18 Sunday, August 23, 1970 1968-69 Quite unexpectedly, Miki Wilner found himself with a free day in Tel Aviv. The previous day was too fraught with action for him to have given much thought to how he would spend the next day. And the night had been restless, like those nights in Renate’s bed in Bad Harzburg, with some of the same characters on the stage of his dreams: Tzvi, Hanna, Nili, Hemme. But this time Brigitte was there too. Each time she appeared, her long blond hair flowing around her, he felt soothed from the agitation of the other, frenetic scenes. At each such waking he felt grateful to fate for having placed her in his life. He finally woke up too hungry for any further sleep. His facial skin, where he had been wearing the false beard, was itchy. His bladder was full. It was time to get up. On his way to the bathroom he looked out the window overlooking Hayarkon Street. It already seemed to be too warm to do much walking in Tel Aviv. What should he do with himself? The only thing he had to do, besides satisfy his bodily needs, was to reconfirm his flight. Seeing Nili again, even if it could be arranged without having made a date beforehand, was out of the question. An attempt to contact her, after their farewell, might be misinterpreted as a change of heart, on his part, about her pass at him. Over the years he had become quite skilled at deflecting the unwanted attention of other women. Not that it happened very often, nor did it take a great deal of effort on his part. He found that, unlike men, who tend to be persistent in their pursuit, women were likely to give up at the first sign of rejection, even something as simple as an ostentatious display of a wedding ring. Or at least with him. There were and always had been, to be sure, men who were so desirable – because of fame, looks, money, power, or any combination thereof – that they were pursued by women, or at least certain kinds of women, regardless of obstacles. But Miki was not one of them. On some occasions when he was away from Brigitte, though, he would come across a woman who was attracted to him and was not discouraged by his being married, and then the deflection presented more of a challenge. Nili seemed to be one of those women. In fact, it sometimes seemed to him that, to some women, his being Brigitte Wilner’s husband gave him an extra edge of attraction, as though the woman were thinking, ‘if a sexy film star like her is happy with him then he must be special.’ And then he would wonder: if I were to meet Brigitte as a film star, rather than having been with her since we were in high school, would she be interested in me? He had toyed with asking Brigitte the question, but he knew her too well to expect an answer that was not an evasion. *      *     * They were almost settled in their house, but not quite yet, when they had their first visitor. It was on a Sunday morning, and it was Max Schwab, on the verge of leaving on a business trip to New York on behalf of The Long Seventh Day and in urgent need of talking with Miki about its American publication. The previous day, the Export Union of German Film had announced that Germelshausen was to be the West German entry for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Though the film’s release had been over a year before, its date fell within the recently concluded German film year, which, like the academic year, runs from the first of October to the end of September. Brigitte decided that that she would go to Hollywood for the ceremony even if the film did not make the short list of five films from which the winner would be chosen. The choice of Germelshausen may have been motivated by the connection with Brigadoon, which would be used in the advertising in America. Miki, who had been following the international performance of German films ever since the Cannes festival that he attended with Brigitte, told her that despite the connection with a popular American musical such a nomination was unlikely, since American tastes seemed to have changed in the decade that had elapsed since West German films were nominated in four consecutive years (though none won the award). Brigitte said that she didn’t care; she wanted to go anyway, and Miki would be with her, in a suit and bowtie! Max congratulated Brigitte on the film’s selection and both Wilners on their house, but the moment Brigitte moved away he got down to business. In America, he told Miki, an integral part of book publishing is what they call a book tour, in which an author visits bookstores, talks about his books, reads excerpts from it, autographs copies, and answers questions. The actual date of publication would therefore depend on when Miki would be available for such a tour. Miki said that he was going to be in Los Angeles in April, anyway, to accompany Brigitte to the Oscars, and that he could stay behind for the tour after she went back to Germany. “Too bad she can’t go on tour with you,” Max remarked. “It would give the tour a touch of glamour.” “Am I not glamorous enough?” Miki rejoined, and they laughed, but Max, who was a busy man, immediately got back to business. A tour that