(Not that You Asked)

by Steve Almond

  More occasionally, my mother would prepare a Chanukah feast: latkes with sour cream and applesauce, which meant for me (picky little shitheel that I was) a quart of applesauce for dinner. Of the gifts, I recall only the chocolate coins in gold foil. The first time I saw a dreidl, I thought it was a piece of candy and popped it in my mouth.

  No, the big day was always Christmas, because this was when the serious giftage came out and you had to dress up and behave with a modicum of respect in order to get at the goods. My grandmother presided over these gatherings in a state of nervous exaltation. We were not to climb the furniture or lick unapproved surfaces. Her house was filled with strange artifacts—vases and delicate clay figurines—kept in museum-style cabinets. She could be ferociously tidy, though she tended to leave perishable foods such as butter out on her kitchen counter for hours at a time. When it came time to open gifts, we would bumrush the tannenbaum, while she admonished us in her sibilant German accent not tear the wrapping paper. The family albums are filled with pictures of her grandsons joyously shredding all available wrapping paper.

  The strangest thing, of course, is that none of this seemed strange at the time. And it should have been strange, because the bottom line is that Christ—as conjured by the zealots of the Church—has meant nothing but misery for the Jews.

  I could argue that the actual event (the gathering, the food, the presents) was so watered down as to qualify as theologically neutral. And I could further argue that Chanukah isn’t much of a holiday at all. The episode from which it derives plays no significant role in the Old Testament, and the miracle at the center of the ritual boils down to a maintenance issue. It’s more like a late-inning retail counterstrike.

  But these feel, finally, like rationalizations. We were purebred Jews acting like purebred Christians.

  Honestly, it makes me sad. It makes me sad to think of our family, so unmoored from its own history, spinning in our private orbits of obligation and grievance. It makes me sad to think of my grandmother embracing the culture that sought to annihilate her.

  I don’t mean to suggest that celebrating Chanukah, or affiliating ourselves more broadly with the traditions of Judaism, would have solved things. I mean only that our inability to unite as a family under the umbrella of our heritage suggested a glaring crisis of identity. We lacked the willingness to fold ourselves into some larger human brotherhood, which is the central and enduring appeal of religion.

  “We weren’t joiners,” my father has often explained.

  But I think our dilemma was more fundamental.

  What we actually lacked was belief. I don’t mean belief in a higher being, but something closer to an emotional capacity for hope. Our house was too full of insecure machismo to allow for much hope. We were too embarrassed to express such feelings, which implied weakness and dependence and left one vulnerable to mockery. We all felt the jones for connection—to each other, to our history. It simply went unrequited, as it so often does in troubled families.

  It’s no coincidence that I decided to spend half my sophomore year studying in Jerusalem. I kept hoping, as I wandered the old yellow stone of that city, that some mystical, transformative spirit would seize me. It didn’t happen.5 No, I was an atheist through and through. God was, to me, a lovely dream, a brave make-believe daddy who provided comforting answers to those who couldn’t bear the prevailing evidence.

  My appreciation of Judaism had more to do with pride. I viewed my people as the pound-for-pound champions of consciousness—Christ, Marx, Freud, Einstein—stars of the longest-running ethnic drama on earth, and, what’s more, authors of our single greatest work of literature! (Hint: Every hotel room has one.)

  It was also true that I simply liked Jews more than other people. They were, as a rule, funnier, more curious and self-reflective, than goys. They loved food. And they knew how to talk. They were talkers. My mother’s people represent the purest example of this verbal bent. Not coincidentally, they are the side of the family that grew up speaking Yiddish. I cannot begin to express my adoration for Yiddish, the official language of the shtetl Jews and the most emotionally precise vernacular ever devised. More than any holiday ritual, Yiddish is the legacy my mother passed on to me. I once actually wrote an entire cycle of poems (awful, all of them) devoted to the Yiddish word schmaltz.

