Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  “I’m sure you’ve all noticed I’m wearing a simple cotton dress,” she began. “My dear parents wanted to buy me a gown with a train, tiara, and veil, but that’s not me. And it’s not Zach. Both of us felt kind of weird about having a big shindig at the Tavern on the Green while millions of our fellow citizens are hungry and homeless, but we wanted to celebrate with all our friends and my wonderful, enormous, extended family so we agreed to let Mom and Dad give us the wedding. Unfortunately, Zach’s father died shortly before Zach and I met; he lost his mother when he was in college and he has no other living relatives, which is why every family member here is from my side. But my aunts, uncles, and cousins adopted him wholeheartedly and he loves them, too, so I know he joins me in thanking all of you for coming from near and far to share our happiness. And, I’m sure none of you give a fig what I’m wearing.

  “Instead of spending a fortune on an outfit I would wear for one day, I asked my parents to donate the equivalent amount of money to Women Strike for Peace and a couple of other groups working to end the Vietnam War, and since Mom and Dad are great people with great politics and they love me hugely, that’s exactly what they did. Then I went to Macy’s and bought this lovely frock for $69.95—and my new husband just told me I look like a million bucks.”

  Affirmation came as a round of applause.

  “We also decided not to spend money on fancy centerpieces. Instead, as you can see, there’s a beautiful doll on each table that was handmade by a women’s craft collective in Guatemala. You might think we did this to be politically correct—I’m often accused of that—[laughter] but wouldn’t you prefer to support women’s economic self-sufficiency than some Park Avenue florist? Now, listen up everyone: check the underside of your service plate. If there’s a Band-Aid stuck to it, you’re the lucky person at your table who gets to take the doll home. Please give it to your favorite little girl—or boy—with love from me and Zach.”

  After much clinking of china and table-by-table eruptions of “I got the Band-Aid!” Bonnie went on. “Speaking of giving, we don’t need stemware, silver, ice crushers, or knife sharpeners. If you want to give us a gift, we’d prefer it be a contribution in honor of our marriage. Just send a check to a worthy cause like Planned Parenthood or the Sierra Club or . . .”

  “The ACLU!” Zach interjected, leaning into the microphone. “Don’t forget, they pay my salary!”

  Bonnie grinned. “And boy, does he earn it!” She turned to her groom and raised her glass. “To the kindest, most principled man I’ve ever known. For everything you are, and everything you do, I love you, Zachariah Levy. Thank you for signing my petition.”

  THEY HONEYMOONED IN Costa Rica, five days hiking in the Monteverde Cloud Forest, five picking beans on a small fair-trade coffee plantation in Llano Bonito. Back in New York, they found a cheap rental on Spring Street—a floor-through loft with huge windows, wide-planked wooden floors, in a former warehouse with a cast-iron facade, gargoyles, and Doric columns—and furnished it with Bonnie’s family hand-me-downs. They cooked dinner together every night and ate at a small table pulled close to the windows that overlooked other buildings with cast-iron facades. They drank cheap Chianti from jugs wrapped in straw and talked about what each of them did that day. They watched the news of the summer unfold on TV—Watergate, the Nixon tapes, the President’s resignation—and made love, sometimes in bed and sometimes, when they couldn’t wait, on the wide-planked floor.

  Contentment was not something Zach Levy took for granted. He was grateful for his wife, for his marriage, and for his work, which, rewarding in itself, also had begun to earn plaudits from his peers. Bonnie opened a small store in the East Village and sold artifacts from the progressive political campaigns and social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—women’s suffrage handbills, labor union leaflets, civil rights buttons, antiwar posters, antinuke bumper stickers, mimeographed position papers from a wide array of women’s liberation groups. She named her shop, “Solidarity Forever.” Zach called it, “The Little Shop of Lost Causes.”

  He admired his wife almost as much as he loved her, but, despite that line in his toast, he discovered she wasn’t perfect. Her rigidity could be infuriating; once she took a position, there was no budging her, so unless he was prepared for a major argument, Zach thought twice before differing with her on anything that she cared about. As comfortable as he was confronting his legal adversaries, conflict on the home front made him anxious. He seemed to have inherited his mother’s aversion to the raised voice and his father’s commitment to keep the peace.

