by Yoram Kaniuk
A consultant from the Bergen-Belsen Society was employed by the company for two years at full payment and there were also royalties for printed material-all that in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Maintenance-two hundred fifty thousand pounds. Memorial for the Holocaust cost a sum impossible to detail here. The average sum for a reasonable calculation is one hundred thousand dollars, but the final sum has not yet been set.
Until '62, and in general, many documents are missing. The Company was then the private business of Boaz Schneerson and was not listed properly according to corporate law, but it paid its taxes as a private person. The sum of taxes was calculated and the difference was paid afterward according to a judgment (see Appendix 11).
Exchange of foreign currency was done according to the usual rates. Nontaxable contributions were calculated separately, they are listed in Appendix 12.
There were problems of publicity. The statue by Tamarin, who specialized in various trends of commemoration, constituted a problem in itself that is illustrative of all the problems. The great nuances of artists like Tamarin pose an especially difficult challenge to an attorney trying to prepare a report like this. There are memorials whose purpose is no longer known. Tamarin's fame grew because of the memorials and his fee also rose, because some of the agreements with the committees of parents and ad hoc committees were made prior to that. Cataloguing fame in the context of the fervor of those concerned with the issue casts doubt on a proper investigation of the expenses. Sometimes the date of concluding the memorials is so important they no longer calculate the signed contract and pay whatever comes to hand, and then S.L.A. has to bear financial responsibility, while its taxes are set according to contracts and memoranda of agreement, or receipts whose evidence is contradictory. There are memorials that were paid for, even though they were not erected because of stubbornness, or a public scandal. Merely dismantling memorials cost the Company about three hundred thousand pounds, moving memorials from place to place cost a great deal (see Appendix 16). Shifting the border, correcting mistakes, all that was not brought into the first account, and now has to be corrected.
Clearing rubble cost a fortune, but the tax is not valid in that matter, since the tax law does not take account of dangers of fire, war, etc. Payment to the army for burned tanks for memorials is calculated according to a price list that does not correspond with reality. In the case of operas of grief, bereavement, and plays of mourning, there is no precedent in the income tax legislation, while the value-added tax is high. Memorial conferences of underground organizations or regiments of the War of Independence are calculated differently from conferences of existing regiments that the IDF still refers to by name.
I want to mention a few numbers as an example of what is written in Appendices 17 and 18. Five hundred forty-five pamphlets for schools were printed and distributed by the S.L.A. Company without cooperation with other bodies. Pamphlets for kindergartens (544); songbooks for youth (134); pamphlets for preparing assemblies in grammar schools (524); pamphlets for junior high schools and vocational high schools were printed in hundreds of thousands of copies. Pamphlets such as "What to Sing on "How to Arrange Flowers at the Ceremony of " were printed in thousands of copies and distributed free. Pamphlets for young people in the Diaspora were printed in six teen languages. The price list was high because of the costs of translation, editing, and printing on quality paper. Records, help in writing musical or dramatic works, radio and television programs, ninety-six films for the Diaspora in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry and the Absorption Ministry. And if you add to all that the postponed payments, an unstable calculation of the rates of inflation and the cost of living, you will see the impossibility of a precise listing.
All the aforementioned does not take account of the personal contribution of Boaz Schneerson, his private expenses with regard to those activities and others are enumerated in the appendices. His activity on behalf of the committees of parents, the commemoration rooms, swimming pools in soldiers' homes, seminar rooms, youth hostels and their upkeep, mobile libraries in memory of the missing, and on this subject, see the letter of Jordana Etzioni of the Ministry of Defense and the letter of Mr. Obadiah Henkin, chairman of the Committee of Bereaved Parents and another letter of his vice chairman Isaiah Shimshoni.
Additional expenses with regard to lawsuits with artists, creators, craftsmen, committees of workers, the union of painters and sculptors, the union of engineers and architects were more than ten times more than a rough estimate. I attach to my letter the affidavit of Boaz Schneerson, given to attorney Bohan Tsedek, the letters of Henkin, Shimshoni, Jordana Etzioni, and others, and as a sign that these words are written innocently, three letters are attached above by members of the Committees of Bereaved Parents of World War II, the War of Independence, and the Six-Day War, separate from the central and national Committees of Parents. A letter from the Society of BergenBelsen in New York is also attached here, along with one from the Union of Fifty in England, a letter by Professor Israel S. Shauli on the sociology of bereavement, a letter by Mr. Nahum Naftali who teaches widowhood in three high schools (experimentally), and letters from three well-known intellectuals who have never taken part in any assembly or memorial book, and whose material has never been printed in this context and thus they have no axe to grind, and they are A. Galbovski, Avinoam Ha-Him, and D. N. Avigdor.
