Christianity in Ukraine.” The priest must have been distributing the pamphlets to those who’d left the courtroom and come outside for air. I read the first sentence of the pamphlet’s first page. “1988 is a significant year for Ukrainian Christians throughout the world — it is the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity to the land called Ukraine.”
The crowd, mostly Israelis, seemed to understand neither the pamphlet’s contents nor what the dispute was about, and because his English was so poor, it was a moment before what the Jewish giant was shouting was intelligible even to me and I understood that he was assaulting the priest with the names of Ukrainians whom he identified as the instigators of violent pogroms. The one name I recognized was Chmielnicki, who I seemed to recall was a national hero on the order of Jan Hus or Garibaldi. I had lived among working-class Ukrainians on the Lower East Side when I’d first come to New York in the mid-fifties and remembered vaguely the annual block parties where dozens of little children danced around the streets dressed in folk costumes. There were speeches from an outdoor stage denouncing Communism and the Soviet Union, and the names Chmielnicki and Saint Volodymyr showed up on the crayoned signs in the local shop windows and outside the Orthodox Ukrainian church just around the corner from my basement apartment.
“Where murderer Chmielnicki in book!” were the words that I finally understood the giant Jew to be shouting. “Where murderer Bandera in book! Where murderer Petlura son of bitch! Killer! Murderer! All Ukrainian anti-Semite!”
Defiantly cocking his head, the priest snapped back, “Petlura, if you knew anything, was himself murdered. Martyred. In Paris. By Soviet agents.” He was an American, as it turned out, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest who, from the sound of his voice, was more than likely a New Yorker and who seemed to have come to Jerusalem all the way from New York, perhaps even from Second Avenue and Eighth Street, specifically to distribute his pamphlets celebrating the thousand years of Ukrainian Christianity to the Jews attending the Demjanjuk trial. Wasn’t he in his right mind, either?
And then I realized that I was the one who had to be out of his mind to be taking him for a priest and that this was more of the masquerade, a performance designed to create a disturbance, to distract the police and soldiers, to draw away the crowd … I could no more free myself of the thought that Pipik was behind it all than Pipik could free himself of the thought that I was perpetually behind him. This priest is Pipik’s decoy and part of Pipik’s plot.
“No!” the Jewish giant was shouting. “Petlura murdered, yes — by
“Please,” said the priest, “you have had your say, you have spoken. Everybody can hear you from here to Canarsie — allow me, will you, please, to address those good people here who might like to listen to somebody else for a change.” And turning away from the Jewish giant, he resumed the lecture he’d apparently been delivering before their ruckus had begun. As he spoke, the crowd grew larger,
But again the Jewish giant interposed himself between the onlookers and the priest, and again he began to shout at him in that astoundingly large voice. “Hitler and Ukrainian! Two brother! One thing! Kill Jew! I know! Mother! Sister! Everybody! Ukrainian kill!”
“Listen, bud,” said the priest, his fingers whitening around the thick stack of pamphlets that he was still clutching to his chest, “Hitler, for your information, was no friend of the Ukrainian people. Hitler gave away half of my country to Nazified Poland, in case you haven’t heard. Hitler gave Bukovina to Fascist Romania, Hitler gave Bessarabia —”
“No! Shut up! Hitler give you big present! Hitler give you big, big present! Hitler,” he boomed, “give you Jew to kill!”
“Cyril and Methodius,” the priest resumed, again bravely turning his back on the giant to address the crowd, “translated the Bible and the Holy Mass into Slavonic, as the language was called. They set out to Rome, to obtain permission from Pope Adrian II to say Mass in the language they had translated. Pope Adrian approved it and our Slavonic Mass, or Ukrainian liturgy, was celebrated —”
That was as much about the brothers Cyril and Methodius as the giant Jew could bear to hear. He reached out for the priest with his two giant’s hands and I saw him suddenly as created not by a malfunctioning pituitary gland but by a thousand years of Jewish dreaming. Our final solution to the Ukrainian Christianity problem. Not Zionism, not Diasporism, but Gigantism — Golemism! The five soldiers looking on with their rifles from the edge of the crowd surged forward to intervene and protect the priest, but what happened happened so quickly that before the soldiers could stop anything, everything was over and everyone was laughing and already walking away — laughing not because the priest from New York City had been lifted into the air and smashed to the ground and dispatched from this life into the next by the enormous muddy boots on the giant’s two feet but because a couple of hundred pamphlets went sailing up over our heads and that was the end of that. The giant had yanked from the priest’s hands all of his pamphlets, hurled them as high as he could, and with that the incident was over.
As the crowd dispersed to return to the courtroom, I stood there watching the priest set out to recover his pamphlets, some of which were scattered as far as fifty feet away. And I saw the giant, still shouting, moving off alone toward the street, where buses were running and traffic was flowing as though it was what indeed it was, in Jerusalem as everywhere else: just another day. A sunny, pleasant day at that. The priest, of course, had nothing at all to do with Pipik, and the plot that I had resolved to foil existed nowhere other than in my head. Whatever I thought or did was wrong and for the simple reason that there was, I now realized, no
The priest continued to gather up the pamphlets one by one, and because he was much older than I’d realized when he was defiantly standing up to the giant, the effort was not easy for him. He was a very weak, very stout old man, and although the encounter had not ended violently, it seemed to have left him as enfeebled as if he had in fact received a terrible blow. Maybe bending over picking up the pamphlets was making him dizzy, because he didn’t look at all well. He was terrifyingly ashen, whereas facing down the giant, he had been a pluckier, much more vivid shade.
“Why,” I said to him, “why, in all of this world, do you come here with those pamphlets on a day like this one?”
He’d fallen to his knees to gather together the pamphlets more easily, and from his knees he answered me. “To save Jews.” A little of his strength seemed to return when he repeated to me, “To save you Jews.”
“You might do better to worry about yourself.” Although this had not been my intention, I stepped forward to offer him my hand; I didn’t see how else he could get back on his feet. Two bystanders, two young men in jeans, two very tough customers indeed, young and lithe and scornful, were watching us from only a few feet away. The rest of the crowd had all moved off.
“If they convict an innocent man,” the priest said as I tried to remember where I’d seen these two in jeans before, “this will have the same result as the Crucifixion of Jesus.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, not that old chestnut, Father. Not the Crucifixion of Christ
His voice shook when he replied, not because he was winded but because my angry response had left him incensed. “Through two thousand years, Jewish people paid for that — rightly or wrongly, they paid for the Crucifixion. I don’t want the conviction of Johnny to have similar results!”
And it was just here that I felt myself leaving the ground. I was being removed from where I was to somewhere else. I did not know what was happening but I felt as though a pipe were digging into either side of me and on these pipes I was being hoisted and carried away. My feet were cycling in the air, and then they met the
