Tel Aviv, 1952
Isaiah Fleischmann presses his nose against the grimy window pane of his rented room, wipes the steam off the glass with his handkerchief, and stands very still. Soft white flakes are floating through the air. Snow in Tel Aviv! Who could have imagined such a thing? The sky is the colour of tarnished brass, and as he watches, the grey street is transformed by a fine layer of snow, pure, silent and untouched.
He has forgotten he is still holding his pen until it drops from his numb fingers and he bends down with a groan to pick it up. He is about to resume writing, but the snow distracts him. It crosses his mind that such a rare phenomenon could be a portent of something momentous, but he shrugs that off. Bube mayseh, superstitious nonsense, that’s what his mother would have said. The silence is now broken by children who have run outside, squealing at their first sight of snow, gathering handfuls which melt as soon as they try to shape them into balls. Some splatter against his window and slide down, leaving a watery trail.
He shuffles back to his rickety wooden table and pulls a blanket around his bony shoulders, determined to start writing, but snow is still falling, and he rises again and peers through the window. It’s a seductive sight, watching flakes drifting from the sky onto the ground, but he knows you can’t trust snow any more than you can trust people. It lulls you with its beauty while it disguises reality. Beneath its plump whiteness lies poverty, squalor and misery.
Snow creates an illusion, it fools people into mistaking the appearance for the substance. Every winter, it used to transform the huddle of overcrowded cottages back in Kolostór into a wintry wonderland scene like those in fairy tales.
But inside their hut his father was bent over his worktable, mending shoes with chilblained hands, his mother added water to the soup to make it go further, and he and his little sister Malka shivered as they huddled together in bed to keep warm.
Most people were too stupid, too complacent, or too trusting to detect the reality concealed beneath the beguiling surface, behind false smiles and lying words, but whether they liked it or not, he intended to continue exposing dishonesty wherever he saw it. Courage and conviction were what mattered, not approval or acclaim.
He knows that people laugh at him, and ridicule the pamphlets he writes. They call him a nebbish, a loser, a curmudgeon with a bee in his bonnet, a crank with a grudge against the whole world, but their mockery has never deterred him and it never would. Those who reveal uncomfortable truths usually face derision, so he doesn’t expect praise when he hands out his smudged, closely written leaflets that expose corrupt politicians and public servants who serve only their own interests. He has turned survival into a mission.
He rubs his stiff fingers and picks up his pen. One day they would realise he had been right. As his mother used to say, you can’t be a prophet in your own kingdom. She was a wise woman with a proverb for every situation, but he wonders if she ever realised the irony of naming him Isaiah.
So he keeps handing out his pamphlets to passers-by on the corner of Dizengoff Street, the busiest thoroughfare in the city. Most people quicken their pace when they see him standing there and avert their gaze, the women staring at the pavement, pulling their dogs and toddlers away, and the men finding a sudden reason to cross the road. Occasionally someone takes a pamphlet, probably out of pity for the thin, unshaven fellow in a shabby overcoat and worn-out shoes who thinks he can put the world to rights. He suspects that when he isn’t looking they throw the thin sheets into the garbage bins or use them to wipe their behinds, since toilet paper, like so many other things here, is an expensive commodity.
That brings his mind back to his current hobbyhorse. He unwraps the crinkly packet of tobacco, places a pinch onto a sheet of cigarette paper, rolls it carefully so not a single shred will fall out, and licks the edges of the paper to glue them together. He takes a comforting puff and continues writing. This time his target is the Rationing and Supply department which he likes to refer to, in capital letters, underlined and asterisked, as the *RATIONALISING* Department. Because that’s what they did. They kept making excuses for their mismanagement.
Every day he passes long queues of women lining up to buy essential food for their families. This is supposed to be the land of milk and honey but you often can’t buy milk, let alone honey. How are mothers supposed to look after their families when they spend hours every day queuing up for basic food which is either unavailable or sold out? His neighbour Fruma who has two kids under five often comes home in tears because when she finally reaches the counter, the grocer spreads his hands in a helpless gesture and says he has run out of milk. ‘But the newspaper says there is milk!’ she complained the day before. The grocer shrugged. ‘So put your newspaper in the saucepan and boil it!’
By now Isaiah has worked himself up into a fury and his pen flies fast over the sheets of lined paper. This time he decides to address the women. Have you ever seen Ben-Gurion’s wife waiting in line? Do you think Moshe Yosef’s children miss out on bananas? Do Moshe Sharrett’s kids exist on two eggs a week? Moshe Yosef, the minister of our *RATIONALISING* department keeps telling you to be patient, because we are a young country, and our population is growing. He thinks austerity is good for your soul, but he and the other politicians live in towers of plenty, they have no idea what ordinary women like you are going through every day, trying to feed your families with the pathetic coupons they issue.
He pauses, checks what he has written and nods agreement with his words. Week after week he writes the truth about the deceptions and lies of the government but no-one seems to be listening. He reaches for the latest issue of Ma’ariv just as the light globe flickers and plunges the room into darkness. Another blackout. Everything here is a balagan, a mess, all due to inefficiency and mismanagement. Cursing, he fumbles for the candle he keeps on the table just in case. He smokes his cigarette down until the butt burns his nicotine-stained fingers, places his small saucepan on the primus stove and a few minutes later he is sipping scalding tea through a lump of sugar he sucks between his teeth.
Squinting at the small newsprint, he shakes his head in disbelief. He is reading about the war in Korea. ‘So now we are worrying about Korea, as if we don’t have enough tsures of our own,’ he mutters. From the moment he arrived in 1948, they’d had to cope with Arab attacks, war, inflation, rationing, recession, unemployment, severe housing shortages and endless discussions about who should be allowed to enter the new nation and in what numbers.
