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 + 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 Oswiecim (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 spelling 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, 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 that 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 in 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, h
e 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 the 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 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—and here’s the reflection again—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 the 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 U.S. 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 intuitions began to be confirmed.
Maybe that was coincidence, but I don’t think so, since Danny was there again as soon as I decided to go back to school in the fall.
It’s raining like hell, and we’re dangling our legs off one of the tracks of a burned-out Panzer tank. You think it’s going to be over this year? I ask him.
How should I know? Danny says. You going to pass your classes this year?
The truth is, I don’t know. I’ve got one extra year to play with age-wise, and by the time another year has gone by, I’m going to know every word in the English language. I’ll be invincible. Is that worth deliberately failing another year of school? I’m inclined to think it might be.
I don’t know, Danny says. How much longer do you think you can ride this grieving-for-your-brother horse?
Shithead, I say. I’m not grieving for you anymore. You won’t leave me alone long enough.
What are you talking about? I left you alone all summer.
And now you’re back.
You’re not answering my question.
I still don’t answer him. After a while he shakes his head. Your heart won’t heal, he says.
Which was such a strange thing for my wiseass brother to say that I walked around for days thinking about it. Then the days stretched into weeks, and I was treading water in school, unable to concentrate on anything—even learning new words—because something about Danny’s words was like a fishhook in my brain. Ambivalence was everywhere: I was passing school but barely, the Reds turned Majdanek into a brand-new concentration camp for Polish resistance fighters, Miriam had come to life but only because she was dating a boy my parents didn’t like. Her dreaminess had somehow hardened into rebellion while none of us were looking.
I went to school long enough to finish an algebra test and keep my head above water, then lit out and just walked around the neighborhood. I walked down across Broadway, underneath the elevated tracks. Briefly I thought about stealing a car even though I had no idea how—or I could just get on the train, switch to another train, get on a bus at Penn Station and disappear. Except I didn’t have any money. It was January. I was about to turn fourteen. Winter rain was dripping through the elevated tracks.
Something about the train made me turn and walk east on Broadway. A train thundered by overhead, and as I looked up through the slatted trackbed to follow its passage, I saw a sign. FUGACCI AND SONS, TAILORS. Each of the initial letters, even the A, was bigger than the others, and red while the others were black. An acrostic: FAST.
Then came one of those moments where everything that has been a mystery makes sense, and as it does you condemn yourself for an idiot because you didn’t figure it out before. For so long I should have known, but at last I put it all together.
Yoo-Hoo will help. You have weird hang-ups. Yesterday Howard went home.
Your heart won’t heal.
YHWH.
All along, he’d been saying God. God. God. God.
Some kind of animal sound came out of me, drowned out by the train passing overhead. “Ah, Danny,” I sobbed. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
I
felt something break, physically break, inside me, and I leaned against one of the I-beams holding up the elevated tracks and wept for my brother. That was why I had dreamed, why he had spoken to me, why—God’s will being God’s will—he had died in the vortex of ocean water near the Straits of Gibraltar. There is no greater pain than complete acceptance of a fact you wish was not factual. I fought it, but that’s not a fight you can win.
New Yorkers being New Yorkers, people left me alone, and I felt it all leaking away, the resentment and obsession and the paralyzing sense of impotent witness drowned beneath the iron and the rivets and the indifference of the BMT. It ended right there in the rain, this grief-stricken rebellion against my patrimony. Because that’s what it was, what I can call it after fifty years of bending back.
I went back to school, but not that day. Instead I went home, and found my mother listening to Walter Winchell on the radio. Winchell was talking about the liberation of Auschwitz.
Seven months later, it was all over. My eligibility for the spelling bee ran out in June, with an invasion of Japan looming. Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and ticker-tape parades, and the counting of the dead. My older sisters Ruth and Deborah went to college like they were supposed to, Ruth to Michigan and Deborah following Eva to Barnard. I never talked to Danny again. But when a kid named John McKinney from Des Moines, Iowa, won the spelling bee the next summer, that jubilant postwar summer of 1946, I felt like the winning word was a last word from my brother, and I made a little room for belief.
Semaphore.
God is mysterious that way.
Golems I Have Known, or, Why My Elder Son’s Middle Name Is Napoleon: A Trickster’s Memoir
Michael Chabon
I saw my first golem in 1968, in Flushing, New York, shortly before my fifth birthday. It lay on a workbench in the basement of my uncle Jack’s house, a few blocks away from the duplex—we called it a “two-family house”—that my parents and I shared with a Greek couple, who lived upstairs. My uncle Jack owned a candy store in Harlem, in a neighborhood where there had once been only Jews but now there were only black people, though my uncle Jack did not call them that. He called them “the coloreds.” Nevertheless he always hired local Harlem people to work in his store, and he extended credit to many families in the neighborhood. I suppose he had complicated feelings about his customers, and they about him, both as a creditor and as a cranky and ill-humored man. Owning a candy store was not my uncle Jack’s choice of employment; he had failed at several other trades before finally arriving, with the last of his and my aunt’s savings, at the threshold of Mount Morris Candy and News. Though I was not told and did not understand any of this until much later, Uncle Jack was also a devoted Jewish scholar who nightly studied Torah and Talmud, and who had in the past year or so embarked upon the study of kabbalah, that body of Jewish mystical teachings that have produced the Zohar, the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, and a sense of deep understanding and inner peace, or so one presumes, for Madonna and Roseanne Barr. My parents and my uncle and aunt were not especially close, but we lived so near to them that inevitably we ended up spending time at their house, and I soon learned to fear and to long to see whatever was going on down there in Uncle Jack’s basement, to which he invariably repaired as soon as decency and the serving of the babka allowed.
People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy Page 38