Daniel Stein, Interpreter

23. 1989, Berkeley

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ETTER FROM

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN TO

E

STHER

G

ANTMAN

Dear Esther,

I cried all night and couldn’t get a moment’s sleep. Grisha is not here. He has flown off to a conference in Germany. Alex went off with friends for two days to San Diego to visit some boys who are also making a film on their own. Before he left he wrote me a letter. I am sending you a photocopy. I can’t bring myself to paraphrase it. I felt a sense of release but at the same time a new burden of responsibility. I am terribly saddened and really don’t know what to do.

Now it seems to me that yesterday when nothing had been said, things were easier. There was still hope. Alex is a very good boy. I don’t want him to be unhappy, but I do not want my son to be gay.

I may just have to adapt.

Lots of love,

Ewa

24. 1989, Berkeley

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ETTER FROM

A

LEX TO

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN

Mum! I haven’t been feeling right recently so I have decided to tell you a truth which you already suspect. I know you will be disappointed in me: I have chosen a path in life which simply doesn’t fit with your outlook. I know, though, that honesty is one of your main principles in life, and so in my situation the most difficult thing would be to lie to you. You always taught me to question myself and answer honestly, in every sphere of life. I remember when you left my father you told me you had fallen in love with another man and Ray had disappointed you. I was very upset by your bluntness at that time but now I understand that it was right.

You may protest that what I am talking about now is not honesty but falling into sin, but I have never felt more honest than now when I make this admission to you and, even more than that, to myself.

How many nights I have spent turning in my bed sleeplessly, trying to answer the question of who I am and what I want. All sorts of ideas came to me. For example, what a gap there is between what we think about ourselves, what other people think about us, and who we actually are. How great it is when these three dimensions more or less coincide, and how painful existence is when they don’t.

I kept thinking how important it was to discover this truth about myself. When the question of my sexuality first arose, I very much wanted to be the same as everybody else, I wanted to believe that everything was in order in me! I was “straight,” arousing suspicion in nobody, including myself. The whole problem is that, quite simply, I have no real sexual experience. I am altogether without sin in that respect! Gradually, though, the realization came from inside me that I was lying. The time came when I could not lie to myself any longer, and it had simply been a trap.

There is a Greek word, “skandal,” whose primary meaning is “a piece of wood.” This wood then became a trap for animals or enemies. Two thousand years later, in the Gospels, the word was always translated as “temptation.” Is it any wonder I have found Greek so interesting?

Every morning when I woke up I had to put myself together bit by bit, and I dragged this unresolved question around with me, afraid that everybody could see it. From morning to evening I monitored every word I spoke, every gesture, every behavioral reaction. I wanted to dissolve, to disappear, I wanted other people not to notice me at all.

In the evenings, I put off the hour when I would have to go to bed and find myself alone with my demons. I sat at the computer, listened to music, and read. Do you remember how many books I read as an adolescent? The whole of world literature is full of love. Taking a break from my books I saw you and Grisha bound by such vital passion. I was so attracted to Grisha. Now I can recognize the nature of my feelings, but then I did not understand.

In the end, I had to admit defeat. I surrendered. Whether that was good or bad, I am what I am. Now I have to tell you. For a long time I did not have the courage because this concerns not only you, but all those people I love and respect and who, to put it mildly, disapprove of homosexuals.

Having come out as gay, I am transformed into a strange, marginal person and feel I am depriving myself of a fully valid place in the world. The majority of people hate gays, considering them, at best, renegades and, at worst, perverts.

This has all made me feel immensely unhappy.

I was very lucky to meet Enrique. He was born into a different culture. Although his family are Catholics, their Indian roots remain and there is no escaping that. They had a different view of sexuality, distinct from what is generally accepted in our world. In many Indian tribes there was no prohibition of homosexual relations. Enrique is far more educated in this respect than I am, and he showed me scholarly articles which describe even institutionalized homosexuality. In certain tribes, young men with warrior status were completely forbidden to have sexual contact with women and allowed only boys as sexual partners.

Please understand me correctly. I am not making any value judgments. It is simply a social situation which reflects an aspect of human nature. If you like, it is evidence that homosexual relations have not always been condemned by society.

Enrique freed me from the terrible burden of feeling guilt toward the whole world and gave me a sense of confidence that our relations are a private affair. Our love is nobody’s business but our own, and needs neither the approval nor the disapproval of society. In order for me to feel happy, however , for some reason I need you to stop pretending you don’t know I am gay, to acknowledge the fact and accept it.

That will be honest and, in the end, it will be good.

I know that presenting you with this truth, I am making you confront a purely Christian conflict. In the eyes of your Church I am a sinner, and that hurts you. In consolation, I can only say to you that I hope God is more merciful toward a sinner whose sin is “the wrong kind of love” than toward those whose sin is outright hatred.

In spite of everything, I’m very glad that I have finally written this letter, which I couldn’t bring myself to write for such a long time. I have nevertheless gone away to give you time to collect your thoughts and accept this admission. I love you very much, Mum, and love Grisha and all your friends who I find always so cheerful and noisy.

Your son,

Alex

25. 1989, Jerusalem

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ETTER FROM

Y

OSEF

F

ELDMAN TO

E

STHER

G

ANTMAN

Dear Mrs. Gantman,

I have started work on your book. I was already familiar with most of the text. It is one of the versions of the Haggadah. The theme you are asking me about is fairly unusual. It is a depiction of a naked woman, whose upper part is sticking out of bushes. The hands braiding her plaits belong to the Lord God. This midrash is most probably medieval but appears for the first time in the sayings of Reb Simeon ben Manassia. I did not know that myself, but yesterday a friend visited who works in the manuscript department of the Museum of Jerusalem. The text is as follows:

“From the sayings of Reb Simeon ben Manassia:

With motherly care the Lord with his own hands braids Eve’s hair into plaits before showing her for the first time to Adam.”

My friend advises you not to sell this book unless you really have to. It is not particularly valuable because it is not of great antiquity but, as he says, it is exceptionally well composed. If you like, I can send it for valuation and you will obtain the relevant information, but valuation is itself fairly expensive.

I shall work on your book next week and hope to have everything finished by the end of the month.

Yours sincerely,

Yosef Feldman

26. 1959–83, Boston

F

ROM

I

SAAK

G

ANTMAN’S NOTES

I never thought I could succumb to the passion for collecting anything at all. It always seemed to me rather base. Love for the item collected proceeds from the vanity of the collector. At a certain point, however, viewing the shelf with my latest acquisitions, and also the pile of invoices which I had kept separate, I realized that I have gradually become a collector. I buy books which I have no intention of reading, and some which I simply could not read. The 18th-century Persian book was bought solely for the sake of its delightful miniatures.

Having established that, I spent the whole of Sunday conducting a survey and compiled something along the lines of a catalogue. Art albums, which I have been buying ever since I had any money to speak of, do not count. I have included only miniatures. My collection comprises 86 books with miniatures, not so much rare as extremely beautiful. I looked through them systematically for the first time, one after the other, and saw that, without realizing it, I invariably only bought books with Biblical subjects. It struck me that my predilection went back to the impression made on me by the first such book I saw in the Vienna National Library when I was studying in the faculty of medicine. I loved going into the rare books section, and in those days valuable books were issued to readers right there in the reading room. I held in my hands the renowned Book of Being from the sixth century, and some of its miniatures were engraved in my memory for life. Of those, the most beautiful was Eliezer, the trusted slave of Abraham, meeting Rebecca by the well. Rebecca is depicted twice, once as she is walking with a bowl, and a second time as she is watering Eliezer’s camels. In the distance the town of Nakhor is painted in a highly stylized manner, and the servant has not yet fulfilled his mission of finding a bride for Isaac but the matter is already in hand. Rebecca’s countenance, as is customary in miniatures, is very finely drawn and resembles my wife, Esther, as I have only just realized. The long neck, the delicate hands, the slender waist, the small breasts without the fatty deposits which always cause so much trouble on the operating table—everything that to this day I still find attractive in a woman. Such is the way a man’s preferences are formed, from a beautifully painted picture seen in his youth.

I once more looked attentively through the books I had bought and confirmed that the women in these highly diverse tales, where there are any, all have large eyes and long necks. They were the only type my attention lingered on. Neither amazons nor vamps have ever attracted me. It is amusing that I should have discovered this when I’m in my seventies.

Another question which belatedly occurred to me is why Jewish books have these miniatures with depictions of people at all. We know that representing the human form was forbidden, so what are we to make of the world-renowned Persian miniatures? After all, Islam also prohibits representation of the human form. I shall write a letter to the indispensable Neuhaus on this matter. Our correspondence is fairly discreet but has not broken off, although in the last three years we have only exchanged greetings during the holidays.

27. 1972, Jerusalem

L

ETTER FROM

P

ROFESSOR

N

EUHAUS TO

P

ROFESSOR

G

ANTMAN

Dear Isaak,

I was very glad to receive your letter, primarily because you have not immersed yourself wholly in medicine but still allow yourself to look at other matters and have, moreover, chosen a good matter to look at. The question you asked is one I have been asked hundreds of times, and some twenty years ago I wrote a brief summary on the topic, in which I continue to take an interest. I am sending you an extract on the matter of interest to you, the prohibition of images. I hope you will find the answer to your question there. Only recently I was reminded of you in connection with a heart operation I face but which has been postponed for the time being.

Greetings to your wife.

Yours,

Neuhaus

EXCERPT FROM THE SUMMARY

Anybody who has decided to study the history of Jewish graphic art, whether in a professional capacity or simply out of curiosity, very soon discovers that a huge number of questions arise in relation to this topic which ultimately lead to one principal question: how can Jewish graphic art exist at all if there has been a prohibition of many forms of representation since ancient times, and what kind of prohibition is it?

Even some 100 years ago it was considered beyond dispute that there never had been and never could have been Jewish graphic art, precisely because of the clear prohibition in the Torah of representations of the real: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” (Exodus, 20:4). The same thing, but in more detail, is repeated in Deuteronomy, 4:16-17: “Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth.”

In reality this is all less clearcut than it seems at first sight. In both cases, immediately after these words there follows, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Exodus, 20:5); and in the second case, “And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.” (Deuteronomy, 4:19).

Here we need to make a short digression. The immense vitality of Judaism, the great faith of a small people, lost among hundreds of other tribes of the Middle East, of Judaism which has given birth to two of the greatest world religions, is founded on two principles. One of these is restrictive. The behavior of a Jew is strictly regulated, and it often seems to modern man that the minute and, at first sight, inexplicable prohibitions governing social and personal behavior are comical and absurd. There are an intimidating number of laws and prohibitions, restrictions and prescriptions for every eventuality in life, from birth to death: how to eat, how to drink, how to pray, how to bring up children, how to give daughters in marriage, how sons are to marry … but at least everything is decided in advance, everything is written down, codified, every conceivable unforeseeable eventuality is accounted for. A husband must not dare to touch his wife while she is menstruating, may not sit on a chair on which she has sat, or touch objects which she has held in her hands. But what if, oh, horror, a woman’s period should come unexpectedly and the husband discovers this when he has already embarked upon fulfilling his conjugal obligations? No cause for concern. Even for this eventuality there is a precise instruction on how to behave. Such is the Talmud, a comprehensive set of laws for good, correct behavior.

So then, what is the second principle I mentioned? It is the principle of complete and totally unfettered freedom of thought. The Jews were given a sacred text on which they have been working for centuries. This work is an obligatory part of the upbringing of a Jewish male. Admittedly, now women too have begun studying the Torah, but it is as yet unclear whether that is good for them or not altogether a good thing. In this area, Jews were afforded a fantastic freedom unheard of in any other religion. There is effectively a total absence of prohibitions on intellectual investigation. Everything is open to discussion and there is no dogma.

The concept of heresy, if not wholly absent, is nevertheless very diluted and blurred. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says of this, “the definition of heresy in Judaism is complicated by the absence of officially formulated dogmas or a central body with recognized authority in religious matters.”

So, while there is no restriction of thought, there are restrictions on behavior. There are a lot of these, exemplified above, but they are compressed into the golden rule of ethics ascribed to Hillel, a Jewish philosopher of the first century: “Do not do unto your neighbor that which you would not wish him to do unto you.”

Now let us return to the topic of our discussion—the prohibition of artistic representation. After the destruction of the Second Temple communities acquired very great independence, effectively now having autonomy to decide many important questions, with the result that the prohibition of representation was treated differently in different communities. Some considered it a categorical injunction and, in accordance with that belief, followed it literally. For them only inorganic ornamentation could be used for decorating objects of Judaica, synagogal or domestic. Others, however interpreted, it less literally, as a prohibition of worshipping what was depicted. This interpretation saw no prohibition of artistic appreciation. This is why we find images of animals and human figures on the frescoes of the synagogue in Dura-Europos in present-day Syria, on the mosaic floors of the synagogue of Beit Alpha in the Jezreel Valley, and a marvelous image of King David playing the harp in a sixth-century synagogue in Gaza.

