The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  But even if observance withers to a phantom remnant of the Orthodox, even if vague tatters of belief shrink to atrophied metaphors—we refer still to “sunrise” and “sunset”—one tremendous force and mysterium tremendum will endure: that of remembrance.

  In the sinew of his or her being, in the innermost self of their self, the Jew will carry, encapsulate, conserve the dead God. This in memoriam is incommensurably more powerful, heavier, than any presumed or officious presence. The Jew will be remembrancer and death watch. Decease was prolonged and fitful. Death notices were posted decades prior to Nietzsche (cf. Heine, Jean-Paul). Radical elements in surrealism mime ironic funereal rites. For many Jews God’s death was certified in the Shoah.

  The Shoah is the unspeakable. Strictly considered, the avalanche of words it has generated is an obscenity. There is, there should be, nothing to say about the torture, humiliation, starvation, incineration of some six million guiltless men, women, and children—those children—in a systematic hell. Here language abandons meaning. This renunciation is no contingent, ancillary catastrophe. It marks, very precisely, the closure of that dialogue, defining, quintessential, between Judaism and its God. Discourse, the force of the spoken and written word (far beyond either music or the fine arts), have structured Judaism’s commerce, narrative, liturgical with its transcendent interlocutor. The articulate, the conceptual, are now void. God’s silence, His muteness in the torture cellars and death camps, signifies far more than His impotence or inattention. It proclaims His demise. What remains of the burning bush is the ash in the crematoria. Whose weight, whose inhuman nullity, is psychically measureless. (How can it be that Jews after Auschwitz are not mad, that they do not transport with them some virus, however covert, of insanity?)

  Could man, the Jew in particular, have helped God to survive—Dieu a besoin des hommes—professed existentialism: “Pray to us, God,” urged Paul Celan. Could we have given Him warning of the gas ovens? What shall we do without Him in the strident desert of rationalist-technological mundanity? Absurd questions, but fiercely nagging and eerily analogous to the famous “What then shall we do?” of Russian revolutionary hopes. To such questioning the Jew will continue to bear ghostly witness. “Lest I forget thee, oh Jerusalem.” This refusal of healing amnesia, this Jewish incapacity to forget, will continue to frighten, to exasperate, the non-Jew. At hidden depths it may remind the non-Jew of his role, active or passively indifferent, in the time of bestiality. Memory is not susceptible to amnesty. It is, therefore, possible that novel, commemorative brands of anti-Semitism will develop. Negationism, already virulent in Islam, is a nauseating but highly suggestive version. It has its parodistic rationale: “How could such a monstrosity have been devised and carried out?” The negationist, however abject his motives, is an advocate for normality: “This simply cannot have happened.” Henceforth the Jew must be denied his totally incredible recall. Without which he will recede into zero. What is there left of the Jew without his kaddish, without his lament for a dead God?

  Bearing God’s coffin on his bent back—Faulkner knew much of such a journey—the Jew and the non-Jewish Jew may still have their function. Israel is not the finale. Should it fail, in many respects an unthinkable eventuality, a post-Abrahamic, post-theological Judaism will surely endure. Why should there not be high finance, scientific eminence, compassionate largesse in Tasmania? Why not found the best newspaper in Lapland? Would the Jew cease to dance in Patagonia?

  Homo sapiens risks nuclear folly and no end to the cycle of massacres unless we learn to be each other’s guests. As we are guests of life, having chosen neither our place, time, nor social condition of birth. Guests keep their bags packed. They learn languages. They endeavor to leave their host’s residence somewhat more comely, humane, and prosperous than they found it. At the same time they must be ready to exit if the city turns despotic or corrupt. These are demanding reflexes of which the Jew has or should have become past master. His departure has often left his sometime hosts lamed. Witness the centuries of near stagnation after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Ask yourself whether German creative and scientific dynamism has recovered after the Reich. Concomitantly, hospitality can harvest rich fruit. What would North American economic, scientific, intellectual stature have been without the Jewish refugee? Freud is buried in Hampstead, Einstein in New Jersey, Paul Celan in Paris. Guests.

  Unless I am mistaken, only the Jewish liturgy features an especial blessing for parents among whose children there is a scholar. Jews may number as many philistines or fools as any other ethnic group, but a reverence for the life of the mind, for study and the prestige of the intellect, is ingrained in their awareness. Learning, intellectual debate, textual reference are second nature to Jewish sensibility. Political clout, material gain, the glitter of social class may be desirable. But they fall far behind the sanctity of abstract thought. Marxism is bookish, even Talmudic, to the core. The Jewish contribution to scientific theory far exceeds statistical probability. The very term intelligentsia is bred out of the Dreyfus trauma. Today populist democracy, the sovereignty of the mass media, egalitarian cant (political correctness), and the naked howl of money constitute a virulent threat to our uncertain chances against barbarism. Persisting ideals arose out of Athens and Jerusalem. It is “Jerusalem” which endures whenever we afford a child the magic of a good book, the music of an equation. The practices of difficulty are the natural piety of the human spirit.

