But Alek wasn’t talking about Genia but about his father Abram Ginsberg, who had immigrated, it transpired, to Israel at the end of that summer. “Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much trouble? He’s living with friends now in Kiryat Menachem.” “Yes … of course,” I said still confused, “I’m sure Hagar would be happy to go and see him, it would interest her, I’m sure she’d be happy, but how exactly will she talk to him? Do those friends of his know a bit of Hebrew?” His friends, said Alek, were old and didn’t know a word of Hebrew, and apparently they wouldn’t learn any now, but Abram might remember something. “Where did he learn Hebrew?” I asked, and then he told me his father’s story, or at least the outline that he knew, and it was the most fluent story I had ever heard Alek tell.
Abram Ginsberg was a student at gymnasium, not yet sixteen and already wild and rebellious, when he forged some papers and ran away from Vilna to the Land of Israel. For two years he worked and knocked around here, in the Galilee apparently, before he decided that nothing serious would come of the Zionist experiment and went to join the real revolution in Russia. Others who did the same thing were liquidated or died slowly or quickly in camps and resettlement plans, but Abram survived, it wasn’t clear how, “I didn’t ask questions, and when I did ask I never got answer, I know that for some time he worked as a truck driver, transporting timber in the North, in the taiga, the devil knows.… Up to the war and after he was on the move most of the time.”
Alek was born “in the war, during an evacuation, almost in a railway station,” and when his father returned as an “official hero” he joined his wife, her mother, and their son, and “registered in Sverdlovsk. My mother was studying at university, he studied a little at the Agricultural Institute, but then he left again, after the war he had friends in all kinds of places, and my mother met Genia, who had a room in Moscow.” Alek was five when they moved to Moscow, and he remembered his father mainly from photographs. “He looked like a real Russian, not like me, completely different from me. You can’t tell he’s Jewish.”
Ten o’clock at night, for over two and a half years I hadn’t heard from him, and Alek was giving me the outline of a five-hundred-page novel over the phone, strewn with allusions I couldn’t interpret and full of gaps I had no idea of how to fill in. Dazed by fever and pills, under the threat of chemical missiles which Alek’s concern made me take more seriously — this time I didn’t feel young, healthy, white-toothed, rudely constructive and far from any comprehension of the tragic, as I sometimes felt with him. The history that had devastated other places was coming closer, gathering force as it advanced, and threatening to reach my home.
I told him that I was sick and that when I was better I would go to visit his father. “Sick? What’s wrong with you?” He sounded alarmed. “Nothing serious, just bronchitis and a fever.” “You’re sure it’s not serious?” And when I said yes he said: “In that case, I wish I could feel your fever.” On the other end of the line I heard him light a cigarette, and in the moment of silence that followed, both of our breathing. “Who are the people he’s staying with?” I asked and pulled the telephone under the blanket. “Friends, Yacov Rudin, also a veteran, and his wife Fanny. Perhaps it’s hard for you to write down the number now?” “Tell me what it is, I’ll remember it. Do you know if they’re organized? Have they got gasmasks, plastic sheets for the windows, masking tape? Should we take them something?” “There’s no need, really. These people you don’t have to worry about, believe me. I just thought it might be interesting.” “And how interesting it is.…” I said, dizzy with over sixty years of history, “I’d be interested to hear what your father thinks about the Zionist experiment now.”
More than two and a half years had passed since we last met, and I still saw his smile as clearly as I heard it in his voice. “Warn the little idealist that she’s not going to meet a Zionist activist. I spoke to him on the phone, the most he is prepared to say is that the whole world is in a mess now, and if he already has to die, then better to die in a Jewish mess.” “To die in the Holy Land? Is that the idea?” “What Holy Land? For my mother, yes, even though she’ll never come to Israel, but for him there’s no such concept as a ‘Holy Land,’ why don’t you wait and hear for yourself?”
In the winter of ’89 Alek was eager to go to Berlin, he was very interested in Berlin then, but both the newspapers he was writing for then had their own correspondents there, and in the end, after “we didn’t stop nagging them,” they sent him to Russia, to cover the elections to the Duma and report on what was happening there in general. In the winter of ’89—to his mother Marina’s horror — he went there for the first time, and then twice more, and on his third trip he found his father, which on the face of things should have been difficult in a country without telephone directories, but in fact “wasn’t difficult at all. For years we heard that he was in Sverdlovsk.” Immigrants, it appears, have information channels of their own.
Alek arrived in Sverdlovsk a few months before the city took back its old name, and found that his father had already applied for an exit visa and was “sitting on his suitcases.” Abram Ginsberg landed in Israel on the night after Yom Kippur.
I didn’t ask: “So what was it like meeting him?” or “So what did you talk about?” or “How did you feel?” You don’t ask Alek questions like these, but I promised to talk to Hagar and to go with her to visit him when she came home. For the first time in the history of our long-distance relations Alek gave me a phone number where I could get hold of him in Paris, and said that he would phone again during the week.
Since I had to talk to Hagar, the story wasn’t confidential, and I repeated it to everyone who came to pay me a sick visit and to everyone who phoned, with a strange enjoyment and without boring myself.
A friend of mine who writes for a local paper said that it was “a great story, only it wouldn’t interest anyone, especially not now.”
Tami said: “Be careful, it would be typical of that maniac to dump his father on you to look after.”
My father said on the phone: “Go know who this man is at all and who he served. If Grandma Dora were alive today, maybe she could have told us … a person can go crazy with these characters who’ve suddenly remembered to sign on as Zionists at this stage of the game.” My mother intervened on the other phone and said: “Excuse me, that’s exactly what the State of Israel is for, so that anybody can remember whenever he likes.” And Talush who was sitting on the armchair next to my bed concluded with: “As long as you don’t end up stuck with that old man in a sealed room.”
Hagar was the only one who was truly excited, and she phoned every day from her group in the Negev while I was still sick in bed to ask how I was and if I had succeeded in making contact with Abram yet. A few months before, towards the end of summer, she had changed her name to “Weber,” and the hostility her last meeting with her father had aroused in her seemed to have subsided as a result. Perhaps the act of changing her name calmed her down, perhaps it was only the symbolic conclusion of an ongoing process, I really don’t know. Among the many subjects that we talk about all the time, Hagar keeps her thoughts about Alek mainly to herself, but even so I knew that she was hungry for information about her father, collecting scraps discreetly so as not to alarm me, my parents, and Yoash, and in any case she was already obsessed with “roots” and “identity,” and I know that she shared this obsession with all her friends.
In a certain sense it was a story of missed opportunity, a series of missed opportunities in fact. I phoned the number Alek had given me four or five times, and every time a woman answered in excited Russian, which grew more excited every time I repeated, “Alek Ginsberg … Abram?” With all her heart she wanted to cooperate, but she couldn’t, all she could do was repeat in varying nuances of interrogation and emphasis the two words: “bolnitza” and “bolnoi.” My fever went down but I was still too weak to get into the car and drive to Kiryat Menachem.