End of the Jews Page 13
“I’d never think to identify myself that way. I can’t see what bearing it has.”
“But it must have some, no? It’s the single factor in millions of people’s destinies.”
Amalia shrugs. “It does for you, I take it.”
“I don’t know. Forces greater than myself want me to be Jewish. And I mean my publisher, not the man upstairs—He couldn’t care less what I do. It’s funny; I realized recently that virtually all the Hebrew I once knew is gone. It’s as if for every word of English I’ve written, a word of Hebrew has disappeared.”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s still in there. Come, let’s have a quick Shema.”
“Even if I could recite it, I’d have no idea what it meant.”
“Does it matter? The sound is beautiful, whether you know or not.”
“From a cantor, maybe. From me, it would be an auditory pogrom.”
Loren reappears at Tristan’s side, a glass of scotch and melting ice in either hand. “Hello, Amalia dear,” he says. “You’re looking splendid tonight. If you’ll permit me, I must borrow Mr. Brodsky for a moment. Some gentlemen across the room are just dying to meet him.”
Tristan takes his drink from Loren and lifts it to Amalia.
“The life of an author beckons,” she says, raising her wineglass an inch.
“Send me a poem.”
“I will,” she promises, and slips into the crowd.
Almost a year passes before Tristan extracts a slim envelope with no return address from his mailbox and stuffs it in his jacket’s breast pocket, running late, as usual, to make it to the uptown train. The world is different now. He is a published author and the country is at war, and what it means to be a Jew has changed again.
They are a side issue in this conflict; what is real to them seems unreal to the rest of the world, and so there the Jews huddle, in colonies along the eastern seaboard of the United States, a paranoid race of the past, trading rumors about their own annihilation, a new one every week. At the second battle for Kharkov, the latest horror story goes, the Nazis sacrificed a tactical advantage—actually decided to lose—in order to round up Jews. No one took notice when the reports of absurd laws and cresting violence first began to trickle into the United States; no one listened when the deportations started. Now only a deafening silence booms from the European Jewry, Rachael’s and Jacob’s families included, and still “the Jewish problem” is of little concern to Roosevelt. In the global theater of war, it is a stray cough from the balcony.
Sometimes Tristan can hardly focus on the paper in the typewriter before him. Yesterday, after eating his usual blue-plate lunch at Pluto’s Diner, he lingered for an extra half hour, eavesdropping on a hushed conversation between two old Jews, both grimly satisfied to have incontrovertible proof of what they’d always known: that the world’s hatred of their race continues unabated. An hour later, standing in the subway’s rush-hour crush, Tristan found himself six inches from a young uniformed draftee, watching the boy’s eyes, imagining them glitter with mortal terror and blaze with the cold, naïve desire to kill. That night, stretched out in bed with the New York Times, Tristan came across the suicide note of a Polish Jew exiled in London, hidden away in the back pages: It was not my fate to die with my comrades, but I belong to them, and in their mass graves. By my death, I hope to express my strongest protest against the inaction with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of my people. He read it twice through, closed his eyes, and tried to understand why a man worried about the obliteration of his race would kill himself. He wondered whether living or dying required more of this man’s courage, then turned the page and worked his eyes over the sports column, retaining nothing. He dropped the paper by the bedside, atop an issue of The New Republic, which seemed to suggest that the editors were equally horrified by Hitler and by the revelation of Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism.
The war rages in headlines and in minds, in the window-box victory gardens hanging from every apartment building and the hulking warships being hewn into existence down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It is in evidence all around Tristan, right down to the cuffs of his pants—the extra inch of fabric marks the trousers as prewar, manufactured before the military declared a textile shortage. And yet he still has books to write, an imagination through which to filter the world. Tristan doesn’t know whether to feel guilty about his daily escapes from reality, or to pity those who have found no such respite. But he is resolute in the desire to hold on to the same sense of complexity that he had before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and thus he does not stand among the proud, the vocal, or the desperate.
