Curiously, if not necessarily meaningfully, this section is only in the Polish version, and not in the Hebrew. Perhaps Abraham deleted it, perhaps Ostoja inserted it.
Or Abraham had eleven fingers. Or at least was born with eleven fingers. The condition runs in the family. In the 1980s Abraham’s grand-niece Osnat gave birth to a baby with six perfectly formed fingers on one hand. This sort of polydactyly, the doctors said, is extremely rare, and is a genetic condition. Mira Meir, the baby’s grandmother, said yes, that makes sense, her uncle Abraham was born with eleven fingers. Mira, an accomplished poet, and one of the most famous children’s book writers in Israeli history, soon thereafter wrote a poem called “A Sixth Finger”:
A Sixth Finger
A.
For five generations the sixth finger waited, dormant
latent in the DNA, passed down
in an invisible relay race. The superfluous sixth finger
is removed. Nobody need know that it once was.
A bond of silence. But it won’t give up
as if to say the bond is like a pact
and continues to flow.
B.
The infant’s sixth finger
something superfluous. A little terrifying, maybe.
Should we ask the doctors? Maybe
I’m mistaken and it’s not so. Maybe it’s just a dream—
it popped up suddenly, out of nowhere. Who knows
what was in the past
the generations dissolved in a fog
in the end, a small, superfluous finger
is removed in the cold, sterile operating room
anesthetized and sanitized as prescribed.
We begin, anew.
אצבּע ששית
א
חמשה דורות חכתה האצבע הששית רדומה
זורמת בּחשאי נמסרת D.N.A. בּ
בּמרוץ שליחים סמוי. אצבּע ששית מיתרת
.מוסרת. איש אינו צריך לדעת שהיתה
קשר של שתיקה. אך היא אינה מותרת
כאלו אומרת קשר כאלו חותם
.וממשיכה לזרם
ב
אצבע ששית של תינקת
.דבר מיותר. אולי מעט בהלה
לפנות לרופאים בשאלה? אולי
-טעיתי וזה לא כך. אולי רק חלום
מאין היא צצה פתאם. מי יודע
מה היה בעבר
כל דורות ההורים כלו בערפל
אצבע קטנה מיתרת בסופו של דבר
מוסרת בחדר נתוח סטרילי וקר
.מאלחש ומעקר כנדרש
.מתחילים מחדש
According to the Museum of Gross-Rosen, Abraham was buried in Holon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, along with his wife, Sophie. According to the Internet there was only one cemetery in Holon.
The cemetery was much larger than I’d expected, which was an unwarranted and dumb expectation, I admit. I suppose I’d become accustomed to tiny Jewish cemeteries in eastern Europe, less cemeteries than remnants of cemeteries, really, and which were usually small enough and run-down enough that if there’s an intact, legible tombstone in there you can find it. But there were thousands of well-maintained graves here; I had no idea where Abraham’s was; an undirected search would take hours.
I followed the “Cemetery Director” signs past a row of open-air eulogy rooms and a small prayer room and into a cluttered, musty office. An old man with a long white beard and a black kipah sat behind the desk, talking softly on the phone. Sitting beside him was a second old man also with a white beard and a black kipah, though much less kempt, and not doing anything, just sitting there, languidly watching the first old man talk on the phone. Cemetery intern, I said to myself. Neither the director nor the intern paid me any attention as I entered the office. I sat down on a bench against the wall to wait out the phone call, giving me time to formulate precisely my request; my Hebrew, limited to begin with, was rusty.
A few minutes later the director hung up the phone and I approached the desk and told him, in deceptively fluent Hebrew, that I was looking for the grave of Abraham Kajzer. He nodded, tapped on the keyboard, and asked, “His father was Fyvush?” I said yes, and when I said yes I felt a flush of pride—I may well have been the only person in the world who could confidently answer that question. The director grabbed a photocopy of a map of the cemetery (there was a whole stack of them; apparently requests like mine were common). He highlighted the relevant section, and, on the bottom of the page, wrote down the row and plot.
The section I found easily enough, but the rows weren’t marked, and I wandered back and forth among the graves, searching: I’d stand in the middle of a row and scan the sea of tombstones in either direction for קיזר—the Hebrew spelling of Kaiser—or some variation thereof. But I couldn’t find it. I had to get more methodical. I began walking down each row, checking each tombstone. It took a long time—the section must have contained four, five hundred graves—but at last I found Abraham’s. Of course I’d missed it at first: the tombstone was only a few inches high, a low stone rectangle, with the inscription on top, facing the sky; in order to read it you’d have to be standing in front of it, looking down. Actually even then you wouldn’t be able to read it, because a thick brambly bush had grown right over it, and it was covered in dirt and tree debris. Sophie’s plot, similarly obscured, was nearby, but not adjacent—the couple were separated by a double plot containing Mr. and Mrs. Poterkovsky. This was either outrageously poor cemetery planning or an eternal testament to a very dysfunctional marriage.
I got on my knees and, wedging my body between the tombstone and the branches, cleared the dirt from Abraham’s tombstone, and then cleared the dirt from Sophie’s. The dirt was heavy and damp; it had been storming on and off all week.
There was no epitaph, just the name. I stood up and the branches overhead snapped back and reobscured the tombstone. I was filthy, my hands were caked with dirt, I had dirt on my face and in my hair.
