The worst thing, she said, was when he talked to her. And also when he forced her to read aloud to him from the book. “The one he was writing? His manuscript?” I asked. No, she wasn’t allowed to touch his manuscript when she cleaned the room. There were a lot of books there, but he always wanted one book in English. He would instruct her to read, and then sneer at her reading and do it to her. But there also times when he would first read aloud from it himself.
The things I know accumulated slowly: a statement here, a statement there. Sometimes she came out with something horribly coherent, but a lot of the time what she said was unintelligible. And I, choking on it, didn’t know what was worse: when she spoke clearly I longed for vagueness, and when she was vague I wanted to shake her until she told me exactly what and how and when. Maybe with her psychiatrist she was different, but when I pressed her she was unable to answer, looking blank and stammering in reply to my questions.
Only when she was about to leave for the United States in her new incarnation, she revealed, as if by the way, the name of the book: The 120 days of Sodom. Because of the name she believed that she was destined to be tortured by him for one hundred twenty days, but the clue deceived her. She was tortured for longer.
He was a brutal, pornographic sadist, that’s what he was. A filthy rat dressed up in sordid intellectual pretensions. He was something that I wouldn’t even call human. A rat. A warped rat who decided he had it in his power to gnaw his way into the black box of Hitler and solve its riddle from the inside. Before he left he gave my sister a potted orchid. Elisheva put it on the reception desk, and there this gift remained until it died. I have no idea why I mentioned this now. I mention it because I remember. This detail of the white orchid I actually told Oded quite early on, but he wasn’t very impressed by it; he only remarked that giving flowers seemed like part of the window dressing. But I knew, and kept it to myself, that the purpose of the orchid was completely different, and that in this final act of parting too, the Not-man meant to mock her. Like he did when he met me and kissed my hand.
•
When the book my parents had so eagerly awaited came out in America, Erica was already resting in her grave, my father was apparently resting with his lady love in Verona, and Elisheva and I were going crazy together in the renovated, three-and-a-half-room basement flat where my father set us up nicely before he deserted us.
I had no idea that the book had come out, or about anything else, except for the fact that I was responsible for a sister who, according to the official authorities, posed no danger to herself or others, and consequently did not need to be hospitalized.
Only months later, after I had put her back, not so nicely, in the hospital, I learned about the book from a newspaper article, and my first thought was: I hope they don’t hand out newspapers in the psychiatric ward.
The article reported on a dispute between the literary editor and the owner of one of the big publishing houses in Israel. The owner wanted to bring out a Hebrew translation of Hitler, First Person, and the editor, it was reported, threatened to resign. Neither of the parties to the dispute agreed to be interviewed on record, but it appeared that they had given the reporter a broad overview of the reasons for the standoff.
Hitler, First Person, as may be gleaned from the title, attempts to present “an autobiography of the fiend.” According to the blurb on the back of the English edition, the book was not a forgery like the so-called “Hitler Diaries,” nor yet pure historical research, but rather “an attempt to deepen human consciousness by literary means” and by “a significant and chilling contribution to the self-knowledge of human beings as such.” The book relies on hundreds of documents and historical research. It attempts to penetrate beneath the persona the Führer presented to the public, and shows the reader not the “real” Hitler, but Hitler as he might have been, and as he would have described himself if he had written a personal autobiography as a kind of complement to Mein Kampf.
According to the article, the controversial manuscript had been rejected by a long line of publishers in the United States, until it found one willing to bring it out, and but for the fact that two well known historians had violently condemned the book, it would probably have disappeared among the piles of trash written on the subject.
The growing campaign in denunciation of the book had given the author, Professor Aaron Gotthilf, exceptional media exposure, at the height of which he had been attacked at the entrance to a television studio by an elderly Holocaust survivor who tried to throw acid in his face.
Gotthilf, a controversial historian and a refugee from the Holocaust himself, stands by his opinion that giving voice to Hitler is not only a legitimate literary device that should be accepted in the framework of the principle of freedom of expression, but an important tool in advancing our understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century. “Hitler was a human being,” he stresses, “and as such, he is not beyond the bounds of explanation.” He adds: “To understand does not mean to forgive.”
However, there are those who do not forgive Gotthilf for his book, among them our greatest Holocaust researcher, who described it as “a vile piece of filth not worthy of relating to.”
Up to now the book has been translated into French, German, Finnish, and Italian, although it should be mentioned that the publishers who chose to bring it out in these countries are also regarded as marginal. Among the reactions to the book in France, the words “provocative” and “interesting” were used. In Germany, on the other hand, the book was widely denounced by critics.
The article also mentioned that the author chose to let Hitler tell his story only up to October 1938, a few days before Kristallnacht, and that some critics have argued that this choice plays into the hands, even if indirectly, of Holocaust deniers.
“It will soon become clear whether Gotthilf’s fictional Hitler will be allowed to have his say in Hebrew too.”
I tore the newspaper to shreds and threw it in the trash, poured the dregs of my coffee onto the scraps, and took the bag of trash out of the house.
I hadn’t forgotten my parents’ talk. I hadn’t forgotten the sound of the typewriter, but for some reason I never thought about the book as something real that could actually happen. I never thought it would happen, too much had happened already.
All kinds of crazy ideas went around in my head, like writing to the publisher that I would kill myself if the book came out in Hebrew—because what other way did I have to preserve the fragments of my sister? But in the end I didn’t even write a letter of protest from a concerned citizen.
I’ll never know whether my mother meant to kill herself with her Digoxin games. I learned to live with the not knowing, let’s say I learned, let’s say I did, but one thing I do know today for certain: my mother did not pass on suicidal genes to me. I never really wanted to go away and die. I wanted other people not to be here.
When Elisheva broke down and was hospitalized for the first time, I was still in my senior year in high school and, surrounded by a protective wall of friends and activities, I spent most of my time at a relatively safe distance from the family.
When I banished her from our basement apartment to her second hospitalization I was already alone. Our parents had flown. My friends had joined the army, and I had been exempted from this obligation, too, which I had no possibility of meeting.
The way things turned out I didn’t have a single soul I could talk to when Hitler, First Person came down on me in the kitchen like a ton of bricks. And after I destroyed the newspaper, not long after that, somehow or other I decided to live. Somehow or other, the decision was taken to live, live like crazy and as quick-sharp as possible. I left the apartment in Talpioth and threw myself giddily into to all kinds of stimulating experiments. I consumed quantities of alcohol, and men, and wild talk, and ups and downs at night and sleeplessness. One morning, after waking up alone in the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv without remembering exactly how I got there, I snuck outside, and as I wandered the streets my eye fell on a tattoo emporium; I went in and had myself tattooed