Oneiron

by Laura Lindstedt

  The development of Shlomith’s career was finally sealed by a performance in 1983 that dealt with the genocide of the Jews. In the performance, Shlomith read excerpts of “Jewish theorists’ post-Shoah attempts to explain the will of God”, as she summarized the event in Vanity Fair. Many saw the presentation as pure blasphemy, not so much because Shlomith-Shkhina read the texts nude (she really did prefer not to wear clothing!), but more because she wasn’t completely naked. She had decorated her body with clothes pins, hanging them from certain painful protuberances such as her nipples and labia. And that wasn’t all: she had pierced her stomach with safety pins, her back was covered in red stripes from being whipped, and to cap it off she had been beaten; the bruises on her legs and arms were genuine. So there she was reading parts of these books, which are difficult even for us to repeat now because (we’re sorry, don’t attack us, this isn’t something we invented!) they reveal a certain masochism that injected itself into Semitic culture at some point.

  In her bruised hand, Shlomith first lifted a work by Eliezer Berkovits called Faith after the Holocaust, and began to read to herself in a steady, slightly monotone voice, autocratically changing “him” to “me”, standing before a live audience bruised, legs slightly spread; there Shlomith read without expression, adding emphasis to not a single word, beginning from page eighty-one, changing one pronoun on the fly. Like this: “‘I am alone—with my God. And God is silent, and God is hiding his face. God has abandoned me. Now I am truly alone. If at this moment I am able to accept my radical abandonment by God as a gift from God that enables me to love my God with all my soul . . . I have achieved the highest form of Kiddush ha-Shem.’”

  The more monotonous Shlomith’s recitation became, the more clearly and slowly she articulated, the more quiet the space around her became, the less the audience dared to rustle their clothing, to shift their weight from one leg to another. “‘My radical abandonment is the great moment for which I have been waiting all my life. For no one can so completely surrender to Him as the one who is completely forsaken by Him.’” Did people really understand what Shlomith read to them? Did they understand that they had just been told that the Shoah meant the ecstatic fulfillment of a lifelong anticipation of surrender? That the greatest evil was actually the greatest good? That the deepest debasement of the soul gave birth to its highest ascension? Never again, but fortunately at least this one time?

  When Shlomith had quoted enough of Mr. Berkovits’s ideas, she picked up the most controversial book of her performance, Ignaz Maybaum’s The Face of God after Auschwitz, and began to read from page sixty-one without changing a word:

  “‘The churban is an operation in which God, like a surgeon, cuts out a past from the body of mankind . . .’” Shlomith continued reading, and after reaching page sixty-four, she asked in Maybaum’s words: “‘Are we to say: the churban created this progress?! How terrible that we paid for this progress with the death of six million martyrs. Can you understand it? I cannot. You cannot. It is not for us to understand. For us it remains to praise the works of God. Ma’asei Eloheinu.’”

  Auschwitz-Birkenau and all the other labor and concentration and extermination camps, prison camps, assembly camps, and pass-through camps: A as in Amersfoort, B as in Bełzec or Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, C as in Chełmno, D as in Dachau, now we jump around, F as in Flossenbürg, we jump and shout M as in Murderer, M as in Majdanek, M as in Mauthausen-Gusen, now picking at random, S as in Sobibór, S as in SS, T as in Treblinka, and that isn’t the end, W as in Warsaw and Westerbork, and then back to the middle, N as in Nacht und Nebel, N as in Niederhagen, N as in Nuit et Brouillard . . . There’s never any end. All the camps, the destroyed ghettos, the broken windows, the razed shops, all of them were part of GOD’S INTERVENTION as Ignaz Maybaum claimed and emptied his pipe bowl of ash. This wasn’t a matter of punishment, it was a sacrificial offering. God used his chosen people as an instrument of creative destruction. All out of love. This is the meaning of the Hebrew word churban, a moment of massive destruction, in Maybaum’s interpretation.