Neither does he stand in the long procession of young men snaking from the draft board’s office and down Broadway—the recruitment line has replaced the breadline, he thinks whenever he passes—nor tremble with dread as he inserts his key into his mailbox lock and turns. No draft notice lies inside, and not because Tristan has been deemed unfit to serve, or judged so frail that his name was reshuffled to the back of the list. He does not stand among the gimps, the asthmatics, the high of blood pressure shunted by their country even in its hour of need.
Instead, Tristan stands behind a podium in a large, dingy classroom at City College for three hours a day, five days a week, shepherding freshmen through the greatest hits of Western literature. When the draft began, he did as he was told: typed up an application and a résumé and mailed them to the recently appointed chairman of English and Comparative Literature, Peter Pendergast, who promptly offered Tristan a job. Teachers, Peter explained during what passed for an interview, would be among the last men called, like farmers and automotive workers.
Every day, as he rides the subway up to school, Tristan thinks of Achilles. Not the fierce warrior stalking the killing fields of Troy, nor the mercurial demigod sulking in his tent, but Achilles on the day Diomedes and Odysseus came to fetch him to battle and found the hero-to-be hidden among maidens, disguised in a dress. Tristan might as well be wearing an evening gown himself, because he will sooner develop a pair of knockers than an ability to teach.
And yet Professor Brodsky’s classes are as full as the school registrar permits. His students are boys like he was, commuters from the Bronx and the Lower East Side, and all of them, it seems, have read The Angel of the Shtetl. After class, they want to talk to him about it—tell him that they cried when they got to the end, or that their fathers threw the book across the room in anger, then walked over and picked it up and resumed reading. Tristan never tires of hearing it. He hopes they cannot tell how much he enjoys being read, received, loved or despised or both. Half his students want to be writers themselves, and half of those only since reading Tristan’s novel.
Every week, he promises himself he will be more professional, more professorial, that he will sit down, compose his thoughts, structure a proper lecture. Fat chance. The new novel is progressing with infuriating torpor as it is; if he actually prepared for class, he’d be sunk. Tristan is learning that his mind does not switch gears without a fight. It sputters every morning, wanders, freezes. The anticipation of having to stop writing and teach hinders him from getting started, and once he’s ground past that, the workday’s nearly gone. The subway ride to City College would be an ideal time to map out his impending class, but Tristan tends to spend it clamping his molars together and pondering his tendency to resent everything for which he should be grateful.
Today is the third time Pendergast has sat in on Tristan’s classes, acting not as his boss but as his friend. He seems to find his former student’s incompetence amusing, or perhaps reassuring, and he very much enjoys the opportunity to dispense advice.
“I’ve never seen a teacher free-associate so obviously,” he tells Tristan at Mama’s Coffeeshop, across the street from campus. Pendergast tamps some tobacco into the pipe he’s taken to smoking, then pats himself down, feeling for a matchbook. “Not that you aren’t interesting. But come on, man. A chimpanzee could tell you’re not prepared.”
Pendergast gets his pipe lit and leans back, waving it in the air like he’s Mark Twain. “I’ll tell you again.”
“I know, I know, it’s a performance. I’m an actor. I could give this speech myself by now. Look, Peter, if I’m so hopeless, just can me. No hard feelings. Hell, I’d thank you. Do you know I stared at a wrong sentence for half an hour this morning before I could muster up the brainpower to fix the goddamn thing?”
“You know I’m not going to fire you. Why do you even say it?” Pendergast affects a slight hurt, aims a smoke ring at the ceiling. “Christ, Brodsky. You’re not even twenty-four and you’ve got your second novel in the pipeline. Why put such pressure on yourself? What’s the point?”
Tristan toys with the book of matches, lights one, lets it burn down, shakes it out. “The point is to write.”
“How noble.”
“Oh, fuck you, Peter.” He lights another match and waves away a puff of acrid smoke. “Finish your lecture. The coffee’s getting cold.”
