Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  These were Cosmo’s circumstances when my e-mail arrived in his in-box. He had followed the Messiah to New York, but the Messiah was dead and showed no signs of coming back. And now Cosmo was stuck in a kind of purgatory. He felt trapped in his job, waylaid in Crown Heights, but couldn’t just go on taking comfort in the certainty that at least he was still a rabbi, at least still a Jew.

  “Do you think you’ll ever speak to your mother again?”

  “Eventually,” he said. “There’ll be a wedding, children.”

  “Really?”

  He flashed a rubber-band smile.

  “Have you ever heard of Philip Larkin?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “He has a poem I like called ‘This Be the Verse,’” I said. Cosmo made his way over to the oak table, sat on top of it and began rolling a cigarette. He paused, looked at me and lowered his black-plastic-frame glasses an inch down on his nose as if to say, “Continue.” While he smoked, I recited, clumsily, from memory.

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  It’s a short, rhyming poem by a known anti-Semite about how one generation of parents passes all their bullshit down to the next, and adds “some extra, just for you.” The moral is to get away from home as soon as possible and never dare to reproduce.

  “Where did you come up with that?” Cosmo asked flatly.

  ONE OF THE BEST THINGS I learned in school was to memorize poetry. My memory used to be terrific, and now it is increasingly terrible, no doubt hampered by trips to the Boom Boom Room over the course of the months that followed. But buried somewhere among the refuse, alongside dialogue from every episode of Sex and the City and the phone numbers of several childhood friends, are scattered fragments of James Merrill, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Alexander Pope—whatever happened to stick.

  The person who told me to memorize poetry is also the person who taught me most of what I know about love and death, sex and jealousy, and the stories people tell themselves about happiness. Harold Bloom was in his seventies by the time I met him—frail, in poor health, terrified of spiders, unable to sleep, confined largely (literally) to the butterscotch-color leather lounge chair in his study. Bloom was a titan in every sense, an intellectual colossus, poetry scholar, and author of such works as The Western Canon and How to Read and Why. In The Invention of the Human, he argued that Shakespeare’s characters were not just drawn from life, they drew it—that Hamlet, in a fashion, taught us how to be ourselves. In The Anxiety of Influence, he inspired a generation of literary critics to use the tools of psychoanalysis. In person, Bloom was a monstrous, sorrowful figure, with the kindest face I’ve ever seen, large tufting eyebrows and a forehead permanently shaped into deep furrows of concern. He was always on the verge of tears.

  Professor Bloom taught humanities at Yale. I first approached him as a sophomore, shortly after he wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal calling the Harry Potter book series a scourge. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first movie adaptation of the series, had just come out, and if Bloom would watch the film with me, I thought, I could write up the story and sell it to someone. Who knew how Bloom might respond to such a request, but I suspected he wouldn’t be game. When you’re a journalist—or, as I was at that stage, merely aspiring to be one—you spend your life facing down almost certain rejection. People should really never speak to reporters. We rarely have their interests at heart. The impulse to grant an interview, when it is not in service of some greater social good, basically amounts to a character flaw. It’s hard to deny the little voice inside every journalist that says “Why bother?” since there’s no good reason someone as brilliant as Professor Bloom would want to spend even a few of his precious minutes on the planet speaking to me. But I was bold and reckless then. When you’re eighteen, it’s easy to think of reasons people will say yes. I found Bloom’s telephone number in the phone book and spent half an hour summoning the courage to call. I imagined him shouting at me for wasting his time, slamming the phone down or worse. Ten times, at least, I rehearsed my pitch, then dialed with a shaky finger, my heart thumping in my chest.

  He answered the phone on the first ring. “Yes? Hello?” His voice was quiet and urgent, as if he’d spent the better part of his adult life alone at the bottom of a mine shaft and was just giving up hope of being rescued.

  “Hi! Yes, hi, Professor Bloom!” I shouted into the phone, as if his hearing were impaired, which it was not. I stumbled loudly through my pitch.

