by John Klima
My sisters knew what I was doing. So did my parents. None of them stopped me. I think they figured this was my way of working out Danny’s death, and they liked the way I was serious about something. Before this I’d been flighty, accidentally good at school but never dedicated to it—nor to anything else, for that matter. Like a lot of children of immigrants, I reacted to their resolve and perseverance by becoming indifferent to everything except the Dodgers…and, in my case, spelling.
So they quietly encouraged my newfound interest in spelling, recognizing it for the homage it was. Mom did have a tendency to stiffen and get quiet when I started spouting off Anglo-Saxon roots during one of my etymology binges. They sounded too much like German to her. She saw the effect the whole game had on my sisters, though, who started to seem more substantial again, their colors more vibrant, as they came home from the library with new words to challenge me. They asked doctors and lawyers, people whose lives revolved around jargon, for new ones. I soaked them all up, a glutton for words to fill the space left by Danny’s loss.
At the same time, I was spooked by my own obsession. Miriam’s dybbuk comment rang around in my head. If the dybbuk took over someone close to it to complete an unfinished task, didn’t it make a certain kind of sense that Danny would come for me? Was that why I was dreaming of him?
I told you there’s no such thing as dybbuks, he’s saying to me in a dream. We’re sitting next to each other, about to parachute out of a C-47 that’s bucking and shuddering from flak. I think my dreaming mind has borrowed the scene from a movie, but the thought is stripped away like the streaming silk canopies opening below the plane and then ripped away out of sight.
Maybe you’re just telling me that so I don’t know you’re one, I say.
It’s his turn to jump. He cracks a smile at me over his shoulder. You have weird hang-ups, he says. Then he’s gone.
Waking up, my first thought was that I’d never heard anyone say hang-up like that before.
It didn’t stop there. Didn’t stop anywhere, really, even though as the war dragged on and the news out of Europe mounted to a pitch of awful horror that penetrated even my self-obsession, I learned to stop talking about it all the time. The lesson came at the breakfast table late in 1943. The Fifth Army was in Italy, the U-boats that had murdered my brother were vanishing from the Atlantic, and Hitler was beginning to pay the price for his dream of conquering Russia. Guadalcanal and Midway had cut the Japanese down to size. The war was turning.
My father built pianos. Well, he did until Pearl Harbor. Then Steinway and Sons, like every other manufacturer in the country, tried to figure out some way to make itself useful to the war effort. After backing-and-forthing with the War Production Board, Steinway settled on parts for the CG-4A glider, which was basically a vehicle for controlled crash landings. It didn’t have to fly; it just had to fall from a C-47 tow plane to earth without killing the pilot and wrecking whatever it was carrying.
It wasn’t easy, that’s for sure. There’s a famous story about how Henry Ford tried to get into armaments production during the First World War, and found out that although he knew just about everything there was to know about making cars, that didn’t mean he had the first clue about how to make boats. By World War II, Ford had the war-matériel game figured out—they turned out a pile of CG-4A’s—but Steinway sure didn’t. They cut and recut, jiggered processes around, held the Army’s blueprints at various angles…and still the glider wings came out wrong.
Until one day my dad lost his temper on the factory floor. I imagine him there, surrounded by jigsaws and racks of tools, ankle-deep in sawdust and hemmed in by the suits demanding to know why the company who made the greatest pianos in the world couldn’t make something as simple as a wing for a glider that was only designed to crash.
“You leave me alone for a day,” my dad said—he said a lot of other things, but I’m giving you the story as I got it, in its bowdlerized (from Thomas Bowdler, nineteenth-century English physician who published a kids’ version of Shakespeare without all of the dirty jokes and gore) version—“You leave me alone for a day, and I’ll figure it out.”
They did, and he did, and Steinway made glider wings. The company also turned a nice dime by painting a bunch of unsold uprights olive drab and selling those to the Army as “Victory Verticals,” but my dad didn’t have anything to do with that, except indirectly, and that part of the story comes later.
