He had made his living with his hands, at his desk, writing lies for money.
He had had some success. He was read by yeshiva boys in secret, passing his books from hand to hand; by young Zionists filled with ideological fervour, who would have denied it stoutly were they challenged; by the rabbis who confiscated the books from their wards, by the women who picked them up for a few kopeks along with a bag of onions in the shop, by intellectuals who railed against this prostituting of literature, by wealthy merchants and farmers and cobblers and clockmakers, carpenters and engineers: they all knew the name Shomer, which means guardian, or watchman, and was his nom de plume, for it was not respectable for a man to be writing
shund
.
For it was hopeless. His life had been erased like his books, set alight, reduced to ash and scattered. It no longer existed. But then, all lives were ultimately extinguished, and in their passing nothing remained of the person who’d been – their dreams, their thoughts, who they loved, what they hated – from Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon and down the ages to Jews.
And yet Shomer lives still.
He’d met Fanya at an open-air showing of a film about Palestine and the work of the pioneers there. She wore white. He was in his best suit, he had only recently begun to write: stories about detectives and dames, with no redeeming literary value. He’d sported a thin moustache at the time (Fanya made him shave it off before the wedding). In the film, men and women no older than he were tilling stony fields and sleeping in tents and picking oranges. They looked like Biblical peasants reborn in distant Palestine; he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in this way. But he only half-saw them, anyway. All he really saw was Fanya, more real than anything the screen had to offer, like a woman out of the pages of one of his stories.
Of course, in hindsight, he realised that she wasn’t. She was not cut out of cardboard like the dames in the stories. She had an internal life he would never see (and now never could), irrational likes and dislikes, moods he could not interpret, times she was happy for no reason he could tell and times she was sad and he could do nothing to change it. But she loved him, he loved her, and they were happy for a while. Even in the ghetto they could still make each other happy, even on the train here he was still telling her and the children stories.
Stories, stories, he is sick to death of stories!
Yet they are all he has.
Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 –
contd.
I was in a foul mood when I left the Mosleys’ party. The taciturn driver waited outside. He hailed me but I refused his offer of a ride, foolishly perhaps. I walked away, though I walked with a slight limp from my old injury. The night was dark and quiet but I was not fooled, for it is in the night that one comes most alive. To know the light you must understand shadows. I walked through Belgravia though I had the feeling I was being watched, and often I turned abruptly but there was no one there. Nevertheless the feeling of being watched persisted.
In this manner – that is to say, furtively – I traversed the city in an easterly direction. My mind was busy like a rat’s.
Vicious, dirty creatures, rats. Julius Streicher’s genius with
Der Stürmer
was, firstly, the graphic caricatures he ran: the long-nosed rat-like Jew, always lusting after German maidenhood. It was a magazine appealing to the lowest common denominator, glorying in gruesome tales of sex crimes and murders, all naturally blamed on the Jews. He was rat-like himself, was Julius Streicher, vicious and dirty and oh so effective. His magazine was all but pornographic; it put the English
Daily Mail
to shame. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him again after all those years. The past was threatening to catch up with me.
My mind returned to the symbol carved on the dead woman’s chest. I had thought the swastika forgotten.
He had had some success. He was read by yeshiva boys in secret, passing his books from hand to hand; by young Zionists filled with ideological fervour, who would have denied it stoutly were they challenged; by the rabbis who confiscated the books from their wards, by the women who picked them up for a few kopeks along with a bag of onions in the shop, by intellectuals who railed against this prostituting of literature, by wealthy merchants and farmers and cobblers and clockmakers, carpenters and engineers: they all knew the name Shomer, which means guardian, or watchman, and was his nom de plume, for it was not respectable for a man to be writing
shund
.
For it was hopeless. His life had been erased like his books, set alight, reduced to ash and scattered. It no longer existed. But then, all lives were ultimately extinguished, and in their passing nothing remained of the person who’d been – their dreams, their thoughts, who they loved, what they hated – from Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon and down the ages to Jews.
And yet Shomer lives still.
He’d met Fanya at an open-air showing of a film about Palestine and the work of the pioneers there. She wore white. He was in his best suit, he had only recently begun to write: stories about detectives and dames, with no redeeming literary value. He’d sported a thin moustache at the time (Fanya made him shave it off before the wedding). In the film, men and women no older than he were tilling stony fields and sleeping in tents and picking oranges. They looked like Biblical peasants reborn in distant Palestine; he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to live in this way. But he only half-saw them, anyway. All he really saw was Fanya, more real than anything the screen had to offer, like a woman out of the pages of one of his stories.
Of course, in hindsight, he realised that she wasn’t. She was not cut out of cardboard like the dames in the stories. She had an internal life he would never see (and now never could), irrational likes and dislikes, moods he could not interpret, times she was happy for no reason he could tell and times she was sad and he could do nothing to change it. But she loved him, he loved her, and they were happy for a while. Even in the ghetto they could still make each other happy, even on the train here he was still telling her and the children stories.
Stories, stories, he is sick to death of stories!
Yet they are all he has.
Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 –
contd.
I was in a foul mood when I left the Mosleys’ party. The taciturn driver waited outside. He hailed me but I refused his offer of a ride, foolishly perhaps. I walked away, though I walked with a slight limp from my old injury. The night was dark and quiet but I was not fooled, for it is in the night that one comes most alive. To know the light you must understand shadows. I walked through Belgravia though I had the feeling I was being watched, and often I turned abruptly but there was no one there. Nevertheless the feeling of being watched persisted.
In this manner – that is to say, furtively – I traversed the city in an easterly direction. My mind was busy like a rat’s.
Vicious, dirty creatures, rats. Julius Streicher’s genius with
Der Stürmer
was, firstly, the graphic caricatures he ran: the long-nosed rat-like Jew, always lusting after German maidenhood. It was a magazine appealing to the lowest common denominator, glorying in gruesome tales of sex crimes and murders, all naturally blamed on the Jews. He was rat-like himself, was Julius Streicher, vicious and dirty and oh so effective. His magazine was all but pornographic; it put the English
Daily Mail
to shame. I didn’t know why I was thinking about him again after all those years. The past was threatening to catch up with me.
My mind returned to the symbol carved on the dead woman’s chest. I had thought the swastika forgotten.
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