“Words are the only things that last forever”—Winston Churchill
Let’s say that this isn’t one of those “it’s all a dream” stories or “he’s really a ghost” stories or any of the other myriad clichéd stories Elihu Abramov dreamt of writing before the Nazis took him. Let’s just say the situation is simple, blood on skin simple, like Elihu’s death.
There is a dead man in a room, and he must choose a word. For eternity. Just one word. That word is him, and he is that word — and all that comes with it.
Why? Why does death take a pear-faced boy playing with oblong green marbles, prodding him into a cattle car, and not an old man hacking away his last toothless moments in a mite-ridden bed? Who knows? All that Elihu knew was that for his entire writerly life words were sacred, the living breath of The Torah, and that to be a word, to achieve utterance, was to be a step closer to God. Elihu thought himself honored to go to the afterlife of writers, to sit at the same desk as Hayim Nahman Bialik or the great master he’d studied overseas, Saul Bellow.
If the reader is willing to accept the premise that not everything makes sense or has a neat little resolution, like the lives of those who died, as Elihu did, during the darkest of days, then this overly painful and excessively awkward exercise in storytelling will go more smoothly.
Agreed?
If so, let us begin . . . If not, well, choose another...
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