When Shlomith had quoted enough of Mr. Berkovits’s ideas, she picked up the most controversial book of her performance, Ignaz Maybaum’s The Face of God after Auschwitz, and began to read from page sixty-one without changing a word:
“‘The churban is an operation in which God, like a surgeon, cuts out a past from the body of mankind . . .’” Shlomith continued reading, and after reaching page sixty-four, she asked in Maybaum’s words: “‘Are we to say: the churban created this progress?! How terrible that we paid for this progress with the death of six million martyrs. Can you understand it? I cannot. You cannot. It is not for us to understand. For us it remains to praise the works of God. Ma’asei Eloheinu.’”
Auschwitz-Birkenau and all the other labor and concentration and extermination camps, prison camps, assembly camps, and pass-through camps: A as in Amersfoort, B as in Bełzec or Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald, C as in Chełmno, D as in Dachau, now we jump around, F as in Flossenbürg, we jump and shout M as in Murderer, M as in Majdanek, M as in Mauthausen-Gusen, now picking at random, S as in Sobibór, S as in SS, T as in Treblinka, and that isn’t the end, W as in Warsaw and Westerbork, and then back to the middle, N as in Nacht und Nebel, N as in Niederhagen, N as in Nuit et Brouillard . . . There’s never any end. All the camps, the destroyed ghettos, the broken windows, the razed shops, all of them were part of GOD’S INTERVENTION as Ignaz Maybaum claimed and emptied his pipe bowl of ash. This wasn’t a matter of punishment, it was a sacrificial offering. God used his chosen people as an instrument of creative destruction. All out of love. This is the meaning of the Hebrew word churban, a moment of massive destruction, in Maybaum’s interpretation.
A small lesson on Maybaum may be in order to facilitate a better grasp of this plot stub. The story goes this way: when Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 bce, the Jewish diaspora began, thanks to which knowledge of God and His laws spread across the world. This was the first historical churban. When the Romans destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, the synagogue was born, animal sacrifice ended, and religious study and prayer began, which elevated the system of Judaism to a higher level: this was the second churban. The third churban, as you can guess, was the Holocaust, which most Jews prefer to call the Shoah, but not Maybaum, not he, and began the modernization of Jewish culture. Regressive medieval traditions inherited from the feudal system, which people tended to follow in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and among Sephardic Jews, were destroyed along with the ghettos. Traditionally-minded Jews were “exterminated”, as the sophisticated expression has it in this series of events, and “Their death purged Western civilization.” Thus Maybaum wrote, and then began gently to clean his pipe with a bristle cleaner.
His remaining coreligionists, already cosmopolitans who had opened their minds to progressive ideas (you may have heard talk of a Jewish enlightenment ideology named haskala) avoided destruction by moving to other countries, mainly the United States and Israel. Maybaum’s God stood at the gates and chose carefully whom he would send on the ships to the New World or to the arrow-headshaped strip of shore between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and whom he would shove in trains and barracks and gas chambers and then, finally, crematoria hidden in the shadows of the forest. In Maybaum’s sketch, God’s divine face bears a strong resemblance to an Obersturmbannführer. It might be handsome, kind, and even bear an affectionate smile, because carrying out great plans can make anyone beautiful, or at least a momentarily sparkling pulsar. According to Maybaum’s God, purity, progress, shiny surfaces, and speed ran rings around cobblestones, smoky alleyways, and strange traditions whose origins the followers of those traditions didn’t even attempt to trace.
Maybaum listened carefully to the whisperings of his God, acknowledging that they were logical in their own special way and recording his thoughts. His thoughts or God’s thoughts, it made no matter—presumably they developed in a collegial spirit. After he finished writing, Maybaum filled his pipe with high-quality tobacco, lit the bowl, and inhaled with the utmost pleasure. A nauseating, suffocating smoke enveloped the room like a veil of mourning. Ignaz Maybaum wrapped his pages in brown kraft paper and sent his manuscript to his publisher.
Shlomith read Maybaum’s book kneeling. Her monotonous, exaggeratedly calm voice resembled a speech simulator. And when she had read enough of the book (“enough” in the sense that our artist couldn’t stand to read any more and began to trip over the words and nod off over the book, on the verge of passing out), she set it on the floor and began tearing out pages. With disgust she loved those densely printed pages, because (this was clear to Shlomith by the third day she presented the piece, on the day The New York Times published a halfpage review of it, which included, for the first time, a small sidebar about Shlomith-Shkhina) reading this specific scandalous book out loud clinched her reputation. The other books were actually props, just warm-ups for Maybaum. To be perfectly clear: it was largely thanks to Maybaum that Shlomith became an artist to be reckoned with. What a grotesque twist!
Fortunately there were specialists in tortuous twists in ideology who pounced the instant they smelled an Important Topic floating on the air. Performance art researchers came from as far away as Australia to watch Shlomith, and Shlomith did her best. In a frenzy she tore the pages of the book, wallowing in the white shreds, biting the paper and gnawing on the cover, and finally she put what was left of the book named The Face of God after Auschwitz in an incinerator build out of red bricks. Within
