by Yoram Kaniuk
Tape / -
Report 5/677-E. S.-(The Last Jew)
By 1946 we found out about Ebenezer Schneerson. We had been tracking him for about a year and in January 1946, we created an initial contact with him. His impresario-as Samuel Lipker was called-presented us with unacceptable conditions. He demanded that the material to be published be recorded in his name, and that in exchange for every hour of debriefing the aforementioned (Samuel Lipker) would be paid ten dollars. Our then modest institution could not have accepted those demands and henceforth the meeting with Ebenezer was postponed until the year nineteen fifty-six 1956. When he came to us, Ebenezer was fifty-six years old. He suffered from pain in the pelvis, his fractures are patched up but are abnormal, his body is scarred from the blows he received, and even though the scars have healed he urgently needed treatment. His heart is abnormal, his pulse is too rapid, his blood pressure is high, he was borderline diabetic.
This report does not constitute research but is an introduction to research that will be documented forthwith, and is to be seen only as an interim report. When Ebenezer Schneerson came to us, we discovered that during the years since his release from the camp his intellectual activity had been reduced to a minimum. Only after long conversations did he become free for what he himself called "the need to do something in this life." He could not say explicitly "this life of mine." The word "mine" wasn't clear to him. His life was reduced to words he guarded. The body was only a tool to protect what his brain preserved. In conversations we held with him at the time of awakening (seventeen recorded conversations) when he was in a non-alert condition, he talked a lot about being the only survivor of the Jewish nation. In sixteen of the conversations, he repeated the sentence: "All the Jews died and I have to tell the world what they knew."
In the period he stayed with us, he created a genuine and first contact with a stranger. Traveling to the nearby hospital to treat his burns, he met Mrs. Fanya R. (Debriefing File Number F.R./6/444). Fanya R. was hospitalized in various institutions and when Ebenezer met her, she was in the small hospital then financed by a fund called the Fund for the WarDamaged, whose origin is not clearly defined. These were people sent to the camps for obscure reasons, or whose postwar status is not clear. Mrs. Fanya R. was sent to the camp because she was the lover and mother of the daughters of a Jew named Joseph Rayna, and later it turned out that Ebenezer thought this Joseph was his father. Joseph Rayna was shot to death in Dachau. The aged Joseph Rayna met Fanya R. under circumstances that the abovementioned is not interested in telling. She gave birth to twins named Danka and Toleda. When the girls were five years old, Fanya R. learned that her mother, Kathe nee Prausen, married her husband Mr. Prausen when Fanya R. was a year old. Before that, her mother lived for some time with another person. To make a long story short, note that Fanya R. discovered that Joseph Rayna was her mother's lover and that she was not only the mother of his daughters, but also their sister. Her emotional condition, which was bad in any event, grew even worse and in the camp she cleaned latrines. Her daughters were taken away from her and when the war was over, she went in search of them. They were killed by Dr. Mengele, whose experiments on twins are widely known. Only when she met Ebenezer did something stir in Fanya R. that had previously been dead. After a certain period, her condition improved, her attempts to hurt herself almost stopped, and in March nineteen fifty-eight, Ebenezer Schneerson and Fanya R. were married in a modest civil ceremony.
Ebenezer claimed that he was the stepfather of both his wife and her daughters. As far as he was concerned, he was the brother of his daughters, his own uncle, and even his mother's brother. I'm almost my own father, he smiled at us. In a ceremony held in our institution, Ebenezer adopted Fanya R.'s dead daughters, and, the two were retroactively named Danka and Toleda Schneerson.
Ebenezer claimed to us that he had married Fanya R. out of sympathy. He loved, he said, only one woman, whose name was Dana and his mother murdered her. Samuel Lipker, he said, was searching for him because they had gotten separated from one another in a heavy fog in the port of Marseille.
