In Professor Schiff’s Guilt, an Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house. Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose, and the book he is secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?
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Yes, it’s true: my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather was a slave trader.
I cannot deny it. Nor do I see any point in obscuring this embarrassing fact. After all, I feel no affinity with the man, who departed this world almost a century and a half before I entered it. And I trust you will believe me when I say that our genetic linkage arouses more than a shred of discomfort in me.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are those who claim that the past always makes surprise appearances. Indeed, that is sometimes true. Except that what we have here is not a long-forgotten parking ticket that crops up out of nowhere and, if not paid — with interest, of course — might result in your bank account being seized. Nor are we dealing with an old woman who stops you on the street to remind you that she was the girl you were once madly in love with. No. The past I am being asked to submit to you, distinguished members of the Special Tribunal, is my family heritage, for good and for bad, and when it rears its head, I cannot pretend to be surprised.
Because I have known for years about my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Klonimus Zelig Schiff. About his business affairs, the fortune he amassed, and his mysterious disappearance. I have read about him. I have written about him. I have dreamed about him. I even know what he looked like.
In a portrait that hangs in the Surinaams Museum in Paramaribo, he stands upright and rigid, wearing a tricorn and a stern expression. He is flanked by his wife Esperanza, her head covered with a snood, and although she is not beautiful, she certainly is — how can I put this? — charismatic. In the background, a ship with billowing sails glides across a flat, gray sea that glistens like a sheet of zinc.
Naturally, almost instinctively, one seeks out the resemblance. It’s a bit like searching a baby’s face for the parents’ features. And when one persists, one always finds something. A certain glint in the eye. An angle. A contour. Generally speaking, though, ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you will agree that a face is an asset we tend to overvalue. Particularly if we take into account how quickly it withers and loses its capacity to do justice to its owner.
Then again, why should anyone care what the slave trader who was my great-great-great-great-grandfather looked like? As far as I’m concerned, you are entitled to think that Professor Schiff — namely, I — am him, as long as you can maintain your judicial objectivity. Not that I doubt your integrity, distinguished members of the tribunal. Not at all. I trust you unequivocally.
Members of the Special Tribunal, Madam Attorney General, Head of the Investigation Team:
I stand here before you.
It is hard to believe that up until a few weeks ago, I knew nothing of your existence or of the existence of your lovely country. Truth be told, I could barely have placed it on a map. And so you see, there was not even the slightest chance of me ever landing here.
Besides, I am a truly wretched traveler. I have not the foggiest sense of adventure. Zero aspiration to self-transport. I prefer to stay at home, in my own private disarray, surrounded by the illusion of safety among familiar landscapes. The disruption, the waiting, the carrying, the pushing, the ups, the downs — all these, for me, are torture. I detest airports. Sitting on airplanes. Flight attendants’ saccharine smiles. Small talk with potential partners to an aviation disaster. Explanations about life jackets in two languages I do not speak. Immigration officials. Standing in line. Staying at hotels — oh yes, sleeping on mattresses that are too soft and smell like too many honeymoons. Special effects from an American action movie blaring from the television in the next room. The impossible modulation of hot and cold water in the drizzle of a shower …
Not to mention the sojourn itself: city maps that rip down the middle, streets with impossible names, incomprehensible information flashing on a cellphone screen, the fear of pickpockets and overzealous vendors and relentless self-appointed tour guides. And the endless yearning — for shade, for shelter from the rain, for a bench to rest on, for a cup of espresso, for a toilet! The mere thought of battling a full bladder while traipsing around a foreign city causes me unimaginable suffering. And what about sustenance? Yes, that is also a challenge for the likes of me, an aging man set in his ways.
Be that as it may, precisely when I had made the decision to never again travel more than a two-hour drive from home (that’s gross hours, including traffic jams), I came across a small story in the newspaper. And this inconspicuous item, on the back page of an old daily, is what led me to be standing here before you.
It happened during my summer break, in the public library. I sat there one morning, leafing through newspapers from June 2006, as part of my research for a book. A different book, of course. Not this book that I am writing now, the one in which you yourselves are playing a central role. I was flipping through the papers idly. Languidly. My eyelids were drooping, as I recall. My head lolled. You can imagine the scene: a summer afternoon in the reading room, a large but musty space lit with fluorescent bulbs, where the air-conditioning’s frequent death rattles disturb the readers as they try to doze at the long tables. In fact, my municipal library somewhat resembles this chamber, at least in climate and soundtrack.
