by Tova Reich
Gloria gazed tenderly at Marano, struck by the resemblance to Leon in the droop of the cheeks that defined the contours of the face and the swarthiness of the complexion, it was a wonder she hadn’t noticed it earlier. And especially now, with Marano lost behind those glasses in meditation reciting a mantra under her breath, Gloria was acutely reminded of Leon at those times when he would mouth his silent devotions standing with his feet pressed together, the phylactery box on his forehead and the leather straps wrapped around his arm, nothing could be permitted to disturb him. On a flight home from Davos once, descending toward New York over the cemeteries of Queens, Leon, wrapped in plastic tubing to shield him from proximity to the dead forbidden to him as a member of the priestly caste, stood in the aisle with feet pressed together silently praying the Eighteen Benedictions as three stewardesses resorted to brute force to wrestle him back into his seat—but still he would not be budged. Pious Jews in prayer shawls were the original meditation practitioners, Gloria had concluded long ago. Covering their eyes and proclaiming their mantra “Shemah Yisrael,” Hear O Israel, they leap ecstatically into the flames and are consumed.
She looked toward the roshi for a signal that he had read her thoughts—about meditation, about Jews, about Michael—believing on some mystical level that he might have the power to plumb her soul, wondering if maybe he could relieve her by knowing without her having to explain, because of course she would never explain, it was something she never talked about, it happened a third of a century ago after all, Mel found him cold in the closet, the rope impersonal around his neck, the suitcases packed in the room, he would have set off to college that bright morning like a young prince, everything lay before him. How to absorb such a failure of hope? She glanced toward the roshi seated in his wheelchair against the spectral background of Birkenau for some sign of understanding, but realized instead that she was disturbing the flow and the focus of the meditation, like a foreign intruder who would just never fit in. Let me not look upon the death of the child, she said in her heart as she went on sitting by the now silent train tracks of Birkenau. She closed her eyes. More than anything else she desired at that moment to be restored into the inner circle of the favored and sought after. So she laundered her private loss and donated it to the community. “I just want to say that finding out here in Auschwitz where they tried to wipe us off the face of the planet that I’m going to become a grandmother is like hope reborn, it’s like spitting in Hitler’s eye,” she said, as if moved to speak. “Children are the greatest revenge in the world—and the greatest victory.”
“Memory is the greatest revenge in the world, and the greatest victory,” Bunny the newly minted Holocaust professional, asserted adamantly. “Really really remembering all of the eleven million victims, including the five million others. Roma and Sinti, formerly known as Gypsies. Political prisoners, formerly known as Soviets. And also, of course, our good friends and hosts, the Poles, formerly known as Polacks. And finally, gays, yes, we must never never forget gays—formerly known as fruits, faggots, and fairies, homos and dykes, queens and queers.” She gave her mother a laden glance, and looked away.
Maurice was about to remark to Monty that now that Gloria had found Leon’s long-lost daughter, maybe she would shell out another ten million to the museum to make Marano codirector with Bunny—what a dynamite duo that would be, Abbot mit Costello, Mutt mit Jeff!—but luckily for him, before he would have had the good sense to stop his mouth from spilling over, he was deflected by Fisher-roshi, who was again strumming his guitar contemplatively, weaving his words mournfully into the waves of the meditating circle. “We’ll never know, my beautiful friends, we’ll just never know what our final destination may be, even if we achieve the highest level of samadhi by meditating in a mountain cave for nine years like Bodhidharma himself in wall-gazing zazen. Listen, friends, this is so so deep. You know how when your plane lands, your flight attendant says, Have a nice day in Minsk, or Pinsk, or wherever your final destination may be? Can you think of anything deeper, friends—wherever your final destination may be? This may be the ultimate koan. My sweetest friends, you may imagine that Auschwitz was the final destination—the end of the line, literally and figuratively—for so many souls, and not only for the dead but now also for us, the living, on the journey to knowing. Yet I feel the energy of the dead souls moving restlessly in our midst. It is a healing energy, my beautiful friends. They are giving us permission to heal in their space, and we, in turn, must make space for them in our living circle and allow them to sit with us. We must liberate them and ourselves from torment and passion, we must open the gates to righteousness and enlightenment, He who makes peace in His heavens must also grant to them peace, and to all of us too—peace, shalom—and let us say, Amen.”