Pendergast grins around the stem of his pipe. “All I’m trying to say, schmuck—that’s Yiddish, by the way, I’ll tell you what it means later—is that at some point, you may not be running a fan club anymore. I had one, too, when I was the young hotshot novelist around here. It’s great fun, but it doesn’t last. Someday you may have to teach students who don’t know you from Adam’s house cat. Might as well learn how to go about it, don’t you think?”
“Someday this war will be over, and my teaching career with it.” The rest of what Tristan thinks, he refrains from saying: you were never the young hotshot novelist around here. Pendergast’s first book was a moderate commercial success and a critical belly flop, and he’s produced only two in the ten years since, garnering respectable sales and the general indifference of reviewers. Tristan tries to avoid talking craft with his old teacher, but the day is fast approaching when Peter will hand over his new manuscript to be critiqued. Just the thought of putting his own novel on hold to wade through Pendergast’s earnest drama of high-society mores and immores, with its bloated word count and its Magical Colored Folk, is maddening. And then there’s the question of what in the hell Tristan will say to the man whose machinations have prevented him from being fitted with a rifle and shipped overseas to kill and die. Your punctuation is absolutely flawless, Peter.
It is not until the meeting is over and Tristan is back on the subway that he remembers to remove his mail from his pocket. The paper stock of the cream-colored envelope is heavy, his name and address neatly typed. He checks the back again. Still blank. Six months ago, Tristan would not have noted any of this before ripping the letter open, but he is wary these days. He’s received a few disturbing letters from readers, some forwarded by his publisher and others sent directly to his address.
He opens the letter anyway, and inside finds a single page, as heavy as the envelope, with fourteen lines typed in its center. A sonnet, unsigned. Tristan looks up from the page and smiles. The Farbers’ daughter. He prepares himself to read the nineteen-year-old’s poem; if it’s as precious as her letter’s guise of anonymity, it will give him a perfect opportunity to get in some practice for responding gently to Pendergast’s book.
He hasn’t seen Amalia since the night they met, but her parents have been among his greatest supporters. Natalie Farber rented two hundred sets of metal and silk wings and threw him an Angel of the Shtetl party the day the novel reached stores: turned her apartment into Heaven, replete with a harpsichordist and big cotton clouds suspended from the ceiling and a white-bearded God on a gilded throne. She served champagne and angel food cake to half of Manhattan for his sake.
The whole evening was so surreal that Tristan was forced to make sense of it by getting stupendously drunk, which turned out to be an entirely acceptable, even proper, thing for a novelist to do at his book party. Somehow, as he careened around Heaven, heaping praise on Natalie and Maurice whenever he crossed their paths, Tristan managed to sign three hundred books. He woke up the next morning to a phone call from Loren, informing him that he had made the society page. Tristan lurched to a newsstand for a copy, and sure enough, there he was, grinning at the camera with an arm around his hostess, looking like an imbecile in his feathery wings—a decidedly New Testament imbecile. The Bronx thought who-knew-what. The book took off. The author spent half an hour goggling at the photograph, stuporously gratified, his pounding hangover burned away by an ecstatic, surging sense of possibility, a wild feeling of staring directly at the godhead of success. Then the hangover rallied, and Tristan staggered back to bed.
He’d asked after Amalia before he’d gotten sauced, or perhaps after, and learned that she would be attending Vassar in the fall; Natalie promised to let her know he’d asked. Tristan examines the postmark, and sure enough: Poughkeepsie. He wonders for a moment what it’s like to attend an honest-to-goodness college, with a real campus and professors who aren’t just biding their time until the Allies cream the Japs and knock off Hitler, then realizes he’s only stalling and turns his attention to the words, crossing his fingers in the hope that Amalia’s creation is passable.
Two lines in, he uncrosses them. The best writers, to Tristan’s mind, make him feel stupid and oafish by doing what he cannot. And with these fourteen lines, Amalia Farber has made a bid to join the list. Her poem is as smooth and well formed as an egg, as fragile and as full of life. Her brevity cows Tristan most; his greatest fear is to leave anything out. Amalia trusts the power of the single brushstroke. Her poem glows with a quiet belief in the reader, and yet there is a hard kernel nestled at the sonnet’s center.
