I recall Ola’s telescope, and hurry to my bag, running with the moon behind my back. Ahead of me, my shadow dances across the ground, shortening as the moon draws itself further and further away. I open my bag and extract the spyglass and return with it as quickly as I can. We pass the collapsible cylinder among ourselves, watching the moonrise through its fractured lens. It sails as if by instinct to its proper quadrant. This, Zalman verifies against his map with our compass.
Finally, it comes to a rest. I have no idea how much time has passed, but not a little.
Still, none of us moves to leave. We bend our necks back and keep our heads lifted to the sky.
I cannot say I experience much joy and, judging from their stern and melancholy countenances, neither do my companions. Curious, after all this work.
“But how can we be sure,” Kalman whispers fretfully, “that it won’t wax and wane and disappear again?”
No one, not even the Rebbe, answers him and his words bring with them a mood of finality. They signal an end, not only to our work, but to our observations as well. We stretch, cracking our stiff joints and bending our backs until they pop. This one kneels to tie a shoe, that one blows his nose. With the tip of my handkerchief, I wipe spittle from the corner of my mouth. Zalman and Kalman collect the spare ends of their machinery and their equipment, and begin packing it away. Periodically, each of us glances nervously at the moon, reassured and haunted by its presence in the sky.
“Chaimka,” the Rebbe calls, turning away. “Stay near now. Our work is not yet over for the night.”
80
There is nothing, really, left for us to say, and so I bid farewell to my two companions. I can see their weariness, in Zalman’s red-rimmed eyes, in Kalman’s sagging shoulders. They’re exhausted and why shouldn’t they be? This in itself might account for the simplicity of our farewells. But something else, a throbbing heaviness, enters into our exchanges, as we grasp each other by the hand and offer our tired kisses. They are at the end of fifty years of work, fifty-odd years of waiting, of planning, of study and interpretation. Hardly a simple task to awaken in the morning and prepare tea, contemplating the day’s few meaningless chores.
And what have we really accomplished? The moon once again shines, it’s true, but its resistance to our gravity is perhaps rather tenuous. I mustn’t speak for my companions, but it’s hard to feel that anything has changed. Also, we are each perhaps humiliated and a little ashamed to have spent so much time in such extraordinary darkness. And so our farewells, as I say, are passed between us hastily, like cards in a game of Sixty-Six.
The Rebbe approaches as we finish our goodbyes. He takes my arm and escorts me away, but turns back without me for a few private words.
As I watch the three of them talk, a longing pierces my heart. How will I face tomorrow without them, my two dear Hasids?
“Of course, of course,” I hear Zalman saying.
The Rebbe returns, leaving them to their packing. They must dismantle their structures. On the Rebbe’s instructions, they will return after a short rest to replace the bones and cover them again with earth.
The night is thick. There is no hint of morning in the air. The Rebbe and I walk away from the moon, our blue shadows slanting at our feet. Behind us, the clanging and banging sounds of the two Hasids disassembling their equipment start to fade. I think I hear them shouting at us, as they pull their cart away, but I cannot really be certain.
“We don’t always understand God’s ways,” the Rebbe is saying. “But that is our failing, not His.”
His voice is clear, like the sound of moving waters.
“I have tried my best to assist you but, of course, there were things you had to do on your own. You have done these things now, Chaim. You have done the necessary things. Don’t try to understand them.”
A blue light floods through the trees and a lumbering weariness overtakes me. I can barely lift one foot after the other. My shoes feel weighted with lead. When I fear I will not be able to walk another step, the Rebbe indicates, through a small gesture of his head, that we may stop. My chest is constricted and I must lean against a tree for support.
“Ah, Chaimka,” he says, approaching me, digging with his fingers into a pocket of his vest. He is a trim man still, his chest a narrow column above an indented belly. As I watch his hand, I am flooded with revulsion for him.
“Don’t come near me!” I scream, shocked by my own words.
“Chaimka, you have worked so hard,” he murmurs. “So hard. I’m going to help you now.”
The Rebbe lifts a bony, yellowed hand and places it against my chest. My dormant heart begins pounding in wild spasms. I want to run away, but can’t.
