The Morning Star

The very first day, she had dragged him off to the Wailing Wall so she could insert between the stones a letter to God that she had carefully written. Wishes and messages reached Him in all languages, and, before that multitude, he thought about the apocalyptic atmosphere that had reigned in the days leading up to the Six-Day War. Haim had gone to Israel at the time, and in the face of all the real threats of annihilation, he had thought that it may well spell the end of the Jewish people. But, for two thousand years, hadn’t each generation also thought that it was the end? The world would certainly do without Jews, but it could do even better without mankind.

“Look,” she said, pointing at the crowd. “They’re alive…they’re alive. They’re not ghosts.”

They had come from all continents, witnesses from all the races and traditions, Jews of the East and of the West, white Jews, black Jews, yellow, red, right down to those mysterious Jews from Cochin China, whose eyes seemed to gaze upon a different sky; right down to those beings who seemed to step straight out of legend, Falashas from Ethiopia, who still remembered the Queen of Sheba; right down to the Jews of Harlem, who carried the two heaviest legacies in human history on their shoulders. She said that this country of Israel was first the act by means of which all these scattered people asserted their common identity. But it was also the singular history of each and every one of them, it was the past that they’d torn themselves away from and that lived on in them. It was Cairo, Baghdad and Teheran. It was the mellahs of the Maghreb and all the memories of Arab civilization. It was the shtetls of Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, and all the vestiges of Eastern Europe. It was also Paris, Berlin, New York, and it was Palestine itself, where the Jews had never stopped being, in spite of everything, while the Romans and Byzantines, the Arabs, Egyptians, Mamelukes, Turks and English had run the country. It was a planetary tribe: you’d have said that the totality of humanity’s past had poured into this place and so it thereby reflected, by the sheer nature of things, the whole set of contradictions of the modern world.

Page: 170-171, ‘The Morning Star’, Andre Schwartz-Bart