  A small lesson on Maybaum may be in order to facilitate a better grasp of this plot stub. The story goes this way: when Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 bce, the Jewish diaspora began, thanks to which knowledge of God and His laws spread across the world. This was the first historical churban. When the Romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, the synagogue was born, animal sacrifice ended, and religious study and prayer began, which elevated the system of Judaism to a higher level: this was the second churban. The third churban, as you can guess, was the Holocaust, which most Jews prefer to call the Shoah, but not Maybaum, not he, and began the modernization of Jewish culture. Regressive medieval traditions inherited from the feudal system, which people tended to follow in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and among Sephardic Jews, were destroyed along with the ghettos. Traditionally-minded Jews were “exterminated”, as the sophisticated expression has it in this series of events, and “Their death purged Western civilization.” Thus Maybaum wrote, and then began gently to clean his pipe with a bristle cleaner.

  His remaining coreligionists, already cosmopolitans who had opened their minds to progressive ideas (you may have heard talk of a Jewish enlightenment ideology named haskala) avoided destruction by moving to other countries, mainly the United States and Israel. Maybaum’s God stood at the gates and chose carefully whom he would send on the ships to the New World or to the arrow-headshaped strip of shore between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and whom he would shove in trains and barracks and gas chambers and then, finally, crematoria hidden in the shadows of the forest. In Maybaum’s sketch, God’s divine face bears a strong resemblance to an Obersturmbannführer. It might be handsome, kind, and even bear an affectionate smile, because carrying out great plans can make anyone beautiful, or at least a momentarily sparkling pulsar. According to Maybaum’s God, purity, progress, shiny surfaces, and speed ran rings around cobblestones, smoky alleyways, and strange traditions whose origins the followers of those traditions didn’t even attempt to trace.

  Maybaum listened carefully to the whisperings of his God, acknowledging that they were logical in their own special way and recording his thoughts. His thoughts or God’s thoughts, it made no matter—presumably they developed in a collegial spirit. After he finished writing, Maybaum filled his pipe with high-quality tobacco, lit the bowl, and inhaled with the utmost pleasure. A nauseating, suffocating smoke enveloped the room like a veil of mourning. Ignaz Maybaum wrapped his pages in brown kraft paper and sent his manuscript to his publisher.

  Shlomith read Maybaum’s book kneeling. Her monotonous, exaggeratedly calm voice resembled a speech simulator. And when she had read enough of the book (“enough” in the sense that our artist couldn’t stand to read any more and began to trip over the words and nod off over the book, on the verge of passing out), she set it on the floor and began tearing out pages. With disgust she loved those densely printed pages, because (this was clear to Shlomith by the third day she presented the piece, on the day The New York Times published a halfpage review of it, which included, for the first time, a small sidebar about Shlomith-Shkhina) reading this specific scandalous book out loud clinched her reputation. The other books were actually props, just warm-ups for Maybaum. To be perfectly clear: it was largely thanks to Maybaum that Shlomith became an artist to be reckoned with. What a grotesque twist!

  Fortunately there were specialists in tortuous twists in ideology who pounced the instant they smelled an Important Topic floating on the air. Performance art researchers came from as far away as Australia to watch Shlomith, and Shlomith did her best. In a frenzy she tore the pages of the book, wallowing in the white shreds, biting the paper and gnawing on the cover, and finally she put what was left of the book named The Face of God after Auschwitz in an incinerator build out of red bricks. Within the incinerator waited a large pile of paper shreds. During the debut performance, which was on the fifteenth of January, Shlomi
th ended her reading with the death threat she had received: BITCH YOU’RE AN INSTRUMENT OF SATAN YOU OUGHT TO DIE!!! She lit the sheet of paper with slow, ritualistic movements and shoved the burning threat into the oven, setting alight the other paper. Champagne glasses in hand, the invited guests with their geometric hairdos and garish lipstick clapped furiously.

  The performance, which was named The 614th Commandment, by no means ended after one or two or even three days of reading and tearing and burning. Shlomith had collected an appalling number of Maybaum’s books from every bookstore and second-hand shop she could find. She had sacrificed a small fortune in order to get her hands on every one it was possible to get. And the audience lasted as long as the books: all the way until May. (As a result of this, Maybaum’s work is extremely difficult to find anywhere. You have to shell out $147 for a ragged, used paperback version if you can even find one.)

