by Saul Bellow
My comment was “I break my head trying to understand why it’s so important for Fonstein. He’s been turned down? So he’s been turned down.”
“To express gratitude,” said Sorella. “All he wants to say is ‘Thanks.’ “
“And this wild pygmy absolutely refuses.”
“Behaves as if Harry Fonstein never existed.”
“Why, do you suppose? Afraid of the emotions? Too Jewish a moment for him? Drags him down from his standing as a full-fledged American? What’s your husband’s opinion?”
“Harry thinks it’s some kind of change in the descendants of immigrants in this country,” said Sorella.
And I remember today what a pause this answer gave me. I myself had often wondered uncomfortably about the Americanization of the Jews. One could begin with physical differences. My father’s height was five feet six inches, mine was six feet two inches. To my father, this seemed foolishly wasteful somehow. Perhaps the reason was biblical, for King Saul, who stood head and shoulders above the others, was verrucht_—demented and doomed. The prophet Samuel had warned Israel not to take a king, and Saul did not find favor in God’s eyes.
Therefore a Jew should not be unnecessarily large but rather finely made, strong but compact. The main thing was to be deft and quick-witted. That was how my father was and how he would have preferred me to be. My length was superfluous, I had too much chest and shoulders, big hands, a wide mouth, a band of black mustache, too much voice, excessive hair; the shirts that covered my trunk had too many red and gray stripes, idiotically flashy. Fools ought to come in smaller sizes. A big son was a threat, a parricide. Now Fonstein, despite his short leg, was a proper man, well arranged, trim, sensible, and clever. His development was hastened by Hitlerism. Losing your father at the age of fourteen brings your childhood to an end. Burying your mother in a foreign cemetery, no time to mourn, caught with false documents, doing time in the slammer (“sitting” is the Jewish term for it: “Er hat gesessen”)._ A man acquainted with grief. No time for froth or moronic laughter, for vanities and games, for climbing the walls, for effeminacies or infantile plaintiveness.
I didn’t agree, of course, with my father. We were bigger in my generation because we had better nutrition. We were, moreover, less restricted, we had wider liberties. We grew up under a larger range of influences and thoughts—we were the children of a great democracy, bred to equality, living it up with no pales to confine us. Why, until the end of the last century, the Jews of Rome were still locked in for the night; the Pope ceremonially entered the ghetto once a year and spat ritually on the garments of the chief rabbi. Were we giddy here? No doubt about it. But there were no cattle cars waiting to take us to camps and gas chambers.
One can think of such things—and think and think_—but nothing is resolved by these historical meditations. To think_ doesn’t settle anything. No idea is more than an imaginary potency, a Los Alamos mushroom cloud (destroying nothing, making nothing) rising from blinding consciousness.
And Billy Rose wasn’t big; he was about the size of Peter Lorre. But oh! he was American. There was a penny-arcade jingle about Billy, the popping of shooting galleries, the rattling of pinballs, the weak human cry of the Times Square geckos, the lizard gaze of sideshow freaks. To see him as he was, you have to place him against the whitewash glare of Broadway in the wee hours. But even such places have their grandees—people whose defects can be converted to seed money for enterprises. There’s nothing in this country that you can’t sell, nothing too weird to bring to market and found a fortune on. And once you got as much major real estate as Billy had, then it didn’t matter that you were one of the human deer that came uptown from the Lower East Side to graze on greasy sandwich papers. Billy? Well, Billy had bluffed out mad giants like Robert Moses. He bought the Ziegfeld Building for peanuts. He installed Eleanor Holm in a mansion and hung the walls with masterpieces. And he went on from there. They’d say in feudal Ireland that a proud man is a lovely man (Yeats’s Parnell), but in glamorous New York he could be lovely because the columnists said he was—George Sokolsky, Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, the “Midnight Earl”—and also Hollywood pals and leaders of nightclub society. Billy was all over the place. Why, he was even a newspaper columnist, and syndicated. True, he had ghostwriters, but he was the mastermind who made all the basic decisions and vetted every word they printed.
