by W. E. Gutman
*
One day, on his way home from an errand, my father saw a high school senior set upon a small boy, pinning him against the ground, beating him about the face and pulling at his ear locks with such force that the boy shrieked in pain. Taking pleasure in the pain he caused, the bigger boy pulled harder, battering his quarry's head against the cobblestones and spitting at him.
“Filthy little Jew. Kike. Hooknosed piece of shit. That’ll teach you to tread on my sidewalk. I ought to rub your face in a pig’s ass. You and your foul race should be exterminated.”
“I saw red,” my father remembered. “Red and blue and purple, and then I saw nothing as the tears blinded me, and I felt my blood coursing through my body like acid and, even though he was much taller and stronger, I let him have it with a flurry of fists and elbows and feet that stretched him out cold in a pool of his own blood in the gutter near a pile of horse manure.”
“What happened,” my father asked the little boy. “He was eight or nine and shaking like a leaf. I dusted him off and wiped his face with my handkerchief.”
“‘I was hurrying home from heder and going over a difficult passage that Rebe Yanku wants me to memorize. I didn’t see domnu (“sir”) and I knocked into him by mistake.”’
“Well, domnu is out of commission for a while. I don’t think he’ll ever bother you again.”
“You think so,” asked the boy, looking at my father with awe then glancing at his persecutor with a remnant of terror.
“I know so. Now run along. By the way, what’s the passage you’re supposed to learn?”
“Habakkuk, chapter one, verses eight and nine."
“Their horses also are swifter than the leopards and are more fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.”
“I never forgot the incident or the prophecy,” my father told me, “but it took another fifteen years or so to grasp its oracular surrealism, its apocalyptic significance.”
The next day, the high school principal summoned my father.
“You nearly killed him, Ari.”
“He asked for it.”
“That’s not the point. Meanwhile he’s in the hospital with a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, a busted eardrum and a pair of very swollen balls.”
“So what.”
“It so happens he’s the son of Colonel Petrescu, the military governor. He….”
“Fuck him.”
“… He claims you attacked his son without provocation. He wants you expelled. I’ve no choice. He’s a powerful man. Please understand I’m doing this with great reluctance and sadness. You’re one of my best students. I’ve arranged a transfer to the high school in Cluj. Petrescu would have my head if he knew. You’ll do fine there, that is, if you learn to manage your temper and stop playing paladins.”
“But, sir, you don’t understand....”
Able to convey tenderness and forbearance, my father’s pale blue eyes could also ignite with exasperation. Lies did that to him. Lies or absurd rationalizations, and I knew that few people could withstand his disarming gaze. He would have made a lousy politician. The principal, a decent man, a kind man, according to my father, would not be out-stared.
“No, Ari. Nothing you say will change my mind. I’m sorry. Vindicating a wrong has a way of creating a fresh injustice. Sometimes, it never ends. It’s better to let go. For your own good. Maybe someday we can both look back at this and laugh. Good luck.”
They shook hands.
When my father got home and told his mother what had happened, “she pounded her breast and threw her hands up in the air and looked pleadingly at the ceiling where God can be found when tragedy strikes.”
“Cluj? Cluj,” she lamented, “it’s a world away.”
“A very small world measured in mere kilometers,” my father replied. “Now, look mamale, it’s not a big deal. I’ll come to visit once a month or so, you’ll see. Everything will be fine.”
“But how will you live, where will you live? We don’t know anyone in Cluj. Where will you eat? Who will press your shirts?”
“The principal said there’s a small room in the school‘s attic and I can have it in exchange for doing chores and tutoring slow students. Supper is included.”
“What will Tatale think?”
Tatale, it seems, took the matter with pious fatalism, my father would later claim without a hint of bitterness. “He must have felt relieved to learn that he'd have one fewer mouth to feed.”
If God allows men to deny his existence he’s either an atheist or a myth.
*
Two years later, my father graduated from high school with honors and passed the baccalaureate. He applied and was admitted to Prague’s prestigious School of Medicine. As he had done in high school to support himself, he worked to pay for tuition, books, a closet-like windowless maid’s room that stank of bedbugs, and two skimpy meals a day. The evening collation was generally taken in bed while studying and waiting for sleep to subdue nagging hunger pangs.
A year later, ill at ease with the school’s curriculum -- taught in German to foreign students -- he obtained a transfer to the Faculty of Medicine in Paris and came home to Sighet for the summer.
“In the fall, as I boarded the bus for the train station, tatale offered me a new pair of phylacteries, a skullcap and a fresh prayer shawl. ‘It’s not good to start the day without first calling upon the Lord,’ he said, patting my bare head, an air of studied mortification and pity animating his blue eyes. My mother gave me a bag stuffed with sandwiches, cake and fruit. We hugged. She whispered, ‘it’s not good to pray on an empty stomach....’”
Atheists live in certainty; believers in doubt.
