waiting for this. He turned back and with one swift movement he leaped inside me, and I couldn’t see him any more.”

Adam S. fell silent.

We were sitting in an Asian restaurant on Theater Square. Outside our window, the day was chilly. All the days of the anniversary ceremonies were permeated with damp and chill. A drizzly grayness had settled on cars; people were rushing somewhere, not bothering to look around. We watched them, thinking the same thought: Does anyone care about ghetto ceremonies, wooden synagogues, and crying dybbuks?

“No one cares about them in America, either,” I concluded, although Adam S. knew this better than I did.

Snapshots of Adam S.’s wife and son lay on our table—a happy, bright-eyed boy in the arms of a serious woman, her brown eyes visible through thick lenses.

“Moshe,” said Adam S. “Like my father. But my father was an actual ordinary Moshe, and we call the little one Michael.”

“Did you tell your father about the monk and Boston?”

“Yes, in a phone conversation. He was living in Iowa; I called him after I got back home. I thought he wouldn’t believe me, that at the very least he’d be taken aback, but he wasn’t taken aback at all. He listened calmly, and then he said, ‘I know what that cry is. When they threw him out of the hiding place he stood in the street and cried loudly. That was the cry—the cry of my child who was thrown out into the street.’

“This was the first time I had talked with my father about my brother. Father had a weak heart; I didn’t want to upset
him. I knew that my brother had died, like everyone else; what more was there to ask about? Now I found out that the boy had been hidden somewhere with his mother, my father’s first wife, along with a dozen or so other Jews. I don’t know where, if it was in the ghetto or on the Aryan side. Sometimes I picture a kitchen and people crowded together. They were sitting on the floor, trying not to breathe. He started crying. They tried to quiet him. How do you calm a crying child? With candy? A toy? They didn’t have toys or candy. His crying grew louder and louder, and the people crowded together on the floor were thinking the same thought. Someone whispered: ‘We’re all going to die because of one little kid.’ Or maybe it wasn’t a kitchen. Maybe it was a cellar, or a bunker. My father wasn’t with them; only she was, Abram’s mother. She stayed with the others. She survived. She settled in Israel, maybe she’s still living there, I didn’t ask, I don’t know.… “My father died.

“My wife went to the hospital to give birth. I went with her and lay down on the bed next to hers. When the midwife told my wife, ‘Push, any minute now,’ I felt something happening inside me. I felt movement, a rocking motion. I guessed who it was. He was getting ready to leave me. He was getting ready to take up residence in my child. I leaped up from the bed. ‘Oh, no,’ I said out loud. ‘Don’t you dare. No ghetto. No Holocaust. You are not going to inhabit my child.’

“No, I didn’t shout, but I did speak forcefully. I spoke in Polish, so the midwife and my wife didn’t understand. But he understood. He grew calm, and I lay down again. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep. I was awakened by a loud cry, but there was no terror in it. It was the cry of a healthy, normal baby who had just come into the world. My son. Moshe.”

The Buddhist monk sat on the bed, his legs extended stiffly. Both legs were encased in white plaster pipes; only his toes, long and restless, protruded from them. He was holding a flute that was a yard long. From time to time he raised it to his lips; his toes, protruding from those pipes, would begin to flutter and bend in time to the music, and the room would be filled with high, mournful sounds.

The monk had two flutes, both of them made of cedar. The shorter one, of white cedar, was a gift from some North Dakota Indians; the longer one, of red cedar, came from Arizona, from the mountains. The two woods can be distinguished by their fragrance.

“Check it out.” He moved the flute over to me. It was saturated with a dizzying aroma, full of mysteries that aroused no fear.

In the monk’s room there was a bed, a wheelchair, two crutches, a hotplate, a mug on a little table, and a few
books. I thought: I have already been in such a room, in a medieval castle, in Germany. In the home of Axel von dem Busche, a baron and an officer in the Wehrmacht. He saw how the Jews were being killed in Poland and he resolved to kill Hitler. I recognized the smell of the bedding, the coffee and medicine.

I said, “I have already been in such a room, but it was a German baron without a leg who was sitting on the bed.”

