Heretics

by Leonardo Padura

  It was in the tensest moment of those difficulties, feeling on the edge of suffocating due to Nazi pressure, when Dr. Isaiah Kaminsky received a cable sent from Havana in which Joseph announced the opening of an unexpected chance for salvation: a Cuban government agency would establish an office inside the Berlin embassy to carry out the sale of visas to sons of Israel who wanted to travel to the island as tourists. The same day the agency started running, Isaiah Kaminsky went to the embassy and managed to buy three visas. Immediately, with the help of the Kellersteins and his doctor friend, he paid the sum the German government demanded to grant the exit permit for Jews and, finally, for the first-class tickets for a passenger ship authorized by the immigration authorities to set sail from Hamburg toward Havana: the S.S. Saint Louis, which took to sea on May 13, 1939, with an anticipated arrival in Cuba exactly two weeks later to deposit its human cargo of 937 Jews overjoyed by their good fortune.

  * * *

  When Joseph Kaminsky and his nephew Daniel arrived at the port the morning of May 27, 1939, the sun had not yet risen. But, thanks to the reflectors placed on the Alameda de Paula and the Caballería dock, they joyfully discovered that the luxurious passenger ship had already dropped anchor in the bay, since it had come in several hours ahead of schedule, pressured by the presence of other vessels loaded with Jewish passengers also seeking an American port willing to accept them. The first thing that caught the attention of Pepe the Purseman was that the ship had had to drop anchor far from the points where passenger boats tended to dock: the Casablanca dock, where the immigration department was, or that of the Hapag Line, the Hamburg-Amerika Linie, to which the Saint Louis belonged and by which the tourists passing through Havana would disembark.

  Around the port there were already hundreds of people gathered, mostly Jews but also many, many curious onlookers, journalists, policemen. And just at six thirty in the morning, when the deck lights came on and the horn commanded by the ship’s captain to signal the opening of the breakfast rooms blared, many of those gathered on the dock leapt with joy, causing a prolonged ruckus that was joined by the passengers, since one after another they assumed it was a sign of imminent disembarkment.

  With the passing of the years and thanks to information he picked up, Daniel Kaminsky came to understand that that adventure, destined to mark his family’s fate, had been born twisted in a macabre fashion. In reality, while the Saint Louis was sailing toward Havana, each step was already outlined of the tragedy that episode would become, one of the most miserable and shameful in all of twentieth-century politics. Because, crossed in the fate of the Jews aboard the Saint Louis, as if to give shape to the loops of a dead man’s noose, were the political and propaganda interests of the Nazis, stubbornly trying to show that they allowed Jews to emigrate; the strict migratory policies claimed by different factions of the United States government; and the decisive weight that that government’s pressures exercised over Cuban leaders. To top it off, the ballast of those realities and political machinations was rounded out by the worst sickness besetting Cuba in those years: corruption.

  The indispensable travel permits granted by the Cuban agency established in Berlin were a key piece in the perverse game that would envelop Daniel’s parents and sister and the vast majority of the other 937 Jews aboard the passenger ship. Very soon it would be known that their sale was part of a business put together by the senator and former army colonel Manuel Benítez González, who, thanks to his son’s close relationship with the powerful General Batista, then unlawfully held the post of director of immigration … Through his travel agency, Benítez came to sell about four thousand Cuban entry permits, at $150 apiece, which generated the fabulous earnings of $600,000 at the time, cash that must have been shared by many people, perhaps even Batista himself, whose hands held all the strings moving the country from his Revolt of the Sergeants in 1933 until his shameful escape before the first dawn of 1959.

  Of course, when he found out about those movements, then president of Cuba Federico Laredo Brú decided that the time had come to jump into the game. Pressured by some of his ministers, he tried to show his might before Batista’s power, but also, as was the national custom, set out to obtain a slice of the pie. His first presidential gesture was to approve a decree by which each refugee who intended to arrive in Cuba should bring $500 to demonstrate he would not be a burden on the state. And when Benítez’s permits and the Saint Louis’s tickets were already sold, he decreed another law by which he invalidated previously issued tourist visas and through which he demanded a payment of almost half a million dollars by the passengers to the Cuban government to allow their entry on the island with refugee status.

