Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  O the rotted roots of the familytree, the strangling, twisty begats, begets, and begots that rot the tree from the roots on up, then the forest, too, every town, village, and Development surrounding: excommunication, it’s been argued if only recently, can become a form of purification, a manner of rebirth. And so now let us make our ways out onto the steep of His father’s branch, the strong and outstretched bough of the Unaffiliated, deepdrinking, stoutly trunked, thickskinned, and lasting—anything but the Garden’s withered, winterleafless barren chopped for coffinwork, abandoning Him to the elements without even the shadow of shelter. In this beginning, though, as in all of them, how it’d been shared, the roots or root, all stemmed from the same, seeded by the grave of an original fall…that of Adam, named so by He Who has no name and every one of them, also, according to many actually ninetynine of them that they all themselves name as One the ineffable, inextinguishable hundredth that Itself named Lilith to know her named and then, though only after this the first union or, say, marriage ended in what had to have been the first divorce, a great split of fire struck at the growth of the trunk—did he know an Eve, Hava her name was in the tongue with which he licked her and, too, named his other animals (snake, serpent, sidewinder, rattler), Eve who in her own way grew heavy with kind, meaning pregnant as opposed to fat and unattractively apple-shaped from overappleeating, brought to bear two sons one of whom killed the other it’s tragic I know, would rather not talk about it, you understand…and from then on throughout the halls of the house of David, which must have been manyroomed, sixfloor sixfigured expensive and held up under an enormous mortgage, the naming and knowing have been most commendably documented by either God the One and Only, or at the very least by Moses, if you want, or else by any other prophets you’d like to name who though they, too, like all of us had been present at Sinai, still only prophesized their knowing and naming of the past for the sake of future generations such as ours and amid them as well, living subsequent to the Law or their description of it and of its putative giving upon that mountain lost, all of them much more omniscient I’m sure than the mortal here, presently invoking their calling; passages becoming a bit circuitous then, windingly serpentine, fanglocked the doors along the hallways until we reach that sepulchral, chronically unfinished, basement-like abode of a mensch he’s named Jesus the son of Joseph and to many dead the son, too, of God the One and True: the room’s unkempt, sorry, actually messy, requiring duster and vacuum, a mother or whorish maid though Jesus He or he never knew anybody, apparently, knew in the knowing sense, I mean, reportedly never left his room, or it’d been rumored that he couldn’t make the payments, and that the bank it foreclosed on the House of his father, or fathers, or Father—and so where to wander now expelled, made homeless, prodigally estranged, and vilified, too, held in cruciform contempt upon the last standing beam grown out from under the mangered roof ’s collapse: to begin, then, again, or only to meddle around with the middle, ten generations later, if not fifty, or rather many many many more than all that, on what had been the coldest day on record that year, which was the year 1770something or other, perhaps, or possibly only those number of years before the birth of our B, upon which a peasant, endued dirtily in rags of skin, and with the head of an ox, three fingers on each hand and four toes on each foot, its loins, his, perpetually inflamed, rashyred with carbuncle and boil, set upon as if by a ghost, an apparitional superstition he claimed Baba Yaga or Rusalka, the Dziewanna who was Diana and her dogs if you want his name’s let’s say it’s Dziobak and he’s a priest, responsible in his district whose property boundaries and municipal borders have yet to be established for the establishment anyway of a standard depth of grave, who on this day was made a father through his rape of a woman named Tamar of a son named Jan who died along with his mother in birth and then through his rape of another Tamar who this one was married to a mensch Dziobak never thought to remember his name before he killed him then ate him, too, and then drank his wineblood and pickled