B002FB6BZK EBOK (56 page)

Near the end of the long period of forgetting, Sam staged a play for two
actors, closed the play because the words written by the playwright bored
him. He wanted the Bronya the Beautiful to hold an apple in her mouth,
he wanted to see his mother in the empty room, and he wanted Ebenezer,
the camp, Kramer, the smell of bodies, he wanted to create a world nobody
still believed ever existed. Licinda, who had long ago forgotten, stopped
asking herself if she was in love with Sam and accepted her life with him
as natural and started feeling children in her womb and was afraid of greenyellow eyes. She taught Sam quiet ceremonies of love, restrained lust, softness, and said: If I'm four years older it means they passed. Sam said:
Ebenezer assigned me to be a witness, but how do you witness? Testimony
has to be lies and by that to describe truth. The first time he produced
Lionel's Lament for the Death of the Jews (an excerpt of the second cycle), the
play was harshly criticized. He read the reviews calmly and said they were
surely right, but he was more right. He taught his actors to be animals, to
steal, to devour one another, to survive. They crawled and licked and hit one
another, fought and learned to speak out of need and not desire. And
Licinda sat in Sam's studio and took care of the wounded and offended
actors, brought coffee and beer, mended, organized, supplied every detail,
for long hours she talked with Lily, and at night she'd let loose.

Sam taught his actors and himself to act Darwin's theory of evolution,
and started supporting them from the money Saul Blau would bring him
from the shirts, five percent of their income belonged to him and he didn't
know why. Rachel died alone quietly in a room full of flowers in a private
hospital for incurables, and even at the time of her death, she didn't know
who was who and didn't know that Sam Lipp wasn't Lionel and Lionel
wasn't Joseph and Saul Blau was her husband. She smiled, shut her eyes,
and from so much sadness and weariness she forgot to open them.

At his mother's funeral, Lionel stood and tried to remember his youth,
and suddenly he grasped that all he had left were Samuel and Lily. He
talked about Samuel's plays, and Lily said: He's not doing theater, he's
creating the Fourth Reich! Then he put in a new door and the carpenter,
who remembered Sam from the camp, said: Where's Ebenezer? And Samuel
said: He died and I died too. The carpenter who remembered how Samuel
used to bring him a slice of bread from the kitchen of the Sonderkommando, said: You know what's really awful? That we are alive. Lionel wrote a poem about that. The poem constituted a kind of end to the four extinct
years. Critics started talking about Samuel's plays. His new theater evoked
strong and contradictory reactions on both sides. At his birthday party, Sam
sang a jolly song in Yiddish to the daughter of one of the actresses. Six of
the actors could have been the baby's father and Samuel sang the song
and started weeping. They saw the tears and Licinda ran away. And thus
ended some camp with barbed wire fences, where they acted and dogs
were sicced on them and he stood and whipped himself. In the morning
when he got up, his leg was broken. The doctor couldn't explain the meaning of the phenomenon and put a cast on the leg. Samuel went to Licinda's
parents, played chess with them, and taught them how to cheat at cards.
In the small town in upstate New York he learned the annals of Licinda
and connected her to the parents of his parents. And thus Licinda started
having nightmares about the parents and grandparents Samuel knew from
other places.

Among the salvations Licinda's grandfathers sought were salvations like
the ones his parents' parents sought. And thus Samuel came to the story
of Joseph de la Rayna and started adapting it for the theater. He told
Licinda: You're my great love, you'll be what you always were, you'll be
Frieda and Lilith. A German author wrote to Sam and Sam answered him.
He wrote: I know who I am and who my father is and who Lionel's father
is. Next time you'll be Weiss, but I'll be Kramer. Lily said: He's creating
the Fourth Reich!

