by Larry Kramer
Mariamne is a pert, attentive blonde, quite sure of herself. She says if this were not wartime she would become a doctor. I said, “Why not now? What better time?” She responded, “I must raise children first. Jewish girls must work overtime to replace those our rabbi says are being murdered. We don’t have time to even go to college. And besides,” she whispered, “my two brothers are homosexual.” She is pregnant with her fourth. I loathe it when women feel obligated to drop offspring like cows; we are, after all, more than childbearing machines.
“Oh, everybody is giving parties,” Fifi told Mariamne, “it’s just that Jews aren’t invited to any of them. Every gentile friend I know does nothing but go to strings of parties.” Fifi moves in a gentile crowd. She’s still one of those cheerleader types, quite the fast and loose one, but no longer with a high school football team. I can see her, with her huge bosoms energetically bouncing up and down. She continued: “If I cater some of these parties—and I know enough of the hosts, one way or another, to call in a few favors—I could pick up the sort of secret, unofficial information we could use more of. I’ll become a spy!” I do believe she was quite sincere. I tried to advise her that spies don’t talk so much. “I’m only talking to my friends,” she snapped back. “If I can’t trust these girls, who is there to trust?” Indeed.
This molelike gnat of a man, Winesap, Breckinridge Winesap—he wears moccasin shoes with pennies in them and he must be sixty years old—came over from the White House, mainly, I believe, because I yelled at Franklin: “Tell me, Franklin, why do you hate yids so much!” To which Franklin replied, “It is really quite rude to refer to them anymore as yids.” To which I replied, “That’s exactly the point!” To which he replied, “I’m afraid I don’t understand…” To which I replied, “You most certainly do not!” He must have asked Brecky to keep an eye on me and us. Brecky has named us the Jew Tank.
I was going to tell him I knew all about Hoover’s new homosexual whorehouse, courtesy of Pippy Phipps, my pal at the FBI, but that would get her in trouble. A house of young men for hire by others of their sex, for the purpose of entrapping spies and others who might disclose valuable information. Pippy was fairly screaming with laughter when she told me about it. “Can you believe our chief actually thinks this is the way to win a war? And he wants everyone to know about it—not that he’s behind it, of course, but that it exists. ‘How can we find anything out if no one goes there?’ he demands. J. Edgar is one big creepola. I wouldn’t trade this job for a diamond ring!” Personally, I wonder more about who the hookers are than who their customers are. Have we got a bunch of Mata Haris at work here?
Why do the Jews believe that Franklin’s helping them? I ask that all the time and every one of these sweet girls says, “My father would disinherit me if I said anything against FDR.” Blind blind blind!
So what it boils down to is that each day we come into these barracks and we tackle stacks and piles and bags of mail, each with a list of missing relatives and a plea for help. With each letter we must call an embassy or a consulate and register a formal inquiry. “Please, Mr. Belgium, could you put out an official inquiry as to the whereabouts of the Ashkenazi family, consisting of…” Typewritten inquiries must be submitted in quintuplicate. It is quite difficult to type through four pieces of carbon paper. It should be obvious how pointless this all is. We cannot instance one single person who has been located or moved one inch closer to these shores.
Fifi became quite emphatic: “I will cater one of these huge parties of all the kids I was in high school with, who are now admirals and captains or work in the Office of This and That, and I will tell the band to stop playing ‘I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time’ for a second, and I’ll grab the microphone and look straight into the eyes of all the men who had their hands up my panties or on my tits, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, guys, how about a little help?’” Then she started to cry. “It won’t work, it won’t work, nothing will work.” All very sad. So sad. Tragic, really. Fifi’s desk, like the others, is covered with framed photographs of relatives presumably lost over there.
So life goes on. Washington also now has its very own exclusive heterosexual whorehouse! The real kind, not that one for fairies. Actually, we’ve had it for a number of years, but now so many of the best men go there, we talk about it more. Perhaps it’s a sign we might be getting up there with all the best cities at the pinnacle of their sophistication. The peak of chic. The madam’s name is Doris Hardware, and I know and like her. Pippy says Hoover has it under constant around-the-clock surveillance, which sounds a little like Berlin was when we left it. Martha Dodd told me that every time she screwed with a Nazi her father heard about it.
