Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Or an alphabetical list of the murdered: Golobibsky-Haim Austoroy, fortyfive years old, his son Jacob, seventeen years old, or in one town: Klibanov,
Elijah, seventy-one years old, along with his wife Hayke. Israel Zvi
Goldenberg, forty-five years old, Israel David Klayman, fifty-five years
old, murdered along with his two sons-in-law, Isaac and Samuel ... And
then: Hanna Gradover, Simha Feinstein, his son Nahman. Lev Austoroy,
his wife Sareke, his daughter Rebecca and his son Elijah. Abraham
Lapolski, Moshe Kalike, Yosef Krayz, Leah, daughter of Arye Hoykhman.
Her husband Yanek and her four children (their names are erased from the
tape), Isaac Posman, Meir ben Arye, Parties Hadash ... Joseph Joffe ...
Benjamin ben Elijah ... Toni daughter of Haim Serberiazsek, Pisanoy
Baruch Beamer ...
The number of killed in those towns and villages (only to the letter C)
amounts to two thousand one hundred.
The lists of Jewish communities we found at Yad Vashem and other
institutions include some of the names mentioned by Ebenezer. We discovered that all the names that appear on tombstones or in lists, in books, in the
scrolls of slaughter, also appear in Ebenezer's recital, but there are many names he
recites that have no alternative indication.
In one town-fortunately for us, the register of its Jewish community
has remained intact-were names of all the Jews who had lived there.
Ebenezer recited all their names. After this timing and what was said
above, it is clear to us that what he knows, he knew precisely. And there
are things only he knows or that we cannot know more than what he
knows. Meanwhile, of course ...
What made the research even more difficult is the disorder of the knowledge or the illogic in the logic of memory. For some time, we entertained the
idea that there was a logic unknown to us in this illogic, but that remained
an intellectual amusement. You do know that his encyclopedic knowledge is
not systematic at all; books in five or six languages, the Bible, and suddenly
brilliant lies about astrophysics (made up by a mad genius), a long solid
study refuting Einstein's theory, an atomic structure of the world according
to the order of the letters in the Book of Genesis, annals of the world according to a person named Pumishankovitch who argues that God was created
after the world and the Torah of the Jews is nothing but an attempt to combine the annals of nature with the annals of antinature, a book about the
world as a fallen planet in a system of stars that were extinguished long ago,
a rather bold theory about the influence of the battle of Albania on technological development. A hundred and fifty pages of The Jewish Wars by
Josephus Flavius in reverse order, books of mythology describing unknown
myths documented with knowledge and skill, even though they're apparently fakes. Books of religion and science, journals of three people who tried
to measure their love for one another by writing hasty lines in the depths of
the earth until they passed out, the stories of Kafka, stories of the Hasids,
journeys of the emissaries of the Land of Israel to future generations of the
eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century, family trees going back
to the first generation, calculations of the end of days according to the books
of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Nostradamus, and documents of wars, mathematical
theories, the poetry of Homer, the poetry of Virgil, Dante, and other writers
I attach in a separate appendix.
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.
Yours truly,
Alexander Twiggy Henderson Levy
Tape / -
Got to bring Henkin the poem, thinks Boaz.
Thinking poem.
Menahem poem.
Boaz remembered how they brought Menahem Henkin to the school
gym. The commander looked at the three corpses and said: So Henkin got
a summons? And he wrote: Menahem Henkin, Palmah, Harel, the fourth
brigade, headquarters company, to inform the parents, Deliverance Street,
Tel Aviv.
Fuck it, he said, soon I won't have any live soldiers left! From Tel Aviv,
a soldier went to inform the Henkin family that their son had fallen. Boaz lay
under a tree and smoked. Years later, he would part from Teacher Henkin
on Ben-Yehuda Street. The sky is blue and the clouds float quickly. The
vendor of German books crossed the street and walked past Hayarkon
Street. Boaz started walking to the central bus station, stood in line,
boarded the bus and fell asleep. An hour later, he came to the settlement, it was afternoon. Rebecca expected him as always. She didn't measure, she
didn't complain, she didn't pressure, she sat at the screened window and
waited. For some years now, Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg had been
living in Ebenezer's old house. The house is rented to him with a lease
renewed every year. If Boaz wants to live here someday, he'll have someplace to live, said the old woman.
A month after Ebenezer disappeared and boarded the ship that took
him to Europe, Rebecca Schneerson went to the offices of the National
Committee in Jerusalem. She asked to speak with the head of the committee. They told her that the head of the committee was abroad on a mission.
She said she wanted to adopt her grandson as her son. She was told that
wasn't possible. Rebecca tried the chief rabbinate and the various district
offices and deigned to meet with people whose existence she once
wouldn't have been willing to admit. The Captain's connections with the
British Mandate authorities weren't any help either. A grandmother can
adopt her grandson, she was told, but to state explicitly and officially that
Boaz is Rebecca's son by birth was not possible. She wrote a long letter
explaining her request. According to her, there was no proof that the person called his mother did indeed give birth to him. In another letter, she
claimed that Boaz was her son from a marriage she had never disclosed. She
quoted a well-known and reliable Russian newspaper that told of a woman
who got pregnant in eighteen twenty-one, while her son was born thirtytwo years later. But even this quotation, which, after a visit from the Captain, was authenticated by three old Russians in the Russian Compound in
Jerusalem, didn't make the required impact. When serious arguments were
raised against a retrospective pregnancy, she deigned with the courtesy of
a desperate woman to refrain from hearing the explanations and whispered
to the Captain: They always were and still are fools. Later on, she'll tell
Boaz: I was impregnated by a river. Don't turn up your aristocratic nose,
even a distinguished mother like me sometimes gets pregnant, the river
lusted for me and I for him, all your life you've seen streams, what do you
know about a river. Do you know that the Americans bought the Dnieper
and transported it to America? And Boaz said: You find a way to say
America every chance you get. How do you transport a river? He was ten
years old then and she was his mother.