In summing up, I wish I had some kind of affirmative message to leave you with. I don’t. Would you take two negative messages?
—WOODY ALLEN
I COULD DIE LAUGHING
— Leon Whiteson —
My granduncle Solomon played a dual role in my hometown in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s—as the local Jewish community’s official shokhet, or kosher slaughterer, and its unofficial sardonic jokester. These twin talents often ran together, as in: “Do you know the hens make this funny cackle when I slit their gullets? Like they’re literally laughing their heads off at some private joke at our expense.” He claimed that when he’d killed his last fowl, he’d slit his own throat and laugh his head off at “the biggest joke of all, my life.”
The joke life played on Uncle Sol began at birth, back in the Ukrainian shtetl that was the family’s ancestral village. Apparently, he was a fraternal twin. His mother had already delivered five boys, and she desperately wanted a girl. However, Sol’s twin sister was stillborn and he survived, much to his mother’s chagrin. In revenge, she saddled him with the pet name of krumeh oigen (cross-eyed), though this affliction was barely noticeable. In the family, he was known simply as Krumele. As my mom said, Sol was krume, “and not only in his oigen.” Perhaps it was this cursed epithet that caused him to be a lifelong bachelor—that, along with his often thoroughly nasty but sometimes hilariously bitter tongue. The nickname he chose for me was “Boots,” suggesting I was way too big for them altogether. This irritatingly apt tag stuck for years while I was growing up.
From the time I was eight, I was given the task of accompanying our African cook, Sout, when he took the Sabbath chickens to Sol’s shed on Friday afternoons. My mother insisted I go along because the schwartzes (blacks) could not be trusted; she said they’d vanish for hours to “whoop it up with their pals at the drop of a hat.”
The shokhet shed was a veritable poultry Auschwitz, a hellhole stinking with the blood and excrement of a host of terrified fowls. The place was crowded with African servants, and the racket of their chatter competed with the screeches and squawks of the chickens to create an unholy uproar. The floor was slippery, the stench was overwhelming; no matter how hard I tried not to breathe through my nose, I could not block out the dreadful odor.
Sol presided grandly over this scene of carnage. Draped in a long white apron decorated with dried gore, he grasped each hen by the legs and severed its throat with one swift slash of his razor-edged blade. As the decapitated bird’s red juice spurted into a pail at his boots and slopped over onto the cement floor, he chanted, “Why did the chicken cross the road? To meet up with me!” In such moments his grizzled, sunken cheeks and his wild grin recalled the Joker, the villain in the early Batman comics.
Whenever Sout and I entered the shed, Sol gaily summoned us to the head of the line. “Boots! Mishpocheh!” he’d shout joyfully, favoring family over the several other boys who, like me, had been sent to supervise the servants. He snatched away the hen I carried in my arms and hefted it upside down, judging its weight of blood. He particularly relished this act because he knew that the poor fowl was something of a pet to me—I tended the chickens we raised from chicks in our backyard pen—and that inspired him to an extra dash of glee as he cut its throat.
If the hen laughed, I was too dismayed hear it. I had to watch while the last drop was drained from the convulsed carcass. Kosher law, as Sol never tired of reminding me, demanded that all the meat be bloodless. When at last I staggered from the shed, my throat was choked with suppressed puke. But Sout was unperturbed. “It’s kosher, baas,” he’d say serenely, hoisting the headless birds.
Sol was not only the town’s shokhet, but also its principal mohel, or male circumciser. It was he who had slit my baby foreskin to honor Abraham’s covenant with Jehovah, and every time I saw him, in the shed or at family get-togethers, my scrotum clenched. He used a different knife for circumcisions, of course, but in my nightmares I fancied he was cutting my tiny penis with his heavy shokhet’s blade, before tossing my prepuce into his slop pail, along with the chicken heads.
Like his older brother, my grandfather, Mathew, Uncle Sol had ended up in Africa after a series of misadventures. In the great wave of migration at the turn of the twentieth century, millions fled Europe’s familiar homelands for a variety of far-flung destinations, often as alien as the moon in their provincial experience. My grandpa, for instance, never really understood how he’d come to settle in a remote corner of the so-called Dark Continent, but Sol seemed to know exactly where he was and why. “I’m in sheissland,” he said, “because the Lord, baruch Hashem, thinks that I’m a turd—and he has to be right, isn’t it so?” In a final twist, the Lord had seen fit to condemn him to a life of ritual butchery.