  Sports was the only issue on which Zach pushed back. Growing up playing stickball in the streets of the Bronx, rooting for the Yanks or Knicks, and memorizing box scores and stats, he had felt like a normal all-American boy, rather than the heir to a European catastrophe. Sports had provided refuge from the oppressive atmosphere in his parents’ apartment and the horrific images that sporadically flashed through his skull. Bonnie, however, “absolutely loathed” sports and expressed her antipathy not just in disinterest but disdain, shunning anything that required physical exertion, involved a ball, or required keeping score. Her passions were politics and history, fiction and poetry, theater and movies, activism and sex. Her views brooked no contradiction: Professional athletes were mercenaries who sold themselves to the highest bidder and endorsed sneakers most kids couldn’t afford. Sports fans were fanatics who drank the Kool-Aid. Fandom was a capitalist conspiracy to dull the pain of poverty and distract workers from their grievances. She often said that were it not for home team hype and the “we won, they lost” mentality, millions of Americans would long ago have taken to the streets demanding higher wages, better working conditions, and universal health care.

  Bonnie told him she’d been seduced into partisanship only once—when Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs in the so-called “Battle of the Sexes.” After the middle-aged Riggs taunted the country’s top-ranked female tennis players, bragging that he could beat any of them—and Margaret Court, then the number one woman in the country, took Riggs on and suffered a humiliating loss, on Mother’s Day, yet—the headlines were unavoidable, even for Bonnie. Riggs’s arrogance having raised her hackles, she watched the telecast from the Houston Astrodome along with sixty million other people and felt euphoric when the feminist icon beat the male chauvinist pig in straight sets. As far as Bonnie was concerned, it wasn’t a tennis match, it was gender warfare.

  When Zach watched an occasional ball game on TV or attended a sports event, she raised no objection, so he was unprepared for her reaction when they were going over their monthly bills and she lit into him for wanting to re-up at the gym.

  “A year’s membership costs as much as some people’s rent,” she said. “I think it’s obscene to spend that kind of money on your body.”

  “And I think it’s important to stay fit.” Zach opened the checkbook. “You’re way too sedentary, Bonnie. A protest march doesn’t qualify as a workout.”

  “If you need exercise so badly, go volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. Build a house. Paint a school. Clean up the waterfront.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I work ten hours a day. I have a full-time job.”

  “If you have time to jump around on those machines, you have time to do something useful.” Bonnie reached for the checkbook. Zach held it close and shook his head ruefully. His back was up now.

  “I’m already doing something useful,” he said. “I’ve got a huge workload. I’m under a lot of pressure. You want me to work out at the gym or have a heart attack like your Uncle Sid?”

  Of her six well-loved uncles, Sid had been Bonnie’s favorite. “Okay, forget it,” she murmured, as graceful a retraction as Zach would get from his wife on any subject. In the end, he wrote the check to the gym for a two-year membership at a discount price. He also persuaded Bonnie to walk to her shop a couple of days a week, rather than take the bus. Then she got pregnant—without meaning to, and far earlier in the marria
ge than they’d intended, though they were thrilled nonetheless—and suddenly, she was as interested in health and fitness as he was.

  “I think I’m going to stop by the gym,” she announced, one morning. “I hear they have special classes for pregnant women.”

  In her fourth month, Bonnie came home with a book of baby names that had separate alphabetized sections for girls and boys, each name followed by its meaning and biblical, ethnic, or national origin.

  “Aren’t you jumping the gun?” Zach asked, remembering his mother’s superstition. “I’ve heard it’s bad luck to name a baby before it’s born.”

  “That’s just an old wives’ tale—or an old husband’s,” she grinned. “Come on, let’s pick out some names. It’ll be fun.”

  He opened the refrigerator and took out a blueberry yogurt. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks,” she flipped the pages of the book. “You tell me your favorite girls’ names and I’ll tell you what they mean.”

