I had a strange dream. I was waiting for my father at the railroad station. Renate came arm in arm with an old Jewish woman. A man who may have been a Jewish pimp from a Sturmer cartoon asked me what side the snake pees on.
I'm sitting at home now, in the room you know well. Behind me is the beautiful picture of the black horse. You write that my last book sold three million copies. I was glad to get the nice articles you sent me. The depth of the article from the New York Times amazed me, I never heard of the author of that article, Lionel Secret, but the name does ring a bell only I can't decipher or locate it on the map of my memories. I loved the thin irony of the article seeing my book as my most successful suicide attempt, the one you can photograph and go on looking at it. I remember my father telling me that the film he took in the Warsaw Ghetto was a beautiful film. When I saw the film afterward I understood what he meant. The book I've been trying to write all those years about the Last Jew doesn't interest you. But in addition, it also refuses to be written. I'm now rewriting a novella I wrote a few years ago but my heart is given to "The Last Jew" that's stuck in my craw. In Israel, I met Ebenezer. The meeting didn't do me any good. I met a man named Henkin who's also investigating the Last Jew (he's not a writer) and his wife is the woman that Renate loved in Israel. Ebenezer's mother, Rebecca, I didn't meet. She's very old, they say she's still beautiful. For some reason, I was afraid to go visit her in her settlement.
Since you're not only my editor and publisher, but also my close friend, I must explain to you clearly where I stand now. I know, you've worked hard for many years to promote me. You published my books when nobody else wanted them, you believed in me despite the bad or indifferent criticism or the thousands of copies you had to bury because nobody wanted to buy them, and I, I of all people, now sit and write what our reader won't want to read and our critic will trash, and the most awful thing of all, what is hard even for me to write. The book can be written by two different people, my dear, by me and by that Henkin. And then it won't be the book you wanted, will it? I am my father's son and Obadiah Henkin is the father of Menahem Henkin, who fell in Israel. Someplace, an ancient battlefield is stretching between us, and in that battlefield is a person devoid of memory of his personality who is also part of me and part of him. It's like two men trying to beget a son together. There's a nice saying: The best poem is a lie. What is the German lie and what is the Jewish lie that can create on paper the existing character, painfully existing, of Ebenezer Schneerson, son of Rebecca and father of Boaz Schneerson, stepfather of Samuel Lipker, a man who hoarded knowledge to remain a last Jew in a war that you, I, and he were in together on both sides of a death that's now being forgotten?
Grief is banal. Life is banal. Death is banal. Everything is banal. The tormented and monstrous words. What to do? I have to prophesy Ebenezer through Henkin and he has to prophesy him through me. What will come out of all that may be bad but necessary. I know how much these words upset you.
What I can't grasp in that banality is the symmetry. Boaz and Samuel Lipker are the same age, born the same day, one in Tarnopol in Galicia and the other in a settlement in Judea. They look alike. When Ebenezer met Samuel in the camp he didn't know that Samuel was the last son of Joseph Rayna whom he went to Europe to seek and came to us. He didn't know that Samuel and Boaz are alike because he had left Boaz when he was a year old and hadn't seen him since. So isn't it funny that, when Ebenezer returned to Israel forty years later and met Boaz (and Samuel whom he hadn't seen for many years), he said: Samuel! And Boaz was offended to the depths of his soul. I have to understand Ebenezer, his mind, the words he hoards and then sells to foreigners in seedy nightclubs. I understand that you want another book, you want a different story, but I, I have no other way, I have to live in the stammering attempt to write a book that doesn't want to be written…
Tape / -
Attached below, another chapter of the draft, the third copy. If you compare it to the previous copy (that you disliked so much) you'll see that in principle I didn't change things, I just cooled them a little, I distanced myself, I let people shape themselves a little in view of the words that didn't stick to them. And so…
Bent over he was at the barbed wire fence, maybe more than bent over, he was leaning forward, and his whole life would pass in that second like a flash with nothing except memories of others, and he won't know if what passed through his mind was his life.
A woman in rags passed by on the other side of the fence. She said: Are you all right, Schneerson?
I'm looking at you through a fence we haven't passed through for years, he said, I look and I see. He didn't know how he knew they hadn't passed through it for years if he didn't remember who he was and what happened to him.
I'm eating, said the woman.
And then a slice of bread she held in her mouth dropped. The bread fell on the ground covered with bone dust that flew in the wind. She bent over in alarm, picked up the slice, cleaned it with her hand and put it back in her mouth. At that moment, Samuel appeared, touched Ebenezer, and said to her: See how much food they brought, sausages, cheese, bread, and she smiled, the slice of bread in her mouth, and then she fled wildly.
Ebenezer stood still because he had nowhere to go. Everything was in motion. Bonfires were lit. A tank was slowly squashing the drooping roof of a gigantic block that had previously collapsed. Imagined shapes of human beings, staggering, dressed in pajamas or tatters. A soldier vomits. Hands of a dead man leaning on a wall, like a skeleton who started walking and stopped, the hands are stretched forward, clenched into fists, the skin is flayed. A Spitfire was circling in the air and dropping paratroopers full of food and medicine and uttering a purity of distances no longer unimaginable. For a moment Ebenezer sensed the stench that had been with him for three years.
April fifteen, nineteen forty-five. Five hours and five minutes after noon. A long twilight, whose long faded shadows, twined with fiery hues, create calculated uncertainty and solid vagueness, an hour with no boundaries, until the dark that may really descend again. On the horizon blue mountains, treetops and silence. A gleaming gold of a tank tramps to the block. Behind Ebenezer the blocks still stand in a long line, a ditch perpendicular to them, its banks concave. A second glimmer of a passage from one planet to another. In the distance, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer is seen. Tied with a coarse rope. Two British soldiers guard him. One of them touches him, almost pushes him, and Kramer tries to wave his hand, as if he wanted not to wave the white flag, his eyes keep revealing contempt and at the same time keep surveying the destruction, the tanks crushing his blocks, their sloping roofs, and those people in pajamas. The impulse is mechanical, his hands are bound and he can't wave them, he drops his hands and once again straightens his hands behind, Ebenezer sneaks a look at him from the distance, and very slowly turns his back to him. Ebenezer feels a stab in his back, as if he were shot, but Samuel's hand is stroking him, Samuel doesn't see what Ebenezer sees, he's already far away from here, in a future that's almost solid and bound to reality, Kramer doesn't interest him anymore. Ebenezer wants not to see the humiliation, he didn't want it. A British officer who had previously been seen chatting with the tall, ruddy Red Cross representative then asked Ebenezer something and Ebenezer said: It's true that I was almost the first one in this camp. But I'm not the last! And he blushed at the sound of his words. The "but" sounded arrogant and coarse. The architect Herr Lustig made them a stylized roof, Kramer requested, Weiss approved, and so he got sloping roofs with a unique angle for that camp. The originality of their slope is an interesting modular plan, said Herr Lustig. Concentrating vertical force. The arc on which the roof is set doesn't have to be a concrete support but only its bottom half, you can learn from these dimensions in the Alhambra, for example, he added. A city isn't houses, Herr Lustig then said, camp and city, town and future concentration of human beings will constitute a planned texture and not some accidental combination of beautiful or ugly structures, streets or squares, it will be a unit in itself!