“Rebbe,” is the only word I can manage. Sweat pours from me, my forehead and my shirt are drenched in it, my chest. My tongue sits, thick and dry, in the cavity of my mouth, like a shoehorn someone has forced into it.
“Try not to struggle, sheyne, sha, sha,” the Rebbe mews. “Rest, rest. You have earned it. Let me help you. I am your Rebbe, after all. The pangs of the grave have ended.”
The Rebbe has fallen beneath me, his thin knees brace the side of my body, his chest presses against my back. He places one warm hand on my heart, a wild fluttering bird, and the other on my forehead. His thumb finds the space of skin between my eyes. I understand that I will die.
“No, no, not die, not die, hush, hush,” he whispers, reading my every thought. “That happened long ago, long ago.” His familiar voice is again soothing. With difficulty, I twist my neck to find his face, for its comfort, but also to assure him that the disgust I felt was of the moment only and not authentic, but I can barely move my body. Such a strain it is to lift my head. And when I am able finally to roll over, he isn’t there. In his place is a young woman, a girl really. I am lying on her square and enormous lap. Her black hair is wild and untied, it falls into her face, a face I know, but which I have never seen so young.
“Chaimka, Chaimka,” she sings. “Do you know me? Can you say my name?”
My history falls away, like sacks of grain from a careless farmer’s wagon. I begin to forget everything. Names of trees … times of day … the words of the morning prayer … the Bund … details of leases, of mortgages … the purpose and function of cravats, of wine, of air … all remove themselves, one by one, from my understanding. Beneath this large woman’s caressing hands, I forget my children’s names. Even their faces leave me. I no longer recall how I earned my living or why I died. I’m floating, free from detail, although I find I can still, without difficulty, remember my name.
Chaim Skibelski.
“Chaimka, Chaimka,” the woman sings, “look at the moon. Can you see the moon?”
My small body is flooded with well-being. I gurgle in her lap. With her large fingers, she carefully turns my head and the light of the moon fills my eyes, until it is all I see.
A BLESSING ON THE MOON
Interviews with Joseph Skibell
Family Portrait
Questions for Discussion
INTERVIEWS WITH JOSEPH SKIBELL
We first interviewed Joseph Skibell in 1997 on the publication of his novel A Blessing on the Moon and caught up with him again in 2010 as a new paperback edition of the novel reached the public. Both interviews are below.
QUESTION: Is it true that your novel started out as a play?
SKIBELL: Well, not as a play exactly, but as a monologue in a play that I was writing at the time and that, incidentally, I have never finished. The play was about a character very much like myself, coming to terms with the effect his aunts’ and uncles’ and great-grandparents’ deaths in the Holocaust have had on him. At one point, the ghost of the main character’s great-grandfather enters the stage, gunshot wounds in his face, et cetera, et cetera, very dramatic, you know, and he starts to speak. I had written this scene maybe fifteen times and was totally stuck. The whole play simply could not get over the hump of this one scene. (It still hasn’t.) Anyway, the g
reat-grandfather’s character recalls the day he died, the day the Germans roared into town, rounding up Jews and shooting them in the forest. And to my horror—or to my additional horror, apart from the subject matter—I saw that the character wasn’t even speaking in dialogue. It was prose! I did everything I could to turn my great-grandfather’s words into stage dialogue.
QUESTION: Like what?
SKIBELL: I added “ums” and “uhs,” I had him repeating words, stuttering, things like that. But there was no denying it: the monologue was in prose.
QUESTION: So what did you do with it?
SKIBELL: I didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it, fortunately. I filed it away in an ever fattening file of rejected drafts of an impossible scene in an unwritable play, and then, one day, it occurred to me that I could perhaps turn it into a short story. I had seen a notice for a short story contest and was trying my hand at the form, and I thought this might make a good little story. So I took the monologue out of the file, dusted out all the “ums” and “uhs,” the speechy repetitions and whatnot, and when I sat down to write, the whole story came pouring through me. In one very intense sitting. In fact, I can remember getting to one particularly appalling detail—the gifts exchanged by the Polish family around the breakfast table the morning after they move into my great-grandparents’ house—and I myself was appalled and sickened as the words appeared on the page, as though I were not the scene’s writer but its first reader. It was only about one thousand words, but by the time I got to the end, I was exhausted.
