Here I Am (35 page)

Like his dad, Sam was drawn to worst-case scenarios. It was obvious why they thrilled him, but hard to explain the comfort they offered. Perhaps they mapped a distance from his own safe life. Or perhaps coming to terms with the most horrible outcomes allowed for a kind of mental preparation and resignation. Maybe they were just more sharp objects—like the videos he hated and needed—to allow his insides out.

When he was in sixth grade, his Hebrew school class was made to watch a documentary about the concentration camps. It was never clear to him if this was because his teacher was lazy (an acceptable way to get rid of a couple of hours), or unable or unwilling to teach the material, or felt the impossibility of teaching it in any way other than simply showing it. Even at the time, Sam felt that he was too young to be seeing such a thing.

They sat at chipboard desks for righties, and the teacher—whose name they will all be able to remember for the rest of their lives—muttered a few unmemorable words of context and inspiration and disclaimer, and pressed Play. They watched lines of naked women, many pressing children to their chests. They were crying—the mothers and the children—but why were they only crying? Why were they so orderly? So good? Why didn't the mothers run? Why didn't they try to save their children's lives? Why didn't they protect their children? Better to get shot running away than simply walk to one's death. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance.

The still-children watched from their desks; they saw men digging their own mass graves and then kneeling in them, their fingers interlaced
behind their heads. Why did they dig their own graves? If you're going to be killed anyway, why help with the killing? For the few extra moments of life? That might make sense. But how did they maintain that composure? Because they thought it might buy them a few extra moments of life? Maybe. A minuscule chance is infinitely greater than no chance, but a moment of life is an eternity. Be a good Jewish boy and dig a good Jewish grave and kneel like a mensch and, as Sam's nursery school teacher, Judy Shore, used to say, “You get what you get, and you don't get upset.”

They saw grainy montages of humans who had become science experiments—dead twins, Sam could not not remember, still clutching each other on a table. Did they cling like that in life? He could not not wonder.

They saw images from the liberated camps: piles of hundreds or thousands of skeletal bodies, knees and elbows bending the wrong way, arms and legs at wrong angles, eyes so deeply sunken they could not be seen. Hills of bodies. Bulldozers testing a child's belief that a dead body doesn't feel anything.

What was he left with? The knowledge that Germans were
—are
—evil, evil, evil, not only capable of ripping children from their mothers and then ripping their small bodies apart, but
eager
to; that had non-Germans not intervened, the Germans would have murdered every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the planet; and that of course his grandfather was absolutely right, even if he sounded insane, when he said a Jewish person should never buy a German product of any kind or size, never put money into a German pocket, never visit Germany, never not cringe at the sound of that vile language of savages, never have any more interaction than what simply could not be avoided with any German of any age. Inscribe that on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.

Or he was left with the knowledge that everything that has happened once can happen again, is likely to happen again,
must
happen again,
will
.

Or the knowledge that his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between
his
life and
their
deaths.

Or no knowledge, but a feeling. What feeling? What was that feeling?

Sam didn't mention to his parents what he'd seen. Didn't seek explanation, or comfort. And he was given plenty of guidance—almost all of it unintentional and extremely subtle—never to ask about it, never even to
acknowledge it. So it was never mentioned, always never talked about, the perpetual topic of nonconversation. Everywhere you looked, there it wasn't.

His dad was obsessed with displays of optimism, and the imagined accumulation of property, and joke-making; his mom, with physical contact before saying goodbye, and fish oil, and outer garments, and “the right thing to do”; Max, with extreme empathy and self-imposed alienation; Benjy, with metaphysics and basic safety. And he, Sam, was always longing. What was that feeling? It had something to do with loneliness (his own and others'), something with suffering (his own and others'), something with shame (his own and others'), something with fear (his own and others'). But also something with stubborn belief, and stubborn dignity, and stubborn joy. And yet it wasn't really any of those things, or the sum of them. It was the feeling of being Jewish. But what was that feeling?

