Judenstaat (26 page)

Finish what Hitler started

“Do you understand that jargon?” Freddi asked Judit.

Judit surprised both herself and Freddi by dodging the question. So did Sammy Gluck and another girl who'd joined them at the window who at the very least had enough Yiddish to understand
Hitler
. All were transfixed by the spectacle, by the sheer number of men who filled the streets and sidewalks and brought traffic to a halt. If police had been called in, there'd been no visible effect.

The phone in Kornfeld's office started ringing. No one had occupied that office for a month. It was just down the hall. Everyone looked at Judit. She stayed where she was, and on the fifth ring, Sammy Gluck ran off to answer it.

They could hear him even from a distance. “Who?” His voice sounded too high. “Well, do you think it's a good idea?” Then, he set the receiver down, walked back, and stood in the doorway. “There's one of them, wants to come upstairs.” He looked at Judit.

“It's not up to me,” Judit said.

“Who's it up to, then?” Sammy asked savagely. “She says she knows you.”

Judit hesitated. Then she said, “I'll go meet her.” Turning to the others, she added, “It's just a woman from Chabad.”

Still, she admitted some anxiety as she walked towards the elevator. Nothing was less appealing than facing Charlotte in a state of panic, and with any luck, Charlotte would take one look at her and know that she was pregnant. The elevator door opened. It was Shaindel.

Shaindel tore down the hallway like she was on fire, pulling Judit with her and then suddenly, they were both in the Media Room surrounded by staff and their blinking screens. Shaindel's hair was out of her hair-band, wind-blown over a face fixed with terror. She'd lost one shoe and carried the other, leaving her in muddy stockinged feet.

Freddi asked, “Is that your niece?”

Sammy addressed her in Yiddish. “
Sit. You want a cookie?
”

But someone else said, “It wouldn't be kosher. Don't upset her.” They brought her water in a paper cup, and she drank it. She didn't take her eyes off Judit, and finally, Judit had sense enough to shut the two of them in Kornfeld's office.

His desk was still there, and like the desk of the porter in her dormitory, it had an ink-blotter on it, and also that telephone, and a box of tissues. Judit pulled out Kornfeld's padded office chair, and Shaindel kept standing, shivering, holding that shoe and looking at Judit with her big, clear eyes. She whispered in Yiddish, “
Are you in charge?
”

Judit addressed her in German, hoping the shift to a rational language would calm her down. “You can stay here a little while. Then we'll find someone to take you home.”

But Shaindel had forgotten her German completely. “
Are you in charge?
” she asked again, in crude Galician Yiddish. “
Is it my fault? I was the one who brought them. I didn't know they were bad.
”

Judit's hand went up to smooth Shaindel's hair, and Shaindel recoiled, but then she seemed to gather herself up again and suffered the affection. Judit asked, “
What are you talking about?
”

“
I thought they were what you wanted.
”

“
Are you talking about those video tapes?
” Judit asked. The question was unnecessary. This time, her voice was stronger, and she felt the hand that stroked Shaindel's hair rest on her neck, not very gently.

The girl burst into tears and said, “
I know there were naked people in them. I thought that's what you wanted. Now Uncle Moishe is in trouble. Don't send us all away because I did a bad thing, please. Have mercy on us.
”

“
So did you know what you were doing? What did you think would happen?
” Her own voice sounded strange to her, too harsh, and Shaindel wrenched herself away and backed into Kornfeld's desk. “
Shaindel, what are you people after?
”

She stopped asking questions. What was the point? She just let Shaindel sob into tissue after tissue. Her breasts hurt. Her bladder began to fill with urine. She moved to touch the girl again, and Shaindel gave a cry and said, “
Don't hurt me!
”

Someone knocked on the door. It was Mr. Rosenblatt himself, who'd come to retrieve Shaindel. Shaindel seemed glad to see him, and even took his hand. In turn, he put his cap on her head. She looked at Judit with terror and suspicion. He said to Judit, “She's been here almost every day, wanting to see you. I didn't have the heart to turn her away now, with all the trouble out there. You really ought to tell her that we don't let kids into the administrative offices unless they're relatives. She's not, is she?”

