THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

did not know then whether Grandmother Tzivya was alive or dead, so they namedthe doomed child after her, but with slightly different spelling of the name, Tzviya, notTzivya. Perhaps this is why she lived and then died so early.My father was so lonely in his dream, he and his suitcase, like the Wandering Jew.Always traveling like a nomad. Always ready to flee to another place with his suitcasewithin reach. It would be a Samsonite, and he is Samson the Hero. Heinrich Heineonce said that the Jew after the Ruin created for himself a mobile homeland thatincluded his Pentateuch, his prayer shawl, and his phylacteries. My father’s homelandwas inside the suitcase. When he immigrated to Israel in the 1930s he brought withhim a wooden crate in the style of nineteenth-century globe-trotters, a German crate,Kabinen Koffer, containing thirty-five ironed and starched silk, linen, and cottonshirts, and more than forty pairs of socks, all embroidered with his initials. Therewere other things as well that his Jewish mother packed for her son’s one-way trip tothe Holy Land.He spent many months in Tel Aviv living in the Germany that he imported in hiscrate, postponing his bond with the old-new land that had become his safe havenfrom the new Germans. He desperately needed help, for years, from the Israelis whodid not make a motion. Then something happened, he said. “I shouted at them.”This cannot be, Father. You never shouted in your life. Once you were angry withme when I spoke ill of the chief rabbi, and another time when I played with the toyChevy that you brought me in your suitcase, because it was during the Sabbath,between two o’clock and four o’clock, in the winter. Except for these two instances,you never showed anger. And you did not call the police. It cannot be. My fatherwould never inform the police, as in our prayers we say, “And for the slanderers letthere be no hope.”This was in the dream. In reality, my real father spoke to them, regardless of thelanguage, but he surely did. The Israelis, some of them, fled like Israelis. Some ofthem treated him, with his adherence to the rule of law and his full command of manylanguages, with indifference. Here comes the bitter truth about many people’s dreamsat the end of their lives, including my father’s.“I do not exactly remember what I actually wanted.”“What did you really want, Dad?”Later my father described in great detail a jumbled fantasy of a technological