First Chapter
13 September 2031
My name is Gunther, a name given to me by my parents or, more precisely,
by my grandfather, my father's father, whose appreciation and admiration
of German culture were boundless. For him, German culture was the foundation
stone of aesthetic-philosophical and spiritual poetry on the one
hand, and on the other, the powerhouse of industrial enterprise in the
tradition of Mercedes, Telefunken, Bosch and others. In fact, my
grandfather's urge to celebrate German culture was exceeded by his desire
to play down his Lithuanian origin and if possible, to ignore it altogether.
Grandpa, who emigrated to Germany in the early thirties, on completing his medical studies in Warsaw, was well aware of the depth of the gulf between the small-town provincialism of the shtetl where he grew up and the secular reality flourishing in the ivory towers of Berlin and Frankfurt. The Germany of those years was rich in culture and art on the one hand, but on the other was also bruised and wounded, like a boilliable to burst at any moment. Such eruptions led, finally, to the outbreak of the Second World War. Even then Grandpa understood well enough that this enlightened culture, at its best, with all its vitality and qualities, was capable of turning its sword against the web of ideas, ideas of freedom and of liberty, that used to stand by its bedside. Things did indeed turn out this way.
Grandpa, who saw a lofty objective in integration and assimilation among the German people and especially among the shining exponents of German culture, encountered intense and lasting humiliation in Prussia.Educated and astute as he was, he never succeeded in rising in the eyesof his Aryan neighbours above the despised image of the Ost Juden. So it was that in fact he remained a lonely alien throughout his time in Germany.
Grandpa wasn't devoid of understanding of reality, or of dread of the impending Holocaust, not at all. On the contrary, Grandpa was equipped with enviably acute antennae for sensing persecution and chaos. For thisreason he left Germany as early as the mid-thirties. In the late summer of thirty-six Grandpa went to live in Palestine. By one of those ironies of fate, what he failed to do in Germany, you could say, he achieved somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, on the fringes of the East. In Palestine he was seen by his Polish neighbours as a "yekke-putz", a combination of words which fitted him perfectly. As for his reception, soon after his arrival Grandpa found himself connected in some way or another with a closed and exclusive social club of high class émigrés, intellectual refugees from the elite German universities of those years.
Since he attached no particular value to his Jewishness, seeing it as nothing more than a sleeve for the reality into which he had been propelled by an accident of birth, Grandpa spared no effort in the quest to mingle his blood with the blood of a German girl. Grandpa wanted to sink into the arms of a pure Aryan maiden, in so far as it was possible, and the sooner the better. He used to say, "What the hand can't reach by means of brain or cash, can be got between the sheets". In accordance with this principle, Grandpa invested a great deal of physical and intellectual energy in the business of assimilation. Untroubled by inhibitions, he roamed among the isolated German settlements that were scattered around Palestine in those days, expending much sweat in pursuit of white-skinned Aryan girls, from the surviving remnant of the German Diaspora living in the Holy Land on the eve of the outbreak of world war.
Thinking back, from the vantage point of today, I myself can testify and confirm with confidence that Bavarian and Prussian girls have something special, something for which there's no substitute. It could be there's nothing more wonderful than a love-dance between the legs of a healthy and fragrant Aryan chick. There between the sheets the truth becomes blindingly clear. There between the white thighs, rubbing your lust on blond downy hair, you grab a share of the kingdom of the good. Screwing white-skinned women is like capturing the enemy's command-bunker. The Bavarian woman, even when she's taken she's still not available, she's an iron fortress planted in the heart of a spiritual moat and she's pouring down boiling oil from the ramparts. She's impregnable, even when experiencing conquest.
For example, it's said that short men love tall women and yet, there aren't many men who have grown taller as a result of seducing giantesses. So, for all Grandpa's efforts in chasing and even screwing German women, when confronted by his loneliness, before his reflected image in the bathroom mirror, the shame of his circumcision continued to haunt him. For all his clinging to those German blondes, he could never free himself from his degrading Jewish origins. So Grandpa used to slake his lust in the seduction of Aryan women and pour his anger into them too. Those Germans, Kristina, Helga, Frederika, were all apparently available for a brief moment, but the next, they were lost forever. The fact is, Grandpa didn't turn into an Aryan as a result of screwing all those white-thighed "Helgas". He didn't turn into an Aryan, any morethan short men grow taller as a result of grazing in the pastures of out-sized women. Although Grandpa was well aware of this, till his dying day he never ceased longing to be on that wavelength of horny transcendentalism.