And then, in front of my half-closed eyes, there appeared a small, marginal item, at the bottom of the page, a sort of trivial curiosity that the night editor must have fished out from the slush pile to fill in a gap between two other articles.
I woke up at once.
The piece was about the remnants of a nineteenth-century merchant ship that had been unearthed off the coast of a West African city — none other than this very city, the capital of your charming republic. But at the time, as I said, I knew very little — almost nothing, to be honest — about your country, your capital, or even this vast continent. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we have here a coincidence: the ship was found in your territorial waters, and the items dredged up from its crumbling body by a British archeological delegation are housed here, in the Museum of African Culture. The ship was identified as a cargo vessel with a 200-ton capacity that is thought to have been built in the Rotterdam shipyard in 1780 and christened the Esperanza.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is poetic justice, even a certain logic, in the new law recently enacted by your parliament, the lengthy title of which is the Law for Adjudicating Slave Traders and their Accomplices, Heirs, and Beneficiaries. I might even have welcomed it, if not for the fact that I myself have been chosen to serve as the law’s first test case.
When it comes to identification, you are not mistaken. There is no shortage of Jews bearing the last name Schiff. Most of them acquired the name (which means “ship” in Yiddish) because they traded in pickled herring or repaired sails for a living, or because their wanderings led them to some damp port city where one could not escape the whipping winds, the noise of the waves, or the dreams of ships at sea. But this was not the case with my ancestor, Klonimus Zelig, who gave the name “Schiff” to the shipping company he founded in faraway Suriname, at the southwest reaches of the Caribbean. He owned a fleet of four multipurpose trade ships, which crossed the Atlantic back and forth between the Americas and the Bight of Benin in West Africa. Three of his vessels were named after his daughters: the Rachel, the Rebecca, and the Sarah. The fourth and largest, which was also the most elegant of the small fleet, was named for his beloved wife: the Esperanza.
Esperanza Schiff, my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, died in the prime of her life, before her young son, Solomon, had even celebrated his bar mitzvah. I, Professor Schiff, am Solomon Schiff’s great-grandson’s great-grandson’s son. Or is it his great-grandson’s son’s grandson? Please forgive me, as the counting back of generations can be confusing, even when the genealogical sequence is simple to track.
Incidentally, you might be interested to learn that my father kept a family tree. It was a yellowing parchment on which, rather than the customary tree diagram, a wave at the base rippled out in smaller waves, like some sort of watery cactus. At the frothy end of each wave-branch was a tiny illustration of a sailboat, inscribed with a name, date of birth, and date of death. I found this scroll a loathsome artifact, with its grotesque design and musty smell. I hated it. And so when I took it to school one day, in the second or third grade, I made sure to lose it. How? I simply gave it to the most popular girl in my class, in return for a quick peek at her forbidden zone. After some time, stricken with remorse (but mostly driven by my father’s terrifying fury), I asked for the document back. But the girl, who turned out to be a shrewd businesswoman, demanded that, in return, I give back what I had seen. Namely, that I return to her the sight revealed to my eyes and imprinted on my memory. Are you following the logic, ladies and gentlemen? Do you understand how a peep show engraved in one’s memory can be of equal value to a family heirloom passed down from generation to generation?
In any case, it was clear to me then that I had inherited none of my late forefather’s business acumen. Not even a smidgen. What he did, perhaps, bequeath me was hubris, and a burning desire for glory and honor — although in me the syndrome has manifested in a humbler form, expressed only in the publishing of books. It is a troubling but tolerable obsession. But with my forefather, Klonimus, it was bona fide megalomania: when he finally comprehended the magnitude of suffering and injustice he had caused, he made up his mind to atone by repairing the entire world.
But, of course, none of this alters the fact that the man was a criminal, at least by today’s standards. Moreover, were he standing here today before this distinguished tribunal, the way he chose to absolve himself might have merely served toamplify his guilt.
I assume all this will be clarified at a later point.
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Professor Schiff’s Guilt, published by New Vessel Press on May 9, 2023, by arrangement with The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. Copyright © Agur Schiff, Translation copyright © Jessica Cohen. You may acquire a copy directly from the press by clicking here.