All in all, the community didn’t quite know what to make of Uncle Sol. On the one hand he smelled of stale blood, despite the harsh carbolic soap he used to scrub his hands and arms, and his jokes were often off-color or just plain rude. He delighted in pricking pretensions, particularly the Jews’ precarious status as “honorary whites” in a racist culture. “Jews are Asians,” he declared bluntly. “If Israel is our Holy Land, we can’t rightly claim to be Europeans.” In their cultural confusion, he said, “The Yids hereabouts blunder around like farts in a pickle barrel.”
On the other hand, Sol was a noted scholar, a role long appreciated by Jews. The local rabbi regularly consulted him on the interpretation of passages in the Torah for his Sabbath sermons. Sol had the Talmud and its multitudinous commentaries at his fingertips, plus the writings of major Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides, his favorite. “As RamBam [Maimonides] said, ‘Only in the days of the Messiah will we know what the metaphors mean …’ ”
At the family Passover Seder, hosted by Grandpa, these opposite aspects of Sol’s character collided. Learned disquisitions upon the meaning of exile for the Jews were interrupted by a barrage of sly anecdotes about family members, plus the odd questionable joke. One moment he was quoting Gershon Scholem—“ ‘Jewish Messianism is in its origins and by its nature a theory of catastrophe.’ That’s to say, Jerusalem is far more inspiring for our people as an aspiration rather than a reality …”—and the next moment he’d sideslip into gossip about who was shtupping who in the community, within and without wedlock. He countered outraged protests with his ritual retort, “cashmere in tochas,” a play on Yiddish kush mir in tochas, “kiss my ass”—a jibe against the genteel pretensions of “honorary whites.” Veering between esteem and disgrace, Sol kept everyone off-balance.
Another of Sol’s unsettling quirks was his rare fluency in Ndebele, the local African language. Most whites spoke to their servants in Fanagalo or “kitchen kaffir,” a kind of pidgin baby talk that made every speaker sound infantile. My grandpa, for example, often jumbled English, pidgin, Afrikaans, and Yiddish in one sentence: “O put lo manzi und voetsek der hund.” Translation: Take the dog outside and give it some water. Announcing litigation involving a business rival, he declared, “I am bringing against him a suitcase.” Sol, by contrast, favored polyglot curses, including Yiddish mamzer (bastard), Ndebele masatanyoko (motherfucker), and English shit-brains.
When whites heard Sol chatting to the Africans in their native tongue, they were uncomfortable, as if he were breaching some unwritten code of nonfraternization. “If you talk to your slaves as if they were people, they may soon stop being slaves,” he said. He claimed that truly successful colonizations depended on the absolute destruction of the native culture, either literally as in North America, or figuratively as in South America. “In our area we haven’t quite accomplished that—not for want of trying!” Sol said. “So Africa will soon shrug us off, kosher and unkosher whites together, like fleas on a dog.”
My feelings about Sol began to change as I grew into my teens. Through the fog of my childish revulsion at his manner and his trade, I began to recognize a truly extraordinary personality, one who might open my eyes to the world beyond our remot
e corner. After my bar mitzvah, I began to hang around the shokhet shed, hoping Sol would have time to sit down and chat with me. Many afternoons I waited by the door to his small apartment behind the shed until he returned from Mincha, the afternoon prayer session at the synagogue. He’d soon appear, carrying his worn blue velvet bag containing his yellowing prayer shawl and much-thumbed Torah that looked as if they had been handed down through the ages.
At first I was anxious about violating his fierce privacy, but he put me at ease with a cheery, “Shalom, Nephew! Welcome to my palace.” His welcome was a momentous privilege for, so far as I knew, I was the only family member ever allowed into his palace, a marvelously shabby place submerged in a sea of books and papers, with islands cleared for his bed and desk. I imagined my mom’s horror if she’d ever been allowed to view such splendid chaos; sight unseen, she pronounced it a pigsty. “I modeled my hovel on Karl Marx’s study,” Sol explained. “The man drowned in books. Fortunately, unlike him, I’m not plagued by boils on my bottom.”
