Attorney Perl gets up to make us some more tea. With his back turned to me he looks small and hunched. His feet still give him the strength to work. His hands tremble slightly, but he carries the tea confidently, cautiously, without spilling a drop. He sits down opposite me with a lucid mind — mercilessly lucid. I thank him, and from some troubled region of my memory I insist on murmuring, “I would still like to find out about Hermann Dunevitz.”
Attorney Perl sighs. “You know, I think that maybe, somehow, with all my cards, you’ve gotten yourself headed in a bad direction. For every dreck like that Hermann Dunevitz or Yehezkel Ingster, there was a wonderful man who did more than you could imagine. Think about Mordecai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw ghetto uprising — what a leader this country could have had if only he hadn’t stayed in a bunker with the last of the insurgents. And think about Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Judenrat. Read about him. Such a wonderful man. And Robert Stricker, who could have used his connections to stay out of Auschwitz, but he insisted on going with his congregation precisely because ‘that was where he was needed.’ You have surely heard of Janusz Korczak. And just think of all the people whose names we don’t even know but who gave morsels of bread to people who had no strength to get to the food because they were pushed away by the strong ones. Think of all the rabbis who did not flee but went with their people to death. Some of them carried Torah books in their hands, to give people courage in the train cars. And the people who sung Hatikvah, the national anthem, on the way to the crematoria. So many were killed in this Shoah — if only I had the courage and the strength to behave as they did. What happened there, in the Shoah, is more complex than what you can derive from my cards. All the educated people who committed acts of betrayal, and the simple Polish peasants who saved lives and were sometimes killed with their whole families because they hid a Jewish child. All the monks who were exterminated because they were caught hiding Jewish children. The people who informed on Jews, the people, even within the SS, who turned a blind eye and gave a prisoner one more chance to live. I told you, there were SS camp commandants who did their jobs without hating Jews. It didn’t stop them from carrying out all their orders, and they killed prisoners to maintain discipline, but they tried to provide the Jews with the calorie quota dictated by their regulations, even during shortages. Then there were the Hanoch Bayskis, the Jews who hurried after hangmen to let them know a victim needed to be hanged again. Complicated, very complicated. Think of the Polish monk, Maximilian Kolbe, who volunteered at Auschwitz to go to his death in place of another prisoner. He knew his punishment would be death by starvation in a locked cellar beneath Cell Block 10, the hut of death. He knew he would lie in a dark hut until he died, but still he volunteered. It turns out that he was an anti-Semite and had published articles against Jews before the war. So what was he, this man? And what do we understand?”
We drink our tea.
But on the way home, Hermann Dunevitz floats to the surface like a strange dream trying to get out. Black markers are scattered through Memorial park. The kaleidoscope of memories is overturned, trying to record something. Upside down, it cannot find rest. On the pillow at night, troubled sleep, the kaleidoscope tries to emit a voice. There is something down there. Something down there.
The next day I ask Grandpa Yosef if he happens to know a Hermann Dunevitz. Grandpa Yosef struggles. His memory digs deep and enquires. Nothing. “Hermann Dunevitz, who is that?” He takes me into his house, although I have only come to pick up Grandpa Lolek’s Vauxhall. It’s Friday, Shabbat is almost here, and everyone has lots to get done. Grandpa Yosef pleads, “Come in, eat something, help me out. My pots and pans are bursting with food already. I don’t know how it happened, the whole house is full of food.” He takes my hand; the Vauxhall can wait, as well as my other errands. He sits me down in the kitchen and serves me plates of food. He chops, slices and waits for my reaction. Last night he insisted the Vauxhall had to go back to Grandpa Lolek’s so it wouldn’t be in the way here in his parking lot. Now the urgency is drowned out in steaming soup on the stovetop, in hot fritters he serves with grated fresh horseradish and ginger on top. “Taste these please.” From the window I can see the edge of the parking lot. How is the Vauxhall in anyone’s way? (Perhaps he wishes to erase all traces of the former tenant before he can host Hans Oderman wholeheartedly.)
Grandpa Yosef rushes off to his pots and in the window between the bushes, crazy Hirsch pops up. Motionless, he watches, looking straight at me. The man from the Lodz ghetto, the beadle of the Admor of Tipow, still dwelling on his question, “Only saints were gassed?” Perhaps he will come right up to the windowsill and scream his impenetrable question, shattering the days of my childhood. Yet the question is becoming clearer and clearer to me — I even have an answer. If he comes up to the window I will simply reply: Regular people were gassed. Righteous and evil people too, but mainly regular people, just like the ones who walk past me on the streets. If they were tossed into a reality of concentration camps, they would quickly settle into their roles — the attempts, the failures, the loss of sanity, the revelation of greatness. Hirsch knew this all along, and he questioned it. Ever since he began to ask in the Lodz ghetto, “Why, why the annihilation?” and to reply, “Because of the diminishment of life,” all the way through the day he began asking his new question in the neighborhood, many thoughts must have passed through his mind, a theological debate beneath a cloak of filth and madness. Perhaps the debate continues still in secret, under cover of insanity. Perhaps he has found his role, to wander an entire lifetime on the path to one single conclusion—the conclusion, the essence of all contemplation.
I look at Hirsch in a new light. Perhaps he truly is the servant of a theological journey. But Hirsch simply disappears, going off to his daily routine in the bushes, and Grandpa Yosef comes back with a dish of sausage and cooked sauerkraut.
“Did you see Mr. Hirsch?” I ask.
Grandpa Yosef is daydreaming, not listening to my question, answering instead a question that was not asked at all. “Hans Oderman will stay with me, of course. He’ll sit here and finish his research.” He waits to see what I think about the dish. “Delicious, isn’t it?”
Delicious.
“The Germans call it ‘Bratwurst mit sauerkraut.’ Except of course, my sausage is kosher!”
I have trouble starting the Vauxhall. It would be better if Green the Mechanic took it to Grandpa Lolek’s, but Grandpa Yosef called me last night urgently, as if the Vauxhall had to disappear at once.
“What’s so urgent?” I angrily ask out loud. It’s not as if Hans is arriving tomorrow. But the Vauxhall comes to Grandpa Yosef’s assistance and wakes up. We can go, no answers needed.
On the way up to the Carmel neighborhood I pass by lights, intersections, a busy Friday coming to life. In the cars I see glum faces calculating lost time, trying to imagine a burst of salvation, a long wave of green lights rushing like a river all the way along their route. I have time. I only have to pick Yariv up from kindergarten at twelve. I need to talk to Grandpa Lolek and find out when he’s planning to have the surgery — the tumor is still there and the doctors have urged him to get it treated.
“He’s waiting for brain surgery to go on sale,” Effi said.
She doesn’t know why the name ‘Hermann Dunevitz’ sounds familiar to me either. I ask her when she comes over to talk with Anat. Anat is trying to recruit her to her army of volunteer women, to help them give out gift baskets to the poor on Purim. They sit talking in the kitchen, and before Effi leaves she comes by my desk.