The following Saturday, when Mom suggested a visit to Grandpa Yosef, I asked instead to go hiking in the Jezreel Valley. (In class we had learned about Hankin, the Zionist who had redeemed lands in the valley). Effi, at home, used the flu.
We began to withdraw from the neighborhood, from Grandpa Yosef. We abandoned the Shoah. We were repelled by something. Levertov’s betrayal was the seed of something greater, and it only grew larger and darker, with onion-like layers. We gave ourselves up to maturity.
We were fourteen when Levertov betrayed us. After that, we were seduced by a new world. With Tal Brody, we led Maccabi Tel Aviv to victory in the European Cup Championship. With Yizhar Cohen, we won the Eurovision Song Contest. The world glowed with lights of victory and we lapped them up. It was the start of our years of Imaginary Purposefulness. Growing up. Aspiring to things that were bigger, less alive. We allowed ourselves to be painted with the right colors, to assimilate, to blend in. The instructions were precise and we followed them, no questions asked. And whatever we didn’t do, our bodies rushed to achieve on their own, treacherously, with an apologetic grin but pleased with the changes.
We were dropped off on an unfamiliar platform. Adolescence.
Things happened.
Occurrences.
But only to us.
Around us, stagnation. The years passed by. In the family, everything stayed as it was. Grandpa Yosef’s neighborhood remained unchanged. The people we knew added twenty years on to their ages, years swallowed up like pills taken and forgotten. For them the years were pushed into drawers, closets, lives with secret bottoms. Things stopped changing. A spell brought it all to a standstill and let us run ahead and grow up. Blindly, we ran.
There was Rachela Kempler, every day before dawn in her window. Opposite her, with drawn blinds, was mad Itcha Dinitz. Linow Community, Sarkow Community, swayed slightly more as they walked with their baskets of vegetables. In season, the bombax bloomed. The bauhinia. The poinciana. Katznelson, calm as always, flowed in numbers and letters. A frozen world where nothing changed. Not even Eva Lanczer. Twenty years have passed since they took her away and she still lies in a hospital bed all in white. Eliyahu goes to visit her. Wondrously, she still embroiders strange and beautiful things for him to sell. All those years she spent resting, we devoted to growing up. The people around us grew older, sicker, much the same as always, determined to go on without aging, as if the secret of longevity was unhappiness. Avoid happiness and you have as good as avoided dampness, wetness, any danger to your health.
The family stuck to itself and clenched its teeth against change. Nothing could happen. When someone died, everyone rushed to the funeral and huddled around the muddy grave with wintry umbrellas, or sweltered in midday in a desert of white gravestones — just as long as we huddled around the plot, piled up the dirt to stop a hole in the ship.
Grandpa Shalom died in 1980. Effi’s camera captured Aunt Ecka for the final time. We had her face as a souvenir, next to a table spread with whipped cream and desserts. Uncle Tulek also died (finally, the African statuette could be removed from the living room). In the unknown distances at the edges of the family with-whom-we-never-met, people died. But the bonbons still arrived at the holidays. People died, but the bonbons could not be stopped, they were like a herd of buffalo galloping by on the holidays, kicking up dust. Every year a Passover Seder managed to somehow be arranged. We managed to meet at the dinner table. If we had photographed ourselves and sent the picture to a lab, the report would have come back and certified: this is a family.
The family friends did not abandon us either. Attorney Perl was still in his store. Now he had two assistants, both named Yakov, but only he went up the ladder. A ninety-year-old Spiderman in 1990. And it wasn’t only Dad sitting with him in the backroom — I started to sit there too. The years brought Attorney Perl and myself together in an unexpected way. At the age of fifteen I tried my hand at a woodworking course held near his store. I wanted to drop the course almost immediately, but the teacher was a friend of Dad’s from the army reserves and lots of warm regards were exchanged between them. I stuck it out for more than a year, fulfilling my messenger duties, and built a wooden menorah, a bookshelf, a wine rack, and a model airplane. My consolation was that I could go into Attorney Perl’s store on my own, without Dad, as a grownup. Attorney Perl welcomed me into the little back room, the mirror room, where he made me tea, told me about his late spouse, about the Nuremberg Trials that had put an end to all hope, and about Eichmann, who was put to death just like that, without us knowing his thoughts.
I kept going to see him even after squirming my way out of the woodworking course, sometimes before seeing a movie in town, sometimes for no reason. During my army service, too. I was welcomed respectfully, pleasantly, with a cup of tea that suspended all commerce. He ordered his assistant, “Yakov, mind the store for a while,” and took me to the back room, the mirror reflection of his store. Every visit opened with a short discussion of my military service. A meeting of the special staff. “How’s it going at your Lager?” Attorney Perl would enquire. They have their own words. Camp, with them, is Lager. A pass is a Certifikat. Even here in Israel, after years of independence. But they do have Hebrew words. Even those who speak only broken Hebrew acquire essential words. A draft, for example. They must have stepped off the boat and enquired, “How do you say in Hebrew when the windows are not sealed properly? A draft?” And that was it. Absorption in Israel.
Attorney Perl did not allow the Holocaust to disappear. He regretted the Nazi criminals who had been hanged before we could understand their thoughts, and he regretted those who were not hanged at all and whom the world had found swift ways to forgive. His memory catalogued hundreds of names of war criminals, their deeds, their verdicts. His map of the world included every country that had taken in Nazis after the war, every country that had served as a means of transit, every country whose agents had assisted the criminals in their escapes. In the air of the little room among the shadows of tea, he made long lists, calmly, meticulously.
— Martin Sandberger. Sentenced to death during the Einsatzgruppen Case for having engaged in mass extermination of Jews in occupied territories. Set free as early as 1953.
— Dr. Carl Clauberg, “the sterilizing doctor.” Conducted horrific experiments on Jewish and Gypsy women in order to improve methods for quick sterilization. His lethal experiments were carried out in a special hut at Auschwitz. Released in 1955 from a Russian prison and transferred to Germany. No legal proceedings were initiated against him there, and only under pressure from the Jewish communities did an investigation begin. Preparations for his trial were cut short due to his death.
— Dr. Wilhelm Beiglböck. Conducted human experiments designed to ascertain whether man could subsist on seawater, and concluded that he could not. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 1947 but set free in 1951.
— Dr. Karl Genzken, physician. A typhus ‘researcher’ who killed hundreds of prisoners in his experiments at Buchenwald camp. Sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was reduced to twenty years and he was released to live in freedom in 1954.