The reason I bring up his job is that he used to come home from work, and with help from my uncle Mike, read the letters we got from relatives in Europe. By 1943 we all knew what was going on. There had even been demonstrations in New York; that spring our whole family went and stood outside Madison Square Garden while inside various luminaries demanded that the government do something about what the newspapers were delicately calling the “plight of the European Jew.” Not that any of us thought the demonstration would do any good. The way my mordant Uncle Mike put it, “We demonstrated in 1933, when the Nazis were just burning books, and look where that got us. Now they’re burning us.”
In 1933 I was two years old. For some reason Uncle Mike’s comment got to me. I felt for weeks afterward that I was a creature of futility, doomed to merely witness.
Anyway, in 1943 some letters were still getting out. For some reason the Nazis were more likely to let letters through if they were written in German—for that matter, Jews who spoke German were marginally more likely to get on protection lists and survive in the camps—so our cousins in Poland and Czechoslovakia wrote us in German. They got letters—don’t ask me how—to another cousin in Russia, or sometimes a former business associate who fled to Sweden, and the letters got passed on, eventually, to us. My parents got some of it because they spoke Yiddish, but my Yiddish vocabulary was restricted to insults and endearments, so I waited for Uncle Mike to pause and catch me up via extempore—and, I’m sure, idiosyncratic—translations. (Idiosyncratic, from the Greek idios and synkrasis, “one’s own mixture.” Extempore is even better: from the Latin that means “out of time.” What did you do to me, Danny?)
What I tried to do was pick out words that were interesting, or that I didn’t know, or that I knew something about but not enough. Reflexively I would try to spell them, or test them against my embryonic knowledge of etymology. This time what happened was a little different. The letter mentioned Auschwitz, and I thought Klinkojoke. My mouth opened and, louder than I meant to, I said to Uncle Mike, “In German Witz means joke.”
Of course I shouldn’t have said it. Not then and there. But it was one of those moments when you suddenly discover that you’re attuned to something that you find irresistibly adult—the small, gruesome ironies of language—and Uncle Mike had the blackest sense of humor of anyone I’ve ever known. And that little coincidence in the Germanization of Óswi¸ecim (not so unlike the Germanization of Kalienkowicze to Klinkowitz) was the kind of cruel witticism the Nazis would have appreciated, or for all I knew did appreciate. In the same vein as Arbeit Macht Frei. Or the “model ghetto” at Terezin. I meant it to be a sort of letter of introduction into the mysterious and seductive adult sphere of world-weariness and caustic humor.
Silence fell at the table. Uncle Mike put down his fork, and in a gesture for which I have always been grateful, tried to save me from my own idiot flippancy.
“That’s America,” he said with a chuckle. “Education, education, education.”
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” my mother said, with a coldness in her voice that I’d never heard before. “The Germans killed your brother. They’re killing every Jew in Europe. And you joke about it. You spell.” She twisted the last word, making it sound filthy somehow, as if spelling was something you did to little kids when nobody was looking.
“Zol zein,” Uncle Mike said quietly. “He’s just a boy, Sarah.” He folded the letter up and handed it back to my father. I learned to stop talking about spelling after that.
My sisters left me alone, too, so my s
pelling mania became a solitary preoccupation. I struck a balance in my head, learning to live with the sense of triviality that came from obsessing over words while my people were being erased from the earth.
Danny got it, at least.
You’re on a roll, kiddo, he says to me that night. We’re walking along a beach. This was fall of 1943, so I’m guessing the beach was somewhere in Italy, although it could have been Wake or Bougainville. I followed the war in Europe more closely, though, for obvious reasons, so I’m guessing it was Italy. Salerno, probably.
Sesquipedalian, he says to me. I spell it.
See? he says.
Screw you, I say. We walk along the beach a little farther. Artillery rumbles over the horizon. Soldiers climb out of the ground and run backwards into the ocean. A B-24 rises up in flaming pieces from the ocean and eats its own trail of smoke on its way back up into the sky.