Fonstein was soon familiar with Billy’s doings, more familiar than I ever was or cared to be. But then Billy had saved the man: took him out of prison, paid his way to Genoa, installed him in a hotel, got him passage on a neutral ship. None of this could Fonstein have done for himself, and you’d never in the world hear him deny it.
“Of course,” said Sorella, with gestures that only a two-hundred-pound woman can produce, because her delicacy rests on the mad overflow of her behind, “though my husband has given up on making contact, he hasn’t stopped, and he can’t stop being grateful. He’s a dignified individual himself, but he’s also a very smart man and has got to be conscious of the kind of person that saved him.”
“Does it upset him? It could make him unhappy to be snatched from death by a kibitzer.”
“It gets to him sometimes, yes.”
She proved quite a talker, this Sorella. I began to look forward to our conversations as much for what came out of her as for the intrinsic interest of the subject. Also I had mentioned that I was a friend of Wolfe, one of Billy’s ghosts, and maybe she was priming me. Wolfe might even take the matter up with Billy. I informed Sorella up front that Wolfe would never do it. “This Wolfe,” I told her, “is a funny type, a little guy who seduces big girls. Very clever. He hangs out at Birdland and dotes on Broadway freaks. In addition, he’s a Yale-trained intellectual heavy, or so he likes to picture himself; he treasures his kinks and loves being deep. For instance, his mother also is his cleaning lady. He told me recently as I watched a woman on her knees scrubbing out his pad, ‘The old girl you’re looking at is my mother.’ “
“Her own dear boy?” said Sorella.
“An only child,” I said.
“She must love him like anything.”
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. To him, that’s what’s deep. Although Wolfe is decent, under it all. He has to support her anyway. What harm is there in saving ten bucks a week on the cleaning? Besides which he builds up his reputation as a weirdo nihilist. He wants to become the Thomas Mann of science fiction. That’s his real aim, he says, and he only dabbles in Broadway. It amuses him to write Billy’s columns and break through in print with expressions like: ‘I’m going to hit him on his pointy head. I’ll give him such a _hit!’
‘__ “
Sorella listened and smiled, though she didn’t wish to appear familiar with these underground characters and their language or habits, with Village sex or Broadway sleaze. She brought the conversation back to Fonstein’s rescue and the history of the Jews.
She and I found each other congenial, and before long I was speaking as openly to her as I would in a Village conversation, let’s say with Paul Goodman at the Casbah, not as though she were merely a square fat lady from the dark night of petty-bourgeois New Jersey—no more than a carrier or genetic relay to produce a science savant of the next generation. She had made a respectable (“contemptible”) marriage. However, she was also a tiger wife, a tiger mother. It was no negligible person who had patented Fonstein’s thermostat and rounded up the money for his little factory (it was_ little at first), meanwhile raising a boy who was a mathematical genius. She was a spirited woman, at home with ideas. This heavy tailored lady was extremely well informed. I wasn’t inclined to discuss Jewish history with her—it put my teeth on edge at first—but she overcame my resistance. She was well up on the subject, and besides, damn it, you couldn’t say no to Jewish history after what had happened in Nazi Germany. You had to listen. It turned out that as the wife of a refugee she had set herself to master the subject, and I heard a great deal from her about the technics of ann
ihilation, the large-scale-industry aspect of it. What she occasionally talked about while Fonstein and my father stared at the chessboard, sealed in their trance, was the black humor, the slapstick side of certain camp operations. Being a French teacher, she was familiar with Jarry and Ubu Roi,_ Pataphysics, Absurdism, Dada, Surrealism. Some camps were run in a burlesque style that forced you to make these connections. Prisoners were sent naked into a swamp and had to croak and hop like frogs. Children were hanged while starved, freezing slave laborers lined up on parade in front of the gallows and a prison band played Viennese light opera waltzes.
I didn’t want to hear this, and I said impatiently, “All right, Billy Rose wasn’t the only one in show biz. So the Germans did it too, and what they staged in Nuremberg was bigger than Billy’s rally in Madison Square Garden—the ‘We Will Never Die’ pageant.”
