After her unsuccessful week in Jerusalem, desolated to have to return, still a Catholic, to her old life in France, she was at dinner at the Appelfelds’ house on the evening before her departure, when Aharon and Judith, who could no longer bear to see the woman suffering so, suddenly announced to her, “You are a Jew! We, the Appelfelds, declare you a Jew! There — we have converted you!”
As we sat in the restaurant laughing together at the antic audacity of this obliging deed, Aharon, a small, bespectacled compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head, looked to me very much like a benign wizard, as adept in the mysteries of legerdemain as his namesake, the brother of Moses. “He’d have no trouble,” I later wrote in the preface to our interview, “passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat — it’s easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled: responding, in a string of elusively portentous stories, to the disappearance from Europe … of just about all the continent’s Jews, his parents among them.” Aharon himself had managed to remain alive by escaping from the Transnistria concentration camp at the age of nine and living either in hiding, foraging alone in the woods, or working as a menial laborer for poor local peasants until the Russians liberated him three years later. Before being transported to the camp, he had been the pampered child of wealthy, highly assimilated Bukovina Jews, a little boy educated by tutors, raised by nannies, and fitted out always in the finest clothes.
“To be declared a Jew by Appelfeld,” I said, “that’s no small thing. You do have it in you to bestow this mantle on people. You even try it with me.”
“Not with you, Philip. You were a Jew par excellence years before I came along.”
“No, no, never so exclusively, totally, and incessantly as the Jew it pleases you to imagine me to be.”
“Yes, exclusively, totally, incessantly, irreducibly. That you continue to struggle so to deny it is for me the ultimate proof.”
“Against such reasoning,” I said, “there is no defense.”
He laughed quietly. “Good.”
“And tell me, do you believe this Catholic professor’s fantasy of herself?”
“What I believe is not what concerns me.”
“Then what about what she believes? Doesn’t it occur to the professor that she may have been left in a churchyard precisely because she was not Jewish? And that her sense of apartness originates not in her having been born a Jew but in her having been orphaned and raised by people other than her natural parents? Besides, would a Jewish mother be likely to abandon her infant on the very eve of the liberation, when the chances for Jewish survival couldn’t have been better? No, no, to have been found when she was found makes Jewish parentage for this woman the least likely possibility.”
“But a possibility no less. Even if the Allies were to liberate them in only a matter of days, they had still to survive those days in hiding. And to survive in hiding with a crying infant might not have been feasible.”
“This is what she thinks.”
“It’s one thing she thinks.”
“Yes, a person can, of course, think absolutely anything. …”And I, of course, was thinking about the man who wanted people to think that he was me — did he think that he was me as well?
“You look tired,” Aharon said. “You look upset. You’re not yourself tonight.”
“Don’t have to be. Got someone else to do it for me.”
“But nothing is in the papers, nothing more that I have seen.”
“Oh, but he’s still at it, I’m sure. What’s to stop him? Certainly not me. And shouldn’t I at least try? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone in his right mind?” It was Claire’s position I heard myself taking up now that she was gone. “Shouldn’t I place an ad in The Jerusalem Post informing the citizens of Israel that there is this impostor about, an ad disassociating myself from whatever he says or does in my name? A full-page ad would end this overnight. I could appear on television. Better, I could simply go and talk to the police, because more than likely he’s traveling with false documents. I know he’s got to be breaking some kind of law.”
“But instead you do nothing.”
“Well, I have done something. Since I spoke with you I phoned him. At the King David. I interviewed him on the phone from London, posing as a journalist.”
“Yes, and you look pleased with that — now you look like yourself.”
“Well, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable. But, Aharon, what am I to do? It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And it’s activating — reactivating — the very state of mind that I’ve been working for months now to shake off. You know what’s at the heart of the misery of a breakdown? Me-itis. Microcosmosis. Drowning in the tiny tub of yourself. Coming here I had it all figured out: desubjectified in Jerusalem, subsumed in Appelfeld, swimming in the sea of the other self — the other self being yours. Instead there is this me to plague and preoccupy me, a me who is not even me to obsess me day and night — the me who’s not me encamped boldly in Jewish Jerusalem while I go underground with the Arabs.”
“So that’s why you’re staying over there.”
“Yes — because I’m not here for him, I’m here for you. That was the idea and, Aharon, it’s still the idea. Look” — and from my jacket pocket I took the sheet of paper on which I’d typed out for him my opening question — “let’s start,” I said. “The hell with him. Read this.”
I’d written: I find echoes in your fiction of two Middle European writers of a previous generation — Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who wrote in Polish and was shot and killed at fifty by the Nazis in Drogobych, the heavily Jewish Galician city where he taught high school and lived at home with his family, and Kafka, the Prague Jew who wrote in German and also lived, according to Max Brod, “spellbound in the family circle” for most of his forty-one years. Tell me, how pertinent to your imagination do you consider Schulz and Kafka to be?
Over tea then, we talked about neither me nor not-me but, somewhat more productively, about Schulz and Kafka until finally we grew tired and it was time to go home. Yes, I thought, this is how to prevail — forget this shadow and stick to the task. Of all the people who had assisted me in recovering my strength — among others, Claire, Bernie, the psychopharmacologist — I had chosen Aharon and talking to him as the final way out, the means by which to repossess that part of myself that I thought was lost, the part that was able to discourse and to think and that had simply ceased to exist in the midst of the Halcion wipeout when I was sure that I’d never be able to use my mind again. Halcion had destroyed not merely my ordinary existence, which was bad enough, but whatever was special to me as well, and what Aharon represented was someone whose maturation had been convulsed by the worst possible cruelty and who had managed nonetheless to reclaim his ordinariness through his extraordinariness, someone whose conquest of futility and chaos and whose rebirth as a harmonious human being and a superior writer constituted an achievement that, to me, bordered on the miraculous, all the more so because it arose from a force in him utterly invisible to the naked eye.