Seriously, Danny says. You’re a hell of a lot better at this than I was.
Sesquipedalian’s easy, I say. Spelled just like it sounds. Nothing tricky about it.
Danny’s laughing. I smell saltwater, and I notice his uniform is wet.
It was true, though. Compare sesquipedalian with the winning word in 1942, sacrilegious. I knew that one, too, but it has that tricky transposition of the I and the E. Like sacristy, not like sacred, which is what you would expect.
Winter came. The refugees in the basement stole our coal and erupted in furious arguments before sunrise. I learned words. My bar mitzvah came in January, and suddenly because I went to synagogue and read a blessing, I was supposed to follow the Commandments. I couldn’t make anything make any sense because I was an obsessive with no possibility of putting my obsession to use. I was running out of eligibility, too. Age wasn’t going to be a problem, at least not unless the war lasted a lot longer than people were saying it would; but I was due to finish eighth grade in June of 1944, and unless there was a regional that year, I would never get a chance to compete. This possibility ate at me, kept me up at night, had me devouring newspapers and radio broadcasts and movie newsreels for hints that the end was coming.
Do we need to apologize for the fact that as children we fail at things that no child should be expected to do? Perhaps in extraordinary times we do. Looking back—now that I’ve had fifty years to learn reflection—I can tell you that what I really wanted was my family safe. I wanted no more Judenfrei, no more letters that had to travel ten thousand miles to get from Poland to Brooklyn, if they got there at all. No more lists of the dead, and rumors of the missing. No more pale sisters silent in their room. No more mother bursting out in rage-fueled accusations that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t serious enough, wasn’t Jewish enough.
And the spelling bee started to stand in for all of that for me. Maybe it’s superficial, or cowardly, but I couldn’t handle it. I think I came to feel that the only way for me to survive it was to strip myself of whatever parts of my identity left me vulnerable to the horror of it all, and substitute the endless gluttony for syllables that got me up in the morning and lulled me to sleep at night while the adults conferred in the kitchen over school, work, the war, the Shoah.
Which nobody was yet calling the Holocaust, at least not with a capital H. (Holocaust: from the Greek holokaustos, “burnt whole.” Word used by Greek translators of the Torah for burnt offerings to God; there’s irony for you.)
“He turns to words,” I heard Uncle Mike say to my mother one night in the kitchen, when they thought I was asleep. “What could be more Jewish than that?”
God is mysterious that way.
I decided to fail the eighth grade. By the spring of 1944 it was clear that there would be no spelling bee that year, and although I was failing at so much else I would not fail the memory of my brother—even if not failing meant I had to fail.
So I quit doing homework, and started cutting school almost every day. It was late enough in the school year that I had to work pretty hard at being held back, since my grades from earlier in the year were pretty good, but I was counting on the establishment of a downward trend to make up for that.
The truant officer came to our house three times. My mother slapped my face. My father, skinny with sorrow and overtime, shook his head in weary disgust. On Passover, my sisters, taking a break from helping my mother cook for the seder, huddled like a flock of birds and sent Miriam over to make overtures. “We know what you’re doing,” she said. “Daniel wouldn’t have wanted you to.”
“Maybe I’ll ask him,” I said, cruelly, and she went back to her flock of four.
I do ask him, while we’re walking through the pulverized rubble of some European city that night. Fires smolder in the ruins. Danny, me, and a couple of stray dogs. Aircraft engines thrum overhead, but the sky is a featureless black.
So am I wrong, Danny?
What do I know, he says. I’m just a dybbuk.
What you are is fish food, I say. In waking life, he is the only thing I can’t be flip about. Here it’s different.
Not even that anymore, he says.
What were you doing when it happened? I ask him.
He looks me in the eye. It?
When you got killed, I say. When the torpedo hit.
Signaling, he says, and pantomimes a semaphore. I don’t catch the letters. Telling the ship behind us that one of our engines was acting up and we could only make eight knots.
