Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

And Boaz said: Your son, Samuel!

Ebenezer went outside, and Boaz said: It's me, Samuel, and in his voice I heard reverence, maybe a certain cry for help, surely a supplication, some breaking of a savage. Yes, said Ebenezer, you're Boaz, the son of Rebecca Schneerson.

Boaz looked at his father. He yelled at Jordana and Noga: This is my father! He came to die in the Holy Land with a woman who is both his sister and maybe his daughter and the sister of his mother. Look at him, in his opinion, I betrayed the two people he loved, one Samuel and one Dana who's supposed to be my mother. Jordana, my mother Dana, was murdered by Yemenites.

Arabs, hissed Noga angrily.

Ebenezer went to them, he raised his eyes to my house, he did know I was watching, I knew he responded to my hidden figure, maybe he needed my help.

What do you want, Boaz? asked Ebenezer. Clearly he seemed to be wrapped in a dream. I'll tell you what I want, said Boaz, and approached his father. He pushed him toward the fence and for a moment I almost couldn't see him, but Ebenezer moved and then I saw his eyes. I'll tell you, I've got two women like Our Teacher Moses, one black and one white, the two of them belonged to the son of your friend there, and he pointed to the shutter where I was hiding, and now do for them what you did for Samuel, recite your fucking knowledge, you're in a nightclub, Ebenezer, you set clocks back, I'm Samuel, you're in a nightclub in Cologne! Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, on whose horrible death I grew up, in a nightclub, you're entertaining gentiles with your wonderful memory, turn on your crappy computer, why don't you start. I'm tired, Boaz, said Ebenezer, and his voice contained some submission. He haggled, but we knew he meant to do what Boaz ordered him to do, and I understood: That small chance that his son was Samuel… I wanted to get into bed, block my ears, but I sat fascinated. Ebenezer shut his eyes, looked obsequious like a Jew in your caricatures, and for a long time he recited the annals of the Mendelssohn family, as if anybody really cared to know who was the banker, who was the musician, and who was the philosopher. Hasha Masha put up water and blocked her ears with cotton and I sat and listened. The girls stood on the side, apparently already in despair at hiding from me, and Ebenezer recited. It was a cheap circus act, the setting was the seashore, lifeguards' surfboards on the way to the sea carried by tanned fellows, girls in blue on the way to school, the garbage truck on Yordei Sira Street, and he's telling about some woman he asked what she would do after the Liberation and she said: I'm going back home to my son who was a Hitler-jugend and she spoke proudly of her son… She went back home, she said, and waited for her son, for her husband, and they didn't come. When she discovered that her son had put her in the camp, and now neither he nor her husband wanted to see her, she committed suicide in a hotel, and then Boaz, a uniquely humiliating act, he went into the house, brought out the hat of the Last Jew who stood humiliated, foaming at the mouth, stopped the woman delivering milk who was trying to pretend not to hear and demanded money from her, and she put half a pound into the hat and he went to the two girls, Jordana and Noga, and demanded money from them and they put it in the hat, and you could see they were scared and did that as if they were possessed by a demon, and Boaz took the hat and went back to Ebenezer and Ebenezer said: Samuel, you always know how to surprise me, and I thought: Well, at long last, I saw the Last Jew in a real performance, not like when he recited and talked about you but just as in the nightclub, and what a setting that was, a small street, a woman delivering milk, construction workers on their way to work, tanned girls and boys on their way to the seashore, the Hilton on the left, and then surprisingly, without Boaz sensing anything, the Last Jew took the watch off Boaz's wrist. Jordana and Noga didn't see, I did. Boaz wanted to go, his face was ashamed, and the Last Jew said: What time is it, Boaz? And Boaz searched for the watch and didn't understand where it was. And then the Last Jew waved the watch in front of Boaz's face and laughed, he laughed, really laughed, and said: There, there you wouldn't have lasted a day, you're not Samuel, and he threw the watch at him. And Boaz waited until his father went into the house, put on the watch, and went down on his knees and chewed the wet sand, even though the sun was a little warm now and his face was black and he wept. Never did I see Boaz Schneerson weep.