Fat tears from the roshi’s eyes were plopping audibly onto his guitar like raindrops into a metal pot set under a leak, he had lubricated himself so thoroughly with his own words. He let the strumming of his fingers trail off plaintively into a sustained pianissimo that merged with the shades of the silence, giving them shape and substance—the silence of the ongoing meditation practice and the silence of the otherworldly twilight descending in a translucent pale violet haze over the chimneys and train tracks of Birkenau.
Even Monty, the old Holocaust hand, was caught under that heartwarming spell that the roshi had cast—that self-affirming spell attesting to your place on the side of the good that comes at minimal personal cost through virtual victim immersion in such lowest-common-denominator consensus evil and horror as the Holocaust—that it took him just a few seconds longer than usual to realize that the shrill buzz streaking through the circle like an electric current was coming from the inside pocket of his own iridescent fly-blue suit jacket. Retrieving his cell phone, he automatically summoned up that universal voice oblivious to all bystanders, enunciating in an inflection and at a decibel level in a no-man’s-land between conversation and proclamation. “Sibyl, sweetie? Yes, I’m sitting—at the unloading ramp in Birkenau at an unscheduled activity with my campers and Uncle Maurice.” What followed then for the general listening audience were echolike, bulletlike queries, punctuated by brief pauses. “Mommy?” “The garage?” “Gas?” “Police?” “Hospital?”
“Tomorrow,” Monty said finally in those winding-down tones recognizable to one and all as the approaching end of a phone call. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, Daddy will be home tomorrow, everything will be all right.”
Clicking off, he whispered behind his hand into Maurice’s ear. That was Sibyl, Monty said—your little onion, which was what Maurice affectionately called the girl, translating from the Yiddish, he was like a grandpa to her, he had known her all her life. It seems that Honey had attempted to commit suicide in the garage, Monty went on to report matter-of-factly—the bitch!—maybe even with the Zyklon B. There was still a can or two of the contraband left over, stored on the shelf in his suburban garage in Arlington, Virginia, alongside the bicycle oil and the fertilizer and the cremated ashes in a pickle jar of the father of the previous owner, and all the other junk, from the ones he had smuggled into the country in his swashbuckling museum pioneer period to elude the environment Nazis. What a pain! Sibyl had found her unconscious when she came home from school and had called 911—the shit, to traumatize their daughter like that, not to mention the consequences for himself and the museum and the entire Holocaust itself, no way she would ever get custody now, she could kiss it good-bye.
Completing his briefing to Maurice, Monty then turned with an expression of large-type pain on his face, and raised his voice like the part-time rabbi he also was, performing the pastoral duty of clarifying the rumors and gently delivering the bad news to his flock. “Word has just reached me from the United States of America that my wife, the well-known multimedia artist Honey Blank-Pincus, depressed over man’s continuing inhumanity to man as exemplified by the Holocaust and other more recent genocides such as Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia, has attempted to take her own lif
e, joining the great sorrowful pantheon of such eminent and distinguished figures as Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi. Fortunately, Honey’s life was saved in the nick of time by fast thinking on the part of our daughter, Sibyl, but the lesson for all of us is that the Holocaust will not go away, its aftereffects remain with us, Holocaust post-traumatic stress disorder is of epidemic proportions. The barbarians have befouled the earth, strewing in their wake desolation and despair and black holes such as this planet called Auschwitz, as the survivor Ka-Tzetnik 135633 described it, in which we struggle to find meaning and a sign of God’s face even today—and we are forever condemned to clean up the mess they have left behind.”
Maurice nodded his approval. It was a masterful beginning, Monty was a genius, as per usual. For the sake of the museum, for the sake of the six million plus the five million others, it was not one minute too soon to begin spinning this looming scandal in the most sacred and inviolate of Holocaust threads.
