An Excerpt from Returning, soon to be published by Kasva Press
It is a strange thing, to be a memory…. I write from a moment in my own past—from within my memories. In fact, I realize that I am my memories. I am everything that I remember up to this point in my life. I drift between the past and the future—living and dreaming and thinking in the past, but writing in my own future.
I know that I will survive and one day live in Eretz Yisrael, but then I will be a different person. And those things I can’t remember now won’t be part of that person—the morning sunlight on the walls of the house where I grew up, the sound of the waves lapping against the sides of ships in the harbor…. I can’t remember those things now, though I know they were once important to me. Now I think only of simple things—food and drink and keeping out of the way of certain people here—and I don’t look into my past or my future. Today is already too much for me to deal with. So all those things that were so important to me before I came here will be lost when I become that future person living in Eretz Yisrael.
Perhaps the same is true of me now; the person I once was is dead. He died soon after coming here. Perhaps he died together with his mother and his sister. The one who remained here is branded with a number instead of a name and is not the same person. He can’t remember all the things that were important to that other person. He is what’s left of memory after the death of the rememberer. “Alex” is what remains of Ovadya.
But even then, something of Alex will survive and go into someone who will continue in Eretz Yisrael, just as something of Ovadya has entered Alex, who was born behind the fence in the spring of ‘43. Perhaps that something is even now entering a new person as I think about all this from inside the walls here.
It is very misty today and I can’t see far beyond the road between the kremas. Even the chimney of the other krema is invisible; it’s been cut off by the clouds. There is no one alive here today.
It is indeed a strange thing, to be a memory….
“What are you smiling at?” Masha asks. “What do you see?” Her voice comes from just behind me, but I dare not turn for fear that she will vanish.
“I’m looking out the window at the Sharon Plain of Israel!” I tell her.
“Then the rain must have passed.”
I shake my head. “I think it’s still very misty in Birkenau. It was so foggy this morning that one couldn’t see beyond the road. Water was dripping from the wires just from the mist. But now I’m not there anymore—or at least only part of me is there. And in Israel we have Gishmei Brachah—the rains of blessing, that water the fields and renew the Kinneret so we’ll have water in the summer after the rains stop.”
…to be a memory.
I started this day 63 years ago standing on the steps of the krema looking out at the mist. Now, all these years later, I sit at my desk in Israel and type, while the winter rain taps against my windows.
