by Tova Reich
It was Monty, in fact, who had written this speech, as he wrote all the others—or, more precisely, the speech was a product of Monty’s shop, from a boilerplate drawn up years ago, probably by Honey, tailored for each specific occasion such as this Tibetan Holocaust program by one of his cute little interns the age of his daughter, Sibyl, since, following his filthy divorce, Monty no longer had Honey to do the ghostwriting for him. Providing speeches was one of Monty’s responsibilities as Maurice’s chief of staff, the job he had been given as a consolation prize after that whole mess, when he had found out through a press release that Bunny Bacon had been named director of the museum. Rattling drunk, he had showed up after midnight, banging on the door of Maurice’s suite at the Four Seasons hotel, threatening to destroy him together with the entire museum and the whole goddamn Holocaust by leaking everything to the media, every sordid scrap, which he not only had filed away in his head but about which he also had in his possession real documentation in black and white and on tape, both video and audio, the least being the data on the unsavory acts they had been required to perform re that geriatric Zelda Knecht, White House liaison to the Jewish community, to get Maurice named chairman.
“Chief of staff?” Monty had wailed when Maurice had made this compensatory offer. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You know what you can do with your fucking chief of staff?” In vain had Maurice struggled to convince him that while he, Monty, had a life and above all the blessing of a family, of children, Bunny was alone, she had nothing—nothing! She needed the job far more than he did to give her something resembling a purpose on this earth. “What for you need this headache?” Maurice had tried to rationalize with him. In the end, though, Monty had been placated with the promise of complete independence as Maurice’s chief of staff, minimal duties along with a bloated staff to carry them out, the unlimited pro bono services of a museum lawyer in his divorce case, and then the deal clincher, a salary in the stratospheric six figures, which Maurice had to squeeze out annually from private donations rather than federal appropriations to avoid a major whopper of a scandal, justifying the expenditure in a top-secret confidential behind-closed-doors executive session of the council’s Politics and Perks Committee with the cry, “I need him, I need him for mine work, the six million need him, Jewish survival needs him!” That was also the cry he would raise each time some constipated federal GS–7 stickler bureaucrat caught Monty falsifying his expense account records, claiming reimbursement, for example, for a four-star business lunch at Galileo’s or Gerard’s Place with a representative of the Anti-Defamation League or the Pentagon or a similar gourmet type, when actually he had dined there for three hours of applied personal orientation with the newest female Holocaust hire not hopelessly hideous under age twenty-five, who then staggered back to the office to buckshot the details to all of her friends and family via e-mail. “I’m telling you, I need him,” Maurice would cry on those occasions of looming exposure as well. “Don’t worry! I’ll take care from him. I’ll take the boy behind the woodshed and give him a few good potches.”
But for all his tragic heroic flaws, this time, too, Monty had created a brilliant product customized for the Tibetan Holocaust program. When Maurice returned to his seat after delivering the speech, Abu Shahid leaned over cordially and the two men shook their equally fastidiously manicured hands as the jihad minister, in a gonadic voice deepened even more by a lifetime of smoking, like the late lamented King Hussein’s of Jordan, muttered, “Excellent, first-rate—truly inspiring!” And it was inspiring, Maurice could not but agree, even if he had to say so himself, even if this cold sensualist had not listened to a single word—about the lessons of the Holocaust, “learning from the past for the sake of the future,” that brilliant motto coined by Monty one ordinary Sunday morning while casually shopping for brunch items at the Georgetown Safeway with Joy something-or-other who covered museums for the Style section of the Washington Post at the time, and he had noticed in the gourmet freezer a package of lox produced by some venerable smoked-fish company with the slogan “Emulating the past to preserve the future,” to which he gave a creative little Holocaust twist, and—voilà! As Maurice now proclaimed to all the assembled concerning the lessons of the Holocaust, “irregardless of what we suffered and lost from this horror of horrors, in the end made it all wort’while.” Those lessons, he elaborated, were many and rich, but the one we must take to heart now, the one that history and memory and conscience demand of us and teach us so compellingly, is that it is ethically and morally unconscionable to remain silent bystanders in the face of the Tibetan genocide. History, memory, conscience, ethical, moral—“peepee words,” was how Norman characterized them to Maurice not long after the poor nebbish had been passed over for the directorship, “pieties and platitudes.” But for Maurice they were juicy words, words that never failed to thrill, they were all-purpose words that formed a great pool into which you could dip, and however many times you dipped, you always came up looking refreshed and good.
Maurice definitely looked good this sizzling noon in the Hall of Witness, even with the cutting-edge air-conditioning system pumping desperately and increasingly futilely against the massed body heat. And the fact was, if Maurice looked good, the museum looked good, the Holocaust looked good, which was the bottom line, after all, the reason he was still going full blast on borrowed time—he was driven, he was obsessed, pushing on day and night, never resting even now, well past his allotted three score and ten, well beyond the paltry number of years doled out to his luckless and, let’s face it, less resourceful companions in the shtetl of his boyhood. Too bad Monty wasn’t here to witness his performance today, Maurice reflected, he would have been very proud of his handiwork, he would have been very gratified indeed, though probably the boy was just doing his job outside in the pendulous humidity; despite his wise-guy image, deep down there was nobody more loyal and dedicated than Monty. Most likely he had gone across the street, to the National Park Service grassy knoll on the other side of Raoul Wallenberg Place where that useless gang of protesters was penned behind barriers, to try to keep them from buttonholing the media and agitating the crowd streaming in, in solidarity with the Tibetans.