  “Ah, my child,” he whispered back. No, of course, he wouldn’t come to the theater with me—he couldn’t fit into the seats. But if I brought over a VCR and a copy of the film, he would endure a screening in his living room. He said I had a “sweet voice,” and he would be happy to meet me. “Okay!” I yelled and then hung up, ecstatic. Having done nothing except shout at a lonely genius, I felt nevertheless that I had achieved something monumental. I had been discovered. He could tell. From my voice.

  The following Sunday afternoon, it rained as I hauled the TV-VCR combo I’d bought five years earlier with money from my bat mitzvah to Bloom’s Tudor-style home and put on a bootleg copy of the film a friend had bought in Times Square. The whole episode lasted fifteen minutes. Harold and his wife, Jeanne, spent ten of them arguing about her latest health kick—she had recently begun the Atkins diet, which he found foolish—and the last five discussing Richard Wagner’s influence on film scores. They quickly forgot the film was playing at all and went about attending to the huge volume of visitors who arrived after me, each evidently “chosen” in his own right. Students streamed through the house, which smelled like the Atkins-approved chicken soup Jeanne was heating on the stove. Eventually, I packed up my television and left.

  “Good-bye, little bear,” Bloom said, hugging me on my way out the door. “Please do come again.”

  No one bought my story, but the interaction was enough to fix me in Bloom’s mind and gain me admittance to his oversubscribed seminars the following year. I read all of Shakespeare with him and every worthwhile twentieth-century American poet. But really what I did was study Bloom, this monstrously isolated, brilliant man—“The Prophet of Decline,” as the New Yorker called him once. Beset by “messianic loneliness” and “grandiloquent fatigue,” he was a great soul, perhaps the greatest. Bloom was on a slew of medications by the time I made it into his class, one of which caused dry mouth, so he paused often to glug from a large sports water bottle. He wore a monitor on his wrist, which beeped straight through our two-hour sessions, in rhythm with his overfull heart. I lived in fear of it speeding up, like I saw happen so many times on hospital-themed TV shows and like I would experience myself, six years hence, waking each morning to Cosmo’s alarm.

  Bloom said wild things. “Sailing to Byzantium” was “one of those poems you look at and it instantly gives you an immortal wound.” He memorized it as a small child, “as indeed I memorized all of Yeats as a small child.” On life: “I find it so hard, when I am awake, not to talk.” On death: “I have said in my will that I wish to be cremated and my ashes scattered as indifferently as possible.” He occasionally quoted himself. His favorite “Bloomian aphorism” was “If you don’t speak ill of the dead, then who will?” Bloom had been friendly with Gershom Scholem, as he had been friendly with “Tommy Pynchon,” John Ashbery, Paul de Man and pretty much everyone else. He occasionally brought up one of these luminaries as a footnote. Pynchon, an anxious man, used to say “Even paranoids have enemies.” Scholem “always spoke in the third person: ‘As Scholem said…’”

  Every kid runs into her parents’ limitations at some point, and for me this had happened on matters of the soul. My parents were great at helping me with math problems—hence Dictionary’s warp-speed ascent through middle school algebra—but the human stuff was rougher terrain. We didn’t talk about love or death or feelings in my house, and so I learned about them the way I learned about singing: through books a
nd movies and magazines. In some respects, this is terrific, since I learned from the best. But the problem with it is it’s one-directional. There’s no experience, no exchange. It turns you into a vessel, a smooth cylinder with no parts for joining, just a big hole in the center to fill. When I met Harold Bloom, it was not so different from when I first encountered Carrie Bradshaw and her own pink, fluffy kind of messianic sadness. My reaction was awe and instant devotion. I sat quietly and let them pour everything in.