After he started opening up to his past (for example, his recall of Joseph Rayna and his relation to him), it became clear from things he dredged up from inside himself with difficulty (we spent several days on that) that he had wandered in Europe and searched for somebody he thought was his father and on his way he came to Russia. After the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, he was expelled (as a Pole) from the Polish territory that had stopped being Russian and was then expelled to Russia as a Ukrainian. In the struggle between the Belarussians and the Ukrainians for German sympathy, he was caught in a maze of schemes and this is not the place to describe them, and in the twists of the cosmos he discovered that the Jews were glad when the Russians came, but were bitterly disappointed. The Poles in the area were landowners who had previously been moved there by the Polish government to hinder the progress of the Belarussians who were expecting the Germans, while as for the Germans, they disappointed them too after they came. Crossing the border to German Poland (along with a group of Jewish youths returning to organize the Pioneer Youth there), he was captured by the Germans. He managed to run away and came to a Polish village. The Poles who thought he was a Ukrainian turned him over to the Belarussians who judged him for what they called "despicable Polish subversion." Naive and uneducated, he didn't understand the delicate subtleties in those relations of nations, and in Operation Barbarossa he was captured again. When he ran away (he was swift and strong), he was tortured by Yugoslavian partisans who were searching for a way out to the Russian forests and thought he was a hostile Jewish-German spy. He was caught in a tight net-and this is not exactly the place to go into detail-of Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Polish schemers, and at any rate, his Judaism was only one more pretext for abusing him, and a millstone to hang accusations of identity on him of which he was ignorant. Lacking an ideological background, it was easier for him when he was captured by the Germans as a Jew. The Sonderkommando caught him and this time he couldn't run away. Now his pedigree was clear. No importance was ascribed to the fact of his birth in Palestine.
What stands out in Ebenezer is the lack of individuality in the accepted sense of the word. One of our investigators called him "a man without qualities" from Musil's well-known book. But that of course is only one aspect and does not characterize his personality. His love for his wife Dana and for Samuel Lipker is not the love of a man without qualities. His life is made of too many libels for him not to be aware of some of them. After he spent time in several camps, he was taken to Hathausen and was the first prisoner there and even helped build the camp. From what we know, it was his skill in the art of carpentry that kept him alive.
For a few weeks we observed his work and although at first he refused to get involved again with carpentry, he eventually agreed to show us his handiwork. He was ordered by our investigator to build a small pipe rack. For two weeks we observed his production. Clearly the final shape wasn't clear to him; the rack resulted from a need called in this report "particular," that is: to be this rack and no other, and that a metaphor of a wellknown concept. Ebenezer built drawers for pipecleaners, matches, of various sizes, he lined the concavity with green cloth, he used forty-two different lacquers he created from solutions of glue powder and other materials. He skillfully planed tiny pieces of wood and interwove them in a marquetry: the rack was the product of many combined details (things Ebenezer apparently imagined, but didn't know) and the product was a rack of restrained beauty and uniqueness. We sent the rack to four different museums (in Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, and London), and the unanimous opinion was that this is an excellent rack, the handiwork of an early nineteenth-century artist. Dr. Rosenberg of Vienna, the greatest expert in European cabinetry of the period 1795-1838, mentioned the names of only two artists who were capable of building that rack and claimed that we had presented him an absurd riddle, since he knew every rack made by
those artists, while an imitation of the rack of those artists was impossible. Thus it is hard to argue that Ebenezer Schneerson is a man without qualities.
After we collected other works by Ebenezer, in the homes of former SS officers, we made a small exhibition of his works. The exhibition was presented only in our research institute. We wanted to print a modest booklet in honor of the event, but Ebenezer refused, saying that only Samuel Lipker had the right to do that.
