Berlin Cantata by Jeffrey Lewis Page B

who I was and to depend on his love and mercy. When these came into question, or more specifically when he tried to convert me into a “snatcher” of other Jews, I murdered him and retired into the depths of the socialist neighborhoods. On the war’s end, I met a camp survivor named Herbert Kaminski. Through Herbert, my deeds became known to the Americans. Soon they earned me modest honors, which were then magnified in the new West Germany’s wish to find whatever saving graces it could in the disgraceful past and to put a distance from the rest. I became Herbert’s right hand man in his expanding business ventures. At first this consisted of nothing more than collecting rents from whores and pimps. But Herbert had bigger things in mind. “Somebody will have to rebuild this city. It may as well be us, its human rubble.” Of course we were all human rubble then, we Berliners, but Herbert considered us the rubble of the rubble. As money for reconstruction flowed in, our new construction company received its share and perhaps more. I had always been handy with figures, and now I abandoned my dreams of literature and became the one Herbert trusted with his numbers, his “Jew,” as it were. My fortunes were restored. I imagined, despite my inversion, that my father would have been proud of me. I came to be considered a wise man in Berlin’s miniscule remnant of a Jewish community. I became, at long last, a Zionist, and when the West German government established reparations funds to aid Israel, I was named trustee of one such fund. I turned ascetic as well. My dandy days gone, I donned a dark overcoat like my brother’s in all sorts of weather. It was apparent that I was one of those whom the war had singled out to recast into an unlikely hero. I often spoke at those inspirational occasions held in Berlin’s churches where the theme was “never again.”
    In addition, I wished to do my part to help my Israeli brothers find peace in their new land. I attended conferences and sent money. At one such conference on the question of refugees, my heart went out to a young Palestinian. He called me his rose. This may sound at once preposterously kitsch and obvious, but its very simplicity touched me. It was not so much the end of my asceticism as the beginning of a devotion. From the start I knew that Khalil could lie to me. He often did. Yet I was touched by his usual affection, by his periods of “making up,” and by the dispossession he had suffered, both different from and similar to my own, as if we occupied two wings of a triptych separated by a middle that was dark and unintelligible. From the outset my Zionism had been tinctured by the old European dream of a Jewish state that would be a moral beacon to the world’s nations. After the war in 1967, I was shocked that Israel did not promptly vacate the various territories it had occupied, and in particular by its claim to keep all of Jerusalem forever. A rift developed between my ideal Zionism and the reality, a rift which I could only partly paper over by remembering that I lived in “safety” in Germany. And so when the Gulf War began in ’91 and Israel was under assault by Saddam’s missiles and there were legitimate fears of gas attacks, I was already prepared to have my moral sense cleaved. Khalil plied me with reports that, despite Israeli denials, Jews were being issued gas masks while Palestinians in the occupied territories were not. “Thousands will die. It’s what they want, to have no Palestinians left.” Despite Khalil’s hyperboles, the injustice rankled. The East German state had warehouses full of unused gas masks. Inasmuch as it could be imagined that Israel simply hadn’t enough gas masks to go around, I initially tried to broker a deal whereby Israel would grant asylum to a certain high-ranking Stasi man who happened to be Jewish in exchange for the East German