Halacha unambiguously forbids the creation of an object depicting anything if the intention is to worship it, but unambiguously permits and even encourages artistic activity for ornamentation. The prohibition on worshipping anything material applies, however, not only to art. One contemporary Rav said, “That is called an idol which a person considers to be such, and if somebody sets up a brick and worships it, the brick becomes an idol and may not be used for any purpose. If a beautiful statue adorns a city, it will be a welcome guest.” That is sound common sense.

The problem of resemblance did not trouble Jewish artists. Resemblance was not an end in itself. Moreover, it was customary to slightly alter something in the human figure, to depict it with some deformation or distortion so that it became, as it were, not exactly human. The distortion might be barely detectable, for example, an incorrectly formed ear, or it could be obvious, as in the famous Bird’s Head Haggadah created in the fourteenth century in Germany, so called because the people in it have birds’ heads.

A further characteristic of Jewish art is a system of symbols which has remained virtually unchanged over 2,000 years, despite the absence of iconographic and semantic canons. The ancient symbolism develops, as can be observed by researching art objects. Both in Jewish frescoes and in mosaics, in book miniatures, and in the ornamentation of objects of Judaica, any representation, be it a bird, person, or plant, is not a direct representation but a symbol, which is accordingly by no means obliged to correspond to reality.

28. March 1990, Berkeley

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ETTER FROM

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WA

M

ANUKYAN TO

E

STHER

G

ANTMAN

My dear Esther,

Everything is just awful. I knew this was going to happen! I knew everything would turn out just like this. You shouldn’t marry a man 10 years younger than yourself. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Grisha is having an affair with some assistant in the department. I have an animal intuition. I noticed her the first time I saw her at some banquet. Even then the bitch was circling Grisha very brazenly. I found her behavior so disagreeable that I was immediately on the alert, and some time later Grisha told me he had two more hours of lectures at Stanford University and would be going there on Fridays. As you weren’t there beside me, there was nobody to tell me not to do something foolish. I rang that damned university and asked whether I could register for his course. They confirmed that they had no such professor on their permanent or visiting staff. Then I was guilty of a second act of folly: I demanded an explanation and he made no great attempt to deny it. He admitted it straight away, but added that I am his wife, he has no intention of divorcing me because he loves me, and whether I choose to accept the situation or not is up to me. Now I am sitting and wondering what to do. I have found out that Alex knew about Grisha’s girlfriend because he met them in the town in some dive, and altogether it strikes me that Alex’s sympathies are far more on Grisha’s side than mine. I regard it as treachery on his part. It is male solidarity. I am terribly hurt. Now when I so need Grisha’s support after all I have been through after Alex’s confession … do you know what he said when I showed him Alex’s letter? “Leave the boy alone. I’ve known that for ages.”

What I most want to do right now is get on a plane and come and weep on your shoulder, but having just been taken on by this laboratory it would be the height of stupidity to give up the job. I am only too aware of how many foolish mistakes I have made, but alas I am one of those women who have to say what is on their mind and wreck everything, rather than keeping stumm and sitting out a crisis.

Another utterly amazing piece of news which I forgot because of all this stress. I don’t want to write about it and am sending you a photocopy of my mother’s letter. The letter had enclosures, a certificate of admission, exactly as if into the Communist Party, and a certificate of baptism. If I were in a normal state of mind I would react to this news much more sharply, but at present I can only shrug and say, “God Almighty, is this a joke?”

With love,

Your idiotic Ewa

29. January 1990, Haifa

C

ORRESPONDENCE FROM

R

ITA

K

OWACZ TO

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN

(Photocopies sent by Ewa Manukyan to Esther Gantman)

Dear Ewa

The moment has come for me to inform you about the most important event in my life. Last Christmas after thinking about it at great length and undertaking the necessary preparation I was baptized. This will come as a surprise to you of course but for me it has been prepared by the whole course of my life. It is not something random but predictable and I am happy that I have not died before I could be christened. There were so many times I might have died during the war in prison in the camp and even in recent years after all my heart attacks and strokes. This whole year past I have been urging Father John and Agnessa to hurry up. I was afraid of dying too soon but they just smiled and said that now I did not need to worry either about my life or about my death. Complete calm has come down upon me. In our Church the Anglican Church there is not a whiff of that exaltation which so repelled me in Catholicism, the exaltation which I always found unacceptable for myself and unacceptable in you.

Now the only thing I want is for you to meet my wonderful friends and pass on to you the precious things I have received at the end of my life.

You know that I knew Christ since I was a child. In Poland there was nowhere he was absent from he is everywhere. In Israel which has rejected him it is very difficult to believe you can meet him but I have been fortunate. Thanks to Agnessa the doors of the only Christianity acceptable to me have opened.

Dear Ewa I know much has been wrong in our relations and that I have wronged you. I need to explain to you why everything happened as it did in order to help you sort yourself out.

I think the best thing would be for you to come here for Easter. We could celebrate this first Easter in my life together as a sign of our complete reconciliation.

Now when all I do is read the Bible and the New Testament all the time I could help you to find the right path in life.

I have a very convenient folding wheelchair which can fit in a car and together we can go to the Easter service. I want to be with Christ until the end of my life and we will finally be able to say to each other “The Lord is among us!”

Your mother

Margarita

30. 1990, Haifa

R

ITA

K

OWACZ’S DECLARATION

My declaration

I, Rita Kowacz (Dwojre Brin), was born into a Jewish family. Since I was four I have believed in God. I do not know how I came to have knowledge of Jesus. Before 1939 school lessons began with a prayer and I also prayed although I was not christened. The works of famous writers and poets were full of Jesus. Although I never studied the catechism I knew a lot about Jesus. When I was young Renan’s The Life of Jesus made a great impression on me. Polish Catholicism alarmed me by its aggressiveness and repelled me by its anti-Semitism. My path to Christ was not through miracles. What attracted me was the profound dignity of the Anglican Church as I saw it from being together with my Anglican friends, and the day came when I felt Jesus within me. I believe in him because he is the Truth. In my life I have many times erred in respect of what is the truth and took social justice to be the truth, the equality of all people, and other things which have let me down badly. Now I know that Christ is the Only Truth and that He was crucified for that. I believe that Christ is the Father and Lord.

Why do I want to be christened? Because the moment has come and the Lord has come through people, Agnessa Widow, John Chapman, Marion Selley and many others and I have realized that the love of Jesus binds people to each other with a special love. There is also a further reason why I want to be Christian. I am old and want to surrender myself entirely to His will.

I have thought a great deal about my sins. My greatest sin which has always tormented me is that I did not perform my duty to the full when I found myself under the occupation. Later, in Czarna Puszcza, I did not take part in partisan operations because I was in the last months of pregnancy, then I gave birth and had a six-year-old son on my hands. When I managed to send my children to Russia and joined the army some of my friends reproached me for not remaining with the children, but I do not consider that a sin because fighting Fascism seemed to me then to be my main mission. Subsequently when I found myself in the Soviet camp I collaborated with organs of the NKVD and some of the people I knew also condemned me for that.

Here too I do not feel I sinned because everything I did I did not out of self-interest but for the good of the cause. I sinned in that I did not respect my parents but to tell you the truth they were petty traders concerned only about having enough to eat here on earth and really did not deserve respect. I was unkind to them but they too were unkind to me. I think I wronged them somewhat.

Other than that I am not aware of any sins.

Rita Kowacz

CERTIFICATE OF BAPTISM

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

Matthew, 28:19

This is to certify that Margarita Kowacz was baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost on the thirteenth day of January in the Year of our Lord 1990.

Vicar (signature): Father D. Chapman

31. 1990, Haifa

F

ROM A LETTER FROM

R

ITA

K

OWACZ TO

A

GNESSA

W

IDOW IN

J

ERUSALEM

I thank you for the beautiful Bible you have given me. Unfortunately it is too heavy for my hands. The table is too narrow and when I put it down it is difficult to read. It is easier for me to hold a thin book.

Is there an edition which consists of separate booklets? I would like to have the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles in that form. Of course cassettes would be ideal but to tell you the truth I would prefer them in Polish. I cannot say that I understand spoken English well. This is made worse by the fact that my hearing is getting worse and my sight is also not getting any better but you know dear Agnessa I have never before in my life felt such a renewal of life as now. I really have been born again!

There is one question which is troubling me. God gives me so much and I cannot do anything now other than thank him with all my heart and all of you my true family. I would also like to participate in the life of the Church but my pension is very small. The trouble is that I refused to accept money from Germany. I did not take the compensation they paid out after the war to prisoners of the ghetto and even less did I want to have a pension from them. No money can compensate for the lives of the people they killed. The Germans pay money to those who by a miracle survived but that miracle was by the hand of the Lord and not of the German government. I disapprove of people who take that money it is blood money. As a result from my modest pension I have 200 shekels a month for my personal needs. It is not a lot but I spend money on the little silly things I need sometimes on books and all I can donate is five shekels a week which makes 20 a month. I very much regret it but I really can’t afford more. Of course I could get money from Ewa but in the first place I do not want anything from her and in the second place it would not even be my donation but hers.

32. 1970, Haifa

L

ETTER FROM

D

ANIEL

S

TEIN TO HIS NIECE

, R

UTH

Dear Ruth,

I’m not just writing to you for no reason but because of a conversation I had yesterday with your parents. It was your mother’s birthday and I went to wish her many happy returns. Almost the only thing they talked about was you. You were absolutely the focus of attention. Even not so much you as your departure to the theater school. There was a great deal of noise because two extreme views on the acting profession came into collision. Your father, as you can imagine, was badmouthing actors because they don’t do anything useful and went so far as to say that your mother, looking after poultry on a farm, had done more for mankind than the actor Gregory Peck. I don’t know why he so disapproves of Gregory Peck. Milka threw up her hands, chuckled, and announced that she would be very glad to change places with Gregory Peck. Then Milka’s friend Zosia chimed in to say that all through her youth she had dreams of being an actress. Before the war she had been invited to join a theater company but her father had not allowed it, and you, Ruth, would have a great acting career because in your school play you had acted the part of Esther better than any of the others. Zosia’s husband, Ruvim, told us what a bad end his cousin had come to, who once had happened to be in a film and then spent the rest of her life trying to be in another and not succeeding, as a result of which she lost her mind and drowned herself. Then people told a number of other instructive stories and I also offered my tuppence’ worth telling them about a man I met in Kraków called Karol Wojtyła who was an actor and playwright in his younger years before becoming a monk and making a great career for himself. He is now a bishop in Poland. Ruvim said in some irritation that if Karol Wojtyła had been a good actor he would not have had to become a monk because that was no less mad than what his cousin had done.

I thought that a little provocative but said nothing. I claimed my own justification was that at least I had never had any artistic gifts but at this there was an even greater uproar. They decided that actually I had great acting ability because I had spent so much time in the service of the Germans and had played an uncongenial role so well that it saved my own life and the lives of many others. Suddenly everybody made peace and your artistic destiny ceased to seem so hopeless because it will give you an opportunity of resolving life’s problems not headlong but in some devious artistic way. Ultimately, it was a good party.

For myself, I am very glad that you passed your exam and are learning a profession. Write when you start, I will be glad to hear your news. Your last letter made me very happy. France is a beautiful country and it is great good fortune that you will live there for some years, learn to speak French perfectly, see the life of Europe, and return home with new experiences. I am particularly glad that you will speak French fluently. I know quite a few different languages, but have to admit I speak all of them badly. I cannot read Shakespeare in English, Molière in French, or Tolstoy in Russian. I’m sure that each new language expands a person’s mind and his world. It is like another eye and another ear. A new profession also expands a person, even the profession of a cobbler, as I know from my own life. Work hard, my child, do not be lazy. Be an actress. When I see a large poster by the bus station with your sweet, funny little face on it, I shall be very happy! Let’s have an actress in our family, too!

Love from

Daniel

33. 1981, Kfar Saba

L

ETTER FROM

T

ERESA TO

V

ALENTINA

F

ERDINANDOVNA

Dear Valentina Ferdinandovna,

A rare opportunity has arisen to send you a letter which will not be opened and pried into. It will be brought to you by a woman you know following a very complicated route. She will tell you all about it.

Gradually we are beginning to get used to the colossal change in our life which has occurred and to our new circumstances. The most extraordinary thing is that the temptations have almost left me. It has become easier for me to pray, and my awakenings in the night which were previously such torment now pour out into warm prayer. Sometimes, when Efim hears I have got out of bed, he joins me, and this shared prayer gives both of us great solace. I will not conceal from you that from the very first step, we have encountered major problems here for which we were ill-prepared.

We began our life in Israel with a deception. On our arrival Efim, filling in the immigration form, wrote in the box for faith, “Atheist.” After some hesitation, I followed his example. In the papers we are recorded as a married couple and I did not want to create additional difficulties for him and concealed my faith, not for my own benefit but for his. We were settled in an ulpan, a language school with a hostel, to study the language and adapt. Actually, we could have avoided that because Efim knows Hebrew well, but his knowledge is book learning and not the language people speak. It is not so easy to understand the spoken language. For my part, I am entirely innocent of knowledge. I do not know a single word. We live in Kfar Saba in a tiny flat, two rooms, luckily, so each of us has their own cell and, after my communal neighbors, I feel happy here.