Maurice didn’t even have to bother to glance out of the window of the red brick administration building that morning to know who was already yelling out there bright and early with the roosters and the cock-a-doodles—the usual suspects, naturally, that yutz, Herzl Lieb, Leon’s crazy rabble-rousing son, a rabbi no less, recklessly attacking in front of all the goyim this sacred temple of his own people in the Diaspora, a fringe character if ever there was one, along with two of his sidekicks, those alter cockers who might, you never know, finally cholesh from the heat once and for all, it was time already, Maurice’s enemies from the hair wars during the formative years of the museum, those so-called survivors, Lipman Krakowski and Henny Soskis. You could count on these three stooges to show up like clockwork, screaming their heads off and waving their signs and shoving their flyers into the face of every passerby whenever Maurice invited another Arab such as this Shahid fellow to the museum as his personal guest as an element of his Teach a Terrorist program, or whenever he presumed to give the persecution of another people, such as these pathetic Tibetans, equal time as part of his You-Too-Can-Prevent-a-Holocaust initiative. This was a lucky day for Herzl and his cronies, they had scored a double whammy, the Tibetans and the Arabs in a single shot, two birds with one stone, yelling bloody murder for all they were worth like the world was coming to an end. How dare you invite Jew killers and Holocaust deniers into the shrine to Hitler’s victims! How dare you undermine the uniqueness of the Shoah by implied comparisons! We are outraged! We are shocked! Shame, shame!
Maurice was not moved. What did these naive troublemaking nothings know of the kinds of pressures that are exerted on someone in his position, especially the pressure to maintain such a fine balance between the museum’s mission to memorialize the Jewish dead and the priceless feder
al mandate, with all the advantages it conferred in terms of status, prestige, power, funding, visibility, location, location, location, and on and on, not to mention the annual Days of Remembrance ceremony in the Capitol rotunda itself, with that tasteful display of pomp and pageantry—the presentation of the flags and the colors as the U.S. Army Band (Pershing’s Own) played the processional, and then that singing sergeant first-class in her military suit skimming her shapely figure, who gave every donor and survivor a richly deserved hard-on when she belted out not only the national anthem but especially “Es Brent,” that heartrending lament on the burning shtetls, in the original Yiddish no less. It was phenomenal, unbelievable! Who would ever have thought that the Jewish people would have been kept alive and sustained to reach such a moment? As far as Maurice was concerned, instead of screaming and hollering, we should open our prayer books to page sixteen and bow our heads in gratitude, every male member should stand up as the cantor leads the congregation in a recitation of the blessing of a “Shehechiyanu.” Which other ethnic group in America could claim such an affirmation of its tragedy, in the Capitol rotunda no less? Why the Jews? Why not your so-called Native Americans, or your so-called African-Americans? Because unlike those poor suckers, we weren’t screwed by America—at least not yet. The truth is, the Holocaust Museum on the Mall was a testament to Jewish success and clout in America, a “Jewish power testicle,” as Maurice phrased it in strictest confidence, it made the Nazi hunting office in the Justice Department, which everyone used to think was such a big hoo-hah, look like peanuts in comparison. This was not a talking point to be shared with our enemies, Maurice would have cautioned, but as he expressed it to his Blanche in the privacy of their boudoir, the museum was like a Jewish fist in the world’s eye, like, you should pardon me, a proud circumcised Jewish cock erect in the body politic of the country. Every prince and prime minister and president who came to Washington on a state visit was required to pass through the museum, to light a candle in the Hall of Remembrance, place a wreath at the base of the marble altar containing soil samples and God alone knows what else from the concentration camps, and bow his head solemnly, be cleansed and purified as in a mikvah, a ritual bath, for God’s sake.