See also Appendices numbers 20-25-Commemoration, What Is It? (Jarushka and Aviram). "Bereavement and Insomnia," published by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Judaism. "Poetry of Mourning, Revenge for Bereavement," by S. Nahmiahu. "Songs and Hymns for Holidays and Celebration," by Even Hen and Atara Shaked, etc.
Sincerely, Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Tel Aviv
I have translated the contents for you, not the appendices. The trial took place before a judge in the district court. Boaz pleaded guilty. After you judged in his favor, Boaz wrote a letter to the judge thanking him, he said he was writing on behalf of Menahem Henkin, may the Lord avenge his blood. And I? I was silent.
Tape / -
Rebecca Schneerson's house, afternoon. On the table stands a steaming samovar, on either side of the table sit an old woman and a man in a uniform, decorated with medals and sporting an unidentified military cap. They're drinking tea. An Arab boy named Ahbed brings a plate with pistachios, sunflower seeds, halvah, biscuits, dumplings, and goat cheese; he serves a pitcher of water and two glasses. The old woman puts a sugar cube into her mouth and sucks the tea through the sugar.
Captain: Excellent tea.
Rebecca: Thanks for saying that, Captain, it's excellent even if you don't say so.
Captain: I say the tea is excellent because it's excellent and also because I think it's excellent.
Rebecca: You've been saying my tea is excellent for forty-five years now, Captain, you say it's excellent when it is excellent, and you say it's excellent even when it's not excellent. And always on Wednesday. I'm starting to doubt if I can believe your honesty, Captain.
Captain: I say the tea is excellent on Wednesday because only on Wednesday do you invite me. I say the tea is excellent even when it's not excellent for three reasons: One, I can't bear tea and I drink tea only be cause of you, so whether it's excellent or it's not, it tastes the same. And the second reason, I say it's excellent is because I know only one kind of tea and it's the tea I drink with you, and so it has to be excellent even when it's not excellent. Another reason is that I've been drinking tea with you for forty-five years now and you still stir strong feelings in me, if I were allowed to marry you, I would start drinking coffee also on Wednesday afternoons or continue drinking tea, and that would surely amount to the same thing, because I would be too happy to distinguish, just as the hope that you'll still deign to marry me allows me to enjoy your tea even when I loathe it. In South America, we're used to drinking coffee.
Rebecca: And when were you last in South America, Captain?
Captain: To be precise, I'm a colonel. And second, yo
u're evading again.
Rebecca: I'm now over eighty, Captain. You won't be a colonel to me now, children you won't make me now, what good will it do you to marry me? Money you don't need and even if you did, I'd leave everything to Boaz and not give you a cent.
Captain: You don't appreciate the force of my love, Madame.
Rebecca: I'm not fond of that word, Captain.
Captain: I know, but I also know you wouldn't have drunk tea with me for forty-five years if you hadn't found something in me.
Rebecca: You didn't stop amusing me, Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. You remind me of Michael Halperin in the lion's cage. You remind me of the of the splendid and absolutely needless way my husband died on the shores of Jaffa.
Captain: May he rest in peace.
Rebecca: As a Christian you don't have to say such things.
Captain: I also have memories.
Rebecca: Years ago you didn't have memories. You've changed with time, once you didn't have a childhood because you couldn't have been born in all the places you said you were born in. You're Argentinean, Jewish, Christian, Swiss, American, and you're also a spy and write for a French newspaper in Cairo.
Captain: The newspaper was closed thirty years ago. I've always admired you, Madame, and your late husband, too.
Rebecca: That's because you didn't know him, he wronged me.
Captain: He was a brave man.
Rebecca: He was innocent and beautiful, not brave. I'm brave.
Captain: You're very brave, Madame.
Rebecca: I'm also beautiful and lately you've been forgetting to say that.
Captain: You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known.
Rebecca: You say that so I'll agree to marry you. But this week is out of the question.
