Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “So much of Judaism today—regarding Larry David as anything beyond very funny, the existence and persistence of the Jewish American Princess, the embrace of klutziness, the fear of wrath, the shifting emphasis from argument to confession—is the direct consequence of our choice to have Anne Frank’s diary replace the Bible as our bible. Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition. Righteousness is.

  “Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom because of the righteousness of its citizens. Not because life is inherently deserving of saving, but because righteousness should be spared.

  “God destroys the earth with a flood, sparing only Noah, who was ‘righteous in his own time.’

  “Then there is the concept of the Lamed Vovniks—the thirty-six righteous men of every generation, because of whose merit the entire world is spared destruction. Humankind is saved not because it is worth saving, but because the righteousness of a few justifies the existence of the rest.

  “A trope from my Jewish upbringing, and perhaps from yours, was this line from the Talmud: ‘And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.’ This is a beautiful idea, and one worth living by. But we shouldn’t ascribe more meaning to it than it contains.

  “How much greater the Jewish people might be today if instead of not dying, our ambition was living righteously. If instead of ‘It was done to me,’ our mantra was ‘I did it.’ ”

  He paused. He held a long blink and bit at his lower lip.

  “There are things that are hard to say today.”

  He almost smiled, as Irv had almost smiled when touching Jacob’s face.

  “Judaism has a special relationship with words. Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. ‘Let there be light,’ God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is perhaps the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: expression is generative.

  “It’s the same with marriage. You say, ‘I do,’ and you do. What is it, really, to be married?”

  Jacob felt a burning across his scalp. Julia needed to move her fingers.

  “To be married is to say you are married. To say it not only in front of your spouse, but in front of your community, and, if you are a believer, in front of God.

  “And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that would otherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

  He bit again at his lower lip and shook his head.

  “There are things that are hard to say today.

  “It is often the case that everyone says what no one knows. Today, no one says what everyone knows.

  “As I think about the wars in front of us—the war to save our lives, and the war to save our souls—I think about our greatest leader, Moses. You might remember that his mother, Jochebed, hides him in a reed basket, which she releases into the current of the Nile, as a last hope of sparing his life. The basket is discovered by Pharaoh’s daughter. ‘Look!’ she says. ‘A crying Hebrew baby!’ But how did she know that he was a Hebrew?”

  The rabbi paused, and held the agitated silence in place, as if forcefully saving the life of a bird that only wanted to fly away.

  Max spoke up: “Probably because Hebrews were trying to keep their kids from getting killed, and only someone in that situation would ever put her baby in a basket and send it down the river.”

  “Perhaps,” the rabbi said, showing no condescending pleasure in Max’s confidence, only admiration for his thought. “Perhaps.”

  And again he forced silence.

  Sam spoke up: “So, I say this fully seriously: maybe she saw that he was circumcised? Right? She says, ‘Look.’ ”

  “That could be,” the rabbi said, nodding.

  And he dug a silence.

  “I don’t know anything,” Benjy said, “but maybe he was crying in Jewish?”

  “How would one cry in Jewish?” the rabbi asked.

  “I don’t know anything,” Benjy said again.

  “Nobody knows anything,” the rabbi said. “So let’s try to learn together. How would one cry in Jewish?”

  “I guess babies don’t really speak.”

  “Do tears?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s strange,” Julia said.

  “What is?”

  “Wouldn’t she have heard him crying? That’s how it works. You hear them crying, and you go to them.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “She said, ‘Look! A crying Hebrew baby.’ Look. She saw that he was crying, but didn’t hear.”

  “So tell me what that implies,” he said—no patronizing, no self-righteousness.

  “She knew he was a Hebrew because only Jews cry silently.”

  For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to lose the most intelligent person on earth.

  “Was she right?” the rabbi asked.

  “Yes,” Julia said. “He was a Hebrew.”

  “But was she right that Jews cry silently?”

  “Not in my experience,” Julia said, with a chuckle that drew a depressurizing chuckle from the others.

  Without moving, the rabbi stepped into the grave of silence. He looked at Julia, almost unbearably directly, as if they were the only two living people left, as if the only thing that distinguished those buried from those standing was ninety degrees.

  He looked into her and said, “But in your experience, do Jews cry silently?”

  She nodded.

  “And now I’d like to ask you a question, Benjy.”

  “OK.”

  “Let’s say we have two choices, as Jews: to cry silently, as your mother has said, or to cry in Jewish, as you said. What would it sound like to cry in Jewish?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nobody knows, so you can’t be wrong.”

  “I don’t even have a guess.”

  “Maybe like laughing?” Max suggested.

  “Like laughing?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we do.”

  For an instant, for a stitch, Jacob was overwhelmed by the terror that he had managed to ruin the three most beautiful human beings on earth.