Every free day we take the bus completely at random, and sometimes go on trips with tour guides, some of them even free. It is very difficult to get to a church service. Sunday here is a working day so I have only been to the evening service in Jaffa twice. Of course, on our very first trip to Jerusalem we visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and climbed the Mount of Olives. I have to admit that at the gate of the Church of Mary Magdalene I felt very upset. It belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. As members of the Russian Orthodox Church, admission is denied us. That is, we can go in and look around, of course, but there is no liturgical communion between these two churches. Everywhere there is division and strife, even here, especially here. My heart is not yet reconciled to the loss, but my path to the Catholics is now also closed. Efim told me to leave the solution to the Lord. In our peculiar situation we really have no choice.

Our visit to Moscow as we were leaving was a real turning point. Marvelous Father Mikhail, with whom Efim had long been in contact, in part advising him on bibliographical matters, gave us great comfort and strength. He is an ecclesiastical writer and his books are published abroad. It was precisely in connection with this that Efim gave him advice. There is a very large theological library in Vilnius, all in German, which was left intact and they did not even make an inventory. Efim drew from it much of the information for Father Mikhail’s works on biblical theology. Incidentally, Father Mikhail spoke of you with great warmth. He rates your translations and articles very highly. He also gave us a number of addresses which he told us to learn by heart. He warned that address and notebooks, and also old letters, diaries, and manuscripts, in short anything in handwriting on paper is often confiscated at the border, so that all the most important things have to be committed to memory. Naturally, this was no difficulty for Efim. We thus gained a number of leads to believers of goodwill for whom Father Mikhail is a great authority. Efim said that he had never enjoyed talking to anybody more and regretted that their meetings had only ever been sporadic.

Everything is turning out exactly as Father Mikhail had warned, starting with the Orthodox brethren whose reception of Efim was far from friendly. The Russian Orthodox Church owns many churches in Israel, several monasteries, and accordingly lands. The Russian Church Abroad also has its representation, and indeed many Christian denominations have their own churches, monasteries, and, in a word, property in the Holy Land.

Efim went to the Moscow Patriarchate with a letter from his abbot to a certain highly placed cleric but it turned out that he had been recalled, so then he went to see his replacement. He perused the letter, was very unforthcoming, and said there were no vacancies and that priests were appointed from Moscow. I might add the detail everybody knows, which is, of course, that appointments require the blessing of the KGB! Efim was no use to him, although he told him to leave his application in the office.

Quite differently, one of the contacts Father Mikhail had recommended responded to our postcard immediately, phoned and invited us to visit. This was Father Daniel Stein, a Catholic priest from Haifa, but we have not had time to visit him so far. Next week I am planning to visit Mother Ioanna, also on Father Mikhail’s recommendation. I think you knew her at one time.

Dear Valentina Ferdinandovna, I cannot tell you what a strange state of suspension I am living in at present, like a speck of dust in a sunbeam. What a joy it is that fate has presented me with Efim as my life’s companion. He continues to reveal unexpected, touching characteristics. He helped me so much in the last years in Vilnius when all that unpleasantness began and impressed me as a strong, purposeful man. Now his weakness in the face of the world and his helplessness have been revealed to me. He is completely at a loss when confronted with dishonesty and insolence. He is pained by avarice and cynicism, and we have found that in some practical senses I am the stronger.

I gladly serve him in every way possible. He shows great tact, does not allow me to wash his underwear, and when I was cleaning the windows, he stayed close by because he was afraid I might fall from the second floor. Our relations are pure and nothing darkens them.

Efim is at present in a state of complete uncertainty as regards work. His only hope is to find a job with a certain religious publishing house in Europe, again through the good offices of Father Mikhail.

I fear I shall not have another opportunity of sending you such a complete letter any time soon. All that is sent through the post has necessarily to be very reserved. Write, I beg you! Write, in spite of the poverty of my letters. May the Lord be with you.

Your sister,

Teresa

34. 1980, Jerusalem

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Father,

Whom did you send me? A beautiful woman with curly hair and her head uncovered turned up and said she came from you. She gave her name as Teresa. She says that the telephone number and address of Ir. Al. which you gave them has now changed and they can’t contact her. She asked me for her new address and telephone number. Can you imagine, she said to me, “I know you have links with that publishing house!” Why did you tell her that, Father? Please remember, you must never say a word more than is necessary to anybody here: everybody spies on everybody else, and slip-ups are not forgiven. What if she had said that in the presence of somebody else? I did not give her the address, but decided to ask you about her first. I showed her the convent, took her around everywhere, and went down to the cemetery. In the church she prayed, crossing herself from left to right! Why have you sent me this Catholic? You know, we should help everybody but we have many of our own people in need. It is said, first you give to children and only after that to the dogs.

The Lord be with you.

Mother Ioanna

35. 1981

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Dear Valentina Ferdinandovna,

You are the only thread left which binds me to home. Perhaps it’s foolish to say that. Where is home in my situation? For me, a half-Pole, half-Lithuanian, home is anywhere they speak Russian.

Our situation remains unclear. Efim has not lost hope of finding a job he can put his heart into. You know what I mean. He was offered retraining classes: the choice was between computer programming and plumbing. In desperation he went to the mission of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and was received very courteously. He talked to the head of the mission, a pleasant-looking archimandrite who was a considerable improvement on the official who received him at the Moscow Patriarchate, but they, too, had no vacancies. All he could offer was for him to transfer to their jurisdiction with the right to participate in their service. That was it.

For the time being we are being paid welfare benefits. I’m finding learning the language very hard going and envy Efim his flair.

One of my neighbors suggested I should work as a cleaner, not officially but privately. It seems a good offer but I’m not ready to accept it yet. At least my vocabulary has increased by one word, “nikayon.” Cleaning.

It is particularly upsetting that Efim was relying on help from his abbot. He wrote him a letter but so far has had no reply. What he misses most is being cut off from libraries, because for his peace of mind he needs to be sitting somewhere he is surrounded by books.

The only good thing in spiritual terms is our acquaintance with Father Daniel, which also came with your kind help and on the recommendation of Father Mikhail. Unfortunately we have not yet managed to make contact with the publishing house: the nun we went to see on his recommendation was very unhelpful and said that she couldn’t give us the address at present but might do so later.

Father Daniel, on the other hand, is an exceptional man. Unfortunately he lives quite far away and it takes three hours and two changes of bus to get there, but we have visited him several times already. He has a small Catholic community in Haifa and gives help to anybody in difficulty. Believe it or not, he speaks excellent Polish and even knows Lithuanian. The first time I went on my own, without Efim. He received me as if I was a member of his family. I have to say he bears little resemblance to any monks I had dealings with before: he emanates a kind of Franciscan joy, although he doesn’t look like St. Francis at all, except that he had a cat in his lap which he stroked affectionately behind its ear. His outward appearance is very modest. He is short, with small round eyes, and a mouth with prominent lips like a baby. He doesn’t go around in a soutane but in crumpled trousers and a baggy sweater and looks more like a gardener or a market trader than a priest. No matter what I said to him he responded, “Oh, you poor dear, oh, my dear …” At the end he asked for Efim to come and see him as there was something he wanted to talk to him about. I told Efim and he agreed, only we don’t know when he’ll be able to, because he is very busy. Daniel is a man of exceptionally broad views, but Efim is a bit prejudiced against Catholics and will not agree to take communion there if he can possibly avoid it.

Efim is suffering greatly and that has a bad effect on me indirectly. My cruel nocturnal attacks have begun again. I talked to Father Daniel about this. He heard me out very attentively and said that before making any reply he would need to talk to Efim.

Everything he said seemed strange, coming from a monk. He said the monastic path is not for everyone by any means, and possibly only for very few; that he has been burdened by his vows for many years and knows the weight of them. He thought that my expulsion from the convent might possibly serve to redirect me to a different but no less blessed path. What should I make of that?

Efim is busy. For now he is unable to go to Haifa with me, and I am impatient for him to have an opportunity to do so. He has been taken on part-time at the local library cataloguing a small archive and he sits there in raptures. I can’t see him as a computer programmer, let alone a plumber. I have less difficulty seeing myself as a cleaner. I am not afraid of any job, but you will agree that I really had no need to emigrate in order to mop floors. I could have done that equally well in my homeland. I feel very down. The only thing that gladdens me is the sun. In Vilnius it is damp and cold at present but here at least the sun shines, and as a result light enters your soul. But my nights are a trial.

I ask your prayers, dear Valentina Ferdinandovna.

Your former Sister,

Teresa

36. April 1982, Jerusalem

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Father,

Your letter gave me strength and the power of your prayer is something I have long been aware of, since the time Mother Euphrosinia was alive and our elder was still with us. I can say that before your prayers, my child, misfortune has retreated. In the hospital here they took not an X-ray but some other new-fangled photograph and said they had found not cancer but a common garden-variety hernia. It will need an operation, but there is no particular urgency. That is all I was hoping for, that I would not have to go under the knife but just be left to die in peace.

They took me back to Jerusalem, to the Church Mission, in another connection: a visit from the top management. My fate is extraordinary. They rooted out nearly all the descendants of the boyards but for some unknown reason relented with me. Perhaps it was because for two centuries some of the men in my family have gone to serve in the Army, others into the Church, and that in both spheres they attained high rank, so that the people running the Church secretly respect me. Or perhaps sending me from an impoverished nunnery on the periphery to the Holy Land reveals that my illustrious forebears are watching over me. Or am I wrong, Misha?

A little monk, young Fyodor, comes to me claiming your recommendation. Assuredly, he emigrated from Russia some time ago, lived five years at St. Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos, then left it and came here. To be safe, I questioned him closely and understood that he really was one of yours and had been with you in Tishkino and knew your close circle and family.

He told me that he left the monastery on Athos of his own volition and complained about his superiors, but I stopped listening. It is because he is young. He is a deacon, loves the service and understands it, so I sent him to the abbot and he allowed him to assist in the service. He has a pleasant voice, but weak. He has a long way to go before he will compare with a real deep bass who can boom out from the pulpit. He does, however, conduct the service competently and meaningfully, Misha my friend, and in these times that is a considerable recommendation. He has a pleasant appearance and looks young, although it seems he is almost forty. Of course, I remember our elder, Father Seraphim, at the same age, before his first imprisonment. He was a country priest but even then his true spiritual stature was evident. This thought came into my head and I was taken aback yet again by how little the years matter. He at 30 was wise and radiant, while others even at 90 lack substance and are lightweight and capable only of making a loud noise.

I have to admit, Father, for me you are still that little Misha who was passed from hand to hand in our catacomb while the service was being conducted. How angelically your mother, Elena, sang, may God rest her soul! Age is not on my side except that it resigns me to my illnesses, and what sort of an illness is a hernia anyway? It brings neither death nor even suffering. It is mere nonsense and bother. How good it is to be thoroughly ill before dying, to be purified and prepared. Otherwise, we may be taken in an instant, without repentance, without absolution of our sins.

You no doubt have all the necessary information about Teresa, whom you sent to me. At first I didn’t take to her, but having now learned more about her circumstances I feel great pity for her. I have not questioned her but it seems to me that she is muddled. Do you see, my friend, even advancing age is not putting me to rights: just as when I was young I was headstrong, so I remain into old age. I always decided for myself whom to love, whom to hate, and now in my dotage I have yet to acquire an even-tempered, benign attitude toward all. To this day I love my own choice and defend it.

I have finished those two icons, the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth and the small John the Baptist. It is all very much ours, local, what we see from our window here. Father Nicodemus gave me his blessing to paint them. I ask you, Father, to bless my painting of a big icon. I have long wanted to paint the Akathist. I have a certain audacious idea, a little artistic. How prettily I imagine it, not quite according to the canon. Will you give me your blessing?

When I was young, Misha, I was very vain and remain so to this day. You wrote that my icons gladden you, that they open windows to the heavenly world, as Father Pavel Florensky said. I am so glad and happy.

Spring is only just beginning, a wonderful time. The apple trees and acacias are blooming and I delight in one branch which peeps in my window. I am on the ground floor now. Because of my frailty I have been moved down from the second, nearer to the earth, which is fine. My little window looks out at the cemetery, and soon from the cemetery I will look at my little window. The last two monastic graves are a mother and daughter. A year ago a crazy Arab stabbed them right in their cell. The two dear graves are side by side. It is a domestic, family scene. The mother was as thick as two planks but had a good heart. Her daughter was brighter but less sincere. I have asked for a place to be reserved beside them for me.

I kiss you, Misha, my dear godson. I remember you always and do not you forget me in your prayers. You are blessed by God.

Give my love to Ninochka and the little ones.

