The Last Jew (review)

The Last Jew deals with the problematic nature of Jewish identity in an age of unprecedented historical change, with the Holocaust as the central catalyst for that change. As secular Israelis move away from original Zionist ideology, so their need to define their identity increases, and The Last Jew, which appeared remarkably early in this process of redefinition, attempts to engage with both the process and its outcomes. This important work, which encompasses such a wide span of history, people, and places, is bound to resist categorization. Questions such as: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where do I go from here?, which could have been posed by a Jew at almost any time since the Enlightenment, are employed by Kaniuk to challenge fundamental assumptions in Israeli society. He insists on the need to ensure continuity between the Diaspora past and Israeli present, and thereby offers a powerful critique of the early-Zionist rejection of "Jewishness" in forging a new Israeli identity.

This complex novel contains surreal, absurd, and fantastic elements, and seems to be disconnected in time and place. We are introduced to Boaz, a young man who meets another young man, who, like Boaz, had been sent to fight in the Jerusalem hills, in his case only two days after his arrival in Palestine from Europe in 1948. Both survived the same battle by pretending to be dead, and it is not clear who is who, for this second "young man" functions as Boaz's alter ego. Boaz's family history through several generations emerges slowly and with some lack of chronological and historical clarity. His father, Ebenezer, a child of one of the new settlements in early twentieth-century Palestine, found himself in Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War looking for the man he believed to be his biological father, Yosef Reina. Yosef was a descendent of Matan Ba-Seter, a mystic who had followed the false messiah, Jacob Frank, into Christianity and joined a monastic Order. Both Matan Ba-Seter and his wife are depicted on a mythic scale. Yosef wandered Europe, was said to have fathered 52 children, spent 1897 in the Holy Land, and then returned to Europe.

Yosef married Rachel Brin, and was eventually shot at Dachau at the age of 62. Rivka, Rachel's best friend, married a Zionist leader, Nehemiah Schneersohn, whose family name is probably not coincidentally also that of a dynasty of Hasidic rabbis, and this couple left for Palestine even though Rivka would have preferred to go to America. On 1 January, 1900 Nehemiah and Rivka, with a small group of other pioneers, established a settlement near the Arab village of Merar. Their lack of agricultural experience caused their crops to fail, and they suffered from the hostility of Baron de Rothschild's administrators and the corruption of Turkish rule. Rivka wept for eight years, and after nine years of struggle Nehemiah agreed to take Rivka to America, leaving Ebenezer behind. He installed Rivka on board a ship in Jaffa harbor before committing suicide on the shore. Rivka promptly disembarked and returned to Merar where she established a successful farm, becoming in old age a symbol of successful survival.

Rivka could not love her own son, Ebenezer, but was passionate about Boaz, her grandson, claiming him as her own son. Boaz was born in 1928, at the very same hour as Shmuel Lipker, their identities being confused and merged from the start. When his mother was attacked and buried alive by two Arabs, Ebenezer killed the old man who had raped her and left for Europe. In a concentration camp in Europe he met Shmuel who was born from an almost ridiculous coupling, his strange origins conferring on him a kind of mythic or mystical status. Meanwhile, Rachel Brin had left for America and married there, and her son by Yosef Reina, Lionel, volunteered to serve in the British Army in Europe during the Second World War. In Germany after the War Lionel became the...