  My wife is, in her own words, a “recovering Catholic.”6 I am happy to report, however, that she shares my affection for Jews. Early in our engagement, she surprised me by announcing that she wanted to convert to Judaism. I was flattered, flustered, quite close to asking if she was nuts. She explained (calmly) that she’d always admired the religion’s emphasis on ethics and learning, and that she liked the idea of raising children in one faith.

  And now that we have a daughter (one who arrived just in time for Chanukah), I’m seeing the advantages of this arrangement. My wife, after all, will have to undergo an education to convert formally, and this should mean that at least one of us will know the blessing spoken over the candles, which I forgot long ago.

  As for the rest of my family, they have all shown a greater interest in Judaism as they have grown older, my father in particular. He became a member of the chorus at a local synagogue and spent several months studying Hebrew. A few years ago, he visited Israel for the first time in many years. He sent me a postcard in which he confessed, somewhat joyfully, that he had burst into tears as he stood before the Wailing Wall.

  And I believe, in fact, that he was weeping for what he had never experienced, the faith his parents had deprived him of, the faith he failed to instill in his sons, the possibility of some great spiritual bosom into which he might nestle and rest his weary bones. I am speculating, of course, based on my own mawkish proclivities.

  I know this much: that my daughter will be raised as a Jew, that she will be afforded the chance to believe in the miracle of Chanukah, and all the other silly miracles, as suits her fancy, that she will learn the blessing (perhaps we will learn it together), and that she will make up her own mind about whether there is a God in heaven, or whether God exists between us creatures on earth.

  She will know where and who she came from. She will be loved unreasonably. The rest is hers to determine.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut right off the bat, for imparting the perfectly foolish notion that writing is an elegant and hilarious manner of rescue. This book was supposed to be about Vonnegut actually, a sort of Behind the Music biopic. That’s the pitch I sent the folks at Random House last spring. They wanted a book of essays instead. So it goes.

  To those who read early drafts and managed to deliver the bad news with kindness—Erin, Barbara, and Richard Almond, and Keith Morris, Billy Giraldi, Dave Blair, Pat Flood, Peter Keating, Karl Iagnemma, and Holden Lewis—I offer the hallowed words of gratitude employed by my nephew Lorenzo: Spank you very much!

  This spanking should and does extend to the following citizens: any editors who published this work originally, musicians who continue to make sexy music against the odds, those writers who love their characters without restraint, and the friends who continue to tolerate my panicky affections. I am especially indebted to Julia Cheiffetz and Daniel Menaker for their careful consideration of the manuscript, and irrational support.

  This brings me (thank God) to my wife and daughter, without whom I would be as lonely and angry and lost as this book often suggests.

  Finally, I would be remiss at this particular juncture if I failed to thank those humans who are striving, through words and deeds, to awaken this country from its false dreams of conquest and convenience. It is possible that Americans will again wage war on poverty rather than people, will choose mercy over grievance, and will adopt as their final great cause an end to the suffering we know to exist on this planet.

  Or, as our pal Ann Coulter might put it, “Steve Almond is a faggot.”

  Awesome.

  About the Author

  STEVE ALMOND is the author of the story co
llections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the nonfiction book Candyfreak, and the novel Which Brings Me to You, co-written with Julianna Baggott. He lives outside Boston with his wife, Erin, and daughter, Josephine, whom he cannot stop kissing. To find out what music the author listens to, visit www.stevenalmond.com.

  Also by STEVE ALMOND

  Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions

  (with Julianna Baggott)

  The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories

  Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

  My Life in Heavy Metal

  1. Hartford, I was recently informed, is “the world capital of closeted insurance executives.” Sweet.

  Return to text.

  2. An excerpt of the letter follows. Note: In a misguided effort to endear myself to Vonnegut, I addressed him as Mr. Rosewater, a reference to the benevolent protagonist of his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

  Dear Mr. Rosewater,

  As fate would have it, I’ve just been asked to write an appreciation of your work. I wondered if you would be willing to be interviewed. I have read most everything you’ve ever written. I became a writer, in large part, because of my admiration for you. My own books (three fiction and one nonfiction) all express the essential notion that our species will perish if we do not awaken our mercy.

