moorland expectation, people rarely left. It was too comfortable where they were, opening the gates of the ghetto, imagining Jews without Jewishness, dunking biscuits into tea, and looking at my mother.
3
Not true that I wouldn’t in the future give thanks to my father for hurrying me out into the Gentile light.
I thought of him and thanked him frequently when I was older, going to art school in South London, dressing like a goyisher housepainter, throwing warm beer down my throat and wooing the likes of Chloë Anderson, the college beauty with the Slavic cheekbones who, on our first date, confused me with an Aaron Blaiwais in the print department, and on our second with an Arnie Rosenfield who sculpted.
‘Do you think we are all one person?’ I asked her on our third. ‘Do we all look the same same to you, or do you just like Jews generically?’
Chloë Anderson’s finely etched brows arched further from her eyes than most people’s, which gave her a look of perpetual disapproval. Her nose, too, was constructed on a disdainful tilt. Everything on her face wanting to be somewhere else, or with someone else. ‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘I don’t like Jews at all.’
‘So what are you doing with me?’
For a moment I thought her brows might come away from her face altogether. ‘Penance,’ she said.
Was she joking? When I ask myself why I took her to wife, given her hostility to me as a representative of my people (and excluding the obvious: that it was because of her hostility to me as a representative of my people), that’s the only answer I can come up with – to discover once and for all whether she was joking. And of course (because in my heart I knew she wasn’t joking) to see if she would remember on the day which of the Jews she didn’t like she was marrying.
I thought of my father on my wedding night, when Chloë told me that though she wasn’t Catholic she had spent some time at a Catholic school where they had taught her to pray for all the Jews they knew as they were earmarked for eternal damnation. ‘Do you mind if I pray for you tonight, darling?’ she asked me.
Darling ! Was that darling Aaron, darling Arnie, or darling me?And did it matter?
As for the praying, well, yes, that I did mind, actually. She was already on her knees by the bed, her hands folded together like a small child’s, her hair tied in a ribbon, naked but for the ring I had bought her and the startlingly explicit silver crucifix with which her mother had presented her to mark our nuptials. It was a shame to interrupt her in her quiveringly voluptuous orisons – her white flesh cathedraled in solemnity, even her breath stilled so as not to offend the silence – but yes, yes I most decidedly did mind.
‘Couldn’t you leave it until tomorrow night?’ I wondered.
‘Please yourself,’ she said, getting up and blowing out the greatwhite cathedral candles she had bought (presumably from some Catholic book and expiation emporium) especially for the occasion. ‘I was only trying to be nice. You’ll burn in hell whether I pray for you or not.’
Thank you, Dad, I would say to myself on these and similar occasions. Thank you for the Jew-free start you gave me.
4
Not his fault. And not the fault of the Silvermans and Finkels either. They did what needed doing. They threw open the windows of our closed world, brought Europe into our homes, Europe with its chest out, the grand parades and parks and coffee houses, not the sweatshops of ancient superstition and obedience which my poor friend Manny had been born into, or the airless hovels which it was Tsedraiter Ike’s function to remind us of until his dying day.
They were the children, most of them, of venerable anarchist or trade unionist families, heirs to the Jewish strikes of 1880s London, inheritors of the high hopes of revolution that had engulfed Poland, Lithuania, Russia, in the 1880s and 90s, reaching at last even as far as Novoropissik. Some of
3
Not true that I wouldn’t in the future give thanks to my father for hurrying me out into the Gentile light.
I thought of him and thanked him frequently when I was older, going to art school in South London, dressing like a goyisher housepainter, throwing warm beer down my throat and wooing the likes of Chloë Anderson, the college beauty with the Slavic cheekbones who, on our first date, confused me with an Aaron Blaiwais in the print department, and on our second with an Arnie Rosenfield who sculpted.
‘Do you think we are all one person?’ I asked her on our third. ‘Do we all look the same same to you, or do you just like Jews generically?’
Chloë Anderson’s finely etched brows arched further from her eyes than most people’s, which gave her a look of perpetual disapproval. Her nose, too, was constructed on a disdainful tilt. Everything on her face wanting to be somewhere else, or with someone else. ‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘I don’t like Jews at all.’
‘So what are you doing with me?’
For a moment I thought her brows might come away from her face altogether. ‘Penance,’ she said.
Was she joking? When I ask myself why I took her to wife, given her hostility to me as a representative of my people (and excluding the obvious: that it was because of her hostility to me as a representative of my people), that’s the only answer I can come up with – to discover once and for all whether she was joking. And of course (because in my heart I knew she wasn’t joking) to see if she would remember on the day which of the Jews she didn’t like she was marrying.
I thought of my father on my wedding night, when Chloë told me that though she wasn’t Catholic she had spent some time at a Catholic school where they had taught her to pray for all the Jews they knew as they were earmarked for eternal damnation. ‘Do you mind if I pray for you tonight, darling?’ she asked me.
Darling ! Was that darling Aaron, darling Arnie, or darling me?And did it matter?
As for the praying, well, yes, that I did mind, actually. She was already on her knees by the bed, her hands folded together like a small child’s, her hair tied in a ribbon, naked but for the ring I had bought her and the startlingly explicit silver crucifix with which her mother had presented her to mark our nuptials. It was a shame to interrupt her in her quiveringly voluptuous orisons – her white flesh cathedraled in solemnity, even her breath stilled so as not to offend the silence – but yes, yes I most decidedly did mind.
‘Couldn’t you leave it until tomorrow night?’ I wondered.
‘Please yourself,’ she said, getting up and blowing out the greatwhite cathedral candles she had bought (presumably from some Catholic book and expiation emporium) especially for the occasion. ‘I was only trying to be nice. You’ll burn in hell whether I pray for you or not.’
Thank you, Dad, I would say to myself on these and similar occasions. Thank you for the Jew-free start you gave me.
4
Not his fault. And not the fault of the Silvermans and Finkels either. They did what needed doing. They threw open the windows of our closed world, brought Europe into our homes, Europe with its chest out, the grand parades and parks and coffee houses, not the sweatshops of ancient superstition and obedience which my poor friend Manny had been born into, or the airless hovels which it was Tsedraiter Ike’s function to remind us of until his dying day.
They were the children, most of them, of venerable anarchist or trade unionist families, heirs to the Jewish strikes of 1880s London, inheritors of the high hopes of revolution that had engulfed Poland, Lithuania, Russia, in the 1880s and 90s, reaching at last even as far as Novoropissik. Some of
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