“Greeeenbaum,” at Simon and me. We both turned toward them, I balancing on one foot on the hopscotch squares we had drawn, Simon clenching his fists.
“Greeeeenbaum, Esther Greeeeenbaum, Simon Greeeeenbaum,” whinnying the green, thundering the baum.
“My father says you’re Yids.”
“He says you’re the Yid’s kids.” One boy hooted and yelled, “Hey, they’re Yid kids.” Some giggled, and then they chanted, “Yid kid, Yid kid,” as one of them pushed me off my square.
“You leave my sister alone,” Simon yelled and went for the boy, fists flying, and knocked him over. The boy sat down suddenly, and I felt pain in my lower back. Another boy ran over and punched Simon. Simon whacked him back, and the boy hit him in the nose, hard. It hurt like hell and I started crying from the pain, holding my nose, pulled away my hand and saw blood. Simon’s nose was bleeding, and then the other kids started in, trying to pummel my brother, one guy holding him, another guy punching. “Stop it,” I screamed, “stop it,” as I curled on the ground, hurting, seeing the teachers run over to pull them apart. Then I fainted, mercifully, and came to in the nurse’s office. They kept me there until it was time to go home that day.
Simon was proud of himself, boasting, offering self-congratulations. “Don’t tell mother,” I said when we got off the bus, “don’t, Simon, she’ll get upset and go away again, please. Don’t make her sad.”
(When I was fourteen, during one of the times mother was away, my father got drunk downstairs in the kitchen with Mr. Arnstead, and I could hear them talking, as I hid in my room with my books and records, father speaking softly, Mr. Arnstead bellowing.
“No one, no one, should ever have to go through what Anna did. We’re beasts anyway, all of us, Germans, Americans, what’s the difference.”
Slamming of a glass on the table and a bellow: “God damn it, Sam, you Jews seem to think you have a monopoly on suffering. What about the guy in Harlem? What about some starving guy in Mexico? You think things are any better for them?”
“It was worse for Anna.”
“No, not worse, no worse than the guy in some street in Calcutta. Anna could at least hope she would be liberated, but who’s gonna free that guy?”
“No one,” softly, “no one is ever freed from Anna’s kind of suffering.”
I listened, hiding in my room, but Mr. Arnstead left after that; and when I came downstairs, father was just sitting there, staring at his glass; and I felt his sadness softly drape itself around me as I stood there, and then the soft veil of love over the sadness, making it bearable.)
I began to miss school at least twice a week, hurting, unable to speak to mother, wanting to say something to father but not having the words. Mother was away a lot then, and this made me more depressed (I’m doing it, I’m sending her away), the depression endurable only because of the blanket of comfort that I felt resting over the house.
They had been worried, of course, but did not have their worst fears confirmed until Thanksgiving was over and December arrived (snow drifting down from a grey sky, father bringing in wood for the fireplace, mother polishing the menorah, Simon and me counting up our saved allowances, plotting what to buy for them when father drove us to town). I had been absent from school for a week by then, vomiting every morning at the thought that I might have to return. Father was reading and Simon was outside, trying to climb one of our trees. I was in the kitchen, cutting cookies and decorating them while mother rolled the dough, humming, white flour on her apron, looking away and smiling when I sneaked small pieces of dough and put them in my mouth.
And then I fell off my chair onto the floor, holding my leg, moaning, “Mother, it hurts,” blood running from my nose. She picked me up, clutching me to her, and put me on the chair, blotted my nose with a tissue. Then we heard Simon yelling outside, and then his banging on the back door. Mother went and pulled him inside, his nose bleeding. “I fell outa the tree,” and, as she picked him up, she looked back at me; and I knew that she understood, and felt her fear and her sorrow as she realized that she and I were the same, that I would always feel the knife thrusts of other people’s pain, draw their agonies into myself, and, perhaps, be shattered by them.
(Remembering: Father and mother outside, after a summer storm, standing under the willow, father putting his arm around her, brushing her black hair back and kissing her gently on the forehead. Not for me, too much shared anguish with love for me. I am always alone, with my mountain, my forest, my lakes like puddles. The young couple’s boat is moored at the island.)
