Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

… I, the letter also said, had to continue to supervise but to worry less about the education of the commander, not to go easy on him at all, but to remember that there are people whose SS document is among the first five hundred documents and ideological problems of the Reich are solved now by thousands of professors and experts in famous universities like Gottingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg and they do excellent ideological work. Nevertheless and despite all that, they thank me for my devotion and loyalty and are proud of me even though, because of the burden of work in the service of the nation and the Fuhrer, they cannot answer me except at certain times.

Therefore I went on with my deeds because my education imposed an obligation of honor on me to serve the homeland even if it involved danger or even a personal sacrifice. From that point of view, there was something in common between me and Ebenezer, the two of us were condemned to freedom and exploited by people who lacked nobility and imagination. And I could not get to the truly great men up above, because of the ignoramuses that stood between them and me, like Weiss, for example.

I talked about relations between me and Ebenezer. I was of course a volcano against a mosquito. But Ebenezer, unlike all my cannons, had a pair of intelligent hands, I was drawn to them. As a dilettante of the noble sort, and out of an infinite yearning for beauty, I learned to understand the perfection that is totally useless. When I listen to Beethoven's "Jesus on the Mount of Olives" or to Schutz's "Seven Words on the Cross," I can feel the unshakeable greatness of the German idealistic nature, that controlled boldness, sharp and original, some painful and tormented closeness full of bliss for perfection, an attempt to touch the untouchable, a wise and imaginative thoroughness along with a visionary penchant, a pure and virginal ideal, a struggle of man against himself and against others at one and the same time, with joy and disappointment necessarily intertwined, and not because of those circumstances or others and together they light a fire that is both ardent and burning, blood that is both beautiful and terrifying. If they left me here, in my cell, between one death sentence and another, yearning for something, after the defeat and the betrayal of the grateful liberated nations, these yearnings are not yearnings for life, but for a great culture we were about to rescue but didn't succeed, because the rescuers themselves were always unfit for the greatness of the mission. The Jewish culture of remorse once again ruled us and I can sense that in the things I read in prison. In the camp I saw behavior that didn't deserve the word "cultural," but my distinguished teacher was the monk Daniel who wrote "I gather spirit and hunt a hare with a bull and swim against the stream" and an ancient and noble taste fills my veins when I hear those things whose opposite are written now. The German person has some notion, even though it's often denied by him, of necessary worlds, and it sometimes seems imperative as a means and not an end. It is the Jews themselves who will suffer again someday, from the totality of our imaginary remorse and morality. German pangs of conscience will punish the Jews for their very existence, whereas our punishment was only for the quality of their existence.

I loved the way Ebenezer worked with wood, building boxes, the wisdom of his hands. His idea of "the Last Jew" I thought a dubious joke. But today many admire the parts of his memory in seedy cafes and cheap nightclubs. Like one of the innocents was this man. One of my friends, Sonderkommando SS Lieutenant Sheridan, once invited me to the camp where he worked. At dinner I met an officer I remember as even more splendidly dressed than we were. I remembered him from my schooldays in the homeland as the son of a distinguished and coarse farmer, whose father's estates stretched over a gigantic area near the duchies of ancient and historic Schleswig-Holstein, not far from the Danish border. All he could do in the camp was to become an absurd trickster who managed to get apples or bras out of villas or a pair of pants out of nostrils but was unable to get a decent living from his father's estates or to demonstrate the boldness of a German commando. I always knew he would sing the arias of Aida off-key but with ridiculous gaiety, while the celestial melodies of Bach or Buxtehude im parted such mighty boredom to him that he was able to sing them without being off-key in the slightest with practiced pleasure only because he was bored. I told that because we tend to exaggerate our excitement about things outside the realm of nature as it were, like Ebenezer's tricks of memory and the incomprehension of his boxes and frames. How remarkable that a boob like him learned knowledge he thought was Jewish knowledge. Did he understand what he remembered? When I was in Paris years ago (I was given a Christmas leave from the camp) I met an old woman, half German, who had once been married to an Argentinean colonel. She introduced me to a young and handsome woman who loved to hear my stories and the songs I'd sing when she sat at the piano and played. Maybe that really was the love of my life. She once told me that she and the old woman-she called her noble-loved to hypnotize, and that sounded amusing after the quantity of wine we had drunk, and I succumbed to their pleas and was hypnotized and she wrote word for word what I said while I was in a trance and what I said was the precise history of the annals of a life a hundred fifty years before I was born. I piled up instructive and almost unknown details and the old woman who had inherited memories from days when somebody from her family served in the kaiser's army, burst into bitter weeping since I remembered places that no longer exist and battles nobody remembers. We checked in the SS library in Berlin, and in forgotten books we confirmed every single detail. In my youth I didn't know a thing about the man I described. Was it because of the hypnotic pleasure of that charming woman (who was later slaughtered brutally by barbarians of the French Underground), was it because of that that somebody had to admire me? If I deserve appreciation it's because of my love of beauty and because of my service to the Reich. And Ebenezer was a minor prophet of ideas that others expressed. It was the Duke of Wellington who said that great nations aren't capable of appreciating small wars. The opposite is also true… their memory is also their curse, Ebenezer captured knowledge, but his hands, his hands knew something else!

I'd come to Ebenezer's chamber and sit there. That life I had left was not the life I aspired to. He was afraid, he knew that unlike Weiss, I was a real enemy. But I was captivated by his creation. With thin knives he'd slice strips of veneer, put them together, twine them into one another, carve birds or portraits, spread lacquer whose secret ingredients and composition were known "in his hands." On the first nights I'd flog him but he never mentioned that to me, he made the kind of frames you don't see anymore, built grandfather clocks, more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in my life. A small kerosene stove would burn there and after a while I came every day, I brought a jug of coffee and by necessity we even drank together, he and I, I couldn't not come. Something enchanted me; I hated him but I couldn't take my eyes off his work.

I didn't like only the above-mentioned works, like Weiss, but also and mainly the act itself. That man knew wood in its distress.

I loved his hands, his fingers hypnotized by the big German magnet hanging over the altars of Wotan. I could be only me. The things I said in the courthouse in Nuremberg were only partial. When I was reading my words from the written text the bored Russian officer's snoring was clearly heard. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay attention to what I was saying then. One day, when Ebenezer was mixing lacquer, he turned pale and started talking. His words were a kind of recitation. I heard in them a distant, familiar, Jewish melody. He spoke without excitement. His hands were then shaping an eagle on a frame that looked both very ancient and new. He spoke and I wrote. Why did I write? Today I can no longer understand. Maybe it was an internal compulsion to know what caused the sordid creation to be noble in his hands. He spoke about the contracts won by some Neumark and Berl Shmuel in a contract of leasing salt and delivering it to merchants and Jewish suppliers named Simon Isaac Rosen, Isaac Shonberg, Jacob Lederman, and Michael Ettinger, and they got rich. When the Polish bank borrowed the sum of forty-two million zlotys in eighteen twenty-nine, the loan was financed by the commercial house of S. A. Frankel and the Berlin bankers connected with him in business contracts and even contacts with noble families… in eighteen thirty-five Jacob Epstein and Samuel Frankel were granted a loan of a million rubles…