My Holocaust

by Tova Reich

  Fisher-roshi nodded his head sagely and indicated to Gilguli to come forward and kneel down before him on the railroad track behind which the wheelchair was braked. He took up his guitar again and resumed his chant. “My sweetest friends, and my holy holy soul mate Jake Gilguli, this is so heartbreaking and so deep! Today, amidst the horror of Birkenau and the healing, here in this space of endless crying where the ashes of your former life as Yankel Galitzianer lie scattered, I bestow on you a new name to mark the beginning of your one-thousand-day journey as a lay monk toward dharma transmission, toward more supreme enlightenment and perfection, and to acknowledge at one and the same time the oneness of duality, the oneness of your Zen karma with your Yiddishe neshama, your Jewish soul. Your new name as a monk is Koan—like Cohen, resonating richly of the word for a priest of Israel, kohain. From today and henceforth you will be known as Jake Koan Gilguli—Buddhist monk, Jewish priest. I also present to you on this day of your ordination as a lay monk the first of your koans, the first of the enigmatic questions that through zazen and fidelity to your master will lead you as you set forth in fulfillment of your vows beyond the boundaries of reason to ultimate awakening. Your koan of the week is: Who is a Jew?”

  “Who is a Jew?” Maurice Messer repeated far too loudly as he stood over Krystyna, panting heavily, having found them at last after running around the camp searching for them everywhere. “What kind of a fercockte question is that to ask a mixed-up kid like this Gilguli-Shmilguli over here who doesn’t even know who he is one day to the next? The real question is, Who is a good Jew? And the answer, ladies and gentlemen, is, It depends on the size of the donation.” Then he turned to his paid employee. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “I thought I told you to have them waiting for me by the plint’.” Krystyna glanced at him dismissively. “Madam Fifi over there decided she wanted to meditate with the hippies,” she answered smugly, swiveling her jaw perfunctorily to indicate the other side of the circle, where Gloria was happily installed on her cushion with Marano to her left and Bunny at her right. Maurice shook his head in resignation. “So where are the boys?” he asked brusquely. She pointed first to Norman, who was sitting outside the circle with his legs stretched straight out in front of him like a toddler in a sandbox, sullenly filling his helmet with mud and dirt, scooping it up, packing it in, and then flipping it over and dumping it into little rounded molds in the shape of Nazi brains, five such mounds at least lined up already like a barricade on either side of him. Next she pointed farther down the circle to where Monty was contorted in an inane imitation of the lotus position next to the redheaded ideological nudist in her poncho, attempting to enter into conversation with her like an old creep who has wandered into a coed dorm party. Maurice glanced at his son, then headed toward Monty for an unscheduled meeting regarding museum affairs.

  To Monty’s astonishment, at the opposite end of the circle, not far from where the guru was enthroned, Bunny was venturing to speak up. “Hi,” she began, sliding her red-framed glasses up her nose with her index finger as her mother smiled and bobbed her blond head encouragingly. “My name is Barbara ‘Bunny’ Bacon and I just wanted to say how really really happy I am to be visiting with you here today in your circle of diverse Holocaust worshippers and especially how deeply moved I was listening to the recovered-memory testimony of Jake Koan Gilguli. I also want to tell you how much I really really appreciate your interfaith intergender inter-sexual-orientation inter-age, well, just about inter-everything, ceremony. I’m a little nervous now but I’ve got to get used to public speaking because I just got this really terrific news that I’m about to switch jobs. I’m about to become a Holocaust professional, and I’m really really excited. I just want to say that I’ve been learning a lot about the Holocaust, and I’ve concluded that what it all comes down to, like all the other problems in the world, is child abuse. I used to be a kindergarten teacher before becoming a Holocaust professional, so I know all about child abuse. My main source for studying the Holocaust is this incredible little book that I carry around with me at all times—you’ll never find me anywhere without it, it’s like my bible, my lucky charm. I read a passage from this book every night before bedtime like a prayer. Some day, I hope, portions from this classic will be included in the official Passover seder service. And, just to do my little bit, I want you to know that when I start my new job as a Holocaust professional at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I intend to make communal readings of passages from this book a daily mandatory requirement for my entire staff. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to read a short selection from this masterpiece because as far as I’m concerned, it explains it all. Okay, so here goes: ‘Yes, it’s a sickness called hunger. Frozen fingers don’t hurt. Sometime in the night they chewed their fingers down to the bone—but they’re dead now.’ Isn’t that just amazing? Doesn’t that just say it all—and in a child’s voice, too? In case you’re interested—and I really really believe that you and all women and men of goodwill have a moral obligation to be interested!—the book is a true-life memoir called Fragments by a Swiss Jew named Binjamin Wilkormirski. I can’t begin to tell you how highly I recommend it, it’s a definite must-read; there’ll be a quiz tomorrow—okay, just kidding. Oh, and I just wanted to say one more thing—thank you so so much for listening.”