OYSTERLISH YIDEN (WEIRD JEWS)
The postcard Paris that my father had fancied as a boy spread open before him like a pair of luscious thighs, baring treasures of rare beauty and promising unimagined delights. Prague had given him a foretaste of big city life, but Prague was grim by comparison, exquisite to look at but Germanic in temperament, stripped of frivolity, incapable of self-parody. Sublime and profane, sophisticated, palpitating with carnality, Paris quickly seduced him. The allure, the love affair -- lustful in his youth, sustained by memory and nostalgia in old age -- lasted a lifetime. He would die “in exile in Babylon,” -- New York -- a city he likened to “a dynamo too engrossed in its own circuitry to foster feelings of quietude or intimacy. It’s a great place if you’re twenty, with acid coursing through your veins and transistors in place of nerves.”
Pleasure delayed, pleasure enhanced.
In its implied eroticism, coined by my father, this aphorism also warned against the pitfalls of romanticism. Paris was an irresistible seductress but her siren call, for the good of his medical studies, needed to be temporarily stilled. Having to work to pay for tuition further reduced my father’s leisure time, much of which he devoted to doing odd jobs and earning a few extra francs to send home to his parents. Twice a week he ran the night elevator of a posh 16th arrondissement hotel. In the morning he washed dishes in the hotel kitchen in exchange for breakfast and a hot bath. Once a month or so, he sold his blood. Between classes, he tutored dunces, unloaded trucks at Les Halles, the now-defunct sprawling city-center produce and meat market, and sparred with third-rate pugilists in a gym that reeked of beer, urine and sweat and where youthful dreams of glory were repaid with defeat, disfigurement and early dementia, and turned men into broken souls.
Answering a call for extras, he was also cast in a period film in which he wore a “soiled costume and a powdered wig so old, mangy and foul-smelling that it may well have belonged to the Sun King himself.
“I had no speaking part but I was given multiple roles in several action scenes. One of them had me sitting at attention on a horse in a line of cav
alrymen being passed in review. My mount was an incontinent, bow-legged mule that took pleasure nipping at my shins and finally managed to throw me off. I landed in a pile of shit and promptly asked to be transferred to the infantry. In one of many battle-scene close-ups, I had to put a wounded Hessian soldier out of his misery with a thrust of my dagger. The collapsible blade mechanism failed and I would have skewered the poor bugger had it not been for the metal-studded leather sash he wore across his chest. In another scene, mortally wounded by a musket shot, I had to clutch my heart and fall to the ground, backwards. The director found my mimicry of death quite unconvincing so he made me die again and again. I was sore for days after that. I never got to see the picture. Who knows what they left in and what wound up on the cutting-room floor.”
I never forgot this last remark. Uttered by my father without pretense or forethought, I later found it metaphorically rich: Is life but a mere scenario? Why are some plots granted form and substance while others are unceremoniously scrapped? What if a fiction character could seek damages from the author? Imagine if a creation could litigate against its maker, if it could sue for frivolous, unsolicited conception, flawed workmanship, pain and suffering, invasion of privacy, the burden of unattainable potentials and cruel disdain for the absurdity of existence? Oh, what a fabulous class-action suit we could file. And what a thrill to see the miscreants brought to justice at last.
I never shared these thoughts with my father. Although he valued abstract reasoning and often engaged in philosophical inquiry, he considered such mental pirouettes pointless unless they led to some verifiable, useful truth.
“You need exercise,” he once offered an acquaintance that had pestered him with some circuitous suppositions -- “suppositories” as my father called them. “I suggest you use your feet. Walk from l’Etoile to Place de la Concorde and back. You’ll behold superb architecture, cross paths with lovely women and revel in pure symmetry. Symmetry is everything. It calms. It gladdens. It redeems.”
My father didn’t mind antagonizing people if he thought it would do them good. It often did. But, more often than not, the penalty for such solicitude was resentment, followed by alienation. I inherited much of my father’s irreverence and paid the price. Candor and spontaneity, in lieu of hypocrisy and circumspection have proved catastrophic. Speaking my mind has cost me friendships, family ties and prospects for professional growth. In a couple of cases, it damn nearly cost me my life.
*
On May 13, 1936, earning high praise from his professors and from the Sorbonne University School of Medicine jury for his thesis, Contributions to the Study of Breast Cancer in Men, my father, Armin Gutman, the 33-year-old elder son of an impecunious Sighet candle maker, became Dr. Armin Gutman.
Armed with his hard-earned diploma, he went home to Romania a few weeks later. On a visit to Bucharest he was introduced to my mother, a petite hazel-eyed brunette with art deco features and a gentle disposition, fourteen years his junior. They were married in September and left for Paris soon after the wedding. I was born a year later.
