Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself. Nobody wants to be a Jewish man, or a dying man.

  Jacob didn’t want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? Allow Sam to snip a ritualistic thread that reached back to kings and prophets, simply because Judaism as they practiced it was boring as hell and overflowed with hypocrisy? Maybe. In the rabbi’s office he’d felt ready to use the scissors.

  Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel—the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping. Perhaps that would be a way to do it without doing it. Sam objected on the grounds of it being a terrible idea.

  “Terrible why?” Jacob asked, knowing full well why.

  “You really don’t see the irony?” Sam said. Jacob saw many ironies, and was curious to hear which one Sam was thinking of. “Israel was created as a place for Jews to escape persecution. We would be going to escape Judaism.” Nicely put.

  So the bar mitzvah would be at the synagogue they paid twenty-five hundred dollars per visit to be members of, and officiated by the hip young rabbi who wasn’t, by any reasonable definition, hip, young, or a rabbi. The party would be at the Hilton where Reagan was this close to being put out of our misery, and where Julia and Sam were representing Micronesia. The band would be capable of playing both a good horah and good rock. Of course, such a band has never existed in the history of live music, but Jacob knew that at a certain point you just crunch the capsule you’ve been hiding in your cheek and hope not to feel too much. The theme—handled with delicacy and taste—would be Sam’s Family’s Diaspora. (This was Julia’s idea, and insofar as a bar mitzvah theme could ever be a good idea, it was sufficiently OK.) They would have tables representing each of the countries the family had been dispersed to—America, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada—and instead of seating cards, each guest would receive a “passport” to one of the nations. The tables would be designed to reflect regional culture and landmarks—this is where delicacy and taste were most severely challenged—and the centerpieces would include a family tree, and photographs of relatives currently living in those places. The buffet would feature stations of regionally specific foods: Brazilian feijoada, Spanish tapas, Israeli falafel, whatever they eat in Canada, and so on. The party favors would be snow globes of the various locales. There are more wars than snowfalls in Israel, but the Chinese are smart enough to know that Americans are dumb enough to buy anything. Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.

  “I asked you a question,” Irv said, bringing Jacob back to the argument that only Irv was having.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes: Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “The what doesn’t even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us: Because the world hates Jews.”

  Jacob turned to face Max. “You realize that genetics aren’t destiny, right?”

  “Whatever you say…”

  “In much the same way that I escaped the baldness that ravaged your grandfather’s head, you have a fighting chance of dodging the insanity that transformed a passable human into the man who married my mother.”

  Irv gave a deep, dramatic exhale, and then, with the full force of his faux sincerity: “Would it be all right if I offered an opinion?”

  Both Jacob and Max laughed at that. Jacob liked that feeling, that spontaneous father-son camaraderie.

  “Listen, don’t listen, it’s up to you. But I want to get this off my chest. I think you’re wasting your life.”

  “Oh, that’s all?” Jacob said. “I was bracing for something big.”

  “I think you are an immensely talented, deeply feeling, profoundly intelligent person.”

  “The zayde doth protest too much, methinks.”

  “And you have made some very bad choices.”

  “I’m guessing you have a specific choice in mind.”

  “Yes, writing for that dumb TV show.”

  “That dumb TV show is watched by four million people.”

  “A: So what? B: Which four million?”

  “And is critically acclaimed.”

  “Those who can’t teach gym, acclaim.”

  “And it’s my job. It’s how I support the family.”

  “It’s how you make money. There are other ways to support a family.”

  “I should be a dermatologist? That would be a good use of my talent, feeling, and intellect?”

  “You should make something that befits your abilities and expresses your definition of substance.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of the epic dragon adventure of someone who isn’t fit to spit shine your hemorrhoids. You weren’t put on earth to do that.”

  “And now you’re going to tell me what I was put on earth to do?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  Jacob sang: “Somewhere in my youth, or childhood, I must have done something very bad.”

  “As I was about to say—”

  “High on his horse was my lonely dad, Irv, lay ee old lay ee old lay hee hoo.”

  “You’re witty—we get it, Fraukenstein.”

  “Bad advice, bad advice, bless my homeland for never.”

  This time leaving no room to fill: “Jacob, you should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”

  An underwhelmed “Wow.”

  “Yes: wow.”

  “Would you mind saying that once more, and projecting, for the cheap seats in my brain?”

  “You should forge in the smithy of your soul the uncreated conscience of your race.”

  “Didn’t the ovens at Auschwitz do that?”

  “They destroyed. I’m talking about forging.”

  “I appreciate your sudden vote of confidence in me—”

  “I just stuffed the ballot box.”

  “—but my soul’s smithy doesn’t get that hot.”

  “That’s because you’re so desperate to be loved. Friction generates heat.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “It’s the same with the n-word business at Sam’s school.”

