the book my parents had so eagerly awaited came out in America, Erica was already resting in her grave, my father was apparently resting with his lady love in Verona, and Elisheva and I were going crazy together in the renovated, three-and-a-half-room basement flat where my father set us up nicely before he deserted us.
I had no idea that the book had come out, or about anything else, except for the fact that I was responsible for a sister who, according to the official authorities, posed no danger to herself or others, and consequently did not need to be hospitalized.
Only months later, after I had put her back, not so nicely, in the hospital, I learned about the book from a newspaper article, and my first thought was: I hope they don’t hand out newspapers in the psychiatric ward.
The article reported on a dispute between the literary editor and the owner of one of the big publishing houses in Israel. The owner wanted to bring out a Hebrew translation of Hitler, First Person, and the editor, it was reported, threatened to resign. Neither of the parties to the dispute agreed to be interviewed on record, but it appeared that they had given the reporter a broad overview of the reasons for the standoff.
Hitler, First Person, as may be gleaned from the title, attempts to present “an autobiography of the fiend.” According to the blurb on the back of the English edition, the book was not a forgery like the so-called “Hitler Diaries,” nor yet pure historical research, but rather “an attempt to deepen human consciousness by literary means” and by “a significant and chilling contribution to the self-knowledge of human beings as such.” The book relies on hundreds of documents and historical research. It attempts to penetrate beneath the persona the Führer presented to the public, and shows the reader not the “real” Hitler, but Hitler as he might have been, and as he would have described himself if he had written a personal autobiography as a kind of complement to Mein Kampf.
According to the article, the controversial manuscript had been rejected by a long line of publishers in the United States, until it found one willing to bring it out, and but for the fact that two well known historians had violently condemned the book, it would probably have disappeared among the piles of trash written on the subject.
The growing campaign in denunciation of the book had given the author, Professor Aaron Gotthilf, exceptional media exposure, at the height of which he had been attacked at the entrance to a television studio by an elderly Holocaust survivor who tried to throw acid in his face.
Gotthilf, a controversial historian and a refugee from the Holocaust himself, stands by his opinion that giving voice to Hitler is not only a legitimate literary device that should be accepted in the framework of the principle of freedom of expression, but an important tool in advancing our understanding of the horrors of the twentieth century. “Hitler was a human being,” he stresses, “and as such, he is not beyond the bounds of explanation.” He adds: “To understand does not mean to forgive.”
However, there are those who do not forgive Gotthilf for his book, among them our greatest Holocaust researcher, who described it as “a vile piece of filth not worthy of relating to.”
Up to now the book has been translated into French, German, Finnish, and Italian, although it should be mentioned that the publishers who chose to bring it out in these countries are also regarded as marginal. Among the reactions to the book in France, the words “provocative” and “interesting” were used. In Germany, on the other hand, the book was widely denounced by critics.
The article also mentioned that the author chose to let Hitler tell his story only up to October 1938, a few days before Kristallnacht, and that some critics have argued that this choice plays into the hands, even if indirectly, of Holocaust deniers.
“It will soon become clear whether Gotthilf’s fictional Hitler will be allowed to have his say in Hebrew too.”
I tore the newspaper to shreds and threw it in the trash, poured the dregs of my coffee onto the scraps, and took the bag of trash out of the house.
I hadn’t forgotten my parents’ talk. I hadn’t forgotten the sound of the typewriter, but for some reason I never thought about the book as something real that could actually happen. I never thought it would happen, too much had happened already.
All kinds of crazy ideas went around in my head, like writing to the publisher that I would kill myself if the book came out in Hebrew—because what other way did I have to preserve the fragments of my sister? But in the end I didn’t even write a letter of protest from a concerned citizen.
I’ll never know whether my mother meant to kill herself with her Digoxin games. I learned to live with the not knowing, let’s say I learned, let’s say I did, but one thing I do know today for certain: my mother did not pass on suicidal genes to me. I never really wanted to go away and die. I wanted other people not to be here.
When Elisheva broke down and was hospitalized for the first time, I was still in my senior year in high school and, surrounded by a protective wall of friends and activities, I spent most of my time at a relatively safe distance from the family.
When I banished her from our basement apartment to her second hospitalization I was already alone. Our parents had flown. My friends had joined the army, and I had been exempted from this obligation, too, which I had no possibility of meeting.
The way things turned out I didn’t have a single soul I could talk to when Hitler, First Person came down on me in the kitchen like a ton of bricks. And after I destroyed the newspaper, not long after that, somehow or other I decided to live. Somehow or other, the decision was taken to live, live like crazy and as quick-sharp as possible. I left the apartment in Talpioth and threw myself giddily into to all kinds of stimulating experiments. I consumed quantities of alcohol, and men, and wild talk, and ups and downs at night and sleeplessness. One morning, after waking up alone in the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv without remembering exactly how I got there, I snuck outside, and as I wandered the streets my eye fell on a tattoo emporium; I went in and had myself tattooed with my tiger face. It took two days to do it, and in between I fell asleep on a bench in the park among the smell of dog shit. All this isn’t important now, and also irrelevant to Hitler, First Person, which I had started to talk about.
Three years after I met Oded and fell on him with false accusations, he traveled to London for the firm and there, between his real-estate negotiations, he was tempted to buy the book. He bought it, came home, and immediately told me. Presumably he believed that the act of confession would atone for the sin of voyeurism he had committed by reading it.
Alice had not yet been born then, but Yachin was lying at my feet on his baby blanket, and I was already pregnant with Nimrod, although I didn’t yet know it—so my drive to attack had faded to a considerable degree.
“Where is it?” I asked.
“What? The book? I left it in the office. I thought you wouldn’t want it in the house.”
“You thought right. It’s none of my business that you read it, I just don’t have to hear about it,” I said, and a minute later: “Okay. Now that you did it, you’d better tell me about it.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he picked up our son and clasped him like a soft shield to his chest. “I’m not a big expert on literature. I didn’t even finish reading it, it’s over three hundred pages long, and I don’t think I’ll finish it.”
“Is it that dreadful?”
“Dreadful?” My husband deliberated for a moment, and then pronounced the magic word, because of which, and only because of which, even though I have a thousand other