I understood Sorella: the object of her researches was to assist her husband. He was alive today because a little Jewish promoter took it into his queer head to organize a Hollywood-style rescue. I was invited to meditate on themes like: Can Death Be Funny? or Who Gets the Last Laugh? I wouldn’t do it, though. First those people murdered you, then they forced you to brood on their crimes. It suffocated me to do this. Hunting for causes was a horrible imposition added to the original “selection,” gassing, cremation. I didn’t want to think of the history and psychology of these abominations, death chambers and furnaces. Stars are nuclear furnaces too. Such things are utterly beyond me, a pointless exercise.
Also my advice to Fonstein—given mentally—was: Forget it. Go American.
Work at your business. Market your thermostats. Leave the theory side of it to your wife. She has a taste for it, and she’s a clever woman. If she enjoys collecting a Holocaust library and wants to ponder the subject, why not? Maybe she’ll write a book herself, about the Nazis and the entertainment industry. Death and mass fantasy.
My own suspicion was that there was a degree of fantasy embodied in Sorella’s obesity. She was biologically dramatized in waves and scrolls of tissue. Still, she was, at bottom, a serious woman fully devoted to her husband and child. Fonstein had his talents; Sorella, however, had the business brain. And Fonstein didn’t have to be told to go American. Together this couple soon passed from decent prosperity to real money. They bought property east of Princeton, off toward the ocean, they educated the boy, and when they had sent him away to camp in the summer, they traveled. Sorella, the onetime French teacher, had a taste for Europe. She had had, moreover, the good luck to find a European husband.
Toward the close of the fifties they went to Israel, and as it happened, business had brought me to Jerusalem too. The Israelis, who culturally had one of everything in the world, had invited me to open a memory institute.
So, in the lobby of the King David, I met the Fonsteins. “Haven’t seen you in years!” said Fonstein.
True, I had moved to Philadelphia and married a Main Line lady. We lived in a brownstone mansion, which had a closed garden and an 1817 staircase photographed by American Heritage_ magazine. My father had died; his widow had gone to live with a niece. I seldom saw the old lady and had to ask the Fonsteins how she was. Over the last decade I had had only one contact with the Fonsteins, a telephone conversation about their gifted boy.
This year, they had sent him to a summer camp for little science prodigies.
Sorella was particularly happy to see me. She was sitting—at her weight 1 suppose one generally is more comfortable seated—and she was unaffectedly pleased to find me in Jerusalem. My thought about the two of them was that it was good for a DP to have ample ballast in his missus. Besides, I believe that he loved her. My own wife was something of a Twiggy. One never does strike it absolutely right. Sorella, calling me “Cousin,” said in French that she was still a femme bien en chair._ I wondered how a man found his way among so many creases. But that was none of my business. They looked happy enough.
The Fonsteins had rented a car. Harry had relations in Haifa, and they were going to tour the north of the country. Wasn’t it an extraordinary place! said Sorella, dropping her voice to a theatrical whisper. (What was there to keep secret?) Jews who were electricians and bricklayers, Jewish policemen, engineers, and sea captains. Fonstein was a good walker. In Europe he had walked a thousand miles in his Polish boot. Sorella, however, was not built for sight-seeing.
“I should be carried in a litter,” she said. “But that’s not a trade for Israelis, is it?” She invited me to have tea with her while Fonstein looked up hometown people—neighbors from Lemberg.
Before our tea, I went up to my room to read the Herald Tribune_—one of the distinct pleasures of being abroad—but I settled down with the paper in order to think about the Fonsteins (my two-in-one habit—like using music as a background for reflection). The Fonsteins were not your predictable, disposable distant family relations who labeled themselves by their clothes, their conversation, the cars they drove, their temple memberships, their party politics. Fonstein for all his Jermyn Street boots and Italianate suits was still the man who had buried his mother in Venice and waited in his cell for Ciano to rescue him. Though his face was silent and his manner “socially advanced”—this was the only term I could apply: far from the Jewish style acquired in New Jersey communities—I believe that he was thinking intensely about his European origin and his American transformation: Part I and Part II. Signs of a tenacious memory in others seldom escape me. I always ask, however, what people are doing with their recollections. Rote, mechanical storage, an unusual capacity for retaining facts, has a limited interest for me. Idiots can have that gift. Nor do I care much for nostalgia and its associated sentiments. In most cases, I dislike it. Fonstein was doing_ something with his past. This was the lively, the active element of his still look. But you no more discussed this with a man than you asked how he felt about his smooth boot with the four-inch sole.
