Here I Am

  you know i meant that idiomatically

  yes, i know you are not a vagina

  then i really have you fooled

  i will never write lol

  i’m sorry i hurt you

  why did you do it?

  because it was a cowardly

  way to hurt myself

  what was so hard about it was that

  i always feel like i understand you

  but last night i didn’t

  it scared me

  do you accept my apology?

  as franz rosenzweig famously responded

  when asked if he was religious…

  “not yet”

  impressive memory

  not yet?

  not yet

  but you will

  did you ever wonder why it even mattered

  if achilles was wounded in the heel

  because that was the only part of him

  that wasn’t immortal

  so? so he’d be an immortal with a limp

  i’m guessing you know why

  i do

  i’d really, really, really like to know

  really, really, really, really, really

  until you broke the word “like”

  into a million pieces

  into love

  so tell me

  it’s not just that his heel was

  the only mortal part of him

  ALL of his mortality was in his heel

  —like moving everyone in a skyscraper

  into the basement, and then it floods

  and people who work on different floors,

  and never otherwise would have met,

  talk, and decide to go out to dinner,

  and keep going out to dinner,

  and meet each other’s family,

  and celebrate holidays together,

  and get married, and have

  kids, who have kids, who have kids

  but they drowned

  so?

  MAYBE IT WAS THE DISTANCE

  Jacob was the only one who referred to the Israeli cousins as our Israeli cousins. To everyone else in the house, they were the Israeli cousins. Jacob felt no desire for ownership of them, and too much association made him itchy, but he felt that they were owed familial warmth commensurate with the thickness of blood. Or he felt that he should feel that. It would have been easier if they’d been easier.

  He’d known Tamir since they were children. Jacob’s grandfather and Tamir’s were brothers in a Galician shtetl of such minuscule size and importance that the German people didn’t get to it until their second pass through the Pale to wipe up Jewish crumbs. There had been seven brothers. Isaac and Benny avoided the fate of the other five by hiding together in a hole for more than two hundred days, and then living in forests. Every story Jacob overheard about this period—Benny could have killed a Nazi; Isaac could have saved a Jewish boy—suggested a dozen stories that he would never overhear.

  The brothers spent a year in a displaced persons camp, where they met their wives, who were sisters. Each couple had a child, each a boy: Irv and Shlomo. Benny moved his family to Israel, and Isaac moved his to America. Isaac never understood Benny. Benny understood Isaac, but never forgave him.

  Within two years, Isaac and his wife, Sarah, had opened a Jewish bodega in a schwartze neighborhood, learned enough English to begin working the system, and started saving. Irv learned the infield fly rule, learned the alphabetic/syllabic logic of D.C. street naming, learned to be ashamed of his house’s look and smell, and one morning his forty-two-year-old mother went downstairs to open the store, but instead collapsed and died. Died of what? Of a heart attack. Of a stroke. Of surviving. A silence so high and thick was built around her death that not only did no one know any significant details, no one even knew what others knew. Many decades later, at his father’s funeral, Irv would allow himself to wonder if his mother had killed herself.

  Everything was something never to remember, or never to forget, and what America had done for them was retold and retold. As Jacob grew, his grandfather would regale him with stories of America’s glory: how the army had fed and clothed him after the war; how at Ellis Island they never asked him to change his name (it was his own choice); how one was limited only by one’s willingness to work; how he’d never experienced anything that carried even the faintest whiff of anti-Semitism—only indifference, which is greater than love, because it’s more reliable.

  The brothers would visit each other every few years, as if the performance of familial intimacy would retroactively defeat the German people and save everyone. Isaac would lavish Benny and his family with expensive-looking tchotchkes, take them to the “best” second-tier restaurants, close the market for a week to show them the sights of Washington. And when they left, he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how big-headed and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli crackpots were Hebrews—people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings. Then he’d reiterate how necessary it was to maintain closeness.

  Jacob found the Israeli cousins—his Israeli cousins—curious, at once alien and familiar. He saw his family’s faces in their faces, but also something different, something that could equally well be described as ignorant or unself-conscious, phony or free—hundreds of thousands of years of evolution crammed into one generation. Perhaps it was existential constipation, but the Israelis didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. All Jacob’s family ever did was give shits. They were shit-givers.

  Jacob first visited Israel when he was fourteen—an overdue present that he didn’t want for a bar mitzvah he didn’t went. The next generation of Blumenbergs took the next generation of Blochs to the Wailing Wall, into whose cracks Jacob inserted prayers for things he didn’t actually care about but knew he ought to, like a cure for AIDS and an unbroken ozone layer. They floated in the Dead Sea together, among the ancient, elephantine Jews reading half-submerged newspapers bleeding Cyrillic. They climbed Masada early in the morning and pocketed rocks that might have been held in the palms of Jewish suicides. They watched the windmill break the sunset from the perch of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. They went to the small park named after Jacob’s great-grandfather Gershom Blumenberg. He had been a beloved rabbi, and his surviving disciples remained loyal to his memory, choosing never to have another rabbi, choosing their own demise. It was 105 degrees. The marble bench was cool, but the metal plaque with his name was too hot to touch.

  One morning, while they were driving to a hike along the sea, an air-raid siren went off. Jacob’s eyes opened to half dollars and found Irv’s. Shlomo stopped the car. Right there, where it was, on the highway. “Did we break down?” Irv asked, as if the siren might have been indicating a cracked catalytic converter. Shlomo and Tamir got out of the car with the vacant determination of zombies. Everyone on the highway got out of cars and cargo trucks, off motorcycles. They stood, thousands of Jewish undead, perfectly silent. Jacob didn’t know if this was the end, a kind of proud greeting of nuclear winter, or a drill, or some national custom. Like dupes in a grand social psychology experiment, Jacob and his parents did as everyone else was doing, and stood by the car in silence. When the siren stopped, life reanimated. Everyone got back in the car and they were on their way.

  Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Deborah was left to ask what had just happened.

  “Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.

  “That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.

  “For the Jews,” Shlomo said, “the ones that were chopped down.”

  “Shoah,” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d known everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’ ”

  “But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”

  Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”

  “And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.

  Shlomo said, “Himself.”


  Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.

  Shlomo was as over-the-top a host as Benny had been. He was further over, untethered as he was from the dignity of survival. And dignity was never Irv’s problem. So there were many scenes, especially when the check came at the end of a meal.

  “Don’t touch that!”

  “Don’t you touch that!”

  “Don’t insult me!”

  “Me insult you?”

  “You’re our guests!”

  “You’re our hosts!”

  “I’ll never eat with you again.”

  “Count on it.”

  More than once this competitive generosity escalated to genuine insult. More than once—twice—perfectly good money was ripped up. Did everyone win, or did everyone lose? Why so binary?

  What Jacob remembered most sharply and tenderly was the time they spent in the Blumenbergs’ home, a two-story Art Deco—ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. Every surface was made of stone and cool enough to be felt through socks at every time of day—an entire house like the bench in Blumenberg Park. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast. Jaunts to weirdly specific two-room “zoos”: a snake zoo, a small-mammal zoo. Tamir’s mother would make huge spreads of side dishes for lunch—half a dozen salads, half a dozen dips. At home, the Blochs made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Blumenbergs made a point of trying not to turn it off.

  Tamir was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. In those days, Jacob concealed dirty magazines inside reference books at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogs for nipples and pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally exposed Spice channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult. Even as a teenager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have need of it. Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty fuck, but what else was time made for?

  Once, while they watched a pixelated woman jerkily spread and close her legs—an animation composed of six frames—Tamir asked if Jacob felt like beating off.

  Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw—voiced “No,” assuming his cousin was joking.

  “Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea butter moisturizer into his palm.

  Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen—close enough for static shock. His penis was wide, Jacob had to give it that. But he wasn’t convinced it was any longer than his own. He wasn’t convinced that in the dark one would be able to tell the difference between their penises.

  “How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for voicing such a creepy question.

  And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.

  Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (totally subconscious) intent?

  They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s quiet moans were always irrepressible—if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about such sessions after—not three minutes after, and not three decades—but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough at the time not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what was lost.

  Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blowjob before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested), traveled abroad before Jacob, had his heart created by having his heart broken before Jacob. When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in south Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob—he would have been Jacob, given the choice—but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that stupid New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one. Tamir tried not to get killed, while Jacob tried not to die of boredom.

  After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech start-ups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many nonflops to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to give Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.

  Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone, whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?

  Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed—he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote—and that wasn’t in any way confusing. Nothing was getting bigger in his life—it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established—and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.

  Isaac always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. His grandfather seemed to have serious problems with all his post–bar mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.

  Tamir. Now, he’s a good grandson.

  Even if he wasn’t all that good, or in any way his grandson.

  Maybe it was the distance Isaac loved. Maybe the absence allowed for a mythology, while Jacob was cursed to be judged by the increments he fell short of perfect menschiness.

  Jacob tried to persuade Tamir to come see Isaac before the move to the Jewish Home. There were eighteen months of purgatory as they waited for someone to die and free up a room. But Tamir denied the significance of the event.

  “I’ve moved six times in the last ten years,” he e-mailed, although like this: “iv mvd 6 tms n lst 10 yrs,” as if English were as vowelless as Hebrew. Or as if there were no possible way for him to give less of a shit about the message.

  “Sure,” Jacob wrote back, “but never to an assisted-living facility.”

  “I’ll come when he dies, OK?”

  “I’
m not sure that visit will mean as much to him.”

  “And we’ll be there for Sam’s bar mitzvah,” Tamir responded, although at that point it was still a year away and definitively happening.

  “I hope he makes it that long,” Jacob wrote.

  “You sound like him.”

  The year passed, Isaac survived, as was his way, and so did the insolent Jews squatting in the various rooms that were his birthright. But then, finally, the exasperating wait was over: someone shattered his hip and died, bringing Isaac to the top of the list. Sam’s bar mitzvah was finally upon him. And according to Jacob’s phone, the Israelis were in their final descent.

  “Listen,” Jacob told Max as Irv pulled into a parking spot, “our Israeli cousins—”

  “Your Israeli cousins.”

  “Our Israeli cousins are not the easiest people in the world—”

  “We’re the easiest people in the world?”

  “I’ll tell you the one thing the Arabs get right,” Irv said, annoyed by the angle at which a car was parked. “They don’t give women licenses.”

  “We’re the second-most-difficult people in the world,” Jacob told Max. “After your Israeli cousins. But the point I’m trying to make is don’t judge the State of Israel by the stubbornness, arrogance, and materialism of our cousins.”

  “Also known as fortitude, righteousness, and ingenuity,” Irv said, turning off the car.

  “It’s not their Israeliness,” Jacob said, “it’s just them. And they’re ours.”

  IN THE END, ONE’S HOME IS PERFECT

  There were rolls of bubble wrap in the basement, like rolls of hay in a field in a painting—dozens of liters of trapped air that had been saved for years for an occasion that would never come.

  The walls were bare: the bequeathed awards and diplomas had been taken down, the ketubahs, reproductions of posters for Chagall exhibits, wedding photos and graduation photos and bar mitzvah photos and bris photos and framed sonogram images. So many framed pictures, as if he’d been trying to conceal the walls. And in their absence, so many rectangles of discoloration.

  The made-in-China tchotchkes had been removed from the china cabinet’s shelves and put in its drawers.