  It will be the task of tomorrow’s Jew to act as custodian of a defunct Western monotheism. The Holy of Holies is henceforth known to be truly empty, but remembrance stands guard. Memory is possessive beyond presence. We engage future experience by remembering forward. Writ, though no longer holy, will exercise its authority. The Torah will be recognized as God’s biography. The Jew will remain marked by his former intimacies with God, by the shock and letdown of his near extermination. Anti-Semitism has often portrayed the Jew as a fossil, but it will be a fossil tactlessly alive. “I was what I was,” ineradicable. Jewish social thought will devise guidebooks, road maps to a post-metaphysical atlas. Freudian psychoanalysis labored to domesticate the incursive thrusts of our imperfectly entombed past. Future Jewish cartography will aim to orient the human enterprise even as we map our cosmologies by the light of stars and nebulae long extinguished. The Jew will seek to be a navigator in the new emptiness.

  The dialectical tension between an unalterable commemoration and the exploration of futurities, often bleak, will continue to set the Jew apart. His will be the uninvited specter at the New Age jollities. Within his tribal solidarities, his cherished cult of family, black holes of solitude will persist. Jewish women and men will affront an inward loneliness in that world after God. It chills Jewish thought in Spinoza, in Wittgenstein. It is the solitude of higher mathematics and of Celan. Jews can be strangers to themselves. That aura of apartness will once again elicit disquiet, hostility, and pestilential phobias among non-Jews. So I suppose, though it is idle to play guessing games about political and social circumstances to come. But one constant looks to be lasting: no pardon for the Jew. Let him remember the future and be on his tired guard. No solace there, but a fascinating voyage. God left one posthumous bequest and eleventh commandment to Israel: “Thou shalt not be bored.”

  MASON STOKES

  Namesake

  FROM Colorado Review

  When I told my uncle Mason that I was gay, my father was back at the house, getting drunk. Earlier that evening I had come out to my parents, and my father didn’t take it well. I knew he wouldn’t, so I had put this off as long as I could, telling friends and strangers, but not my family. I was operating on a theory a friend shared with me: Come out to people only when you think it will make the relationship better. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that coming out to your parents will open up lines of communication long dormant through years spent in the closet. Revelation rarely heals.

  But by this time—it was 1996, and I was twenty-eight—I
was in a serious relationship with a lovely man named T., and it felt too wrong to keep that a secret. (Never mind that this relationship would end two months later, when T. told me he loved me, and I said, “Thank you.”) To lie about myself was one thing; to pretend that someone I cared about didn’t exist was another kind of wrong entirely. And so on a hot summer evening in South Carolina, I sat with my parents on the patio of their house and told them I was gay. I remember contorted faces, and a long silence. I remember my mother telling me, in a quavering voice, that she didn’t want me to get AIDS. And I remember what my father said, when my mother finally prodded him to say something, “They shoot horses, don’t they?” At the time I didn’t know the reference to the film in which Michael Sarrazin shoots Jane Fonda because she’s too weak to kill herself, but I got the gist.

  Later that night, at a restaurant, I told my uncle Mason, my mother’s brother. It was just my mother and me, since my father had disappeared into his bedroom shortly after the scene on the patio. And after some halting commiseration, and awkward pledges of continued love, my uncle asked, “So, is it like The Birdcage?”

  I laughed, for the first time that evening. The Birdcage, released a year earlier and based on the fabulously gay La Cage aux Folles, features Robin Williams as the gay owner of a drag club in South Beach and Nathan Lane as his queeny companion and the club’s drag headliner, Starina. The plot involves this gay couple’s straight son bringing home his fiancée, as well as her deeply conservative parents, and for a second I thought my uncle was making a joke about our inverted version of this plot. Well played, I thought. This was something we could work with.

  But no, I quickly realized that his reference was less subtle than that. When my uncle thought “gay,” he conjured up the homosexual excess of floats in a gay pride parade, of men in dresses. In his fevered imagination, he was casting me as Starina. I loved drag, but I’d never done it. I didn’t have the shoulders for it. So I tried to explain to my uncle that my gay world was very different from the one he imagined. It was, in fact, quite boring, if South Beach was your only point of comparison. And as I walked him through the banal particulars of my so-called gay life, I was struck by how absurd this conversation had become.

  Because here’s the thing about my uncle, my never-married, more-than-a-little-queeny, bachelor uncle: I had long assumed that he was gay, that his name wasn’t the only thing we had in common. And given that, how could he so fail to understand the story I was telling him? How could he think that, after dinner, perhaps, I would put on pancake makeup and a dress and lip-sync to “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man”?

  Later that night he asked me another question: “So, would you ever want to bring someone home to meet the family?” And it struck me that this question, more accurately than his first, reflected his great distance from my life and its possibilities. The world of The Birdcage was alien and extreme, but at least he had a reference for it, something that helped him to see it. But a world where I would bring a male partner home to meet my family? That was beyond his ability to imagine. And I wondered: Was there longing in his voice when he asked this question? Was there regret? Was there envy?