  There’s a children’s book by P. D. Eastman about a little bird that hops around to different animals and objects, asking, “Are you my mother?” I read it countless times as a kid and only recently recognized it for the breathtakingly profound, essentially religious text it is. I wrote down everything Bloom said while I was his student and did everything he told us to do, and tried, in this manner, to be a kind of daughter to him—not to be like him, exactly, but to be the person he might want me to be. Your first pair of parents makes you, and then you go through life choosing different parents, remaking yourself to look like them. Sometimes the person is an actual person, like your annoyingly sporty shrink, and you have the luxury of interacting with her. Sometimes the person isn’t real, is instead the protagonist of a mediocre television series or the prince of Denmark. And sometimes the parent you’ve chosen up and dies, and you’re left with a rabbinical certificate and a job you hate at a photocopy shop in Crown Heights, and then all you’ve got is some random junk, picked up from somewhere, cluttering your brain.

  COSMO SAT ON THE WINDOWSILL, nodding and smoking through the first night of our giftless Hanukkah, in what must have been on one of the most pathetic celebrations a Jewish holiday has ever occasioned: no latkes, no family, no singing, no dancing, no joy.

  “I don’t think Judaism is working for me anymore,” he said.

  And now: no Judaism.

  He went on. “It’s a marvelous religion, if you’re looking. It’s grand. It has facets. It has colors. You know how everyone needs a father figure? Judaism says: ‘Here. Don’t worry. We know how the world works.’ It’s awesome.” Except he pronounced it oowahsome, drawing the word out to three syllables as if he were a native Brooklynite who grew up shouting this sort of thing at Mets games. “But I need something else.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s big.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m seventy-five percent sure I’ll come back to it.”

  If I had to put a number on it, I would have said I was about 75 percent sure I would go back to Manhattan at some point, get a new apartment, fall in love again, ease back into the broader outlines of my old life. But maybe I wouldn’t! It was a tantalizing prospect. Maybe I would run off to Buenos Aires or Majorca or some other place where I might actually get a tan. Or maybe I would go study an indigenous tribe somewhere like Margaret Mead, and then come back to New York someday many decades later to deliver a paper before an esteemed crowd of academics, looking half-feral, wearing a hopelessly outdated style of jeans. Maybe I would meet a prince and he would cart me off to Morocco. There really was no telling. The thing in the shiny package in front of the fireplace might fly or bounce or save my soul. Maybe it would usher me into a whole new life.

  While I have no interest in the miracle of Hanukkah, it is hard to ignore a hundred signs telling you THE TIME FOR YOUR REDEMPTION IS NOW NOW NOW. I thought about Harold Bloom, massive and orphic in his brown leather chair, and then I looked over at Cosmo, who had left the windowsill and was now sorting out his cigarette papers on our pleather couch, repeatedly readjusting the glasses on his nose. We sat in silence.

  Chosenness is a major concept in contemporary Judaism. Jews believe they are God’s beloved nation, gifted with the Torah and destined for greatness. Chosenness is also a fundamental concept in secular society, especially in the achievement-obsessed suburban middle-class prep school world I come from. Get picked for dodgeball, get picked for Yale, get picked by Harold Bloom to schlep a TV over to his house one rainy day. It’s all glitter sprinkling down from heaven, making you shine. The brighter you shine, the happier you are. This is what my people believe. But what happens when that belief breaks down? When being chosen loses its luster?

  The candles had burned out in Cosmo’s cheap menorah, and a waft of singed aluminum floated through the apartment. It could have been a euphoric moment, Cosmo’s prison break from Orthodoxy. But it felt more like a somber time, and a scary one. Here was a Hasidic rabbi, a man whose entire adult life had been dictated by the strictures of Judaism, deciding, on the first night of Hanukkah, to give it all up. Would he eat treyf? Would he date shiksas? Would he cut off his beard, he wondered, and if so who would do it, and how much would he cut off? The questions were endless.

  I looked at Cosmo, motherless son of a motherless mom, and longed to somehow help. It never occurred to me that in that moment he might have felt the same mix of pity and helplessness for me.

  Cosmo looked up from the couch.

  “Do you know Joseph Brodsky?”

  I shook my head.

  “He has a poem I like called ‘History of the Twentieth Century: A Roadshow.’”

  He rolled and lit another cigarette, and then began to recite.

  Ladies and gentlemen and the gay!