Mother Ioanna

37. June 1982, Tishkino Village

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Dear Mother Ioanna,

Your letter awoke childhood memories from long ago, for I, too, remember resting in your arms, and in those of Marfinka and Maya Kuzminichna, and how the elder spoiled me. It was given to us to witness amazing times and amazing people. I do not weary of giving thanks for all of you, living and departed, into communion with whom the Church brought me from such an early age. In this respect you are richer even than I. How many truly saintly people you knew and what great spiritual accomplishments attended your generation. The present persecutions bear no comparison with those which fell to your lot. Two weeks ago I went after Easter to Zagorsk and walked toward Marfinka’s house. There is a new building there now, a five-story block. My heart sank, for the elder was buried in the cellar of that little house. In those times all this was frightening and amazing, both the fact that he hid from those searching for him for eight years, and that nobody denounced him, and that he celebrated the liturgy in secret in the cellar, and that the people gathered with him in the night as in times long ago, his disciples, mostly old ladies, but they also brought their children with them.

From the age of seven I assisted at his services and never since have I had the feeling of such perfect mindfulness as by the side of Father Seraphim. Of course, all those priests who did not accept the Soviet regime, who went at that time against the will of the weakened Church, proved spiritually stronger than those who accepted the regime, and they were personally saints, but now when so many years have passed, and after Father Seraphim’s will in which he commanded his spiritual children to rejoin the Church and cease that small schism, only now do I begin to understand how difficult that decision was for him. In that will was his repentance before the Church. All of us who remember him well understand the difference between the authority of the state, the authority of the Church, and the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, in which alone we place our faith and in which we seek our refuge.

I have allowed my thoughts to wander and have not said what I meant to: before Marfinka’s house was demolished, they reburied our father and again in secret. His remains were transferred to the Alexandrovsky Cemetery, next to the cathedral, where Father S. was the abbot, whom you knew well. The cemetery has long been closed, and it was in one of the sacred graves they placed him, and Father S. conducted the funeral service in the night. He, too, was one of the righteous, a radiant man.

Thank you for Teresa. She is a restive soul, suffering, as you have seen for yourself. As regards your headstrong intuition, I trust it. Efim, her life’s companion, is a very gifted man, but has yet to find his right place. Possibly a publishing house of religious literature would be a good job for him. I, for my part, have written them a letter of recommendation, but I do not know how much weight my word carries.

Your news of Fyodor Krivtsov surprised me greatly. I knew Fyodor ten years or so ago. He is an original person, a seeker after truth. When we came together he had already been a Buddhist but had not found truth with the Buddha. He converted to Orthodoxy fervently and passionately, aspiring to be a monk. I saw him often for two years, and he even moved in with us in Tishkino, but then seduced a girl here and fled. He vanished. I heard he was living as a novice in one of the monasteries in Mordovia, almost as a hermit, so your advice that he had arrived from Mount Athos is complete news to me. We did not become close, you know, I always am a little nervous of people who are too fervent in their faith, and he burned with the fire of the neophyte. I also remember that he was from a Communist Party family. His father was even supposedly some petty Party boss. His parents broke off relations with him and the two sides cursed each other. I had no idea he had made it all the way to Mount Athos. It would be very interesting to contact him again. Please send him my good wishes.

I have one other pleasant piece of news, but it is at the same time a little worrying. Nina is expecting a child. She is in the sixth month and her blood pressure is consistently very high. She has been in the hospital for two weeks. The doctors told her to abort the child, considering that the pregnancy puts her life in danger. She refused and now we are entirely trusting in the Lord. She lies in bed almost never getting up. The girls are behaving with great concern, even selflessly, although they are really quite little. Aunt Pasha is still living with us, doing a lot in the way of housekeeping, but she is already very aged and of course it is hard for her. Those are our circumstances, dear Mother.

I will stop writing. It is past one already and I have to get up at 4:30. My perpetual disorganization—I have no time to do anything. I keep meaning to write you a long and detailed letter, but time, time … I don’t have enough. I send you my love. I send my blessing for the work you have told me about. I look forward to receiving photographs, and I am sending you photographs of Katya and Vera.

Your loving

Mikhail

38. January 1983, Jerusalem

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Dear Father Mikhail,

I am very glad that Mother has given me your address and told me to write to tell you what I have been up to all this time. It’s a long story, of course, but I will try to keep it short. How many years have passed since I left Moscow? I went first to Mordovia and was a novice there for two years, then went to Valaam Monastery in the North, and from there God helped me make my way to Mount Athos itself. In Thessaloniki I was given a diamontirion, a permit for Athos. There was a Russian consulate there. They supported me. They were instructed not to obstruct me. There are few Russians on Mount Athos now, mainly Bulgarians, Serbs, and Romanians. Greeks, needless to say. There is a lot of Russian territory there, but little in the way of a Russian population. It made no difference to me then, Russians or Greeks. I did not understand, then began to understand that politics is one thing but spiritual works are another, and politics has nothing to do with us.

At the very beginning I found myself in the Karulya hermitage, on the slope of the mountain with the arsanas dock below. People walked with mules along the path up and down, dragging sacks uphill with food and greens. The fishermen sometimes leave fish. I went to Elder Paisius. He asked what I had come for. I said I wanted to live on Mount Athos. He said, “Are you a tourist?” “No, it’s just my visa is a tourist visa,” I told him honestly. He said to me, “We don’t have tourists here, and people do not live here, they save their souls. Are you a monk?” Of course, I was only a novice, not a monk. Perhaps the reason I went all the way to Mount Athos was because I could not make up my mind, but I said nothing, and he said to me, “If somebody has even one percent of doubt, if something is holding them in the world, that percentage will be decisive.” Then he added, “You may stay.”

So I stayed. My work was demanding but very simple. I made incense. The resin of the Cedar of Lebanon is imported to Greece, only not from Lebanon but from Ethiopia. It is brought to Athos and boiled. It is hard work milling this resin. It is not a manual mill but a kind of little cement mixer. Then you add the aromatics, the holy water or anfo oil, and mix everything into a dough. You add a little magnesium, like flour. Then with a rolling pin you roll out the dough into a thick pancake and with a two-handled knife cut it into squares. When the squares have dried the incense is ready. Making it damages your health. We wore breathing masks and gloves. We delivered it to the Panteleimon Monastery. I served three years like that, living not in the monastery but in a cell. There are a lot of cells around the monastery, some hewn out of the mountain, some built of stone. One had been abandoned since the last century and I was allowed to move in there, but rarely allowed to see the elder. I saw him mostly at the services. Occasionally, though, he would call me, tell me something or give me a present. I went to him twice and asked to become a monk, but he kept saying, “One percent!”

My last two years I was serving the elder. He had an omologion for the cell, a kind of lease. The cell belongs to the monastery and the elder is allowed to live there. When he dies he passes it on to someone else, usually his disciple. It is the elder himself who decides who is to live there after him, and mine told me, “You will not live here.” He registered the name of a monk from Novocherkassk in the omologion. That’s when I left.

On Athos the lady in charge is none other than the Mother of God. Whoever she accepts lives there, and anyone she does not accept leaves. She put up with me for five years. Nobody is ever expelled from Athos. Anybody who takes to the life can live there.

And there were all sorts living there! I should mention the Greek zealots, fanatics. They have proliferated new synods. There are “old-stylers” who live by the old calendar and do not accept the new-style calendar. Sometimes fights break out between them. From one cell to another they send each other anathemas, and the Mother of God puts up with them. Me, however, she did not accept.

I can only say, it did not work out. I miss Athos to this day. For the present I am in Jerusalem but can make no sense of the place. Everything is so mixed up!

Father, how happy I was with you in Tishkino. Whatever you said I accepted, but here it is impossible to understand. So many churches, so many denominations, but where is true Orthodoxy? I am indescribably disturbed at present. The Russians have just as many schisms as the Greeks.

I attend a variety of places, but go mainly to the Greeks. On Athos I didn’t completely master Greek but I can understand and read it. I move from one place to another. My soul is in turmoil and cannot find its home but I cannot go back to Russia. I shall stay here, in the Holy Land. Perhaps I shall find some quiet monastic house, an elder. Joseph the Hesychast was on Mount Athos. He died only quite recently, in 1957. Perhaps here is where I shall find someone to attach myself to. I shall soon be over 40 years old but still have no decisiveness. I cannot cut myself off from the world. This year I had the idea of marrying a Greek woman, a good woman, a widow in Saloniki, but as things turned out I nearly came to a bad end.

Father Mikhail, I remember the advice you gave me. “Do not become a monk, do not go from one monastery to another. Work for the Church in accordance with your gifts.” Alas, my pride turned my head. I thought, How come you became a priest and all I am good for is to sweep the church courtyard? But if I had then, as you advised, married Vera Stepashina everything would have worked out. How is Vera? I imagine she is married and has a dozen children. This letter has so disturbed my soul. I have recalled my life in Tishkino, my brother coming from Nalchik and getting drunk, and having to be taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. My respects to Mother Nina. I will write again, with your blessing.

With brotherly love from the slave of God.

Fyodor Krivtsov.

That is the name I have taken now. I did not become a hermit and am no longer a novice. I am still seeking the truth. Here in the Holy Land there are so many holy places of every description, but still I cannot find The Truth.

39. 1982, Kfar Saba

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Dear Valentina,

How pleasant it is for me, although a little awkward, to address you by your Christian name, but this familiar form, of course, accords with a special intimacy which I have never enjoyed with anybody before. Your last letter I have learned almost by heart, so important and exact do the thoughts you expressed seem to me. Especially your bitterly true words about fidelity and the impossibility of human loyalty. I know the Gospels almost by heart, but never had it occurred to me that even St. Peter renounced Christ three times, and that this signals the impossibility of an ordinary person remaining loyal. But after all, if you look from the height on which our Savior is situated, perhaps the difference is not so great between the fear which prompted Peter to renounce him and the envy which provoked Judas into betraying him. It is a bitter thought.

I told Efim about your letter, and he took it very seriously. He gave me a whole lecture. You probably know all this, but I will briefly paraphrase what he said. It seemed very important to me. Jews have a prayer called “Kol Nidrei”, which frees them from vows and oaths which a person has given to God. Once a year the service is held on the most important Jewish festival, the Day of Atonement. It is on this day that repentance and the absolution of sins are accomplished. After the prayer has been recited three times, all these vows are annulled. It embodies a very profound insight into human nature and a gracious attitude toward human weakness. I would go so far as to say that this Kol Nidrei embodies the grace of God.

Efim told me many very interesting historical details. For example, the Kol Nidrei prayer was seen for many centuries as grounds for considering Jews untrustworthy, since people who could so easily repudiate their vows could hardly be reliable partners in business. I thought, however, about the great wisdom and understanding of human psychology of the teachers who introduced this prayer into their religion. Efim is so erudite that any question you ask provides the topic for an absorbing lecture. I think lecturing is his true vocation. The trivial work he is doing at present is completely unsuited to his abilities and his inclinations.

We are both very dissatisfied with our strange situation. My intention of finding a congenial nunnery has evaporated. No place in the world would accept me. I can readily picture myself as Efim’s assistant, but so far he, too, has been unable to find a proper, worthwhile application for his talents. My nocturnal alarms are affecting him, too, and increasingly we spend the night in a shared vigil.

Last week I was again in Haifa visiting Brother Daniel. There is an amazingly joyful spirit around him. It seems to me that there really is something of the first years of Christianity in his community.

I have got so carried away that I have forgotten to thank you for sending me your new translation. I have to admit that so far I have read only your Introduction, and it is very meaningful. Your thoughts about the fragility of the word, its mortality, its mutability are very profound. Lately I have been increasingly reading not the Synoptics but St. John and, as always, the Acts and Psalms.

Please pass on thanks from Efim and me to Father Mikhail. Our meeting with him before we emigrated was very helpful. His strict godmother, the nun Ioanna, who at first received me with great suspicion, has now relented and gave me the address of the publishing house. Efim has been in touch with Ir. Al. and they are currently discussing how he might be useful to them. Needless to say, I am quite certain they will be making a big mistake if they do not offer him a job, but how can you explain to people what is in their own best interest?

Were you acquainted with this Mother Ioanna before, in Russia? She has been living here for many years in a convent on a special basis because she paints icons. I don’t know much about icon painting, but there is something quite enchanting about it as an occupation. She has a little table or easel, I don’t know what it is called, pots with ground-up paints, and everything is so pleasing. She has almost finished one icon of Peter on the Waters. It took my breath away when I saw it. It really seems to be about me. The water is engulfing me but I cannot see the Master’s hand. My move to Orthodoxy was so rapid, and partly involuntary, but now I am gradually understanding it and see its immense warmth, through iconography also.

Efim says there are great riches to be found in the Orthodox service, but I do not find it easy to access. In the Moscow Mission we are not welcomed, the Church Abroad are friendlier, but it is up to Efim to decide about that. And also Him above. I have to make the bitter admission that I do not feel I belong anywhere. I am neither a Catholic nor an Orthodox. I am in some ill-defined place which is completely unfamiliar.

My love to you, dear Valentina. I ask to be remembered in your prayers.