The next moment, two blasts from the shofar were sounded, which Monty interpreted as the highest personal compliment, a most rewarding expression of how powerfully Koan Gilguli and the entire audience had been affected by his family tragedy and his stirring existential oratory. Instantly, everyone stood up, fluffed their zafus, and bowed toward the cinnabar bowl on the train tracks in the center of their circle with the ring of memorial candles surrounding it, filled with the names of the dead like a poisoned soup. With tiny steps, they began walking silently in a circle behind the roshi as he was pushed nearly soundlessly in his wheelchair by Marano, guided by Koan Gilguli. Slowly they moved around the tracks and the unloading ramp and the ring of flickering candles with the carved red bowl like a votive in the center. Their hands were clasped on their chests, their gazes focused a short distance ahead to the back of the breakable neck of the seeker in front of them, spines erect and chins drawn in, in a posture like the zazen from which they had just arisen. To Monty they appeared hypnotized, drugged, like sleepwalkers, but the redhead, who was beginning to bore him profoundly, told him in a whisper that this was kinhin—the shofar was being used here in Auschwitz instead of the traditional two strikes of the bell in the zendo to herald its commencement—he should just try to empty himself of all of his habitual egoism and follow her lead in the performance of this walking meditation. Behind him walked Maurice, humming a subversive “Hava Nagila” medley under his breath while slowly and dutifully he circle-danced as at an alien bar mitzvah. Gloria was taking mincing steps in stocking feet, hunched uncharacteristically, pressing on Marano’s heels, an unguarded expression of utter grief on her face. Bunny was behind her, straining not to offend. Some distance away, Krystyna made no effort to rein in the swing of her hips in her tight leather miniskirt as she tottered in the mud on her stiletto heels, balancing herself with the weights of Gloria’s two shopping bags, which she would not under any circumstances leave on the ground, only a naive American could believe they wouldn’t be stolen. Not far behind her came Norman, marching morosely in the circle, his hands clasped over the helmet, like a malignancy on his heart.
Reb Tikkun from the Shtetls made his way to the cinnabar bowl on its rosewood base in the center of the circle and took out a page of names. He began to read: Aronowicz, Nina, age twelve—Auschwitz. Bulka, Albert, age four—Auschwitz. Friedler, Lucienne, age five—Auschwitz. Goldberg, Henri-Chaim, age thirteen—Auschwitz. Halpern, Georges, age eight—Auschwitz. Krochmal, Renate, age eight—Auschwitz. Mermelstein, Marcel, age seven—Auschwitz. Spiegel, Martha, age ten—Auschwitz. Wertheimer, Otto, age twelve—Auschwitz.
When he completed his recitation, there was again the liquid silence of the quest for inner collectedness accented by the soft brushing of feet as they continued to circle in walking meditation. In the middle of this silken silence Gloria was moved to speak. “This is for all the children of Auschwitz,” she said. She began to sing off-key in the thin creaking voice of an old woman. “Hush little baby don’t you say a word”—it was the only lullaby she could remember—“Mama’s gonna buy you a something-something.”
And after that, it was all la, la, la.
PART THREE
Lessons of the Holocaust
1
THE TAKEOVER OF THE UNITED STATES Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., began a short time after noon on a Tuesday in late August, the hottest recorded day of the debut decade of the new millennium. A large crowd consisting primarily of advance-ticketed visitors to the museum, mostly tour groups of captive black and Latino kids in shorts and tank tops from summer schools, camps, and other assorted enrichment and holding programs, but also conscientious local citizens driven to come out specifically for this event even in the humidity of the capital’s sublimated swampland, was standing in the Hall of Witness at the foot of the grand staircase for a public rally to “express outrage and reject silence” concerning the Tibetan Holocaust. Maurice Messer had pulled every possible string to engineer an appearance at this program by the Dalai Lama himself—“a close personal friend from mine,” he confided. “When I first heard his name I thought he was maybe some kind of camel or something,” he added off the record when it became clear that his holiness would not materialize. Years earlier, Maurice had escorted this simple Buddhist monk, as he called himself—“a public relations genius and fund raiser par excellence,” Maurice had pronounced him—on a VIP tour through the three floors of the museum’s permanent exhibition amid a bracing sauna of media bulbs. Afterward, blinking in unison as they emerged on the Raoul Wallenberg Place side of the building, on the Eisenhower Plaza near the abstract Loss and Regeneration sculpture, the chairman and the spiritual leader—in his “trademark one-sleeved toga number,” as Blanche had put it at breakfast the next morning, gazing down through her half-moon glasses perched on the tip of her nose at the front-page photo above the fold from which her Maurice had been cropped—had issued a joint statement declaring that the Holocaust is redeemed through the lessons it teaches.
This time, though, a functionary from the Tibetan government-in-exile had advised the museum’s external affairs and special events and press and public relations offices that, regrettably, his holiness would be cloistered at a Buddhist retreat on Martha’s Vineyard throughout the summer, at the beachfront estate, as it happened, of the museum’s backup choice as guest of honor for this rally, who would unfortunately obviously also not be available, “that movie actor, what’s-his-name, you know, that alter cocker Buddhist, the one mit the gray hair and the little squinty eyes mit the wrinkles or the crinkles you might call them on a good day who always gets all the young chiclets, God alone knows what they see in him. Tell me something,” Maurice simply could not hold back this outpouring of his frustration and disgust, “is it strictly kosher for an ort’odox Buddhist to be shtupping all the time mit the opposite gender?”
