THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

of us talked about everything. The rider turned out to be a new immigrant fromGeorgia. Buskila, the driver, told him: “Since you Gruzinim [the new emigrants fromGeorgia, or Gruzia] came to Israel, we Moroccans started to go to [classical]concerts,” meaning that the Moroccans had moved up in the pecking order. Later,when I came home for Shabbat, I recounted the incident to my parents. My fatherdemanded an explanation.“You know, dad,” I said. “The Gruzinim are . . . you know.”“No. I don’t know.”“Different . . . distant . . . Jew ish Gypsies . . .”I used many laundered words to avoid using the horrible stereotypes that werecirculating at the time in Israel at the Shabbat table. Still, my father did notunderstand. So I told him everything I heard, about the look and the smell attributedto the Georgian Jews as they came off the planes. I told him about their leatherjackets and their pendants, their square heads and their gold teeth. My father wasastonished. He hadn’t heard about these stereotypes. It couldn’t be. Not in the statethat he helped build. Not in the nation of the Jewish people. Not in the new state ofthe Jews where the rule should and must be, “Do not do to your friend what youhated being done to you during the Diaspora.” It was his country, Yossel Burg’s,whose passport had the word Jude stamped on it. Joseph Goebbels had comparedhim to a rat, called him a usurper, a gold dealer, Shylock.This could not be.He went to bed upset, mumbling in German, Das ist unmöglich, “This isimpossible,” and I knew he was not sleeping. He was turning over and over in hisbed. I knocked on his door and asked if I could talk to him. His eyes were stillclosed as he responded, as if our conversation had never ceased, even in sleep.Georgian Jewry is dated back to the First Temple, he proclaimed, from theencyclopedia in his head. They have been in Georgia almost 2,600 years. They arewriters and artists, poets and financiers. It is absolutely forbidden to talk about themas you did. They have been in Georgia longer than we have been in Germany, hestated, invoking his ultimate test of Jewish existence. Then he fell asleep, into theschlafstunde—the German idiom of afternoon rest—literally the sleeping hour of theShabbat. I left quietly.