“That’s him.”
“Is there anything you can tell me or that you want to tell me?” I asked as kindly as I could manage.
“I couldn’t talk before, when you saw me in town, you understand?”
“I’m beginning to,” I said.
“That Rosen guy was one of them Yellow Stars. His prescriptions used to come into the pharmacy. Most of the time one of the others would pick them up for him, but once or twice he came in for them by himself.”
“How long ago was this, would you say?”
“Two, maybe three years ago. Listen, I don’t know anything else. I hope this helps you.”
“Thank—”
He hung up before I could finish thanking him. Joe might have been an excellent pharmacist, but his espionage skills needed a little fine-tuning. He hadn’t exactly done the best job of covering his identity. It was of little consequence, because for the first time I actually had a tangible place to start. And the less-than-mysterious Joe had confirmed something both R. B. Carter and Hammerling had alluded to: something had happened two or three years ago to reinvigorate Arthur Rosen’s search for the cause of his sister’s death. Somehow I doubted his membership in the Yellow Stars was completely coincidental. I decided I had an appointment for 7:00 P.M. the following day at 29 Short Mountain Road.
Now there was only one thing preventing me from sleep. My bladder suddenly had a mind of its own, and I was going to pee whether I liked it or not. I didn’t, because instead of the mundane yellow I’d grown accustomed to over the first three decades-plus of my life, a burning stream of pink and red poured out of me. Getting thumped in the kidneys will do that to you. I’d deal with Bailey in my own way on my own schedule. For the moment, that was third or fourth on my to-do list.
Chapter Eleven
December 4th
I kept my breakfast appointment with Sam. Unlike the last time we ate together, we sat in the dining room, completely unfettered by the presence of other guests. The silence was both peaceful and unsettling. We had spinach-and-cheddar omelets, home-fried potatoes, and copious amounts of bacon. It had all the trappings of a condemned man’s last meal.
Sam was curious about why I’d walked into his hotel the night before looking like something the cat would be too afraid to drag in. He tried several indirect questions and a few direct ones, and, in the end, resorted to guessing. It got him nowhere, but I enjoyed watching him try. He was an entertaining fellow even offstage. With a promise to see him later, I excused myself and went back upstairs.
Earlier, I’d been afraid to took at my back. Now, with some bad coffee and enough cholesterol in me to clog a three-quarter-inch pipe, I peeled up my shirt, lowered my pants, and stood before the wardrobe mirror. What last night had been a couple of fist-sized bruises had spread into nearly convergent purple patches covering a good portion of my lower back. The damage appeared worse than it felt. There was pain, but it was duller, less urgent than when I was flat on the cold, damp pavement. The color of my urine was still unnaturally pink. Less so, however, than when I’d gotten up.
Last night’s sleep had been exceedingly uncomfortable. I pulled the shades and settled into bed with a copy of yesterday’s
Catskill Tribune. I didn’t have anywhere to be until the evening, so I tried letting the news of the day be my lullaby. As I read through the pages, I finally recognized one of the comforts of living outside New York City. Not all the world bordered on insanity. There were actually parts of the world that functioned without a constant stream of bodies and chaos to feed the machine. It was no wonder that the Fir Grove fire would have had such a profound impact on a place where the big stories of the day involved jackknifed tractor trailers carrying mixed poultry.
I had reached well into the paper, to the pages with recipes for green-bean salads and charity bake-sales announcements, before I began drifting off. As I did, a voice inside my brain told me to snap out of it and pay more careful attention. My body shut down on its own even before I could decide to ignore the voice.
It was about 5:00 P.M. when, with paper clamped between my chin and chest, I opened my eyes. After washing the newsprint off my neck and dunking my head in a sinkful of chilly water, I felt a whole lot better than I had in the morning. Sleep, however, hadn’t completely muffled that voice in my head. I went back and studied the green-bean page. Alas, my perspiration and drool had rendered some of the print unreadable, but there really was nothing to see. The little voice was finally quiet.