*
If my father had long since abandoned all pretense of religion -- a process hastened by Paris’ irresistible embrace and consummated in the ashes of the Holocaust -- he would never regard himself as anything but a Jew. This self-image, a vestige of atavism and the consequence of an indelible Orthodox Jewish upbringing, was, however, altogether secular and devoid of mysticism or sentimentality. He accepted himself the way one accepts having green eyes or flat feet. Asked if he was proud to be a Jew he replied: “I take pride only in my accomplishments; I feel shame only at my failings. I concede all else, including the right to be asked idiotic questions.” In truth, my father found dignity in his Jewishness. He was fond of quoting Peter Ustinov:
“I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.”
Free as he was from doctrinal tyranny, disdainful of absurd beliefs and zealotry, my father found my mother’s synthetic Jewish milieu bizarre, if not grotesque. Cosmopolitan, sophisticated, an enclave of Latin culture in a region suffused with German, Hungarian, Slav and Turkish influences, Bucharest stood worlds apart from provincial Sighet. Unlike Sighet, where Jews formed a monolithic and homogeneous core, Bucharest Jews were stratified, dissimilar and unequal, separated by religious attitudes and conventions, education, professional status and wealth, with the most pious, hence the most recognizable element generally occupying the bottom tiers. Learned, urbane and successful -- my mother’s father was a noted engineer, jurist and poet; her brother was a promising young lawyer; the family my father married into was light years removed from his own. Divested of all discernible Jewish accouterments, perhaps as a hedge against anti-Semitism -- widespread at all levels of Romanian society -- perhaps because conformity and upward mobility took precedence over ethnic identity and survival, they stood in sharp contrast to the unassuming, outspoken Transylvanian Jew that my father would never cease to be.
It’s only by comparing ourselves to others that we discover who we really are.
*
Assimilation had begun early in my mother’s family. Both my grandmother -- born into an upper-middle-class household in the genteel Moldovan capital of Iasi -- and my mother were educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame, a German teaching order known for its demanding curriculum and the severity of its disciplinary system.
“They were mean,” my mother recalled. “They took pleasure in hitting the back of our hands with the edge of a metal ruler at the slightest infraction. Failure to sit erect at our desks elicited a barrage of insults. Crossing our legs or inadvertently exposing a bare ankle drew swift penance, on our knees, in the courtyard, gravel eating at our flesh, in full view of the other pupils. ‘Ill-mannered and unladylike’, sneezing was forbidden.” This injunction was so viciously enforced that my mother, to her dying day, could barely emit a sound.
*
Despite its air of civility, Iasi endured a long history of anti-Semitism. Jews had always been a special target of popular hostility. They were suspected of factionalism and disloyalty; they were loathed for their erudition, envied for their affluence and resented for occupying prominent positions in what was then the second largest center of Christianity in Romania. Wounded national pride and economic woes found relief in mortifying Jews, first through calumny and vilification, then by resorting to wholesale violence. The university of Iasi (Romania’s oldest) and, by osmosis, all educational institutions under its superintendence, were vigorous promoters of that tradition. One of its most notorious alumni was “Captain” Corneliu Codreanu, the self-anointed “savior of Romania from the Jewish scourge” and founder of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, later re-named the Iron Guard. Encouraged by the success of Fascism in the 1920s and 30s, and later, infuriated by the loss of territories resulting from the Russo-German treaty of 1939, Codreanu, and his followers took “love of country” to new heights of anti-Jewish fervor.
In July 1940 Romanian soldiers went on a rampage in Dorohoi, north of Iasi, murdering more than 50 Jews, including five children. Six months later, in January 1941, Iron Guards murdered 125 Jews in Bucharest, impaling some of the victims on meat hooks.
Small wonder that many Romanian Jews, my mother’s family included, eschewed the obvious emblems of their faith and adopted, without necessarily espousing them, the outward trappings of Christianity.
*
What my mother’s family lacked in spiritual fervor was more than offset by a curious amalgam of idolatry, parodies of Christian liturgy, corruption of Jewish protocols, and clandestine excursions into necromancy, palmistry and divination. They crossed themselves in church, which they visited regularly “for inspiration,” (they never set foot in a synagogue) put up Christmas tr
ees, and hosted Easter Sunday dinner parties at which daintily decorated hard-boiled eggs were cracked, dipped in salt water and nibbled on to the accompaniment of rousing “Christ has risen!” cheers.
“A leur manière,” my father recounted, “ces drôles de juifs” (“these weird Jews”) abstained from solid food on Yom Kippur but consumed large quantities of Turkish coffee, chain-smoked aromatic oval cigarettes and read the Tarot. Come Passover, they gingerly took part in Seders at which both bread and matzoth were served, presumably to help ease pork medallions and lobster tails onto their forks.
Just in case, prominently displayed under an ivory crucifix, and sharing honors with an ancient Russian Orthodox icon, a bisque statuette of St. Anthony sat on the mantelpiece ready to hasten the recovery of lost treasures. Locating common objects -- so long as they were misplaced on the premises -- was entrusted to a crystal glass turned upside-down and set atop a lace-trimmed handkerchief.