I knew Doris’s father. Do you remember Horace Hardware? (Why am I asking myself questions in my own diary?) Horace hailed from Denver. He owned a chain of whorehouses, all across the West. They were very important for the growth of that part of our country. They all had raunchy names like Ace in the Hole, Up Your Lazy River, that sort of thing. You got a leather wallet with the name of the particular house branded on it when you spent a certain amount of money, and those wallets are now collectors’ items. Horace built himself the biggest damn palace of a house in Denver you ever saw. He invited Daddy and me to lunch when Daddy was in the cabinet. Daddy didn’t think it was a good idea for him to go, but I went. It was great fun. I sat at the table with a bunch of his girls. Horace proudly said something like, “These girls are America’s secret weapons. They could spread the clap to the entire world if I wanted them to.” His little daughter at our lunch that day is now not only the madam but also married to one of the richest men in Washington, Abe Masturbov. I met her at a Jew Tank reception and we nodded to each other in dim remembrance of things past before we figured it out. I am certain we shall get together and become friends.
I constantly forget to make note of sweet young Daniel Jerusalem, who is here every day. He must dearly desire to get away from home. I don’t even know where Masturbov Gardens is. His constant smile is quite infectious. Only dreadfully unhappy kids smile so much and want so much for you to like them.
WHAT DANIEL LEARNS AT THE JEW TANK
Everyone at the Jew Tank is obsessed with missing persons. I wonder if that’s what David is. “He’s in California! He’s with Grandma Libby!” is now what we’re told, and which we don’t believe. What’s he doing there? When’s he coming home? Why doesn’t he write? There are questions our parents still refuse to answer. It’s hard to avoid the thought that something fishy’s going on. Stephen is the one who says, “I think it’s something so awful they don’t want to talk about it and it may be cruel of us to force the issue.”
I ask Rivka why Jews can’t be traced through her American Red Blood friend, Mrs. Algonqua Lemish, a Masturbov Gardens neighbor who works in the home office downtown. “I told you that. You never listen to a word I say. None of you does.” It seems that all the blood organizations have made a pact not to deal with the “Jewish problem.” And she’ll speak of this no more, just as she won’t speak of David. She’s doing her best to put a good face on the fact that she works for an organization that is suddenly visibly anti-Semitic, and that she feels betrayed by her employer, to whom she’s been so loyal and devoted for so many years.
How our family lives in this small apartment with all the horrors of a lost son and a lost marriage—well, it’s our own dreadful war, bloodless perhaps, but with definite fatalities nevertheless.
I file a report about David at the Jew Tank. I figure, why not? I saw a war movie where an American spy got inside Hitler’s bunker, so maybe someone got inside a camp. I corner Mr. Winesap and beg him to place his special seal on my search application, indicating that Mrs. Strode has blessed it.
“People are getting lost every minute,” he says to me. “I’m sorry it’s your brother.” He’s very courteous. I know I’m supposed to hate him because he’s supposed to hate all of us.
My country is at war and I’m growing up, faster in s
ome ways than in others. The Office of Alien Immigration is called, not always behind our back, the “Jew Tank.” Rivka arranged for me to volunteer here. She knows most of the young women who run it because she taught them in her class at Washington Jewish, where I met them too.
Heidi Osteroff started it. Her father was a close adviser to FDR and talked the president into humoring his Heidi. Her husband, a banker, is one of the most handsome men I have ever seen. Alexei. Alexei Osteroff.
He looks like Alan Ladd with John Garfield’s dark brooding eyes. And Clark Gable’s wavy hair. And Lew Ayres’s kindly face. And Dick Haymes’s lilting voice. Every time he appears I stare. Everybody does. It’s hard not to. And he loves it, in the nicest way, as if he knows he’s blessed with this gift he’s going to share with you. He’s lovely to everyone and he’s lovely to me and from the moment I meet him I love him. If it takes being accused of Trudy McNab’s blindness for me to be so handsomely rewarded, then maybe God knows I’m innocent. I shake Alexei’s big soft gorgeous hand every single time I can.
I’m so happy when I see him and sad when he goes. Of course, I don’t let myself think of this, or anything else that would reveal such a clear preference for my sex alone. Mordy was yesterday and I don’t think of him, either. He’s gone. Our group is over with. I don’t even know where Arnold Botts is, my nemesis who threatened to torture me forever. While I’m discovering as I get older that I have lots of girlfriends at school, or rather friends who are girls, boys are another matter. Boys smell me coming and take off. Boys sense what I sense: I’m not one of them.