Always thinking of you,

Teresa

40. 1982, Haifa

C

ONVERSATION

B

ETWEEN

D

ANIEL AND

E

FIM

D

OVITAS

DANIEL: How do they say it in Russian, we are to some degree compatriots: zemeltsy? zemlyaki?

EFIM: Zemlyaki. Yes, Lithuania and Poland are close. Do you miss Poland?

DANIEL: I love Poland, but I do not miss it. How about you?

EFIM: What I miss most here is Orthodoxy. I do not find it here, but this is where I belong.

DANIEL: You are a Jew. What is Orthodoxy to you?

EFIM: I have spent ten years in the Church. I love Orthodoxy. I am a priest. It is the Church that does not want me.

DANIEL: Here there are a score of Orthodox churches and an equal number of Catholic. There are a hundred Protestant. You can choose. It’s a big bazaar.

EFIM: I did not know what awaited me here. Real Orthodoxy is what I am seeking!

DANIEL: Look, authentic what are you seeking? Why are you not looking for Christ? He is here, in this land! Why should we seek him in church doctrines which appeared one thousand years after His death? Look for Him here! Look for Him in the Gospels.

EFIM: That is true, but I have found Him deep within Orthodoxy, in the church service which I so love. I meet Him in the liturgy.

DANIEL: You are right. You are right. Forgive my presumption. This is probably my Achilles heel. The trouble is that I have spent half my life among people seeking the Lord in books and rituals which they themselves thought up. In fact, you can meet Him anywhere, in Orthodoxy, in the liturgy, on a river bank, in a hospital, or in a cowshed. The closest place to find Him, though, is in your soul.

EFIM: Yes, yes, Father Daniel, of course. Spiritual life is simply a search for the Lord in the depths of one’s soul.

DANIEL: Oh dear, oh dear! Spiritual life is the very thing that makes me nervous. This spiritual life is what, in my experience, more often than not becomes an end in itself, as an exercise. How many small people I have met with big spiritual lives, and almost always it transpires that for them spiritual life is no more than digging around in themselves at a very superficial level. And everybody is looking for a spiritual mentor!

EFIM: Yes, that really is a problem. No matter whether spiritual life is superficial or profound, a father confessor is essential. Since I left Vilnius I have lacked a confessor to talk to, and I feel that loss. A confessor is indispensable.

DANIEL: Fine, fine … Forgive me, my premise is always that we need only one Master, so tell me, what is a father confessor?

EFIM: What? Someone who guides the spiritual life, so that what you mentioned doesn’t come about: digging around in yourself, introspection.

DANIEL: Are you sure you can tell where spiritual life ends and practical life begins?

EFIM: No.

DANIEL: Good, then tell me what is troubling you more than anything else? What is your greatest concern?

EFIM: Teresa.

DANIEL: Your wife?

EFIM: We have a spiritual union.

DANIEL: I have always thought that any marriage is a spiritual union.

EFIM: We live as brother and sister.

DANIEL: Together? You live together as brother and sister? What are you, saints?

EFIM: No. Only our temptations are like those of the saints. For years Teresa has been suffering from terrible visitations, but I cannot talk to you about that. For the past year I have felt this dreadful presence myself.

DANIEL: Enough, enough! Don’t tell me anything about it! I am not a father confessor! My brother always says I am an ordinary social worker, only unpaid. So, you are married, you live in the same apartment, and you do not sleep in the same bed?

EFIM: We decided on that from the outset. Teresa was expelled from a convent. She was in despair. I, meanwhile, could not be taken on by a monastery or ordained because I was not married. That was the quandary we faced. We got married so I could get ordained.

DANIEL: Then you have a fictitious marriage! What do you need such complications for? Go and sleep with your wife! How old are you?

EFIM: Forty-one.

DANIEL: And Teresa?

EFIM: Forty-one.

DANIEL: Well, get a move on! Women pass the age of childbearing when they get older. Go and have children and you won’t have any spiritual problems.

EFIM: I do not understand. You, a monk, are saying such things to me?

DANIEL: Well, what of the fact that I’m a monk? It’s my affair that I’m a monk. Life was given to me, and I vowed to give mine. That’s all. But you are a Jew, and the Jews have never known monasticism. Even in the Essenes’ community there were married people, they were not all unmarried. The Syrians and Greeks dreamed up monasticism. They invented all sorts of things which have no relevance to us. Go to your wife. You need a father confessor? You need somebody to take decisions for you? Right. I’ll do it! Go and sleep with your wife …

41. 1983, Kfar Saba

L

ETTER FROM

T

ERESA TO

V

ALENTINA

F

ERDINANDOVNA

Dear Valentina,

Your letters give me great succor and the last one, where you write about your trip to Lithuania, to Pater S., filled me with sadness. How much I have lost, but what a lot I have gained! I cannot say that my present life is worse or better than my past life, but the changes are so profound that there is no comparing them. At last a number of like thinkers have appeared around us among the parishioners of Brother Daniel. Of course it is not what we were used to at home. Here everything is far more diverse, including the people. They come from different countries and towns, and even speak Russian in different ways.

Efim is still lonely, but when there are the two of us, loneliness is not so hard. We are both suffering from the disorder in the Church. We are not fully satisfied with what we have now. Efim goes to the Russian Church Abroad. His relations with the ‘red’ Church have not worked out at all. Sometimes we visit the Catholics, the highly individual parish of Father Daniel who celebrates the Catholic Mass in Hebrew. I have made some progress in Hebrew now, I can talk a little. There is, however, no one I can talk to about the most important and private things. It is only with you that I can discuss my personal life.

Dear Valentina, you were married for 20 years and took vows after the death of your husband. That is the best thing a widow can do. We have a different experience, but you will understand me better than anybody else because you know both states: that of a married woman and that of a nun. Although, of course, covert monasticism, monasticism in the world, has its peculiarities, many who have been chastened by experience consider it the more difficult path. Your life seems to me an example of womanly service: getting married, being a faithful wife, giving birth to a child, becoming a widow, and taking vows.

Your translations too of the Gospel texts into modern Russian, revealing new meanings and nuances, which you undertake solely at the command of your heart, is not this true monastic service? As regards to myself, I see nothing in my time in the convent beyond a feat of discipline. The spiritual growth which is the whole purpose of monasticism did not occur. I venture even to think that my spiritual life has become richer since I left, and the sufferings associated with that have been a separate school of learning.

There are some intimate matters, dear Valentina, which I would probably never be able to talk about aloud, but for some reason putting them in writing is simpler. My marriage to Efim, which we intended to be spiritual, has not remained so and has gained new meaning. Of course, we could never have taken this decision independently. We are both excessively shy people for such an audacious decision, but we were helped by Brother Daniel. No one could suspect him of being shy! He fought in the war, worked among the Germans, and performed acts of heroism.

Our marital life, blessed by Daniel, is blighted by one obstacle. Perhaps it is the fear and revulsion at physical relations between man and woman which has developed since my childhood that is the cause, but my gate is firmly barred and our intimacy is incomplete. That depresses me greatly, because these are the most critical years, and if we cannot fulfil the main function of marriage and have a child, would it not have been better for us to have remained in our previous state?

Efim comforts me, he is endlessly tender, does not let me out of his arms, and all my sufferings of many years associated with visits of the Enemy have departed.

At times I am downcast by thoughts about my renegacy. I have violated my vows and only the thought of a posterity which could justify that violation gives me strength.

As always, I ask for your prayers, but perhaps you will also be able to give me some practical advice. My poor husband, who beats against my impenetrable, in every sense, virginity, implores me not to be upset and tells me that he is entirely happy, but I am afraid he is saying that only out of compassion. I beg forgiveness for burdening you with my tormenting problems. I wanted to write to you long ago but it is very difficult, and there is no other person in the world to whom I could turn about this.

Your loving

Teresa

42. 1983, Moscow

L

ETTER FROM

V

ALENTINA

F

ERDINANDOVNA TO

T

ERESA

My dear girl,

We have been so close to each other these last years that the feeling arises of a complete and rich friendship and not only of a correspondence. Your last letter greatly disturbed me. Your trust in my diversified experience of life, dear Teresa, is entirely misplaced. My marriage to Arkady Aristarkhovich was not happy, and I fear that the main experience I derived from my matrimonial state was that of enduring. My parents did not like Arkady and did not give me their blessing, but I insisted, and my difficult marriage I subsequently associated with that circumstance. I was passionately in love, blind and deaf to everything. He really was a brilliant man, much older than me, which I found particularly attractive. Already in our first year, when I was pregnant with Kirill, Arkady acquired a mistress, and that shocked me to the core. We lived 20 years together and I was compelled to live in accordance with his ideas about marriage. He had complete sexual freedom, something which I never contemplated. The most bitter thing in my life was that Kirill, as he grew up, inclined to his father’s logic and scolded me for my mute subservience. There was a suggestion of disregard, if not of contempt.

The last year of Arkady Aristarkhovich’s life, when he was seriously ill, his girlfriend came into our house constantly and literally tore the bedpan out of my hands, and that, too, I had to accept meekly. Even at the funeral, by the coffin, this Marianna Nikolaevna stood next to me dressed in deep mourning. I am writing all this so that you should understand, Teresa, that my marriage was very difficult, agonizing, although I preserved it to the very end and never gave Arkady Aristarkhovich a divorce. I did not allow our family to fall apart. For many years that was what he asked me for.

My parents are long dead, and it would seem a matter of no account that I married without their blessing. Now, however, I can say that only in monasticism have I found my vocation. My voluntary nocturnal labors, little different from slavery (you know how hard I find them), give great satisfaction. They are the only thing that I do for the Lord, and this is the one thing that gives me joy.

Life with my son’s family is not easy, but in quite a different way from life with Arkady. Our apartment has long been too small. When the granddaughters were born, I moved into a small room, but now that they have married and are themselves having children, even this small room has become a luxury. Kirill is completely remote from me and I was never close to his wife.

I am writing this so that you should understand from my experience how important it is to follow your destiny. Perhaps if I had not disobeyed my parents, had not flung myself into the agonizing complications of family life, I would have gone into a convent when I was young and my life would have been more blessed.

I am saying all this so that you should ask whether there is some sign in your strange situation, and ask what it might be. Do you really not have near by any experienced guide who could help you resolve this agonizing situation? Spiritual and material things are very closely intertwined in our life, they do not exist separately.

I wondered for a long time how I could help you and finally talked to an old friend. She is a gynecologist and I told her, without of course naming names, about your problem from a medical point of view. She said the following: what is happening to you is not such an unusual disorder, it is called vaginismus, and it usually affects women who have experienced some sexual trauma in childhood or youth. There can be another explanation, a thickening of the hymen, which needs to be removed surgically. Another, very rare, cause of this disorder is a tumor. In all her 40 years of practice she has met only one case of that. She listened to me very attentively but said that from this distance she cannot help. When she heard that you live abroad she assured me that you need a good sexologist. Here that is an unusual profession, but abroad there are unquestionably such services.

She said that it would do no harm at all events to take an anti-spasmodic (something along the lines of No-spa) and a gentle sedative. You just need to find out what these drugs are called in your dispensaries.

Sweet Teresa, I retrace my steps back to the most important thing: no matter how your life has turned out, you must not despair. Of course the fact that you have broken your vows initially almost shocked me, but then I recognized that your attempt to live a secular life may not signify capitulation but a new and fruitful period. May God grant that your life works out and may he send you posterity, which will be the meaning and justification of everything.

Have courage, Teresa. I send you my most ardent prayers.

Yours,

Valentina

43. 1984, Haifa

L

ETTER FROM

H

ILDA TO HER MOTHER

Dear Mother,

Now then, why have you still not come to visit us? Last week Daniel took a German group to Sinai and I went, too. The whole time I was thinking what a pity it was that you were not with us. From the very outset it was a complete delight, a real holiday! Everything went so well. First with the minibus, because it didn’t break down. Usually something fails on the journey. Daniel did not get lost even once. Everywhere we came across people who knew him, and we were not delayed at the border when our documents were being checked. Even the customs officers were obliging!

And Daniel really is the best guide to Israel in the world. How admirably he showed us everything and explained it to us! He talked for four days and we looked to the right and the left. It was a very powerful experience, as if in those four days I experienced all of history, from the creation of the world to this night. Our country is very small (I forgot to tell you that last month I received Israeli citizenship, which is why I now say “our”). But can you picture how everything is squeezed into this strip of land from Sinai to Kinneret? The well beside which Abraham received the mysterious strangers; Jacob’s well; the place where Jacob wrestled all night with his unseen adversary; the well into which Joseph’s brothers threw him, and then pulled him out and sold him to merchants; and the burning bush out of which a voice spoke to Moses.