  A certain Andrea Dworkin also came to see The 614th Commandment, on a day when Shlomith was particularly bruised (who beat her into performance condition and where, that Shlomith wished to keep secret to the end). In Andrea’s opinion, the presentation was only disgusting, and she wrote an angry essay in the New York Post: “Anorexic-Masochist, the Wanna-Be Messiah.” Shlomith-Shkhina betrays feminists and Jewish women, imagining herself a reborn Simone Weil, how embarrassing! And Andrea wasn’t just anyone shouting from the bushes—she was a passionately worshiped and deeply despised belligerent, a militant feminist who had eaten herself into enormity, who thought that Zionism produced macho wife beaters and oppressors of Palestinians. And copulation was the same as rape, which was the same as the Holocaust of the Jews. And men were fundamentally evil. And women were supposed to be on each other’s side. Why on earth was a well-off woman like Shlomith playing victim again? Why was she using her slender body to repeat the wrongs the Jews had suffered? Were there no limits to her narcissism? Didn’t she understand she was damaging the cause she defended?

  “I’m not a lawyer, I’m an artist,” Shlomith replied to Andrea in the next edition of the New York Post. “I show, I don’t argue or defend. Everything else is interpretation.”

  Soon after this, Shlomith and Andrea were at Rockefeller Center for a taping of the Today Show. They glared at each other angrily from opposite ends of a curved sofa, hunched over uncomfortably. Between them the host sat straight as a board—the peacemaker, her long, beautiful legs smartly tilted to one side; that posture came naturally when you worked in TV, when you had to look, if not beautiful, then at least impeccable: no varicose veins on the legs and no runs in the stockings, and the camera could never, ever, under any circumstances, record even a promise of opening shins; the skimpy suit skirt had to stay on the thighs as if it was glued there; the slender kneecaps had to stay together as if they were sewn; the shins had to look more like plastic than flesh, and then you also had to be unaffected, from head to toe one hundred percent natural.

  The host’s mahogany-colored hair was teased skywards, and her eyelids were weighed down by heavy arcs of turquoise that could have extended farther but for the thinly plucked eyebrows. But this make-up served, strangely enough, the impression of naturalness, because on television everything was different from the outside world. If you were naturally natural on television, all was lost. And besides, the host’s whimsical appearance calmed the picture frame, forming as it were a vertical divider between the spaces the two peppery women occupied. Without her, Shlomith and Andrea probably would have attacked each other, or at least that was the feeling that had been created in the studio. (We can only stand in silent admiration of the skill of the Today Show’s crew.)

  There they were, the stars of the night, Lady Negative and Lady Positive: Shlomith, thin with curly hair and Andrea, fat with curly hair. One wore all-black overalls, held tight around her waist by a gold sequined belt but bulging loosely elsewhere, the other a mournful dark brown kaftan, brightened by an enormous Inca-style poplin vest. The conversation immediately went off the rails:

  “My body is a transit place for the audience’s pent up feelings of anger.”

  “Well, that certainly is pompous . . . Can we stop the bullshit? You do to your body exactly what you decide to do to it. You may not have heard but the battlefield is somewhere else entirely . . .”

  “Of course I make my own decisions about my body! Pain is an important element in my work. I take possession of pain the same way I take possession of history: through my body. And you do the same thing: you take possession of something through your body . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, the personal is political . . .”

  “Yes, the personal is political! I think you’ve eaten too much rugelach . . .”

  “A few rugelach might do you good too, darling. All I can say is that it’s significantly easier to think when you’ve eaten properly. Hunger also shrinks the brain, if you didn’t know. It narrows the perspective . . .”

  And so on and so forth. The talk show didn’t give a terribly flattering image of either zealot. And besides, they looked comically identical, with the only difference being that one was thick and one was thin. What else could they do but fight! They obediently played their roles. It was a masterstroke of casting . . . They taunted each other’s appearance, even though they were supposed to talk about the painful spots in Jewish culture. Maybe one of the production assistants sparred with them behind the scenes to bring out their worst sides? Maybe before the broadcast they were goaded into losing their composure and through their composure their self-respect? At least the viewers got the sensationalism they were hungry for. And the cartoonists. For the next week the papers were full of pictures, each more grotesque than the last: Shlomith and Andrea in a boxing ring, on a wrestling mat, brandishing swords. Shlomith and Andrea sitting at a banquet table, throwing cake, pies, and fruit at each other. “Shlomith and Andrea, Andrea and Shlomith, it seemed like it would never end,” Shlomith said to the Vanity Fair interviewer, who had tilted his head empathetically. “It was a miscalculation for both of us. We made peace after a few years, but no one bothered writing headlines about that.”