“Not what?” Judit asked.

“A relative. No? Well, she looks like you,” he said, “or like you looked when you were her age. I still remember. You looked just like a little lamb, back then.”

*   *   *

It wasn't until Judit returned to her mother's apartment that she learned what was behind the demonstrations. A copy of
A Home
lay open on the kitchen table: “Museum Bomber Arrested.” Apparently, an investigation traced the explosives found in the archive to a Loschwitz location, and for the first time in Judenstaat's history, the case would not be handled by a rabbinic court. There was a photograph of Kravitz—untrimmed beard over his prison jumpsuit, velvet skull-cap on his head—a seedy, ignominious man whose shop was full of trigger-wires and timers and who faced arrest without resistance.

The arrest of Moses Kravitz took place early that same morning, and the scene when the police van parked in the heart of Loschwitz was apocalyptic. The van was overturned and set on fire, and the police shot in the air, but rather than dispersing, the mob poured down the street, and it was only when reinforcements arrived that they'd managed to plow right through a wall of men in caftans and put the suspect behind bars.

Well, it was about time, of course. Why should those people have a separate court and separate laws? The paper's editorial pressed the point and took it further. Isn't it about time to end the forty-year policy of subsidizing a community that didn't hold to common standards? Their schools produced paupers with no written knowledge of the national language. Their housing blocks were never up to code; the concrete foundations had been crumbling for years, and it was amazing that their children hadn't been electrocuted on the exposed wires that dangled from those ceilings.

Her mother heard her come in, and stood in her slippers and robe in the kitchen doorway. “Is it true, sweetheart?”

“Is what true?” Judit asked.

“That they're going to deport them all?” Leonora looked so fragile that Judit felt she ought to offer her a chair, but she shook her head. “I don't want to bother you. I try not to wait up for you anymore. But I just wanted to know. Is it true that there are trucks waiting at the border to take them to Siberia?”

“Where did you hear that?” Judit asked.

“Where I work,” her mother said. “They're in a panic. Oh, it's terrible to see, the way they're overreacting and spreading rumors. The old ones in the home, they've all stopped eating. I had to force-feed one woman who actually struck me, Judi, right across the face, and they had to put her in restraints.”

Leonora tended to keep to herself these days; she and Judit seldom crossed paths. She looked older than Judit had remembered, diminished, and the robe was too big for her. Her hazel eyes searched Judit's.

“That's crazy, Mom,” Judit said. “They arrest one nut, and the black-hats get a persecution complex. He should be treated like everybody else.”

“I know, I know,” Leonora said. “But they don't see it that way. As far as they're concerned, they'll never be like everybody else.”

“Go to bed, Mom,” Judit said.

“Don't you agree? That they think they can't be like everybody else?”

“They're right,” Judit said. “We can't be.”

Leonora looked perplexed, and Judit herself wasn't sure what she just said and what she had confessed. She knew she owed her mother an explanation, but that would mean a longer night, and sharing a document she would prefer to keep to herself for a while. She suspected that her mother often went into her room, and thus, she'd placed it inside her old sewing machine, just below a panel where she kept spools of thread. Of course, it was Stephen Weiss's manifesto.

 

4

The Manifesto of Stephen Weiss

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of genocide. The great powers struggle to exorcise this specter through solemn dedications, bad art, and rhetoric that is designed to drain the term of any specificity. Where is the nation that has not been decried as genocidal by its opponents? Where are the opponents who have not hurled the reproach of genocide against their adversaries?

Two things result from this state of affairs:

1. Genocide has become a term for mass murder of a group on ideological grounds.

2. It is high time that we who were the objects of genocide should publish our views and meet these fairy tales with a manifesto that defines the meaning of the term and once and for all lays out a program of action for Churban survivors.