  He remembered when Sam was young, how every time he got a scrape, cut, or burn, after every blood test, every fall from every tree branch that was forever after deemed “too high,” Jacob would urgently pick him up, as if the ground were suddenly on fire, and say, “You’re fine. It’s OK. It’s nothing. You’re fine.” And Sam would always believe him. And Jacob would be thrilled by how well it worked, and ashamed by how well it worked. Sometimes, if a greater lie was needed, if there was visible blood, Jacob would even say, “It’s funny.” And his son would believe him, because sons have no choice. But sons do feel pain. And the absence of the expression of pain is not the absence of pain. It is a different pain. When Sam’s hand was crushed, he said, “It’s funny. It’s funny, right?” That was his inheritance.

  The columns of Jacob’s legs couldn’t bear the weight of his heavy heart. He felt himself buckling, in weakness or genuflection.

  He put his arm on Julia’s shoulder. She didn’t turn to him, she showed no acknowledgment of his touch, but she kept him standing.

  “So,” the rabbi said, reassuming his authority, “what can we say about Isaac Bloch, and how should we mourn him? There are only two kinds of Jews of his generation: those who perished and those who survived. We swore our allegiance to the victims, were good on our promise never to forget them. But we turned our backs on those who endured, and forgot them. All our love was for the dead.

  “But now the two kinds of Jews have equal mortal standing. Isaac might not be with his brothers in an afterlife
, but he is with his brothers in death. So what can we now say about him, and how should we mourn him? It was not because they lacked strength that his brothers died, but it was because of his strength that Isaac lived and died. Kein briere iz oich a breire. Not to have a choice is also a choice. How will we tell the story of he who never had no choice? At stake is our notion of righteousness, of a life worth saving.

  “What was Moses crying about? Was he crying for himself? Out of hunger or fear? Was he crying for his people? Their bondage, their suffering? Or were they tears of gratitude? Perhaps Pharaoh’s daughter didn’t hear him crying because he wasn’t crying until she opened the wicker basket.

  “How should we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears—what kind of tears? With silence—what silence? Or with what kind of song? Our answer will not save him, but it might save us.”

  With all three, of course. Jacob could see the rabbi’s moves from five thousand years away. With all three, because of the tragedy, because of our reverence, because of our gratitude. Because of everything that was necessary to bring us to this moment, because of the lies that lie ahead, because of the moments of joy so extreme they have no relation to happiness. With tears, with silence, with song, because he survived so we could sin, because our religion is as gorgeous, and opaque, and brittle, as the stained glass of Kol Nidre, because Ecclesiastes was wrong: there isn’t time for every purpose.

  What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want.

  Jacob cried.

  He wailed.

  THE NAMES WERE MAGNIFICENT

  Jacob carried the casket with his cousins. It was so much lighter than he’d imagined it would be. How could someone with such a heavy life weigh so little? And the job was surprisingly awkward: they nearly fell over a few times, and Irv was only a half teeter from tumbling into the grave with his father.

  “This is the worst cemetery ever,” Max said to no one in particular, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Finally, they were able to position the simple pine coffin on the broad strips of fabric that eased it into the grave.

  And there it was: the fact of it. Irv bore the responsibility—the privilege of the mitzvah—of shoveling the first dirt onto his father’s coffin. He took a heaping mound, turned his body to the hole, and tipped the shovel, letting it fall. It was louder than it should have been, and more violent, as if every particle of soil hit the wood at once, and as if it had been dropped from a far greater height. Jacob winced. Julia and the boys winced. Everyone winced. Some were thinking of the body in the coffin. Some were thinking of Irv.

  HOW TO PLAY EARLY MEMORIES

  My earliest memories are hidden around my grandfather’s final house like afikomens: dish-soap bubble baths; knee-football games in the basement with the grandchildren of survivors—they always ended in injury; the seemingly moving eyes of Golda Meir’s portrait; instant-coffee crystals; pearls of grease on the surface of every liquid; games of Uno at his kitchen table, just us two humans, just yesterday’s bagel, last week’s Jewish Week, and juice from concentrate from whenever in history was the last significant sale. I always beat him. Sometimes we’d play one hundred games a night, sometimes both nights of the weekend, sometimes three weekends a month. He always lost.

  What I think of as my earliest memory couldn’t possibly be my earliest memory—it’s too far into my life. I am confusing foundational with earliest, in the same way that, as Julia used to point out, the first floor of a house is usually the second, and sometimes the third.

  This is my earliest memory: I was raking the leaves in front of the house when I saw something against the side door. Ants were beginning to envelop a dead squirrel. For how long had it been there? Had it eaten poison? What poison? Had a neighborhood dog killed it and then, full of a dog’s remorse, delivered his shame? Or perhaps his pride? Or had the squirrel died trying to get in?

  I ran inside and told my mother. Her glasses were steamed over; she was stirring a pot she couldn’t see. Without looking up she said, “Go tell Dad to take care of it.”

  Through the open door—on the safe side of the threshold—I watched my father cover his hand with the clear plastic bag that the morning’s Post had come in, pick up the squirrel, and then pull his hand out, turning the bag inside out with the squirrel in it. While my father washed his hands in the bathroom sink, I stood at his side and asked him question after question. I was always being taught lessons, and so came to assume that everything conveyed some necessary piece of information, some moral.