  Those aboard the passenger ship couldn’t come up with those sums, of course. Upon leaving German territory, the supposed tourists were allowed to leave with only one suitcase of clothing and ten marks, the equivalent of four dollars. But, as a part of the game, Goebbels, the head of German propaganda and demiurge of that episode, had started the rumor that the refugees were traveling with money, diamonds, and other jewels amounting to a great fortune. And the Cuban president and his advisors gave the Nazi leader much more than the benefit of the doubt.

  When the sun rose, the multitudes clustered around the port were already more than five or six thousand people. Little Daniel Kaminsky didn’t understand anything, since the comments around him were continuous and contradictory: some led to hope and others to despair. People were even running bets—whether they’d disembark or not disembark—and they supported their decisions with a variety of reasons. To the passengers and their relatives’ relief, someone reported that the deboarding process had been postponed due to it being a weekend and the majority of the Cuban bureaucrats being off. But the greatest trust among that group of relatives was placed in the certainty that everything could be bought or sold in Cuba, and, as such, soon some envoys from the Joint Distribution Committee would arrive in Havana, willing to negotiate the prices set by the Cuban government …

  In reality, Joseph Kaminsky and his nephew Daniel would have a very powerful reason to be more optimistic than the rest of the relatives of the travelers piled up in Havana’s port. Uncle Pepe the Purseman had already confided to the boy, with the greatest discretion, that Daniel’s parents and sister had in their hands something much more prized than some visas: they possessed the key that could burst open the doors to the island for the three Kaminskys aboard the Saint Louis. Because with them, somehow saved from the Nazi requisitions, traveled the small canvas of an old painting that for years had hung on some wall of the family home. That work, signed by a famous and highly valued Dutch painter, was capable of reaching a sum that, Joseph assumed, would surpass the demands by a mile of any police bureaucrat or Cuban Immigration secretary, whose goodwill, the man assured him, tended to be bought for far less money.

  * * *

  For almost three centuries the painting that represented the face of a classically Jewish man, who simultaneously looked like the classically iconic Christian image of Jesus, had gone through various statuses in its relationship with the Kaminsky family: a secret, a family heirloom, and, in the end, a jewel on which the last Kaminskys to enjoy owning it would place their greatest hopes for salvation.

  In the house in Kraków where Daniel was born in 1930, the Kaminskys, although no longer as financially comfortable as a few decades before, lived with all the comforts of a typical petit bourgeois Jewish family. Some photos saved from the disaster prove it. Expensive wooden furniture, German mirrors, and antique Delft porcelain vases could be seen in those sepia-stained photographs. And that exact photo of Daniel at four or five years old, with his mother, Esther, beside him—a snapshot taken in the light-filled living room that sometimes served as a dining room—revealed it especially. In that image one could see, just behind the boy and above a table decorated with a vase overflowing with flowers, the carved ebony frame in which Isaiah had placed, as if it were the clan’s blazon, the painting that represented a t
ranscendental man with Jewish features and a gaze lost in the infinite.

  Forty years before, the fur trader Benjamin Kaminsky—father to Joseph, the deceased Israel, and Isaiah—had managed to amass a generous fortune and, resolved to guarantee his sons’ futures, had insisted on leaving them something no one would be able to take away from them: education. Before the war of 1914 began, he had sent his firstborn, Joseph, to Bohemia so that he could develop his notable skills there, training with the best leather craftsmen, renowned in that region of the world. In this way, the day he inherited the family business, he would do so with a background sure to guarantee him quick progress. Later, Benjamin sent the deceased Israel to study engineering in Paris, where the young man quickly decided to establish himself, dazzled by the city and French culture. To his misfortune, in his process of becoming French, Israel would end up enrolling in the French army, to end his days in a trench overflowing with mud, blood, and shit just outside Verdun. After the Great War, even in the middle of the crisis that did away with so many fortunes and the political instability the family lived in, the fur dealer invested his remaining money in sending his youngest, Isaiah, to become a doctor at the University of Leipzig. It was at that time the young man met Esther Kellerstein, the daughter of one of the city’s wealthy and reputable families, the beautiful young woman he married, and in 1928 he established himself in Kraków, ancestral home to the Kaminskys.