I hear them downstairs.
“Anna, the poor child, what can we do?”
“It is worse for her, Samuel,” sighing, the sadness reaching me and becoming a shroud, “it will be worse with her, I think, than it was for me.”
BERNARD MALAMUD
The Jewbird
Jewish fiction has always been at home with humor. Perhaps it is a natural propensity to exaggerate and twist reality—the kind of fancy that soars to the logical end of the ludicrous, that attacks and promotes itself under an umbrella of cynicism and resignation. Even the most realistically layered stories seem to be punctuated with those odd fancies and impossible details that contrast brightly with their sober themes.
While Pamela Sargent transmutes flying geese into rich Jews wintering in Miami Beach, “coating their feathers with Coppertone and ordering lemonades from the waitresses,” Bernard Malamud converts crows into Jewbirds that doven with passion, speak a passable Yiddish, prefer matjes herring to schmaltz, and must flee from the “Anti-Semeets.” He exaggerates, celebrates, underplays, shouts, whispers, teases, rejoices, and pulls mundane reality apart like Coney Island taffy. And the impossibly possible Jewbird named Schwartz complains, entertains, suffers, endures, and chokes until the reader stops laughing.
But who are the “Anti-Semeets”? Where are the “Anti-Semeets”? Out there, of course, but they’re in here, too, in the kosher homes with Friday night candles flickering in dining rooms, in the trades where Yiddish slang operates best, in small neighborhood synagogues, on the Long Island Expressway where the “Queen-Bride” of the Sabbath rides in Cadillacs, and in the media mirror of laughs and insecurities.
As Gabriel Pierson put it so well: “A Jew fares as badly with his own Jewishness as the non-Jew: he is his own ‘anti-semit. ’ ”
J. D.
*
THE WINDOW WAS OPEN so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate. The bird wearily flapped through the open kitchen window of Harry Cohen’s top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River. On a rod on the wall hung an escaped canary cage, its door wide open, but this black-type long-beaked bird—its ruffled head and small dull eyes, crossed a little, making it look like a dissipated crow—landed if not smack on Cohen’s thick lamb chop, at least on the table close by. The frozen foods salesman was sitting at supper with his wife and young son on a hot August evening a year ago. Cohen, a heavy man with hairy chest and beefy shorts; Edie, in skinny yellow shorts and red halter; and their ten-year-old Morris (after her father)—Maurie, they called him, a nice kid though not overly bright—were all in the city after two weeks out, because Cohen’s mother was dying. They had been enjoying Kingston, New York, but drove back when Mama got sick in her flat in the Bronx.
“Right on the table,” said Cohen, putting down his beer glass and swatting at the bird. “Son of a bitch.”
“Harry, take care with your language,” Edie said, looking at Maurie, who watched every move.
The bird cawed hoarsely and with a flap of its bedraggled wings—feathers tufted this way and that—rose heavily to the top of the open kitchen door, where it perched staring down.
“Gevalt, a pogrom!”
“It’s a talking bird,” said Edie in astonishment.
“In Jewish,” said Maurie.
“Wise guy,” muttered Cohe
n. He gnawed on his chop, then put down the bone. “So if you can talk, say what’s your business. What do you want here?”
“If you can’t spare a lamb chop,” said the bird, “I’ll settle for a piece of herring with a crust of bread. You can’t live on your nerve forever.”
“This ain’t a restaurant,” Cohen replied. “All I’m asking is what brings you to this address?”
“The window was open,” the bird sighed; adding after a moment, “I’m running. I’m flying but I’m also running.”
“From whom?” asked Edie with interest.
“Anti-Semeets.”
“Anti-Semites?” they all said.
“That’s from who.”
“What kind of anti-Semites bother a bird?” Edie asked.
“Any kind,” said the bird, “also including eagles, vultures, and hawks. And once in a while some crows will take your eyes out.”
“But aren’t you a crow?”
“Me? I’m a Jewbird.”
Cohen laughed heartily. “What do you mean by that?”
