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.”
A gentle chuckle of recognition.
“He spoke slowly, and with effort. He told me about Sam’s bar mitzvah, and Jacob’s show, and Max’s early long division, and Benjy’s bike-riding, and Julia’s projects, and Irv’s mishegas—that was his word.”
A chuckle. He was winning.
“And then he said, ‘Rabbi, I feel no despair anymore. For seventy years I had only nightmares, but I have no nightmares anymore. I feel only gratitude for my life, for every moment I lived. Not only the good moments. I feel gratitude for every moment of my life. I have seen so many miracles.’ ”
This was either the most audacious heaping and steaming mountain of Jewshit ever shoveled by a rabbi or anyone, or a revelatory glimpse into Isaac Bloch’s consciousness. Only the rabbi knew for sure—what was accurately recounted, what was embellished, what was fabricated out of whole tallis. Had anyone ever heard Isaac use the word despair? Or gratitude? He’d have said, “It was horrible, but it could have been worse.” But would he have said that? Thankful for what? And what were all these miracles he’d witnessed?
“Then he asked me if I spoke Yiddish. I told him no. He said, ‘What kind of rabbi doesn’t speak Yiddish?’ ”
A proper laugh.
“I told him my grandparents spoke Yiddish to my parents, but my parents would never let me hear it. They wanted me to learn English. To forget Yiddish. He told me he’d done the same, that he was the last Yiddish-speaker in his family, that the language would be in the casket, too. And then he put his hand on my hand and said, ‘Let me teach you a Yiddish expression.’ He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Kein briere iz oich a breire.’ I asked him what it meant. He took back his hand and said, ‘Look it up.’ ”
Another laugh.
“I did look it up. On my phone, in his bathroom.”
Another laugh.
“Kein briere iz oich a breire. It means ‘Not to have a choice is also a choice.’ ”
No, those words couldn’t have been his. They were too faux-enlightened, too content with circumstance. Isaac Bloch was many things, and resigned was not one of them.
If having no choice were a choice, Isaac would have run out of choices once a day after 1938. But the family needed him, especially before the family existed. They needed him to turn his back on his grandparents, his parents, and five of his brothers. They needed him to hide in that hole with Benny, to walk with rigid legs toward Russia, eat other people’s garbage at night, hide, steal, forage. They needed him to forge documents to board the boat, and tell the right lies to the U.S. immigration officer, and work eighteen-hour days to keep the grocery profitable.
“Then,” the young rabbi said, “he asked me to pick up toilet paper for him at the Safeway, because they were having a sale.”
Everyone chuckled.
“I told him he didn’t need to buy toilet paper anymore. It would be taken care of by the Jewish Home. He gave me a knowing smile and said, ‘But that price…’ ”
A louder, freer laugh.
“ ‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Was there something you wanted to hear? Something you wanted to say?’ He said, ‘There are two things that everybody needs. The first is to feel that he is adding to the world. Do you agree?’ I told him I did. ‘The second,’ he said, ‘is toilet paper.’ ”
The loudest laugh yet.
“I’m thinking about a Hasidic teaching that I learned as a rabbinical student. There are three ascending levels of mourning: with tears, with silence, and with song. How do we mourn Isaac Bloch? With tears, with silence, or with song? How do we mourn the end of his life? The end of the Jewish epoch that he participated in and exemplified? The end of Jews who speak in that music of broken instruments; who arrange their grammar counterclockwise and miss the point of every cliché; who say mine instead of my, the German people instead of Nazis, and who implore their perfectly healthy relatives to be healthy instead of feeling silent gratitude for health? The end of hundred-and-fifty-decibel kisses, of that drunken European script. Do we shed tears for their disappearance? Silently grieve? Or sing their praises?
“Isaac Bloch was not the last of his kind, but once gone, his kind will be gone forever. We know them—we have lived among them, they have shaped us as Jews and Americans, as sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters—but our time of knowing them is nearly complete. And then they will be gone forever. And we will only remember them. Until we don’t.
“We know them. We know them with tears for their suffering, with silence for all that cannot be said, and with song for their unprecedented resilience. There will be no more old Jews who interpret a spot of good news as the guarantee of imminent apocalypse, who treat buffets like grocery stores before blizzards, who touch a finger to the bottom lip before turning a page of their people’s Maxwell House epic.”
Jacob’s hatred was softening—not evaporating, not even melting, but losing its shape.
The rabbi paused, brought his hands together, and sighed. “As we stand at Isaac Bloch’s grave, there is a war going on. There are two wars. One is on the brink of breaking out. The other has been happening for seventy years. The imminent war will determine the survival of Israel. The old war will determine the survival of the Jewish soul.
“Survival has been the central theme and imperative of Jewish existence since the beginning, and not because we chose it to be that way. We have always had e
nemies, always been hunted. It’s not true that everyone hates Jews, but in every country we’ve ever lived, in every decade of every century, we have encountered hatred.
“So we’ve slept with one eye open, kept packed suitcases in the closet and one-way train tickets in the breast pockets of our shirts, against our hearts. We’ve made efforts not to offend or be too noisy. To achieve, yes, but not to draw undue attention to ourselves in the process. We’ve organized our lives around the will to perpetuate our lives—with our stories, habits, values, dreams, and anxieties. Who could blame us? We are a traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma’s power to deform the mind and heart.
“If you were to ask one hundred Jews what was the Jewish book of the century, you would get one answer: The Diary of Anne Frank. If you were to ask what was the Jewish work of art of the century, you would get the same answer. This despite it having been created neither as a book nor as a work of art, and not in the century in which the question was asked. But its appeal—symbolically, and on its own terms—is overpowering.”
Jacob looked around to see if anyone else was as surprised by the direction this was taking. No one seemed fazed. Even Irv, whose head only ever rotated on the axis of disagreement, was nodding.
“But is it good for us? Has it been good to align ourselves with poignancy over rigor, with hiding over seeking, victimization over will? No one could blame Anne Frank for dying, but we could blame ourselves for telling her story as our own. Our stories are so fundamental to us that it’s easy to forget that we choose them. We choose to rip certain pages from our history books, and coil others into our mezuzot. We choose to make life the ultimate Jewish value, rather than differentiate the values of kinds of life, or, more radically, admit that there are things even more important than being alive.