See Under David Grossman (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

it in all its pungency when he was alone with young Kazik [see under: CHILDHOOD] in his pavilion. Kazik was a wild and lively child, always into mischief. He broke everything he set his hands on, and made a terrible mess with his daredevil pranks. He grew quickly; that is, never taller or heavier than the fifty-one centimeters and three kilograms Fried had first estimated him to be, but decidedly stouter and stronger. He rocked on his naked legs like a little hooligan in diapers. His albino hair grew long and thick, and Fried was forced to tie it in back to keep it out of his eyes. The doctor—leaning on his cane—chased him around the house, gently pulling him away from the door handles and lifting him out of the sink and toilet bowls through which he tried to escape. Suddenly Fried was angry with himself: “Nu, that I hadn’t given him a better EDUCATION [q.v.] in these formative years, and that I had been too preoccupied with how I was feeling and with my soul-searching about life and memories of my own childhood,oh yes; I hardly know the child, I know only his aggression, his energy, as I watch him running and falling and picking himself up again, and his tyrannical passion for grabbing the world and stamping on it victoriously, and this frightens me, yes.” Or to expand the point: it scared Fried that the child was so powerful and strange, that he didn’t know what Kazik thought, or whether Kazik loved him, or considered him instead to be his inevitable and painstaking servant, or whether he would grow up to be like Fried, or perhaps Like Paula. He would have preferred him to be like Paula, but there was nothing he could do about it. He wondered whether he should pit himself against the child with all his might and experience in order to prepare him for life, or whether it would be better to lie to him about the world, since the child had so short a life span anyway. He watched Kazik burrowing deeper in the closet and wondered if he would ever be able to get close enough to him. It was like watching your own reflection in the mirror: even if you say “me” a thousand and one times, you never really know what you mean. You are both too near and too far. For the first time, the doctor envied the strange biographical talent of MALKIEL ZEIDMAN [q.v.], who could enter his fellow man and feel him from the inside.

The old doctor closed his eyes, shocked with the bitter knowledge that this child was a stranger to him; that he would always remain so. That Fried would always love him more than Kazik loved Fried. And even if he were wonderfully successful and Kazik lived a complete and happy life [see under: PRAYER], Fried would suffer the same hunger and grief at his inability simply to “be” Kazik, to overcome the strangeness, the part of himself that was banished forever. And he wondered whether he shouldn’t reconsider, whether he shouldn’t start defending himself against this disappointed love and the unendurable pain that bound him. And he also knew that there is something in parents—even in the best and most sensitive of parents—that the child must always kill in order to free his way into the light and air, like a sapling struggling against the old trees in the forest. Now, the doctor realized that he and his child had only a very short time together, and that their capacity for understanding, love, and compassion was scant indeed, and as he was staring into space, Kazik emerged from the closet, ran past the bookstand, yanked the doily and brought down the porcelain bowl with the four blue stags, and the bowl was shattered to bits.

Also see under: TIME

CHADASH, HAADAM HA

THE NEW MAN

The German prototype delineated by Nazi theoreticians.

The NM is what Obersturmbannführer Neigel contraposed to Wasserman’s type in speaking of the “new future” pledged by the Reich and the Fuhrer. At this point, for precision’s sake, the NM concept will be enlarged upon: In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that the Nordic race is the bearer of civilization; thus the struggle against the alien, the Jew, the Slav—in short, all inferior races—is a holy struggle. Hans Gunther, the official theoretician of the National Socialist Party, on the basis of his study of ten million Germans, delineated the ideal NM: tall, with straight blond hair, an elongated skull, a narrow face, a well-formed chin, a thin nose, fair deep-set eyes, and a whitish-pink complexion. (Neigel, like most Bavarians, had dark hair and dark eyes as well.) Since there were not enough ideal subjects in Germany to ensure the NM’s dominance of the Reich for the next thousand years, German leaders began to look for ways of increasing their human resources. A plan was proposed, for example, with regard to the improvement of Bavarian stock, to transplant Norwegians to Bavaria, where by means of crossbreeding and proper diet the local stock would become pure Nordic in only a few generations. This idea was just the beginning of a more far-reaching plan, as Dr. Willibaud Henschel wrote in Die Hammer, the official propaganda organ of the National Socialists in Berlin: “Round up a thousand girls, isolate them in a camp, mate them with a hundred thousand strapping young German youths, and then, with a hundred such camps, you will beget a generation of a hundred thousand pure-blooded German children.” Or as the Gauleiter of Bavaria, Paul Giesler, reminded the females in the audience during his address to the students of the University of Munich on 2/19/39: National Socialists regard SEX [q.v.] solely as a means of procreation, and every woman should bear a child for the good of the fatherland, and “any girl who lacks sufficient charms to find a mate of her own, will be assigned one of