And then there was Sinai itself, which we went up at night and then watched the dawn and descended the mountain by the very path Moses came down with the tablets; and there is so much more which everybody knows from Scripture but when you read it, it seems abstract history, legends, myths, and when you get into a minibus and travel around all these places in a matter of hours, you realize it is not history but geography. This happened here, that happened there, and everything becomes true. Do you know where that feeling comes from? Because there are actual witnesses here, mountains, wadis, caves. Daniel showed us the cave where young David hid with his reed pipe from crazed King Saul. Saul came in and squatted down to relieve himself. David crept up and cut off the corner of his cloak and then showed him. See, you were defenseless, I could have killed you but I did not, so I am not your enemy. And this cave is a witness, and the plants and the animals which to this day live there just as they did then are also witnesses. At every such place we prayed, and everything was filled with such profound meaning that there is no describing it. In fact, everything that occurs here is very difficult to convey in words. They are inadequate and very approximate.

If you had stood next to me when Daniel was celebrating the Mass almost at the top of Mount Sinai! The sun was rising and what I wanted most was to die right then, because if I live a long time everything will be eroded, washed away, sullied by all sorts of rubbish, but at that moment there was such clarity and union with the world that it is difficult to describe. At all events, it had nothing to do with faith, because faith presupposes the existence of something which cannot be seen, and you make an effort to give that unseen and unfelt thing pride of place, and you repudiate seen things in favor of unseen things. But here there is an end to all faith because no effort is needed. You just stand and are happy and filled to the brim not with faith but with certainty. Forgive me, for God’s sake, for this torrent of words, but I am writing to you in order not to burst. Perhaps I won’t even send this letter. I’ll reread it in the morning before deciding!

Mama, this year I will come and spend my holiday with you, but next year you really must promise to come here. Give me your word! I know, I have guessed long ago why you do not want to come. But do you know, half the Germans who were in the group are the children of those who fought in the war, children of SS men and all that, and you and I are not the only descendants of people for whom it is difficult to pray. Mama, I know perfectly well that you do not like Jews and are ashamed of it and still cannot like them. Please come. It will not be I or Daniel but the land here itself that will tell you more than you knew before, both about love and about history, and we will drive around Kinneret with you and then go up to Tsfat and you will see down below how small the Sea of Galilee is, like an elongated drop of water, and around it are the villages—Kfar Nahum, that is, Capernaum, Magdala, Cana, Gergesa—and you will take in at one glance all the Bible’s history. It would be good if you could come in the spring when everything is green, covered in wild flowers, poppies, wild irises, and wild mustard.

But now I must not forget the most amazing thing about our trip. Believe it or not, we were already returning home and had passed the turn to Zikhron Yaakov, which is not far from Haifa at all. Daniel suddenly braked, turned the bus, and, without saying a word, took us to that town. Pretty cottages, some five-story blocks in which repatriates live. Daniel stopped at a small round plaza beside a café and said, “The perfect time for a cup of coffee! I’ll just leave you for half an hour.”

Off he went, somehow vanishing between the identical cottages. We sat and waited for him. Half an hour later he hadn’t come back. He likes to say that he and I are very punctual people, but I in a German way and he in a Jewish way. To my question as to what the difference is, he replies, “A German comes on time, and a Jew when necessary!”

Anyway, he came back not half an hour but an hour later looking very pleased with himself. The whole way home he said nothing, although by this time he had lost his voice anyway and could only whisper. We reached Haifa, took everybody back to their lodgings, and returned to the community house. I put the kettle on and Daniel sat down and told me. “Listen, Hilda. What a day it’s been. It must be five years ago that I received a letter from an old Jewish woman saying she wanted to be baptized. Her son had had an operation and his heart had stopped. The old lady was convinced that Jesus had saved her son because her Russian daughter-in-law, Vera, had prayed so fervently she had practically blown the roof off. I went to see her again. There was a whole district full of Russian Jews. They were all spying on each other, and the moment anything wasn’t quite right they were writing denunciations. Well, not all of them, of course, but there are people like that. In this sense, whether they are Soviet or Polish all Communists are the same. They keep a close watch to make sure nobody else is getting more than them. Anyway, daughter-in-law Vera, because all the neighbors knew she was Christian, had a certain amount of trouble. The old lady, although she believed, was scared to death of the neighbors. ‘Can you baptize me so that not a living soul should know?’

“She was a tiny little old woman, barely larger than a cat, but glowing. She was bent double and could barely move her legs, but she had cooked something for me, pies and the like.

“I looked at her and asked, ‘Well, why have you taken it into your head to get christened, Olga Isaakovna?’ ‘Sonny,’ she said, ‘I’m alive and I’m so grateful, so grateful to Christ. I had a dream about him and he said, “Come, come to me!” He called me, and it was such fun, like when I was a girl! Perhaps I’ve gone back to my childhood. But when he said “Come to me,” what else could he have meant? I decided it could only mean being christened. But in secret! Otherwise the neighbors will all spread it around and my son will lose his job.’

“The old lady was very frail, but so light and joyful! A cheery old lady like that would be loved by any god: baking pies, loving her daughter-in-law.

“I said, ‘Fine, I will baptize you. Meanwhile, prepare yourself, read the Gospels with your daughter-in-law, rejoice and thank God, and before you die I will christen you. Not now, because you may change your mind and start being upset at being unfaithful to Abraham!’

“I left my telephone number and said that if she became seriously ill her daughter-in-law should phone me and I would come.

“I forgot all about the old lady until we were driving past that turn to Zikhron Yaakov. As we went past, it was as if someone cuffed the back of my head. I had forgotten the old lady!

“While you were drinking coffee I went to see them. The daughter-in-law is tall, broad, and as soon as she opened the door, she threw up her great arms in the air and said, ‘We’ve been trying to phone you at the monastery for three days and they said you were away. I’m so glad they got through to you. Olga Isaakovna is not at all well.’

“I didn’t bother to tell them it was an angel from heaven who’d told me about their phone calls when he thumped me on the head at the turn. Olga Isaakovna was fully conscious but barely breathing. Her little eyes were shining. She saw me and said very weakly, ‘You’re keeping me back. I have waited for you such a long time.’ The daughter-in-law was radiant. At the back stood an enormous bearded husband, David, and two sons who were also big lads. I had nothing with me, not even a crucifix. The daughter-in-law took a little cross from her neck and that was it. That was how I baptized Olga Isaakovna.

“Olga, the new Christian, died that very night. After being christened she fell asleep and died in her sleep. They phoned me in the morning and I thought, that’s a worker who came to the vineyard in the last hour.”

Daniel was thinking of the parable of the workers in the vineyard, where those who were hired first and worked from early morning till evening were paid exactly the same as the latecomers who had worked for only one hour.

Mama! Please stay well, look after your health. I want you and me to walk this land and not just look at it out of a car window. Please come to Israel! Life here is so buoyant.

Love to everybody,

Hilda

44. 1984

R

EPORT TO THE

L

ATIN

J

ERUSALEM

P

ATRIARCHATE

To Monsignor Rafail Ashkuri, Secretary to the Patriarch

From Eldar Halil (Brother Elijah)

I bring to your attention the fact that on the 16th ult. Brother D., in the course of a sightseeing excursion to Sinai with a group of theology students from Germany, on the way, by the spring in Tabgha, celebrated Mass in the open air in which he was guilty of distortions, instead of the “Symbol of Faith” reciting unauthorized prayers in Hebrew. What these were I could not discover, but in subsequent conversation at dinner, which Brother Daniel himself cooked for the group, he conducted a discussion which I did not understand since they were speaking in German. However, the assistant of Brother Daniel told me that he indicated that he did not accept the dogma of the Holy Trinity and justified his position by saying that Christ himself never spoke of the Trinity and it had been thought up by the Greeks. I asked Hilda, his assistant, for the text of the service he had conducted, calling it a Mass, and she has promised to give me that text. I will send it to you as soon as I receive it from her.

I enclose also a recording of a discussion which Father Daniel conducted in the parish house shortly before the service where the Trinity was also spoken of.

As my father’s house in Haifa is being repaired, I request a grant to carry out the repairs.

Brother Elijah

45. 1984

T

O THE

A

BBOT OF THE

S

TELLA

M

ARIS

M

ONASTERY FROM THE

S

ECRETARY OF THE

P

ATRIARCH OF

J

ERUSALEM

Reverend Father,

I request that you invite Brother Daniel Stein, a monk at your monastery, to visit me for a talk.

Monsignor Rafail Ashkuri, Secretary of the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem

TO THE PROVINCIAL OF THE CARMELITE ORDER FROM THE PATRIARCH OF JERUSALEM

Your Grace,

I request that you review the case of a member of your Order, Brother Daniel Stein. According to information in my possession, he is guilty of gross violations in the order of conducting the Mass. He turned down my request to appear for a talk, which I consider a breach of ecclesiastical discipline. However, bearing in mind the fact that Brother Daniel Stein belongs to your Order, I request that you conduct an investigation and appropriate conversation.

Patriarch of Jerusalem

46. 1984

T

O THE

H

OLY

C

ONGREGATION ON OUESTIONS OF THE

D

OCTRINE OF THE

F

AITH

TO PREFECT CARDINAL ROCKHAUS FROM THE GENERAL OF THE ORDER OF BAREFOOT CARMELITES, FATHER LAURENIS

Your Holiness,

I am regretfully obliged to inform you that within the Order entrusted to me, a certain doctrinal disagreement has occurred associated with the activities of one of our monks, Father Daniel Stein, and I have received intelligence from the Provincial of the Order in respect of sermons of the above priest which in certain matters deviate from the Church’s dogma and traditions. Among the members of our Order there are few priests working with a congregation, and Brother Daniel Stein has a parish in the city of Haifa. Thanks to his active participation a church was restored through the efforts of his parishioners where he has performed his pastoral service for 15 years.

Under the State Law of Israel, missionary activity among Jews is forbidden; nevertheless we have on more than one occasion received warnings from the Ministry of Religions that, according to information in their possession, D. Stein performs the baptism of Jews.

Back in 1980 I had a talk with him on this matter and he asserted that he had performed individual baptisms of children whose Jewish parents profess the Catholic faith and did not have the right to refuse baptism to such people. Two other cases he told me about concerned people on their deathbeds and he could not refuse to carry out his pastoral and Christian duty. In one of these cases concerning the christening of a woman from Russia, who had been asking him for this for many years, he said that he had promised to carry out her request only if she was close to death. He did so on the eve of her death. You will agree that in such a situation I cannot hold infringement of the law against him. However, a hortatory talk was conducted.

At the end of last year I received from the Provincial of the Order a new message in respect of the preaching of Father Daniel Stein. At the same time I received an official letter from the Patriarch of Jerusalem in respect of the activity of Father Daniel Stein. This time the issue was more complex since it concerned non-acknowledgement by Stein of the primacy of the See of Rome in the Catholic world and his expression of the absurd idea that primacy should be with the Church in Jerusalem. Moreover, he had in mind not the Patriarchate of Jerusalem but the Church of St. James, the brother of the Lord, which ceased to exist early in the second century.

Affirming this idea, Father Daniel Stein celebrates Masses in Hebrew. Since the Second Vatican Council official permission has been given for services in local churches to be conducted in local languages, this can evince neither condemnation nor prohibition on my part. His thoughts on polycultural Christianity also seem to me questionable, but I would prefer that you discuss these issues with Father Stein yourself.

In the course of our conversation, basing myself on confidential information received, I asked whether he omitted the Symbol of Faith when celebrating the Mass. He admitted that in recent years he had not considered it possible to recite a text some of whose postulates he does not accept. On this occasion the matter in question was one of the fundamental dogmas of the Holy Church, the Trinity. His views appear to me so heretical that I will not venture even to paraphrase them, and this is one further argument in favor of your meeting him.

Instances of divergence of the views of Father Daniel Stein from the traditions generally accepted within the Holy Church are so numerous that I have temporarily banned him from celebrating Mass and leave a final decision to your Eminence.

Those charged with administration of the Order are prepared to send Father Daniel Stein to Rome for discussions at any time deemed acceptable by your Eminence.

Wholly devoted to you in Christ,

Father Laurenis

General of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites,

47. 1984, Haifa

F

ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

D

ANIEL AND

H

ILDA

“Listen carefully and try not to interrupt! You know I was not expecting anything good to come of my trip to Rome and was ready for anything. Actually, the worst had already happened. My superiors had forbidden me to conduct services, although only temporarily, but I had had little hope of having the ban lifted. The more so since the Prefect of the Congregation on Matters of the Doctrine of the Faith, to which I was summoned, is extremely conservative. This prefect and the present Pope are a kind of balancing act who hold each other back from extremes, if I can put it that way. But the Pope is capable of emotional impulses, and I greatly admire that in him, while the Prefect is dry, emotionless, rational, and highly educated. He has a dozen degrees, speaks a dozen languages, and is very strict—at least that is how he seemed to me, and how he looked, too. He was slightly too rosy for an official, but that is in passing.

“I flew to Rome three days before the visit. It was not the first time I had been there. I know it fairly well, and do not like the city despite its charm. This time, too, as I walked around it my soul said no and no again to the city. I am a rural person and the grandeur of Rome repels me. It always has. It is some kind of madness that everybody wants to live in cities, and Rome is the city par excellence. It is redolent of the cruelty and grandeur of empire. Even the last historical Rome, the Rome of Mussolini, expresses the same thing—the power of force over the weak individual. In the Vatican you feel that even more strongly.