Israel continued to describe the situation as manageable, but it also continued to close off its airspace, which left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded on vacation and prevented Jews who wanted to help from coming. Tamir tried hitching a ride on a Red Cross cargo plane, tried getting special clearance through the military attaché at the embassy, looked into chaperoning a shipment of construction equipment. But there was no way home. He might have been the only person grateful to be at the funeral—it gave him a few hours to rest in peace.

Sam wore his ill-fitting bar mitzvah suit to the cemetery. Wearing it was the only thing he hated more than the process of getting it: the torture chamber of mirrors, his mother's unhelpful help, the functionally pedophiliac survivor tailor who not once, not twice, but three times groped at Sam's crotch with his Parkinsonian fingers and said, “Plenty of room.”

Tamir and Barak wore slacks with short-sleeve button-up shirts—their uniform for every occasion, whether it was going to synagogue, the grocery store, a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game, or the funeral of the family patriarch. They viewed any kind of formality—in dress, in speech, in affect—as some kind of gross infringement on a God-given right to at all times be oneself. Jacob found it obnoxious, and enviable.

Jacob wore a black suit with a box of Altoids in the pocket: artifacts of a time when he cared enough about how his breath smelled to attempt to echo it off his palm for sniffs.

Julia wore a vintage A.P.C. dress she'd found on Etsy for the equivalent
of nothing. It wasn't exactly funeral attire, but she never had occasion to wear it, and she wanted to wear it, and since the neutering of the bar mitzvah, a funeral was as glamorous an occasion as she was going to get.

“You look beautiful, Julia,” she said to Jacob, hating herself for saying it.

“Very beautiful,” Jacob said, hating her for saying it, but also surprised that his assessment of her beauty continued to matter to her.

“The impact is lessened by it having been prompted.”

“It's a funeral, Julia. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saying I look handsome.”

Irv wore the same suit he'd been wearing since the Six-Day War.

Isaac wore the shroud in which he had been married, the shroud he'd worn once a year on the Day of Atonement, the chest of which he'd beaten with his fist:
For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance on the lips…For the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly…For the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart…
The shroud had no pockets, as the dead are required to be buried without any encumbrances.

A small—in number and physical stature—army from Adas Israel had passed through the grief like a breeze: they brought stools, covered the mirrors, took care of the platters, and sent Jacob an un-itemized bill that he was unable to question without requiring Jewish seppuku. There would be a small service, followed by burial at Judean Gardens, followed by a small kiddush at Irv and Deborah's, followed by eternity.

All the local cousins were at the funeral, and a few older, zanier Jews came in from New York, Philly, and Chicago. Jacob had met these people throughout his life, but only at rites of passage—bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals. He didn't know their names, but their faces evoked a kind of Pavlovian existentialism: if you're here, if I see you, something significant must be happening.

Rabbi Auerbach, who'd known Isaac for several decades, had a stroke a month earlier and so left the officiating to his replacement: a young, disheveled, smart, or maybe dumb recent product of wherever rabbis are made. He wore unlaced sneakers, which felt, to Jacob, like a shabby tribute
to someone who had probably
eaten
sneakers in the skyless forests of Poland. Then again, it might have been some kind of religious display of reverence, like sitting on stools or covering mirrors.

He approached Jacob and Irv before the service began.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” he said, cupping his hands in front of him, as if they contained empathy, or wisdom, or emptiness.

“Yeah,” Irv said.

“There are a few ritualistic—”

“Save your words. We're not a religious family.”

“It probably depends on what is meant by
religious,”
the rabbi said.

“It probably doesn't,” Jacob corrected him, either in his dad's defense or in the absence of God's.

“And our stance is a choice,” Irv said. “Not laziness, not assimilation, not inertia.”

“I respect that,” the rabbi said.

“We're as good as any Jews.”

“I'm sure you're better than most.”

Irv went right back at the rabbi: “What you do or don't respect isn't of great importance to me.”

