Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

I didn’t want my affection for Katya to end up the same way. I didn’t want someone, perhaps years later, to pity us, the way I’m now pitying K and Dora, mourning a lost love. But at least Dora survived. Unlike K’s three younger sisters, Ottla and Valli and Elli, whom the Germans took and had killed in 1942, young Dora Diamant made it to England in time.

I was glad for K when he fell in love, and I rooted for him and Dora. And I cursed her father’s intervention, and even more, her father’s Hasidic rebbe, who forbade the match because K was non observant, even though Dora herself was removed from that world of piety. And I felt sorry for poor K when they parted.

Did Katya intentionally say she was going to be at the marionette shop knowing she wouldn’t be there? Or had she been taking lessons from Karoly Graf? Or had something happened beyond her control — in all fairness, we have to take that into consideration — that prevented her from keeping her promise? I don’t usually let defeat or disappointment stop me. But if she had indeed disappeared, there was nothing I could do.

She wasn’t here; she wasn’t there. And there was nowhere I could look for her. So I had to conclude it was not meant to be, she and me, which rhymes, and sounds better than she and I. Because if it was meant to be, it would already have been. So many missed signals, so many missed opportunities. If it was meant to be, she wouldn’t have vanished so many times. If it was meant to be, someone would have known where to reach her. So many misses hinted that this miss was not for me.

One night I dreamed of Katya. Dreams are like films, with storyline, dialogue, characters, even colors. Except there’s no replay or editing. I dreamt I met her. We’d gone for a walk in a park. Suddenly, she broke away from me and, with a teasing laugh, said, “Try to catch me.” I ran after her. Then she stopped, changed direction with that provocative laugh, and ran away again. I couldn’t catch her. Then a fog, a thick mist, rolled in. She went into it. I followed. The sun burst through. The mist vanished. I looked. She was gone. Gone? Yes. Gone. How gone? Gone gone. Terrified, I woke.

My mother always said a bad dream is just that: a bad dream. Of no significance. What’s bad is spit out in dreams. In real life good remains. Which meant that the opposite would be true. I would catch her. No fog. No mist.

Just sunshine.

Early another morning, I returned to the Altneushul.

The cop greeted me, looked at my camera bag.

“What? In? Sack?”

“Big tefillin.”

“Ah,” he grunted.

I found Yossi golem. He gave me an enthusiastic hello.

“Shalom. So, how are things?”

“Fine. Thanks for the great introduction to Eva and Mr. Klein.”

He smiled, pleased. He looked at my bag.

“Big tefillin, huh?”

I laughed. “Camera.”

The shamesh came over, also looked at my bag.

“Good. I see you brought your camera.” He patted his hair. “We’ll start right after davenning, is that all right?”

“That’s exactly why I came,” I said. “But first I have to interview the first man I met in Prague — Yossi. I’ll be with you in a moment, shamesh.”

Yossi agreed. I was going to tell him I had learned that Mr. Klein was Jiri’s father, but recalling his and the shamesh’s derisive laughter, I kept silent. You poor deluded soul, he would say. You believe that? They’re almost the same age! Shamesh, kum aher! Come here and listen to this! Mr. Klein is Jiri’s father, he says!

Yossi examined the strap of my camera, saw the ring.

“Beautiful ring. Why not on your finger?”

“Because it’s for good luck, not adornment. It’s been there for years.”

“Well, may it bring you much mazel.”

I asked Yossi why he liked this shul, how often he came, his feelings about the place, its mystery, its history. I asked him to bring me an old Siddur from the bookcase and open to the title page. I also asked about his service in the Israel army.

“Who told you?”

“Eva. Just like you told me about her wartime heroism, she told me about yours. None of you speak of yourselves; you only have nice things to say of others.”

“The way it should be.”

I listened to him as he talked. But in truth, I wasn’t so much interested in his answers as his face, his movements. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but art is never fair. It’s selective, egotistical. Later, in the editing process, I would make my commentary on his features, accenting the stiff left side of his face, the golemic part, showing the viewer what a golem must have looked like, with similar lumbering movements and a frozen face. My commentary would override, subdue, maybe even silence, many of Yossi golem’s words. He would be a fitting prelude to the shamesh’s story about the golem and the attic.

At the end of the morning service the shamesh and I sat alone in the synagogue on the bimah. An eerie stillness pervaded. It echoed through the enormous space of the Altneu. I heard the walls stir, the curtain of the Holy Ark rustle, the centuries-old banner up above wave. I told the shamesh I would ask him about his reaction to people requesting to see the golem. He nodded; he understood.

But while the camera was rolling, the old shamesh with the rheumy eyes and red lids, as if he’d had an excess of weeping, this old shamesh fooled me. He didn’t speak about what I wanted him to speak about. Instead, he answered a question I hadn’t asked — but not before he asked me a question I couldn’t answer.

“Do you know how the golem is made to come to life?” the shamesh said, fixing his twinkling, pink-red lidded eyes on me.

I wanted to get to the two points I thought would be most interesting, so I said, “Yes.”

“Good. I’ll review it for you, in case you forgot.”

And as if reading from an invisible manual before him, the shamesh stared straight ahead at the metal music stand that wasn’t there with the unseen notes on how to chant the instructions to vivify the golem.

“And you take the golem you fashioned from the clay and loam on the banks of the river Moldau,” the shamesh chanted from the unwritten staves, “and you open his mouth…”

Here the shamesh closed his eyes like a violin soloist who knows the score by heart and has no need of notes, and he stood and held on to the old shiny wood of the railing of the bimah as if he were addressing a crowd of worshippers or a class of golem makers.

“…and you take the shem written on a tiny piece of kosher parchment,” he continued softly, his eyes pressed shut, “the sort on which the Sh’ma Yisroel is written for a mezuza, the same sort of parchment which if it was bigger you could write a Sefer Torah on it, and you write on this little piece of parchment no bigger than a thumbnail the holy shem , the four letters of the holy name of God, first a yud and then a hey and then a vov and last a hey, and you take this tiny parchment”—the shamesh drew a breath, in and out like a sigh—“now called a shem because it has the shem , or name of God, on it, and you place it under the tongue of the clay and loam golem, and then the clay and loam golem, a shudder runs through him as though he is vibrating, for a special kind of current, the electricity of life, is running through his veins, and then the golem opens his eyes because life has come into him, in other words he lives, with God’s name part of him, now he is alive…”

And I’m filming this extraordinary presentation.

Now the shamesh slowly lay down on the wooden floor of the bimah, much like Leah did in the film The Dybbuk as she died. At first I thought he had collapsed from the spiritual exertion of his narration. But I was mistaken. He was merely demonstrating for me how it would look if he were a vivified golem. Then the shamesh opened his eyes, blinked a few times, looking confused, his milky watery eyes staring straight ahead, and I have this magnificent scene I hadn’t expected to film, in fact, wanted to avoid, because I thought it was extraneous but now realize is central, I have it all on film, including how the shamesh rose, a bit dazed, stretched out his hands before him and walked down the steps of the bimah as if he were a vivified golem taking his first steps in his newfound life. Then the shamesh stopped and turned to me. A shudder went through him and he was himself again and he said: