What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander Page A

thought our training was worth the effort. Our mothers brought frozen steaks to press against black eyes and stood close as our fathers tilted our chins and hid smiles. “Quite a shiner,” they would say, and they could hardly stand to give up staring when the steaks covered our wounds.
    Along with the training injuries, we had other setbacks. One was a tactical error when, post–shotgun blast, we went as a group to egg the Anti-Semite’s house. Shlomo thought he heard a noise and yelled, “Anti-Semite!” in warning. We screamed back, dropped our eggs, and fled in response. This all took place more than a block away from the house. We hadn’t even gotten our target in sight.
    We weren’t cohesive. We knew how to move as a group but not as a gang.
    We needed practice.
    After two thousand years of being chased, we didn’t have any hunt in us.
     
    · · ·
     
    We sought help from Chung-Shik through Yitzy—an Israeli with an unfortunate heritage. Yitzy’s parents had brought him to America with the last name Penis, which even among kind children doesn’t play well. We teased Yitzy Penis ruthlessly, and as a result he formed a real friendship with his Gentile neighbor Chung-Shik, the only Asian boy in town. Bothshowed up happily, Yitzy delighted at being asked to bring his pal along.
    And so we proposed it, our plan.
    “Can we practice on you?” we asked.
    “Practice what?” Chung-Shik said amiably, Yitzy practically aglow at his side.
    When no one else answered, Harry spoke. “A reverse pogrom,” he said.
    “A what?”
    “We just want to menace you,” Harry said. “Chase you around a bit as a group. You know, because you’re different. To get a feel for it.”
    Chung-Shik looked to his friend. You could see we were losing him, and Yitzy had already lost his smile.
    That’s when Zvi pleaded, almost a cry of desperation: “Come on, you’re the only different kid we know.”
    Yitzy held Chung-Shik’s stare, the Asian boy looking back, not scared as much as disappointed.
    “Chase me instead,” Yitzy said, sort of pantomiming that he could be Chung-Shik and Chung-Shik could be him, switch off the yarmulke and all.
    We abandoned the idea right then. It wouldn’t be the same.
     
    · · ·
     
    Our failed offensive got back to Boris, as well as the reverse pogrom that wasn’t, the continuing rise in Blum-related trouble, and chases home from school. The rock salt still stung us all.
    We met in the rec room of the shul. Boris had swiped a filmstrip and accompanying audiocassette from the yeshiva he worked at in Royal Hills. He advanced the strip in the projector,a single frame every time the tape went beep . We knew the film well. We knew when the image would shift from the pile of shoes to the pile of hair, from the pile of bodies to the pile of teeth to the pile of combs. The film was a sacred teaching tool brought out only on Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust memorial day.
    Each year, the most memorable part was the taped dramatization, the soundman’s wooden blocks clop-clopping, the sound of those boots coming up the stairs. First they dragged off symbolic father and mother. And then, clop, clop, clop , those boots marched away.
    The lights still dimmed, we would form two lines—one boys, one girls. We marched back to class this way, singing “ Ani Ma’amin ” and holding in our heads the picture they’d painted for us: six million Jews marching into the gas chambers, two by two; a double line three million strong and singing in one voice, “I believe in the coming of the Messiah.”
    Boris did not split us into two quiet lines. He did not start us on a moving round of that song, or the equally rousing “We Are Leaving Mother Russia,” with its coda, “When they come for us, we’ll be gone.” After the film, he turned the lights back on and said to us, yelled at us, “Like sheep to the slaughter. Six million Jews is twelve million fists.” And then he segued from fists and Jewish fighting to