“I respect that, too,” the rabbi said. “You're a man of strongly held beliefs.”

Irv turned to Jacob: “This guy really can't take an insult.”

“Come on,” Jacob said. “It's time.”

The rabbi walked the two of them through a few of the small rituals that, while entirely voluntary, they would be expected to perform in order to ensure Isaac's proper passage into whatever Jews believe in. After his initial reluctance, Irv seemed not only willing, but wanting, to cross his chets and dot his zayins—as if stating his resistance was resistance enough. He didn't believe in God. He couldn't, even if opening himself to that foolishness might have opened him to badly needed comfort. There had been a few moments—not of belief, but religiosity—every one of them involving Jacob. When Deborah went into labor, Irv prayed to no one that she and the baby would be safe. When Jacob was born, he prayed to no one that his son long outlive him, and acquire more knowledge and self-knowledge than him, and experience greater happiness. At Jacob's bar mitzvah, Irv stood at the ark and said a prayer of gratitude to no one that trembled, then broke, then exploded into something so beautifully
unrestrained and full-throated that he was left with no voice to deliver his speech at the party. When he and Deborah didn't read the books they were staring at in the waiting room of George Washington Hospital, and Jacob almost pushed the doors off the hinges, his face covered in tears, his scrubs covered in blood, and did his best to form the words “You have a grandson,” Irv closed his eyes, but not to darkness, and said a prayer to no one without any content, only force. The sum of those no ones was the King of the Universe. He'd spent enough of his life wrestling foolishness. Now, at the cemetery, all the wrestling felt foolish.

The rabbi said a small prayer, offering no translation or approximate sense of the meaning, and took a razor blade to Irv's lapel.

“I need this suit for my grandson's bar mitzvah.”

Because he didn't hear Irv, or because he did, the young rabbi made a tiny incision, and directed Irv to open it—to create the actual rip—with his forefingers. It was ridiculous, this gesture. It was witchcraft, a relic from the time of stoning women for having their periods the wrong way, and it was an unconscionable thing to do to a Brooks Brothers suit. But Irv wanted to bury his father according to Jewish law and tradition.

He inserted his fingers into the incision, as if into his own chest, and pulled. And as the fabric tore, Irv's tears were released. Jacob hadn't seen his father cry in years. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen his father cry. It suddenly seemed possible that he'd never seen him cry.

Irv looked at his son and whispered, “I don't have parents anymore.”

The rabbi said that now was the moment, before the casket was taken from the hearse, for Irv to forgive his father, and to ask for forgiveness.

“It's OK,” Irv said, dismissing the offer.

“I know,” the rabbi said.

“We've said everything that needed to be said.”

“Do it anyway,” the rabbi suggested.

“I think it's foolish to speak to a dead person.”

“Do it anyway. I wouldn't want you to regret missing this last chance.”

“He's dead. It doesn't matter to him.”

“You're living,” the rabbi said.

Irv shook his head, and continued to shake it, but the object of the dismissiveness shifted: from the ritual to his inability to participate.

He turned to Jacob and said, “I'm sorry.”

“You realize I'm not the dead one.”

“Yeah. But both of us will be at some point. And here we are.”

“Sorry for what?”

“An apology is only an apology if it's complete. I'm sorry for everything that I need to apologize for. No context.”

“I thought we'd be monsters without context.”

“We're monsters either way.”

“Yeah, well, I'm a schmuck, too.”

“I didn't say I was a schmuck.”

“OK, so I'm the schmuck.”

Irv put his hand on Jacob's cheek and almost smiled.

“Let's get this party started,” he said to the rabbi, and approached the back of the hearse.

He tentatively put his hands on the casket and lowered his covered head. Jacob heard some of the words—he wanted to hear everything—but he couldn't make out the meaning.

The whispering went on—past “Forgive me,” past “I forgive you.” What was he saying? Why did the Blochs find it so hard to talk to one another while alive? Why couldn't Jacob lie in a casket long enough to hear his family's unspeakable feelings, but then return to the world of the living with what he'd learned? All the words were for those who couldn't respond to them.

