Tana Pinkus

Zipora Rachmiel

Telt Schnur

Zedek

00031

2. The Jew’s star consists of a six-pointed star of yellow cloth with black borders, equivalent in size to the palm of the hand. The inscription is to read “Jew” in black letters. It is to be sewn to the left breast of the garment, and to be worn visibly.

I write these names down slowly, as if I cared, forming the letters with a certain calm disdain. I arrange them emblematically (for am I not at play?), forming a star my imagination floods with yellow like urine. It gives me pleasure. They are strange names, for the most part; dug out of biblical crannies like tiny obstinate weeds. These are the names given demons in magical spells, filthy names, names so Jewish even their noses are hooked, their skins are swarthy; took at the kinks in those k’s, the low craft and chicanery characteristic of z: I command you, Abimelech, appear with your cohorts, the witches Chinke and Keile, the imps Zedek and Itzig, the succubae Hitzel and Milkele, the whores, the Jezebels, Rebekka and Chiniche, cunts in their throats to howl with, and the fur like a necklace, smile atop slit like a T made of lip, presenting our lusts with a puzzle: which mouth to kiss? which wound to dress? which opening to enter? which boon to bless? which curse to caress?

This star, this shape, is like my book, my history of Hitler and his henchmen (their homosexual hearts, their hermaphrodite designs), and exposes itself the way my work exposes the parts and conditions of their crime; for the carefully conventional appearance of my manuscript—so Buch, so Boche—the resonance of its title, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, its soberly documented form, its piling up of day upon decade like shit in a stable, its powerful logic like the stench from there (has there ever been such an unpleasant assembly of facts?), and then its lofty hierarchy of explanations, as though it were a government bureau, the anal tables of statistics, too, and weighty apparatus of referral: they straighten the teeth of the truth; they impose an order on accident, find a will in history as fiery as phlogiston (what is chapterlike about tyranny but the beatings and decrees? how much of life is simply consecutive like forks of food, as straightforward and declarative as my disciplined academic style? everything is both simultaneous and continuous and intermittent and mixed; no tattooed numbers, no leather love-thongs, mark the page); ah, my book cries out its commands, and events are disposed like decorative raisins on a cookie (that row there is the mouth, and there’s an eye); it huffs the wind it flaps in, and soon all fog is blown from circumstance, confusion is scarred from the corn, an empty field is ringed with quotes like barbarous wire; well, in the same way this pretty pattern of names removes disgust from a dozen dossiers, rips up some threatening proclamations, decorates death like pennant on a spear.