The monk grew animated. He, too, had befriended a German, but not a baron. A communist, who had fled Hitler and come to the States. The man taught Buddhist philosophy in Washington. He protested against the war in Vietnam, and in 1968 he supported the young people who were demonstrating against it. He was expelled from the United States for his radical views. For his fascination with Buddhism, Samuel Kerner, a Jewish boy from the Bronx, is indebted to Edward Conze, a German communist.

It was the sixties. Sam and his college friends had shoulder-length hair and wore sandals on their bare feet; they looked with loathing upon American wealth, especially in their own homes, took LSD, and waited for the revolution. The revolution was supposed to be worldwide, in defense of justice and against the rich. Later they were called the New Age generation, or the Age of Aquarius, which would arrive with the new millennium.

As well-read people they already knew that revolutionary purity does not last long. Politics creeps in after the initial rapture, and the revolution devours its young.

They had three options:

Go to a poor country, in South America, for example, and organize people for the struggle.

Hold up American banks and distribute the money to the poor.

Slip away with the goal of perfecting mind and character in peace and quiet.

They chose to perfect themselves.

When the revolution goes bad, when the rapacious struggle for money and power begins, they will emerge from their seclusion pure, ennobled, resistant to temptations, and will rescue the ideal.

They had no idea where to go in search of perfection, so Samuel asked Edward Conze for advice.

“You are a Jew,” said Conze. “Reach for your own tradition.”

So Sam went to a rabbi.

“Where should I begin?” he asked.

“With the Talmud,” the rabbi replied.

“How long will my studies take?”

The rabbi grew thoughtful. “Five years, no more than that.”

“And then what?”

“Kabbala.”

“For a long time?”

“Five years.”

“And then what?”

“You’ll come to me. We’ll talk.”

This was not a serious proposition for a man who was supposed to save the revolution. Especially for an American, who received everything in an abbreviated version, easily dissolvable like instant coffee.

Samuel Kerner and his friends went to San Francisco. They rented a rundown house in Chinatown. They slept in sleeping bags, washed with cold water, and ate once a day, in the afternoon, always the same thing: cabbage and rice. Under the guidance of Du Lun, a Chinese from Manchuria, they meditated and discussed Buddhism.

Du Lun did not require that they study for ten years. They could sit down and immerse themselves in meditation without lengthy preparations.

There were thirty Jews in Samuel’s group. Their parents had been born in the States, but their grandparents’ brothers and sisters, and the children of those brothers and sisters, had stayed in Europe and perished in the gas chambers.

They asked Du Lun why God had allowed Treblinka.

Du Lun did not know and asked them to meditate more deeply, with more concentration.

They meditated for ten, twelve hours at a time. The God who had permitted the Holocaust preoccupied them more than the coming world revolution.

In the following year Samuel Kerner went to Taiwan, then to South Korea, then to Macao. He became a Buddhist monk. He donned a cloth robe and settled into a small wooden cabin in the Montana mountains. He read, he thought, he listened to the falling snow. Would he hear
the answer that Du Lun, the Chinese from Manchuria, did not know? Perhaps, when the heart and mind are at peace, man does not ask questions?

Samuel Kerner finished his story. He sank into thought. Suddenly he bent down and reached under the bed. He pulled out a laptop computer, placed it on his plaster knees, and started searching for something. He stared at the screen. I thought he was looking for answers, for the most important ones, but it was only a Jewish calendar for the year 5754.

It’s Hanukkah!” he exclaimed. “I had a feeling that tonight is the first candle!”

He asked me to take down the Hanukkah menorah from his shelf; he lit a candle, the first one on the right, and recited the blessing.

American rabbis became anxious when educated, good Jewish children began to abandon their parents’ homes for Chinese slums and Buddhist masters.

“If we reject these youth, we will lose the most sensitive, most profoundly spiritual people of our age,” wrote Zalman Schachter, a theologian, an American, born in Żółkiewka, Poland. He decided to address the young rebels. He wanted to inform them that everything they were seeking in Buddhism could be found in Jewish tradition. He began his
first lecture with the following statement: “Over two hundred years ago, in Podole, the Baal Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name, created a movement called Hasidism. Many paths lead to God, the Baal Shem Tov taught, and God’s desire is to be served in all ways. Let us not interfere with people in their service.”