When Grandpa had exhausted all his strength in searching, he settled for a compromise, finally marrying a nearly pure Aryan wife. Grandma Gertrud was in fact a German of suspected Jewish extraction, something which Grandpa succeeded in suppressing almost entirely. Despite her total lack of inspiration or sense of humour, Grandma acquired for Grandpa, from his point of view at least, a respectable place in westernised society.
Not content with being a systematic lover of Germans, Grandpa went further and became, in his own way, a hater of Israel, exploiting every opportunity to needle his Jewish neighbours. He particularly enjoyed trampling on Holocaust sensibilities. It was clear to him beyond any doubt that: "There's no business like Shoa business."
Although Grandpa took the view that the Holocaust, in essence, had been a terrible event (after all, of his own family he was himself the only male survivor) he was at pains to point out, incessantly, that the slaughter had to be seen in depth and from a totally different perspective. He believed that the destruction had to be studied from another angle, the German for example. With a kind of morbid energy, he would insist on reminding me, over and over again, of the tired old cliché? that most of the peoples of Europe had been implicated, through some strange compulsion, in the German slaughter effort. Thus my entire childhood was spent in an exercise in suppressing the memory of the Holocaust. To begin with Grandpa would diminish German responsibility by dividing the blame equally among all the peoples of Europe. When he realised that he'd finally worn me down and I was prepared to accept any conclusion expected of me, if only to get a bit of peace, he took to raising, on a regular basis, that shitty key-question. The question that I was already capable of quoting as the occasion demanded. The hackneyed question that had the sole purpose of convincing me that the Jew, whoever he may be, is nothing but "a creature automatically provoking aggression".
"What is it about the Jew that makes everyone want to see him dead?" he used to ask me almost every day. Being an unruly child, I didn't rate my Grandpa highly as a teacher; on the contrary, I saw him as a generous contributor to the decay of my teeth. In practice he used to buy my loyal support in his campaign of Holocaust-suppression with free samples drawn from his illegal trading in golden honey-sweets (a brand no longer in existence).
Although in my infantile company Grandpa's ideas went down well enough, among his neighbours he came a real cropper. When he raised his hackneyed question in his circle of acquaintances, he left behind him a cloud of head shaking, bemusement and scorn. Grandpa used to carry on and on as if driven by obsession until, at a certain stage, his constantly repeated question turned the man himself into a pathetic figure, like the commercialised image of the Holocaust against which he had fought with such determination. In his old age Grandpa became such a pathetic figure that he was left utterly alone. Pathetic figures don't oblige those around them to respond in any way or even take them seriously. So Grandpa gradually turned into a demented herald crying alone into the wilderness.
In Palestine of those years in general, and in Ramat Gan where I was born in particular, much use was made of the pathetic principle as an easy method of evading awkward issues. Whenever a troublesome subject was raised, people would excuse themselves on the grounds that the subject was pathetic, a matter of cliché?s. The idea that sometimes, something as big as the dignity of humanity, or a nation, is nothing more than a pathetic issue absolves those present from any obligation whatsoever. The more that I've examined this question myself, the clearer it's become. Paradoxically, it turns out that the most substantial questions, the issues most urgent in daily life, they of all things sound to our ears like meaningless babble, as irritating as tinnitus.
For example, my darling Lola, God bless her, the woman who has lived with me and comforted me in my old age for a number of years, asks me about six times a day, at fairly regular intervals, if I still love her as much as I used to. I guess there could hardly be a more substantial question in relation to my life and hers, and to this of all questions I'm incapable of putting together a meaningful and interesting answer. I prefer to treat my loved one as a pathetic figure, and this most of all as a means of excusing myself from any in-depth analysis of her question and of her presence, which has become tiresome over the years. Sometimes, when my self-confidence fails me for a while, I feel a sudden stab of fear. Could it be that she's smarter and more subtle in intellectual terms than I ever suspected? Is she asking me if I love her just as a way of giving me a tranquillising drug? Is this her way of turning herself into a dull monotone, freeing herself from my sterile posing? So in fact I carry on living and growing old beside her in a kind of perpetual mutual impenetrability. It turns out that the pathetic principle is a mechanism liable to conceal more than it exposes. That's the way it was with Grandpa: even the big questions that he asked, including the tiresome and repetitive ones, including those going to the very root of life and experience, were left unanswered. So Grandpa became in old age a man despised by his peers, and I was left as his living memorial tablet, walking among people adorned forever with the name of a German aeronautical engineer.