SOAP
Drek Kline is a German Jew - a bit of a scum bag - who lives from scams and small-time crime in Berlin, screws german women, drinks too much, sells cocaine.
He is a thin and quick shyster in a sharp suit, brill cream on his dark hair, Clark Gable mustache, pale bulging blue eyes, long face, and big nose.
He tugs at his earlobe when he lies, which is all the time. He is half Jewish - his mother was Jewish, his father German, but his mother died in childbirth, and his Grandmother brought him up much against her will, seeing him as a symbol of her daughter's falling away from her people.
She calls him "drek" - human garbage - and this is how she treats him. When he is 13, after his Bar Mitzvah he runs away.
Drek has forgotten what he is, denied his past. He is a made-man sharp and sly like a rat, a small-time hustler getting fat on war. He deals a little, steals a little, pimps a little, and buys jewels cheap from Jews and other desperate people wanting to flee the Nazi regime.
Then one day he is sleeping in his bed with this big-tit german girl, sleeping bare-ass but in his vest and he hears screams from downstairs. He gets up, lights a cigarette, goes to the window, and sees downstairs the vans and the soldiers and it means nothing to him.
Then they break down his door, screaming his name. He is naked in his vest with just his socks and his suspenders, his cigarette forgotten sticking to his lip.
They drag him downstairs, and the German girl comes to the window in a flowered wrap, her thick breasts hanging like udders, her yellow hair sticking up, and screams: "Schweine, let him go!"
And the officer says, "Would you like to go too?" and she shrinks back, mouth open wide, her startled tongue lapping at the icy air.
They take him "JUDEN," and he doesn't understand WHY and they stick him in that van with scared and desperate people crying and sobbing, and he sits there with his shrinking penis dangling and the children staring, and some kind man takes off his long coat so he can cover his nakedness.
He gets processed, shoved into a train, and taken to a camp in Poland. He is outraged; he does NOT consider himself a Jew - he complains, tries to talk to "someone in charge," and gets beaten for his troubles.
He is deloused, given a uniform, and he gets a bunk next to a Rabbi who gets up every morning and whispers, "Next year, Jerusalem."
The Rabbi is a small man with long sidelocks who chants each morning: "If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither" and "Next year, Jerusalem, next year..." and it drives Drek mad.
His daily response is, "FUCK OFF!" They kept each other alive As the days and weeks progress, this old man becomes the symbol of the difference that is killing him, the inheritance he rejected and left behind and is now destroying him.
Hating the Rabbi keeps him alive. The Rabbi has these very thin white feet, I don't know why. Drek would see them sticking out, these white feet, when everywhere there was dirt and mud, and they wore paper slippers - and he hated him even more - because he loved him, you see.
One day they wake up, and the Germans are gone, but the Rabbi does not get up. So Drek screams at him, "Don't you die now, you fucker! Not now! Next year Jerusalem, remember? Next year Jerusalem!"
The Rabbi holds his hand and tries to speak, and he dies. So Drek takes the Rabbi's star of David - the yellow rag of shame- and he hacks off his sidelocks with a shard of glass. The Americans come the next day, but Drek tells them to fuck off, drags himself through the open gates, and starts to walk from Poland to Jerusalem.
It takes him over a year, and he gets there, and he goes to the foot of the wall and gouges a hole in the dead ground and buries the Rabbi in the temple of Soloman.
Then he goes and asks to fight. They tell him no. he can barely stand. He doesn't eat, you see, he can't. Everything he eats he throws up. So he does a scam. like he used to in Berlin. He steals a shipment of cigarettes, American chocolates, and nylon stockings and bribes a ranking officer in the new Israeli Army. He gets assigned to a battalion under the authority of Joseph Levi. This is Leila's Joseph (you will see him in the script) and he dislikes Drek, despises him, and calls him "soap".
On the day of the battle for Jerusalem, the street and the house they are holding is bombarded, and Joseph is wounded, his legs crushed. Drek takes him out of the rubble and drags him to the nursing station and he keeps screaming, "You can't die now! Not now! Not now!" "You can't die this is Jerusalem, and it is ours."
He takes Joseph to Leila, and he is dead already. No breath, no final words are said - but Drek lies. He tells Leila Joseph died with her name in his lips, struggling to live. Drek takes Joseph's gun, and goes back to fight, walking into the clouds of dust. He survives and stays.
He calls himself Joseph Soap; he stays and makes a life.
MC