Heidi is very unattractive. No one can understand how she and Alexei are married to each other. She has a hawk nose and moles near her mouth and she’s about half a foot taller than he is, and also older. Ten years, it’s said, although “she’s been to Switzerland,” whatever that means. She stands proud, though. If she thinks she’s ugly, she doesn’t let you know. She wears high heels and beautiful clothes and lots of dangly gold jewelry. People think she’s the rich one and that’s the reason they’re married, but Feef Nordlinger, who knows these things, says no. “The money is his.” No one wants to accept the idea that these two people might love each other. They do have four children.
Heidi started this office because of Alexei. His family is Russian German Polish Jewish and his father is caught somewhere, whether in Germany or Russia or Poland isn’t clear. His mother and siblings are safe in Paris, “with their valuables in Vuitton sacks. They got out of Heidelberg just in the nick of time. However, the books were burning,” Alexei tells us. The books were a big library of what he describes only as “something very special.” One day Minna Trooble offhandedly asks Alexei, who comes around quite often, what his father was doing in Heidelberg. “Running the special library,” he says. “A Jew? In Heidelberg? In 1943? He must be a spy.” Sensible Minna. It’s now more or less accepted that Mr. Osteroff was on a secret mission for President Roosevelt. But Mr. Breckenridge Winesap, whose name we are all adept at enunciating unattractively, with pursed lips and hissing, tells Alexei that his father “is only one Jew so stop showing off.” Then word comes that Mr. Osteroff is dead. “His file has been consigned to ‘Unreturnable Citizens’!” Fangette Berghertz reads the letter out loud. Alexei is called to the White House and a medal is pinned on his handsome shoulder “to honor some unspecified heroic service by his father,” Heidi says, “and everyone slaps him on the back and shakes his hand and would you believe that is meant to be that?”
Not for Heidi. She barges into Winesap’s office. “I will get them back. All the Jewish lost, the refugees, the wandering strays. From wherever they are. And I’ll get them back alive! Before you can label them ‘Unreturnable’!” Winesap knows a tough Jew when he sees one. A tough Jew with a tougher grandfather. He says to her, Mr. Winesap does, “I am seeing more people like you these days.” He shows her stacks of letters from rich Jews begging Franklin, begging Eleanor, to look into the matter of their beloved So-and-So.
Heidi, a tough Jew indeed, and a potentially noisy one (her grandfather is Alvah Template, who owns the Monument and is president of our temple), is given an old Quonset hut barracks building down by the Mall. Heidi and a few friends had been working out of the three-story Osteroff recreation room on Albemarle Street. There are a lot of these Quonset huts abandoned after World War I still on the Mall. The place is empty, awful, dirty, unheated, and Heidi takes it. In twenty minutes she’s got a dozen volunteers, all young Jewish wives or eligibles, who by the next day have tables and chairs and telephones and typewriters they’ve had no trouble getting hold of just by calling friends. It usually takes months to get even one phone connected and we have twelve in a week. Heidi wants to call the place In Search of Lost Jewry, but Brecky won’t allow the word Jew in our official title. “We can’t play favorites. Now and then hunt down a few Christians, will you? I hereby christen you the Office of Alien Immigration but I’ll call you the Jew Tank.” He makes the sign of the cross and leaves so Heidi can’t pester him anymore.
Heidi Osteroff, Ariadne Finkelbaum, Fifi Nordlinger, Mariamne Teitel, Fangette Berghertz, Lynne Mesiroff, Portia Schwartz, Pandora Fleischman, Ellie-Anne Groober, Samantha Sue Dodeck, Dracinda Applebaum, Janet Guelff, Francesca Adderondakz, Natalie Rudoph, Minna Trooble. There are fifteen of these young women, and their parents are all very rich. I don’t know yet what the dividing line is between rich and very rich, and Rivka never makes the distinction: everyone else is always very rich. Their ancestors came to this city and made a lot of money. They all know where Masturbov Gardens is and are grateful they don’t have to live there or anyplace like it. They are now second- and third-generation Jews-with-money. These fifteen young women become two dozen, then three dozen, and then fifty, and Winesap has to give us another old Quonset hut, then a third, until he sternly orders, “Enough! Find your lost Jews with what you’ve got!”
I discover the letter on Heidi’s desk one Saturday afternoon. All the desks are piled with such heartbreak that reading anything on them is worse than any war movie at the Masturbov. I hang out at the Jew Tank every chance I get, on weekends and after school. It’s a long way, those same three buses that take Philip back and forth to work, but who cares how long it takes to get away if you hate home? Here in Heidi’s office, Quonset Hut 23, there’s a detailed map of Europe all covered with pins. “I am afraid I must now ask you to calculate each pin as one thousand Jews,” Heidi tells us before they all go out to lunch. Lynne Mesiroff starts to softly sob.
