The Beating of Joshua Gruen

The Beating of Joshua Gruen is the hinge on which E. L. Doctorow's City of God turns from inquiry into elegy. Rabbi Joshua Gruen, an American rabbi who had come to Vilnius to recover the hidden diary of Josef Barbanel, was fatally beaten on the doorstep of the ancient synagogue on Vokieciu Street, a building boarded up and preserved only as a ruin, with no congregants, only visitors, as to a graveyard. The assault left him with a fractured skull, both arms and several ribs broken, a collapsed lung, and pneumonia; he slipped into a coma and never recovered. His death transforms the novel's intellectual quest for a lost archive into a story of grief, and it binds the living—his widow Sarah Blumenthal and the former priest Thomas Pemberton—into a shared project of recovery and reckoning that the dead man could not complete.

The Quest That Led to the Doorstep

Joshua Gruen had come to Vilnius on a specific errand: to find the ghetto diary of Josef Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader Dr. Koenig in the Kovno Ghetto. Barbanel had kept a meticulous record of everything that happened in the ghetto—the latest regulations, execution orders, deaths, minutes of council meetings, orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz, proscriptions, dicta, identity papers for work details—writing in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to say what happened each day. His diary, by the time it was hidden, had run into thousands of pages, volumes, a whole trunk full of material. Neither Barbanel nor his companion Greta Margolin was to survive the destruction of the ghetto, and the papers were hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, in its rubble, in the wreckage and ruination and dust of its Christian tradition. Joshua's notebook, found in his hotel room after his death, contained a careful account of everyone he had spoken to about the ghetto diary, including the name of a priest who had held the materials for safekeeping.

The Assault and Its Witness

The beating occurred at night, in the dark, in front of the synagogue doors. The only witness was an elderly Lithuanian woman, the caretaker of the ruined synagogue, who lived in a cottage behind the building. She heard shouts and screams, and it was she who found Joshua bleeding in front of the doors and called the police. Before the shouts, she had heard someone knocking on the synagogue doors; had the knocking continued, she would with some irritation have gone out and around to the front of the museum—that is what she called the synagogue, the Jewish museum—and told whoever it was that it was closed. Joshua had never talked to the old woman; he had not had the chance. When Thomas Pemberton later visited the site and spoke to her, he told her that the American who had been beaten was a rabbi who had come to Vilna to seek journals from the ghetto that had been held for safekeeping by a priest in Vilna. The woman immediately identified the priest as Father Petrauskas, her own priest from the Church of St. Theresa on Kaunas Street, and crossed herself.

The Aftermath in Vilnius

When Sarah Blumenthal and Thomas Pemberton arrived in Vilnius, Joshua was still alive but in a coma. The American chargé d'affaires met them at the airport and rushed them to the hospital. Sarah immediately questioned the adequacy of medical care but had to agree finally that Joshua's condition made it too dangerous to fly him out. Permission was asked to trepan him to relieve pressure on the brain. Pem sat with Sarah in the corridor outside the operating room; she did not cry or speak but simply stared at the floor. They had flown from Kennedy to Frankfurt, waited two hours for the connecting flight, and had come straight from the Vilnius airport to the hospital. Pem supposed exhaustion served her as a kind of sedative. He closed his eyes and prayed silently for Joshua to pull through but thought that Sarah had probably not prayed. They were put up that night in the ambassador's residence; the ambassador and his wife took care of all the arrangements for shipping the body home. Sarah's grief was such that a doctor was called in to minister to her, and she was sedated for twenty-four hours. In that time Pem went to the hotel where Joshua had been staying and packed his few things: the rabbi had been reading Gershom Scholem's Kabbalah, Emil Fackenheim's Encounters between Judaism and Modern Philosophy, and Trent's Last Case, the 1930s English country-house mystery by E. C. Bentley. Also in the hotel room was the rabbi's notebook with his account of everyone he had spoken to about the ghetto diary. The church where it had been hidden no longer existed—a modern apartment house stood in its place. There were two or three additional names and addresses—presumably people he had not had the opportunity to contact before he was assaulted.

