CHARLIE INVITED ME to his Christmas Eve party. He didn’t expect me to come and I met his expectations. Rabbi Judah called and invited me to a first night of Chanukah service at the temple with the assurance that Levi would be there. I declined that too. I sent Cécile Donneaux a polite note saying maybe another time. I accepted a Christmas Eve, and the second night of Chanukah invitation to dinner at Levi’s house. He lived on the ground floor of the two-story house which he owned. He rented out the top floor.
Levi appeared relaxed when he greeted me. Dressed casually in slacks and a cashmere, button-down, pale-blue sweater over a collared shirt, he wore untinted glasses, which did not make his presence any less forbidding. Walking with the aid of his cane, he showed me around the interior and patio of the modest home. Books in English, German, and Hebrew lined the walls of nearly every room, with the rare books stored inside a glass case. I saw none of his books, publications, or personal photographs anywhere. He became almost effervescent when he showed off his small but impressive and deeply rooted European art collection, which prominently featured a print from Otto Dix, a miniature woodcut from Munch, an original Kokoschka portrait, and a signed and dedicated print from Anselm Kiefer. Classical and jazz records and CDs, filed in alphabetical order, filled a floor-to-ceiling cabinet. The sound system played Samuel Barber’s chorale music. He led me to the entrance of his workroom, stopped, and then almost delicately walked into this stark room, with drawn curtains over the windows. On one wall were three reproductions from Goya’s Disasters of War series. On another wall two framed prints from the Arbeiter Illustriete Zeitung newspaper hung opposite his desk. The first was from July 1934, titled “Heil, Hitler” with bullet-filled corpses all around the zealot-eyed Fuhrer. The second from December 26, 1935, and titled in German, which Levi translated for me as “O Joyful, O Blessed, Miracle-Bringing Time,” pictured Nazis as angels wearing gas masks and circling above the terrorized/adoring people. Between these two pieces hung a lone rusted metal, one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old key that hung on the wall behind a Plexiglas box—the only surviving key to his former family home in the Jewish quarter of Prague.
I backed wordlessly away and surveyed the computer, printer, and fax machine, which sat on the mahogany desk. He kept his papers stacked neatly on the floor and on a second, large table; cabinets filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of letters surrounded the room. I contemplated this room devoid of books; this external creating chamber of the hell lived within. He nudged me with his cane and led me to the den.
To enter the den we had to walk down three small steps. A twenty-one-inch TV screen hooked up to a satellite dish dominated the room. The furniture felt, well, heavy loaded, muddy brown in color, and without the fluidity and space I’d seen in Indian homes. It felt like my grandparents apartment. While I took all this in, Levi watched me and called out instructions to the cook.
When Levi invited me for dinner he asked what I wanted to eat. I joked, “Potato pancakes and matzo ball soup.” Done deal. He regularly had boxes of Manischewitz soup and potato pancake mix flown in from New York along with other needed essentials. In the dining room, which was adjacent to the den, I eyed an unlit menorah on the middle shelf of the floor-to-ceiling breakfront. “Hannah lit the candles,” he said, matter-of-factly.
“Was she religious?”
“Observant.” Levi’s tone made it clear that there exists a distinction.
He poured me a glass of red wine. I took it and made a motion with my right hand as a toast. “L’chaim.” He nodded and sat in his favorite chair at the head of a stained wooden dining room table, with a pinkish marble border that looked like the British might have left it behind. He sipped his beer from a frosted mug. “Sit, please.”
I did. “I saw Hannah’s grave in the cemetery.” I asked if he felt any reservations about burying her.
“Of course not,” he snorted through his nostrils. “Would I burn her? Cremate her?”
Never. As tattoos were banned in Judaism, disallowing burial in a Jewish cemetery, so was cremation against Talmudic law, and burning would be a victory for hate because it symbolized not the sacred crematoria of India, but the craven chambers of Europe.
“So, when do you leave?”
“New Year’s Eve.”
“I leave soon after that for Israel.” Levi grinned and his yellowing teeth showed, “I am meeting the esteemed Rebbe Schneerman. He is quite ill. I told him to ask his numerologist to tell him when he is going to die.” He chuckled at his own jibe as if Schneerman could hear it again. “You know that Schneerman used my prewar writings on work on tetras and trinities in his writings to reconcile the silence of YHVH with the hell of Auschwitz? He had no comprehension at all of what I meant and the implications of Judaism being a faith based on the numerologies of one and four, the square; Christianity on one and three, the triangle; and Hinduism on zero and ten, the circle.”
