You have become, señor y maestro mío, most silent. Can it be that you are already gone?
Wait! I want to come too, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah… Why don’t you answer me?…For the love of God, answer me…
‘Twould take but a nod…
‘Tis not as if I need words to understand…
In truth…
Is it self-murder, then?
Yes?… No?…
Biographical
Supplements
AVRAHAM MANI received no answer to his question, nor was there the least movement of the rabbi’s head for him to interpret as a yes or a no; indeed, at this stage of the conversation, even he, as agitated and carried away as he was, had to admit that Rabbi Shabbetai Haddaya, whose judgment he had sought, was dead. There was no way of knowing exactly when the rabbi had breathed his last, and although often, in the years to come, he sought to go over those last minutes in his mind, even staging them there by playing both roles, his own and that of his teacher, he was unable to decide when the moment of death had occurred. In any event, he remembered well his desperate, bizarre, and persistent attempts to resuscitate the rabbi, which were accompanied by loud, angry bangs on the locked door that was finally broken in. Once a local doctor was fetched and the rabbi’s death officially announced, a great wave of emotion swept over the Jews of Athens. While Rabbi Haddaya’s death had been more or less expected, those ministering to him, and especially Dona Flora, felt no sense of relief, for during the forty days they had been tending him they somehow had come to believe that he might remain as he was for many years. Naturally, an accusing finger was pointed at Avraham Mani, who served as the target of angry words and hostile looks, it being felt that his stubborn insistence on remaining by the bedside, where he cried and behaved unrestrainedly, had brought on the old man’s death. Avraham Mani himself, however, was too absorbed in his own private mourning to be perturbed by these accusations, and especially, in the dilemma that continued to haunt him of whether or not to take his life and of the effect such an action might have on his share in the World to Come.
Be that as it may, though, Avraham Mani made himself a central figure at the funeral and during the week of mourning that followed. Although he was not a blood relation of the departed, he slashed his clothing, said the mourner’s prayer by the grave in a loud, ceremonious voice, and spent the week of mourning sitting on a cushion at Madame Flora’s feet as though he were a member of the family. He seemed to enjoy the many condolence calls, which included visits by Greek and Turkish religious and political dignitaries who came all the way from Salonika and Constantinople, and — since he was the only one present to have known the deceased from as far back as the Napoleonic wars in Russia — he dominated the conversation with his stories and anecdotes about Rabbi Haddaya.
Following the first month-day of the death, when Dona Flora began to pack her things, Avraham Mani considered proposing marriage to her, both as a way of “doing what the old man had always wanted,” as he thought of putting it to her, and of making up for his original rejection. In the end, however, Dona Flora was so chillingly aloof toward him that he dared not even hint at the matter. She, for her part, apprehensive that he would follow her to Constantinople, decided at the last minute to set out for Palestine and visit her niece and her niece’s baby, whom Mani’s stories had made her greatly desirous of seeing.
Fearful that the secret of his paternity might be revealed and place him in an impossible position in Jerusalem, Avraham Mani did not follow her there. Reluctantly, he returned to Salonika and to his daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons, still preoccupied with the thought of suicide and with various possibilities of carrying it out. Meanwhile, he comported himself as a mourner and went from synagogue to synagogue to tell of the rabbi’s death. He especially liked to mount the podium on the Sabbath when the Torah scrolls were being taken out of the Holy Ark, give the prayer book a loud clap that brought the congregation to its feet, and compel the cantor to sing the special requiem for distinguished souls, which begins with the verses: “Whence then cometh wisdom, and where is the place of understanding? Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. Oh, how great is Thy goodness that Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou has wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men.”
Yet not even these dramatic ceremonies were able to soothe his soul or to give it respite from the question of whether to take his life for his sin. In the end, he decided to wander in the footsteps of his master, seeking, in his words, “to fulfil his unfulfilled disappearance.” In 1853 he set out for Damascus, from where he sent a brief missive to his five-year-old son-grandson with a conacero he had written himself, which was full of obscure allusions. But he found no peace in Damascus either, and after the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, he journeyed onward to Mesopotamia until he reached the region where his grandfather had been born. The last known Jews he lived among, word from whom eventually got back to his daughter and son-in-law in Salonika, were those of a small town called Dahaman, near Midshakar, an ancient port that had been silted in over time and was now no longer near the sea. Avraham Mani served as a rabbi-cantor there and died — from natural causes, it would seem — in 1860, the year of Herzl’s birth, or in 1861, the year of the start of the American Civil War. He was sixty-one or sixty-two at the time.
FLORA MOLKHO-HADDAYA was deeply shocked by the death of her husband Rabbi Haddaya. Despite his paralyzing stroke, his loss of speech, and the difficulties imposed by their extended stay in an inn in Athens, the childless Dona Flora derived a special pleasure from caring for her distinguished invalid of a husband, who had become, as Avraham Mani accurately put it, “a venerable babe.” When she and the Greek servant broke down the locked door and found Mani cavorting around the rabbi’s dead body, she burst into uncontrollable tears and screams and fell upon Mani in a fury. She quickly got a grip on herself, however, and retained her aristocratic bearing through the period of mourning, even behaving with restraint toward Mani himself out of respect for her late husband. As soon as the month-day ceremony was over, though, she resolved to have no more to do with him and set out for Palestine in order to visit her niece Tamara and Tamara’s baby boy.
Doña Flora arrived in Jerusalem in the spring of 1849 after having been away from the city for eighteen years, and was received with great warmth and honor. She moved into her parents’ old apartment, in which she was given back her childhood bed, and became little Moshe’s “second grandmother,” as he called her. The British consul and his wife, who had recently inaugurated the new Christ’s Church in a lavish ceremony, were quick to see that the distinguished doña, “Yosefs aunt,” had much to recommend her and grew to be very fond of her. They even invited her to a soirée of the Jerusalem Bibliophile Society for a discussion of the newly published novel David Copperfield, although her English was all but nonexistent.
Tamara, of course, did not reveal to her aunt the true identity of her son’s father, and Doña Flora felt happy to be back in her native city and country. She even consulted several of her acquaintances about the possibility of transferring her late husband’s remains from Athens to Jerusalem and publicly reburying them on the Mount of Olives. But in 1853, during the Crimean War, a letter written by Avraham Mani arrived from Damascus with a poem for his grandson that contained several oddly phrased hints that Mani might soon come to Jerusalem. Tamara was gripped by great anxiety and emotion, and after much soul-searching and many excruciating nights of insomnia, she broke down and confided her secret to her beloved aunt. Doña Flora was horrified. Although at first she seemed to make her peace with her niece’s confession, she gradually developed a strange revulsion for her surroundings, including Jerusalem and Palestine themselves. In 1855, following an earthquake in the city and riots between Greeks and Armenians in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and after taking part in the dedication of a new trade school for Jews established by the British consul in an uninhabited area outside the walled city that would one day become the neighbor of Abraham’s Vineyard, she left Jerusalem for Alexandria, where her late father Ya’akov Molkho had cousins. She settled down there, lapsed into a prolonged melancholia, and died in Egypt in 1863 at the age of sixty-three.