“I spent the whole day before the audience walking through the Rome of the catacombs. That is quite a different matter, a small, secret, hidden world trying not to be noticed by the urban power and create some kind of independent existence. Nobody ever manages that, although it is a very touching desire. Great faith, simplicity, and boldness are to be found in that reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power. I came out of the catacombs completely calm and stopped worrying about my meeting the next day.

“I suddenly realized I was going to profess my faith and was prepared to say everything I think, concealing and keeping quiet about nothing. After that, come what may. Of course, I knew my judge was not like Pontius Pilate because he would never ask the rhetorical question, ‘What is Truth?’ He already knows for a fact exactly what it is.

“I had seen the Prefect before, the first time at a meeting with priests from Eastern Europe, and another couple of times, but not so close. He is tall. I’m sure you know, Hilda, that of all tall people you are the only one who does not disconcert me. Very tall and very short people belong to different species. Enough. Altogether, I feel more at home with people who are not tall, present company excepted, of course.

“He immediately told me he had read about me, knew about my past in the war and considered that priests like me who had experienced the war were particularly valuable to the Church. At that I thought that probably no sense would come out of our conversation. I did not bother to talk about the real meaning of all experiences of war. I thought he did not know how war brutalizes, distorts, and destroys a person, but he is a very subtle conversationalist, and immediately detected my reaction, changing the subject:

“‘You conduct services in Hebrew?”

“I explained the peculiarities of the Christians in my community to him, for whom Hebrew is often the only common language. Among my parishioners there is a couple, she is Dutch and he Spanish, who talk Hebrew between themselves. There are not a few such people.

“I used to conduct the service in Polish, but now a new generation has grown up and hardly any of the children of Polish Catholics speak it. Hebrew is their mother tongue. In addition, there are baptized Jews who have immigrated from other countries.

“He asked about translations and I told him that a number of translations already exist. Some we have done ourselves, but the Psalms, for example, we take from Jewish sources.

“I was well aware that he had a denunciation which no doubt informed him that I do not recite the Creed. What else was written there, I could only guess.

“The Prefect suddenly took a step in my direction and said that Christianity is multicultural, that the kernel, the heart should be common to all, but the shell can be different for different peoples. A Latin American is quite unlike a Pole or an Irishman.

“I was terribly pleased. I had never imagined I would find an ally in him. I told him about my meeting with a certain African bishop who told me bitterly that he had studied in Greece, served in Rome, assimilated the European form of Christianity, but could not require his African parishioners to become Europeans.

“‘Our traditions are more ancient, and the African Church is extremely old, and my people dance and sing in church like King David, and when I am told this is impious, I can only reply, We are not Greeks or Irishmen!’ That is what he told me, and I replied that I, too, could not see why Africans should have their service in Greek or Latin in order to understand what a rabbi from Nazareth had said!

“‘Nevertheless, our Savior was not only a rabbi from Nazareth!’ the Prefect commented.

“‘Yes, not only that. For me, as for the Apostle Paul, he is the second Adam, our Lord, the Redeemer, the Savior! Everything you believe I also believe, but in all the Gospels he is called “Rabbi.” That is what he is called by his disciples, and by the people. Do not take that “Rabbi” away from me because that, too, is Christ! I want to ask him about things that matter to me in Hebrew, in his own language!’

“You see, Hilda, I thought, yes he is right. Priests who have been through the war are a bit different. For example, I am not afraid to say what I think. If he prevents me from conducting services, I will celebrate alone in a cave. Here, in Rome, there existed a great Jewish church in the caves.

“I said, ‘I cannot recite the Creed because it is full of Greek concepts. These are Greek words, Greek poetry, metaphors which are alien to me. I do not understand what the Greeks say about the Trinity! An equilateral triangle, one Greek explained to me, has all its sides equal, and if “filioque” is not used correctly the triangle will not be equilateral. Call me what you like, a Nestorian, a heretic, but until the fourth century nobody spoke of the Trinity. There is not a single word about it in the Gospels! It was thought up by the Greeks because they are interested in philosophical structures and not the One God, and that is because they were polytheists! I suppose we should be grateful they did not set up three gods, but only three persons! What persons? What is a “person”?’

“He frowned and said, ‘St. Augustine wrote for us …’

“I interrupted. ‘I very much like midrashes, parables, and there is one parable about Augustine which I like far more than all his fifteen volumes about the Holy Trinity. According to legend, when Augustine was walking by the seashore, contemplating the mystery of the Holy Trinity, he saw a boy who had dug a hole in the sand and was filling it with water which he was scooping with a shell from the sea. St. Augustine asked him why he was doing that. The boy replied, “I want to bail all the sea into this hole!” Augustine smiled and said that was impossible, to which the boy replied, “Well, why are you trying to bail all the inexhaustible mystery of the Lord with your intellect?” The boy immediately disappeared, but that did not stop Augustine from writing all those fifteen volumes.’

“You know Hilda, I do try to keep my mouth shut, but that got me going! How can they go on sounding off about this? With all this clever chatter they cast doubt on the ineffability of the Creator. They already know there are three persons. The structure of electricity is something nobody knows, but the structure of God is something that they know! The Jews also have speculators of this kind, the Kabbalah goes in for it, but that is of no interest to me. The Lord says, ‘Take up your cross and follow me!’ and man replies, ‘Yes!’ That I understand.

“‘Prefect, you have just said that the nucleus, the kernel must be common to all, and this kernel of our faith is Christ himself. He is the necessary and sufficient factor. I see in him the Son of God, our Savior and our Master, but I do not want to see in him one side of a theological triangle. If anybody wants a triangle, let them worship a triangle. We do not know that much about him, but nobody doubts that he was a Jewish teacher. Allow us to keep him as a teacher!’

“You know, Hilda, I was of course talking too loudly, but I could see he was smiling. He said, ‘How many parishioners do you have?’ ‘Fifty or sixty. Maybe one hundred …’ He nodded. He realized he had not beaten me, but he also knew that few people were listening to me. We talked for another hour or so, and it was an interesting conversation. He was a profound and highly educated man. All in all, we parted on good terms.

“Hilda, I left the Congregation, I went to St. Peter’s Cathedral, got down on my knees, and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rejoice, Peter. We are back! It has been a long time, but here we are again!’

“It seems to me I had the right to say that. Our little church is Jewish and Christian. That is so, Hilda, is it not?

“I went from Peter and sat on the steps in the sun and saw Father Stanisław, the Pope’s secretary, coming straight toward me. The last time, three years ago, when I wanted an audience with the Pope, he did not grant me access. Perhaps it’s unfair to say that, it’s just how it felt. Now, however, he suddenly came over to me and said, ‘His Holiness was talking about you recently. Wait here. I’ll come back out in a minute.’ I sat. It’s a strange story. Fifteen minutes later Father Stanisław came running back and invited me to supper the day after tomorrow.

“For two days I walked around Rome. I like walking, as you know. Rome is a big city. I walked and thought about what I should say to the Pope that nobody else would say to him, and which I might never have another opportunity to say. I must not forget any of the important things. I felt I was back at school and about to take an exam.

“It didn’t stop raining. Drizzle at times, heavier rain at other times, and then there was a really torrential downpour. My clothing was soaked and I could feel drops of water running down my back. I was walking along a broad deserted street with walls to left and right, wet trees, it was getting dark. In the distance I could see the skeleton of the Colosseum, and nothing else. Well, fine, I would walk to the Colosseum and get a bus there, I decided. I had just come right up to a telephone kiosk. The door opened a little and a wet girl shouted to me in English, ‘Father, come in here with us!’

“I peeped into the kiosk. There were two of them in there, very young hippies, a boy and a girl, festooned with necklaces and bracelets of seashells and colored stones. They were such sweet children. They were having supper. There was a large bottle of water in the corner and in their hands they had a split baguette and some tomatoes. I squeezed in. There was room for three.

“They were from Birmingham. The girl looked very much like you, and so did the boy. They asked where I had come from and I said I was from Israel. They were terribly pleased and immediately asked if they could come and visit me. I invited them to do so. They are hitchhiking, but when I said it wasn’t possible to hitchhike to Israel because they would have to cross the sea, they laughed at me. What was wrong with going through the Balkans, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Syria?

“So look out, my dear. They’ll be here soon. The girl’s name was Patricia, and the boy’s … now I’ve forgotten.

“We ate their bread and tomatoes, talked about this and that, I left them in the telephone kiosk and went to the bus. The monastery hostel where I was staying was damp and cold and my clothes did not dry overnight, so I went to see Karol very well washed but also very damp.

“I was met by Stanisław on the same stairs where we had seen each other before and he invited me to the papal chambers, next to the cathedral. A door opened and he took me along a corridor to a room. I waited there. I looked and saw bookshelves, a library. A long table. It was fairly gloomy. A door opened to one side and the Pope emerged. He was dressed simply in a white soutane, soft slippers on his feet, leather, with holes. I saw they were from Kraków. His stockings were white and thick. He embraced me, and poked me fairly hard in the stomach.

“‘Hey, you’re getting fat! Are they feeding you well?’

“‘Not badly. Come and see us, Holy Father, we will treat you to some Middle Eastern food!’

“‘Brother Daniel,’ he said, ‘we have known each other for more than forty years and all that time ago we were already on familiar terms and you called me by a different name.’

“‘Of course, Lolek, we all had different names.’

“‘Yes, Dieter,’ he smiled, and it was like a permission to return to the past, an invitation to a frank conversation. Hilda, I was so glad for him. I liked him even more. When a man rises so high he usually loses a lot, but Lolek has lost nothing.

“That is how it was, Hilda. What are you gaping at? I have known the Pope since 1945. He’s from Kraków, for heaven’s sake! I was a novice there, then I studied there. We served in the same diocese. We were friends. We traveled to give sermons. He didn’t like traveling at that time, so sometimes I stood in for him. That’s how things were.

“The secretary was with us, standing alongside, but it was as if he wasn’t there. We went to the chapel, a small chapel with benches with cushions for kneeling on.”

“Velvet cushions?” Hilda could not help asking.

“Yes, velvet, and with crests. A lot of doors. A server entered one and brought out the icon of the Mother of God of Kazan. We knelt and prayed silently. Then the Pope got up and took me to the dining room.

“A long table, for twelve people or so, three settings. I thought there would be a supper of one hundred people, but there was nobody.

“He went on to say that he had been wanting to talk to me for a long time, that he knew how difficult the situation of a Catholic priest and monk was in the Holy Land in our days. At that I got a little irate. ‘In Israel,’ I said.

“He is a clever man and immediately saw what I was getting at. The Vatican State does not recognize the existence of the State of Israel! He guided the conversation very carefully but not disingenuously.

“‘Of course,’ I said, ‘the position of a Christian has never been easy, and the position of a Jew is also far from easy, as Peter testifies. But how about being a Jewish Christian in Israel in the twentieth century? That really is something. There are such people, however, and it gladdens me because it is not so important how many people there are in the Jewish Church—ten, one hundred, or one thousand—but that they exist, and that testifies to the fact that Jews have accepted Christ. This is the Church in Israel, but the Vatican does not recognize Israel.’

“‘Daniel, I know. We have our Christians there, and we are in some sense hostages. Politics has to be carefully balanced in order not to irritate the Arabs, or the Muslims, or our brother Christians. There are no theological reasons, but there are political reasons. You understand that better than I do.’ He seemed to be waiting for me to sympathize, but I could not. ‘I would not like to be in your position,’ I said. ‘Where there is politics, there is disgrace.’

“‘Wait. Wait a little. Even so, we are moving very quickly. People cannot keep up with us. Their ideas change slowly.’

“‘But if you don’t have time to change them, your successor may not wish to.’ I said everything that was on my mind. At that. the server brought the meal. It was not Italian, but Polish: a dish of zakuski—cheese, Kraków sausage. Matka Boska! I hadn’t seen sausage like that since I left Poland. Also a bottle of water and a decanter of wine. They brought soup, then bigos. I couldn’t tell whether it was in my honor or whether the Pontiff retains old habits.

“‘Daniel, when you were serving your rural parish in Poland, did they bring you the food like this?’ he asked and laughed.

“Actually, they did, Hilda. After the war, times were very hard in Poland and old ladies really did bring me cakes and pies, and sour cream. Oh, my Poland, my Poland!

“I had been saving up what I had to tell him for so many years, and then between the soup and the bigos I could not find how to begin. He himself made it clear that he was prepared to listen to me. He said, ‘You know, Daniel, it is very difficult to turn this great ship. There is a habit of thinking in a particular manner, both about Jews and about many other things. You have to change the direction without capsizing the ship.’

“‘Your ship threw the Jews overboard, that’s the problem,’ I said. He was sitting almost opposite me, slightly to one side. He has large hands and the papal signet ring is large and on his head was the white papal skullcap, like a yarmulke, and he was listening attentively. Then I told him everything I had been thinking these last years, the things which keep me awake at night.