  But now the interviewer wanted to move forward, or, more precisely, backward. “Since we’ve already discussed The 614th Commandment and your other significant performances, I wonder whether this might be a good moment to shift to a period of your life you haven’t spoken about much in public. I mean the time you spent in Israel, at the kibbutz. When you were in your twenties. What happened then? At least your name, ‘Shlomith’, is from that period, as I understand, and it isn’t your birth name. Why did you leave the United States, and why did you decide to return?” The interviewer poured Shlomith more oolong tea in her gold-rimmed porcelain cup and waited.

  Sheila the drummer, adrift in Park Slope

  So, what happened? What happened was a chain reaction, whose intermediate stages and flash points can be described in many divergent ways. Everything depends on which party one happens to ask about the series of events (which at the time they occurred weren’t yet a series, nicely ordered in a line, canned and bundled, labeled and shoved in their box, like shoes are arranged on cleaning day, or jars in the refrigerator on jam-making day, or like the endless wires and connectors that build up behind the television crammed in a cable organizer: in a word, tamed, because the nature of wires and connectors is to be tangled like a nest of snakes, and the same thing goes for events; wires and connectors—and shoes!—collect dirt, dust, fuzz, fluff, hair, lint, rocks, just like events collect shocks, changes in direction, hesitations, ruptures, pastilles down the wrong pipe, and, with unfortunate regularity, terrible amounts of anger, which has a hard time finding a target: objects fly, hands are raised, almost striking, screaming penetrates all the surfaces, the walls, the floors, the earth, and space, the cerebral cortex and that heart and the kidneys, which specialize in waste treatment. All those disturbances ultimately end up hidden, like the refuse that disappears under a snake nest of cords and connectors, and under rubber shoe soles, in the grooves o
f the tread pattern; that is the treacherous nature of refuse and disturbances, and even so—breathe, breathe, breathe!—all that distracting, disgusting, difficult, depressing and indeterminate stuff has to be picked up, like apples fallen in the garden; all of them, apples and problems, need saucing and bottling like cables need bundling and shoes need arranging in a row. And if you place a label on the side of the jar, you know immediately what’s inside: BREAKING UP, LOVE, INFATUATION, COMING TO YOUR SENSES, BREAKING UP. A beautiful series, no?)

  In any case, the facts are as follows: the year was 1963 and Shlomith, who at the time was not Shlomith, let alone Shlomith-Shkhina, but rather Sheila, was seventeen years old. She lived in a small studio apartment separated by a thin wall from her parents’ apartment in Park Slope on Carroll Street, and she was in bad shape. Before Shlomith lived in the studio, and before Sheila, it had been cousin Benjamin’s temporary residence, but Benjamin had found the love of his life and moved away. Soon after this, Sheila—we apologize that we have to use, temporarily of course, this previously unfamiliar name, which may be troublesome to commit to memory, but try to remember: Shlomith is (to some degree) the same as Sheila, and Sheila is (to some degree) the same as Shlomith (Sh is Sh is Sh: Shlomith, Sheila, Shlomith, Sheila)—began to pester to have the apartment for herself. She was fifteen years old. She had had enough of sitting together at the dinner table. She didn’t want to see her mother’s face, withdrawn in her martyr’s bitterness, which occasionally blew out an accusation, some sort of muffled exclamation, like a black cloud of spores from an old puffball fungus (Lycoperdon perlatum) that has seen better days. Sheila was bored and depressed, and that was why she was so insanely thin.

  Finally, as a seventeenth birthday present, Sheila received her very own keys to “the practice apartment”, as her mother, Miriam, referred to it. Miriam had demanded that a hole resembling a cat flap be built in the wall, near the floor, so she could send food to her daughter, who was incomprehensibly uninterested in preparing her own, even though the flat had such a nice little “practice kitchen”, where Benjamin’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, Raizy had enjoyed making food, including challenging baked goods, which everyone on both sides of the wall had relished—all except Sheila. No, Miriam’s daughter was definitely not moving to the other side of the wall without this rescue hatch!