  “We should probably leave Sam out of this,” Max suggested.

  “It’s the same everywhere you look in your life,” Irv said. “You’re making the same mistake we’ve been making for thousands of years—”

  “We?”

  “—believing that if we can only be loved, we’ll be safe.”

  “My conversation GPS is on the fritz. We’re back to the hatred of the Jews?”

  “Back to? No. You can’t return to something you’ve never left.”

  “The show is entertainment.”

  “I don’t believe that you believe that.”

  “Well, that sounds like the end of our road.”

  “Because I’m ready to give you more credit than you’re ready to give yourself?”

  “Because as you’re often the first to point out, you can’t negotiate without a negotiating partner.”

  “Who’s negotiating?”

  “You can’t converse.”

  “Really, Jacob. Let down your guard for a second and ask yourself: What is it with the ravenous need for love? You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren’t finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren’t making you rich. But they were making the world rich.”

  “And you hated them.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, switching lanes without checking any of his mirrors, “I hated them. God forbid you should see my marginalia. But do you know who hates your show?”

  “It isn’t my show.”

  “Nobody. You’ve passed a l
ot of time for a lot of grateful zombies.”

  “So this is an argument against television?”

  “That’s another argument I could make,” he said, taking the airport exit. “But this is an argument against your show.”

  “It isn’t my show.”

  “So get a show.”

  “But I have nothing left to offer the tooth fairy in exchange.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Have I tried?”

  No one had tried harder. Not to get a show—it wasn’t yet the time for that—but to write one. For more than a decade Jacob had been breaking his soul’s back shoveling coal into the smithy. He’d devoted himself to the secret, utterly futile task of redeeming his people through language. His people? His family. His family? Himself. What self? And redeeming might not be quite the right word.

  Ever-Dying People was exactly what his father thought he was hoping for—a shofar blast from a mountaintop. Or at least a silent cry from a basement. But if Irv had ever been given the chance to read it, he would have hated it—a far more expansive hatred than the one he felt for the novels. Jacob’s definition of substance could get pretty ugly, but more, there were some essential disagreements about whom the sharp point of the forged conscience should be turned on.

  And there was a far bigger problem: the show would kill Jacob’s grandfather. Not metaphorically. It would literally commit grand-patricide. He who could survive anything would never survive a mirror. So Jacob held it close to his chest in a locked desk drawer. And the less able he was to share it, the more devoted he felt to it.

  The show began with the beginning of the writing of the show. The characters in the show were the characters in the real Jacob’s life: an unhappy wife (who didn’t want to be described that way); three sons: one on the brink of manhood, one on the brink of extreme self-consciousness, one on the brink of mental independence; a terrified, xenophobic father; a quietly weaving and unweaving mother; a depressed grandfather. Should he one day share it and be asked how autobiographical it was, he would say, “It’s not my life, but it’s me.” And if someone—who else but Dr. Silvers?—were to ask how autobiographical his life was, he would say, “It’s my life, but it’s not me.”

  The writing kept pace with the changing events in Jacob’s life. Or his life kept pace with the writing. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Jacob wrote about the discovery of his phone months before he even bought a second phone—psychology so double-left-handed it didn’t justify even one six-dollar minute with Dr. Silvers and was given several dozen hours. But it wasn’t just psychological. There were times when Julia would say or do things so eerily similar to what Jacob had written that he had to wonder if she’d read it. The night she discovered the phone, she asked, “Does it make you sad that we love the kids more than we love each other?” That exact line—those words in that order—had been in the script for months. Although they were Jacob’s.

  Save for the moments that most people would do anything to avoid, life is pretty slow and uninteresting and undramatic and uninspiring. Jacob’s solution to that problem, or blessing, wasn’t to alter the drama of the show—the authenticity of his work was the only antidote to the inauthenticity of his life—but to generate more and more paraphernalia.

  Twenty-four years earlier, around the time that his lack of patience overwhelmed his passion for guitar, Jacob started designing album covers for an imaginary band. He wrote track lists, and lyrics, and liner notes. He thanked people who didn’t exist: engineers, producers, managers. He copied copyright language from Steady Diet of Nothing. An atlas at his side, he created a U.S. tour, and then a world tour, giving thought to the limits of his physical and emotional endurance: Is Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid too much for one week? Especially after eight months on the road? And even if it were endurable, what good would come from pushing the band toward an irritability that would only jeopardize everything they believed in and worked so hard to achieve? The dates were printed on the backs of T-shirts he designed, and actually produced, and actually wore. But he couldn’t play barre chords.

  His relationship to the show was something like that—the more stunted the reality, the more expansive the related materials.

