Jacob handed the urn to Edith, who lowered her head and whispered, “Good-bye, Ma. I love you,” into the mouth of the urn, then took a step forward and poured out some of the ash, most of which ended up on her shoes, as Moses pointed out later, after he had taken his turn with the ashes and they stood there in silence for a full sixty seconds. It seemed to Jacob the longest minute of his life, longer than the plane ride over from Berlin, longer than the drive from the airport to Calabasas, even longer than the seventeen years he’d spent in his father’s house. Sixty seconds. Blink and it was gone. Blink and they were back in the car and Mo was saying to Edith that she had some of Ma on her, and Edith was giving him the finger, even as she wiped their mother off her shoes, and Jacob was smiling, the first smile in days. He had not thought he was up to coming to L.A. and only agreed to go because Diet told him that he’d regret it if he didn’t. Diet who was waiting for them at Canter’s Deli, along with Pandora, his nephews, and Elias, none of whom even asked to come along to scatter the ashes, for they knew: The Jacobson children needed to do this alone.
Jacob drove to Canter’s while Mo sat beside him and Edith in the backseat, crying softly, Jacob noticed, when he glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Thistle,” he said.
“I was just thinking about all the times I went into Ma’s closet, hunting for any sign that she was a witch,” she sobbed. “God, I was a stupid kid.”
“You were definitely a stupid kid, but you’re not a stupid adult. You gave Ma a lot of joy,” Mo said.
“You know what,” she said, blowing her nose. “I don’t miss a single thing about Atlanta. Leaving gave me…it gave us…This is going to sound strange, but I think I would have left even if…Those last few months with Ma were some of the happiest—and the hardest—of my life, but I wouldn’t take any of it back. Not even if Emory had gotten on its hands and knees and begged me to return. Funny, isn’t it? Daddy was right about the place. Still, it makes me wonder about…Well, you don’t think he—”
“Please don’t make this about him,” Jacob interrupted, knowing exactly where she was heading.
“Then how did the advisory committee know about Zion?” she asked. “ ‘In light of this startling new evidence, Dr. Jacobson, we have no other choice but to dismiss you.’ I know you didn’t tell them, Mo, and Jacob didn’t because, oh, I guess I never told you about Zion, unless you did, Mo”—Mo shook his head that he hadn’t— “and Elias wouldn’t ever do such a thing, which only leaves—”
“Who the hell is Zion?” Jacob asked.
“Later, Jacob,” Mo said.
“Daddy,” Edith finished. “But you don’t think he…”
“He was a saboteur,” Jacob said incredulously. He knew nothing about Zion but everything about how their father operated. “Of course he told them. So please stop defending him, because I just…I just…”
“Jacob, calm down,” Mo said, then turned to Edith and conceded that their father must have overheard her talking with Elias the night of the Seder or on the phone with Elias in Pandora’s office that night. “It’s the simplest explanation,” he said. “The only one.”
“But he died that night,” Edith said, “which means…well, I don’t know what it means.”
“Um, how long do you think it takes to send a two-sentence email? Thirty seconds at the most, if you know what you’re saying and to whom it’s going,” Mo said.
While Mo and Thistle continued to rehash the mystery of the anonymous evidence and why Julian would have done it, Jacob tuned out, thinking about their dearly departed despot. You keep trying to come up with reasons to explain why he was the way he was, Jacob thought, which means you still contend that he could have been different. But he was born a black hole. He hid out in the dark, where no one knew where to look for him. But I did.
Jacob pulled the rental car into the lot and parked, recalling the last time he’d been at Canter’s, where he’d met his siblings right after taking his final exams at UCLA. Twenty-one years old and hankering for a life in New York City, for the chance to blossom into a playwright. Though I had no earthly idea how to make it happen, other than knowing I had to get as far away from L.A. as possible, he thought. His brother and sister climbed out into the day, which was already gaining heat and momentum, but he hung back, walking in circles around the car, thinking back to two and a half years ago when he and Diet arrived at LAX. He recalled the accident on the 405 and the Jaws of Life—the Jews of Life, he thought—which cut through the steel and glass like a can opener, dislodging that young man’s lifeless body. It could have been any of them, he realized, and still could be, the longer his family remained here.
Jacob shook the thought off and entered the deli to join his family at a booth by the window, where he took his place beside Diet.
“Baby, you are back,” he said. “Mazel tov,” smiling that big German smile of his. Who would have believed that four years after that dreadful Christmas Eve in Berlin they’d still be together, that they’d still love each other enough?
He had a harder time imagining how he was going to convince his family that it was time for them to go, which was the other crucial reason he’d come back to L.A.—to persuade them, gently at first and then with force if necessary—force being Diet, who would explain to them that the Bundesrepublik had declared every Jew who stepped onto German soil an instant citizen, granting them the same privileges as if they’d been born there. That the government had come out with Die Liste der genehmigten geschützten Arten—The Approved List of Protected Species—which made it a capital offense to harm in any way or kill a person of Jewish descent. That the new Jews of Germany were integrating slowly but surely into the fabric of German life and he would tell them so, again and again, until they got it, until Mo and Edith said good-bye to their lives here and emigrated. Whether or not they are in imminent danger is beside the point, Jacob thought, and all they had to do was take one look at the news to see that he was right. But his siblings had grown complacent and believed, like countless Jews before them, that it could never happen here. And it probably won’t, but why take the chance? Diet had pointed out how easily it could turn, how easily night could overtake the day, understanding better than any of them. But Germany? Seriously? What about the horrible, snowy winters and the terrible food and, well, what about living in a place like that, with such a gruesome history? he thought, having no trouble at all imagining what they’d say.
Yes, okay, but think about the boys, Jacob would say. Think about all the opportunities they won’t have here in America, not the way things are going.
But now was not the time to mention how things were going. They were there, in Canter’s, to celebrate their mother’s life, and they ordered all kinds of food in her honor—matzo ball soup and chicken soup and lox and bagels and blintzes and potato knishes, pancakes and waffles and Denver omelets, chocolate pudding and chocolate doughnuts—foods that had sustained them as children and that their mother had made when they were sick or sad, comfort food that stuck to their ribs and put smiles on their flu-stricken faces. And at one point Mo held up his mimosa as Pandora shushed the boys and the table went quiet.
“I’d like to make a toast.” Mo raised his glass high into the air. “To my mother, who taught me revenge is a foul substitute for forgiveness,” winking at Jacob, to whom he’d confessed his dumping of the peacock in Gibbs’s pool only this morning.
“That was…interesting, Mo,” Edith said, rising. “I’d also like to make a toast. To Ma, who never ceased to cast her spells of love over all of us, even when some of us didn’t believe in them or deserve them.”
Then it was Jacob who stood to meet his family, the sunlight spilling through the plate-glass window, shining across all of their faces, all except Bronson’s. He was lost in his own world as usual, just as Jacob might have been at that age. “To my mom, who never once made it into the pages of my Manifest of Meanness,” he said, as everyone clinked glasses, including the twins, who wanted to say toasters
of their own.
“Toasts, with an s,” Mo corrected them. The food kept coming until there was next to no room left on the table yet still the family noshed and noshed some more, diets and acid reflux and IBS be damned.
“For Ma,” Edith cheered, slathering a potato latke in applesauce and drenching it in sour cream before offering it to Elias, who gobbled it down. It was nice to see her with Elias, and even nicer to see Mo and Pandora laughing again and surreptitiously holding hands under the table. He and Diet discussed extending their visit and then perhaps coming again for Passover and Edith said that was a lovely idea and that they were welcome to stay with her at the beach house in Malibu.
