It works. My son learns and learns, he begins to have more the walk and talk of a scholar and less the walk and talk of a TV repairman. I learn too, not so much of course, but enough so that I can sweeten my conversation with lines from Ibn Ezra and Mendele Mocher Sforim. I’m not any richer, I’m still a kasrilik, a schlemiel, but at least now I’m a bit of an educated schlemiel. And it works also for Rabbi Smallman: he’s able to send his family once a year on a vacation to Earth, where they can sit around a piece of lake and see what real water is like in the natural state. I’m happy for him, me and my herniated module. The only thing I’m not happy about is that I still can’t see any hope for yeshiva tuition money. But, listen, learning is still learning. As Freud says, just to see from Warsaw to Minsk, even if you don’t see right and you don’t understand what you see, it’s still a great thing.
But who, I ask you, can see from here to Rigel? And on the fourth planet, yet, they’ll come here and create such a commotion?
From the Neozionist movement, of course, we had already heard a long time ago. Jews always hear when other Jews are getting together to make trouble for them. We’d heard about Dr. Glickman’s book, we’d heard about his being killed by Vegan Dayanists, we’d heard about his followers organizing all over the galaxy—listen, we’d even had a collection box installed in our synagogue by some of his party people here on Venus: “In memory of the heroic Dr. Glickman, and to raise funds to buy back the Holy Land from the Vegan aliens.”
With that I have no particular quarrel; I’ve even dropped a couple of coins myself in the pushke from time to time. After all, why shouldn’t Milchik the TV man, out of his great wealth, help to buy back the Holy Land?
But the Neozionist movement is another matter. I’m not a coward, and show me a real emergency, I’m ready to die for my people. Outside of an emergency—well, we Jews on Venus have learned to keep the tips of our noses carefully under the surface of our burrows. It’s not that there’s anti-Semitism on Venus—who would ever dream of saying such a thing? When the Viceroy announces five times a week that the reason Venus has an unfavorable balance of trade with other planets is that the Jews are importing too much kosher food: that’s not anti-Semitism, that’s pure economic analysis. And when his Minister of the Interior sets up a quota for the number of Jews, in each burrow and says you can only move from one place to another if you have special permission: that also is not anti-Semitism, obviously, it’s efficient administration. What I say is, why upset a government so friendly to the Jews?
There’s another thing I don’t like about Neozionism; and it’s hard to say it out loud, especially to a stranger. This business about going back to Israel. Where else does a Jew belong but in that particular land? Right? Well, I don’t know, maybe. We started out there with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No good. So the first time we came back was with Moses, and that lasted for a while—until the Babylonians threw us out. Then we came back under Zerubbabel, and we stayed there for five hundred years—until Titus burned the Temple and the Romans made us leave again. Two thousand years of wandering around the world with nothing more to show for it than Maimonides and Spinoza, Marx and Einstein, Freud and Chagall, and we said, enough is enough, back to Israel. So back we went with Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and the rest of them. For a couple of centuries we did all right, we only had to worry about forty million Arabs who wanted to kill us, but that’s not enough excitement for what God Himself, Blessed be His Name, called on Mount Sinai a “stiff-necked people.” We have to get into an argument—in the middle of the Interplanetary Crisis—with Brazil and Argentina.
My feeling, I don’t know about the rest of the Jews, but I’m getting tired. If no, is no. If out, is out. If good-bye, is good-bye.
That’s not the way the Neozionists see it. They feel we’ve had our rest. Time for another round. “Let the Third Exile end in our lifetimes. Let the Knesset be rebuilt in our age. Israel for the Jews!”
Good enough. Don’t we still say, after all the wine, “Next year in Jerusalem”? Who can argue? Except for the one small thing they overlooked, as you know: Israel and Jerusalem these days isn’t even for human beings. The Council of Eleven Nations Terrestrial wants no trouble with the Vegans over a sliver of land like Israel, not in these times with what’s going on in the galaxy: if both sides in the Vegan Civil War are going to claim the place as holy territory because the men they call the founders of their religions once walked in it, let the bivalves have it, says the Council, let them fight it out between themselves.