 

I. The Meaning of Genocide

In earlier epochs, we find almost everywhere famine and bloodshed. As time went on, the opportunities for slaughter multiplied as death became the province not of random natural phenomena or personal vendettas, but of machinery and whole industrial armies. Today, conventional warfare no longer suffices. Given the first half of the twentieth century, the evidence is indisputable. The modern state is but a committee for managing murder.

Paradoxically, the modern state is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, an ideology that privileges progress and abstraction. Beginning with the premise of man's goodness, Enlightenment philosophy assures that human action must be grounded in human reason. Forging ahead, vulgar ideologues insist all men are brothers. What they cannot acknowledge is that all men are, in equal measure, butchers, and that irrationality, along with reason, is our common currency.

Therefore, modern states fight in the name of reason, and battle the irrational. If they wipe out their enemies, surely all men will be brothers. Soldiers, indeed, are burnt sacrifices to this God of Reason. Yet these relations do not constitute genocide. Rather, the term will be defined as follows:

1. Genocide is the attempted destruction of the Jews.

2. As survivors of genocide, we constitute a special class. The penumbra of our experience transforms not only us, but our relationships to other nations, in ways we shall delineate below.

 

II. The Jewish Demon

We leave religious and ethnographic definitions to professionals in those disciplines, but insist that three elements distinguish Jews from what tradition might establish as Nations or Goyim.

In fact, Jews are the antithesis of Nations for the following reasons:

1. We do not bow down.

2. We cross borders.

3. We remember.

The first point can be confirmed both theologically and historically. Our ancient prohibition against idol-worship has had lasting power; we do not honor crowns or flags. The second point is central to our narrative; we thrive in no fixed place. Finally, if we are border-crossers, what we carry is our memories, both individual and collective.

Contrast this set of characteristics to the Nations. They are defined by their allegiances and by their borders. These loyalties can only be sustained by a compulsory amnesia. Otherwise, they would be so tangled in contradictory memories that they would not be able to bow down at all. It is fair to say that forgetting is a passport to the wider world. The Jews can only join the rank of nations if they learn to forget.

Yet we cannot forget. Our memories extend beyond the Churban. Because we do not bow down, we have no loyalty to a particular ideological idol of the age. We are the repository for the history of every border we have crossed. Therefore, how can we help but laugh at flags? We know they are just bits of colored cloth. We carry our contradictions and represent, in the deepest sense, what Nations fear.

 

III. The Jews and Genocide

In what relation does genocide stand to the Jews as a whole? Not all of us lived in countries under fascist domination, but if the fascists sought complete extermination of the Jews, perforce, all living Jews are survivors.

Yet here we come across a paradox: our continued survival is dependent on other Nations and on the implications of the Churban. When Nations see us, they see ghosts; thus, they have no choice but to respond with terror and revulsion, and the power of that response ensures a symbiotic, necessary partnership which will be explained below, and in more detail, in section IV.

Throughout the ages, Jews have inspired in Nations that same terror and revulsion. Whole libraries have been compiled by way of explanation: their ignorance of our customs, their belief in black magic, their association of Jews with an angry, unforgiving God-the-Father who castrates and kills His son. Yet in the end, it is our indelible identity as demons that ensures our lasting power.

In short, we Jews embody the irrational. Emperors, landlords, bishops, and petty tyrants have employed us as money-lenders, merchants, and tax collectors, and most classically, court Jews. Thus, they have shielded themselves from popular outrage while offering us a limited protection. This partnership extended even to the so-called Age of Reason. When nation-states wanted to invoke a demon, they turned to Jews, and gave us another name: Capitalism, Bolshevism, sexual deviance—anything that would provoke a restless, powerless population and keep them from turning against the nation-state that was the true object of their rage. Returning briefly to the ideology of the Enlightenment, we might speculate that one of the things that makes men brothers is their subterranean and visceral response to Jews.