Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

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 full: 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.

Never did I hear such applause…

We went outside. A cold wind was blowing. We bundled up. In the distance I saw the charming Kristina waving a flaccid goodbye to me and disappearing into a cab. My publisher came, shook my hand, and didn't say a thing, looked at me, for a moment he forgot why he had come to me, and he left. We went to Lionel's house. Later, somebody brought the reviews. We also heard the review on television. Sam closed himself in his room and didn't come out. I went to him. He was sad and quiet. A spark of anger flickered in his eyes. I don't like art, he said, I don't make art, what do they want from me, everything they saw was truth, somebody showed them, what's the big deal. But I couldn't pity him. He created a great work and he was suffering because of that. To create something great is to touch painful nerves, it's to try to create, to challenge, to change a world, and they come and say: Oh, it was awfully beautiful, I understood it.

One General Allenby, said Sam, wanted to scare the Sudanese and told them: I command you with a telegram, I sit here with weapons and supervise the wires. What does it mean to create? I translate dreams into theater. By the same token, I could have been a professional murderer or an undertaker, I've got no compassion, Melissa-Licinda is an open wound, I need her and Lily, that's all. I smiled at him and he looked at me, and then he confessed to me about the letter I had once sent him. Lily smiled the honeyed smile of a jungle queen in a Walt Disney movie, and Sam said: Did you see how my naked parents lay there! You must know, your wife could have been an excellent Jewish shawl, there's no future for that stupid past, trying to teach actors to act "it," not "about," what comes out? A review in the Times: Powder and milkshake. A crooner and a football player understand better. Who am I doing theater for and why? I don't have electricity in my hands and I don't have flames. I have to do theater. What does art do? Except that one man I knew built beautiful boxes to stay alive and then I too, because of him, and the life I have left isn't the life I wanted, you know how many came out of Auschwitz alive? Thirty thousand, another two days of war and not even one would have come out alive to tell.

Henkin my friend, a malicious thought came to me: The next time I'm asked about the heroes of my fiction, I'll tell whoever asks that he really should ask the characters about the author and not the author about the characters. I thought about that as a result of something that happened to me and that I'll tell you now. I'm not a person who acts impulsively. I stayed in New York to meet Sam, Lionel, and Lily. The meeting with Sam was disappointing to some extent. The night after the party, I invited him to a small bar, we sat and drank. He didn't talk about anything but his hatred for the play he had worked on for years. He didn't open up to me. I couldn't really make him talk, even when I gave him some information that should have interested him. When I tried to talk with him about Ebenezer, he shut up, then he said to me: For me Ebenezer is dead! And didn't go on.