Sunrise West

by Jacob G. Rosenberg

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I agreed. ‘After all, you spent the war years in academies and libraries, teaching languages, working with words, while people like me lived very different realities. Even you, David, who became so intimately acquainted with the colour and size of Siberian lice, and emerged from the Soviet gulag with a ruined stomach, even you can not conceive in a million years the horror of what we lived through — the horror of standing to be counted in front of the gas chambers, day in, day out.’

  The three of us fell silent. I found myself descending once more into my earlier crowded solitude.

  A full moon peeped through a lead-light window and played like a nocturnal rainbow across David’s sickly face. The wind outside had subsided. The women had rejoined us. Miriam gently nudged her husband that they should make a move; they soon left. We too were ready to call it a night, but our host insisted that Esther and I should tarry a while longer.

  ‘I’ve heard that you write,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘My experiences.’

  ‘It must be hard to record everything.’

  ‘The need to tell is hard to overcome.’

  He nodded. ‘Could we meet again?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’m working on a paper,’ Feldman confided, almost shyly. ‘I hope one day to teach the Holocaust story to my students.’

  ‘The death of Abel can only be told, not taught,’ I replied.

  ‘Why?’

  I shook my head. ‘When we meet again,’ I said.

  Dialogue

  We met again in a restaurant-bar in the city, on the corner of Bourke and McKillop. I arrived a few minutes before the appointed time, and when the professor walked in I thought the place had shrunk. There were pearls of sweat on Aaron Feldman’s forehead, and he panted for air like an expiring fish. Squeezing his immense frame between table and bench he ordered two beers. Amid delighted and sonorous sips he asked me how I was, and before long had invited me to have dinner with him there and then. I accepted and phoned Esther; she wasn’t too happy but didn’t object.

  ‘So,’ he settled back, ‘you’re a writer who believes we shouldn’t teach the Holocaust.’

  ‘I didn’t exactly say that, Aaron. I said that it can only be told, not taught. I meant that teaching involves clarifying, a need to explain. In my opinion there is nothing to explain. How can one explain something that lies outside all human logic? What is there to clarify, what is there to understand? Understanding comes too close to forgiveness.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Well, I’m sceptical. You may know better — after all, you’ve been teaching for most of your life.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. I’ve been involved in education, in scholarship. To me, scholarship is a very important tool. What sort of hope can we have of building a better world if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past?’

  ‘I remember my father saying that if we analyse our tragic history too much, we can lose sight of the pain, the heartache. He didn’t deny that scholarship had its benefits, but he argued that it made our sufferings more palatable. At school, when young people were taught about the Great War they were not, as a rule, horrified by those bloody events, but rather fascinated. Some even romanticized the brutality, so that human suffering became no more than a backdrop to the saga of mankind.’

  ‘All right, but what still puzzles me is this: if you don’t believe in teaching the Holocaust, how exactly would you go about telling it? Doesn’t the difference become a little... academic? Did your father advocate some other, more effective way of imparting the disasters of history to the young?’

  ‘We didn’t discuss the subject all that often, or in very great depth. It wasn’t always easy to juggle metaphysical questions in a ghetto where people were dying en masse, where every second home was a private morgue, where the threat of being “resettled”, meaning killed, was a daily reality. But I do recall one particular chat I had with my father. He pointed out that there is more history in the poetry of our prophets, more tragedy in Lamentations, than in the whole biblical narrative.’

  ‘Was he suggesting that instead of a diary you should write poetry?’

  ‘No, but he maintained that the poet, not the historian or the learned philosopher, is the living seismograph who has registered and recorded every human tremor that took place on our planet through the ages. And father was right. It’s in the Holocaust verses of a Paul Celan, a Nellie Sachs, a Jerzy Ficowski or a Zusman Segałowicz, and many others, that the scream of our slaughtered people lives on. This, dry scholarship alone can never accomplish. Make your students read and memorize such poets and, as Kafka put it, they will hack away as with an axe the ice around their hearts... But forgive me, Aaron, I’ve been talking too much.’

