Or an alphabetical list of the murdered: Golobibsky-Haim Austoroy, fortyfive years old, his son Jacob, seventeen years old, or in one town: Klibanov, Elijah, seventy-one years old, along with his wife Hayke. Israel Zvi Goldenberg, forty-five years old, Israel David Klayman, fifty-five years old, murdered along with his two sons-in-law, Isaac and Samuel… And then: Hanna Gradover, Simha Feinstein, his son Nahman. Lev Austoroy, his wife Sareke, his daughter Rebecca and his son Elijah. Abraham Lapolski, Moshe Kalike, Yosef Krayz, Leah, daughter of Arye Hoykhman. Her husband Yanek and her four children (their names are erased from the tape), Isaac Posman, Meir ben Arye, Parties Hadash… Joseph Joffe… Benjamin ben Elijah… Toni daughter of Haim Serberiazsek, Pisanoy Baruch Beamer…
The number of killed in those towns and villages (only to the letter C) amounts to two thousand one hundred.
The lists of Jewish communities we found at Yad Vashem and other institutions include some of the names mentioned by Ebenezer. We discovered that all the names that appear on tombstones or in lists, in books, in the scrolls of slaughter, also appear in Ebenezer's recital, but there are many names he recites that have no alternative indication.
In one town-fortunately for us, the register of its Jewish community has remained intact-were names of all the Jews who had lived there. Ebenezer recited all their names. After this timing and what was said above, it is clear to us that what he knows, he knew precisely. And there are things only he knows or that we cannot know more than what he knows. Meanwhile, of course…
What made the research even more difficult is the disorder of the knowledge or the illogic in the logic of memory. For some time, we entertained the idea that there was a logic unknown to us in this illogic, but that remained an intellectual amusement. You do know that his encyclopedic knowledge is not systematic at all; books in five or six languages, the Bible, and suddenly brilliant lies about astrophysics (made up by a mad genius), a long solid study refuting Einstein's theory, an atomic structure of the world according to the order of the letters in the Book of Genesis, annals of the world according to a person named Pumishankovitch who argues that God was created after the world and the Torah of the Jews is nothing but an attempt to combine the annals of nature with the annals of antinature, a book about the world as a fallen planet in a system of stars that were extinguished long ago, a rather bold theory about the influence of the battle of Albania on technological development. A hundred and fifty pages of The Jewish Wars by Josephus Flavius in reverse order, books of mythology describing unknown myths documented with knowledge and skill, even though they're apparently fakes. Books of religion and science, journals of three people who tried to measure their love for one another by writing hasty lines in the depths of the earth until they passed out, the stories of Kafka, stories of the Hasids, journeys of the emissaries of the Land of Israel to future generations of the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century, family trees going back to the first generation, calculations of the end of days according to the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Nostradamus, and documents of wars, mathematical theories, the poetry of Homer, the poetry of Virgil, Dante, and other writers I attach in a separate appendix.
Ebenezer doesn't understand the material he knows, he doesn't discriminate, doesn't judge, doesn't know the material isn't Jewish knowledge. The number of twins who studied in orphanages in Lodz between the two world wars is no less important than Kafka's letter to his father. What is important to us is that everything he knows seems important to him because it's somehow knowledge and so the thoughts or nonthoughts of an ant are important and so is the length of the road between Marseille and Bordeaux. As far as he's concerned, everything is Jewish knowledge because it was conveyed to him by Jews. What happened is that like everybody who remembered more important (or unimportant) details he had to carry many more keys with him, and that was to be done by turning his own ego into something even more unimportant. In other words, he learned to remember by learning to forget.
We all remember millions of unimportant details about ourselves. Every such detail had to be forgotten in order to be substituted by impersonal knowledge.
The memory, as we know, is somehow a chemical instrument. Ebenezer's handiwork helped him quite a bit in amassing knowledge. A piece of wood was for him what for others was life, utopia, hope. As a craftsman who understands wood, his brain cells, or some of them, turned into sponges of knowledge and at the same time also into extinguishers of themselves. Therefore, the key of the "keys" is buried in the substitution of physiodynamic materials (if we can use that terminology). The memory of one day in distant childhood, a day a normal person can contemplate for hours and find in it images, smells, feelings, exchanges of words, surprises; in Ebenezer, that turned into the key to a book, to a system of stars, to what didn't happen to himself and thus the memory cell changes its purpose (we talked above about a chemical instrument), and instead of remembering things that were, he remembered things that were not. And in this case, there are and there aren't are all the same. Just as a rack or a cupboard turned from an unclear idea into what can be called "rack reality" or "cupboardness" from the need of the details to harmonize. And that is really how the knowledge Ebenezer acquired was photographed or recorded. They piled up and Ebenezer's brain turned more and more into an instrument alien to himself and unlike other brains, also cut off from itself. In other words, into a sick brain that distinguished between knowledge that knows for the per son himself and knowledge that is alien and destined for others. Thus Ebenezer's individuality could be more and more forgotten and hence his great dependence on Samuel who was to Ebenezer what a normal brain is to another person-both guide and leader. Ebenezer's consciousness of knowledge was in fact a total unconsciousness of himself and also one aspect of the forgetting of his individuality. That is: Ebenezer's remembering was the opposite of nonhuman. Maybe in that the Germans succeeded to a certain extent: a subhuman turned into a nonhuman to survive and to defeat the commandment to be like that.
In the brain that was alien to him, Ebenezer knew there were no more Jews in the world because he decided to survive. A person who knows Einstein's theory by heart can understand that if there was Samuel, then not all the Jews were dead. But things are more complicated particularly in this point. The survival of the Jews (those who did survive) his brain could not absorb. Something deep inside him knew, and still knows, that he is the last survivor. So even now he records everything he says, hears, and sees in order to remember.
Hence your conversations with him that night you described to me, in his house, along with the Israeli teacher Henkin, were recorded by him and remembered by him now as Jewish knowledge along with what he learned in the camp. In his rare consciousness, Ebenezer constantly reconstructs life at one point in the eternal and unchanging present, and prophesies (if we can use that unprofessional term) his past he didn't experience, while what he reads no longer is. As the god in the composition of the madman Ebenezer quotes on behalf of the director of the solar system who describes God as creating from the end to the beginning and merciless, because all life has already died and He meets them on their way-from their death to their beginning. That's how he himself is. As far as he's concerned, they all died and he recites knowledge about something that no longer exists, and not only of those who no longer exist. What I'm writing to you now and will be given to Ebenezer as a copy to keep will also be read by him and recalled as Jewish knowledge. I mean these words literally, the words you're reading now… What Ebenezer knows, he knows because the words were recited to him. Even the words he recites about himself. Even what he knows about himself. Hence he's deprived of judgment about the value of information, of a book or any system of knowledge dormant in him. He paints the world he wants to guard on the walls of his consciousness. There is a sentence by Professor Sharfstein (an Israeli philosopher) that may be able to describe this situation precisely. The sentence appears in a book titled The Artist in Western Culture. There he says: The god Siva, without a brush and without paints, drew the world on the walls of his own consciousness.