  Zach pulled off the yogurt lid. “I’ve never thought about baby names,” he replied, though, of course, he had. “All I know is Jewish people are supposed to name a baby after someone in the family who died.”

  Bonnie found a yellow highlighter in the pencil cup near the phone and made a few marks in the name book.

  Zach stirred up the fruit. “You’re lucky your parents are still alive . . .”

  “Thank God! Poo-poo-poo!” she said, a poor imitation of the Eastern European Jews who, whenever someone said something positive about them, spit out a “thpu-thpu-thpu” sound to stop the evil eye from jinxing their good luck. “My Uncle Sid’s been dead for a while, but I’m not ready to name a child after him. I don’t think I could bear it. Now listen while I try out a few girls’ names on you.” She scanned the page. “How about . . .”

  Zach interrupted, “Rebecca is a beautiful name. I really like Rebecca.”

  “I’m sure you do. I know Rebecca’s English for Rivka, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for our daughter.” Bonnie said, flipping through the pages and stopping now and then to use the highlighter. “How do you feel about Fiona?”

  “Fiona’s not a Jewish name,” Zach barked, as if its Scottish-Irish origin was what bothered him. Stunned by her blunt rejection of Rebecca, he quickly spooned up the last of his yogurt and threw the container in the trash. “Why are you in the Fs anyway?”

  “For my Aunt Frieda,” Bonnie said, blandly.

  “Are you saying we shouldn’t name our girl after my mother, but we should name her after a Great Aunt you hardly ever saw? How many times did you visit your Aunt Frieda in the ten years before she died?”

  Bonnie turned the name book face down on the counter and approached him. “My Aunt Frieda was a cheery, jolly woman. I don’t know how to say this kindly, Zach, but from what you’ve told me, your mom was a tortured soul. She had every reason to be traumatized, still . . .”

  Zach flinched. The expression on Bonnie’s face was both compassionate and uncompromising. She stroked his hair. “I’m sorry but I really feel strongly about this, Zach. I just don’t think it’s fair to saddle our baby with such a tragic backstory; it’s bad karma.”

  He pushed her hand away. “On that basis no one would ever name a child after someone killed in the camps.”

  “That’s fine with me.” Bonnie went back to the counter and snapped a banana off the bunch. “There are other ways to memorialize Holocaust victims. Besides, you’re the last person in the world who needs another reminder of the dead.” She peeled the banana in three smooth pulls. “Just yesterday you were wallowing in some old misery.”

  Yesterday, they’d been forced to evacuate the building because of a gas leak in the neighborhood and while they were out in the street waiting for Con Edison to check the source of the problem, Zach had made the mistake of telling Bonnie about Etty Moskowitz.

  ZACH HAD BEEN doing his math homework when Rivka said she smelled gas and sent him to find the super. He decided to take the back stairs. Two floors below, the smell hit him full blast. He knocked loudly on the Moskowitz’s kitchen door several times then turned the handle and let himself in. Etty was kneeling on the floor with her head inside the oven, her body limp, a towel tented over her head to trap the fumes.

  At fifteen, he could not believe that a woman who had survived Treblinka, made it to America, married a kind man, and had four sweet kids would end her own life. Especially the way she did it. Gas was the terror of the camps. Both of Etty’s parents had been exterminated in the gas chambers. Yet she chose gas. Or maybe that’s why she chose it.

  She was Zach’s first “survivor suicide.” There would be others—Primo Levi’s being the most notable—but it was her death that brought home the power of survival guilt. It also gave Zach the idea that his mother might kill herself. After they came home from Etty’s funeral, he asked his parents if either of them had ever considered ending their lives. Nathan said he wouldn’t give Hitler the satisfaction. Rivka said she owed it to the Six Million to stay alive, but if not for the Torah’s commandment to “choose life,” she would have done herself in years ago.

  “Your mama’s upset about Etty,” Nathan had put in, quickly. “She doesn’t mean it.”