It was way too humid, and one extemporaneous speech would have been way too many. The men sweated through their underwear, through their white shirts and black suits, sweated all the way into the folds of the handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They were losing their body weight in sweat, as if trying to become salt, like Lot's wife, or become nothing, like the man they were there to bury.

While most of the cousins felt obliged to say a few words, none had felt obliged to prepare a few words, so everyone was made to endure, in that humidity, more than an hour of rambling generalities. Isaac was courageous. He was resilient. He loved. And the embarrassing inversion of what the goyim say about their guy: he survived for us.

Max told the story of the time his great-grandfather took him aside and, apropos of no birthday, Hanukkah, glowing report card, recital, or rite of passage, said, “What do you want? Anything. Tell me. I want you to have the thing that you want.” Max told him he wanted a drone. The next
time Max visited, Isaac again took him aside, and presented him with a board game called Reversi—either a knockoff of Othello, or what Othello knocked off. Max pointed out to the mourners that if one were to try to think of the word that sounded least like
drone
, it might be
Reversi
. Then he nodded, or bowed, and returned to his mother's side. No moral, consolation, or meaning.

Irv, who'd been working on his speech since long before Isaac's death, chose silence.

Tamir stood at a distance. It was hard to tell if he was trying to repress emotion or generate some. More than once, he used his phone. His casualness knew no limits, there was nothing he couldn't shrug off: death, natural catastrophe. It was something else about him that angered Jacob and that Jacob almost certainly envied. Why couldn't Tamir be more like Jacob? That was the question. And why couldn't Jacob be more like Tamir? That was the other question. If they could meet halfway, they'd form a reasonable Jew.

Finally, the rabbi stepped forward. He cleared his throat, pushed his glasses up his nose, and took a small spiral-bound pad from his pocket. He flipped through a few pages, then put it back, having either committed the contents to memory or realized he'd accidentally brought the wrong pad.

“What can we say about Isaac Bloch?”

He left enough pause to generate some rhetorical uncertainty. Was he actually asking a question? Admitting that he didn't know Isaac well enough to know what to say?

What can we say about Isaac Bloch?

Quickly, the wet cement of annoyance that Jacob felt at the hearse dried into something to break fists against. He hated this man. Hated his lazy righteousness, his bullshit affectations, his obsessive beard-stroking and Central Casting hand gestures, his too-tight collar and untied shoelaces and off-center yarmulke. This feeling sometimes subsumed Jacob, this unnuanced, swift, and eternal loathing. It happened with waiters, with David Letterman, with the rabbi who accused Sam. More than once he had come home from lunch with an old friend, someone with whom he had been through dozens of seasons of life, and casually said to Julia, “I think we reached the end.” In the beginning, she didn't know what he meant
—the end of what? why the end?
—but after years of living beside such a binary, unforgiving person, someone so agnostic about his own
worth he was compelled to a religious certainty about others', she came to know him, if not understand him.

“What can we say about someone about whom there is too much to say?”

The rabbi put his hands in his jacket pockets, closed his eyes, and nodded.

“Words don't fail us, time does. There isn't time—not from now until time's end—to recount the tragedy, and heroism, and
tragedy
of Isaac Bloch's life. We could stand here speaking about him until our own funerals, and it wouldn't be enough. I visited Isaac the morning of his death.”

Wait,
what
? Was this possible? Wasn't he just the schmuck rabbi, here because half of the actually good rabbi's mouth had stopped functioning? If they'd stopped at Isaac's on the way back from the airport, would they have crossed this man's path?

“He called, and he asked me to come over. I heard no urgency in his voice. I heard no desperation. But I heard need. So I went. It was my first time in his home. We'd only met once or twice at shul, and always in passing. He had me sit at his kitchen table. He poured me a glass of ginger ale, served me a plate of sliced pumpernickel, some cantaloupe. Many of you have had that meal at that table.”