began in Los Angeles and ended in New York, the two cities with the largest Jewish communities in the USA, would be perfect. Exactly when in April would Miki be in Los Angeles? That was something that Miki remembered: the Oscars ceremony would be on the fourteenth, the day before the Bergen-Belsen liberation anniversary. “That’s perfect!” Max exclaimed. “The Americans have another concept, tie-in, and if the first bookstore appearance is on the fifteenth, then they could publicize your being a Bergen-Belsen survivor, and if Brigitte could be with you at that first appearance, it would be even better. She doesn’t have to fly back that same day, does she?” “No, we are going to fly back together the following Friday, the eighteenth.” “Good,” Max said resolutely. “You will cancel your flight, and during that week you will appear in bookstores around Los Angeles. It’s a very big city, very spread out, so that you will need to be in different areas in order to reach as many people as possible. Let me see… the first bookstore should probably be a famous one that’s in Hollywood – for the Oscars tie-in – called Pickwick Books. It belongs to a Jewish family, the Epsteins. In fact, they now have branches, so the first part of your tour can be simply in various Pickwick bookstores; that will be simpler to arrange. And then, when Brigitte flies back to Hamburg, you can fly to San Francisco, then Chicago, and your tour will go from there until you end up in New York.” “Is Montreal usually included in such a tour?” Miki asked. “Montreal? Why?” “My aunt lives there, and I would like to visit her, as long as I am in North America.” “Well, it has a pretty big Jewish community, and they also speak English,” Max said. “But the Canadians get their books from British, not American, publishers. It’s the spelling, you know. Of course, you can always go to Montreal on your own after the tour is over.” “Of course,” Miki said. “Anyway, the publication date is usually about a month before the beginning of the tour, to allow for reviews to come out. That means the middle of March. Good. I will telephone New York in a few hours, when it’s morning there.” *      *     * After a bountiful breakfast, Miki decided to read the book to the finish. He had nothing better to do. Turner began to interrogate the embassy staff, one by one, about their relations with Harting, assuming from the outset that the missing man was a Soviet spy. His harsh interrogation techniques, lacking any finesse, startled Miki. He even mocked the Welsh accent of one of the embassy employees. He was certainly no Sherlock Holmes, that Turner! Turner then became involved with some higher-ups, most notably Rawley Bradfield, the embassy’s Head of Chancery (whatever that meant) with a beautiful wife named Hazel, and Ludwig Siebkron, a high official of the Federal Interior Ministry, who seemed to be close to Karfeld. A former associate of Harting’s, a corrupt ex-Communist named Praschko, also made an appearance. As the plot grew more complicated, the novel came to a conclusion that Miki felt to be a letdown. Somehow Turner managed to deduce, with no clues provided by the author about the reasoning that led to the deduction, that the missing Harting was not a Communist spy but a part-Jewish Nazi-hater who had dug up evidence of Karfeld’s unsavory past (he was a chemist who during the war had managed a research facility that had poisoned thirty-one half-Jews); that Harting had been the lover of Hazel Bradfield; and that Bradfield had been conspiring with Karfeld. At the end there was a riot during which a group of socialists was attacked by Karfeld’s mob. And this was supposed to take place, according to Le Carré’s imagining of the future, at a time when in reality Willy Brandt was the Chancellor! It was about four o’clock when he closed the book’s covers. He thought he might write an article about it when he got home, perhaps gently poking fun at John Le Carré as a prophet. Since he would need the book for reference, he stowed it in his suitcase. He was beginning to feel hungry. He had eaten breakfast late enough for it to qualify as a brunch and so he could skip the midday meal, but he would need an early dinner. But he was also feeling sleepy. A nap of between half an hour and an hour would be nice. Then he could go out in search of a restaurant. *      *     * Max’s idea of the Bergen-Belsen tie-in for the book proved to be brilliant. There turned out to be a sizable community of survivors of the camp in Los Angeles, and it seemed that most of them came to hear Miki in the various Pickwick bookstores in which he appeared. Some of them remembered – or pretended to remember – Miki as a boy, and they all bought the book, many of them several copies. The local Jewish paper, the Bnai Brith Messenger, had reviewed the book unfavorably, since it was critical of Israeli policy, but the people who came to hear him vowed that they would write letters to the editor to castigate him for the review. In San Francisco, no tie-in seemed to be necessary, and his reception was friendly from the outset. As soon as he arrived at his hotel he was interviewed by