Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Sam taught his actors and himself to act Darwin's theory of evolution, and started supporting them from the money Saul Blau would bring him from the shirts, five percent of their income belonged to him and he didn't know why. Rachel died alone quietly in a room full of flowers in a private hospital for incurables, and even at the time of her death, she didn't know who was who and didn't know that Sam Lipp wasn't Lionel and Lionel wasn't Joseph and Saul Blau was her husband. She smiled, shut her eyes, and from so much sadness and weariness she forgot to open them.

At his mother's funeral, Lionel stood and tried to remember his youth, and suddenly he grasped that all he had left were Samuel and Lily. He talked about Samuel's plays, and Lily said: He's not doing theater, he's creating the Fourth Reich! Then he put in a new door and the carpenter, who remembered Sam from the camp, said: Where's Ebenezer? And Samuel said: He died and I died too. The carpenter who remembered how Samuel used to bring him a slice of bread from the kitchen of the Sonderkommando, said: You know what's really awful? That we are alive. Lionel wrote a poem about that. The poem constituted a kind of end to the four extinct years. Critics started talking about Samuel's plays. His new theater evoked strong and contradictory reactions on both sides. At his birthday party, Sam sang a jolly song in Yiddish to the daughter of one of the actresses. Six of the actors could have been the baby's father and Samuel sang the song and started weeping. They saw the tears and Licinda ran away. And thus ended some camp with barbed wire fences, where they acted and dogs were sicced on them and he stood and whipped himself. In the morning when he got up, his leg was broken. The doctor couldn't explain the meaning of the phenomenon and put a cast on the leg. Samuel went to Licinda's parents, played chess with them, and taught them how to cheat at cards. In the small town in upstate New York he learned the annals of Licinda and connected her to the parents of his parents. And thus Licinda started having nightmares about the parents and grandparents Samuel knew from other places.

Among the salvations Licinda's grandfathers sought were salvations like the ones his parents' parents sought. And thus Samuel came to the story of Joseph de la Rayna and started adapting it for the theater. He told Licinda: You're my great love, you'll be what you always were, you'll be Frieda and Lilith. A German author wrote to Sam and Sam answered him. He wrote: I know who I am and who my father is and who Lionel's father is. Next time you'll be Weiss, but I'll be Kramer. Lily said: He's creating the Fourth Reich!

Tape / -

I've been talking for a few days now. Quoting. I didn't register the number of the tapes. Registered on the boxes. I'm tired. Are you a doctor, sir? Is it true that I masturbate into tapes? An unpleasant word for the first son of a settlement in the Land of Israel. Who lives in me and I don't live in him? You wanted to cure me, you make me talk, don't remember. Who taught me to hypnotize myself? The light is dimming, love that dream, the window, the ceiling, the gushing words, what else is left. The walls will fall. The treachery of mother, Joseph Rayna and Samuel. A garden is watered by Teacher Henkin. A dead son he raised. Boaz came. Said he was my son. Who's my son? I'm a pen that wrote a story, a story wrote a pen. They write about me, not worth a word. A tired carpenter of boxes for whores of SS men. Bad climate. One day a heat wave and then rain. Dana was soft as a caress. Mr. Klomin, friendly and lost. Mother? Her hatred. Walking to Marar to beat an Arab. Maybe I killed him. They said I said.

At the hems of a shepherd's cloak

I found a lover

Haughty near a stream near a stream,

A bird passed by a dream

The song a feather above

Is that love? Is that love?

Is that a song I remember?

Is this me?

Is it me speaking?

Who's speaking?

End.

My friend,

I attach here a report of Boaz Schneerson's lawyer. I hope you'll be interested in it. Incidentally, yesterday Ebenezer appeared at my house. He was wearing the kind of white suit they used to wear in Tel Aviv in the twenties. He knocked on the door and in his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, red chrysanthemums. I opened the door and he held the bouquet of chrysanthemums out to me and said he had come to wish me happy birthday. I told him, What's this, and he said: Isn't today your birthday? I thought a little and said: Right, and Hasha Masha and I had forgotten. I invited him in, he entered, sat on the sofa, and was silent. Then he got up, took a little tool out of the pocket of his white coat, and asked permission to fix our cabinet. Hasha Masha, who had come into the room a few minutes before, said: What's this? Why? He said: That's what I can do when I don't have my words, I've got information for the wood. Your cupboards and cabinets are dying, Henkin. He fixed the cabinet and then the easy chair and the cupboard and the chest. He went to his house and came back with a case full of bottles of lacquer in various shades and brushes and sandpaper and he smeared, filed, and smeared again. I loved to see him at his craft. He worked for many hours and stopped only once to drink a cup of tea that Hasha Masha gave him. This morning he returned to my house and looked at his work, fixed here and there and then I saw a smile spread over his lips. I said, Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, and he said, Nonsense, that's not what was, today it's nothing, and he left.

Yours, Obadiah Henkin

And here is the report.

To: The Assessing Official

For the Department of Investigations, Misgar Street 3, Tel Aviv.

In re: Income tax file of S.L.A. Company (Boaz Schneerson) No. 34/4654/8

From: Attorney Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Ben-Yehuda Street 128, Tel Aviv.

(S.L.A. Inc.) Director: Boaz Schneerson, Tel Aviv.

Dear Mr. Mahluf,

As you know, my client is employed by the paratroopers of the Israeli Defense Force, heroes of the underground, saints of the Holocaust and ghetto fighters. My client's assistance to the bereaved families is widely known (See Appendix 1-letter from the branch of mourning-Ministry of Defense, letter from the branch of widows and orphans and letter from the branch of the bereaved). From 1952 until today, inclusive, the company (S.L.A.) has helped publish hundreds of memorial books. The company gathered material, helped directly or indirectly to publish other memorial books, helped establish district, local, brigade, family, and regimental memorials, initiated and established memorial barbed wire for Holocaust and heroism (including memorials), took care to locate, establish, maintain, populate, and decorate dozens of memorial rooms in public institutions, together with the Memorial to Sons it established meeting and unity houses, put up memorial plaques in schools, kindergartens, universities, and along with construction and repair companies (see appendices 2, 3, and 4) advised and assisted in establishing memorial monuments, signs of battles (including living reenactments of battles), public parks to the memory of the fallen and missing, and libraries in the name of those who fell. The S.L.A. company organized memorial conferences of brigades, battalions, the underground, official (132) district (245) military (334) ceremonies, and as aforementioned established the society of thirty-one (31) various memorials in various locations in Israel to commemorate the Holocaust and heroism. The company organized sixty-four assemblies and conferences to commemorate the fallen with subjects set in advance by the company in close and active cooperation with the Ministry of Defense, the (Israel Defense Forces) IDF, Yad Vashem, the Philharmonic Orchestra, Belt Berl, Belt Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and others.

In sum, those conferences (mentioned at the end), less the number of closed conferences of the Intelligence Institutenumber two hundred twenty-one.