Captain: I've been waiting forty-five years now, Madame.
Rebecca: Another few days won't change anything.
Captain: At our age, it can change a lot. But I told you twenty-five years ago, in February, if you change your mind on a day that isn't Wednesday, you can always wake me up, I'm a light sleeper and I hear everything.
Rebecca: You're a light sleeper in my grandson's house.
Captain: In your son's house, Rebecca. Didn't you adopt him?
Rebecca: In your church and that's not legal.
Captain: It was legal in your eyes then and it's legal in the eyes of God.
Rebecca: God doesn't live here.
Captain: But you talk with him.
Rebecca: That's because of something else, not faith.
Captain: Your grandson or son worries me.
Rebecca: My son.
Captain: He worries me even though I love him.
Rebecca: My son died in the Holocaust. Boaz doesn't have to interest you.
Captain: I'm his godfather.
Rebecca: You're right, will you have some more to drink?
(She pours him another cup, he drinks with polite reluctance.)
Captain: Good.
Rebecca: What worries you?
Captain: He sells poems and monuments. He refuses to build me the Dante monument and he's got a girlfriend.
Rebecca: He's got me!
Captain: He's got one. She was the girlfriend of somebody who died. He killed her boyfriend. That's what Mrs. Hazin from the grocery store told me.
Rebecca: Her father was also a fool. I didn't know you went to the grocery store.
Captain: Once I went, I don't go anymore.
Rebecca: You insult him, Captain. Ever since he's been working in the burial society he hasn't been the boyfriend of any girl.
Captain: Yes he is, and I'm worried.
Rebecca: Stop worrying, I know everything, he's my son and my grandson.
Captain: Maybe he's also your father and husband? What about me?
Rebecca: You're starting to be sentimental again, Menkin. Now you'll start weeping on me. You're eighty years old now.
Captain: Even old men are allowed to cry, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Not to us.
Captain: I'm going now. Take it under advisement, I'll wait for you all my life, but my life now isn't something that will take much time.
Rebecca: I'll think about it. (Smiles sweetly.)
He gets up, kisses her cheek, salutes, exits. She sits, and the greatgrandson of Ahbed enters with a tray. She looks at the window and sees Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg's splendid back walking proudly toward Ebenezer's house.
Rebecca: That fool Dana!
Tape / -
Frustrated, unkempt and crimson, reminded, a whiskey in his hand, how to forget, in a bombastic letter to a judge consulting with a serial thief who sat with him in a bar and said an apple no longer symbolizes joy, Boaz. They lend envy today with interest, I'm drunk. The thief climbed on the balcony to make love to two lighted trees that had been brought here from civilized countries. A thick-bearded Anglo-Saxon from North Africa drew partitions on a map of a city that had been invented that morning with a joy that looked to experts more bored than it was supposed to be between three wars in which sympathy for Israel was almost uprooted along with the knowledge of forgotten courage. People were already drawing maps of cities where they were almost born and which had been annihilated long ago and they did that with chilly amazement, and then with a thief of flowerpots, on the balcony, above a ticking tranquillity, a fabric of tan tones and crumbling, filed in a nailed file cabinet with sorting tags that look like the homemade jam of a woman of a soldier's dreams, stood Boaz Schneerson and wrote a letter to the district court judge, chief judge, and an account of the days with him, and on him, and under him, and the thief forgives him and says: The arrow, sir, is no longer a symbol of regret just as the apple isn't a symbol of joy, and Boaz asks what is regret, he doesn't know, and then he recalls. He always recalls that there were days when he gave his temples the importance they craved, well-shorn temples, the best Middle Eastern tradition here on the shore of yearning. Shower, laced-up dresses of local charmers, lacking the lace of laciness for a person like me, a system in himself, hoodwinking eye and sin, a sin that isn't his sweet crimson air flowing and glowing, poets, and I am for the judge and he is for me, leather case with silk leather case of wild lexical melange of a lecherous word-thief, never let it be forgotten, he said with a glass of liquor in his hand, the face of a judge you can see only on unnecessary waking, yours, Boaz Schneerson! Women will stand in line, will learn birth and death in retrospective reconstruction, waving a smell of sour balsam who rises in that house of quarrels to die with me drink himself to death, and here, after they turned the maps into scattered tombstones and the present to an arrow sent to what almost was, his mind was swallowed up, his tongue was glued to the table of an overly enlightened woman's lap, Noga's here, Noga's there, Henkin will bite, Henkin will sing to me, to exclusivize the root and uproot the exclusive, the gray ancient preserved and choked, everything was spilled out, destroyed like the riddle of cities that don't exist, will here become the intercity mourning with drivers attached to the index, sucking the marrow of stone, we will die in a noontime nap, shame on the meek, horrible and terrible, a record of nothingness, the last rain abundantly and I rain from my own abundance, in the language of darkness, grace of whisper plowed and traps drought, this is how the sum of all roots routed in you, son of a bitch, was born ...