QUESTION: But how did it become a novel?
SKIBELL: Well, as soon as I wrote the closing period, the first sentence of what became the second chapter (“The Rebbe is not his usual self”) presented itself to my inner ear, but there was no way I could continue writing. So I kept that sentence buzzing around in my aural safe-deposit box for a few months, and it eventually launched the second chapter, and ultimately the book.
QUESTION: In the book, the fantastic elements are so …
SKIBELL: Weird?
QUESTION: Yeah: dead Jews, talking animals. Did that weirdness just leap out at you during that intense hour of writing?
SKIBELL: Well, for years I’ve been a great lover of fairy tales and folk tales. Yiddish folk tales, especially, speak to me. It’s my culture, after all. And I guess I had been soaking my consciousness in them for so long that a story with talking animals and Rabbis turning into birds and Jews unable to get into the World to Come didn’t seem that strange to me. Also, it always struck me how much the Holocaust (which, to some extent, is the invisible backdrop to my childhood) seemed foreshadowed in the tales of the Brothers Grimm: the oven in Hansel and Gretel becomes the ovens of Auschwitz; the Pied Piper leading away the rats and then the children of Hamelin is, to me, the story of World War II. Hitler as the mesmerizing entrancer seducing the “rats”—which is how the Nazis characterized European Jewry—to their doom; the bad faith of the German people; the loss of their children, the next generation, who suffer the consequence of their bad faith: what is that if not the story of the Holocaust? And, believe me, after 150 years of “The Jew in the Thornbush” as a bedtime tale, nothing the Germans did should come as a surprise. So, anyway, I always had this idea, I had always made that connection, but I didn’t really want to work through the medium of German folk tales. And when I eventually discovered the great wealth of Jewish and Yiddish tales, I knew I had found my form.
QUESTION: A moment ago, you called the Holocaust the “invisible backdrop to my childhood.” Can you explain?
SKIBELL: Yeah, I guess … I don’t know. Although my parents were American, I grew up surrounded by great-aunts and -uncles and my grandparents, who were all European. My grandfather and his brothers were the sons of Chaim Skibelski. Chaim had had ten children. All of his daughters and one of his sons died in the war, and also all their children. My grandfather escaped, as did my uncle Sidney, who fled Poland with his wife, Regina, and wound up in a Soviet work camp, which was nearly as bad as a German concentration camp. Eventually, they made it to America, after the war. All in all, about eighteen members of our immediate family had just disappeared, violently, from the face of the earth. And no one ever talked about it. This silence, I think, haunted me as a child and formed my character in a number of ways that eventually were not that pleasing to me. So the book is an attempt on my part to recover from the silence a family history that, except for a clutch of photos and whatever is encoded genetically, has all but disappeared. It’s an imaginative reconstruction, of course, not a historical one, and because of that, I feel it is somehow truer. In any case, through this imaginative reconstruction, I’ve gotten to spend two very intimate years, primarily with my great-grandfather, but also with my great-grandmother, and my great-uncles and -aunts and cousins, through writing this book. They’ve taught me a lot.
QUESTION: Would you characterize the novel as a book of forgiveness?
SKIBELL: That’s a complex issue. As Chaim says to the head of the German soldier, “You’ve taken everything from me. Must you have my forgiveness as well?” It’s not really up to me to forgive. Or not completely, anyway. I can only forgive the effect it’s had on me. Most of the ones who could forgive have been dead for fifty years and soon most of the ones who need forgiveness will be dead as well. Have the culpable ones even asked for forgiveness? Not only for what was done to the Jews, but to the whole world. I feel the world suffered a tremendous blow. I don’t know, I don’t know. In Jewish thought, we are taught to look at everything that happens to us as a blessing. Good or bad. There is only one God, after all, who is the source of everything, so everything is a blessing. Or should be seen as such. It’s not always easy to do that, I know. In any case, I hope this book is a book of blessing.