  All ye made of sweet human clay!

  Let me tell you: you are okay!

  Christmas with the Goldfarbs

  Christmas Eve dinner was the prix fixe menu at Jean-Georges, one of the finest restaurants in New York. I was with my friend Kate and her mother, Karen, a rich divorcée who arrived, humming, from church, in a wide-brimmed feathered hat. The menu was sautéed scallops, steamed cod, beef tenderloin with horseradish crème and a sampling of seasonal desserts, including a deconstructed apple tart, cinnamon-maple buns, chocolate noodles with vanilla emulsion, something called Textures of Cranberry, plus two $150 bottles of a nice California Pinot Noir. Kate and I went dancing afterward at a club called Avenue, and crawled up to the DJ booth around two a.m., where we met and chatted with an enormous blind pimp in a full-length fur coat, smoking a blunt.

  I came home in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, Christmas Day, and found Cosmo and two houseguests sitting in the living room, drinking beer. Michael and Stephanie were both in their twenties, both Orthodox, both wearing jeans. It took a while for me to realize this was a date, since they barely spoke to each other the entire time.

  Michael was Cosmo’s last roommate and remained one of his only friends. He’d stayed five months in the room that was now mine and then moved to a place on the Lower East Side, where he worked as a computer consultant and sporadically pursued a Ph.D. in applied math. He wore a black zip-up fleece, white socks and a pair of those overdesigned hybrid loafers, with the thick black rubber soles, made for men who don’t want to buy separate shoes for work, shul and silent Friday afternoon dates. Small wire-frame glasses sat so high on his nose they were nearly contact lenses. The brim of his baseball cap angled sharply down, covering his forehead and most of his eyes. The lights were off in anticipation of shabbas, and when he talked in the fading daylight, his mouth didn’t seem to move. He and Cosmo were sipping beers.

  Stephanie, a doctor, was in town from Minneapolis, where she was doing her residency in dermatology. She was slim and pretty, with a pale face, dark eyes and shoulder-length brown hair that she periodically tucked behind her ears. She was utterly un-made-up, and I instinctively imagined how she’d look in heels, mascara and a cocktail dress, something low-cut and flattering. She wore a buttercup-yellow turtleneck sweater that was just loose enough to be modest but which showed off her distinctly Midwestern figure, curvy and athletic.

  “Let’s let the ladies schmooze,” Michael said, dragging Cosmo into the kitchen.

  Once they’d gone, in quiet tones Stephanie explained that she and Michael had met on a Jewish Internet dating site called Frumster and that this was their second date ever, although they had been “corresponding for several months.” They’d met for the first
time in person over Halloween weekend, when Stephanie had come to New York for a visit. Michael had invited her over to cook shabbas dinner, but she’d declined. “I was going to go, but then I thought, ‘This is a strange man. I can’t just go to his apartment,’” she said. They borrowed a friend’s place and had dinner there: neutral ground.

  I asked her if she was Orthodox.

  “I was raised Reform,” she said. Like me.

  “But you’re becoming…more?”

  “Well, I’m wearing jeans.” She gestured toward her knees. “But, yes, I’m getting more into it.”

  Stephanie was what Michael called “traditional Reform,” meaning she was raised in a lightly observant household but was gradually embracing custom. She was in town now for a month, doing a pediatric dermatology rotation at New York University Hospital. She was planning to attend classes at Machon Chana, a nearby Jewish women’s school.

  “They have a two-year program I’m thinking about doing,” she whispered. “They say about half the women drop out by the end of the first year because they get married.”

  She giggled and asked if she could use my room to change.

  “Sure,” I said, imagining the horrors of Machon Chana, and asked her to give me just a few seconds to tidy up. Once in my room, I performed a frantic sweep, as if the Drug Enforcement Agency were at the door. Anything potentially offensive or incriminating went into a bin on the far side of my bed. What was offensive? I had no idea. I erred on the side of caution, hiding birth control pills, underwear, rolling papers, copies of Vogue. I emerged after too many minutes.