Then there was Sorella. No ordinary woman, she broke with every sign of ordinariness. Her obesity, assuming she had some psychic choice in the matter, was a sign of this. She might have willed herself to be thinner, for she had the strength of character to do it. Instead she accepted the challenge of size as a Houdini might have asked for tighter knots, more locks on the trunk, deeper rivers to escape from. She was, as people nowadays say, “off the continuum”—her graph went beyond the chart and filled up the whole wall. In my King David reverie, I put it that she had had to wait for an uncle in Havana to find a husband for her—she had been a matrimonial defective, a reject. To come out of it gave her a revolutionary impulse. There was going to be no sign of her early humiliation, not in any_ form, no bitter residue. What you didn’t want you would sh ut out decisively. You had been unhealthy, lumpish. Your fat had made you pale and clumsy. Nobody, not even a lout, had come to court you. What do you do now with this painful record of disgrace? You don’t bury it, nor do you transform it; you annihilate_ it and then use the space to draw a more powerful design. You draw it in freedom because you can afford to, not because there’s anything to hide. The new design, as I saw it, was not an invention. The Sorella I saw was not constructed but revealed.
I put aside the Herald Tribune_ and went down in the elevator. Sorella had settled herself on the terrace of the King David. She wore a dress of whitish beige. The bodice was ornamented with a large square of scalloped material. There was something military and also mystical about this. It made me think of the Knights of Malta—a curious thing to be associated with a Jewish lady from New Jersey. But then the medieval wall of the Old City was just across the valley. In 1959 the Israelis were still shut out of it; it was Indian country then. At the moment, I wasn’t thinking of Jews and Jordanians, however. I was having a civilized tea with a huge lady who was also distinctly, authoritatively dainty. The beehive was gone. Her fair hair was cropped, she wore Turkish slippers on her small feet, which were innocently crossed under the beaten brass of the tray table. The Vale of Hinnom, once the Ottoman reservoir, was green an
d blossoming. What I have to say here is that I was aware of—I directly experienced—the beating of Sorella’s heart as it faced the challenge of supply in so extensive an organism. This to me was a bold operation, bigger than the Turkish waterworks. I felt my own heart signifying admiration for hers—the extent of the project it had to face.
Sorella put me in a tranquil state.
“Far from Lakewood.”
“That’s the way travel is now,” I said. “We’ve done something to distance. Some transformation, some bewilderment.”
“And you’ve come here to set up a branch of your institute—do these people need one?”
“They think they do,” I said. “They have a modified Noah’s ark idea. They don’t want to miss out on anything from the advanced countries. They have to keep up with the world and be a complete microcosm.”
“Do you mind if I give you a short, friendly test?”
“Go right ahead.”
“Can you remember what I was wearing when we first met in your father’s house?”
“You had on a gray tailored suit, not too dark, with a light stripe, and jet earrings.”
“Can you tell me who built the Graf Zeppelin?”
“I can—Dr. Hugo Eckener.”
“The name of your second-grade teacher, fifty years ago?”
“Miss Emma Cox.”
Sorella sighed, less in admiration than in sorrow, in sympathy with the burden of so much useless information.
“That’s pretty remarkable,” she said. “At least your success with the Mnemosyne Institute has a legitimate basis—I wonder, do you recall the name of the woman Billy Rose sent to Ellis Island to talk to Harry?”
“That was Mrs. Hamet. Harry thought she was suffering from TB.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Over the years I had some contact with her. First she looked us up. Then I looked her up. I cultivated her. I liked the old lady, and she found me also sympathetic. We saw a lot of each other.”