So if the price of such unprecedented power was to cloak it in the somewhat debasing but nevertheless unassailable armor of historical Jewish victimization—was that too much to pay? And if once in a while the White House or the State Department or another branch or big shot requests a favor for diplomatic or other high-level purposes touching on international or national affairs, to escort a visiting foreign dictator, let’s say, or a documented mass murderer or a local racist or your constituency’s favorite anti-Semite through the exhibition and give him the VIP treatment—what was the big deal? Didn’t the government have a right to expect some return on its investment? Who is hurt if some fascist gets a peek at the Ringelblum milk can in which the archives of the Warsaw Ghetto were hidden, or a brief tutorial about the scale model of Jews being processed through the gas chambers and crematoria? The payoff in terms of publicity and recognition for the institution, for the Holocaust itself, was incalculable. Furthermore—who could say?—maybe, just maybe, your average war criminal would have a conversion episode on the spot as he was led through one of the tower rooms, for example, and his attention was pedagogically drawn to the display of the shoes of the victims of the Majdanek death camp, or to the prewar photographs of the Jews of the Lithuanian town of Eiszyszki, celebrating birthdays and mugging for the camera like normal human beings who believed they had their lives under control, that everything was all right, almost all thirty-five hundred of them slaughtered in two days by mobile killing squads. Even a despot has a heart and a mother or maybe a dog or at least a goldfish that he loves, even for someone who committed crimes against humanity such wrenching sights can be life-altering, even a universally despised creature is capable of learning the lessons of the Holocaust and becoming a better person if only somebody out there cares enough to provide him with a little personal attention and quality time. Maurice regarded this as one of his sacred missions, his personal Sponsor a Sociopath campaign, and he subscribed to it not because he was afraid he would not be reappointed chairman if he refused a high-level government request, God forbid, and not because he enjoyed rubbing shoulders with big shots, even if they were bloodstained, but rather because he sincerely believed in the possibility for change through education and enlightenment. The honor that would reflect on the museum dead from an atonement moment by an instantly reformed tyrant would be incalculable. Instead of being desecrated, as the protesters mindlessly chanted like a broken record, the six million would be sanctified, they would be blessed, their suffering and torment would acquire purpose, the Holocaust would have meaning.
Education—that’s what it was all about, “to capture the hearts and minds of the people,” as Maurice liked to say. And it was not just a matter of educating those willing pupils who sign up on their own for the grueling three-hour text-intensive narrative tour of the museum, from Nazi Assault to Final Solution to Last Chapter, from harbingers to horror to healing, savoring the well-deserved reward of a cathartic, side-of-the-good cry at the end as they watch the heartwarming survivor testimony films with endless boxes of Kleenex thoughtfully provided by the management, and then proceed to the hexagonal Hall of Remembrance, like a triumphant Star of David, for a moment of reflection, to light a memorial candle, and to hum “God Bless America” as they gaze out the tall, narrow window at that mighty American phallus known as the Washington Monument, their appreciation of the bounty of liberty and democracy newly strengthened and revitalized—which is why, by the way, of all the museums on the Mall, this one was the most American, believe it or not, its funding most justified, Congress should just shut up already and give it the money. No, above all, the museum’s task, in Maurice’s view, was to educate the difficult cases, the students with the bad attitudes, the students who do not work and play well with others, the students who get a zero in conduct, cunning perfumed Arabs like this minister of jihad, Abu Shahid, for example, who out of ignorance or perhaps an understandable interest in advancing their own cause claim that the entire Holocaust is a lie, an exaggerated Jewish yarn, sly propaganda fabricated by malodorous Jews and Zionists to gain the sympathy of world opinion, to blackmail the powerful nations in support of Israel. These were the visitors that Maurice was targeting in his Teach a Terrorist program—specimens labeled by the unimaginative as beyond redemption, for example, Osama, or Saddam, or the late Yasser (“a sweetie pie, a pussycat,” as Blanche pronounced him after shaking his hand as he stepped out of the men’s room during a White House reception), and others like them, and yes, also this lesser-known figure, this Abu Shahid of the FRS, From the River to the Sea, which Maurice very well knew stood for the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—stood for a Palestinian state with borders that would mean the end of an Israel that was the only sure refuge for Jews in the event of another Holocaust.
But Maurice was not afraid. He was never afraid, as he always proclaimed; it would have been the motto on his coat of arms, had he had one. For the sake of peace it was necessary to take risks; peace would be the crowning achievement of his career. Yes, despite the protests and the threats and the abuse, he would invite Osama and Saddam, “mit joy in mine heart,” he would invite them—and Mr. Kim Jong Il, too, send him over, Maurice was not afraid—give them the VIP tour of the museum just as soon as the State Department for whatever reasons begins the inevitable rehabilitation process and lets them into the country, and certainly the repackaged Yasser after he got his makeover job would have been welcome to the museum any time as Maurice’s personal guest, he would have had a standing open invitation. Maurice would have walked Yasser through the railway car on the third floor of the museum, just like the one in which as many as one hundred Jews at a time would be packed like sardines and shipped to the death camps. He would have brought him out face-to-face with the photo mural of the daze
d men, women, and children just unloaded from the train, lined up for processing and selection, funneled to be murdered in the gas chambers or to be imprisoned and enslaved—arbitrarily to have their lives protracted temporarily or by a whim to die at once. He would have pointed to these lethal pictures, this undeniable evidence, and in a mighty voice trembling with emotion he would have cried, “This, this is why we need Israel!” Yasser’s eyes would have opened wide with instant understanding and recognition, in a life-altering epiphany. The lessons of the Holocaust would have sunk in at last. In front of all the assembled—diplomats, distinguished guests, and media—he would have wept copiously, declaring that he now believes in the Holocaust, and vowing to change his ways. He and Maurice would have embraced with overwhelming feeling. The photo of the two of them bonding through clasped hands would have been splashed across the front page of every newspaper on the planet. And the Middle East problem would have been solved once and for all.