The Archive Recovered

Joshua's death did not end the quest; it passed it to Pem and Sarah. The archive was eventually recovered and impounded at JFK Airport until, at Pem's request, he could get in touch with the Justice Department and have one of their attorneys present when it was cracked open, as customs had insisted it must be. If the archive included documentary proof of the identity of the ghetto commander, S.S. Major Schmitz, it would have to resist a challenge in court, and so the circumstances of the unsealing of the material had to be irreproachable. The day of the unsealing came after arrangements taking the better part of two weeks. Pem and Sarah rode out to JFK in a taxi on a late weekday morning in the rain; they did not speak. In a small office in the International Arrivals Building, Sarah, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and various customs people watched as an inspector took up a hammer and chisel and went to work. The chest was larger than Sarah had understood from Pem's description—she had imagined it as the size of a footlocker, but it was larger, deeper, homemade, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white, with raw lumber where the paint had flaked off. The customs man found the rusted locks impervious and asked if he could pry off the hasps, which, he warned, would splinter the wood. Without quite realizing the proprietorship she had been granted, Sarah nodded her approval, yet the sound of the splitting wood made her wince—as if her father's history was seeping into the room. The hasps were pried off and the thick rope cut. The attorney took a small camera out of her bag and snapped three or four pictures of the Russian writing across the top of the chest. The inspectors carefully lifted out packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest—the fierce preservation of these materials unmistakable and, to Sarah, itself an urgent message that brought a sob to her throat. They unwrapped the packages to find sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script. Having run their hands along the inner walls of the chest, they agreed among themselves that there was nothing here of interest to them, replaced everything more or less as they found it, and excused themselves. Pem and the attorney dove in: in notebooks, students' bluebooks, and unbound pages, a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering a period of three years, 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto was dismantled and the survivors marched to the railroad station, and reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz.

The Unfinished Reckoning

The archive contained typed lists of those who had died in the ghetto and those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen, each name with a date and place of birth next to it; not infrequently, the names of entire families were listed. There was no time or distance in Sarah's apprehension of these pages; they were not historical but, in their simple exact notation, a curve of the universe's light flashing through her, lasing her consciousness into these leaves of paper, letter by letter, as if the newly dead were being written down as she read. Pem handed her an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photos: a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire; a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken, the cloth stars sewn to their coats; a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden; the members of the council posing in business suits with stars; a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows, the head awry, staring heavenward; winter, snow on the ground; and seven little boys in front of a wood cabin, standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council—unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection, all underdressed, with short pants and sweaters and jackets they had outgrown, each at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah found her father in the first row. The legal pursuit of Schmitz, however, came to nothing in the end. The rabbi had faxed Sarah's father's file: letters to the Justice Department, bureaucratic replies, two 1977 articles from the Times about a deportation hearing, a blurry head shot of a bald fellow with a sickly thin face. Three people testified that the man in question was the ghetto commandant, Schmitz, but his lawyer shot down their testimony—they were elderly, easily befuddled. The defendant testified he was Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to fight on the Russian front, the same ID he presented to the immigration authorities after the war; the judge found in his favor. Letters to and from the Simon Wiesenthal Center agreed with Sarah's father that Preissen was almost certainly Schmitz, but short of convincing documentation, the ID could not be made that would justify reopening the case, although their file was being kept open. Pem, reflecting on the pursuit, remembered accounts of the Eichmann kidnapping and the problem of identification, and thought of himself as coming from the other culture—reporting the fact, getting the story, getting the spelling right—a ball and chain that dragged on him. Years later, at a gathering, Pem told the narrator: "We found out yesterday the son of a bitch died two months ago. Schmid, Schmitz, whatever the fuck his name was. The Nazi who ran the ghetto. Died in his sleep. A home in Yonkers. We had him good and nailed, too. Damn!" He never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was. The beating of Joshua Gruen thus ends not in courtroom justice but in the quiet death of the unpunished perpetrator, leaving the archive—and the testimony of the seven little boys in the photograph—as the only lasting verdict.