The bird began dovening. He prayed without Book or tallith, but with passion. Edie bowed her head though not Cohen. And Maurie rocked back and forth with the prayer, looking up with one wide-open eye.
When the prayer was done Cohen remarked, “No hat, no phylacteries?”
“I’m an old radical.”
“You’re sure you’re not some kind of a ghost or dybbuk?”
“Not a dybbuk,” answered the .bird, “though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thanks God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful children.”
“Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.
“Why not?”
“What kind of birds?”
“Like me. Jewbirds.”
Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I’ve heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird.”
“We’re once removed.” The bird rested on one skinny leg, then on the other. “Please, could you spare maybe a piece of herring with a small crust of bread?”
Edie got up from the table.
“What are you doing?” Cohen asked her.
“I’ll clear the dishes.”
Cohen turned to the bird. “So what’s your name, if you don’t mind saying?”
“Call me Schwartz.”
“He might be an old Jew changed into a bird by somebody,” said Edie, removing a plate.
“Are you?” asked Harry, lighting a cigar.
“Who knows?” answered Schwartz. “Does God tell us everything?”
Maurie got up on his chair. “What kind of herring?” he asked the bird in excitement.
“Get down, Maurie, or you’ll fall,” ordered Cohen.
“If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz,” said Schwartz.
“All we have is marinated, with slices of onion—in a jar,” said Edie.
“If you’ll open for me the jar I’ll eat marinated. Do you have also, if you don’t mind, a piece of rye bread—the spitz?”
Edie thought she had.
“Feed him out on the balcony,” Cohen said. He spoke to the bird. “After that, take off.”
Schwartz closed both bird eyes. “I’m tired and it’s a long way.”
“Which direction are you headed, north or south?”
Schwartz, barely lifting his wings, shrugged.
“You don’t know where you’re going?”
“Where there’s charity I’ll go.”
“Let him stay, papa,” said Maurie. “He’s only a bird.”
“So stay the night,” Cohen said, “but no longer.”
In the morning Cohen ordered the bird out of the house but Maurie cried, so Schwartz stayed for a while. Maurie was still on vacation from school and his friends were away. He was lonely and Edie enjoyed the fun he had, playing with the bird.
“He’s no trouble at all,” she told Cohen, “and besides his appetite is very small.”
“What’ll you do when he makes dirty?”
“He flies across the street in a tree when he makes dirty, and if nobody passes below, who notices?”
“So all right,” said Cohen, “but I’m dead set against it. I warn you he ain’t gonna stay here long.”
“What have you got against the poor bird?”
“Poor bird, my ass. He’s a foxy bastard. He thinks he’s a Jew.”
“What difference does it make what he thinks?”
“A Jewbird, what a chuzpah. One false move and he’s out on his drumsticks.”
At Cohen’s insistence Schwartz lived out on the balcony in a new wooden birdhouse Edie had bought him.
“With many thanks,” said Schwartz, “though I would rather have a human roof over my head. You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God. But whatever you give me, you won’t hear complaints.”
However, when Cohen brought him a bird feeder full of dried corn, Schwartz said, “Impossible.”
Cohen was annoyed. “What’s the matter, crosseyes, is your life getting too good for you? Are you forgetting what it means to be migratory? I’ll bet a helluva lot of crows you happen to be acquainted with, Jews or otherwise, would give their eyeteeth to eat this corn.”
Schwartz did not answer. What can you say to a grubber yung?
“Not for my digestion,” he later explained to Edie. “Cramps. Herring is better even if it makes you thirsty. At least rainwater don’t cost anything.” He laughed sadly in breathy caws.
And herring, thanks to Edie, who knew where to shop, was what Schwartz got, with an occasional piece of potato pancake, and even a bit of soupmeat when Cohen wasn’t looking.
When school began in September, before Cohen would once again suggest giving the bird the boot, Edie prevailed on him to wait a little while until Maurie adjusted.
“To deprive him right now might hurt his school work, and you know what trouble we had last year.”
“So okay, but sooner or later the bird goes. That I promise you.”