a television reporter for an “educational” station called KQED, with the interview videotaped for later broadcast on the station’s news program. Early in the course of the interview, the reporter said, “You are a Holocaust survivor, aren’t you?” Miki protested that he could not be a “Holocaust” survivor, since the prefix “holo-” means ‘total’ or ‘complete’ and therefore a holocaust cannot have survivors. It seemed, though, that the reporter did not get his point. The interchange involving the word was deleted from the portion of the interview that was broadcast, and the reporter’s voiceover introducing Michael Wilner, the pronunciation of his name fully anglicized, referred to him as a Holocaust survivor without qualification. Miki had to resign himself to the American designation of his wartime experience as the Holocaust. Most of the newscast was devoted to a local event: in Berkeley, the university town across the bay, where a group of young people had taken over a vacant lot belonging to the University of California and were building a community park there, to be called The People’s Park. Residents of Berkeley and university administrators were interviewed, and it seemed to Miki that sooner or later there would be a confrontation. In Chicago he was met at the airport by a fiftyish woman named Lois, who worked for the company that organized the tour and who served as his hostess there. After the first reading, Lois introduced him to a much younger woman, a reporter who was going to interview him for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Hi,” she said as she reached her hand out to him. “I’m Sandy Bordoni. I’m not here to write about your book, but about you. May I ask you some personal questions, Mr. Wilner? Or may I call you Michael?” “You may call me Miki, just like Mickey Mouse, but I spell it m-i-k-i.” “That’s cute. Anyway, what’s it like to be married to a glamorous movie star like your wife?” “I don’t know; I haven’t been married to any other glamorous movie star. But being married to my wife, who happens to be a glamorous movie star, is wonderful.” “That’s a cool answer. How long have you been married?” “Since 1956. And we have been together since 1952.” “Wow! So you got together, like, real young! And you’re still young! And you’ve stayed together all through the swinging sixties, if you know what I mean?” “I am not sure.” “Well, like, swinging…” He did not know what she meant, and she recognized the fact by saying, “I’ll come to that. Anyway,” she continued, “what’s your secret?” “I don’t think that we have a secret. And also we have no secrets from each other.” “That’s good. Now, you’re apart a lot, aren’t you? Like, when she’s on location, or you’re on tour?” “Not really so much. She does most of her work in Hamburg, where we live, and this is my first tour. But I have done some traveling on my own, recently, to Israel, which is the basis of my book.” “Well, when you’re apart for more than just a few days, this is my personal question, and it’s cool if you don’t want to answer it. Do you have an open marriage?” “What?” “That’s the new term for swinging. It means having other partners, or relationships, or whatever.” “Do you mean sex partners?” “Yeah.” “Of course not,” he said, trying not to sound indignant. “What kind of marriage would that be?” “Well, it’s not like it’s never been done before, only not openly. At least women couldn’t do it openly. But since the pill, it’s a new age.” “I’ve heard about it: the sexual revolution. I suppose I am not a revolutionary.” Sandy’s expression took on a look of disappointment, though he couldn’t tell if it was personal or journalistic. “Do you have any other personal questions?” he asked with a smile. “Oh, sure. Being married to a movie star, I mean an actress, what kind of movies do you like?” “I prefer good ones to bad ones.” Sandy laughed nervously. “I mean, what kind of movies, I mean, like zhahnruh?” It took Miki a while to realize that the woman was saying ‘genre.’ “You know, romance, drama, comedy…” “Yes. I like all zhahnruhs, except… what do you call it… science fiction. I like fantasy, but not when it tries to be scientific.” In New York, on the other hand, the reporters who questioned him seemed to be all Jews, and the paramount question was: How can a Jew like you, a Holocaust survivor, live in Germany as a citizen? He no longer argued about the use of the word ‘Holocaust,’ but went straight to the point. “In the city where I live,” he would reply, “the mayor is a Jew, and since we are a city-state, he is also like the governor of the state. The producer of one of my wife’s films is a Jew. The director of the theater where my wife sometimes works is Jewish.” He remembered that American Jews did not like the word Jewess. “So, you see, I don’t feel alone or out of place.” From his Chicago hotel he had called Fela to let her know that he was in North America and would like to visit her. It would not be a good time, she told him. She confessed that in the preceding year she had been married, after a whirlwind courtship, to a charming, elegant French Jew, but it quickly emerged that he was only pretending