Tape / -
Dear Mr. Henkin,
Your letter reached the Department of Investigation of the Missing a short time ago. As for your issue I recall that before his death, your son, may the Lord avenge his blood, served for some time under my command. I decided to examine your questions both as a sign of my devotion and my emotions, since Menahem, his memory for a blessing, fell many years ago and I still remember him well. You wanted to know if a man named Samuel Lipker had ever come to Israel, and if he served here. I went through the old files, and I found the following details (they don't appear in chronological order, but merely as fragments and I copy them as they are). When we asked him (Lipker) what he would do now, he said he'd finish the war and go to drain the Amazon in Brazil. They pay good money to drain the swamps and cut down the forests, he said. He took part in the diversionary battle at Mount Radar. Thirty-two men were killed there. Three played dead and at dusk, they got up and ran away. One of them was Boaz Schneerson, the son of a man killed in the Holocaust. The name of the second one I don't know. The third apparently was Samuel Lipker. Before that he took part in the battle of Latrun. He joined a brigade without being registered properly; it seems there wasn't time. He came to Latrun straight from the port of Haifa. As far as we can tell, he came to Haifa after being caught on the ship Salvation (Paducah) and was in a British internment camp in Cyprus. The ship left Marseille in 'forty-six. Contradictory evidence exists concerning his boarding the ship. A number of people who were on the ship claim that Ebenezer Schneerson, Samuel's companion, was last seen keeping his place in the line to board the ship, but Samuel didn't come back and was seen talking with the American officer who would bring food, cigarettes, and weapons he managed to smuggle out of the nearby American army camp. Three men testify that his father, that is, Ebenezer Schneerson, disappeared but he himself did return to the line and boarded the ship. At that time, there were no detailed lists, but my investigation shows that most of the ship's passengers I talked to don't explicitly remember if Samuel Lipker was on the ship, except for two who claim that he was there and came to Cyprus with them. When the battle occurred between the little ship with two smokestacks and the British Royal Navy, Samuel fought along with them. They remember that he guarded the deck and with a hose of salty water he sent the people back to the hold of the ship so that a new shift of people could come up on deck to eat, go to the toilet, and get some fresh air. In the battle with the British, three Jews were killed, a little girl who was born and died that same day was called Salvation, and was buried at sea. The commander fought with the one gun he had.
Outraged he was. He tried to run away from Cyprus and was beaten. Later he started his commercial deals and with the fortune he had he continued to make money. Those deals flourished until May seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight. Then Samuel Lipker was put on a ship-even though there is no exact list of passengers, and some claim he wasn't there-brought along with five hundred other young men who were trained secretly at the port of Haifa, were trained two days more and sent to the battle of Latrun. At night, Samuel found a way to escape and came to the other side of Bab-el-Wad. At the Arab village Bidu he met the members of the fifth battalion of Harel. He was transferred to Kiryat Anavim. Nobody remembers him, except for one woman, a medic, who said that a quiet fellow came. He was apparently a handsome young man, she said, but sported a dirty, bristly beard, and it was impossible to recognize him. He joined a division of sappers sent on a diversionary operation near Mount Radar, and as I said, many were killed in the action, while he played dead and was saved. When they came back to Kiryat Anavim, one of them went to try to kill the commander who had abandoned them, while Samuel disappeared.
After the war, he apparently came to Tel Aviv. Walking in the street, seeking what he (later) termed before the investigating officer a new biography he could live in, he ran into somebody at a kiosk who was his age and it seemed to him they had been in a battle together, and that man hit him in an empty lot near the house where Samuel Lipker thought he found a young widow, to whom he was sent by a member of the battalion. The blows were apparently serious and he was wounded and hit back at the person who apparently looked like him. Afterward, he changed his name to Joseph Rayna. And after a certain period for which I have no testimony, he was called Joseph Ranan. When he found out that he was considered killed and that a grave was dug for him in Kiryat Anavim, he said that was fine and let them think that Samuel Lipker had died in the battle of Mount Radar. He was sent to an officers' course where he claimed he was born in Israel and even described his parents' home. He changed the money he had apparently brought with him for valuable objects, traded in them even during the officers' course and then bought himself an apartment, and rented out the apartment the army gave him. Then he was sent to train recruits, suffered a failure in a battle he went to with his recruits. He didn't go drain the Amazon, because the sailors on the Greek ship he was supposed to board looked like white slave traders. Disguised as somebody else whom he himself apparently didn't know, he taught himself basic Hebrew. He got entangled in lies that he couldn't get out of or perhaps he did get out of them and I don't know, he had a plan he devised that nobody would be good enough to hear. And he wrote songs that one girl, whose parents were killed in the Bialystok ghetto, claimed were surprisingly similar to songs her parents had sung in the Zionist club, Young Judea. The girl was afraid of him and ran away and by then he was called Joey Gold and many legends were spun about him. He fought a personal war against an unreal army, and at night after bloody battles he sat in his house and wrote songs that were said to be composed of adjectives and overly exalted words and they smelled moldy, abandoned, and obsolete. After he killed a prisoner in the Gaza operation (the details aren't clear enough because the killer of the prisoner also appears under another name), he was punished, but in the Sinai campaign, he was called back into the army. He commanded a unit that parachuted behind enemy lines. The flanking operation he commanded clashed with the original plan and even though it succeeded, he was rebuked for his rashness, won a medal for heroism but was demoted, which he apparently resented. Then he sold his house, bought an abandoned house in Jaffa, cultivated a beautiful garden, but people who call him by different names aren't sure if it really is the same person. He looked for the man who wounded him when he came back from the war, but didn't find him. He was violent and soft only at times, said one woman who wished to remain anonymous. The investigator at the trial held for him said: Maybe that man doesn't exist, he's both alive and dead. He killed and somebody else was punished. Who is Joey Gold, asked the investigator and added: I can't swear that he exists. The documents say you were killed, he said to Joey Gold, and Joey Gold said, Maybe I really did die.
At the trial, apparently, he said: We don't go like sheep to the slaughter. Here there won't be another Maidanek. The judge reprimanded him for those words and said: You belong to an arrogant generation that was born in Israel and isn't able to understand. After a jail term, he returned to his house in Jaffa. He learned how to play seventeen different musical instruments, wrote poems nobody reads anymore, and very slowly faded away, as if the earth swallowed him up. I can't describe that any better, but there are almost no milestones after that.
Tape / -
I, Ebenezer, what do I know?
Alphabet-Sandwich Islands; the number of letters is twelve (Jewish knowledge!). Burmese alphabet-nineteen letters. Italian-twenty. Bengalese-twenty-one. Hebrew, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumeriantwenty-two letters each. Spanish and Slavic-twenty-seven. Arabictwenty-eight. Persian and Coptic-thirty-two. Georgian-thirty-five. Armenian-thirty-eight. Russian-forty-one. Muscovite Russian-fortythree. Sanskrit and Japanese-fifty. Ethiopian-two hundred and two.