for winter his brain, then fed the offal to his dogs he also raped and ate and whose blood he also drank was the made father of another son named Jan who he also died in birth but not his mother who, through yet another rape of her, which weakened her bruised, beaten, battered as she already was how Dziobak was made the father of yet another Jan during which birth this Tamar finally died, a Jan who was a daughter this once but was named Jan anyway because once you begin a thing (raping, murdering, naming) it’s famously hard to bring about an end to it, a daughter Jan who she verily seduced another Jan this Jan a priest himself, to sin, the fruit of which union were fraternal twins they went and named Slobomir, the boy, and Slutomira, the girl, and later also a daughter, and this one, if briefly, Dziobak’s wife, following nine moons later whom they abandoned upon her maturation to womanhood why, because one daughter, Slutomira, was already two too many, that and the scandal of her wifely rape by her father and then her abandonment by him and her mother and the unsettlingly rapid growth of her breasts and hips, a daughter who’d become adopted by a cowherd named Cowherd (Pasterz, like a pastor, if you’re interested, a herder of hefty flocks), a daughter found at the side of a road less a road than a mud through the fields who knew who owned them and why, whom he named Daughter as she was never named much by her own parents who’d known her by force, her father, then left her to fend for herself in the still of the night, Daughter (Córka) who would grow up and then into her hips and breasts only to become a premature widow without kinder, her husband name of M dying on the very night of their wedding from drinking homemade slivovitz brewed with consumption, before going on to marry another goy named let’s say for the sake of our argument Przybysaw who he would only one day after the consummation of their marriage be conscripted to die a solider but not in combat out in what once had been the pale of Prussia, fell upon by the horse he rode on away from the front deserting the very same day his wife back in it was then known as Polyn bore them their daughter whom she named all on her own because he wasn’t around anymore Adela, who you wouldn’t know it to pass her on horseback or run her down with your carriage on the mud of the street but she was two bits of what’s now called a nymphomaniac herself, then known as a Milkmaid, Bartender, or Chargirl or woman, who she verily bore a daughter whom she named Wanda by one of maybe ten Cossacks or so or their nine horses it’s up to you, nu vot, nichevo, returning to wherever they graze from Krapivno, Wanda who grew up to womanhood and then with her hips boxed amid a heap of excelsior that had been the kindling of her village burnt in a recent pogrom got out of hand with the cup of her breasts, too, properly crated though never insured, bought herself a ticket on only a smile and a passport she swallowed for and imported herself all alone Over Here, just in the nick of time to lose the affections and so sponsorship of this Italianate goy named Nick the Greek, short for Nikolas whom she’d met on the passage over in steerage in favor of yet another fellow immigrant or emigrant take your pick she’d met on the Island in quarantine, measles, this halfGerman, halfIrish, and entirely bisexual goy named he claimed it was true Richard John but that’s not the best part—Israelien, who he left her soon after on Orchard Street in New York City it was with a two day hotel bill and a three night bar tab for the daughter of an insurance salesmensch, a longtime American and yet also still scandalously Affiliated woman by the name of Rachel-Leah who she would later run away with a butcher’s son and his cart then owned by the butcher’s second I think she was wife, commonlaw it was called (which cart was before that the exclusive property of his first, who’d run away with the mailmensch for Missouri, where they opened a barbershop, in the back of a store selling Notions), ran away then with the only son of the Butcher of Bed-Stuy and with the son of Richard John Israelien growing inside her, born only after the butcher’s son was killed in a Brooklyn bar fight over the privilege of a coaster, perhaps, a son she named John Israelien Jr. whom she lived with in the cart she kept until the day John Israelien Jr. who was verily called J.J. if only by his halfsister, Mary her name