  ‘Not at all. I want to hear your thoughts. I want to know what a man like you thinks about questions that lie close to the soul of a man like me.’

  I waited.

  ‘Let me ask you this,’ he said at last. ‘Do you think I should include poetry in my own lectures and lessons about the Holocaust?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied. ‘But including it would only partially remedy the situation. If one were to make poetry the heart of such a presentation, the lesson would immediately take on a profounder meaning. Then the horror would assail the listeners directly, personally, and fill them with a sense of outrage.’

  He leaned back, satisfied with my response. ‘So tell me, what have you been writing?’

  ‘Mainly poetry. But it’s not easy. You see, Aaron, the war broke out a few years after I finished my schooling.’

  ‘A higher education is not always essential when it comes to writing. Look, our biblical scribes were no professors yet they left us an incomparable literary treasure. King David was hardly an academic but he wrote a beautiful book of Psalms. Then there is Jeremiah, the Lamentations. And what about Job?’

  ‘I’m fascinated by the mystery of Job,’ I agreed. ‘There are those who see him as a protagonist in God’s struggle against evil. The postwar behaviour of many survivors has made me feel that he personifies the drama of the Jewish people — their unbroken faith in the future, despite betrayal by their God...’

  It was almost ten o’clock when we stepped out of the restaurant into a breezy but starry night. For a few minutes we walked together like tongueless men. (Unknown to Aaron, my father walked with me.) The professor offered me a lift home. I declined. I needed to be alone, with dad.

  Linguistic Feuds

  At the peak of Australia’s postwar immigration tide, considerable numbers of Jews landed on these peaceful shores. They had been liberated from the camps or were running from the antisemitism they still encountered in their land even after the war. My guess is that the vast majority spoke Yiddish, a tongue that was anathema to the established Anglo-Jewish communities. The question of language became an arena of acute contention.

  I was very pleased to receive a call from Professor Feldman one day, asking if I would join him at a lecture to be held in one of our city’s public halls. The topic was Language and Community. ‘I am told,’ Aaron confided, and I detected a ring of irony in his voice, ‘that the speaker is one of our leading sages and supposedly a great expert on the subject.’

  A good half-hour before the scheduled start of the address, the hall was already packed with people. They were mostly recent arrivals from the east of time, eager consumers of culture and politics, passionate believers in social justice. They sat with serious faces, like a crowd of patients in a doctor’s waiting-room. Aaron was among the last to arrive, but I had thrown my jacket over the seat next to mine to save him a place.

  The evening was chaired by a man in his fifties, attired in a black suit, black shirt and blue tie, with a heavy pair of glasses straddling his oversized nose. His dress and demeanour made me think of a debt-collector. He rose to introduce the celebrity speaker. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began.

&n
bsp; Immediately the assembly broke out in a noisy chorus: ‘Yiddish! Yiddish!’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ the chairman repeated stubbornly. ‘Please, settle down. We’re in a new country now, with new customs. This is not your old Yehupetz or Kasrilevke.’

  ‘Sir, in our Kasrilevke,’ shouted a man, clearly offended, ‘you would be the shtetl idiot!’

  The audience erupted in laughter. There was a general stamping of feet and further volleys of ‘Yiddish! Yiddish!’

  ‘Friends, friends,’ the chairman persevered. ‘Our speaker really needs no introduction, but in accordance with proto-col permit me to say a few words about him, but only a few, since most of us know that he is a very modest man, at times even against his own interests. So, in brief: Morris Blattmann is a businessman and philanthropist, with a doctorate in linguistics, and is currently president of one of Melbourne’s oldest congregations. Please make him welcome.’

  At this, the guest of honour — a man in the prime of life, confident, well-groomed, with two sharp dimples creasing his clean-shaven cheeks — jumped nimbly to his feet, gave a well-rehearsed nod and, with a generous cruciform spreading of the arms, began:

  ‘Destiny brought you to these shores, to a new culture, a new language. So please, friends, open your hearts to new ways. Yiddish is a dying tongue —’

  ‘Shut up, you fool,’ cried a heckler.

