Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

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.

We tried to investigate according to known experiments, for example the experiments of Professor Alexander Luria. Following his example, we urged Ebenezer to recall something that happened in his childhood. We told him about something that happened to him that we found out from a source other than him. When we talked to him about that memory, connected with his dead wife, and we measured his pulse, the pulse speeded up and then fell back. When we asked him to recite a forgotten memory also connected with Dana, a memory he dredged up from what he himself had amassed from things he had heard about himself, from others, the pulse rate was much weaker (seventy-two beats as opposed to a hundred twenty). We tried many other experiments enumerated in the full report and this is not the place to go into detail. The process was repeated several times. The memories that were not told to him did not change the pulse rate. They were alien to him, even though they had happened to him and were a considerable part of the web of his life.

Comparisons with people whose memories are as phenomenal as his did not help us either. We questioned A. G., who now appears all over Europe on television screens and defeats sophisticated computers with quick and correct answers. That gave us no help. Those people were conscious of what they knew. They learned when they were in distress and did that to remain alive, so that in the meantime they would not be impaired. They did not erase themselves to fill the empty space of their brain with knowledge. They learned equations or books by heart because they had to triumph over nothingness and fear.

I attach the tapes. I understand from your words that the book you and the Israeli teacher want to write will be composed or woven mainly of our tapes. Keep in mind that the life of Sam Lipp (Samuel Lipker), for example, is known to Ebenezer only when he was in a trance of indexing his memory. In his real life he doesn't know. In his real life Samuel may also be dying. The Jews are still all dying, and always will die. Hence, we in fact did not succeed in deciphering the secret of Ebenezer's memory, but only in documenting the nature of remembrance. Just as Ebenezer builds racks, so he builds a world of knowledge. The conversion and shoe sizes of a group of Warsaw writers. For us at least the mystery remains. Are we witnessing a kind of spiritual suicide? Vengeance? Escape? I said before: Ebenezer doesn't judge. As far as he's concerned, the Germans are neither bad nor good. Not those he meets today, and not those he met before. The shadows in his brain have no concrete reality. The shadows have no judgment, no past and no future. Fanya R. is his wife. Does Ebenezer live with her or does somebody Ebenezer imagines as Ebenezer live with her? We have questions that only a metaphysical and historiological pathology could solve and therefore science, as in many cases, remains helpless. Art may indeed grant legitimacy to the absurd. Existence is absurd. Ebenezer is absurd and there's no possibility of granting him legitimacy, maybe it's possible to tell him, not about him. As for us, we shall send you the full research, but if our research adds to the perplexity or enlightens it, only Ebenezer's God knows.