was who was the daughter of the butcher’s son and Rachel-Leah who, he went and married a woman that she was named Deborah née we think Epstein, and supported her and them by working as a plumber while his wife this Dvorah, or maybe Deborah or Deb or else Debby who knows how it changed with her dresses she spent all his money on them, she traded plums for what she swore to him were only light favors, exchanges and the like, trades in kind, including which was a son maybe this J.J. gave her and maybe not (how it’s been argued, though only lately, and with the results of tests based conclusively on research no one’s at liberty to reveal, that the boy’s true father might have actually been this Leroy Goywhoremembers, of Astoria, Queens, whom Deborah she’d taken up with only one summer into their marriage after her plums had turned themselves shriveled, then tongue-dry, and so had to be traded as prunes—admitted to his apartment she didn’t even have a chance to lay out her wares on his kitchencounter before he laid her down on the livingroom floor and there had his way with her, knowing her and naming her whatever he’d moan: that’s what these people do, these goyim, understand: they lie with one another indiscriminately, and uncleanly, on floors that are filthy, unswept, unmopped), and so they whoever made a son together name of Isaac and known to us as PopPop, last name Israelien, later raised after J.J. left her barefoot, barestomached, and pregnant for a woman he’d often plumb, too, up at her home in the Bronx, this goy name of Martha who cares for her or what she was called by way of last names, by Deborah and a putz whom she hated but at least he provides, she’d always say Harry who was an electrician but without any electricity himself, it’s been said, that he was quiet and sullen, always at home with a beer and a ballgame, and humiliated, too, at her demanding and only in spite of him and all he felt for her and provided as well for her feet now slippered and her stomach now full though never with his seed but with his own homecooking that her son Isaac he keep the surname of his father, which was Israelien, PopPop and this we’re almost totally sure of who through His MomMom, one Beatrice Schmeatrice it’s not that important, only that it’s PopPop’s wife whom he met outside of a church of hers he’d often attend himself, if only for the free soup and crusts of bread they gave out and for the use of their bathrooms, they had a son themselves that they named him Israel, PopPop thinking the double naming humorous, iconoclastic, and MomMom, she didn’t have any say, it’s said, how they hardly ever talked, and how PopPop had anyway only promised to give her kinder in return for her silence, that around the house and also with regard to his true sexual orientation that was first and irrevocably ascertained at the age of eighteen with the help of a neighborhood priest, Israel their son the first of his kind to convert, then, and that without knowing much of his lineage beyond a generation at most, him the first ever to identify with Affiliation, without any governments or their militaries forcing him to, and all perhaps psychologically in light of a recent history that…to even love his own strangely intermixed, Atlantic watereddown Affiliation, embracing what he would grow to regard as his birthright, as the Cain do, Abelbodied mark of a worldly American with firm roots deep in the earth, a love’s growth filial and strong no doubt stemming as well, as a fruit from a branch from a bough from a tree airing his feelings for a woman that she had the name Hanna he married and impregnated only one day and ten loans out of lawschool and his admittance to the bar not a week or so later, Hanna née Senior her maiden name was though soon better known as the mother of B, the thirteenth of her kinder all of them girls with the exception of Him, the salvific last a boy they named Benjamin and whom we must refer to now by His initial on the advice of our counsel—Ben He once was known as, meaning: A son, originally named after a relative that just had to be maternal, and that only after protracted debate unto sleeplessness and the midnight making, morningside remaking of lists they in their various nervousness, his, and her predisposition for order, neurotic, went and arranged alphabetically, though listing for themselves only the names of females, girls for the girl they’d been expecting as of daughters they’d already had twelve:

  MALKA (queen),

  MAVA (pleasant),

  MIRI (bitter),

  ------------------------------------ MENACHEMA

  (consolation)???

  MIRIAM, (rebellious);

  this, the degeneration of the degenerations of one Benjamin BLANK, as provisionally assembled from an extensive trove of scholarly materials only last quarter discovered amid collections charred, basemented, of Siburban attics both sacred, profane—both previously classified and heretofore outright outclassed: Rabbi Doctor Karol Hushner PhD’s estimable summary of the entire Nachlass of Doctor Elisha Abuya (Ethica Semitica), comprising a small, eminently portable volume whose covers—as do its Subjects—branch themselves out into innumerably leafy later editions, supplanted in terms of comprehensiveness if not in that of readability by the multiedited, multiauthored, multivolume (7) opus Tractatus Neohebraicus, representing the unrivaled summation of all Affiliated thought (indeed, the acknowledged precursor to all future scholarship in the field, it’s suggested in passim), with emphasis placed on parallels manifest between religious ritual and trends within then contemporary culture (invaluable Notes & Postface provided by one Rav Yossi Letushkin). Also might we mention to you our vast selection of surviving incanabula—for esoteric, press #1, for exoteric, press #2—which we are only now prepared to make available in handsome reproduction for the edification of the general public (lacunæ not included, pericope upon request): the Steinstein Agrapha fragments, Poxy 48a, and the Q documents, GMy1, 2, and the Rubina Pseudoepigraphia, this remaining Oxyrhynchiana going on sale now and for the lowlow price of only 99.99 NS (New Shekels; note: B Notes no longer accepted), supplies are limited, operators are standing by the banks of the Jordan reclaimed. And these are the degenerations of the degenerations of the degenerations of one Mister Benjamin Blank: witness the destruction ignobly ordered of the entire Garden Archive, whose hold had been rumored to include a Rothschild’s richesse of firsthand accounts, along with a Warburgian wealth of secondary source documentation, an Oppenheimerian fortune of footage: thousands of hours of recorded interview with many of the Subject’s intimates, culled from hundreds of appearances in tens of media outlets; at the heart of this estimable body of record since lost, once lying in reels that would seem the tombs of instantly resurrectable corpus—pull the blinds, flick the breath, it’s alive—at least threehundred sixtyfive (365) films dealing with the unspeakable Subject Itself, including: Israel’s Home Movies (Beta II, Beta III, VHS, DVD, SPECIFY FORMAT), professionally recorded simchas shredded, Garden surveillance torched…and an excellent selection of those legendarily forgotten Holywood epics, never to be screened for our patience again: The Making of a Messiah (5760), Live in Los Siegeles (5760), The Making of the Making of a Messiah (5760), Pope for a Year (5760), Joysey Girl (5760)…

  But we haven’t mentioned her much, have we—allow us to rectify. Her name was Rubina, and she was the true Israelien firstborn, though a girl, a woman almost, the guardian of their blood and its cause. As if Him developed in opposite, His other half…the mirror that was once in the hall that was then moved into her room to be her mirror while a new mirror was bought for the hall: she was reflective, was it…slim, tall, and silent (reedy, it could be said, but should anyone resemble a reed?), in appearance as neat and orderly as her room, which for those eight days during which they shared the earth together and its house thereupon was B’s obsession. A room fluffed of all pillow, or so it’d felt—hers the one room topside He’d avoid in His house removed to the Garden as if a reflection of the basement below: any sleep there was troubled, nightmares whoever remembered anything but their fright, tumblingly tear the sheets from the bed, highly threadcounted to lull and then…held taut, a white that was tight and yet soft, welcoming to fall asleep and yet, a terror to dream: that wasn’t for Him, the room was too virginally pure, as if carpeted by snow underfoot so undisturbed He wants to fly out the window she’d gaze through toward the tree i
n the yard, not step down to stay and admire its shade. And she, too, was soft, that once she held Him on the recline of that eighth day home from the hospital with Hanna asleep upstairs-upstairs, them in the kitchen, Him gathered hulkingly into her lap, the folds of her skirt, as if cleavage Himself, or a still bumptious pregnancy—but she was still a virgin, wasn’t she, never known…her hips in motherly sit becoming her waist becoming her breasts two of them both severe and knifelike, He’d cried when they wouldn’t milk, pricked His lips, then how she let go, too heavy, too huge—then went to gather Him up again, tried to but couldn’t, pale, unforgiving: the cries she ignored as she felt hers were ignored always and still, leaving Him alone on the floor for her room. Of the wrong sex for inheritance, birthed carelessly to the wrong, engendered only to lose…Rubina would pass with the rest, to the sleep she so desperately needed. Hanna, jealous of her youth. As for Israel, he wouldn’t touch her anymore. Years since menarche. That and the three of them hardly talked ever since she got her license for her own car, too, with her college acceptance, Dear Rubina Israelien, We are pleased to inform you that…she was to leave soon enough, the house, the hearth if they’d had one that worked; the pillows, stuffed full with room. Freedom, she thought. Real life…not to be.