  You must be good and tired of people asking you for things aside from your work. I am sorry to trouble you. I wouldn’t ask if I thought my proposed book, or the world, could do without you.

  With Deep Respect,

  Steve Almond

  Return to text.

  3. It should be noted, as well, that the median age of our current celebrities is roughly nineteen.

  Return to text.

  4. From Slaughterhouse-Five:

  Wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and their children and the old people…the whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always the men against the women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves…the ones who pretend the hardest get their pictures in the papers and medals afterwards.

  Return to text.

  5. For the record, Vonnegut has seven kids, three of whom he adopted after his sister died of cancer and his brother-in-law died in a train wreck.

  Return to text.

  6. Asked about her interest in boxing, Oates insisted she was drawn to subjects “very different” from herself. I immediately pictured her in silk shorts and a mouthpiece, working the speedbag. I recognize that this image is both gratuitous and erotically disturbing. It should be taken as a measure of my frustration with her comments on the panel, and not (I should emphasize) a dismissal of her fiction, which I admire precisely because it exposes our shared lust for mayhem.

  Return to text.

  7. Weiner later posted a summary of the evening on her blog, here excerpted:

  Mr. Vonnegut didn’t appear to have much use for authors who hadn’t figured out a cogent philosophy of life, on par with his “just get off the planet” line—and I would have paid good money for a snapshot of the high school students’ faces when he informed them that human beings are a disease on the face of the planet and the best thing they can do is not reproduce and leave as quickly as possible….

  Return to text.

  Note how incredibly classy Weiner is—not at all bitter or defensive, as you might expect from someone who got punked in front of 2,700 people.8. I would be remiss if I failed to mention this quintessential Weiner moment: Oates had named Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer, and was in the midst of discussing Dickinson’s work, when Weiner piped up with the following question: “Did you know that you can set ‘Because I Would Not Stop for Death’ to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’? Have you ever done that?” Weiner then began chanting the words of the poem in a frantic, square-dancey cadence.

  Regrettably, I am not making this up.

  Return to text.

  1. No idea who he is, or what his first name might be.

  Return to text.

  2. Ditto.

  Return to text.

  3. Actually, I did read the first hundred pages of Booth’s very thick and impressive-looking volume The Rhetoric of Fiction, and I derived a great deal of pleasure from carrying it around with me, on the off chance that some New Critical thug wanted to throw down. (None did.)

  Return to text.

  4. I believe the Chief Curator had this neologism in mind when she used the adjective plucky, though perhaps she realized—as I did not, obviously—that realismo is an actual word in Spanish.

  Return to text.

  5. I fantasize on page one of the thesis about the prospect of meeting Vonnegut, though I stop short of cataloguing what I might wear.

  Return to text.

  6. I cannot begin to describe how pathetic it was to serve in this capacity for a Division Three liberal arts college. I would compare it to carrying a spittoon for one of the minor dwarves, such as Sneezy. The memory that leaps to mind is of an away game against our archrival, Amherst. The halftime score was, if memory serves, 51–0. I am talking about football, though we broadcast other sports, too, such as women’s field hockey. I was privileged to be one of the broadcast team who worked the famous Wesleyan-Colby bloodbath of 1987, a match that took place in a persistent drizzle and which was, inexplicably, a home game.

  Return to text.

  7. I dutifully referred to members of the opposite sex as womyn, this being linguistically preferable to the suffixally oppressive women.

  Return to text.

  1. Why 5:30 A.M.? This will be hard to answer without calling into question my competence as a planner/husband. Briefly: I figured I’d need at least two days to look over Vonnegut’s papers, but I was also psychopathically in the thrall of the World Cup and needed, or felt I needed, to reach Boston by Saturday afternoon, when France played Brazil, which would only happen, based on my calculations (again, questionable) if I squeezed in Day One of the excavation after driving from St. Louis.