  When my mother and I got back to the house, we discovered the remnants of my father’s evening: a half-empty bottle of bourbon on the counter, leftover roast beef and rice in the microwave, the microwave door hanging open like an accusation. He had gotten hungry, my father, but rather than face me, he fled back to his bedroom when he heard our car pull into the driveway.

  Being named after my uncle was a gift. My older brother had scooped up my father’s name, the perfectly fine, though ultimately forgettable, “Doug.” So I was left with “Mason,” which, in 1967, was still fresh. This was a name that set me apart, and I was happy to have it, not least because my uncle was so much fun. He was game for all the stupid stuff kids want to do, all the stuff that makes parents rethink the whole parenting thing. Amusement parks, arcades, houses that defy gravity, mile-high grizzly bears—my uncle could always be counted on to ferry us away to whatever cheesy attraction the area offered.

  He was the life of every party, the big man whose wet laughter announced the center of whatever was happening at the moment. My brother and I competed for his time and attention. On family vacations that required two cars, we’d fight to ride with him, not simply because he had sharper wheels (absent the upkeep of children, he allowed himself a new Cadillac every few years), but because he’d sometimes let us steer, well before the legal age of steering. Whoever didn’t get the front seat would sit in back, ready to supply my uncle with another Budweiser from the cooler. (As with the steering, this was well before casual drinking and driving was an unforgivable sin.)

  He was a talented musician, and at the piano his big hands spanned way more than an octave, enabling the kind of boogie-woogie, left-hand work people demanded if there was a piano around. His relationship to the piano seemed entirely organic. He never required sheet music, and you never knew what he was going to play when he sat down, but you knew he was inventing it on the spot. It was new every time. My uncle at the piano, his left foot pounding the floor, setting lamps and vases moving, was the closest thing to excess you could find in my family. He played the role of uncle to the hilt, swooping in for benign subversions of parental authority, swooping out again when the time came to pick up the pieces. Had he ever allowed himself his own Starina moment, it would have been as Auntie Mame.

  There were, of course, downsides to being my uncle’s namesake, the chief of which was being called, at least within the family, “Little Mason” until I had reached the unseemly age of thirty-seven, the year “Big Mason” died and cleared the field. But mostly carrying my uncle’s name was more boon than burden. It created a bond between us, one that was heightened by the other things we shared: an outgoing personality, a slightly ridiculous sense of humor, a musical talent, and something else I lacked a language for: some quiet sense I had that he lived his life outside the laws that governed other people—that he lived outside expectation. This was an example I would need, though I was too young to know it on those summer days at the beach, when I was six, and my parents would find me curled up in a ball outside my uncle’s bedroom door, waiting for him to emerge from his afternoon nap so that the fun could start again.

  The bachelor—especially the bachelor uncle—was a figure in the South, a recognizable type. A bit dandyish, the bachelor was a trickster figure, someone who hovered outside convention, who discovered loopholes of possibility. As a category, bachelor carried within it a seemingly unresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, the bachelor signified a kind of heterosexual excess, the single man unleashed from marriage and babies, freed from the confines of the domestic. The bachelor could roam the world of heterosexual possibility, more often than not sporting an ascot, and never get caught. On the other hand, bachelor was a knowing, if relatively polite, slur, a euphemism for queer, or unsexed. And yet, ironically, it was a slur that saved men like my uncle from the taint of homosexuality. It both named the possibility of sexual deviance and politely cloaked that possibility in the figure of heterosexual excess, thus leading to that oddest of phrases, the “confirmed” bachelor. What would it take, one wonders, to confirm such a thing? What kind of test would someone have to pass? The confirmed bachelor led a double life: someone who would never marry because he was queer, and someone who would never marry because he was too busy having sex with lots of different women.

  This tension played out in my own family in quiet ways. I remember discovering a book tucked away on the shelves of my parents’ den with the title Everything I Know About Sex. My uncle’s name appeared on the spine as the author. It was a thick book, but when I opened it, I found nothing but empty page after empty page, a gag gift, presumably, and one that my uncle must not have appreciated, since the book was on our shelves rather than his.

  I also remember my father’s many references to a family friend as my uncle’s “girlfriend.” She was, indeed, my uncl
e’s constant social companion and had been for as long as I could remember. She was with us on holidays and vacations, as much an aunt to me as Mason was an uncle. But there was never, to the extent that I could tell, the slightest romantic spark between the two of them, not a shared room on vacation, never a held hand. Like my uncle, this family friend never married, and as I got older and learned the term beard, I assumed that this was what they had been to each other: social partners who disguised their homosexuality through the social fiction of longtime companions.

  But when my father called her my uncle’s girlfriend, did he believe it? Or was this, like the joke book, a not-so-subtle jab at the confirmed bachelor, someone whose “girlfriend” would always be in quotes?

  That halting conversation on the patio, and the one with my uncle at the restaurant, turned out to be the only times my family and I would talk about these things until ten years later, after both my mother and uncle had died. And this silence wasn’t our regular kind of silence, the silence of a family that tacitly agrees not to confront difficulty. Rather, it was willed. It was the silence of an explicit prohibition.