New York, New York
1 October 1919
My dear Son,
In the latest fair copy I was able to examine, belonging to Zebulon Whiteman of Edom County, Missouri, dated 1882, the story of the discovery of the mainland of the North American Continent and the naming of the peninsula of Florida constitute the final words of the Last Will and Testament of Esau Benavides, born Eliyahu ben Moshe Halevy, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
In adapting the copy of 1882, which was itself taken directly from the 1763 translation of the original and certified authentic by the Franciscan missionary Bartolomeo de las Camas, I have merely attempted to impose a fluidity onto the literal translation from the Spanish, with the goal of persuading an American publisher to broadcast to a wider public the true history of our proud family, which is the true history of our country.
In the course of my studies of this remarkable document, I had occasion to visit most of the reputable booksellers of Judaica up and down the East Coast of the United States. Many of them provided valuable material on the history of the Jews in Spain and elsewhere prior to the Expulsion. None of them, however, was able to lay his hands on documents relating to the further history of Esau, his son Eliphaz, or any of his offspring and succeeding generations. Similarly unsuccessful were my communications with the few identifiable descendants. The history of the Mayaimi merged with that of the Seminoles. The subsequent removal of the Seminoles in the 1830s by the Gentiles into larger reservations in the Oklahoma Territory destroyed the requisite curiosity of origins. Only my direct ancestors have taken Esau’s advice to heart—in motion there is survival.
But as I was nearing the end of my work, one of my many inquiries finally bore fruit. I was visited one day by a decrepit bookdealer who claimed to have run a business in Sephardic Judaica out of his tenement on Essex Street in New York City for over thirty-five years, although God knows I have walked the length of Essex Street dozens of times without hearing its name. He boasted that he possessed several documents, in Spanish and in English, that might pertain to the history of Esau Benavides. Upon further inquiry, and a personal visit on my part to his attic, I discovered merely that he had recently received a letter from a Mrs. Albin Barker in Olive Hill, Kentucky, offering for sale several ancient pieces of paper she had discovered stored in a clay jug at the narrow end of a bat cave behind her truck farm. She could read nothing on the paper—she believed in her confusion that the symbols were Egyptian hieroglyphs—except for a large scrawl at the top of the first page: YSWA.
I paid the dealer five dollars for the woman’s address. For an extra five, the documents were mine. Written on vellum and dated 1653, these must be fragments from one of the earliest copies made of the original letter. They could even be part of the Spanish copy from which the translation of 1763 was taken.
I am a ham-handed translator of Spanish, and, with the scant information that exists on the Native Americans of Florida, the whole is therefore sketchy, full of gaps, mysterious at times, and at others unbelievable.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt in my mind that these are the last pages of the Will and Testament of Esau Benavides. With the fondness of a father, I have rushed to finish my translation in time for your bar mitzvah.
Happy birthday,
Papa
“This is absurd,” I said.
“You should see what other boys get as bar mitzvah presents.” Hanni was leaning back against the headboard, snugly surrounded by half a dozen pillows, eyes half-closed. “My Papa was a very lucky young man.”
Isabella still lay chin on hands, giving no sign of either boredom or understanding. The pile of paper I had read was spread around the armchair like a pinochle fan. There was one more sheaf to go, bound in its own purple ribbon.
“Did your grandfather honestly expect any publisher to believe that a Jew named Esau discovered America?”
“Why shouldn’t a publisher believe? There is the proof, in front of your nose.”
“This?” I whispered. “This copy of a copy of a translation of a copy of who knows how many other copies? Maybe if you could find the original …”
“The original?” Hanni finally opened her eyes. “Would you expect a double-breasted publisher, smoking a Montecristo at a mahogany desk high above Union Square to read a cardboard box full of tree bark in the original Castilian?”
“You mean you’ve seen the original?”
“Have you seen five-hundred-year-old tree bark?” Hanni smiled back. “My grandfather would have been laughed out of every waiting room in Manhattan if he had claimed to be carrying the original.”
“But you have no other way to prove the authenticity of the letter!” I felt I was explaining the alphabet to a summer intern. Hanni’s face dropped. Not as if I had finally twigged her to the crucial weakness of her obsession. More as if she had come to the realization that it was I who had failed to qualify for the summer job.
“Look at your own work, your documentaries. Are any of your viewers demanding to see the original?”
“No,” I said, “but they believe in the process of making copies of a film.”
“I mean the original scene, before you put it on film, with your subject walking in his garden, or sitting in her chair, full body, not a tightly framed soft-focus close-up. Does your audience have to be there in order to believe you? Do they have to walk with the astronauts before they believe that man really stood on the moon and not on some highly sophisticated TV set? Would anything less than being Neil Armstrong satisfy them? Would anything less than being Esau satisfy you?”
“That’s ridiculous!” I said, what I always say when I can’t think of a good retort. She did have a point. I never could trust a camera crew.
“Holland,” she said, with remarkable equanimity, “I think it is worth realizing that, put between two leather-bound covers, televised on any public broadcast system, preached from any pulpit, religious or otherwise, just about anything will be believed by most people.”
“Then you admit this is all a fiction?” I smiled triumphantly.
“Of course not,” she said. “We were merely discussing the need for what you called ‘authenticity.’ Now stand up!” Isabella was on her feet in an instant, Hanni a moment later. My legs had fallen asleep. “Let your head drop, chin on chest, roll it slowly to one side, then the other. Head up, raise your hands slowly above your head …”
“Hanni, what are you doing?” I asked. My watch said 5.45.
“In America we call it the seventh-inning stretch.”