And I, Milchik the TV man, I for one see nothing strange in a bunch of Vegan bivalves basing their religion on the life and legend of a particular Jew like Moshe Dayan and wanting to chop up any other Jews who try to return to the land of their ancestors. In the first place, it’s happened to us before: to a Jew such an attitude should by now begin to make sense. Where is it written that a Dayanist should like Dayan’s relatives? In the second place, how many Jews protested fifty years ago when the other side, the Vegan Omayyads, claimed all human Mohammedans were guilty of sacrilege and expelled them from Jerusalem? Not, I’ll admit, that such a protest would have been as noticeable as a ripple in a saucer of tea ....
Well, the First Interstellar Neozionist Conference is organized, and it’s supposed to meet in Basel, Switzerland, so that, I suppose, history can have a chance to repeat itself. And right away the Dayanist Vegans hear about it and they protest to the Council. Are Vegans honored guests of Earth, or aren’t they? Their religion is being mocked, they claim, and they even kill a few Jews to show how aggravated they are. Of course the Jews are accused of inciting a pogrom, and it’s announced that in the interests of law and order, not to mention peace and security, no Jewish entrance visas will be honored in spaceports anywhere on Earth. Fair is fair.
Meanwhile delegates to the Conference are on their way from all over the galaxy. If they can’t land on Earth, where do they go? And to what site should the Conference be transferred by the authorities?
Where else but to Venus? It’s the perfect place for such a conference. The scenery is gorgeous—on the other side of the dust storms—and there’s a Viceroy whose administration loves the Jewish people most dearly. Besides, there’s a desperate housing shortage on Venus. That will create the kind of problem Jews love to solve: a game of musical burrows.
Listen, it could have been worse. As Esther said to Mordecai when he told her of Haman’s plans to massacre all the Jews of Persia—it could have been worse, but I don’t for the moment see exactly how.
So the delegates begin arriving in the Solar System, they’re shunted to Venus—and don’t ask. Life becomes full of love and bounce for us all. First, a decree comes down. The delegates can’t use hotel facilities on Venus, even if they’ve got the money: there are too many of them, they’ll put a strain on the hotel system or something. Next, the Jews of Venus are responsible for their coreligionists. In other words, not only is a Jew naturally a brother to every other Jew, he’s now also got to be either a boarder or a landlord.
Stop for a moment and reflect on how many are inflicted on us. Each and every planet in the galaxy which has a human population has at least a breath, a kiss, of Jewish population. So from this planet comes two delegates, from that one fifteen delegates, from that other one—where there are plenty of Jews, they should live and be healthy, but they disagree with each other; comes a total of sixty-three delegates, organized in eight separate caucuses. It may not be nice to number Jews, even if they’re delegates, but you can figure for yourself that by the time the last one has landed at a Venusian spaceport, we’ve got more than enough to go around.
We’ve got plenty. And on Venus, you don’t go up on the surface and throw together a couple of shacks for the visitors.
The Williamsburg Ashkenazim object. To them, some of these Jews aren’t even Jews; they won’t let them into their burrows, let alone their homes. After all, Shomrim in khaki pants whose idea of a religious service is to stand around singing Tech
ezachna, Reconstructionists who pray from a siddur that is rewritten every Monday and Wednesday, Japanese Hasidim who put on tefillin once a year at sunset in memory of the Great Conversion of 2112—these are also Jews, say the Williamsburg Ashkenazim?
Exactly, these are also Jews, say the government officials of Venus. Brothers and boarders they are, and you will kindly make room for them. And they send in police, and they send in troops. Heads are cracked, beards are torn, life, as I said, is full of love and bounce.
And if you don’t object, you think it helps? Sure it helps—like a groan it helps. The Levittown Ashkenazim announce we’ll cooperate with the government, we’ll provide housing for the delegates to the limit—beyond the limit, even. So what happens? My brother and his family and all their neighbors get evicted from the Kwantung Burrow, it’s needed for delegate headquarters says the government.
An Interstellar Neozionist Congress we had to have?