All Maurice got personally for knocking himself out like this for the Tibetans was a memo from the White House assuring him that the president looked forward to supporting his reappointment as museum chairman in the coming year attached to a letter from the embassy of the People’s Republic of China at Kalorama Circle protesting the Tibetan Holocaust program and the slurs it cast on China, upon receipt of which Maurice had his secretary immediately fax to the Oval Office, with a copy to the Chinese embassy, a first draft hastily put together by Monty’s team of an announcement of a Chinese Holocaust program scheduled for the thirteenth of the coming December, the anniversary of the day in 1937 when the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese began, which, as Maurice very well knew, would provoke an outcry from the Japanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue demanding a program for the Japanese Holocaust on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Well, there was no way in hell Maurice was going there, no way he was going to fire up U.S. veterans and patriots by getting his museum mixed up in some atomic bombshell Japan-versus-America moral equivalency controversy like what happened when his friends and neighbors on the Mall, the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution,
put up its Enola Gay exhibit with a script giving equal time to the Japanese on the bombing of Hiroshima by that U.S. B-29, and the American right wing went ballistic. No, Maurice had his principles, that’s where he drew the line. Hitler’s Axis partner would get a program in his museum only over his own dead body. To hell with the Japanese. Still, what did he get from the Tibetans for knocking himself out like this? Did these little climbing monks have any conception at all of what is required in terms of organizational infrastructure and financial outlays to raise a voice of conscience in this way? The sad truth was that all they got by way of appreciation from the Tibetans was an anorexic Jewish girl with little round glasses from Scarsdale, the casualty of a lifetime of enrichment overscheduling from tap dance to French horn to lacrosse, who, probably in fulfillment of her so-called volunteer community service requirement for high school graduation, to the indiscriminate applause of the audience, had just read a letter in the name of the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharamsala acknowledging the lessons to be learned from Jewish survival strategies in the face of persecution and Diaspora, and thanking the Holocaust.
As far as Maurice knew, to his utter disgust, when he had opened the rally in the Hall of Witness with a short but powerful speech welcoming the “Members from Congress and the Diplomatic Corpse, Fellow Partisan Fighters and Survivors, Mine Fellow Americans,” the highest-ranking official present was Abu Shahid, minister of jihad of the extremist Palestinian organization From the River to the Sea (FRS), now tugging his luxuriant black mustache frosted with silver or working his string of carnelian worry beads and perfecting the drape of his red-checked kaffiyeh over his Armani suit jacket as he sat through the ceremony in the place of honor accorded him beside Maurice, on special chairs set up on the landing of the grand staircase that served as the stage. Nor had it escaped Maurice’s notice that all through his speech this oiled Omar Sharif clone had rudely and inconsiderately conferred with an aide whom he had introduced as his chief of staff, a distractingly stunning woman, as it happened, not quite young any longer but still devastatingly gorgeous, dressed in full military fatigues, leather boots, and a bandolier of cartridges like a beauty queen sash crossing her size thirty-six C bust—Maurice had eyeballed her as a professional from his years in the foundation business. In a patronizing British accent, she had informed the security guards as she sailed past the metal detectors into the museum alongside her boss that her outfit was an ethnic diversity guerrilla-theater folk costume, and were they to discriminate against it by barring her entry, they would be doing so at the risk of massive civil-liberties and human-rights violation litigation; in any case, couldn’t they see, the idiots, that she had no weapon, she added, raising her empty hands to highlight the curves of her body and pirouetting, dizzying them all with her otherworldly lusciousness, like a promised reward only in paradise. Persuaded, Maurice nodded permission and waved her in. And this was how they thanked him, with complete lack of attention during his important remarks, leaning over and consulting each other with mouths so intimately close that their breaths mingled in public, talking throughout Maurice’s entire presentation and stopping only when he finished, just the way Monty always did? It was one of Monty’s least attractive habits, by the way, by no means something to emulate, Maurice could certainly do without it, thank you very much, it drove him crazy. Yet also, despite himself, a part of him interpreted this style of regal disdain and contempt as a sign of superiority, perhaps because it so particularly identified Monty, for whom he still maintained such a passion and such regard, leading him to privately parse such behavior as the mark of a chosen and blessed breed who are above listening, who are excused from the common courtesies due to their special election, the higher sphere they inhabited.