  With Israel dead in the war and Joseph’s professed intention to leave and seek his fortunes in the New World, where he wouldn’t live in constant fear of a pogrom, Isaiah’s father gave his youngest son custody of that old painting that, for generations, had always been handed over to the oldest son in the line. For the first time, the future ownership of the work, of whose value they had more trustworthy information, would be divided between two brothers, although from the beginning Joseph, always frugal, with a certain hermit’s vocation and lacking in great ambitions, preferred to leave it in the care of his “intellectual” brother, as he called the doctor, since, besides, due to his orthodox religious leanings, he had never liked that portrait much. Quite the contrary. Thanks to all of these conditions, years later, when Joseph learned of the financial difficulties Isaiah had while trying to find a way out of Germany for himself and his family, it was easy to make a decision. That man, who tended to count his pennies, who kept his nephew Daniel—and himself—always at the brink of starvation to avoid excess spending on food that, after all, he would say, turned into shit (due to his chronic constipation, he lived until his dying day obsessed with shit and worried about the traumatic act of evacuating it), had written to his brother confirming that he had free rein to make use of the painting if its sale guaranteed his survival. Perhaps this was the manifest destiny of that controversial and heretical, ornate jewel obtained by the family almost three hundred years before.

  No one knew for sure how that painting, a rather small canvas, had come into the hands of some distant Kaminskys, by all accounts in the middle of the seventeenth century, shortly after having been painted. That precise time period had been the most terrible era Poland’s Jewish community had lived through until then, although its cruelty and death toll would soon be surpassed. Despite the amount of time that had passed, all of the world’s Jews knew very well the story of the persecution, martyrdom, and death of thousands of Jews at the hands of the masses of Cossacks and Tartars drunk with sadism and hate, a slaughter carried out to the extreme between 1648 and 1653.

  The family story regarding the painting that the Kaminskys possessed from those turbulent times forward was based on a fabulous, romantic, and, for many of the Kaminskys, false story of a rabbi who, fleeing the advance of the Cossacks, had escaped almost miraculously from the siege of the city of Nemirov, first, and of Zamość, later. The mythical rabbi, they said, had managed to arrive in Kraków, where, to his disgrace, an enemy just as implacable as the Cossacks had trapped him: the plague epidemic that in one summer wiped away the lives of twenty thousand Jews in that city alone. From generation to generation, the members of the clan would tell each other that Dr. Moshe Kaminsky had treated the rabbi on his deathbed, and since that wise man (whose family had been massacred by the Cossacks under the famous Chmiel the Wicked, a murderer in the eyes of the Jews and a tough hero in the eyes of the Ukrainians) understood how things would end, he handed over some letters and three small canvases to the doctor. The paintings were of that man’s head, which appeared Jewish by all indications, and in a very naturalistic way sought to be a representation of the Christian Jesus, although with the obvious intention to make him more human and earthly than the figure that had been established by Catholic iconography at the time; a small landscape of the Dutch countryside; and the portrait of a young woman dressed in the Dutch style of that period. No one ever knew what the letters said, since they were written in a language that was incomprehensible for Eastern European Jews and Poles, and at some point they followed an unknown path, at least for the doctor’s descendants, who maintained and transmitted the story of the rabbi and the paintings.

  According to that family legend, the rabbi had told Dr. Moshe Kaminsky that he had received the canvases from a Sephardic man who said he was a painter. The Sephardic man had assured him that the portrait of the young woman was his, that the landscape had been painted by a friend, while the head of Jesus—or of a young Jewish man who looked like the Christian Jesus—was actually a portrait of himself, the young Sephardic man, and had come from the hands of his maestro, the greatest portrait painter in all the known world … a Dutchman named Rembrandt van Rijn, whose initials could be read on the bottom edge of the canvas, along with its date of execution: 1647.