He sees the question in my eyes and goes on. Yeah, he says. I was on deck, astern over the engine room. The fish hit us square under my feet, bounced me into the drink. Then the water coming in through the hole sucked me right along with it.
His retelling is pitiless, and makes me ashamed of the movies I played in my head. Still I want him to answer my first question, but I can’t ask it again.
Never was a very good swimmer, Danny says. But it doesn’t matter.
I can feel onrushing wakefulness, like the Dopplering sound of a train whistle. Then he’s crying, my dead not-dybbuk fish-food maybe-ghost of a brother. Yesterday Howard went home, he says.
Morning brought news that it was true. Klinkojoke had died when the B-24 on which he was a nose gunner got shot up over Bad Voslau, Austria, and crashed in the English Channel on the way back. Deborah, Ruth, and Eva cried for a week (Eva from the great distance of Morningside Heights because she’d gotten a scholarship to go to Barnard and was living in a dormitory there). They’d loved Klinkojoke, and Miriam cried because they did. I was so scared because of what Danny had told me that I had to scare somebody else, so I told Miriam.
“Danny told me about it last night,” I said. We were out in the backyard garden, which was one of the few good things about having a ground-floor apartment. The air was cool, and beyond the concrete patio the whole yard was turned up and cordoned off into a victory garden. “He also told me how he died.”
She’d been suffering a recurrent sniffle over Klinkojoke, but it stopped and she got absolutely still. “That’s not funny, Josh.”
“Remember what I told you right after he died? It’s been happening ever since.”
Miriam got up from the bench where we were sitting and went back inside. We never talked about Danny again. I always felt that what happened to her after the war was my fault, and that if it hadn’t started when Danny died, it started that April Sunday morning, just after Passover, on the patio next to the stakes and strings and shoots of the victory garden. But I don’t know how I could have done it any different.
In June—the day after the Allies landed at Normandy—my parents were notified that I would be required to repeat the eighth grade unless I completed summer school. My father took me aside, and we both understood that he was doing me a favor by relieving my mother of the duty. “You’re thirteen years old, Joshua,” he said, “and for twelve of those years you’ve been the smart one of my boys. Now I want you to tell me, man to man. Are you doing this because you got the idea that you need to be more like your brother now that he’s dead?”
This was t
he longest speech I’d ever heard my father give, and it took me a minute to recover my surly equanimity. “What if I am?” I asked him.
“Then I’ll get you on at Steinway,” he said without missing a beat. “If you’re just going to clown around at school, you might as well get the hell out of it and make some use of yourself.”
For as long as I’ve been alive since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if there was something I expected less than that. I thought about it.
“Can I work for the summer and then go back?”
My father laughed. “That’s exactly what Mike said you would say. Okay. That’s what we’ll do.”
And we did. I got on the train with my father every morning that summer, while the Allied pincer tightened on Germany and the Marines ground their way toward Japan. My job was to tape the keyboards and pedals of old unsalable Steinway uprights so they could be spray-painted Army green. Victory Verticals. I taped them, they went in for spraying, the paint dried, I peeled the tape. Then came the best part of my job, which was stenciling PROPERTY OF THE US ARMY on the back of every one. At the end of every day I rode the subway home with my dad; he complained about the lousy quality of the wood they were getting for the glider wings, and I picked white paint out from under my fingernails. I never did ask him how he got me the job. The wartime economy had the country as close to full employment as it ever got, but it’s my guess that plenty of grown men—or women—would have taken the job I had as a thirteen-year-old kid. I imagine a conversation in which my father, covered with grease and sawdust from the factory floor, goes to Mr. Steinway and explains the situation, whereupon Mr. Steinway does a favor for the guy who finally got the wing design right. It’s the only time in my life I indulged in a little nepotism (from the Latin nepos, “nephew”; originally the favors bestowed by a pope on his illegitimate children). Something about the daily physical work, the routine of getting up early and working had an effect on my dreams. I didn’t talk to Danny all summer, even in July when Majdanek became the first concentration camp to be liberated and all of our worst suspicions began to be confirmed.