  Monty’s eyes darted toward Maurice. “Since when did she get a job in the museum?” he demanded. “You mean you went ahead and hired her—without even consulting me?”

  “Relax, Pinky.” Maurice placed a restraining hand on Monty’s shoulder. “I had to do it—you’re a shmart boy, how come you don’t understand? Don’t worry so much! I’m gonna shtick her in the bowels from the education department. She’ll shit there the whole day and futz around mit the Holocaust workshops and lesson plans for high school teachers from Podunk to Peoria, and answer the letters from the kids who write in to say that the Holocaust really really sucked. It has nothing to do mit you.” Eager to change the subject, Maurice looked around the circle to locate the person who was moved to speak at that moment, a young man with a soaring white eagle feather in his long dark hair. “I don’t know why,” Maurice whispered to Monty, “but that kid who’s talking over there, the one mit the schmatteh wrapped around his head like he has a terrible headache? He looks to me very familiar.”

  “My father is a Holocaust survivor,” the young man was saying with intense earnestness, “and my mother is the Hopi peaceful little people. I, the sum of their parts, am a spiritual crusader for the Native American Holocaust. I regard myself as a nomad and a traveler. Everywhere I go I make a pilgrimage to the natural wonder of the place, bearing crystal earth pods in my pocket, and take on a new name to honor the gods who dwell there. When I came to Poland I descended into the depths of the Wieliczka salt mines into a rock salt chapel where I knelt down and made an offering upon a salt altar by the light of a salt chandelier. The offering that I made was a photograph of my father’s family before the war, including the brother and two sisters who passed out of the pollution and contamination of this Third World through the gas chambers here in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In front of this offering of the family portrait I placed another offering—a kachina doll, three small ears of blue corn, and a handful of red beans. In this way I honor the Native American Holocaust and vow to work for redress and reparation and restitution. Then, in my Hopi way, I took on my new name—Salt Mines. As long as I sojourn in Poland I shall be known as Salt Mines, Eliot Salt Mines Schmaltz—the spirits will allow me to answer to no other name.”

  “Oy vey,” Maurice groaned, struggling to keep his voice down, “I’m glad his papa is not here to see this—the boy is completely cuckoo from the mushrooms.” He tapped his temple with one manicured finger, and turned sorrowfully to Monty. “Pinky, don’t you recognize who this is? Eliot Schmaltz, the son from mine proctologist, Adolf Schmaltz, mit the oxblood shoe-polish toupee? You know Adolf—he’s up on the wall in the museum, from his chain of private hospitals thanks to
all the insurance policies that nobody can understand. Of course you know him, the one who gives to me the doctor’s notes every fiscal year so I can fly in the first class on the government’s expense account? Oy vey! This is his son from his second marriage, when he divorced his first wife Yetta mit the warts from Bialystok, mine Blanchie’s girlfriend from the same hometown, and married that glamour puss, Vonda Schmaltz, mit the legs, from the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. I think you met Vonda Schmaltz one night—you sat next to her at the Babi Yar testimonial dinner, five thousand dollars a plate, you were very deep in conversation or whatever mit her, I noticed. Mine Blanchie says she has a nose job and I can tell you personally from mine years in the foundation business that everything on top is not only manhandled, it is also man-made, heh heh—maybe that’s why the boy traded her in for Mother Nature.”

  As Maurice went on riffing in this way, discharging waves of discordant vibrations all around the circle, penetrating concentration, snapping detachment, provoking a chorus of shushing, a fusillade of indignant glares, Monty recalled something he had never told his boss, not because he had been pledged to secrecy, which he may or may not have been, he didn’t remember, but simply because it had never seemed that important or useful to him. The day after sitting next to Vonda Schmaltz at the Babi Yar dinner, he had been summoned into her husband’s office and dispatched that very evening with his vaunted rabbinical charismatic and spiritual powers and a fat check in his pocket on a private plane to Flagstaff, Arizona, and from there in a waiting limousine to the desert reservation on a top-secret mission to deprogram the son. In the end, the kid had granted him an audience of a few minutes only, arriving to the meeting surrounded by painted and feathered extras with arms folded across their bare chests and tomahawks in their leather loincloths to guard him from kidnappers. This distracting entourage, plus the brevity of their meeting, plus the fact that Monty had taken along on the junket a fresh-faced Holocaust groupie and had better things to do, probably explained why he hadn’t recognized the boy now. In their brief meeting, however, Monty had managed to extract from Eliot a promise that he would do the death camp tour in Poland for comparative Holocaust shopping. Monty had duly reported this back to old man Schmaltz, asserting that such an exercise would doubtless confirm the superiority of Jewish suffering to all others—what was the trail of tears, after all, compared to the forced marches of death camps and gas chambers and crematoria?—and bring the boy back into the fold. As he pocketed a nice bonus for this success, it had permeated even Monty’s self-congratulatory miasma that Schmaltz was heartbroken, desolate, he would do anything to save his son, crawl and grovel, humiliate himself in any way. What Monty was now witnessing here at Birkenau, he figured, was Eliot Salt Mines Schmaltz in the act of fulfilling his promise to his father.