I’d sit on the unmade bed, the only place to perch, while he settled into the hard wooden chair at his desk a few feet away. To put me at ease, he removed his battered felt fedora, leaving his kippah to ride his springy salt-and-pepper brush like a small boat in wild waves. He usually stayed very still for a long moment while a gentle silence cloaked us both, calming my habitual fidgetiness. Then he’d begin to speak in a soft, almost caressing deep basso—the rough murmur of an aerial spirit swooping over oceans of wit and learning. He roamed from Abraham of Ur to Karl Marx, “from the ancestral father to the modern renegade son,” a span of close to six millennia, practically the entire history of civilization. Sol claimed that at the end of his life, Marx, grandson of a revered rabbi, had returned to his ancestral faith, an act confirmed by shaving off his iconic beard. “As the proverb says, ‘Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.’ ”
As I listened, the thirsty sponge of my mind soaked up every syllable of Sol’s talk. His wide knowledge and rich experience were a revelation to me, just as I was beginning to challenge the narrow local attitudes and assumptions of my colonial homeland. Day by day my soggy brain seemed to literally swell within the carapace of my skull. Sure, I didn’t really grasp a fraction of his wisdom, but the amazing sweep and generosity of his intellect excited me beyond imagining. What a world out there awaited my discovery! So much to know; so much to do and feel and think …
After a session with Sol, my head buzzed so much I found it hard to sleep. “That man is making you meshugah,” my mother grumbled. “I want to be crazy,” I retorted. “Crazy’s the only way to be!”
Though I was fourteen when these sessions began, and he was in his seventies, Sol always treated me as an equal, man-to-man. As a mark of our newfound closeness, he stopped calling me “Boots.” In effect, he became my best friend, and I think I was his sole comrade, his only truly devoted ear.
As my love and admiration for him grew, I puzzled endlessly over the seeming contradictions in my granduncle’s character. How could a man be simultaneously so intellectually refined and so thoroughly vulgar? Slowly it dawned on me that his high intelligence and his low wit were sides of the same coin. “Hashem boasts, ‘Heads I win, tails you lose,’ ” he said, implying that for us the Creator’s cosmos presents a rigged toss of the penny—an everlastingly confounding metaphor only the tardy Messiah could ever explain.
One of the oddest quirks in Sol’s character was his passion for shooting game, rare for a Jew of his generation and origin. However, he told me that, as a boy, he’d hunted pheasants, ducks, and wild hares in the Ukrainian countryside with his father “to supplement the family pot.” Back then, he said, his only gun was an ancient shotgun dating back to the Crimean War. “If you weren’t careful, the ferkakte thing could blow your face off.” Now he favored a bolt-action British Army Lee Enfield rifle, “the most reliable point-three-o-three ever manufactured,” suitable for bringing down large antelopes such as kudu, his favorite target. Also, the gun was “handy to stop a leopard or a charging lion.”
Since Sol preferred to hunt at night, we’d set out at dusk in his old Chevy saloon with its battered body and several missing floorboards. The rattletrap’s flickering headlights cut a narrow tunnel along the strip of road whizzing by just under my shoes. Deep in the bush we made camp under a blaze of stars surrounding the Southern Cross—in Sol’s graphic phrase, “a crucifix awaiting the Redeemer.” Around midnight we fastened hunting lamps to our foreheads, he hefted his rifle, and we plunged into the silvered shadows of the luminous dark, following our twin beams.
Every so often Sol, leading the way, halted in his tracks and cocked an ear. “Listen, listen,” he hissed, and I tried to mimic the intensity of his attention. Sometimes we heard a leopard cough or the brush of an owl’s wings followed by a small scream as it nailed its prey. Then, suddenly, a pair of bright eyes might appear, transfixed by our headlamps. Judging its height off the ground, Sol reckoned it was some kind of antelope, perhaps a favored kudu. Leveling his rifle, he took careful aim.
