When I say "when I was in Amsterdam" — know that something real is about to come out.
Not a trip. Not a photo with a canal in the background. Not a postcard.
Something real.
The first time I was sixteen. 1978. A camping tour with my cousin and some friends. A street-smart kid from Tel Aviv who thought he understood the world because he could pull a coin out of thin air.
In Amsterdam, I lost my virginity.
(My beloved and sensitive daughter — you know I told you the truth isn't always enough. This time it is. Really.)
I have one particularly sharp memory from that trip. I slept in the same sleeping bag with an incredible Yemenite girl, and I honestly had no idea what she wanted from me. On the other hand, I did manage to go with the guys somewhere entirely different. To pay. (I said "to pay." That's not politically correct. I apologize — I'm not converting to anything.)
In Amsterdam, you leave things behind.
That's the rule.
Forty years passed.
2018. The Rijksmuseum project. Four months I lived there, fifty-six years old, alone with myself and the city. Amsterdam took me back without questions — the way it takes everyone — with the smell of the canals and that afternoon light that falls differently there than anywhere else in the world.
Someone told me about a library.
Ancient books. Books of magic. Books that aren't supposed to be accessible to the public — and certainly not to an Israeli magician who'd crossed fifty and was still searching for things he couldn't name.
I walked. Not an Uber — I walked. I felt something strange and wonderful simultaneously. A feeling I know. A feeling Amsterdam gives me.
The place had once been a seventeenth-century conservatory. An inner courtyard. A ceiling of wood, blackened by time. The smell of paper and of secrets. Paintings on the walls with text in Hebrew.
I stopped.
Most of the great books of magic are written in Hebrew. That's not a coincidence. In that moment, I understood what it means to be Jewish — not from the religious side. From the other side. The pagan, ancient side. The one that speaks in names, not in prayers.
They asked my name.
I said Cagliostro.
They were enchanted — two Dutch curators, seasoned and magnificent. I pointed to a book. "That is the Sefer HaRazim of Solomon," said one of them, with an accent that cut through the air like a musical note. "We know every page."
But that's not what stopped me.
What stopped me was this: when I said Cagliostro — they knew immediately. Not as the stage name of an Israeli magician. As a name. As if they knew it from somewhere else. From another time.
And there is a reason for that.
Cagliostro — the real Cagliostro, the alchemist, the mystic, the great charlatan of the eighteenth century — visited Holland in 1778. In Holland, I discovered a large group of researchers who trace his path, his influence, the secret he took with him to his grave.
They gave me the front door.
I peered inside.
I understood that I would return.
The question that has stayed with me since — and more than once I have asked it aloud — is a simple one: Did I choose this stage name, or did this name choose me?
I don't answer. I don't know. And perhaps that, exactly, is the secret.
Forty years between two visits.
The first time, I left my innocence there.
The second time, I found a book that knew my name before I walked in.
Amsterdam keeps things for you. Waits. Knows you'll come back.
Then my wife walked through the door and said we can't take my sister who flew in from America in a dirty car and we absolutely have to wash it right now.
Amsterdam will wait.
It always waits.
— The Magician
The library from the story — Embassy of the Free Mind, Amsterdam
The library that knew my name before I walked in.
השאר תגובה