  Maurice was now raising his voice even louder, ignoring the implicit and overt censure all around, hurling his words across the ring directly at the roshi himself. “I’m telling you, Mickey Mouse baba,” Maurice announced, “this is a tragedy. This boy is Eliot, the son from mine oldest and dearest friend, Dr. Adolf Schmaltz, M.D., the distinguished physician, entrepreneur, and philant’ropist, mine boyhood pal, mine lantzman from mine hometown of Wieliczka, mine comrade in arms who served under me as mine aide-de-camp when I was a leader from the partisans and fought against the Nazis in the woods. Just look at what happened, it can break your heart to pieces. Instead of going back to Wieliczka, his papa’s shtetl, for a heritage tour from the ruins from the Jewish community and the cemetery and so forth and so on, the boy goes to the Wieliczka salt mines to make a pagan offering in the Blessed Kinga chapel mit all those getchkehs and idols and icons. I’m telling you, it’s a calamity. We are losing the best and the brightest from our second and our third generations to the New Agers and the nutcases and the nuns.”

  “That’s Adolf’s and Vonda’s boy, Eliot the Indian?” Gloria exclaimed. “Such an interesting and well-spoken young man, with such a pretty feather! I’ll be seeing your mother in two weeks at our ladies book club meeting, Salt Mines,” she addressed him directly. “Your mom’s the discussion leader. She’ll be so happy and excited to hear that I ran into you at Auschwitz. I’ll give her your regards. We’re reading the Critique of Pure Reason—by Immanuel Kant?”

  From within his fortress of Nazi mud pies, Norman raised the stakes by taking spiteful aim at Gloria. “And that’s your husband Leon’s girl, Mara the hippie and dropout,” he announced portentously, extending his arm with the helmet hanging from it, like a weapon spearing a decapitated head, pointing it toward Marano in deep meditation at Gloria’s left. “Such an interesting old girl our Mara is—don’t you think?—maybe a little too interesting? And what a pretty belly she has, so well cooked—maybe a little too well cooked, huh? Maybe a little too pregnant? Hey, aren’t we having a fun second-generation reunion today here amongst the scenic wonders of Camp Auschwitz?”

  “Oy vey,” Maurice cried. “That’s Leon’s girl Mara, the one who gave him so much aggravation and heartburn that he was too upset to pay attention to his nursing homes and got into such big-time trouble mit the government you wouldn’t want to know from it? What did mine dearest friend, the outstanding financier and benefactor Leon Lieb, ever do to deserve such a punishment? Those were mine very own words what I said to the president from the United States himself when I wrote to him a letter asking for a pardon for mine dear friend Leon. I explained him mit all mine credentials as chairman from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum speaking on behalf from the six million that Leon was one from the great heroes from the Holocaust, a partisan fighter par excellence, he put on a dress mit a brassiere mit schmattehs stuffed inside the size D cups, and lipstick and a teiche’le around his head, to smuggle rifles in his bloomers into the Warsaw Ghetto. He was not ashamed to make a fool from himself in ladies’ garments for the sake of showing to the whole world that the Jewish people will never—no, never!—go like sheep to the shlaughter. That’s what I wrote to the president. The pardon came special delivery the next day. But what does it matter, what good is it all for Leon, when he has a daughter like this—a daughter who had every advantage money can buy, and then she turns around and gives to her papa the finger? Look at her, she’s dressed like a bag lady in the gutter mooching around in a garbage dump by a subway station in the south Bronx!”

  But when Maurice noticed the radiant look on Gloria’s face he was silenced. “Oh my God,” Gloria exulted, “oh my God, I’m going to be a grandma, I’m so excited, I’ve always wanted to be a grandma.” Patting and stroking Marano’s belly reverently, she chattered on about how she hoped Buddhists weren’t hung up by that primitive Jewish superstition that bans buying anything before the baby is born, alerting the evil eye, like counting chickens before they hatch, because there were so many things they needed, there was so much fun shopping to do, a complete layette—adorable little embroidered smocks and teeny-weeny bonnets, irresistible bibs and itsy-bitsy booties and cuddly blankets. She would host a baby shower in the coming weeks in their Fifth Avenue duplex, that was the solution. Leon would be thrilled to see how well his Mara has turned out after all, he had invested so much worrying into that girl, almost as much as into his real estate, and now at last he would collect the returns. But they were definitely going to have to do something about that name. Rumi was just too odd and peculiar. They needed something the other kids could never find a way to make fun of in Yale preschool, like Peter or Richard or William, something reliable like that, something that would keep the boy safe from despair. Because she was certain it was going to be a boy, though instantly she rejected the idea of linking him in her thoughts with Michael. That was something she would never do, something she would not permit herself. It had happened so long ago, nothing in this life could ever be done now to alter or remedy it.