The gun exploded—a crash of thunder and lightning in all that darkness. The recoil staggered Sol, and it was a moment before he could ascertain whether the bullet had hit home. Most times it hadn’t; but when it had, we rushed to the spot to find the dying beast. More in sorrow than in triumph, Sol put another bullet into its skull to end its agony. Sometimes he allowed me to take a shot at a buck, but the heavy gun’s painful kick threw me off, and I never bagged anything but a bruised shoulder.
On the trek back to our camp, Sol would revert to his jokey persona. If we glimpsed a pack of scavenging hyenas, he’d repeat the corny quip: “A hyena only copulates once a year, so why the hell is it laughing?” Somehow his patter made the African night less strange, and I snuggled in my sleeping bag beside the banked fire, listening to Sol ruminating about one thing or another, such as the belief that in southern Africa early human beings appeared many thousands of years ago, way before they colonized Europe. “If we open our ears all the way, we may hear an echo of those folk, who first began to wonder about their fate under the heavens …” Soothed by his hypnotic murmur, my drowsy mind slipped away into the deep silence of the dark.
In the morning, if we’d made a kill, Sol stopped off at a nearby kraal to tell the Africans where the carcass lay so they could retrieve it for themselves. “They need the protein more than we do,” he explained. The deal was that the villagers provided him with a portion of sun-dried biltong (jerky), a treat we both enjoyed.
On the ride home Sol invariably exclaimed, “So, chaver, do you still wonder I could die laughing?” His high-hearted gaiety resonated with many undertones: his delight in the wild glory of the bush and the thrill of the hunt, muted by the darker shades of the slaughter we had shared, along with the sardonic irony of his accidental exile in sheissland, an epithet he reserved for colonial Rhodesia rather than the Africa he revered. In those moments, I came close to crying out that I sympathized in my own callow way, that I loved him more than I could say, but I was too shy. Anyway, his fond scowl as he squinted at the road seemed to say, “I know, my friend, I know.”
When I finished school and was about to leave for university in Cape Town, a long way away, Sol invited me for one last visit to his place. As usual, we sat in silence for a while, but this time Sol did not ease into a monologue. Rather, he let the quiet run on for many minutes, as if there were no words to express what we both felt about the separation. He was a vital part of my life, and I could hardly imagine a world without his close presence; in truth, it was a little scary. How would I survive “out there” without his constant reminder to “listen, listen”? At the last moment, a dreadful thought popped into my mind: Would he actually slit his own throat someday and “die laughing”? Or would it remain a mocking metaphor? I wanted to ask him, but my tongue didn’t dare form the question.
As it happened, Sol did slit his throat. He was diagnosed with a spreading Stage IV prostate
cancer, and in those days it was untreatable. Rather than suffer the agonies of a slow demise, he lay down on the floor of his shed and, in my mom’s blunt summation, “he did to himself what he’d done to a million chickens”—a kind of kosher quietus. If I listened intently, as he’d trained me to do, I imagined I could hear the echo of his laughter at “the biggest joke of all, my life.”
THE BELLE OF PITTSBURGH
— Barbara Graham —
“You don’t have to get all gussied up,” I told her. “He’s a hospice rabbi. He’s used to seeing people in their bathrobes.”
“I’m not people,” my mother said, propped up on the hospital bed that had recently replaced the single bed in her apartment at the retirement place. “And I don’t parade around in a bathrobe when company comes.” Even now, at ninety-five, impossibly frail and tethered to an oxygen tank, Irene looked glamorous in her blue silk nightie with the ivory lace trim.
“He’s not company,” I protested halfheartedly, though, really, there was no point in arguing. My mother, the former belle of Pittsburgh, would die before she let any man see her in bedclothes without her “face” on.
Which is exactly what would happen, but we didn’t know that yet.
Two weeks earlier, before the buildup of fluid in her lungs started squeezing the breath out of her, Irene called me on the phone sounding frantic. Hearing the wheezy panic in her voice, I panicked, too. Could this possibly be it? I wondered. After years of serial near-death experiences, had my mother—the woman who joked that she was too mean to die—entered her final days, possibly her final hours? Could she be on the brink of disproving her point?
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