to be a Jew and that he had married her only for her money, which he quickly began to spend on himself and, it later turned out, on his mistress in France. Fela, as soon as the detective she had hired convinced her of the truth, immediately threw him out, but now she was getting conflicting legal advice on whether to get a divorce or an annulment, and she was not in a state to receive guests, not even family. Miki expressed his deepest sympathy for Fela’s predicament, but could not help thinking that the story might make a good screenplay, of course with a juicy part for Brigitte as the mistress. Should he tell her of his idea? It didn’t seem in good taste to use his aunt’s misfortune as the basis for a story, but didn’t fiction writers do that all the time? It would be best, however, to wait till Fela had recovered from her predicament. *      *     * In the evening he decided to go to the cinema. He would try to see an Israeli film that would be unlikely to come to Germany. He did not think that doing that would necessarily betray him as someone who knows Hebrew, since Hebrew-language films were invariably equipped with English and French subtitles. He saw in the Jerusalem Post that there was a new film by Menahem Golan. The year before, he and Brigitte had seen and enjoyed his Tevye and His Seven Daughters, based on the book by Sholom Aleichem, in Hamburg – in a German version, since the film had been coproduced with a German company. The new film was Hapritza Hagdola, ‘The Great Breakout.’ As he approached the cinema and looked at the marquee, he could not help thinking that if the title were pronounced in the Yiddish-based Ashkenazi way as practiced by the Haredim, it would sound Haprietze Hagdoile and would mean ‘the great whore’; prietze was, as Hanna had reported at the dinner, the word that was shouted in their neighborhoods at women who dared to show more skin than faces and hands. The film’s action took place in a fortress-like military prison is an Arab country that seemed – to judge by the topography – to be Syria. It began with a visit by a United Nations convoy that was received by the prison commander, Major Haikal, portrayed as a stereotypical villain by an Israeli actor whom Miki had already seen in a similar role in a film about the Six-Day War. Among the prisoners were five Israeli captives who, it turned out, were brutally mistreated under Haikal’s supervision. One of them, named Eli, was played by Yoram Gaon, the actor-singer whom Miki had a few months earlier seen on television singing Ballad for a Medic. This Eli managed, quite improbably, not only to escape the prison but somehow to make it to Israel, where he found an army buddy – by now discharged – named Beno, himself a former captive in the same prison, and got Beno to organize a commando team that would go 50 kilometers into Syrian territory and liberate their buddies. The film then became a Hollywood-style action movie, with gunfire, explosions and falling bodies. It even had a stock character of such films when their locale is outside America: the roving American reporter who gets involved in the action. But this reporter was really a Mossad agent in disguise, and his function was to plant false information in preparation for the surprise attack. The resemblance to what Miki had just been through was overwhelming. He wondered if Tzvi had found inspiration in this film. Or, conversely, if Tzvi or someone like him had served as a consultant to Golan. The general idea seemed to be derived from British films about commando operations behind German lines during the Second World War. But the British at least had actors who were native German-speakers – Paul Henried, Fritz Valk, Anton Walbrook – and who could play German officers convincingly. Golan’s film felt more like a second-rate product of Hollywood, in which such qualities as a credible screenplay, good acting and competent editing are sacrificed to high-speed action. By those standards, the film, which was drawing sellout audiences, was successful. Perhaps Menahem Golan had a future in Hollywood! These thoughts were still on his mind as he walked back, in the warm, humid night, from the cinema to the hotel. On his way he passed a bar with muffled noises emanating through its closed doors, loud talk, boisterous laughter, and music that might be by the Israeli rock band called The Churchills. He remembered having had a drink – perhaps more than one –, in that place the previous year, in the company of Hanoch Levin and some of his friends. The recollection of something funny that had happened there began to hover around his mind, but he could not get a hold of it. Perhaps it will come back tomorrow, he told himself. *      *     * It was already May when he returned to Hamburg from America. In his stack of mail there was a book sent by the Countess, with a note reading “This may interest you.” It was titled People in the Ghetto, but it was specifically about the Warsaw ghetto. It consisted mainly of photographs, most of which Miki had already seen, with commentary by the editor, Günther Deschner. But what stood out on the cover were the lines “With a foreword by Jean Améry.” He wrote his article about it in one typing session, and sent it directly to the Countess. Goring a Sacred Cow During the past few years I have had two occasions to comment in these pages on the writing of Jean Améry. The first occasion was a respectful review of his essay Torture. The second occasion was a perhaps not-so-respectful response to his book Beyond Guilt and Atonement, which I read when my uncle, a contemporary of Améry and like him an Auschwitz survivor, was agonizing in Israel. That response unleashed a storm of criticism in West German literary circles, as though I had dared to gore a sacred cow, for in the wake of the book’s publication Jean Améry seems to have quickly attained the status of a sacred cow in these circles. The reproach I read most often was that my reaction was the result of envy of his literary success. I chose not to respond to these criticisms in writing. The time that I spent with my dying uncle in Israel was also a time when my interest began to shift from events in the West, especially Germany, to the ongoing crisis – if I am permitted such an oxymoron -- in and around Israel. As a fortuitous fruit of this shift of interest I have been rewarded with a literary success of my own, both critical and commercial, and so if I venture once again to write some critical comments about Jean Améry, at least those who attacked me before will be short one weapon. What provokes me this time is the publication of an album of photographs from the Warsaw ghetto, published by Bertelsmann, and edited with commentary by Günther Deschner. There is also a foreword in the form of an essay titled In the Waiting Room of Death. By whom? By Jean Améry, presumably in his capacity as West Germany’s newly anointed official Jew-as-victim. Does Jean Améry know anything about the Warsaw ghetto? Can he read the Hebrew on the gravestones that are shown in one of the photographs, or the Polish and Yiddish on the signs in some others? He has already informed us that he cannot. He tells us right at the outset that “he was not, himself, in the ghetto.” But he thinks that “two years of concentration camp, of which one year in Auschwitz – that may, that must be sufficient” for understanding the ghetto, since he has had “experiences that should not fundamentally differ from those of ghetto inmates.” He writes of “the Ghetto Jew’s total loneliness,” ignoring the book’s section that describes ghetto society, with its political and self-help organizations, its ongoing religious life, and the cafés and nightclubs for the “ghetto elite,” or another section devoted to art and culture that illustrates theatrical performances He goes on to give an authoritative-sounding description, based no doubt on himself, of the state of mind of the ghetto Jew. This is something that can be read like any other overbroad generalization -- of the Jew in general, of the German, of the Frenchman – namely, with what in English is called a grain of salt. But Améry goes seriously astray when he attacks his bêtes noires, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt, who, unlike him, really understand what it is to be a Jew and did not need to learn it from Sartre. He refers to what he calls a “ridiculous argument” by Buber about Judaism being “not a teaching of death but one of life,” an argument repeated by Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann book, which Améry calls “remarkably devoid of understanding.” Améry goes on to write, “If I am not mistaken and have not interpreted my personal concentration-camp experiences altogether wrongly, then it was by no means the Jewish ‘teaching of life’ that paradoxically let the masses of Jews to go to their death without resistance.” After the shock of reading “without resistance” in a book about the Warsaw ghetto (in which the resistance is well described) dies down (and, to be fair, Améry does devote a few lines to the revolt), one has to tell him that he is quite mistaken and has indeed interpreted his concentration-camp experience “altogether wrongly.” The “total loneliness” of which he writes, and which is typical of the concentration camp, is not a defining characteristic of the ghetto, and in this regard the Nazi ghetto was not so different from the historical ghetto as he argues at great length. It was still, first of all, a community. But Améry was never a member of a Jewish community, except, as he has told us in other writings, briefly and reluctantly, after arriving almost penniless in Antwerp in 1939, when he – not without shame – was forced to accept the community’s charity. Simply put, Améry does not understand the essence of Jewish survival throughout history: that in every calamity, some must live in order to carry on the flame, even if most die or abandon Judaism. He might have invoked Masada, had he had a smattering of Jewish history. But we know Masada as an aberration, however heroic; had all of Israel followed the Masada example – or, more significantly, had Flavius Josephus not, most unheroically, gone over to the enemy – there would be no memory of Masada, nor any Jews to remember it.