“‘The Church expelled the Jews. That’s what I think. But what I think is not important. What does matter is what St. Paul thought. For him the “one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church” was a Church of Jews and non-Jews. He never imagined a Church without Jews. It, the Church of circumcision, had the right to decide who belonged to that catholicity. Paul came to Jerusalem not just to pay his respects to the Apostles Peter, James, and John. He was sent by an affiliated Church, the Church of the Gentiles. He came to the mother Church, to that early Christianity, to Judeo-Christianity, because he saw it as the source of all being. Later, in the fourth century, after Constantine, the daughter Church usurped the place of the mother Church. It was no longer Jerusalem which was the ancestral mother of the Churches, and catholicity no longer meant unity, all-inclusiveness, global reach, but merely loyalty to Rome. The Greco-Roman world turned away from its source, from the primal Christianity which had inherited Judaism’s attitude toward orthopraxis, that is, to the observance of the commandments, to dignified behavior. To be a Christian now meant principally to acknowledge doctrine emanating from the Center. From that moment, the Church was no longer an eternal union with the God of the Jews, renewed in Jesus Christ as a union with the God of all peoples, following Christ, and thereby confirmation of loyalty to the first covenant of Moses. The Christian peoples were by no means the New Israel, they were the Extended Israel. Altogether we, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, became the New Israel not by rejecting the old one but by extending it to include the whole world. What was at issue was not doctrine but purely a way of life.

“‘In the Gospels we find a very Jewish question: ‘Rabbi, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?’ The Master does not tell the questioner to believe this or that. He tells him to go and do this and that. Act in accordance with the commandments of Moses. But, he says, he is already doing that. He has no intention of breaking the commandments. Then the Master says, in that case everything is fine, but if you want to be perfect, give away all your property and follow me. That is Christianity—giving everything to the Lord, not a tithe, not a half, but everything! But first learn to give away, like a Jew, a tenth. Moses taught how a man should do his duty to the Lord, and Jesus how to do it not from a sense of duty but of love.

“‘Why is Rome the mother Church? Rome is a sister! I am not against Rome, but I am not under Rome! What does “the New Israel” mean? Is it supposed to abolish the old one?

“‘Paul understood that the Gentiles were a wild branch which had been grafted on to the natural olive tree. Israel opened up to receive new peoples. This was not a New Israel separate from the old one but an Extended Israel. Paul could never have imagined that there would be a Church without the Jews.’

“At this point he stopped me and said, ‘Forgive me, I was wrong. I am happy to say that.’

“Hilda, he said that because he is a very great man, greater than one can imagine!

“He said, ‘Yes, I was wrong and I want to put this mistake right. You are correct in talking of an Extended Israel!’

“But by now I could not stop. After all, I did not know whether I would ever see him again and I had to tell him everything.

“‘For the Jews, as for the Christians, it is man, not God, who stands at the center. Nobody has ever seen God. You have to see God in man. In Christ the man, you need to see God. The Greeks put Truth at the center, the principle of Truth, and for the sake of that principle you can destroy a man. I have no need of a truth which destroys a man. More than that, anyone who destroys a man destroys God also. The Church bears a guilt toward the Jews!

In the city of Emsk we were shot down in a square between two churches, one Catholic, and one Orthodox! The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms. These divisions cover the Church in shame right up to this day. Where is the catholicity? Where is its all-embracing nature?’

“‘I know, Daniel. I know this,’ he said.

“‘It’s not enough for me that you know it,’ I said.

“‘Don’t be too hasty, don’t be too hasty. It is an enormous ship!’ That is what he said.

“The server came in and brought kissel.”

“What did he bring?” Hilda asked.

“Kissel. It’s a dessert, made from cherries. Like German Grütze. Yes, Hilda, I have remembered—the boy’s name is Jonathan.”

“What boy?” Hilda asked in surprise.

“That couple of hippies in the telephone box. The girl was Patricia, and the boy was Jonathan. He had a harelip which had been sewn up fairly neatly. You will recognize them.”

48.

F

ROM THE BIOGRAPHY OF

P

OPE

J

OHN

P

AUL

II

1981, 13 May: in St. Peter’s Square a Turkish terrorist, Ali Aca, makes an attempt on the Pontiff’s life, seriously wounding him.

1986, 13 April: for the first time since the era of the apostles a Roman pope visits a synagogue (in Rome) and greets Jews, calling them “our beloved brothers and, we may say, our elder brothers.”

1986, 27 October: on the initiative of John Paul II a meeting takes place in the city of Assisi of representatives of 47 different Christian churches and 13 representatives of non-Christian religions and they pray together.

1992, 12 July: Pope John Paul II announces to believers his imminent hospitalization in connection with an operation to remove a tumor in his intestine.

1993, 30 December: Diplomatic relations are established between the Vatican State and the State of Israel.

1994, 29 April: John Paul II slips getting out of the shower and breaks his hip. Independent specialists consider that it is from this time that he begins to suffer from Parkinson’s disease.

2000, 12 March: in the course of a Sunday Mass in St. Peter’s Cathedral the Pope asks forgiveness and acknowledges the Church’s guilt for its sins: persecution of the Jews, church schisms, and religious wars, crusades and justification of wars on the basis of theological dogmas, contempt for minorities and the poor, justification of slavery. He performs a ritual of repentance (mea culpa) for the sins of the sons of the Church.

2000, 20 March: beginning of the Pope’s visit to Israel, in the course of which he prays at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

2001, 4 May: in Athens the Pope asks forgiveness on behalf of the Church for the destruction of Constantinople.

2001, 6 May: in Damascus the Pontiff, for the first time in the existence of the Church, visits a mosque.

2004, 29 June: Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, pays an official visit to the Vatican.

49. 1984, Haifa

F

ROM

H

ILDA’S DIARY

Met Daniel at Lod Airport. He flew in from the Vatican. Met the Pope. He told me all about it. I feel as if I am standing next to the burning bush. It is scary.

50. 1996, Galilee, Nof a-Galil

F

ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN

E

WA

M

ANUKYAN AND

A

VIGDOR

S

TEIN

CASSETTE 4

On 18 March 1984, Daniel was sixty. It coincided with Purim. We decided to give him a family birthday party. The weather couldn’t have been better, very warm and everything was already green. My Milka, as you know, survived the Warsaw ghetto, and any woman who has experienced such hunger is a little obsessed with food. When she cooks for a celebration she multiplies everything by ten. If there are gtwenty guests she cooks for two hundred. Well, on this occasion she cooked as if for a large wedding. At Purim it is traditional to have all kinds of sweets, so for two days Milka was cooking all manner of honey, nut, and poppyseed buns. Her elder son-in-law Adin brought a car trunk–full of meat and started cooking shashlyk first thing in the morning, heating coals, marinating something. Daniel, of course, had no idea of the scale of the celebration. Our grandchildren, at that time we had three boys and two girls, also made themselves useful rehearsing a play. Our large house, four rooms and two terraces, was as crowded with children and food as a beehive. Everything was buzzing, sizzling, and clattering. I was awarded the role of Haman, and in the morning my whole face was painted and I had bushy red eyebrows stuck on.

Children very much love Purim because they can stuff themselves with sweets and yell themselves hoarse. The producer was Moshe, our second son-in-law. He stuck a hessian wig on top of his skullcap, donned some kind of sack, and pulled red rubber garden gloves on to his hands to represent an executioner.

The entire family made a present for Daniel. On the seat of an old chair we moulded a whole life out of plasticine. Everybody lent a hand, Ruth, of course, more than anyone else. In the middle stands Daniel with a staff surrounded by three sheep. Our family is around him. Ruth modeled the figures very recognizably and Aaron, her elder son whom we have nicknamed Bezalel, draws wonderfully and has become an artist. So then, in the middle is Daniel and around him a great procession of little people, Jews in prayer shawls, Arabs in keffiyehs, Ethiopians, Germans in dreadful peaked caps, even with little swastikas on their arms, and a lot of mules and dogs. When everyone had been put in their place, Milka said, “Look, will you, we’ve forgotten Hilda,” so Aaron also sculpted Hilda, very lifelike and taller than anyone else.

Daniel had promised to come at about seven but was very late. Milka was incensed that the food would get cold, but still there was no Daniel.

He appeared only at ten o’clock when it was already completely dark, but the children had hung lanterns and lit torches all through the garden. You should have seen how they welcomed him, with a clamor of rattles, shrieks, and beating drums. Then he was taken to the table and there in the middle stood our present, covered with a silk tablecloth. Daniel removed it and was so pleased and laughed and then for the rest of the evening kept coming back to look at it and finding amusing new details. A toy David, our grandson, was sitting on Shloma’s back and had a cat on his head. Milka had a spoon and saucepan and there was a chicken in the saucepan. It was all so tiny that Daniel had to put his glasses on.

My grandchildren adored him and hung from him like a tree. At night when Milka had cleared everything away, Daniel, despite her vehement protests, helped her wash the dishes. When we were alone he told me he was being summoned to Rome by the Prefect of the Congregation for Matters of Doctrine of the Faith.

“The Inquisition? The Vicar of Loyola on Earth?” I joked, but Daniel did not go along with my joke. He looked at me in surprise and commented, “No, Loyola was the first general of the Order of Jesuits, but never headed the Inquisition. I hope they will not burn me at the stake, but some kind of unpleasantness is sure to follow.”

I had never seen him so distraught before. I wanted to find some way of giving him strength and said, “Don’t be upset. At worst we will find you a job in our moshav. Admittedly we don’t have any sheep so you won’t be a shepherd anymore, but we’ll make you a gardener.”

“No, I don’t think I will go. I won’t go and that’s that.”

About three weeks later he came to see us and I asked whether he was still refusing to go to Rome. “I shall have to go, but I have put it off as much as I could, until the autumn. I don’t need a quarrel, I need understanding.” He sighed.

He went to Rome in late autumn and returned very pleased. “Well, I asked, they didn’t burn you at the stake then?” “No. Quite the contrary. I was in Rome and saw old friends. Poles. I drank mead, and was treated to Kraków sausage.” “So what?” I said. “Why did you have to go so far. There are lots of Poles in Israel. You could even have found a few among your parishioners!” “That’s true, but it’s still pleasant to meet a friend from your old life.”

“Daniel, half the world are your friends.” He just laughed. “Yes, half the world. Not the first half, though, only the second.” It was much later that Hilda told me which friend it was he had met.

8 June 2006, Moscow

L

ETTER FROM

L

UDMILA

U

LITSKAYA TO

E

LENA

K

OSTIOUKOVITCH

Dear Lyalya,

I got food poisoning from eating something ridiculous. I’ve been ill for a day and a half and experienced a whole gamut of emotions: first puzzlement—after all, I eat absolutely anything and never suffer any consequences—then irritation at myself—why on earth do I eat absolutely anything, after all, the tomato juice which I unreflectingly chucked into the dinner had been standing on the buffet for who knows how many days. I remember exactly that I bought it last week to make a Bloody Mary which one of my guests likes. Then I stopped blaming myself because I really felt very ill. I couldn’t take any pills because I was vomiting every half hour from the bottom of my stomach. You can imagine that today my throat, flank, and stomach muscles are still hurting.

Then I remembered all my friends and relatives who had suffered long and painfully—and patiently!—before dying and thought yet again that the supplication for “a peaceful Christian death, painless and blameless” is the most important of all requests addressed to the Lord God. In the meanwhile I was endlessly drinking lemon tea, then soda water, then just water because I no longer had the strength even to plug in the electric kettle. As soon as I stopped drinking, the spasms of nausea became completely unbearable. All the unpleasantness was happening exclusively in the upper half of the organism.

Then Andrey came in and wanted to call an ambulance straight away. For some reason I knew that was not the right thing to do. Then, Lyalya, here is what occurred to me. Because by this time I had indubitably puked out all the tomato juice, I realized that I was expelling all the nightmare I have been gulping down these last months of reading, the painful reading of all those books about the destruction of the Jews during the Second World War, all the tomes of medieval history, the history of the Crusades and the earlier history of the Church councils, the fathers of the Church from St. Augustine to St. John Chrysostomos, all the anti-Semitic opuses written by highly enlightened and terribly holy men. I puked out all the Jewish and non-Jewish encyclopedias I have read over the last few months, the whole Jewish Question which had poisoned me more powerfully than any tomato juice.

Lyalya, I hate the Jewish Question! It is the most disgusting question in the history of our civilization. It should be abolished as a fiction, as nonexistent. Why do all humanitarian, cultural, and philosophical problems—to say nothing about purely religious problems—constantly dance around the Jews? God has laughed at his chosen people far more than at any of the others! He knew perfectly well that a person cannot love God more than himself. That is something only a very few chosen people can do. Daniel was one of them, and there are a few others. For these people the Jewish Question does not exist. It should be abolished!

At 4:30 this morning I stopped puking and at 2 o’clock this afternoon I more or less got up and sat down to finish the book.

I am sending you Part Three. Not much more to go.

Love,

Lyusya