Task of the Dreamer

Abstract

The incidents in this short story are refracted through the shattered sensorium of a traumatized but ethically intact survivor of the Holocaust. His narrative kaleidoscopically reconfigures horror and everyday life, nightmare and history, the gates of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland and a checkpoint at the border between Israel and Palestine during the First Intifada. His act of witness defends the specificity of the human being, the other, in the face of the reasons of state and the abstractions of ideology.

Keywords:

• Israel/Palestine
• Holocaust
• Trauma
• Checkpoint

Notes

“Task of the Dreamer” is a work of fiction, reprinted with permission from Shadow Traffic, © Red Hen Press, 2006. The character of the survivor and the incidents of the story are products of the writer's imagination. However, the Holocaust scene at the gate of an unnamed ghetto and the humiliation of the Arab boy at the checkpoint adhere to the historical reality of these sites, as documented by reliable sources. A group that called themselves the Paper Brigade, composed of poets and scholars who were members of the Communist- and Bundist-led United Partisans Organization of Vilna, smuggled cultural treasures from the YIVO Library back into the ghetto for burial there (see David Fishman's monograph, Embers Plucked from the Fire: The Rescue of Jewish Cultural Treasures in Vilna [New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1996]). The incident at the checkpoint during the First Intifada is based on eyewitness accounts that I received from one of the Women in Black and on documentary evidence offered in Noam Chomsky's Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (Toronto: Black Rose Books, 1999). See testimony from the trial of Major Mofaz, who was charged with ordering such abuses (p. 130); a report presented by Labor Alignment leaders to Menachem Begin (p. 131); abuses reported in the Knesset by Ran Cohen (p. 149); and a report by Israeli journalist Tom Segev (p. 490).