  Undeterred, the guest speaker pressed ahead. ‘English is our new way, trust me —’

  ‘But I am a Yid,’ shouted another heckler. ‘Yiddish is my soul, my childhood, my home. First, my enemies murdered my mother; now, my friends are trying to kill my mother-tongue, the language that has served us for a thousand years!’

  ‘Please, friends, stop interrupting,’ the chairman cut in. ‘There will be ample time for orderly discussion later.’

  But nothing could now forestall the oncoming storm. Morris Blattmann had a number of supporters vehemently opposing the Yiddish-lovers, who were quickly labelled Bundists; while those among the newcomers who saw a certain logic in his arguments were abused as traitors. Amid the growing uproar, the lecture nearly degenerated into a fist-fight.

  My impulse was to get up and sneak out without being noticed. But there next to me sat Aaron, absorbed in the proceedings, an ironic half-smile on his lips. I knew he wanted to see the evening through and then discuss it with me over a cup of coffee. After all, language was his special field.

  And so I stayed. The speaker pressed ahead valiantly, but could hardly be heard above the din. He persisted for perhaps half an hour. At the end a few of his followers tried to applaud him, but their efforts were drowned out amid booing and general commotion.

  Afterwards, as I had expected, Aaron and I ended up in a nearby café.

  ‘Where there is much screaming, there is no lack of sinning,’ the professor remarked between sips of coffee, paraphrasing Proverbs. ‘Jews never assimilated into lower cultures than their own. Surely, for any intelligent person, English promises such wide, almost limitless horizons...’

  I wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  ‘And mark my words,’ Aaron the lover of Yiddish declared after another lengthy sip. ‘Yiddish has been a dream. Dreams don’t last forever.’

  A Nut-case

  I encountered him at work; as it turned out, he was a landsman. He came over to me at lunchtime, sandwich in hand, and without ceremony made himself comfortable across our factory lunch-table. ‘My name is Ralph Lufchik. I spotted you at the lecture the other night, you sat next to Professor Feldman, what an honour! Is he your friend? I also know your feeling about Yiddish, I’ve read some of your poetry, I especially love the one about your mother — Raindrops crying on my windowpane. But a man like you shouldn’t forget that Yiddish is a Bundist tongue, inherited from Germany. I hate everything that comes from there, including the whole ghetto mentality, I hate that.’

  I shrivelled under this crazy barrage but there was no escape. Never had I been so glad to hear the bell ring, calling us back to work. Good God, I said to myself, who was this character? I hope I never see him again. But alas, come five o’clock he was standing on the footpath outside the factory gate. ‘Hop in,’ he ordered, opening the door of his little Austin, ‘you must let me give you a lift, it’s unbearably hot.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I replied in haste, ‘I have a prepaid tram ticket and I prefer to spend the time reading.’

  ‘Nothing doing, you can read at home.’ And he practically shoved me into the car.

  ‘So where was I?’ And he resumed, in his heavy nasal voice, where he had left off at lunchtime. ‘Ah yes, as I said, Yiddish is just a dialect which should be erased from our history. Tell me,’ and his tone grew steadily more belligerent, ‘Moses was a bad Jew? Did he speak Yiddish? No, he didn’t!’

  ‘But the whole chassidic world spoke Yiddish. Were they all Bundists?’

  ‘Quite so!’

  ‘Don’t you think the destruction of a language is also an act of genocide?’

  ‘So what!’ he fired back.

  Although this absurd remark made me feel like bursting out in laughter, I forced myself to hold back. To hell with it, I thought. But how do I get rid of this pest — throw myself out of the car?

  My driver pressed on unstoppably. ‘You see, you’re silent, you’ve got no answer! I’ve made you think. You’ll soon realize the correctness of my argument, you’re clever enough to understand it. The average person wouldn’t understand in a million years. You see, my friend, although I’m a humble man, as the Torah commands, I have to admit that I often feel I can see God’s hidden light. That’s what comes from knowing the Talmud by heart. I’ve also studied Kabbalah, which enables me to see through everything and everybody.’