“At least until we grow bored from that perfect weather of yours.” Diet laughed and in his laugh Jacob was abruptly struck by the realization that his mother was gone and wasn’t coming back. The idea hit him between the shoulder blades, so utterly incomprehensible and unpalatable that it was all he could do not to throw up. Instead, he got up and went outside, Diet following after him and asking if he was okay, but Jacob was not okay.
“It’s just…it’s been a year and it hasn’t gotten any easier,” he choked.
“Oh, mein Schatz, didn’t anyone ever tell you?” Diet asked. “This is the pain that will inform all other pains from now on. You have lost your mother. That is the primal pain, what we call it in German. There will never be another pain like this pain. You cannot ready yourself for it because it is unimaginable. But I am here and you are here and your brother and your sister and Roz, she is here, too. She is everywhere. You are meant to be sad and you will be sad for a long, long time, and I cannot say this will ever stop being sad, but when it gets bad, I mean really bad, all you have to do is remember the last few months of her life and how extraordinary you and your siblings made them. You gave her an afterlife before she went away, Jacob. Be happy for this, mein Schatz. Let this be soothing to you. I promised your mother we would live a beautiful life and we are, we will.”
Jacob didn’t know what to say. He stared at this man and he could feel himself filling up with love, and it went brimming over inside of him and spilled out of his eyes, more bereft than he’d ever been and yet more in love with the world than ever—all thanks to his mother and to this man, this German, whom he hugged close, squeezing and holding on to him as if for the first and last time. The world was changing, he sensed it even then, as the two separated and Diet went back into the deli and Jacob climbed into the rental car, just sitting there, watching his family through the glass, seeing it all differently and imagining the play he might write one day—a play set in the near future in which his nephews grew up into self-assured, handsome men who married and had children of their own and lived within twenty minutes of one another and within a few blocks of him and Diet in Berlin. In the play, Germany experienced a second enlightenment and the German people continued to prosper, even with the influx of millions of displaced persons, Israelis and American Jews, and the entire Jacobson family was there together to see it, Mo and Edith and Pandora, a second Weimar Republic, a time of peace and prosperity in a place that had at one time been the center of such gross and indecent incivility. In Jacob’s play, those who were most in need, of course, were the American Jews, who were systematically being run out of their country through a series of governmental shifts and insidious propaganda campaigns, the likes of which the modern world had not seen since Adolf Hitler rose to power. In this play, the Jews of Germany would flourish and repopulate the land, giving rise to more and more Jewish schools and kosher grocery stores and butcher shops, in Berlin and all over the country as new synagogues were consecrated and no Jew ever had to fear persecution for being who he was, for they were all safe under the law.
Jacob let his imagination run further, declaring Germany the new Jewish homeland, the German people sworn protectors of Jewish life, all life, in fact. It was one of the most beautiful achievements in the history of man and softened the world’s heart to the Germans, this magnanimous, misunderstood people, who had never forgiven themselves for the part their ancestors had played in the virtual annihilation of the Jews of Europe. The countries surrounding Germany, however, would not be nearly as welcoming or as kind, for once a Jewish person stepped into France or Belgium, Poland or Austria—at least in this version of the future Jacob was dreaming up that day behind the wheel of his rental car—he would feel the hostility and the medieval darkness and hurry back across the border into Deutschland, a rare and endangered person. (It would add to the dramatic tension of the piece, he felt certain.)
Edith and Mo joined him in the car with a smuggled pitcher of mimosas and told him to drive. “Anyone want to join me in a trip down the Ganja River?” Mo asked, pulling out a joint, a gift from Pandora, apparently. “We’ll meet them all later back at the house, but first I want to show you something.” He instructed Jacob where to go.
Jacob felt a momentary guilt for leaving Diet behind, but he knew Diet would understand and so he followed Mo’s directions, a right here and a left there, then straight ahead for a couple of miles until they were on Sunset and Mo said, “Look.” Jacob slowed the car down and the three of them looked up and there was Mo, larger than life, on one of those giant billboards, an advertisement for his upcoming film, Splash.
