LITMIR.BIZ

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sadness to know that people are capable of Oscar-worthy performances.

      “Hate to see you go.”

      “Take care.”

      “We’ll miss you.”

      “Have a great trip.”

      “One more hug for good luck.”

      “Love ya. Don’t forget to write.”

      Oh, shut the fuck up! They all did what people do when they sacrifice tact and discretion at the altar of convention and vulgarity. I endured these theatrics until I could endure no more. I thanked everyone for their solicitude and bid them adieu.

      *

      My parents were there to welcome me. They looked well rested and beaming, their ghastly urban complexion now healed by a radiant tan, the kind of otherworldly glow that people acquire after a few months of retirement in the sun. We spoke about this and that -- hurried and disjointed bits and pieces snatched out of the blue. Life. The weather. The economy. The greed of the governing elite. The imbecility of the governed. Aunt Ernestine’s goiter. Little Adam’s Bar Mitzvah. We would reprise it all in greater detail as we relaxed, just the three of us, late into the long night ahead.

      I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to be introduced to my maternal grandfather. He’d left Yesod the day I was born, never to return. I also met for the first time my paternal grandparents, both of whom had perished in Hitler’s gas chambers. They seemed none the worse for their ordeal, just older and grayer than they appear in the sepia-tone family portrait, the neat taupe three-piece suit and fedora my grandfather wore and the graceful beige silk and lace attire my grandmother sported a bit faded, their former crispness dulled by time.

      They in turn presented me to my paternal great-grandfather Fabian, the one who carried bitter memories of his childhood well into adulthood, “Fretful Fabian,” who, sobbing, had told my father of the indignities he suffered at the hands of his own father, Abraham, and the sly and wanton young woman Abraham took for a wife a month after Fabian’s mother died.

      Abraham, a prayer shawl wrapped around his shoulders and a skullcap cockily perched on one side of his head, smiled at me reflexively, the way strangers part their lips in token civility when first introduced. We did not shake hands. With five generations separating us, the blood that flowed through his veins and mine, the blood of Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, of David and Solomon and, who knows, maybe even that of the Jew named Jesus, seemed stripped of all dynastic relevance. Relegated to mythical status, the reviled patriarch examined me from head to toe with a mixture of languid amusement and detachment. He might as well have been gawking at a monkey in a zoo. He followed me with his eyes but said not a word.

      As I weaved through this genealogical conclave, I also became re-acquainted with a host of long-lost uncles and aunts and cousins, many I’d never met before, others with whom I’d socialized on very rare occasions before I left Yesod for the golden shores of Ein Sof. They too displayed cursory interest in my person, uttering token banalities easily acknowledged with a nod, a grin or one-syllable grunts. Thankfully, they spared me the tedium of small talk.

      That evening, we all gathered around a large table festooned with plates of sliced stuffed derma and sizzling latkes, saucers brimming with gefilte fish, kishka and vine leaves filled with rice, large platters of fried mamaliga squares daubed with sour cream, and tureens overflowing with piping hot cholent, an indescribable but savory mishmash of potatoes, barley, beans, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fried onions. We drank fermented cider, schnapps and plum brandy. And this being Purim, we also scoffed hammentash, bite-size raspberry, apricot, and prune tartlets shaped like the ears of the dastardly Persian vizier Haman, the appendages by which, according to legend, he was hanged to avenge his genocidal plot against the Jews.

      Jews celebrate victory or flight from persecution by eating. They mourn catastrophe and death and expiate sin with a fast. Our history is filled with feasts, abstinence and famine. Every calamity is seen as divine retribution, God’s payback for the debauchery and impiety of his people. No disaster, no torment, however inscrutable and cruel is deemed trivial because every event, every setback, every tragedy is the manifestation of Yahweh’s will. Upheavals and grief and misery are tolerated, if not subconsciously longed-for, precisely because they herald purification and redemption and are encoded by God himself. God has decreed that Jews may not defy their own destiny by repudiating Moses’ legacy without unleashing upon themselves the fires of hell. This is why Jews, to this day, live in a state of controlled anxiety, the Diaspora’s assimilated ones subliminally, the new Canaanites with greater urgency.

      “When will it ever end,” asked my great-great-grandfather Abraham rhetorically, his eyes fixed heavenward, his right fist softly hammering the left side of his chest, unaware that his grandson, grandson’s wife and several of their children had perished, that they were now mere statistics in the nihilistic calculus of the Final Solution. No one had had the heart to tell him. Or he had forgotten. This form of induced amnesia spares weak men the trauma of storing up too much knowledge which, everyone knows, can render them mad. People at the table looked quizzically at each other for a moment then continued to eat.

      “Never,” I replied, breaking a leaden silence. “We are the Chosen People.” My father, who caught the bitter irony of my words, smiled and poured himself another jigger of brandy. My mother looked at me, a grown man, as she always had, like a hen admiring her newly hatched chick. It was a look that had caused me great embarrassment as a boy but in whose reassuring tenderness I now basked.

       TWO

      I slept a deep and dreamless sleep and awoke late, the lingering scent of yesterdays’ banquet still wafting in the air.

      My parents and I had retreated to the den after dinner. We chatted long into the night, catching up on the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous: politics; the economy; the staggering cost of war; family gossip; life then and now; my plans for the future.

      I recounted how pre-election fever had been sweeping Yesod, how stupidity, chauvinism and intellectual torpor guided would-be voters, not acumen or sagacity, how yet another regional “conflict” was looming, this time too close for comfort and threatening to consume contiguous states. One by one, I remarked, major industrial nations, enfeebled by hyperinflation, soaring national debts, double-digit unemployment and social unrest, teetered on the brink of anarchy.

      My parents, who had once shipped me halfway around the world so I could evade conscription and near-certain death in a bloody war, offered words of reassurance.

      “Well, it’s all behind you now,” said my father. I could always count on him to look on the bright side, even in the gloomiest of times.

      “Not to mention that Ein Sof is nothing like Yesod,” added my mother.

      Both had sighed, a wistful look etched on their loving faces.

      “So, are you here to stay?” asked my mother, a trace of good-natured sarcasm lifting one quizzical eyebrow.

      “Time will tell, mama, time will tell.”

      “Oh, leave him alone,” chided my father. “He just got here.”

      “I’ve no plans to go anywhere for the moment,” I interjected quickly, mindful not to create a situation. I can’t swear I meant what I said.

      *

      The family compound was abuzz with activity. My mother was fixing breakfast. My father was scanning the Ein Sof Times. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin played softly in the background. Uncle Lazar, the one who had relieved his mouser, Fékété, of his duties after a dozen years of faithful service and built it a cozy retirement crate, fed a black and white kitten. I remember when the eccentric Lazar gave a speech, praising Fékété for his tireless loyalty to feline duty and introducing him to his understudy, Orozlán. Orozlán, it turned out, played with his quarries and the mouse population that year exploded out of control. Fékété had to be called out of retirement until a more industrious killer could be finally

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