I was a youth back then. A sixteen-year-old half man. I’d never seen scenes like that — the most I’d seen was Oedipus Rex directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Habima National Theatre, while outside the Lehi* people and the British were firing at each other and something was blown up not far away — and I longed for an innocence that was gradually leaking from me, as it was from everybody. The streets began filling up with wretched creatures that resembled the man who’d visited my father, dressed as beggar princes. The city was filled with broken people.
I started seeking them out, searching for the man I thought was my father’s cousin. They crowded together and spoke in whispers and bought and sold, and one carried a bundle and shouted, Thermometer, thermometer going cheap, and he was told, Who needs a thermometer, and he’d say, Buy it so you won’t need it. I thought, Who is the man who came to our house? I wanted to carry him to the Land of Israel again, to be a hero for his people. I was filled with the awful feeling that I, not he, was human dust. I was to blame because I’d eaten sour cream in the war when I traveled to Gedera, while they died. I remember the teacher Zvi Katan once saying angrily that when his family was murdered in the ghetto, the economy here in Palestine was the best. There was food. There was money. Everybody did business with the British.
Then I came across a man who cleaved to me. He said in the old Hebrew of translations from many years ago, with its gendarme and posta and piaster, that I looked familiar and that I’d been with him in the DP camp near Frankfurt, and I said I hadn’t. He said that he remembered my eyes well and couldn’t forget because I and his son who had died in that damned place were like two peas in a pod, and how dare I not know him, and that his son was dead? How, when I am he? I told him that it’s not me. I’m just a shitty Palestinian native, a sabra, a good family, my father’s a museum director, when the Jews died he was holding chamber concerts and they played all his Germans: Bach. Beethoven. Quartets. Sonatas. And the man came close to me and embraced me and shouted, Don’t forget your father, mein kind, and suddenly he straightened up and started running, and then, I swear to my loyal readers who have come this far, he flew, or that’s how I recall it, and hovered over the Mugrabi Cinema and touched the roof that started to move and open, and the fat German who sold hot dogs in the square below, who in the meantime has been murdered, shouted, Tell me, who is better, Goethe or Shakespeare, and when I said Goethe’s better, he gave me a hot dog and I fled in great shame.
I went to the dunes. I wanted to touch them against the fat German who sold hot dogs in Mugrabi Square with his and my father’s Goethe. I wanted to be me, for the sabras, for the Land of Israel citrons we were, for the sweet and prickly sabras that we were created to be, against the ugly and mistaken Diaspora Jews, and against them I wanted sabras, soda pop, and the howling of jackals, and I thought about someone who’d said back then that we’d begged them to come here to save themselves, there was a pro-Jewish high commissioner, and the Germans wanted them out of Europe because they stank and were a wretched race, and there was an office for Jewish immigration in Vienna, with an expert on Jews called Eichmann, and it was possible but they didn’t want to. And when I first heard about the camps I said, That’s good, they’ll learn for the next time, and then got frightened by what I’d said and I cried.
Like most of us I was a fool and thought that perhaps I don’t know much about my father. How is it that he hasn’t got any family here, except for a sister and one cousin in Safed who runs a small hotel on the mountainside, and there were lots of uncles and aunts and cousins. I went to see his friend Ernst who lived on Yoash Street, where I sat facing one of my father’s bosom friends, and told him about the man who was my father. I knew that Ernst’s wife, Lili, the gentlest of women, Lili, had been my father’s love and he had been hers, and everybody knew that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. I don’t know how I knew that when I was sixteen, but I did. Ernst was married to Lili because of the inferiority complex of my father, Moshe the Ostjude*, who due to his terrible need to respect only failure and out of his love for failed heroes, out of his failure to play the violin like Huberman and out of his demand of himself to be only great and out of the knowledge that he isn’t really great and can’t be and because of his feeling, like so many others, that he isn’t as distinguished as Ernst, who was born rich in Berlin, thought he wasn’t good enough for Lili, who loved him so much — that sweet putz, my father, gave his only love Lili to his beloved friend Ernst.
Ernst told me what my father, Moshe, had never told me. That he had all these relatives in Tarnopol, and that most of them lived on Baron Hirsch Street, until all of them, sixty men and women, were taken on the same day to a nearby forest and forced to dig a pit, and when they’d finished digging they were driven into it by shooting and were shot again and again in the pit and buried there one on top of the other, and they say that one, the son of Uncle Menashe, survived and came to Palestine via Syria, and the man I’d seen was perhaps that cousin. I felt sadness and shame that my father hadn’t invited the man to live with us and didn’t want to know where he would live. Ernst said that the man was angry with my father for not staying there. For betraying them and not being in the piles of bodies with them.
A little later I heard from a friend of my mother’s, Ze’ev Shiffman, that the man had started work at the refineries in Haifa, and after a time when the riots began, we heard he’d been killed in an Arab attack on the refineries, and my father said drily, That man you asked about was murdered. He was saved when his family died over there in order to die here in the Land of Israel.
On the floor below us lived our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky. A few days earlier she had an elderly lady visitor whom I met in the hallway, and when I asked her if she’d like me to switch on the hall lights upstairs, she seemed confused and said, I don’t understand Hebrew, and she asked, Why? I said, Just because. She said, What’s just because, is just because against why? I said, Why’s the opposite of just because. She said, I don’t understand anything here. Our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky liked me, and once I even drew her late husband for her using an old photograph hanging on her wall. I told her that I wanted to know about her elderly visitor. I told her I’d seen a man who thought I was somebody else, that someone had come to see my father, that perhaps he really was a cousin, and that my father had said he wasn’t, and I want to know.
Mrs. Kramsky smiled. You’re a sabra and you want to know? Very much, I told her. She called to the old lady. The old lady looked at me and asked, Why just because? and smiled toothlessly. Mrs. Kramsky said something to her in Polish and the old lady moved closer to me, touched my face gently, and laughed. It was cold in the room. The old lady sat bent at the window and above her a sudden shaft of sunlight distorted her appearance. Mrs. Kramsky said that the old lady wouldn’t want to talk to me, but she told me herself at great length how the old lady had escaped and how she was in the hands of a man and how she’d pushed wheelbarrows in the snow barefoot, and how they’d wanted to put her to death but they needed her because she knew how to calculate. Her eyes closed, the old lady listened to her history as it was related to me and she began declaiming numbers in German. I knew some German, and she added and subtracted big numbers and said, Ja, ja, Gottenyu gayt schlafen—our God went to sleep — and SS tore off my ear. How whole family killed. How whole town killed. And then she said to Mrs. Kramsky that I wouldn’t understand what she was talking about, and Mrs. Kramsky told her that I would understand, and we sat there until my father came downstairs in his slippers, which back then were called pantofles, and he knocked on the door and said angrily, Don’t talk his ears off with who suffered more.