“Yes, I read that essay.” Levi first used the phrase “terrible mistakes of mysticism” in a short essay refuting the writings of Schneerman. While in the camps, Levi had confided to Schneerman that using the Hebrew alphabet’s letters, which assigned numerical values to the letters, had spurred some of his keenest thoughts. In Hebrew the name of Adam has the same numerical significance of forty-five, a powerful number in Kabbalistic thought and when broken down (four plus five) adds up to nine, another powerful number. After the war Levi had given up that part of his search. Not Schneerman, who without ever consulting him used his name to imply that Levi supported his work, which posited that ACGT, the tetragrammaton of the genetic code, and YHVH, if one could unveil their secret meanings, would reveal the hidden godhead. Schneerman, too, believed that it was no mere coincidence that there were twenty-two basic letters in the Hebrew alphabet, twenty-two X chromosomes in the male sperm, plus one Y chromosome which equals twenty-three, and when matched together added up to the sacred, Kabbalistic forty-five.
“You’d think after I laid into him with all of my power reducing his ideas to gibberish, he’d leave me alone. But no, he loves me more. He perverted my words and used them to say, ‘Levi Furstenblum supports me.’ I said no such thing. What I said was that he alone had the fearlessness to write what is the logical conclusion of almost all religious doctrine—Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Moslem—that those in the camps deserved to die for past or present sins.” Levi’s defense of Schneerman, although he described his ideas as repellent, had bound Levi and Schneerman together again.
“Now he wants me to make a pilgrimage with him to Prague and Berlin, his home city, so we could pray together.” A rather unpleasant gurgle climbed out from deep in his throat, which meant “not a chance.” He leaned his head forward, pressing his thin, dry lips together. “Have you ever been to Prague?”
He so wanted to hear news of the Prague of which he’d read about. He would have accepted stories of the Prague ’68, although I’m sure he would’ve preferred the Prague of Havel and the Velvet Revolution. Of the cleaned-up Prague with only vague allusions to the Prague of his youth, with no recollections of the jackbooted stomps across the cobblestone, of the ravaged temples serving as Nazi headquarters. Those temples become memorials to 72,000 annihilated Jews. Of Prague with “Kafka cafés” whose owners have never read one word of The Trial. Of month-long grand music festivals and hipster hangouts called the Bohemian Bagel. I had no stories to tell.
“No. Been to Berlin. Didn’t like it.”
“Bah.” He sniffed his nose. “Prague, now that is, or was, a beautiful city.”
“Why don’t you go visit?”
“I am not an apologist. I will not be a smiling Jew used for absolution, like in that insidious movie. I do not want any prizes or gifts sponsored by remorseful-looking children, who then will go celebrate forgiveness.” Levi spit out his words with scorn. “In Israel, he and I will meet, reminisce, visit others, but I will not let him use me in any way, not again, to endorse his repugnant ideas. Not even one photo for his newspaper.”
He excused himself and gingerly, suddenly painstakingly, it seemed, walked into the kitchen to check on dinner.
My eyes searched around the house again and I realized Levi lived in India, but he had never left the West, Prague, Auschwitz.
He and the cook brought in the soup. He sat down, and while we waited for the soup to cool, he began to discuss my dilemmas.
“So, tell me, is there something else besides the unveiling?” His eyes seemed to open and swallow me up. “Yes?”
“I still can’t believe what happened.” I fidgeted in place, my hands and arms feeling like uncontrollable extremities. I grabbed the soupspoon and gripped it in my right hand. “I used to be religious in my fashion. I believed in god. In the future. In an ultimate reason. Now, every day, part of me wants to die. Which is better than a few months ago, when every day part of me wanted to kill.”
“Wanting to kill is the easy part.” So well he understood both urges. He stuck his finger in his beer and stirred the ice cubes for a throat-tensing thirty seconds. “Who do you want to kill? Aren’t those children who murdered your son all dead?”
“Their parents … and I hate, hate myself for saying this—sometimes, my wife.” I felt my head and ears become almost feverish, but still fearful of acknowledging my anger.
“Your wife?” His voice quavered slightly with mild surprise; his eyes never wavered as they stared at me. I wished he’d worn his sunglasses. “Is that why she is not here?”
I gulped, hesitated, and blurted a truncated truth. “It came out that she betrayed me.”