The Jews were God’s chosen people all right — chosen for perpetual suffering, persecution and endless arguments. As for believing in some divine being who ordained every event on earth and directed human lives like some kind of celestial traffic warden, that was just absurd.
He turns, startled to hear a man’s voice in the room, not realising it is his own. They say that a man who defends himself in court has a fool for a client, so what do they call one who talks to himself? He chuckles, and reads on. It seems that the Korean War does affect them after all, because as a result of it, America has now reduced its donations of powdered milk and other food to Israel. More tsures.
He arrived in 1948, a reluctant immigrant to the Promised Land. He had come via Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, hellholes he tries to blot from his memory. He came with a battered suitcase held together with a leather strap, and a heart full of hate. He loathed the Nazis and the camp guards, but most of all he hated that upstart from Budapest who had refused to save his mother and his sister. Miklós Nagy also came from Kolostór, but Nagy’s family had lived in a villa in the best part of town, not in a cobbler’s hut, and ate chicken every day, not just on holy days. After Nagy left town, he became a big shot in the capital, and they hadn’t seen him for dust. Until that day in 1944, a day that is branded on his memory as clearly as the number tattooed on his arm.
For several weeks, they had heard rumours that the Germans were lying, that the Jews being rounded up and interned at the local brickworks would eventually be deported, not to some town where they would find work, as the Germans claimed, but probably to a concentration camp somewhere in the East. It was a story most people found incredible. It didn’t make any sense, and besides, they trusted the Hungarian government would protect them because Jews were patriotic Hungarians. After all, they had been in the forefront of the fight for Hungarian independence after the Great War, so what did they have to fear?
But when they discovered that the Hungarian government colluded in the Nazis’ anti-Semitic agenda, stripped the Jews of all their rights, and facilitated the deportations, people started to panic. No-one wanted to be forcibly taken to some unknown destination. And that’s when Miklós Nagy appeared in town, like some sort of knight in shining armour. It was supposed to be a secret, but word soon got out that he was organising a train to take some of the townsfolk away from Hungary and the Nazi Occupation to a neutral country on the way to Palestine. There was apparently a list of people who would be included on the rescue train. Desperation reached fever pitch. What did they have to do to be included?
For some reason — and Isaiah reckons he now knows the reason — although Miklós Nagy was a Jew, he had the power to save some people in Nazi-occupied Hungary. No doubt he’d put his own friends and relatives on that list, as well as some wealthy people, but maybe there was room on the train for a few more. Isaiah was among the villagers who crowded outside the Nagy villa like feudal supplicants at the manor gate, all beside themselves in their anxiety to get away. But Miklós Nagy flung open the door and pushed past them, not looking right or left or making eye contact with anyone. Isaiah, who was at the back of the throng, stepped forward and blocked his path, begging him to add his mother and sister to the list, but Nagy had looked through him and walked on, as if he was a worm on the ground, not even worth a glance.
Of course, if they’d had money to buy a place on the train, it would have been a different story, but they didn’t, so his poor mother and little Malka ended up in the chimneys of Auschwitz instead, and their ashes were scattered over some godforsaken part of the Polish countryside. He remembers seeing the smoke over the camp that day, and some days he thinks he can still smell its nauseating odour. It’s a memory that haunts him. One day he might forgive the Germans, but he knows he will never forgive one of their own for his perfidy.
Unlike the ardent Zionists who couldn’t wait to get to Palestine, as it was called back then, he had wanted to migrate to the United States, where he had a cousin, but America hadn’t given him a visa and Israel did. He wasn’t in a position to pick and choose, but he refused to be grateful.
A caption on page two of Ma’ariv catches his eye. War hero accepts position as spokesman in the Department of Rationing and Supply. Isaiah chuckles. That department was always at war with the community, so no wonder they chose a man who had proved his mettle in armed conflict. He’ll probably wish he was back on the front line when he finds out what kind of job he’s taken on.
A moment later he stops laughing. His heart is hammering so fast that he is afraid it will jump through his chest. His breath comes in short gasps. He knows this war hero who is being praised for saving thousands of Jews in Hungary. They might describe Miklós Nagy as a hero, but Isaiah knows him as a mamser, a bastard, duplicitous and corrupt.
Isaiah leaps from his chair, then sits down again. He is trembling with excitement. This is the story he has been waiting for. Now he will shake them up, now they’ll sit up and take notice. They won’t make fun of him when he exposes their so-called hero as a swine with blood on his hands, a quisling who collaborated with the Nazis and helped them achieve the biggest mass murder in human history.
Elated by the prospect of unmasking the fake hero, Isaiah can’t sit still. Perhaps there was a god after all. This wasn’t vengeance, it was poetic justice. Fate had chosen him to debunk the myth of Nagy’s heroism and expose his secret. He would do it for his mother and his sister, and for all the other innocents who paid the price for Nagy’s crime.
Outside, large snowflakes are still falling from the leaden sky. They melt as soon as they touch the ground and form grey puddles on the broken asphalt. Soon no trace of snow would remain, the street would revert to its usual greyness, and the snowfall would be a distant memory. Perhaps it is his mother’s voice prompting his thoughts, but he can’t help wondering whether it is really only a coincidence that such a phenomenon has occurred just as he is about to publish his most sensational revelation.
He sits down at the table, picks up his pen and writes for several hours. He doesn’t stop to change a single word. He knows his moment has come at last.