In fact, it now seems to me that Yankele Dann (the Evil Eye should never come upon him) will come up with a third collection and even a fourth and a fifth.
And in that case, whom will he ask to write further introductions?
Don’t ask!
PHYLLIS GOTLIEB
Tauf Aleph
In his fine and reverent book This Is My God, Herman Wouk relates an anecdote about a well-to-do, cultivated Jew who passes two Chasids on Fifth Avenue. The Chasids are dressed in wrinkled black coats and ill-fitting trousers. They both have earlocks, wear black hats, and speak Yiddish. These two men would not have been out of place walking down the crooked streets of an eighteenth-century ghetto in middle Europe. The cultivated, well-dressed Jew, as he passes these awkward ghosts from another century and place, feels nothing but resentment. In his heart he cries out, “I am not one of you! If you are Jews, I am not a Jew!”
But he knows he is one of them, even though he has not seen the inside of a synagogue in years, even though he would laugh at the idea of being one of “the chosen people.” After all, how could he even begin to follow the six hundred and thirteen commands of the Talmud and still remain in the modern world? Nevertheless, he is a Jew, and the two Chasids who have just passed him on the street are, as Wouk says, “skeletons out of his closet”; they are the ghosts of his background which he cannot put to rest.
If these three men are of the same stuff, then just what is a Jew? In Wandering Stars, the “prequel” to this volume, I asked: Is Jewishness a mystical experience, a system of laws, a sense of kinship, a religion, or a myth? Perhaps it is any or all of these things. Perhaps it is an indefinable essence….
In the story that follows, which was written expressly for this volume by Phyllis Gotlieb, we meet Samuel Zohar ben Reuven Begelman, who is the last Jew in the universe… unless you count the walruslike aliens that are native to Begelman’s planet. If science fiction can be called modern mythology, then here is a myth for our time, a parable about the Jew and his history, which asks the age-old question “What is a Jew?”… and perhaps more than that, for as an anonymous author has written, “The Jews are just like everyone else—only more so.”
SAMUEL ZOHAR BEN REUVEN BEGELMAN lived to a great age in the colony Pardes on Tau Ceti IV and in his last years he sent the same message with his annual request for supplies to Galactic Federation Centraclass="underline" Kindly send one mourner/gravedigger so I can die in peace respectfully.
And Sol III replied through GalFed Central with the unvarying answer: Regret cannot find one Jew yours faithfully.
Because there was not one other identifiable Jew in the known universe, for with the opening of space the people had scattered and intermarried, and though their descendants were as numerous, in the fulfillment of God’s promise, as the sands on the shore and the stars in the heavens, there was not one called Jew, nor any other who could speak Hebrew and pray for the dead. The home of the ancestors was emptied: it was now a museum where perfect simulacra performed 7500 years of history in hundreds of languages for tourists from the breadth of the Galaxy.
In Central, Hrsipliy the Xiploid said to Castro-Ibanez the Solthree, “It is a pity we cannot spare one person to help that poor juddar.” She meant by this term: body/breath/spirit/sonofabitch, being a woman with three tender hearts.
Castro-Ibanez, who had one kind heart and one hard head, answered, “How can we? He is the last colonist on that world and refuses to be moved; we keep him alive at great expense already.” He considered for some time and added, “I think perhaps we might send him a robot. One that can dig and speak recorded prayers. Not one of the new expensive ones. We ought to have some old machine good enough for last rites.”
O/G5/842 had been resting in a very dark corner of Stores for 324 years, his four coiled arms retracted and his four hinged ones resting on his four wheeled feet. Two of his arms terminated in huge scoop shovels, for he had been an ore miner, and he was also fitted with treads and sucker-pods. He was very great in size; they made giant machines in those days. New technologies had left him useless; he was not even worthy of being dismantled for parts.
It happened that this machine was wheeled into the light, scoured of rust, and lubricated. His ore-scoops were replaced with small ones retrieved from Stores and suitable for grave-digging, but in respect to Sam Begelman he was not given a recording: he was rewired and supplemented with an almost new logic and given orders and permission to go and learn. Once he had done so to the best of his judgment he would travel out with Begelman’s supplies and land. This took great expense, but less than an irreplaceable person or a new machine; it fulfilled the Galactic-Colonial contract. O/G would not return, Begelman would rest in peace, no one would recolonize Tau Ceti IV.
O/G5/842 emerged from his corner. In the Library he caused little more stir than the seven members of the Khagodi embassy (650 kilos apiece) who were searching out a legal point of intra-Galactic law. He was too broad to occupy a cubicle, and let himself be stationed in a basement exhibit room where techs wired him to sensors, sockets, inlets, outlets, screens, and tapes. Current flowed, light came, and he said, LET ME KNOW SAMUEL ZOHAR BEN REUVEN BEGELMAN DOCTOR OF MEDICINE AND WHAT IT MEANS THAT HE IS A JEW.
He recorded the life of Sam Begelman; he absorbed Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek; he learned Torah, which is Law: day one. He learned Writings, Prophets, and then Mishna, which is the first exegesis of Law: day the second. He learned Talmud (Palestinian and Babylonian), which is the completion of Law, and Tosefta, which are ancillary writings and divergent opinions in Law: day the third. He read thirty-five hundred years of Commentary and Responsa: day the fourth. He learned Syriac, Arabic, Latin, Yiddish, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Dutch. At the point of learning Chinese he experienced, for the first time, a synapse. For the sake of reading marginally relevant writings by fewer than ten Sino-Japanese Judaic poets it was not worth learning their vast languages; this gave him pause: two nanoseconds: day the fifth. Then he plunged, day the sixth, into the literatures written in the languages he had absorbed. Like all machines, he did not sleep, but on the seventh day he unhooked himself from Library equipment, gave up his space, and returned to his corner. In this place he turned down all motor and afferent circuits and indexed, concordanced, cross-referenced. He developed synapses exponentially to complete and fulfill his logic. Then he shut it down and knew nothing.
But Galactic Federation said, O/G5/842, AROUSE YOURSELF AND BOARD THE SHIP Aleksandr Nevskii AT LOADING DOCK 377 BOUND FOR TAU CETI IV.
At the loading dock, Flight Admissions said, YOUR SPACE HAS BEEN PREEMPTED FOR SHIPMENT 20 TONNES Nutrivol POWDERED DRINKS (39 FLAVORS) TO DESERT WORLDS TAU CETI II AND III.
O/G knew nothing of such matters and said, I HAVE NOT BEEN INSTRUCTED SO. He called Galactic Federation and said, MOD 0885 THE SPACE ASSIGNED FOR ME IS NOT PERMITTED IT HAS BEEN PREEMPTED BY A BEING CALLED Nutrivol SENDING POWDERED DRINKS TO TAU CETI INNER WORLDS.
Mod 0885 said, I AM CHECKING. YES. THAT COMPANY WENT INTO RECEIVERSHIP ONE STANDARD YEAR AGO. I SUSPECT SMUGGLING AND BRIBERY. I WILL WARN.
THE SHIP WILL BE GONE BY THEN MOD 08 WHAT AM I TO DO?
INVESTIGATE, MOD 842.
HOW AM I TO DO THAT?