I look around and I remember the promise made to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel—“I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven”—and I think to myself, “A promise is a promise, but even a promise can go too far. The stars by themselves are more than enough, but when each star has maybe ten, twenty planets …”
By this time, me and my whole family, we’re living in what used to be the kitchen of our apartment. My brother and his family, it’s a big family, they should live and be well, they’re living in the dining room. In what my wife, Sylvia, calls the parlor, there’s the wonder-working rabbi from Procyon XII and his entire court—plus, in one corner of the parlor, there’s the correspondent from the Jewish Sentinel of Melbourne, Australia, and his wife, and their dog, an Afghan. In the bedrooms—listen, why should I go on? In the bedrooms, there are crowds and arguments and cooking smells that I don’t even want to know about.
Enough already? No, I am sorry to tell you, not enough.
One day I go into the bathroom. A man is entitled once in a while to go into the bathroom of his own apartment? It’s nature, no? And there in the bathtub I see three creatures, each as long as my arm and as thick as my head. They look like three brown pillows, all wrinkled and twisted, with some big gray spots on this side and on that side, and out of each gray spot there is growing a short gray tentacle. I didn’t know what they were, giant cockroaches maybe, or some kind of plant that the delegates living with us brought along as food, but when they moved I let out a yell.
My son, Aaron David, came running into the bathroom. “What’s the matter, Papa?”
I pointed to the brown pillows. They had some sort of ladder arrangement set up in the bathtub with small shelves in different places, and they were climbing up and down, up and down. “What’s the matter, you want to know, when I see things like that in my bathroom?”
“Oh, them. They’re the Bulbas.”
“Bulbas?”
“Three of the delegates from the fourth planet of the star Rigel. The other three delegates are down the corridor in the Guttenplans’ bathroom.”
“Delegates? You mean they’re Jewish?” I stared at them. “They don’t look Jewish.”
Aaron David rolled his eyes up to the ceiling of the bathroom. “Papa you’re so old-fashioned! You yourself told me that the blue Jews from Aldebaran show how adaptable our people are.”
“You should pardon me,” I said. “You and your adaptable. A Jew can be blue—I don’t say I like it, but who am I to argue with somebody else’s color scheme?—and a Jew can be tall or short. He can even be deaf from birth like those Jews from Canopus, Sirius, wherever they come from. But a Jew has to have arms and legs. He has to have a face with eyes, a nose, a mouth. It seems to me that’s not too much to ask.”
“So their mouths are not exactly like our mouths,” Aaron David said excitedly. “Is that a crime? Is that any reason to show prejudice?”
I left him and I went to the bathroom in the synagogue. Call me old-fashioned, all right, but there are still boundaries, there are certain places where I have to stop. Here, I have to say, Milchik cannot force himself to be modern.
Well. You know what happened. It turns out I’m not the only one.
I took the day off and went to the first session of the Conference. “Rich man,” my Sylvia says to me. “My breadwinner. Family provider. From political conferences you’re going to get brides for your three sons?”
“Sylvia,” I say to her. “Once in a lifetime my customers can maybe not have clear reception of the news broadcasts and Captain Iliad. Once in a lifetime I can go see representatives from all of the Jews of the Galaxy holding a meeting and getting along with each other.”
So I went. Only I can’t say they got along so good. First there was the demonstration by the Association of Latter-Day Mea Shearim (“If the Messiah appears and starts going from star to star, only to find that all Jews are already on Earth and in Israel …”). When that was quieted down, there was the usual Bronsteinite Trotskyist resolution aimed at the Union of Soviet Uganda and Rhodesia, followed by the usual attempt to excommunicate retroactively the authors of the Simplified Babylonian Talmud that had been published in 2685. Then we had to sit through an hour of discussion about how the very existence of a six-story-high statue of Juan Crevea in Buenos Aires was an affront and an insult and an agony to every Jew, and how we should all boycott Argentinian products until the statue was pulled down. I agreed with what the chairman said when he managed to rule the discussion out of order: “We cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by such ancient agonies, such stale affronts. If we do, where do we begin and where do we stop? Let Argentina have its statue of Crevea, let Düsseldorf have its Adolf Hitler University, let Egypt and Libya continue to maintain the Torquemada Observatory on Pluto. This is not our business here today.”