  Keeping one hand on the wheel, he reached with the other into his pocket. I was sure he was about to produce a knife, but to my relief he dragged out a dirty handkerchief, wiped the sweat off his forehead and resumed his tirade. ‘Let me share with you, my friend, something of a revelation. No doubt you’ve heard of Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the great rabbi who supposedly propagated only the purest truth. Well, my father, who was one of his sworn disciples, believed that the rabbi aimed at militarizing the whole chassidic movement!’

  ‘What do you mean, militarizing?’ I was finding it increasingly hard to contain myself.

  ‘Ah, of course, it’s difficult for you to grasp. Well, this rabbi was a clandestine Bundist. To put it simply, he taught his theories of truth and social justice mainly in Yiddish, same as all your mob here in Melbourne — they must be stopped, at any price! Only a Ben Gurion is capable of understanding the danger of this Teutonic plague. No, it’s not their ideas that aggravate the prime minister of Israel: after all, he is a socialist himself, and like them, an iconoclast to boot. What worries him is their ghetto mentality and their language of exile, which if permitted could spell an end to our new beginning.’

  He paused for breath before continuing his verbal hurricane. ‘You see, Jews are a restless nation, we spend our lives inside and outside a promise. When we’re outside this promise we dream of being inside; when we’re inside we want to run for our lives!’

  We were approaching my street, but I certainly didn’t want to show him where I lived. ‘Just let me off on the next corner, would you?’

  ‘Sure, sure, but before you go I must explain my point about the danger that this exilic tongue poses for our holy nation at our present historical crossroads.’

  ‘No, Ralph,’ I replied as calmly as I could. ‘You’ll have to save the rest of your wisdom for another day.’

  I might as well not have spoken. ‘Yiddish,’ he cried, ‘especially its songs and poetry, these are the fleshpots of our latter-day Exodus! They have the potential to drag our people back to the Egypt of Europe!’

  ‘Please, Ralph, just pull up here. Thanks for the lift, and for the enlightenment.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a beer before you get home?’

  ‘No than
ks.’ I quickly climbed out of the car. Then, on an impulse, I leaned in through the open passenger window and said: ‘You’ve given me a headache. Enough is enough.’

  ‘That’s the thanks I get!’ he shouted back, and sped off into the humidity of the dying day.

  Bitter Shoes

  The grey face of a late-August day peeped into our window through the slats of our venetian blinds. Esther, still halfasleep, asked: ‘How does it look outside?’

  ‘It’s autumn,’ I replied, ‘with laden skies, empty beaches, seagull cries, and rain, rain, rain.’

  ‘Stop it, with all your rhymes. We have some urgent shopping to do.’ She reached over the edge of the bed and held up one of my leaky shoes.

  ‘Yes, but it will be hard to part with them. They were my first postwar shoes, I bought them with my own money.’

  After breakfast we boarded a tram for the city. ‘I must tell you a ghetto story about shoes,’ I said to Esther when we had sat down together.

  ‘Again?’ she complained. ‘Haven’t we had enough? You turned off the radio yourself this morning when someone mentioned Dachau.’

  ‘That wasn’t because of the topic,’ I protested. ‘If we’re listening to the radio all day, how can we listen to each other?... Anyway, on 28 August 1942, the day I turned twenty, as I came into our room in my old wooden clogs, mother thrust a pair of leather boots into my hands. “What are those?” I said. “Educated boots,” my father responded. “The bootlegs are made from your former schoolbag!” “How did you pay for them?” I asked excitedly. “Don’t worry, son. The bootmaker owed us a favour.”

  A restrained commercial energy hovered over the shoe department of the large Bourke Street store. We were welcomed by a honey-blond saleslady in a cream blouse beneath a navy-blue jacket. ‘And what can I do for you today,’ she enquired melodiously.

  ‘I would like to buy a pair of shoes for my husband,’ said Esther.

  The saleslady smiled in approval. ‘You’ve come to the right place,’ she observed, and directed us discreetly to a plush chair upholstered in burgundy velvet. She knelt down to measure my foot, then vanished into a forest of storage shelves, re-emerging triumphantly after a minute with a stack of boxes. ‘Let’s try some of these on for size,’ she said, opening the first box.