  Ever since then, the Kaminsky family, who had also only miraculously escaped the slaughters and illnesses of those dark years, had kept the canvases and the somewhat unbelievable story that, as far as they knew, the distant doctor had heard from the lips of the delirious rabbi who had survived the Cossacks’ attacks. What member of the Polish Jewish community of the mid-seventeenth century, with the bloodshed and horror of the genocidal violence that decimated it, could believe that story about a Sephardic Jew, a painter, no less, lost in those parts? Which of those sons of Israel, fanatics in those times to the point of desperation over the wanderings in Palestine of a certain Sabbatai Zevi who had proclaimed himself the true Messiah capable of redeeming them, which of those Jews would believe that in the fields of Little Russia there could be wandering a Sephardic Jew who came to Amsterdam and who, to top off the nonsense, proclaimed himself a painter? Because, really, who had ever seen a Jewish painter? And how could that incredible Jewish painter dare to and actually wander around those lands with three oil paintings, a portrait of himself too similar to Christ among them? Wasn’t it more possible that, during one of the Cossack and Tartar attacks, the supposed rabbi appropriated, God knows how, those paintings? Or that the thief was Dr. Moshe Kaminsky himself—the creator of that clumsy fable about the Sephardic painter and the dead rabbi in order to hide behind those characters some dark act carried out during the years of plague and slaughter? Whether the story was true or not, the case was that the doctor came to own the works and kept them until the end of his life without showing them to anyone, out of fear of being considered idolatrous. Unfortunately, said the descendants who passed along the story and the inheritance for centuries, the small landscape of the Dutch countryside had reached Moshe Kaminsky’s hands in a deteriorated state, while, with the passing of years, the painting that copied the young Jewess’s face, perhaps due to the poor quality of the pigments or the canvas, started to fade and crack until it disappeared, flake by flake. But not the painting of the young Jewish man. As one could expect, several generations of the Kaminskys kept that piece, perhaps even valuable, hidden from public view, especially from the view of other Polish Jews, who were increasingly orthodox and radical, since the act of displaying it could be considered an egregious violation of Jewish Law, since not only was it a human image b
ut the image of a Jew who embodied the alleged Messiah.

  It was Benjamin’s father and Daniel Kaminsky’s great-grandfather who became the first in the clan to dare to hang that painting visibly in his home. There was a reason: he was something of an atheist, like any good socialist, and he even became a somewhat important labor leader in mid-nineteenth-century Kraków. Since then, the family story about the painting acquired new dramatic flourishes, because one of those socialist Jews, a comrade-in-arms of Daniel Kaminsky’s great-grandfather, turned out to be a French trade unionist, and, according to what he himself said, a close friend of Camille Pissarro, who was a painter and a Jew, and boasted of his knowledge of European painting. From the first time the Frenchman saw the head of the young Jewish man in the house, he assured his comrade Kaminsky that he had on his wall nothing less than a piece by the Dutchman Rembrandt, one of the artists most admired by Parisian painters at the time, including his friend Pissarro.

  It was Benjamin Kaminsky, Daniel’s grandfather, who was not a socialist but a man very interested in making money however he could, who one day took the painting off to Warsaw’s best specialist. The expert certified that it was, in fact, a Dutch painting from the seventeenth century, but couldn’t guarantee that it was a work by Rembrandt—although it did have many elements of his style. The main problem for its authentication was due to there having been many heads like that painted in Rembrandt’s studio, more or less finished, and there was great confusion among catalogers regarding which ones were the maestro’s works and which were those of his students, whom he often had paint pieces with him or after him. On occasion, if he was satisfied with the result, the maestro would even sign them and sell them as his own … As such, the Polish specialist, relying on the ease of its possibility as an unfinished work, was inclined to think that it was a work painted by one of Rembrandt’s students, in Rembrandt’s workshop, and he mentioned various possible authors. Nevertheless, said the man, it was without a doubt an important canvas (although not very valuable in monetary terms since it was not a Rembrandt), but he warned that his opinion should not be taken as definitive. Perhaps Dutch specialists or punctilious German catalogers …