Schwartz, though nobody had asked him, took on full responsibility for Maurie’s performance in school. In return for favors granted, when he was let in for an hour or two at night, he spent most of his time overseeing the boy’s lessons. He sat on top of the dresser near Maurie’s desk as he laboriously wrote out his homework. Maurie was a restless type and Schwartz gently kept him to his studies. He also listened to him practice his screechy violin, taking a few minutes off now and then to rest his ears in the bathroom. And they afterwards played dominoes. The boy was an indifferent checker player and it was impossible to teach him chess. When he was sick, Schwartz read him comic books though he personally disliked them. But Maurie’s work improved in school and even his violin teacher admitted his playing was better. Edie gave Schwartz credit for these improvements though the bird pooh-poohed them.
Yet he was proud there was nothing lower than C minuses on Maurie’s report card, and on Edie’s insistence celebrated with a little schnapps.
“If he keeps up like this,” Cohen said, “I’ll get him in an Ivy League college for sure.”
“Oh I hope so,” sighed Edie.
But Schwartz shook his head. “He’s a good boy—you don’t have to worry. He won’t be a shicker or a wifebeater, God forbid, but a scholar he’ll never be, if you know what I mean, although maybe a good mechanic. It’s no disgrace in these times.”
“If I were you,” Cohen said, angered, “I’d keep my big snoot out of other people’s private business.”
“Harry, please,” said Edie.
“My goddamn patience is wearing out. That crosseyes butts into everything.”
Though he wasn’t exactly a welcome guest in the house, Schwartz gained a few ounces although he did not improve in appearance. He looked bedraggled as ever, h
is feathers unkempt, as though he had just flown out of a snowstorm. He spent, he admitted, little time taking care of himself. Too much to think about. “Also outside plumbing,” he told Edie. Still there was more glow to his eyes so that though Cohen went on calling him crosseyes he said it less emphatically.
Liking his situation, Schwartz tried tactfully to stay out of Cohen’s way, but one night when Edie was at the movies and Maurie was taking a hot shower, the frozen foods salesman began a quarrel with the bird.
“For Christ sake, why don’t you wash yourself sometimes? Why must you always stink like a dead fish?”
“Mr. Cohen, if you’ll pardon me, if somebody eats garlic he will smell from garlic. I eat herring three times a day. Feed me flowers and I will smell like flowers.”
“Who’s obligated to feed you anything at all? You’re lucky to get herring.”
“Excuse me, I’m not complaining,” said the bird. “You’re complaining.”
“What’s more,” said Cohen, “even from out on the balcony I can hear you snoring away like a pig. It keeps me awake at night.”
“Snoring,” said Schwartz, “isn’t a crime, thanks God.”
“All in all you are a goddamn pest and free loader. Next thing you’ll want to sleep in bed next to my wife.”
“Mr. Cohen,” said Schwartz, “on this rest assured. A bird is a bird.”
“So you say, but how do I know you’re a bird and not some kind of a goddamn devil?”
“If I was a devil you would know already. And I don’t mean because of your son’s good marks.”
“Shut up, you bastard bird,” shouted Cohen.
“Grubber yung,” cawed Schwartz, rising to the tips of his talons, his long wings outstretched.
Cohen was about to lunge for the bird’s scrawny neck but Maurie came out of the bathroom, and for the rest of the evening until Schwartz’s bedtime on the balcony, there was pretended peace.
But the quarrel had deeply disturbed Schwartz and he slept badly. His snoring woke him, and awake, he was fearful of what would become of him. Wanting to stay out of Cohen’s way, he kept to the birdhouse as much as possible. Cramped by it, he paced back and forth on the balcony ledge, or sat on the birdhouse roof, staring into space. In the evenings, while overseeing Maurie’s lessons, he often fell asleep. Awakening, he nervously hopped around exploring the four corners of the room. He spent much time in Maurie’s closet, and carefully examined his bureau drawers when they were left open. And once when he found a large paper bag on the floor, Schwartz poked his way into it to investigate what possibilities were. The boy was amused to see the bird in the paper bag.
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