TREYF by Elissa Altman Page A

the brain. The brain. Get the brain away from me.
    Whatever she’s serving
, my mother had said as we climbed out of the car,
I don’t want it
.
    I remember this while I stare at the brain on the plate.
    Of course.
    She knew.
    My mother knew.
    She knew that we would all sit down to lunch, and on this delicate Austrian china that was dragged over on the boat from Czernowitz with her mother’s Shabbos candlesticks, my grandmother would feed us whole boiled brains the day after my parents have taken me to see
Young Frankenstein
at The Ziegfeld, where there were brains in glass jars and a man with a moving hunchback and bulging eyes.
    â€œThe baby doesn’t eat brains yet,” my father says, walking into the kitchen with my grandfather.
    Yet.
    My father’s hands leave invisible contrails of the bacon we had for breakfast as he grabs the plate out from under my stare and carries it to the drain board, where it sits like another guest for the rest of our visit. My grandmother curls up her lip in irritation at her youngest grandchild’s bad manners, obviously learned at home. She produces bowls of chicken soup, followed by cold balik fish covered in a thin layer of tan gelatin, powdered hot cocoa poured over kosher marshmallows, and thimble-sized shot glasses of Schnapps.
    My mother is sound asleep in the front seat when my father and I emerge through the lobby doors and down to the sidewalk; her full pack of Virginia Slims has been smoked and the butts are smoldering in the ashtray next to her. The car battery is dead.

8

Camp
    D epending on how you spell it,
Machanayim
means two different things: spelled without a “y,” it’s the name of a group of early-twentieth-century Russian Jewish Zionist refuseniks—Jews not permitted by Russian law to emigrate to Israel—who gathered together in darkened basements and alleys to study the Torah under threat of certain death. Spelled with a “y,” it is the name of a type of Hebraic dodgeball, the goal of which is to pummel members of the opposing team until they relent. Unlike regular dodgeball, when you get struck with the ball in Machanayim, you’re not out: you’re simply conscripted to the other side, where you’re pelted by your own former teammates.
    Created by a rabbinate who thought they made a pun, Machanayim-the-Torah-scholars and Machanaim-the-athletes were pasted together to become the name of an ultra-Orthodox socialist sleepaway camp for the athletic progeny of BrooklynJewish immigrants. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Jewish children were sent off in droves to a remote part of the Catskills to learn how to play baseball like Hank Greenberg—known to his fans as The Hebrew Hammer—to be assaulted with dodgeballs, and to be fed the same foods that they ate at home. Instead of s’mores, children at Camp Machanaim ate schmaltz on rye bread while singing songs around the roaring campfire that licked the star-spangled borscht belt sky.
    My grandparents sent my father to Camp Machanaim for the first time when he was nine; away from the noise and bustle of Brooklyn and my grandfather’s violent rages, he was finally free and at peace, and he learned to love the lush country as an oasis that gave him space to breathe and think. The boyish mischief that made his father apoplectic with fury and resulted in the beatings that inevitably followed at home were met at camp with little more than an extra half hour of sweeping in preparation for his bunk’s daily inspection; the mundane naughtiness of a small child was just that, and nothing more. And so my father grew to love his summers at Camp Machanaim, and he longed for them during the cold, harsh winters that fell in between. So obsessed with his experience that the very name Camp Machanaim showed up like a regular dinner guest at our apartment in The Marseilles, peppering my parents’ infrequent television-laced conversation over the strains