Tape / -

I've been talking for a few days now. Quoting. I didn't register the number of the tapes. Registered on the boxes. I'm tired. Are you a doctor, sir?
Is it true that I masturbate into tapes? An unpleasant word for the first son
of a settlement in the Land of Israel. Who lives in me and I don't live in
him? You wanted to cure me, you make me talk, don't remember. Who
taught me to hypnotize myself? The light is dimming, love that dream, the
window, the ceiling, the gushing words, what else is left. The walls will fall.
The treachery of mother, Joseph Rayna and Samuel. A garden is watered
by Teacher Henkin. A dead son he raised. Boaz came. Said he was my son.
Who's my son? I'm a pen that wrote a story, a story wrote a pen. They write
about me, not worth a word. A tired carpenter of boxes for whores of SS men. Bad climate. One day a heat wave and then rain. Dana was soft as a
caress. Mr. Klomin, friendly and lost. Mother? Her hatred. Walking to Marar
to beat an Arab. Maybe I killed him. They said I said.

At the hems of a shepherd's cloak

I found a lover

Haughty near a stream near a stream,

A bird passed by a dream

The song a feather above

Is that love? Is that love?

Is that a song I remember?

Is this me?

Is it me speaking?

Who's speaking?

End.

My friend,

I attach here a report of Boaz Schneerson's lawyer. I hope
you'll be interested in it. Incidentally, yesterday Ebenezer appeared at my house. He was wearing the kind of white suit they
used to wear in Tel Aviv in the twenties. He knocked on the
door and in his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, red chrysanthemums. I opened the door and he held the bouquet of chrysanthemums out to me and said he had come to wish me happy
birthday. I told him, What's this, and he said: Isn't today your
birthday? I thought a little and said: Right, and Hasha Masha
and I had forgotten. I invited him in, he entered, sat on the
sofa, and was silent. Then he got up, took a little tool out of the
pocket of his white coat, and asked permission to fix our cabinet. Hasha Masha, who had come into the room a few minutes
before, said: What's this? Why? He said: That's what I can do
when I don't have my words, I've got information for the wood.
Your cupboards and cabinets are dying, Henkin. He fixed the
cabinet and then the easy chair and the cupboard and the chest.
He went to his house and came back with a case full of bottles
of lacquer in various shades and brushes and sandpaper and he smeared, filed, and smeared again. I loved to see him at his
craft. He worked for many hours and stopped only once to drink
a cup of tea that Hasha Masha gave him. This morning he returned to my house and looked at his work, fixed here and there
and then I saw a smile spread over his lips. I said, Ebenezer,
who knew wood in its distress, and he said, Nonsense, that's
not what was, today it's nothing, and he left.

Yours, Obadiah Henkin

And here is the report.

To: The Assessing Official

For the Department of Investigations, Misgar Street 3, Tel Aviv.

In re: Income tax file of S.L.A. Company (Boaz Schneerson)
No. 34/4654/8

From: Attorney Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Ben-Yehuda Street
128, Tel Aviv.

(S.L.A. Inc.) Director: Boaz Schneerson, Tel Aviv.

Dear Mr. Mahluf,

As you know, my client is employed by the paratroopers of the
Israeli Defense Force, heroes of the underground, saints of the
Holocaust and ghetto fighters. My client's assistance to the bereaved families is widely known (See Appendix 1-letter from the
branch of mourning-Ministry of Defense, letter from the branch
of widows and orphans and letter from the branch of the bereaved). From 1952 until today, inclusive, the company (S.L.A.)
has helped publish hundreds of memorial books. The company
gathered material, helped directly or indirectly to publish other
memorial books, helped establish district, local, brigade, family,
and regimental memorials, initiated and established memorial
barbed wire for Holocaust and heroism (including memorials),
took care to locate, establish, maintain, populate, and decorate
dozens of memorial rooms in public institutions, together with the
Memorial to Sons it established meeting and unity houses, put up
memorial plaques in schools, kindergartens, universities, and along with construction and repair companies (see appendices 2,
3, and 4) advised and assisted in establishing memorial monuments, signs of battles (including living reenactments of battles),
public parks to the memory of the fallen and missing, and libraries in the name of those who fell. The S.L.A. company organized
memorial conferences of brigades, battalions, the underground,
official (132) district (245) military (334) ceremonies, and as
aforementioned established the society of thirty-one (31) various
memorials in various locations in Israel to commemorate the Holocaust and heroism. The company organized sixty-four assemblies and conferences to commemorate the fallen with subjects
set in advance by the company in close and active cooperation
with the Ministry of Defense, the (Israel Defense Forces) IDF,
Yad Vashem, the Philharmonic Orchestra, Belt Berl, Belt Ze'ev
Jabotinsky, and others.