At last, finally, after all the traditional Jewish preliminaries, they got down to the real problems of the opening session: the accreditation of delegates. And there, in no time at all, they got stuck. They got stuck and all mixed up, like bits of lox in a lox omelette.
The Bulbas. The three from my bathroom, the three from Max Guttenplan’s bathroom—the total delegation from Rigel IV.
No question about their credentials, said the Committee on Accreditation. Their credentials are in order, and they’re certainly delegates. The only thing is, they can’t be Jews.
And why can’t we be Jews, the six Bulbas wanted to know? And here I had to stand up to get a good look, I could hardly believe my eyes. Because guess who their interpreter was? No one else but my son, my kaddish, my Aaron David. Mr. Show-No-Prejudice in person.
“Why can’t you be Jews? Because,” says the Committee Chairman, stuttering with wet lips and plucking at the air with his right hand, “because Jews can be this, can be that. They can be a lot of things. But, first of all, they have to be human.”
“You will kindly point out to us,” the Bulbas say through my son, the interpreter, “where it says and in which book that Jews have to be human. Name an authority, provide a quotation.”
At this point the Deputy Chairman comes up and apologizes to the Chairman of the Committee. The Deputy Chairman is the kind who wins scholarships and fellowships. “You’ll pardon me,” he says, “but you’re not making it clear. It’s a very simple matter, really.” He turns to the Bulbas. “No one can be a Jew,” he explains to the six of them, “who is not the child of a Jewish mother. That’s the most ancient, most fundamental definition of a Jew.”
“Aha,” say the Bulbas. “And from what do you get the impression that we are not the children of Jewish mothers? Will you settle for the copies of our birth certificates that we brought along with us?”
That’s when the meeting falls apart. A bunch of delegates in khakis starts cheering and stamping their feet. Another bunch with fur hats and long earlocks begins screaming that this whole colloquy is an abomination. All over the hall arguments break out, little clusters of argument between two and three people, big clusters of argument between twenty and thirty people, arguments on biology
, on history, on the Baba M’tziya. The man sitting next to me, a fat, squinty-eyed man to whom I haven’t said a word, suddenly turns to me and pushes his forefinger into my chest and says: “But if you take that position, my dear fellow, how in the world can you make it compatible with the well-known decision, to mention just one example—’’And up on the platform, Bronsteinite Trotskyists have seized control of the public-address system and are trying to reintroduce their resolution on Uganda and Rhodesia.
By the time some kind of order is restored, two blue Jews have been carried away to the hospital and a lawyer from Ganymede has been arrested for using a hearing aid as a deadly weapon.
Someone calls for a vote, by the entire Congress, on the accreditation of the Bulbas. Accreditation as what—someone else wants to know—as delegates or as Jews? They’ve been accepted as delegates, and who are we to pass upon them as Jews? I’ll accept them as Jews in the religious sense, someone else stands up to point out, but not in the biological sense. What kind of biological sense, he’s asked by a delegate from across the hall; you don’t mean biology, you mean race, you racist. All right, all right, cries out a little man who’s sitting in front of him, but would you want your sister to marry one?
It’s obvious that there are as many opinions as there are delegates. And the chairman, up there on the platform, he’s standing there and he doesn’t know what to do.
Suddenly I notice one of the Bulbas is climbing up on the platform. These little tentacles, they use them for everything, for walking, for eating, for talking, for I don’t know what. And this Bulba, he gets to the public-address system, and he vibrates one short tentacle for a while, and finally we hear what he says, faint and very soft. We hear that funny voice, like a piece of paper rustling, all through the hall:
“Modeh ani l’fonecha.”
The line, just translated by itself, may not mean so much—“Here I am standing before you” or “I present myself before you”—but what Jew, even with only a fingernail’s worth of religious background, could not be moved by it, delivered in such a way and at such a time? Modeh ani l’fonecha, the Jew says in the prayer, when he is directly addressing God, blessed be His Name. And that’s what we all of us now hear in the hall.
Wandering Stars Page 3