“Oh, shut up, Lynne,” Ellie-Anne says. “We must prove ourselves stronger than that.”
“I am not stronger than that,” Lynne yells back. “And neither are you. And neither is anyone else.” Then she sobs some more, building to a hysterical pitch.
Feef Nordlinger slaps her. “My God, what am I doing? I just slapped you!”
Lynne doesn’t stop. “I can’t take care of the world! I just can’t! My tante Gute is lost in Poland. My nanny’s sister is trapped in Armenia. I don’t know where Armenia is! Why should she be trapped there? Is there a war in Armenia I don’t know about? Some sort of local struggle that the papers aren’t telling us about? She isn’t even Jewish!”
“What is she screaming about?” Portia Schwartz asks Pandora Fleischman.
“She doesn’t read the papers. She can’t read,” Pandora says.
Mariamne Teitel frowns. “That’s not nice, Pandora. Of course she can read.”
And Ariadne Finkelbaum gets so upset she runs out of the room, pulling her car keys out of her purse. Ariadne’s father has pull somewhere, so she always has plenty of gas.
Then the rest of them go out to lunch, and I read the letter. It’s not dated. The handwriting is very tiny, as if the writer is trying to smuggle out a secret. We get lots of letters in tiny handwriting on small pieces of paper. There mustn’t be much paper over there to write on.
Heinie, my darling sweet heinie, my heinie, missed and blessed with the good fortune to live in safety, I send
you greetings from a dark pit of agony with no escape. I love your hands, I love your feet, I love your nose that seeks and finds. Oh, why did my heart not love your heart! Had I only lied to us both, I would be free, with you, in that New World so far across the earth, free from this monster who chains me in this basement somewhere, somewhere, I don’t know where, oh heinie, I don’t know where I am! I only know that it hurts, not so much the pain of chains around my ankles, but the knowledge, the experience, that we have come to this, where one human being does this to another. I no longer know what means this word human, when one human does this to another human. I no longer know what means … almost anything. You know the irony of this? That around this monster, that around him one two three four five six of them, his now-trusted fellow conspirators, were all my lovers. That all of them gave of themselves inside of me. That for a brief moment in time I was one with each of them. That with each, with the monster himself, in that moment, coarseness turned affectionate and tender, like your huge paws of hands. I did that for this world! I thought such tenderness as I could give, as I could draw from them, might save us all and alter history. Can you understand such a feeling in such as myself? To turn something so brutal and ugly into something decent? That is better than art. That is my kind of art, the only art I am capable of creating. I am crazy. They have burned the library. All the books collected by so many of us for so long. The history of our people. The testimonies of our endurance, impossible as it has always been. Our bibliothek is gone. When all this is over, promise me that you will start collecting our books again. Promise me! When I see the flames from my window out here in this cold wilderness, then comes my overwhelming shame. I see that my abilities have all been puny. And that I have too big a part in this tragedy. I could have poisoned them all. I could have stabbed each one in his back. Enough! What are you doing to save me? What are you doing to save all of us from the monsters in charge of this enormous underwater dungeon we must swim in forever seeking breath that cannot come in time to keep us from drowning? What are you doing to hold your head up as a homosexual, to say, At least I have tried! For my people! For both my peoples! To be a homosexual is as awful as being a Jew. There is no difference in the degree of hatred against us, or in our inability to combat it. The word must somehow be spread that it is not only Jews who are being burned to ashes. It is those of us who love others like ourselves. But I know that this news does not and cannot reach the world, because we are dismissed and shunned so vehemently, with such regularity, that to put the news out would jeopardize whatever sympathy and support might be raised for the possible salvation of being just plain Jews. I have heard Hitler speak often. He talks always with metaphors of disease, comparing Christianity to syphilis and Jews to a putrid infection. He calls us germs, vermin. “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus? We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jews.” I know these lines by heart because two of my lovers were forced to compose them for him. Hateful words about homosexuals were eliminated at the last moment only because people must not be reminded of Röhm, who was a homosexual and also Hitler’s lover. He was also popular and is still missed. They say he was the only one who could control Hitler’s hate. As he was murdered, so do we expect to be. I send you this via my guard Abner, who protects me so long as I let him fuck me every night. He smells and has rotten teeth but he loves me. Perhaps, for one brief second in time, God is being kinder to Jewish homosexual artists than to just plain Jews and you will receive it. Although what good it will do you I don’t know. Perhaps it is better that you don’t get it and that we were never born.