Before heading up to the Yellow Stars, I decided to try and organize what I knew or thought I knew into a scheme in which the pieces might hang loosely together. First, I drew a time line dating back to just before the fire. On that time line, I filled in names and events. Second, I wrote out the names of everyone even remotely connected to my so-called investigation. Even people on the periphery, like Molly and Sally, were included. I ripped out the names into little squares and tried making an organizational chart, matching names with other names. It was difficult to know if it did me any good. Some of the players knew almost none of the others, whereas some knew almost everyone else. And what I couldn’t see at all was who had the most to gain by Anton Harder’s being presented to the authorities on my silver platter. I guess the fault lay in me. I just didn’t know any of the players well enough to see things any of them might have seen if they knew what I knew. I went downstairs for dinner.
There were maybe three or four people in the dining room besides myself, each of us at a separate table. None of us moved to join the others. No one wanted to pretend the scene was anything but sad. Although I knew he was gone, I found myself looking for Mr. Roth. I remembered his gift beneath my bed upstairs. The scotch would have to age a bit longer. Until my kidneys were running properly, I wasn’t about to put any alcohol into my system. Sam was nowhere to be found. That was fine. I didn’t want to evade any more of his questions.
I found 29 Short Mountain Road where Molly had said it would be: distressingly close to the grounds of the old Fir Grove and Anton Harder’s band of angry misfits. The appearance of the old bungalow colony hadn’t been much changed by its new proprietors. It looked about like every other bungalow colony I’d ever seen. There were fifteen or twenty small cabins in a semicircle around two larger buildings shaped like old Indian longhouses. There was nothing sinister or cultish about the place, not a vat of Kool-Aid or a machine gun to be seen. The worst I could say about it was that it was rather dark. But for a few bulbs outside one of the longhouses, there wasn’t a light to be seen anywhere. I parked my car next to the four or five others in the communal lot. I checked my watch: six-fifty-seven. Tick, tick, tick …
Since there were no signs or arrows pointing the way, I followed the light. I let myself into the longhouse. The innards were rustic as all hell. There were hand-hewed beams and log walls, a stone fireplace—a crackling fire burning in its maw—and an icy-cold flagstone floor. It was fairly dark inside: the faux gas-lamp fixtures held low-wattage bulbs. Three rows of folding chairs, seven chairs to a row, were laid out facing the fireplace. A rostrum built of tree limbs and twigs stood between the seating and the fireplace. Six people, four men and two women, turned to face me as the door creaked shut at my back.
There were other people in the room, though their presence was purposefully less obvious. In the shadows of each corner stood one of the Yellow Stars, all of them dressed in thrift-shop clothes with the now familiar yellow star sewn onto their left breasts. Three were men of different ages, and one was a woman about my age. Suddenly it dawned on me that my experience of the Holocaust was black and white, that it was odorless, without taste, that my experience was dry like the pages of an old history book. Yes, I knew many survivors, but I knew them only as my friends’ parents or, like Mr. Roth, as old men. At that moment it occurred to me I did not know them, not really, not at all.
The Holocaust, it struck me, was as real as the moment I was living in. There was no soundtrack, no velvety-voiced narrator to rationalize the i
nsanity in a neat sixty-minute segment. The real Holocaust was in color. It smelled of gas and burning flesh and hair. Actual people died. Those lifeless skeletons stacked like bait fish had once been human beings with dreams and feelings and destinies. They would no longer be pieces of film for me, forgettable or dismissable, like a boring movie. I was very angry and very weak. My head and heart were both leaden and light. I dragged myself to a seat in the third row.
A dim spotlight shone on the rostrum, and a man dressed not unlike the other Yellow Stars stepped behind the podium. Backlit by the dancing flames of the fireplace, his face was difficult to focus on. Yet he made eye contact with each of us in the small audience. His eyes were a burning deep blue that seemed to look through mine into the mass of conflict raging in my heart and head.
