Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

They threatened me by phone, and friends who tried to encourage me said things like: I do understand you. Or: In your circumstances, it's easy to understand why, and so on… All of them hypocrites and flatterers. I decided to appear in a television interview and at least try to refute some of the charges against me. The producer of our television news is an old friend of mine. We were in school together, we once traveled together to Italy, Greece, and South America. He arranged that interview. It was an act of courage and resolution on his part.

In the television studio, I sat with Sam in the producer's office, the woman who prepared the report looked at Sam with wicked eyes and asked embarrassing questions. When she smiled she looked like a person who has started missing herself. Then I was interviewed and I returned home. I could have been interviewed in my house, but I wanted to be interviewed in the studio to impart much more credibility to my words, as if it wasn't only I who was talking, but the communications media. Sam drank hot chocolate and sat in front of the turned-off television. When the interview with me was broadcast, he turned on the television. We sat and didn't say a word, Renate smiled once and then averted her eyes and looked at Sam watching the program and her eyes suddenly became cold as steel.

And here are some news clippings for you.

… in his television appearance, he chose not to apologize. Nor did he try to cover up. He told candidly, and that candor has to be appreciated, how years ago he met a person who performed in nightclubs and was called the Last Jew, and about a fellow named Samuel Lipker who would lead him. He told how he investigated that person and now that Samuel-the American director Sam Lipp-came to our city, he swept him up into his world of horrors and made him act in his presence the commander who commanded both Sam Lipp and the one he called the Last Jew. Maybe what he said was candid, but equally unconvincing. Candor isn't necessarily a substitute for truth. Candor, like good intentions, is sometimes the road to hell. The poetic license our praised writer permits himself this time went beyond the boundary of good taste… On the contrary, the amazement about the past was even sharpened, his persistence in writing a book he can never write and doesn't write evokes a sense of intellectual impotence, ideological shallowness, and fear of critical readers, for if the book is so important to him, why did he write his other books? It is hard to accept as logical the fact of the clock set backward, the story about the fellow whose anger justifies disgraceful behavior in a nightclub and hectoring an old man, imprisoned in the past, who lives on a small pension, struck and pestered by a distinguished writer and a guest from America. Virgil (the moderator-A.S.) asked our writer why he had to go to a fortuneteller before his last trip to the United States, and didn't even get a satisfactory answer. Why does a writer try to pretend to be a beautiful person without delusions, when he secretly believes in superstitions of a clock set backward and secretly consults a fortuneteller. In his articles, he attacks the ignorance of what he calls worshippers of stars and signs. Our writer is caught here in naked hypocrisy!.. Great amazement… As for the intellectual integrity of a writer whose past was restored without pangs of conscience, and along with streetwalkers, profiteers, and pimps, he presents a shameful play about the resurrection of the Reich, when in the same week, he writes a trenchant article against performing the Passion in Bayreuth, because as he puts it, it is a basic and profound insult to human moral values and to the Jewish nation.

… sometimes even hypocrisy has to be consistent, even if it concerns shutting one's eyes and tormented candor. Along with his friends, our writer is trying to condemn us, our society, to condemn us for what he himself calls in his articles "Teutonic arrogance, and the lost souls of the patriarchs." For many years he has demanded again and again that we stop making-as he puts it-"tours of exaltation and disgrace in the lost forests of ancient myths, and that along with the other nations of Europe we live the noble majesty of the civil world promised in the future, even if it is bereft of a real past"..

Or:

… it is to be believed that he fell victim to a dangerous suggestion… A person doesn't set people back by an imaginary clock… His words were incredulous verbiage…"

Or:

… I was convinced! Convinced that our author was an embezzler in his past, that those great moments of truth he experienced were wasted and he has to apologize for…

The studio was inundated with phone calls, Henkin. Hundreds of people called in. Most of them didn't scold me for denying my past or for falling victim to it. I was asked if my wife is indeed of Jewish origin, and when I tried to explain, I was flooded with insulting answers in a righteous and disgusting way. I was even asked why there are so many "last Jews" in Germany. When I told the questioner that only thirty thousand Jews live in Germany and most of them are old retirees, I was told that that was thirty thousand too many, I was accused of lying to the authorities of the Reich about my wife's origin, I was accused of being related to the fortuneteller and Sam Lipp. They called me a crazy leftist and a stinking rightist and an intellectual pig and a man of dubious honor… what wasn't said in those endless conversations. Even my son was conjured up. I was asked if my son was murdered, committed suicide, or died of natural causes, and why he had to be educated to hate his grandfather, and who taught the boy to challenge the grandfather, for after all he was only following orders. Friedrich, said one woman in a shrill and annoying voice, was a charming boy whose parents destroyed him, and he had to die to atone for their sins, but she didn't identify herself and I asked myself where were my three million readers where were the critics and journalists who wrote such nice things about me, and because of them and for fear of their criticism, I hadn't yet written The Last Jew, but they were in hiding, didn't express an opinion, were tranquil and silent. I asked myself where were my books, The Lost Honor of Venus Daedelus? The English Lesson, The Awful Blow of the Soccer Goalie, where are my giant trumpet and the filmgoers, where is all that, but they weren't, they offended my son, they said: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

What I didn't know, of course, was that, after the interview with me, a television crew was sent to the club. They filmed the seedy ladies, the stage where they were acting that night, the bartender, and they got unpleasant comments from them. They also went to Lily's father's house and heard his version, and all that was presented to the viewers, as Sam, Renate, and I were waiting in front of the television set that Sam didn't turn on. That was a real bond against me, a bond only I was guilty of.

The next day, I complained to my agent, who apologized and said he had been at the sea. I told him: In the winter? In the ice? And he muttered something and I hung up. Then I hugged Sam and drank tea with lemon and the producer called. He said: I heard you're angry. Sam Lipp sent us to the club and to Herr Schwabe. He said it was your idea! Don't feel guilty and don't get mad at us… I told him: That's nice. I'm not guilty. You're not. My agent's not guilty. Only Sam Lipp is guilty. If so, how come I know that both you and I are guilty?

And then Renate said in a quiet voice that froze my blood. She said: I want Friedrich to be buried next to Menahem Henkin.

A few days later, Sam called from Marseille. He told me he was waiting for Lionel in Cafe Glacier. Lionel would come interrogate him about his crimes. Then he called from the hotel and said he was calling from Lebensborn. Hotels like that should be erased from phone books, he said. And I did complain at city hall and in the next phone book that name won't appear again. Sam said, I'm waiting for a ship.