He shook his head as if to say, Ah-so … I see. But he spoke more bluntly. “In your heart you would rather your wife had been killed rather than your child.” This was not a question. The accusation petrified me; he knew my inner secrets.
“I, I guess. Part of me …”
He interrupted my stammering.
“‘Mörder sind leicht einzusehen’ …”
I looked at him, clueless.
“‘Minds of murderers are easily understood.’” Levi had cited this quote from Rilke’s Duino Elegies in his writings, twisting the phrase into another of his controversial challenges to one’s heart and one’s language: “Minds of victims are not so easily understood.”
He wrote how easily he came to understand the mind of the torturer, the rapist, and the murderer during his internment. He became excited at the idea of killing his captors, branding them, and having sex with their wives and daughters. After the war, he became sick of hearing the preposterous notion that “We are all Jews.” “We are all Nazis” more accurately reflected human history. Understanding what it was like to be in the camps—that terror fell beyond the limitations of most people. The murderers certainly did not understand the victims. Levi suggested as punishment for the thousands, not the few who were tried at Nuremberg, but all who had killed and tortured and watched and guarded and led the imprisoned to the chambers, whether they were Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Croats, Ukrainians, or Czechs, that they be interned for one year as he had been interned. No heat in winter, no change of clothes, no bathrooms, no hot water, barely any water at all, no visiting with loved ones, almost no food. Being magnanimous, he’d allow them to forgo the torture and beatings. At the end of one year they should be released into society on a single condition: they could never procreate. If they had children they had to give them up for adoption. If their wives became pregnant, they could either choose to abort or give the child up for adoption. Many thought he was being ironic.
“You cannot let your murderous desires paralyze you.” He dipped a piece of naan bread into the steaming soup.
“Levi, I accept my inner Nazi.” He snickered at my psychobabble term. “Though I don’t know if I could kill in cold blood. But what I want, I simply want this never-ending, indelible ache of loss to go away.”
“I possess no magic elixir,” he frowned sympathetically, “that would excise your ache or fill the void. Don’t worry about your ability to kill. You can.” He breathed heavily. He wiped his mouth with his cloth napkin. “You cannot let your own victimization make you into a torturer.”
I nodded.
“Listen carefully,” we both stopped sipping our soup. “And I hope this makes sense to you. India gave us, the West, the zero, the idea of nothingness. They have used the zero as a cosmological concept for over two thousand years. In Hinduism, in the cult of Sunya, the essence of nothingness is from where we come and, finally, the ultimate reward. Life is the absence of nothingness. In the seventh century, this universal truth became known to humankind after the Brahmaghupta defined it as a mathematical and algebraic concept.
“Their sense of nothingness is not at all like ours in the West. The end result of life is to return to nothingness. Not like the traditional Western cataclysmic oblivion myth—the word messiah did not exist in Hindi or Sanskrit until the Christian missionaries brought it with the Bible. There are those, and I have spoken with them at length, who say I do not, cannot, understand the Indian way. Perhaps they are right.” He nodded skeptically. “But in the system of castes I perceive a salvation that, over the centuries, became less transcendent and more Darwinian, more a tool of social control than spiritual. The best ascend and finally reach eternal nothingness—nirvana. In the ideal, I understand it, but this veers from my point.
“In the West, the zero and nothing are the ultimate terror. Even the American colloquialism of ‘being broke’ means having no money. To have nothing. To be broken.” He frowned as if to say bah. “The West has spent centuries trying to negate or transcend the zero and nothingness, which is not possible. For if nothing is possible, then godlessness is not only possible, but probable. I accept this. There is no ultimate reason for existence, only chaos and what comes next is nothingness. Absolute nothing. I do not consider myself a nihilist. I have faith in nothingness. It is a wonderful feeling, in which I embrace the barbarian in myself, the cruelty in being a part of the human race. I accept my being as part Nazi and a creation of European culture, which has given the world TNT, the guillotine, the gas chamber, and the atomic bomb. I don’t forgive. I never forgive. Those who say they forgive but don’t forget are liars. But I understand.”
I bowed my head, feeling quite sullen and inadequate.
He stared at me, with those pupils that sucked you in like vacuum tubes leading to the metaphysical void. “I don’t tell you to understand those boys who are killers or the parents who may or may not be responsible, but understand your wife. You will not have tranquility, but you must have less hate, hate that is filling your void. And hate kills like no other emotion.”