“My name is Judas, Judas Wannsee. You do not know me, but I know you, all about you, every one of you. We, the people who met you on the street, those standing in the corners, the others and myself, have no name. People call us the Yellow Stars for obvious reasons, but we are nothing but Jews. This is not a cult. We don’t want your money. We don’t ask for loyalty. We don’t even want your respect. All of us here come and go as we please. We exist for you, and if you decide to follow our teachings, you will be here for the others who find their way to us. You cannot save a people all at once. You must save them one at a time. We will talk of this later.
“First, let us begin with humor. Appropriate, don’t you think, given our locale? There is an elderly Jewish man, frustrated by what he’s had to endure in his life. He looks to the skies, throws up his hands, and says: ‘Dear God, the next time You’re searching for a chosen people, do me a favor. Choose somebody else.’ “
The seven of us in the folding chairs seemed finally to exhale and laugh, looking at one another for the first time. Judas Wannsee paused, letting us enjoy the moment of release. As he did, he smiled. It was a strange smile—superior and sad all at once.
“Yes,” he continued. “That man was exactly right, wasn’t he? Who needs the burden, the baggage we all carry just for being born Jews? God, wouldn’t the world have been an easier place to live in if every time there was an oil shortage we wouldn’t have to deal with those witty bumper stickers that say ‘Burn Jews Not Oil’? Can you imagine the relief of reading a newspaper or watching television without praying that the murderer or thief or assassin wasn’t a Jew? Okay, if the victim is a Jew, we can live with that. But God forbid the perpetrator of a crime is a Jew. We are all tarred by his crime. Wouldn’t it once be a joy to un-self-consciously wear a cross around your neck? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not have to worry about how others might react to a star or a chai? Sometimes, admit it, you think you’d almost float if you were relieved of the burden of your Jewishness. So—wasn’t that old man exactly right?
“No! No! No!” Wannsee pounded his fist on the rostrum so fiercely I thought the twigs and branches might snap. “He was exactly wrong. You can never escape your fate, and the romance of the myth that you can is why you are sitting here this evening. It is the reason even if you are not yet fully aware of it. You have been tormented all your lives, mostly tormented by yourselves, by the dream of escape. But I am here to tell you that this torment can end, that it will end, and that you are not and have never been truly responsible for it.”
Another spotlight came up. This one shone on an American flag hung on the wall over Judas Wannsee’s left shoulder.
“There are a thousand things, a million things I love about this country. I fought for that flag in the rice paddies of Vietnam. I would do it again tomorrow. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights are both brilliant documents, maybe the most brilliant documents of their kind that will ever be produced. Yet they are not perfect. They promise what they cannot deliver. But for us, for Jews, there is one aspect of the Bill of Rights which has been our undoing.
“Yes, we are guaranteed freedom of religion, the right to practice our rites and rituals unfettered by the state. But this has been disastrous for us, for we have been misled into believing we can both assimilate and be true to our Jewishness. This is a straw man, a falsehood, a myth that has done more damage to our collective consciousness than the Holocaust or the Spanish Inquisition. Assimilation is more effective than any gas chamber, more deadly than a cloud of Zyklon B. If the Nazis had used their heads instead of their hatred, they would have shipped our families to America. Assimilation, in the end, is the Final Solution.
“Assimilation will be the death of our souls. That’s why you’re here, because for all of your lives you’ve had to struggle with a haunting self-hatred. And what is the root of this struggle, of this impulse to hide what you are, to run away from what you are, to reject what you are? Assimilation. Or, more accurately, it is the myth of assimilation that has tormented you so much it has driven you into our womb.
“No, you say.” He pointed directly at me. “You reject my words as demagoguery. They are not, and in your heart, though you are fighting now to reject it, you know it’s true. Go, move to Alabama. Will you feel free, protected to practice your faith? Or will you look over your shoulder and dread the time your neighbor asks what church you attend? Admit this to yourselves even if you can’t admit it to me. Now, I harbor no hatred for Christians or Southerners. I had basic training in the South and served proudly with Christian men from North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Sure, I took teasing. Certainly I was the target of some deplorable hate-mongering, but I never took it personally.