  Something in Zach changed after Etty Moskowitz died. He developed a morbid fascination with the Holocaust, the workings of the concentration camps, the Nazi killing machine, and specifically Zyklon B. He learned that twelve cans of the German gas—hydrogen cyanide crystals that released their toxins when heated to twenty-seven degrees Celsius—could only incinerate fifteen hundred prisoners per day and when the ovens couldn’t keep up with the output of the gas chambers, bodies were dumped in a giant pit and set afire. There were times when Zach thought he smelled the stench of Auschwitz on University Avenue, times when the Bronx became Birkenau in his mind, times when, during a walk with his father in Pelham Bay Park, he saw a cop in high leather boots turn into a Nazi commandant. In the steam room at the schvitz, a skinny old man morphed into a cadaverous inmate. The shower fixtures in the locker room at DeWitt Clinton High School became gas jets. And on Saturday, when Zach and Gary Elkind were jammed up against one another in a packed subway car on their way to the theater district to see Fiddler on the Roof, the D train turned into a cattle car.

  The first year that the Holocaust visions appeared, they freaked him out. But after enduring a dozen or more of them, he realized he could simply wait them out and they would dissipate, like a sudden dizzy spell. An occasional vision seemed a small price to pay for having escaped his brother’s fate. He called them “flare-ups,” not flashbacks, because how could a kid flash back to something he had never witnessed?

  WHILE CON ED WAS checking the pipes under Spring Street and Zach and Bonnie were waiting to be allowed back in their building, he had told her about Etty’s suicide but not that Holocaust hallucinations still visited him now and then. Why make a big deal about something he couldn’t change?

  “I wasn’t wallowing in misery yesterday,” he countered, watching her eat her banana and finding it erotic despite himself. “I was recalling a sad childhood memory. The gas leak triggered it.”

  “That’s my point. You don’t need any more triggers. You have enough sad memories as it is.” Bonnie marked another baby name with the highlighter and folded down the corner of that page. “Hey! What about Emma? I love Emma, don’t you?”

  “Let me guess: Emma, as in Goldman? While you’re in the E’s, why not Eleanor, as in Roosevelt?” Zach meant it sarcastically.

  “Great idea!” she raved.

  “I’m holding out for Rebecca,” Zach replied, annoyed. He plopped down in front of the TV and turned on the Mets game.

  “And I’m holding firm against the intergenerational transmission of trauma,” Bonnie said, before she put on her Walkman earphones and looked up Eleanor in the book.

  They argued about baby names for the next four months. Bonnie refused to entertain anything beginning with a Y for Yitzhak but she did agree, if
they had a boy, to name him Nathaniel. In return, Zach gave up on Rebecca. For a girl, they compromised on Anabelle, an amalgam of the names of one deceased relative from each of their families, neither of whom had died tragically: Bonnie’s Great Aunt Anna, who petered out at ninety-two, and Zach’s maternal grandmother, Belle, who expired of an ordinary heart attack before he was born. Bonnie declared unilaterally that Anabelle would also be named in memory of Anna Strunsky, the radical writer who was a Socialist, Quaker, war resister, and cofounder of the NAACP; and in honor of Bella Abzug, the crusading feminist Congresswoman, former union lawyer and indefatigable political activist, who had just introduced in the House the first federal gay rights bill in US history—and who was famous for wearing big-brimmed hats.

  Anabelle Emma Eleanor Bertelsman Levy was born on November 24, 1975.

  HER TAFFETA PARTY dress stained with cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie, Anabelle had fallen asleep in her car seat on the drive home from Bonnie’s parents’ house on Long Island. The smears of chocolate icing on the baby’s cheeks were evidence of her birthday having fallen this year on Thanksgiving, and her grandmother having added a birthday cake to the feast. Zach had congratulated himself for successfully carrying her to her room, undressing her, washing off the icing, and putting her to bed without waking her. He was at the sink trying to floss out the shred of turkey that had wedged between his molars, when Bonnie appeared in the frame of the bathroom door wearing a flannel nightgown the color of smog.

  “There’s no right way to say this, Zach.” His wife paused to tug at her sleeve. “I’ve met someone. I want a divorce.”