  Return to text.

  2. Taylor told me that the Sylvia Plath collection actually got a lot more requests. I was devastated.

  Return to text.

  3. You can stop laughing now. I am merely suggesting that—so far as Ms. Taylor was concerned—I might very well have been a scholar (i.e. I was wearing chinos, my shirt was tucked in, etc.).

  Return to text.

  4. I should mention that I was, to this point, reading as fast as I could and tapping out notes on my computer while also fretting over how little time I had, an activity to which I devoted nearly as much time as the actual note taking. This, if I may be frank, is called Judaism.

  Return to text.

  5. As far as I can tell, this is the raison d’être of all writers.

  Return to text.

  6. How familiar this all seems to me! The strutting tone, the inside jokes, the desperate whiff of personal ingratiation. How many letters like this have I written to editors over the years?

  Return to text.

  7. Vonnegut’s 1956 letter to Karl Saalfield (president of Saalfield Games) is a classic. It includes twenty pages of specs for “General Headquarters,” a troop warfare game best described as a cross between chess, Stratego, and quantum mechanics. On the other side of one particularly baroque diagram I found this oddity, jotted down in Vonnegut’s elegant chicken scratch:

  In 1925, Hal Irwin had a contractor build him a French Chateau out at 57th and North Meridian Street in Indianapolis.

  There’s still old Metzger pear trees out through there, and a lot of em would still bear, if somebody’d think to spray em—hard little pears, taste like rock candy and lemon juice…. Hal had had Ella the cook out there, on her days off, rehearsing it

  The story stops right here. Vonnegut must have been struck by the idea in the midst of his diagramming. That’s the scenario I like best, that his imagination dragged him away fr
om matters of money and war, back to the tawdry precincts of human desire.

  Return to text.

  8. Ten years ago, when I was applying to grad school, I very nearly decided to attend the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, because I became hopelessly enamored with the idea of driving from my home in Miami Beach to Fairbanks, the northernmost hub of America if you don’t count Barrow, which (my apologies to the brave residents of that city) I don’t. The route ran 5,021 miles. It was a great plan, very cinematic, its central flaw being that it would oblige me to actually live in Fairbanks, which is a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and dark up to eighteen hours a day and where—according to a newspaper clipping sent to me by the Chief Curator at the inception of the plan—perfectly innocent citizens are occasionally killed by moose.

  Return to text.

  1. Campy remains my favorite baseball player of all time. A few inches shy of six feet and 160 pounds, he was a shortstop by trade, though he is the only player in the history of the game to have played all nine positions in a single game, including pitcher. He did this at the behest of the team’s cockamamie owner, Charles Finley, who was crazier than any other man alive on the earth at that time.

  Return to text.

  2. It should also be mentioned (though not dwelled upon) that I slept with a miniature kelly green bat under my pillow through my early childhood.

  Return to text.

  3. Murphy is to be forgiven, at least by me, for helping to fund and produce MC Hammer’s first album.

  Return to text.

  4. Or, as my colleagues referred to her, Billie Jean Rug Muncher.

  Return to text.

  5. I would later conduct an interview with Canseco himself, the full text of which, in the interest of historical exactitude, I now proffer:

  Me: “Mr. Canseco?”

  Canseco: “What the fuck are you?”

  Me: “I’m from the—”

  Canseco: “Get the fuck out of my way.”Return to text.

  6. The current figure is closer to 137,000, as Gibson’s homer has become inarguably the most popular highlight in the history of baseball. It is clearly a sickness that I cannot stop myself from watching these replays, and in particular that each time I see the play, some small, pathetic cavern of my heart truly believes it will turn out differently, that Gibson will swing through Eck’s lousy slider or send a harmless pop-up into shallow right.