I have a decent pension as a war veteran, an invalid, and so on, and a good apartment. My daughter comes once a week, and I don’t need more. I will say frankly that first I had women courting me, one, two, three, but then I asked myself what I needed that for. I had a nurse from Holon and she came to me in that connection, even while Zhuzha was still alive. So I had no need of anything.
Dear and respected Esther, I like you so much that I immediately decided to get married. I will soon be 80, it is true, but as much as we have left we could live life together. Think about it carefully, but not for too long. However you look at it, we don’t have much time left to think about things, although my grandfather died at the age of 103. What else can I say about my faults? I am a bit hard of hearing. That’s all. You would suit me very well. I will tell you truthfully, I like you very much. We have a shared past, you were also in Puszcza at that time. If you like, you could just come to visit first. I will meet you at the airport with a taxi.
Write to me at the address on the envelope.
I await your positive reply,
Naphtali Lejzerowicz.
Oh, I forgot to say also that I have five grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.
34. 1994, Be’er Sheva
L
ETTER FROM
T
ERESA TO
V
ALENTINA
F
ERDINANDOVNA
Dear Valentina,
This will be the last letter, I think, before you leave. Phone so that we can meet you at the airport. Our whole family is preparing for your arrival. I think Sosik is fully aware that we are looking forward to you and is excited, too. He is an exceptionally sensitive creature with unerring reactions. You only have to be able to decipher them. Both Efim and I read all his impulses like an open book. He plays marbles for hours at a time. He has favorite ones and unfavorite ones and he endows them with different qualities. When something disturbs him or he is not pleased, he brings a yellowy-pink pebble which is misshapen and puts it very delicately in your hand. A black pebble with a white belt is a stone for something which has turned out well, and it is a particularly good sign when Sosik puts it in his mouth. Altogether his behavior reveals an amazing connection between the spiritual world and the world of nature. He is an ideal mediator between different forces and can pacify all around him. Literally a few days ago a young family looked in on us, parishioners of Efim, and they were having a terrible quarrel. Efim instructed them for one and a half hours but things only got worse. Then Sosik came and immediately reconciled them. He said some word or other. I need to warn you, dear Valentina, that what you will see is unusual. Our boy speaks but people cannot understand his language. He speaks the language of the angels. He utters some words we do not know over a withered flower and a few days later the flower revives. There is an amazing aura emanating from the child but he hardly says anything in human language, although he can say “Mama,” “Papa,” and “me.”
He can walk but his movements are not very smooth. The doctors think he should do exercises but he doesn’t like that. From the day he was born we decided to raise him without compulsion and not to force him to do anything he found difficult or did not want to do. For the same reason we do not take him to a special school for children with Down’s syndrome, to be taught by pedagogues and psychologists. It is difficult for us to explain to the doctors that he is a higher being, and not disabled.
I am writing in so much detail to prepare you a little for meeting him. There is so much in this child that is enigmatic, mysterious, and hidden, not yet revealed, that Efim and I keep the knowledge to ourselves and do not share it with anyone. We can see from the reaction of many people that his special chosen status is evident not only to us. The sense of reverence which our boy evokes in us, his parents, is something you will of course be able to share.
Dear Valentina, I do not want to burden you with requests but, please, the only thing I would ask for is cassettes with children’s songs. In Russia there were so many wonderful cartoons which we cannot get hold of here. We don’t have a video player and Efim doesn’t consider it appropriate to bring a television into the house, in which I fully agree with him, but it would be good to give Sosik the opportunity of hearing children’s music and songs. It seems to me that he understands Russian far better than Hebrew. I have to admit that I communicate with him on an extra-lingual level which is difficult for me to define, but you will immediately feel it as soon as you meet him.
Efim has arranged with a nun we know, who lives in the Old Town, to find you a place in her convent for a few days so that you can live in that incomparable atmosphere.
Efim and I have devised a whole program of trips. One of them, to the Dead Sea, we will take as a family, together with Sosik. He very much likes bathing in the Dead Sea and the doctors say that salt has a beneficial effect on relaxed muscles.
I’m simply burning with impatience to see you as soon as possible, dear Valentina.
With love,
Teresa
35. 1994, Moscow
L
ETTER FROM
V
ALENTINA
F
ERDINANDOVNA TO
T
ERESA AND
E
FIM
Dearest Teresa, Dear Efim,
I could not write a letter to you immediately because I was so overflowing with impressions. It is impossible to convey over the telephone even the hundredth part of my gratitude to you and to fate which gave me the good fortune this late in life to visit the Holy Land. Two weeks were a single drop of time and flew past like two minutes. Now I am going through my impressions and notes and trying to articulate what exactly it was that most impressed me, apart from seeing you in your home, which I will come to.
Perhaps the most amazing discovery for me was the enormous diversity of the Christian trends in Israel. Theoretically I, who all my life have been translating Christian literature for samizdat and only in recent years have seen my translations brought out by official publishing houses, on good paper and with my name as the translator, should have been well acquainted with the diversity of opinion which exists on any theological question. But it was truly during these two weeks that I saw for myself the diversity of Christians—Greeks, Copts, Ethiopians, Italians, and Latin Americans, messianic churches, Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals. The history of all the splits and schisms came to life. There are neither conquerors nor conquered, the Monophysite and the Aryan, the Pharisee and the Sadducee coexist in the same time and space.
I am full of joy and perplexity. What puzzles me most of all is the fact that all this fire-breathing diversity is situated in the heart of active and self-sufficient Judaism, which appears not to notice the immense Christian world. Furthermore, all this is embedded in the domain of Islam, for which Israel is also one of the centers of life and faith. These three worlds appear to exist in the same space but almost without intersecting.
I stood through the long liturgy which Efim conducted, and then drove to Haifa to Daniel, and his Mass had nothing in common with the service conducted by Father Efim. Incidentally, in the small room on the table I forgot two sheets with the text of the liturgy which Father Daniel conducted. It was a beautiful, joyous, and very meaningful service which all fitted into half an hour, and I did not find half the prayers which are recited at Mass. Even the Creed was missing!
What a lot of food for thought! Here in Moscow I have always been considered too emancipated. Many members of the Orthodox clergy have told me that I am infected with the “Latin heresy,” and I have gone to great efforts to return the cultural dimension to the stagnant medium by the only means available to me, my new translations into Russian of the texts of the New Testament. In this I saw an opportunity of serving church unity. At least, that was my intention. My situation as you know is unusual. As a child I was baptized by a Russian grandmother into the Orthodox Church, I was brought up by a Lithuanian aunt, a Catholic, and so my whole life I have stood at this crossroads and, coming closer to the Dominicans who support my translation work, I am realizing the ecumenical idea. It is not I who chose this, but destiny ordained this place for me.