His story in the camp (and his survival as a carpenter, if what he produced can be called carpentry) is told in the expanded research. What can be said positively is that there was a certain moment when Ebenezer decided to give up being the Last Jew in the world. Out of an empathy he developed for his imprisoned companions, fear that many geniuses and scholars, writers, and researchers would die without leaving a trace of their knowledge. In our work with him we have penetrated to only a certain area of investigation of his memory. In his hallucination under hypnosis he told us how he once sat in a woman's house, a woman he apparently respected and maybe even had relations with, and hated himself for what he called his betrayal of Dana. At night he sat in a little room, he told us, and tried to recall Dana. Her precise image eluded him. All he could remember was a vague form of a woman. He felt a need to remember her exactly as she had been, something that's hard for the human memory to do. He had no photos. So he sat, stared at the burning oven, concentrated and very slowly remembered a small dimple in Dana's right cheek. He meditated on the dimple for a long time until it was completely clear in his memory. Then, he left it and meditated on her nose. When the nose was clear, he left it for a while and the mouth began to be drawn in his mind and only then he connected the dimple in the cheek and the cheek to the nose and the mouth and did he connect the throat to the orbits of the eyes and come to the hair, which at first was separated from the other parts of the face and joined to them, and so, very slowly, Dana's image was drawn like a crossword puzzle that became a precise photo he'd see before his eyes. Her legs, for example, he recalled when he thought about the hike they had once taken to the desert and Dana tripped and he smeared the wound with medicinal leaves he had learned from the Bedouins. Ever since then, he said, Dana appears whenever I need to remember her, he shuts his eyes, thinks of the stove and Dana's image rises in his mind. He claims he has many keys he remembers dimly but when he needs them they appear in the back of his mind and through them he remembers things. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity depends on thinking of the smell of roasted coffee. A pince-nez raises before him the entire Pentateuch.
Did he learn to photograph knowledge? It's hard to say since he didn't read the knowledge and if he photographed it, he photographed the voice that recited the knowledge. If so, the word "recorded" will be more appropriate. But that doesn't explain anything. At most it can describe a process whose source remains blocked. According to a representative sample, we measured about nine million words that Ebenezer knew orally. For instance, in nightclubs where he appeared with Samuel Lipker, he often recited lists of those killed in the pogroms of 1915-1919. The knowledge was divided by towns (the key to that knowledge was drummed out by the fire department orchestra in Livorno). Many of the towns he mentioned were wiped off the face of the earth and there is no longer a trace of them on maps. In a forgotten Jewish book titled The Scroll of Slaughter, we found one section he recited almost completely. Of the two hundred pages we copied of our tapes I shall present a few examples: Garbatishi, Kortivo district, Minsk Gubernia, six Jewish families. Granov, Haysen district, Podolia Gubernia (attack of Petlura's Cossacks) eight families, etc....
Or an alphabetical list of the murdered: Golobibsky-Haim Austoroy, fortyfive years old, his son Jacob, seventeen years old, or in one town: Klibanov, Elijah, seventy-one years old, along with his wife Hayke. Israel Zvi Goldenberg, forty-five years old, Israel David Klayman, fifty-five years old, murdered along with his two sons-in-law, Isaac and Samuel ... And then: Hanna Gradover, Simha Feinstein, his son Nahman. Lev Austoroy, his wife Sareke, his daughter Rebecca and his son Elijah. Abraham Lapolski, Moshe Kalike, Yosef Krayz, Leah, daughter of Arye Hoykhman. Her husband Yanek and her four children (their names are erased from the tape), Isaac Posman, Meir ben Arye, Parties Hadash ... Joseph Joffe ... Benjamin ben Elijah ... Toni daughter of Haim Serberiazsek, Pisanoy Baruch Beamer ...
The number of killed in those towns and villages (only to the letter C) amounts to two thousand one hundred.
The lists of Jewish communities we found at Yad Vashem and other institutions include some of the names mentioned by Ebenezer. We discovered that all the names that appear on tombstones or in lists, in books, in the scrolls of slaughter, also appear in Ebenezer's recital, but there are many names he recites that have no alternative indication.
In one town-fortunately for us, the register of its Jewish community has remained intact-were names of all the Jews who had lived there. Ebenezer recited all their names. After this timing and what was said above, it is clear to us that what he knows, he knew precisely. And there are things only he knows or that we cannot know more than what he knows. Meanwhile, of course ...
