Tale 4 - Letter 1

 To: Asher Charlap

18b Aldgate High Street

London, United Kingdom, EC

From Simon Charlap

Robben Island Lighthouse

Cape Colony

9/11/01

Dear Asherkeh, B’’H

Shalom from a place without peace, where the people are upside down, the trees are upside down, even the morals are upside down. The land is beautiful, the weather’s beautiful, it has mountains and valleys and trees and sun and hundreds of animals you’ve never seen or heard about; it’s everything beautiful you’d imagine the Holy Land is like, except without a Moshiach or peace or tzaddikim or anything else stopping you from wondering how everybody acts like a khazer in a place so sheyn. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors that Reb Herzl wants to build a Jewish state here in Africa. We’d all have to be meshuggeh to go along with it. The politics here are already such a khopteh that everybody wants to kill each other over gornishts. It would be better to keep fighting for a State of Israel in the Holy Land, where nobody lives and we finally wouldn’t have to think about politics.

I’m sorry I haven’t geshribt to you in a year. I know you were bazorgt to join me down here, and I won’t lie, I could use you here more than ever, but please, Asherkeh, for your own sake, if you’re still making any money in London, and even if you’re not making any money but aren’t losing any, stay there; and whatever you do, DO NOT SIGN UP FOR THE WAR. The Boers are meshuggeh and geferlakh, but all those English who seem so sane are even crazier. England says they declared war on these paskudnyaker schlemazels because they want to protect anybody British who lives around Pretoria, but the British already own every other place in the world. They could just pay to bring their English back to Johannesburg. What they really want is the Dutch gelt and to own whatever’s left of the world they don’t have yet.

I’m not even in Johannesburg anymore. For a while I was stationed in a city on a mountain called Pretoria, a shreklekh place where Dutch Christians who look like Chassidim work shvartses to death in gold mines and harass the British who live there like Cossacks. After Pretoria they sent me to a country called Madagascar, where the British keep their war prisoners in something called a ‘concentration camp’, where they pack thousands of Boers together like Jews in the Venice ghetto, but at least the Italians let Yids work still and make money. The British already have all the money, and the point of putting all these Christian Chassids in the same small area is so they can make the Boers die without killing them. I understand why they think they should. The Boers are absolutely meshuggeh and want to kill all the British, but at least the Boers are honest about what they want to do. The British have the world thinking they’re so much better, and then they find this expensive way to make the Boers die slowly without pulling a trigger and show people that British are so much better because they pay for an ongepotchket way to make the Boers kill themselves, and tell the world they have no choice. They’d have a choice if they just leave this farkakteh country alone.

I’m sure this meiceh sounds very different from when you last saw me in London, or even like I’m beginning to sound like you, but no Yid could ever imagine what a concentration camp is like. Everything about this country was already cursed by the ayin hora. First we burned all their crops and killed all their cattle, then we burned down their houses and piled thousands of these homeless schlemiels into trains like cattle and took them to camps where they have to sleep a hundred to a room and ten to a bed, have nothing to eat, und machten drek right next to their beds. Everybody in the camp comes down with measles and dysentery, and it kills a lot of the adults, but it kills the majority of the kinder. By the time they die, the only thing left of them is their beyner and pupiks. For days before they die, they can’t walk, they can’t get out of bed, they can only kakn and vomit in the bed they’re sleeping in with two other families. You hear people groaning and crying every minute of the day, and you don’t know if they’re dying or mourning the dead. Even after all those pogroms and ghettos, I don’t think any Yid has ever seen anything like this, and anyone who did would say for the first time ever that there are some things worse than being a Jew.

I will send you a second letter soon, but if you want to write me back, and it would be sheyn to hear from you, my address is Simon Charlap: Robben Island Lighthouse, Cape Colony, Africa.

Lieb fun sein Brider,

Shimmi