Noga, Noga. Noga, who was a stranger to the hut on the seashore even before Boaz Schneerson moved to the attic apartment, she sat-and this is something that happened long before that-padded in a sheaf of light that shone on her, and she defended herself from her feelings. She didn't know what to do when they knocked on the door: to open, not to open, she worried, the sea spread out through the window, and she waited for Boaz to tell her. He didn't tell and she got up, hugged her shaking body in her hands, stretched them, went to the door, was a little amazed, and opened it. There stood a solid man wearing a beret who said something about how Boaz knew Menahem and maybe he also knew his son who fell in Ramle and loved to read the poems of the poet Rato
sh. He wants to know if Boaz can arrange a meeting for him with the poet Ratosh. The poet Ratosh can explain to me, said the man, and Noga trembled because she knew that Boaz would bring him Ratosh the poet, to explain his son to him, then he showed the letters of the son and asked for an expert opinion, maybe to make a pamphlet of them? Letters full of names, Ratosh and the poems of his black wedding canopy and the night road from Mesilot to Sadeh Nahum and Belt She'an at night when the Arab dogs are barking and he quoted an excerpt from the book Pampilov's Men. The man measured the rectangle of sea in the window and smiled. Then, maybe about a month later, a child also came with a letter and Boaz said too loudly: If a woman comes here, give her coffee, I'm going down to swim in the sea.
But the woman was already on her way to him and the man whose son loved Ratosh's poems met her, but didn't know where she was going, and Boaz thought: Somebody said we have to find a moral equivalent of war, what's the equivalent of that nothingness, that dreadful, heartbreaking lust? Meanwhile, he put on a bathing suit and over the bathing suit he put on his pants and shirt. Noga looked at the sea. The woman walked past the hut. He'll search for the poet Ratosh, said Noga, what do I tell Menahem from Menahem, to Boaz from Boaz? But Boaz didn't go down to the sea. He sat down on the windowsill and drank the coffee Noga gave him before. Outside the wind raised leaves and papers and sand in the wind and yellow limestone flowers didn't budge. A ship sailed north and Noga stood up and facing the small mirror tried to put on a new belt. In the mirror, Noga saw Boaz's half-shut eyes and also the ship. What began as trying on the belt turned into being a game. She stretched the belt and released it, and said: I've got a riddle for you. A bagel distributor walked on Mapu Street and distributed four bagels to every apartment. When he came to the last apartment he saw he had only three bagels left. He panicked and thought: Where did the fourth bagel disappear? He reversed direction and searched for the bagel. He came back to the bakery and understood that he had lost the bagel on the way, but didn't know where. You know where the bagel disappeared? Boaz didn't open his eyes and his face was stuck to the rim of the cup and she knew he was measuring her with his eyes shut, that he was expert in looking with eyes shut and she played with the belt again, her face frozen, the man seeking the poet Ratosh still between her lashes and Boaz was silent and waited for the woman who was now walking in the street and he was still wearing a bathing suit under his clothes. Noga emitted a brief laugh that shriveled her cheeks and suddenly made her lost, burned, he wanted to get up and hug her, but he didn't know how much, sometimes, it was forbidden to touch her. And then Noga whispered: A fat man and a beautiful woman sat in a train compartment. The fat man was smoking a big cigar, and the beautiful woman was holding a barking dog on a leash. The beautiful woman said to the fat man: Sir, your cigar bothers my dog and so he's barking. The fat man with the cigar said: Your barking dog bothers my cigar. Finally, the beautiful woman rips the cigar out of the fat man's mouth and throws it on the platform. The fat man picks up the dog, removes its leash and throws the dog outside. The dog runs after the cigar and you know what he found?