What made the research even more difficult is the disorder of the knowledge or the illogic in the logic of memory. For some time, we entertained the idea that there was a logic unknown to us in this illogic, but that remained an intellectual amusement. You do know that his encyclopedic knowledge is not systematic at all; books in five or six languages, the Bible, and suddenly brilliant lies about astrophysics (made up by a mad genius), a long solid study refuting Einstein's theory, an atomic structure of the world according to the order of the letters in the Book of Genesis, annals of the world according to a person named Pumishankovitch who argues that God was created after the world and the Torah of the Jews is nothing but an attempt to combine the annals of nature with the annals of antinature, a book about the world as a fallen planet in a system of stars that were extinguished long ago, a rather bold theory about the influence of the battle of Albania on technological development. A hundred and fifty pages of The Jewish Wars by Josephus Flavius in reverse order, books of mythology describing unknown myths documented with knowledge and skill, even though they're apparently fakes. Books of religion and science, journals of three people who tried to measure their love for one another by writing hasty lines in the depths of the earth until they passed out, the stories of Kafka, stories of the Hasids, journeys of the emissaries of the Land of Israel to future generations of the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century, family trees going back to the first generation, calculations of the end of days according to the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Nostradamus, and documents of wars, mathematical theories, the poetry of Homer, the poetry of Virgil, Dante, and other writers I attach in a separate appendix.
Ebenezer doesn't understand the material he knows, he doesn't discriminate, doesn't judge, doesn't know the material isn't Jewish knowledge. The number of twins who studied in orphanages in Lodz between the two world wars is no less important than Kafka's letter to his father. What is important to us is that everything he knows seems important to him because it's somehow knowledge and so the thoughts or nonthoughts of an ant are important and so is the length of the road between Marseille and Bordeaux. As far as he's concerned, everything is Jewish knowledge because it was conveyed to him by Jews. What happened is that like everybody who remembered more important (or unimportant) details he had to carry many more keys with him, and that was to be done by turning his own ego into something even more unimportant. In other words, he learned to remember by learning to forget.
We all remember millions of unimportant details about ourselves. Every such detail had to be forgotten in order to be substituted by impersonal knowledge.
The memory, as we know, is somehow a chemical instrument. Ebenezer's handiwork helped him quite a bit in amassing knowledge. A piece of wood was for him what for others was life, utopia, hope. As a craftsman who understands wood, his brain cells, or some of them, turn
ed into sponges of knowledge and at the same time also into extinguishers of themselves. Therefore, the key of the "keys" is buried in the substitution of physiodynamic materials (if we can use that terminology). The memory of one day in distant childhood, a day a normal person can contemplate for hours and find in it images, smells, feelings, exchanges of words, surprises; in Ebenezer, that turned into the key to a book, to a system of stars, to what didn't happen to himself and thus the memory cell changes its purpose (we talked above about a chemical instrument), and instead of remembering things that were, he remembered things that were not. And in this case, there are and there aren't are all the same. Just as a rack or a cupboard turned from an unclear idea into what can be called "rack reality" or "cupboardness" from the need of the details to harmonize. And that is really how the knowledge Ebenezer acquired was photographed or recorded. They piled up and Ebenezer's brain turned more and more into an instrument alien to himself and unlike other brains, also cut off from itself. In other words, into a sick brain that distinguished between knowledge that knows for the per son himself and knowledge that is alien and destined for others. Thus Ebenezer's individuality could be more and more forgotten and hence his great dependence on Samuel who was to Ebenezer what a normal brain is to another person-both guide and leader. Ebenezer's consciousness of knowledge was in fact a total unconsciousness of himself and also one aspect of the forgetting of his individuality. That is: Ebenezer's remembering was the opposite of nonhuman. Maybe in that the Germans succeeded to a certain extent: a subhuman turned into a nonhuman to survive and to defeat the commandment to be like that.
In the brain that was alien to him, Ebenezer knew there were no more Jews in the world because he decided to survive. A person who knows Einstein's theory by heart can understand that if there was Samuel, then not all the Jews were dead. But things are more complicated particularly in this point. The survival of the Jews (those who did survive) his brain could not absorb. Something deep inside him knew, and still knows, that he is the last survivor. So even now he records everything he says, hears, and sees in order to remember.