Yours with friendship and the hope of seeing you again soon,

Obadiah Henkin

Tape / -

One warm morning, Rebecca Schneerson got up and looked at the window she had looked through but hadn't seen for forty-two years. She rec ognized handsome almond trees, a thick-trunked eucalyptus, a weeping oak, lemon trees, and expanses of flowers and greenery up to the edge of the horizon. In the distance, she saw the road that hadn't been in the window forty-two years ago. Rebecca put on a white dress, wrapped herself in a shawl, and went out. She walked erect and confident, even though it had been years since she strolled on these paths. When she came to the center of the settlement, children buying gum at the kiosk peeped at her. They said: Here's the witch come out of her hole. Yehiel, the shopkeeper, whose father remembered Rebecca, wanted to go outside to greet her, but a vague fear kept him from doing that. Now that Rebecca felt that there were no more enemies of life in the settlement, the children of the first ones, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren started loving her. Fears of her had been passed down as a legacy, but belief in their stories was even stronger than the worries, and there was talk in the settlement council of making amends for the ninetieth anniversary celebration. Among many candidates, thirty-one men and a woman were chosen as the founders of the settlement. Some of them did indeed found it, but Rebecca had long ago become the most senior and important founder of them all. She heard from a laborer who worked in her yard about the decision to fix the synagogue and call the main street, the Street of the First Ones, Nehemiah Schneerson Street and she told the reporter from Our Settlement who came to interview her (she even agreed to receive him), that the number of founders growing in inverse proportion to the realization of expectations worried her. Nehemiah died on the seashore in Jaffa, she said, and because of him, she had been living here for seventy-one years. There were ten families in the settlement at that time, then twenty, of the first four sons, only one was still alive, Ebenezer, who died and came back to life only because he went to the Holocaust. So, she added, Zionism has nothing to be proud of.

Rebecca Schneerson went into Mr. Brin's small department store, and Mr. Brin, who had never seen Rebecca life-size, said: It's a great honor for me that you came to me. And she said: No honor, Mr. Brin, I didn't come to you but to the only store in the settlement where you can find a tape recorder. I assume that if there were two stores, the prices would be more reasonable. He tried not to pay attention to the complaint and bitterness in her voice and served her with an exaggerated devotion that disgusted her. Ever since the Captain and Mr. Klomin had died, and all her enemies had been buried in Roots, she had lacked a certain adulation that Ahbed and his friends couldn't grant her since they were too simple to recognize her value.

Mr. Brin showed Rebecca Schneerson about sixteen different tape recorders, and since she didn't trust anybody, she chose the one Mr. Brin claimed was not as good as the others, but she had to have it. She allowed the disappointed Mr. Brin to wrap the tape recorder, picked up the package, and went home. She walked through the fields, saw the new houses, the farms and trees and orchards and gardens, and the new school and the community center and the old water tower, and she thought that in fact this wasn't such a bad place, that there was nice air here and the view was soft and beautiful and everything was painted now and not gnarled, people built and improved, trees grew, flowers bloomed, yards multiplied and were beautiful, the horizon stopped evoking gloomy expectations, the sky became softer and not exactly because of the cataracts in her eyes. She feared those thoughts, as if some long way, maybe the longest she had made since her forefathers' forefathers got her pregnant, a way that had gone on for more than two hundred years, was coming to its end. She wasn't afraid of the end, it wasn't death that scared her, what scared her was some more absolute end, beyond death, an end that torments everybody and only its contamination is felt, an end of what had been dreamed in her veins for two hundred years-Secret Charity, the curse, the river that pierced, Joseph and his poems of yearning, Nehemiah longing for Zion, could all that simply vanish, only because there was never a solid basis for the dream entrenched in some cosmic bitterness of a cruel God against those who betray His command of destruction?