  Was it cold? When do you think it died? How do you think it died? Didn’t it bother you?

  “Bother me?” my father asked.

  “Gross you out.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you just went out there and did it like it was nothing.”

  He nodded.

  I followed his wedding ring through the soap.

  “Did you think it was disgusting?”

  “I did.”

  “It was so gross.”

  “Yes.”

  “I couldn’t have done it.”

  He laughed a father’s laugh and said, “One day you’ll do it.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?”

  “I still couldn’t do it.”

  “The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be.”

  The closet was filled with hundreds of plastic bags. He had chosen a clear one to teach me a lesson.

  I obsessed over that squirrel for a few days, and then didn’t think about it again for a quarter century, until Julia was pregnant with Sam, at which point I started having a recurrent dream of dead squirrels lining the streets of our neighborhood. There were thousands of them: pushed against curbs, filling public garbage cans, prone in final poses while automatic sprinkler systems soaked through their fur. In the dream I was always returning home from somewhere, always walking up our street, it was always the end of the day. The window shades of the house were illuminated like TV screens. We didn’t have a working fireplace, but smoke poured from the chimney. I had to walk on tiptoes to avoid stepping on squirrels, and sometimes it couldn’t be avoided. I apologized—to whom? There were squirrels on the windowsills, and on stoops, and pouring from the gutters. I could see their silhouettes on the undersides of awnings. They hung halfway out of mail slots, in apparent attempts to find food or water, or simply to die inside—like that squirrel that had wanted to die inside my childhood home. I knew I was going to have to take care of all of them.

  Jacob wanted to go to his father’s side, as he had as a child, and ask him how he managed to shovel dirt into his father’s grave.

  Did you think it was disgusting?

  I did, his father would have said.

  I couldn’t have done it.

  His father would have laughed a father’s laugh and said, One day you’ll do it.

  What if I can’t?

  Children bury their dead parents, because the dead need to be buried. Parents do not need to bring their children into the world, but children need to bring their parents out of it.

  Irv handed the shovel to Jacob. Their eyes met. The father whispered into the son’s ear: “Here we are and will be.”

  When Jacob imagined his children surviving him, he felt no version of immortality, as it’s sometimes unimaginatively put, usually by people who are trying to encourage others to have children. He felt no contentment or peace or satisfaction of any kind. He felt only the overwhelming sadness of missing out. Death felt less fair with children, because there was more to miss. Whom would Benjy marry? (Despite himself, Jacob couldn’t shake his Jewish certainty that of course he would want to marry, and would marry.) To what ethical and lucrative profession would Sam be drawn? What odd hobbies would Max indulge? Where would they travel? What would their children look like? (Of course they would want to have children, and h
ave children.) How would they cope and celebrate? How would each die? (At least he would miss their deaths. Maybe that was the compensation for having to die himself.)

  Before returning to the car, Jacob went for a walk. He read the gravestones like pages in an enormous book. The names were magnificent—because they were Jewish haiku, because they traveled in time machines while those they identified were left behind, because they were as embarrassing as pennies collected in paper rolls, because they were as beautiful as boats in bottles brought over on boats, because they were mnemonics: Miriam Apfel, Shaindel Potash, Beryl Dressler…He wanted to remember them, to use them later. He wanted to remember all of it, to use it all: the rabbi’s shoelaces, the untied melodies of grief, the hardened footprints of a visitor in the rain.

  Sidney Landesman, Ethel Keiser, Lebel Alterman, Deborah Fischbach, Lazer Berenbaum…

  He would remember the names. He wouldn’t lose them. He would use them. He would make something of the no longer anything.

  Seymour Kaiser, Shoshanna Ostrov, Elsa Glaser, Sura Needleman, Hymie Rattner, Simcha Tisch, Dinah Perlman, Ruchel Neustadt, Izzie Reinhardt, Ruben Fischman, Hindel Schulz…

  Like listening to a Jewish river. But you can step in it twice. You can—Jacob could; he believed he could—take all that was lost and re-find it, reanimate it, breathe new life into the collapsed lungs of those names, those accents, those idioms and mannerisms and ways of being. The young rabbi was right: no one would ever have such names again. But he was wrong.

  Mayer Vogel, Frida Walzer, Yussel Offenbacher, Rachel Blumenstein, Velvel Kronberg, Leah Beckerman, Mendel Fogelman, Sarah Bronstein, Schmuel Gersh, Wolf Seligman, Abner Edelson, Judith Weisz, Bernard Rosenbluth, Eliezer Umansky, Ruth Abramowicz, Irving Perlman, Leonard Goldberger, Nathan Moskowitz, Pincus Ziskind, Solomon Altman…

  Jacob had once read that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if everyone were dead. And for all the individuality—for the extreme idiosyncrasy of the names of those extremely idiosyncratic Jews—there was only one fate.

  And then he found himself where two walls met, at the corner of the vast cemetery, at the corner of the vast everything.