“What I could never get over, however, was my jealousy of those men. They lived their lives proudly as Christians, never hiding or running or assimilating. Their un-self-consciousness haunted me. You’ve felt the same thing, haven’t you? Haven’t you?”
We, all seven, shook our heads yes.
“The Hasidim embarrass you, don’t they? You wish they would dress like the rest of us. Well, like you, at least. They’re too visible for your taste, aren’t they? They give us a bad name. They make us all targets. I know. I know. Sometimes, when they’re walking down a crowded street, you want to run up to the Christians and swear that we’re not all like them. They’re fools. They’re fanatics. They’re not like us. If I am wrong, if you’ve never had these thoughts or feelings, please take this opportunity to leave.” He paused for the longest thirty seconds I think I ever experienced. No one left.
“Feeling as I did, as you do, I gave great thought to how to deal with the torment of my self-hatred.
“First, I came to the realization that the torment, embarrassment, and shame I often felt were largely not of my own doing. Though generally I espouse a philosophy which would have people take full responsibility for their feelings, I would make this one exception. Furthermore, I beg you to make this one exception. It’s not your fault. It simply isn’t. It’s a product of the impossible expectations laid out before you. Relieving myself of the guilt and responsibility was the easy part.
“The more difficult part of the equation was to work out a way for me to become un-self-conscious of my Jewish soul. How could I become like the Christians I was so jealous of? How could I free myself? Then it dawned on me to stop and pay attention to what was going on around me. I studied the civil-rights movement and the evolution of the Black Pride movement. It dawned on me that black people have a huge advantage over us. They can’t hide the way we can. They cannot pretend to be what they are not. Every mirror is a reminder to them of what they are. It is a blessing to them. So I needed a way to be Jewish in the way that a black man or woman is black.
“You have seen our people dressed as if they just walked out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Do you know that some of us have even tattooed numbers on our forearms? Some, not all. It is a personal choice. But this is not dress-up. It is our way of being conspicuously Jewish. Dressing as the ultimate victims of hatred serves a dual purpose. While on the one hand it proclaims our Jewishness to the world, it allows us to work through our own petty self-hatred. And make no mistake about it, i
f you take our way, there is no compromise. You will wear the yellow star on your clothing for the world to see. It is not for everyone. Many people leave us. Some don’t. Those who don’t can be set free. Don’t you want finally to be free?
“To paraphrase the late John F. Kennedy, we choose to do this thing not because it is easy, but precisely because it is hard. In conclusion, I want to set you straight on some issues. We are not concerned with your religiousness. It is almost beside the point. We are not the Hasidim. We are not here to be rabbis or parents. We are driven by a very reductionist view. If there is another Holocaust, would they burn you? Did you know that at the beginning of World War II many assimilated Jews served in every branch of the German armed forces? These were men and women who had a Jewish relative, people who never considered themselves Jewish. Yet, by the end of the war, many, if not most, were quite dead. They were victims of their own sleeping Jewishness. So, if you’ve married out of the faith, neither you nor your spouse will be protected, nor will your children. There is no immunity from your own essence. You are either a Jew or not. You are either a proud Jew or a tormented Jew. When you decide these questions, we will be waiting here for you. Thank you. Good night.”
The spotlights, all the lights, went off. When they came back up, only the seven of us in the audience were still in the longhouse. Judas and his apostles were gone. No one spoke. What was there to say, really? Much of what the man had said rang true—not the stuff about assimilation, but the stuff about self-consciousness was exactly right. For me, anyway. I could not speak for anyone else. Eventually, the six others drifted slowly out. I stayed behind, because, in the end, I was here about Arthur Rosen, not to be saved.
I figured if I sat around long enough I’d get somebody’s attention. Strangely, I felt I was being watched. I think I’d felt that way all throughout Judas Wannsee’s lecture. My mother used to say it was the eyes of God. She would point at the ceiling: “You can feel His eyes on you sometimes. He sees what you are doing and hears the things you say.” When I asked why I couldn’t feel His eyes on me all the time, my mom would say God was too busy to waste His time on such a good boy like me. She was such a charmer.
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