QUESTION: It’s been about thirteen years since A Blessing on the Moon came out—and thirteen years since we spoke about it together—so, what has gone on with the book during all these years, and also with you?
SKIBELL: Oh. Well, the book came out, and it made a little noise. Nobody seemed indifferent to it, that’s for sure. People either loved it or hated it. A small minority hated it, but reviewers almost unanimously loved it. There was that one fellow in the Jewish Forward who seemed to concede that the book was an enjoyable work, but that it somehow violated some unspoken taboo about creating fiction out of the Holocaust. That was really the only bad review. So I guess I had my fifteen minutes of near-fame, and although the book was very special to me, and although I actually did worry about writing another novel as good, or as important, or as meaningful, I’ve since written a play and two novels—the newest one, A Curable Romantic, is being published in tandem with this new paperback edition of A Blessing on the Moon—and I’m currently working on two nonfiction projects as well. So, for better or worse, A Blessing on the Moon no longer seems quite so totemic to me as it once did. Now it seems like a very good foundation for what I hope will be a long and varied and continually interesting literary career.
QUESTION: Over the years, there have been some attempts to adapt the novel, yes?
SKIBELL: Well, yes, although that’s something I’ve resisted, for the most part. I received many letters when the book first came out from people who wanted to turn it into a play or into an animated film, but somehow—I don’t know—I just felt very protective of the book and also of its characters. These were my relatives, after all! And I was a bit wary, I suppose, of the sense of theatrical artificiality that I assumed would come from a dramatic adaptation. Also, the writers who tried to adapt it didn’t seem able to approximate the book’s tone.
QUESTION: But now it’s being turned into an opera, and you’re doing the libretto. Isn’t that right?
SKIBELL: Well, it’s a long story, but yes, it’s true, I am.
QUESTION: And so what changed your mind?
SKIBELL: Well, opera always seemed to me to be a medium predicated on artifice, and so the sense of tone didn’t seem to be a problem. Also the compos
er, Andy Teirstein, and I really got along. I loved his work and I trusted his instincts. He tried to work with a few collaborators, but it became apparent that the tone of the book was too elusive. I realized—and I think Andy realized, or he maybe knew it all along—that it wouldn’t happen unless I did the libretto. However, I was knee-deep in A Curable Romantic, and I had no interest in either leaving off from that book or in revisiting A Blessing on the Moon. There seemed to be no joy in mechanically adapting a book that had been a passionate writing experience for me. And so I told Andy that, although I was willing to work on the libretto, the idea of sitting alone in a room, and taking apart this fragile, beautiful, and meaningful little book and then putting it back together again, was abhorrent to me. So instead, I spent two weeks at Andy’s summer place, and we wrote the libretto together. He’s still composing the music.
QUESTION: And what was it like, reading the novel after all this time?
SKIBELL: Well, I hadn’t looked at it in many years, and I have to say—and I don’t mean for this to sound immodest—but I was a little in awe of the audacity of the young writer I encountered there. That guy was fearless, more fearless, I thought, than certainly I could ever be now. And he really seemed to know how to put a novel together. He left a lot there for Andy and me to work with, that’s for sure. But I also saw the flaws.
QUESTION: Let’s speak of the issue of the Holocaust and fiction. When A Blessing on the Moon first came out, the issue seemed more controversial than it does today. Why do you think that is?
SKIBELL: I don’t know. The question has always seemed a little odd to me, especially in relationship to A Blessing on the Moon, since, with the exception of about three paragraphs—the opening and, a little later, the exposition about the murder of the little boy nicknamed Pillow—I don’t believe there’s any depiction of any actual events from the war. Except for those three or so paragraphs, the entirety of the book takes place in the corridor between this world and the next. I don’t mean to make light of it, and I hope I don’t seem disingenuous, but those three paragraphs are a description of a massacre, and I don’t believe that anyone who advocates against creating fictions based on the events of the Holocaust has ever suggested that it’s taboo to describe a massacre.
A Blessing on the Moon Page 20