In sum, those conferences (mentioned at the end), less the
number of closed conferences of the Intelligence Institutenumber two hundred twenty-one.

In Appendices 6-10, you will find the names of hundreds of
lecturers, paid consultants, payment for flag-raising, renovation,
washing and maintaining memorials, care of tombstones, parking arrangements, payment for the Composers' and Authors' Association, orchestras and choirs, announcers, speakers, eulogists,
poets paid royalties and/or one-time grants by the Company.

The Company also collects objects left on various battlefields, purchases objects that fell into unreliable hands, locates
pieces of clothing, accessories, personal effects all over Israel.

Ever since listing for income tax purposes began, nine hundred fifty thousand kilometers of travel were listed. As for the
value of the cars and jeeps, see Appendix 8a, which deals with
the problem of attrition of cars and jeeps on battlefields and in
the desert, and landmine insurance. The value of the insurance,
amortization, small construction of barbed wire fences moved
from their places-and in that matter, also see the judgment of
the district judge in Jerusalem, A. Jacoby, in District Court Case
6/678 1961.

To calculate the correct value, it is necessary to add eightyone flights to Eilat and Sinai (for the aforementioned purposes),
twenty-four trips abroad (financing activities of commemoration
and fund-raising in Denmark, Germany, England, Holland, the
US, South Africa, etc.), for contribution, consultation, commemoration, demarcation, and investigation.

Between 1952 and 1972, the Company employed for payment forty-six sculptors, two hundred craftsmen (carpenters,
tinsmiths, ironworkers, painters, speakers, cantors, burial society, flagmakers, artists, graphic designers, chauffeurs, researchers, interviewers, tape recorders, maintenance workers, etc.).

A consultant from the Bergen-Belsen Society was employed
by the company for two years at full payment and there were
also royalties for printed material-all that in the sum of one
hundred thousand dollars. Maintenance-two hundred fifty
thousand pounds. Memorial for the Holocaust cost a sum impossible to detail here. The average sum for a reasonable calculation is one hundred thousand dollars, but the final sum has
not yet been set.

Until '62, and in general, many documents are missing. The
Company was then the private business of Boaz Schneerson and
was not listed properly according to corporate law, but it paid
its taxes as a private person. The sum of taxes was calculated
and the difference was paid afterward according to a judgment
(see Appendix 11).

Exchange of foreign currency was done according to the usual
rates. Nontaxable contributions were calculated separately,
they are listed in Appendix 12.

There were problems of publicity. The statue by Tamarin,
who specialized in various trends of commemoration, constituted a problem in itself that is illustrative of all the problems.
The great nuances of artists like Tamarin pose an especially difficult challenge to an attorney trying to prepare a report like
this. There are memorials whose purpose is no longer known.
Tamarin's fame grew because of the memorials and his fee also
rose, because some of the agreements with the committees of parents and ad hoc committees were made prior to that. Cataloguing fame in the context of the fervor of those concerned
with the issue casts doubt on a proper investigation of the expenses. Sometimes the date of concluding the memorials is so
important they no longer calculate the signed contract and pay
whatever comes to hand, and then S.L.A. has to bear financial
responsibility, while its taxes are set according to contracts and
memoranda of agreement, or receipts whose evidence is contradictory. There are memorials that were paid for, even though
they were not erected because of stubbornness, or a public
scandal. Merely dismantling memorials cost the Company about
three hundred thousand pounds, moving memorials from place
to place cost a great deal (see Appendix 16). Shifting the border, correcting mistakes, all that was not brought into the first
account, and now has to be corrected.

Clearing rubble cost a fortune, but the tax is not valid in that
matter, since the tax law does not take account of dangers of
fire, war, etc. Payment to the army for burned tanks for memorials is calculated according to a price list that does not correspond with reality. In the case of operas of grief, bereavement,
and plays of mourning, there is no precedent in the income tax
legislation, while the value-added tax is high. Memorial conferences of underground organizations or regiments of the War of
Independence are calculated differently from conferences of
existing regiments that the IDF still refers to by name.