I am going to tell you a story.
My name is Daniel Zwickel.
The Zwickels of Galicia were not the bearers of a name so noble as, say,
the Duke of Orange or as elegant as the Spanish Granadas (which means pomegranate.)
No, we were the turnip Jews. Family history has is that Zwickel is
not our original name and somewhere back before the time of the patriarch,
Leybush Zwickel, we had something to do with turnips.
Well, suppose Leybush
lived, not in Austrian Galicia, but the Galicia of, say, a Franco-Hungarian
empire with France as le Grande Frommage of nineteenth-century Europe –
might his name not have been Leybush Tenet (which is turnip in French)?
So, then, Leybush begat Abraham who begat my grandfather, Chaim who called
himself Charles. Suppose Charles Tenet and his young bride emigrated,
not through Ellis Island to America's Brooklyn, but to a
thriving, cosmopolitan, tolerant Paris and my
father, Abraham, and his brothers
and sisters were raised in the cultural mecca
that would have nurtured some of
the greatest writers and artists the 20th century
would know?
My mother, Jean, received
her degree from the Sorbonne of the University
of Paris. She and my father could easily
have met in a cafe, he, a dashing young Parisian Jewish intellectual, she,
bright, vivacious, willful and independant and lovely enough to cause such
a dashing young man to think impure thoughts.
But then something went
horribly wrong. Not the Huns, but the arrogant French precipitated
the “Great War” and it was they who got their arses whupped by the good
guys and humiliated at Munich into signing the treaty of that name and
so a now impoverished France became the petri dish which would cultivate
its own little fascist monster by the name of Jacques leNoire who, lacking
the efficiency of the Germans, only succeeded in killing two million Jews
before being defeated by the Allies.
Well, that was two million
too many for the young Daniel Tenet, my father's son and sole surviving
Zwickel of the holocaust, who, not a pacifist, emigrated to the new Promised
Land of Israel, there to mock the shades of his grandfathers and grandmothers
by designing ever more elegant and efficient and effective weapons of mass
destruction 'til his hands were drenched in the blood of his Semitic cousins,
born on the "wrong" side of the progeny of Abraham.
A Wandering Jew among
the hills of ancient Judea, a prematurely old Daniel comes upon some alien
technology which, he discovers, can transport him back in time. He
has become a social historian of sorts and in search of a theoretical solution
to the shambled horrors of the mid-twentieth century he has developed the
"Nexus Theory" which suggests "nexi", or points in time which could, if
altered, impact dramatically on the course of history. His favorite
is Puebla, Mexico, May 5, 1862, site of the famous Bataile de la Republique
where cousin Napoleon III nearly got his arse whupped by the Mexicans before
establishing the new Empire de la Mexique and that, my friends, is where
our story is about to begin. But first, please be so kind as to allow
me one more prefacing remark in the form of an entry from his journal,
translated from the original Hebrew. It is dated January 8th, 1992
and begins thus:
I am an old man and I can no longer
bear the pain. I carry the weight of too much history and too little
humanity. Tonight I
embark on a journey and leave this final journal
entry more as a conceit then as a gesture to any reader as may come upon
it—likely it shall cease to exist. I cannot say this for a certainty
as I go the road never yet traveled, and so I leave this to a posterity
which may or may not disappear in my absence.
With any luck the
specter of the corpses of two million Jews
will cease to haunt my waking dreams, vanishing
with the last evil traces of the demon Jacque LeNoir, known within nouveau-fascist
circles affectionately as Black Jack, author of the Holocaust.
In my mind's eye I
see a triumphant post-WW I France, a
united States where now, for all practical
purposes, three separate nations exist (four if you include the secessionist
Western Territories); a single Spanish Mexico celebrating a fifth of May
or cinco de mayo if you prefer on which the forces of Napoleon III under
the Brigadier Charles Latrille, Compte de Lorencez were defeated hard by
the “Cerros de Guadalupe y Loreto”, the twin forts of el General Ignacio
Zaragoza.
For I believe the
battle at Puebla to be absolutely pivotal.
In a nutshell: The French lose.
No more Mayan Dynasty, no
Northern and Southern Mexico, French and Spanish
biting and
hissing and scratching like the British and
the Irish, vainly
attempting to hold together a country occupied
by an absentee
European landlord. The Confederate States,
lacking the support of the French, lose their bid for autonomy, remain
with a union of States with Louisiana but a sleepy backwater state rather
than the trade nerve center of the continent. Perhaps the autonomous
Western Territories forget their enmity over time and remain in concord
with the Union. Such a mighty nation would easily help to defeat
the Prussians.
Mexico would in all
probability not be a factor at all and
without Northern Mexico, Louisiana and the
Confederacy,
Germany would stand not a chance in Lenoir's
hell of defeating the French and its allies.
A triumphant France
would not suffer the indignity of defeat
leading to a massive economical collapse and
an inflation where, literally, a wheelbarrow of francs is needed to buy
a family's groceries. And a Belgian half-Jewish carpenter son-of-a-whore
would not rise as the savior of Royal France to send two million Jews to
the ovens. You see, with a German defeat in WW I a fat and complacent
France would never entertain such a monster and leave not so much as a
stain in the path of history.
So tonight I intend
to go after that Lieutenant whom I believe inspired the French to victory
in 1862. I intend to bring along a few 20th century devices as insurance.
I shall not return to
Israel for in the absence of a Holocaust the
need for a Zionist
homeland should be sufficiently lessened as
to leave Palestine the sleepy, peaceful land God intended it to be.
I shall not miss my job with the Ministry of Defense, designing weapons
with which to terrorize the Palestinians; I am sick to death of the blood
on my hands. I shall not miss Israel and its fanatics.
I intend to jump only
part way back to the second decade of
this century and observe from a cantina somewhere
in Baja's La
Paz the Prussian defeat. Then contemplate
the Torah with a shot of tequila in one hand and a Havana cigar in the
other, in proper communion with the Master of the universe.
For the Germans will
know better than to allow a dog like
LeNoir to rise to power and goose-step across
Europe with two
million dead Jews in his wake.
They are a people of culture, of
industry and efficiency. Certainly they
could better rebuild with
vigor than the contentious and arrogant French.
The Germans are a proud lot and their Jews are a partly a source of that
pride.
And those two million
of my brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles
and nieces and nephews and cousins will die natural, peaceful deaths, far
from the flames of
war.
My chariot awaits.
Peace shall be wrought in Puebla.
[Translated from the original
Hebrew
by Rabbi Benjamin Lieberman.]