The girl is me, it begins, and describes a terrified six-year-old, her grainy face spliced into a newsreel played before a motion picture: a Polish child standing huddled against her family, eyes on the crisp legs of the battalion marching past.
The newsreel image switches and The man is me: a squint-eyed, square-jawed blond soldier whose military affiliation the author never reveals. In the course of the poem, Amalia imagines herself as innocent and vicious, as a Nazi and a Jew and an American, inhabits each face in the newsreel swiftly and completely, until the screen goes blank and the poet sits alone and exhausted in the blackened theater, her empathy draining away. And then, as the movie begins, the poem ends: I am Betty Grable.
Tristan reads it through a second time, folds it, slides it back into his jacket. He begins composing the first lines of a reply, then breaks off, unfolds the poem, and reads it again. The first stanza is burned into his memory by the time Tristan steps off the train. He recites it to himself as he walks up the stairs and down the street and through the front door of his building, chopping the lines into syllables and examining the stresses and the sounds, the rhythm.
Amalia, he writes as soon as he reaches his desk. I am in love with your poem. The line sits there, atop his typewriter, and Tristan stares at it for several minutes, growing lonely. He doesn’t want to offer rhapsody, or writerly observations. He wants to sit down with this girl, tell her that he, too, is Betty Grable, and talk to her for hours.
The community of wordsmiths into which Tristan always imagined being ushered has not materialized; no one slipped him the key to a private club upon the publication of his book. He knows where the cliques meet now, but he doesn’t want to vie with the young book reviewer Saul Bellow for king of the Hillel, or sit awkwardly at the knees of Langston Hughes. The New York Intellectuals, as they somewhat ridiculously call themselves, Trilling and Kazin and the rest of the Tribesmen, have been nothing but cordial, but Tristan has skirted their entreaties. He is younger than all but the youngest of that crowd by ten or fifteen years, and far worse educated, and he imagines they would treat him like a child, or grill him on politics if the conversation went on long enough, and be disgusted by his lack of certitude. It is a different kind of intimacy Tristan craves.
I want to read more, he types, and I would be honored to take you out whenever you are free, in celebration of your sixtieth birthday. Best regards, Tristan Brodsky.
Two weeks later, a reply:
Tristan,
I thank you for your kind words. Here is another recent attempt at a poem. I beg you to be less merciful this time. You have done wonders for my ego, but what I really want is to be ripped apart. Please do not hesitate to reciprocate by sending anything on which you might desire an (amateur) opinion.
I finally picked up The Angel of the Shtetl last week, as I’ve been meaning to for months. I haven’t had a spare moment since. I’m halfway through and enjoying it immensely, but I’ll wait to say anything more until I’m done.
As for your invitation, I must regretfully decline, on the grounds that in poetic terms I am perhaps just turning twenty-five. Which, I might add, makes me far too young for a man of forty-one such as yourself. I am also, as previously noted, completely occupied in classwork and your novel. When I do finish it, however, I would very much like to meet for a drink. Might you find your way up to Vassar, or will it have to wait until my spring recess?
Best Wishes,
A.F.
Tristan does his best to find fault with the poem enclosed. It is longer and riskier than the first, and far less polished. Still, it glows. He handwrites long annotations of both pieces, desperate to praise all that is worthy and to criticize lucidly the lack of clarity he finds in certain images, the dubious usage of one or two words. It takes him three drafts. He needs to prove to both of them that he can handle poetry, that he is not the brutish, boorish Great Novelist type who falters when forced to deal with the world writ small. He says so in the letter, excises the admission from the second version, restores it in the third, reads it over and sees how silly it sounds and decides to keep it anyway. He will be as open as he can with her, honor Amalia’s work by making himself as vulnerable as the girl in the sonnet.