  He created, and perpetually added to, a “bible” for the show—a kind of user’s manual for those who would one day work on it. He generated an ever-adjusting dossier of background information on each of the characters—

  SAM BLOCH

  On the brink of 13. The eldest of the Bloch brothers. Spends virtually all of his time in the virtual world of Other Life. Hates the fit of all clothing. Loves watching videos of bullies getting knocked out. Incapable of ignoring, or even not perceiving, sexual double entendres. Would take a body covered with acne scarring in the future for a clear forehead in the present. Longs for his positive qualities to be universally recognized but never mentioned.

  GERSHOM BLUMENBERG

  Long dead. Son of Anshel, father of Isaac. Grandfather of Irving. Grandson of someone whose name has been lost forever. Great Rabbi of Drohobycz. Died in a burning synagogue. Namesake of a small park with cool marble benches in Jerusalem. Appears only in nightmares.

  JULIA BLOCH

  43. Wife of Jacob. Architect, although secretly ashamed of referring to herself as such, given that she’s never built a building. Immensely talented, tragically overburdened, perpetually unappreciated, seasonally optimistic. Often wonders if all it would take to completely change her life would be a complete change of context.

  —and a catalog of settings, which included short (if always expanding) descriptions of place, hundreds of photographs for a future props department, maps, floor plans, real estate listings, anecdotes—

  2294 NEWARK STREET

  Bloch House. Nicer than many, but not the nicest. But nice. If not as nice as it could be. Thoughtful interiors, within the working limits. Some good midcentury furniture, mostly through eBay and Etsy. Some IKEA furniture with cool hacks (leather pulls, faceted cabinet fronts). Pictures hung in clusters (equitably distributed between Jacob’s and Julia’s families). Almond flour in a Williams-Sonoma glass jar on a soapstone counter. A too-beautiful-to-use Le Creuset Dutch Oven in Mineral Blue on the back right burner of a double-wide Lacanche range whose potential is wasted on veggie chili. Some books that were bought to be read (or at least dipped into); others to give the impression of a very specific kind of very broad-minded curiosity; others, like the two-volume slipcased edition of The Man Without Qualities, because of their beautiful spines. Hydrocortisone acetate suppositories beneath a stack of New Yorkers in the middle drawer of the medicine cabinet. A vibrator in the foot of a shoe on a high shelf. Holocaust books behind non-Holocaust books. And running up the kitchen doorframe, a growth chart of the Bloch boys.

  When it was time for me to move, I lingered at this threshold. The doorframe was the only thing I couldn’t let go of. Forget the Papa Bear Chair and forget its ottoman. Forget the candlesticks and lamps. Forget Blind Botanist, the drawing we bought together, attributed to one of my heroes, Ben Shahn, lacking any provenance. Forget the moody orchid. While Julia was out one afternoon, I jimmied the doorframe loose from the wall with the aid of a flathead screwdriver, slid it down the length of the Subaru (one end against the glass of the hatchback, the other touching the windshield), and drove the record of my children’s growth to a new house. Two weeks later, a house-painter painted over it. I redid the lines to the best of my sorry memory.

  —and most ambitiously (or neurotically, or pathetically): the notes to the actors, striving to convey what the scripts on their own could not, because more words were needed: HOW TO PLAY LATE LAUGHTER; HOW TO PLAY “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; HOW TO PLAY SUICIDE GROWTH RINGS…Each episode was only twenty-seven pages, give or take. Each season only ten episodes. There was room for a little background, a few flashbacks and tangents and clumsy insertions of information that didn’t drive the plot but filled out the motivation. So many more words were needed: HOW
TO PLAY THE NEED FOR DISSATISFACTION; HOW TO PLAY LOVE; HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE…The notes were Jewish-motherly in their irrepressibly naggy didacticism, Jewish-fatherly in their need to obscure every emotion in metaphor and deflection. HOW TO PLAY AMERICAN; HOW TO PLAY THE GOOD BOY; HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME…The bible quickly surpassed the scripts themselves in length and depth—the explanatory material overwhelmed what it attempted to explain. So Jewish. Jacob wanted to make something that would redeem everything, and instead he was explaining, explaining, explaining…

  HOW TO PLAY THE SOUND OF TIME

  The morning Julia found the phone, my parents were over for brunch. Everything was falling apart around Benjy, although I’ll never know what he knew at the time, and neither will he. The adults were talking when he reentered the kitchen and said, “The sound of time. What happened to it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know,” he said, waving his tiny hand about, “the sound of time.”

  It took time—about five frustrating minutes—to figure out what he was getting at. Our refrigerator was being repaired, so the kitchen lacked its omnipresent, nearly imperceptible buzzing sound. He spent virtually all his home life within reach of that sound, and so had come to associate it with life happening.

  I loved his misunderstanding, because it wasn’t a misunderstanding.

  My grandfather heard the cries of his dead brothers. That was the sound of his time.