Cracked Fairy Tales and the Holocaust
From the Bruno Schulz documentary ‘Finding Pictures’ (© Benjamin Geissler)
I wake up early so I can get to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, by eight o’clock, when it opens. I am in Jerusalem with my family, and I have only one hour because we are scheduled to go to the Kotel, where it will be so crowded that I will never get close enough to slip my prayer into the wall’s ancient cracks. It is Passover. Everyone is rushing the wall as if god were impatient, or actually there, and if there then not there for long. Squeezed between too many bodies, I give up, walk back, and wait for my husband and my sons to emerge from the men’s section with better luck. A week later, when I get home, I will leave my prayer inside a Hebrew copy of Bruno Schulz’s , also a holy ruin, a temple. Like most prayers, my prayer is for health. My son Eli, who is four, tells me that since I didn’t get my prayer to the wall it will never come true and so I imagine a long, imminent plague: pleurisy, and lice, and fevers and damp bedsheets, and thick rashes. But for now it is eight o’clock and I have only one hour. I leave my