“Oh my God.” Edith giggled as she took a sip from the pitcher, then handed it to Jacob, who took a gulp before passing it to Mo, who declined and lit the joint, taking a long, slow drag.
“You must be so excited,” Edith exclaimed. “We’re so proud of you, Mo.”
“It’s basically soft-core porn,” he said glumly. “I’m naked—half-naked—through most of it, but I am in every scene except for one, so I guess that’s saying something.”
“That’s saying a lot,” Jacob said robustly, glancing up at the facsimile of his older brother, then back at the flesh-and-blood version beside him. “Mom would have loved it.”
“Mom would have shit her pants,” Mo said.
“Mom would have bought the first ticket and been the first in line to see it,” Edith warbled, her voice faltering, and Jacob thought she was about to cry. Instead, she leaned forward and laughed. “This is the best unveiling ever,” she gasped, and just a couple of tears plunged down her face.
As they sat there, gazing up at this giant poster on which Mo, half-clad, with a fishtail, was perched on a rock in the middle of New York Harbor, Jacob saw how the ending of his play might go. He couldn’t wait to start writing, for if anything would see him through the loss of his mother it would be this new work of his, which he would dedicate to her.
After taking a hit off the joint and passing it to Edith, who took a hit as well, he thought about how his fictional Jacobsons, after having lived for dozens of years in peace and harmony in Germany, would all wake up one morning—older and grayer and virtually unrecognizable, with wrinkles and cataracts and hearing aids, the life of a Jacobson in old age—and leave their homes to meet for breakfast, just as they had been doing for years. Except that on that day, one that none of them would ever forget and that would prove the indomitable supremacy of history yet again, they would all pass newsstands, each a different one, for they all lived in different corners of Berlin, and they would pause to read the headlines, which were the same on every paper and said the same thing, in German and in English—that the Bundesrat had ratified and updated The Approved List of Protected Species and had, by a count of 56 to 13, struck the word Jew from it completely.
I cannot lie—I nearly didn’t write Tell Me How This Ends Well because I agonized over the day I’d also have to write the acknowledgments page. Well, here I am, and I did write the book, which you’ve just finished reading, and here you are at the dreaded page, which I fear will not live up to expectations. You, dear reader and possible friend, may not find your name and for that I am truly sorry, especially if I know you and especially if you thought, well, that you might find your name included here. But given the constraint of space, I can only thank a few
people in the end. Thus—an enormous thanks to Sheila Fiona Black, Cliff Hudder, Kimberly Elkins, Steven Volynets, and Robbie Goolrick for all of the talks; Jeff Goldberg and Erika Halstead for being there; Emily Wirt and Adam Ross for the company; Joseph Skibell for the Shabbat lunches; Janice Convoy-Hellmann and her family for their Southern hospitality; Hannah Conway, location scout extraordinaire; the creative writing department at Emory University; all of my students; and finally to the great city of Atlanta, where I wrote the novel. Major, major, major thanks also to the fantastic team at Hogarth; my amazingly patient, funny, and brilliant editor, Hilary Rubin Teeman; and my equally brilliant, patient, and supportive agent, Richard Abate, without whom I wouldn’t have had to agonize over this page of thank-yous at all. But I’m not kvetching, Richard. Believe me, I am not kvetching a single bit…
—
This book is for my mother and for anyone who’s ever been terrorized and bullied—you are not alone.
DAVID SAMUEL LEVINSON is the author of the novel Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence and the story collection Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Jentel Foundation, Ledig House, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers. He won an award for his fiction in The Atlantic, and his stories have been published in RE:AL, storySouth, The James White Review, The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, The Brooklyn Review, Prairie Schooner, The Toronto Quarterly, West Branch, and Post Road, among others. He has served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and as the Fellow in Fiction at Emory University.
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Tell Me How This Ends Well Page 43