We hailed a cab and went to the hotel. By ten in the morning, I was sitting in the public library, in a closed room, and poring over the material. Not until five in the afternoon, when I was so hungry I was dizzy, did I leave. I found very valuable material for our book, Obadiah, and I'll send you copies of all the material as soon as I can. The story about Kramer's meeting with Nehemiah Schneerson amazed me early in the morning, when I read part of the material Lionel gave me. Eating brings an appetite. Even if Kramer's journal, which I read in Ebenezer's house, was (as Renate says) my creation, and I don't accept that crazy versionthe meeting between Nehemiah and Kramer absolutely cannot be the product of my imagination, no matter how fertile it is. In the report from London, Ebenezer tells about the meeting between his father and Kramer. (In his relation to the story, Kramer is not presented at all as a commander in whose camp he stayed. He tells a story of an encounter between a man-and only we, the readers, know was his father-and a German whom only we know was the commander of the camp where he stayed, in other words: he tells a story that is alien to him, unrelated, and that was enough to make me shudder.) Kramer, who was then a young man, went on a journey to the Land of Israel with an old German named Doctor Kahn, who never was a real physician. The two of them were residents of the village of Sharona, although Kramer was born in Willhelma, and only at the age of seven did he move to Sharona. The doctor, who had worked as a ship's physician for many years, collected butterflies, lived with an Arab lad, Higer, who was said to have been wounded once by mistake with his rifle, loved to swim, spawned children all over the east like some ancient god and spoke of turning Palestine into a German protectorate. On one of their journeys they came to a settlement in Judea, and that settlement was the settlement where Ebenezer was born (even though he doesn't mention that fact, and when he recited this story maybe he didn't know he was born there). They were caught in a storm, sought shelter, came to the house of Nehemiah and Rebecca Schneerson. Kramer (according to Ebenezer) describes Nehemiah as a handsome man for a Jew, hot-tempered like most Jews. And Rebecca (in his opinion) was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen even though she was a Jewess. Kramer told Nehemiah there would never be peace between the Jewish world and the Christian world, or the Muslim world. There won't be forgiveness, he said, until the so-called Jew of Jesus is taken out and the reality of the real Jews in the world is separated. Christianity, said Kramer, had a Greek, pagan tone, sublime and tragic in its essence. The idea of conscience and guilt feelings are the Jewish contribution that stuck to original Christianity. The Jews as a nation that rejects race-Gangbok-invented the ahistoricism of remorse. Pure chauvinism is foreign to Judaism, and there's nothing like pure chauvinism to cleanse and create, a solid element in the health of its nation. Would-be patriotic crusades have to be destroyed, he said, and then the Christian Jesus will be the natural god in the world where there are no witnesses to the Jewish betrayal of Him.
I won't weary you with the long speech Kramer delivered that night. We can be amazed only that he said those things in nineteen nine, if he really did say them. Kramer was drunk, drooling, and looked at the enormous expanses stretching to the Arab vines. He said: Today we no longer remember who was the first father of the eagle, evolution isn't only in nature, it also exists as a huge intellectual trap.
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 fulclass="underline" 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.