Half Empty (11 page)

Libeskind might have saved the architectural bells and whistles for the upper floors, which cover the roughly thousand-year history of the Jews in Germany before the late unpleasantness of the 1930s and ’40s. The display about what keeping kosher means, for example, could have used a little spice, although I do come upon an interesting interactive display: a computer with two large buttons: green for “Yes,” red for “No.” On the screen is the question: “Do you think it is all right to tell a Jewish joke in Germany today?” I’m assuming by “Jewish joke” they mean a joke told
about
Jews, i.e., “Knock, knock, who’s there? Usurer,” as opposed to a joke told
by
Jews, like I have done here, and will continue with
these
two, both of which were originally told to me by my Jewish parents, and both of which involve medicine and long-term-care facilities for the aged, which solidifies their Semitic bona fides beyond any doubt:

A doctor in an old folks’ home is visited by his patient Max Goldfarb, ninety-two years old. Max has come for his checkup and to announce that he is about to be married to fellow resident May Koussevitzky, age eighty-nine. The doctor says to him, “You know, Max, I don’t feel this is a violation of doctor-patient privilege because you’re going to marry her, but I’ve examined May Koussevitzky and I have to tell you she has acute angina,” to which Max responds, “You’re telling me!
”

Here’s the second joke:
Two psychiatrists meet on the street and say hello. “How are you?” asks one. “Eh, not so good,” says the other. “I had a stupid misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue. I was visiting my mother out at the old folks’ home. We were having lunch and I asked her to pass me the salt, but instead I said, ‘You fucking bitch you ruined my life.’ 
”

It’s not that I hadn’t been mightily impressed with the honesty
that I’d encountered while there. The explanatory text at the house at Wannsee where the Final Solution was first drafted, and at some recently excavated bunkers where the SS conducted torture on dissidents, was written exclusively in German. These were not displays of contrition for my benefit. But jokes? I just wasn’t sure. We still didn’t seem thick enough on the ground for the familiar contempt of jokes, so I pressed “No.” The computer told me the tally so far: 76 percent of those who responded agreed with me.

I experienced only two moments that might be described as fear and they were not even Jewish in nature: one when the ice-blue-eyed German shepherd that lived near the reception desk of my Berlin pension showed up, unaccompanied and growling, outside my door, and the other in a brick-vaulted rathskeller in Cologne when a group of football-jersey-wearing men broke into very martial-sounding, beer-soaked song. Maybe it was the claustrophobia-inducing basement aspect, because the spontaneous male chorus that erupted one evening in Munich in a famous beer garden didn’t faze me. The garden, at the foot of a huge pagoda in a huge park in the middle of the city, was apparently Hitler’s favorite, and even that seemed harmlessly distant. Sitting with my German publisher, I drank a pale, lemony beer in a tall trumpet of a glass, and ate a
Schweinshaxe
, a Renaissance-looking joint of silky pork with crackling skin.

After supper, we walked through the park to the nearby Haus der Kunst, a massive museum with brutalist columns, a building erected for Hitler. It was in the Haus der Kunst that the Nazis opened the three-year-long exhibit of degenerate art, a show that essentially included every major movement of modern painting and sculpture: the cubists, the expressionists, you name it. If it wasn’t a painting of some Rhineland mountainscape with billowing Wagnerian clouds and a mighty stag in the foreground,
or else a sanctioned portrait of
der Führer
himself, chances are it was considered the physical manifestation of the decayed morals of a subhuman race.

But that night, in a bit of wry symmetry the Reich would have shuddered to contemplate,
I
was giving a reading. The Jewish homosexual writer: the ultimate degenerate. I was welcomed without reservation despite the history,
because
of the history that lay thick as incense in the air and escaped no one’s notice, neither mine nor my hosts’.

In his highly entertaining cultural history of the Yiddish language,
Born to Kvetch
, Michael Wex shows how Yiddish “arose, at least in part, to give voice to a system of opposition and exclusion.” Jewish language and, by extension, Jewish culture was, perforce, based in a disdain for Christians, a disdain born of some very legitimate fear and mistrust. “Eating
treyf
signals a cessation of disgust for the Gentile world,” says Rabbi X.

Eating pork, then, is a Jewish joke I feel licensed to tell. Unlike most subversive humor, though, it doesn’t have its roots in transgression, at least not for me, while for one friend, a woman well into her adulthood, it decidedly does. Yet she eats it with gusto and frequency. She still feels that she is getting back at her mother with each bite, much like the Shangri-Las and their defiant love for the Leader of the Pack. This is what is known as an underlying motive, and I would respectfully submit that she would have neither the words nor the tools to understand such things if Jews
hadn’t
begun eating pork, psychoanalysis and the interrogation of the unconscious being just one of the many exciting things with which newly secular nineteenth-century Jews replaced religion in their quest for greater existential meaning. No longer confined to narrow lives defined solely by liturgy, they were free to pursue all manner of spiritual fulfillments, filling their time with street theater, socialism, anarchism, movies, and jazz.

I know bacon has become something of a ubiquitous cliché of late (“a little too pleased with itself,” as my friend Patty says), but when I eat a piece, aside from its preposterous, heart-stopping deliciousness, I taste all of that: all those years and all those migrations that brought me to that museum in Munich, to that privileged place in space and time. I taste Max Beckmann lithographs, Freud case histories, Emma Goldman exhortations, the tunes of Irving Berlin and his Tin Pan Alley chums. Just behind the bacon’s bracing jolt of salt and its comforting embrace of fat and smoke, even more than its shattering crispness and tenacious, leathery pull, I taste the World.

Bomb Shelter was designed to teach us nuance and compromise; a welcome departure from the usual bombast of the
Bosses-Bad, Workers-Good, Kibbutz-Best-of-All
indoctrination of Socialist summer camp. A game of musical chairs with lethal consequences, the counselors would dress up as characters vying for salvation and we campers would make our selections for the limited places in the hypothetical bunker (in the summer of 1976, the premise still seemed entirely plausible). Each candidate was a flawed archetype: Construction Worker was young and strong and able to sire offspring, but he was also a meathead; Old Philosopher might have been the ideal choice for spiritual leader of the New World Order, but his advanced years meant that he was frail and probably shooting blanks; Young Woman, her obvious fertility notwithstanding—she was sporting an advanced pregnancy of a sofa cushion under her peasant blouse—lacked education or abilities … You get the picture.

Their presentations made, the contenders then walked around the room to address each team directly. It was like the Iowa caucuses if the Iowa caucuses had been attended solely by Jewish children with a collectivist bent from Canada. When we asked Chaya, the drama counselor who was portraying Aging Schoolteacher—very smart but old, barren, and weak—how she proposed to teach in a post-nuclear world bereft of school supplies,
she answered with a vehement, “I can fashion pencils from twigs!” This struck us all as somewhat desperate. One should want to escape the fiery apocalypse, certainly, but one shouldn’t be seen as actively
campaigning
for it. That was just vulgar.

Young Woman approached and I, elected team spokesman, voiced our concern that she seemed too tiny for safe childbirth in the hospital-free moonscape of the future. It’s such an odd thing for us to have focused on, since we were all similarly small-boned. Moreover, it seems unsporting that we should suddenly hold Young Woman to the physical standards of genuine adulthood, given the pretend nature of the exercise. It was like doing an ultrasound of her “belly” and being troubled that her fetus appeared to be made of foam, or asking Old Philosopher how he planned to stay geriatric once he ran out of baby powder for his hair. How did a bunch of kids even know about pelvic width or childbearing hips, anyway?

Young Woman’s face got suddenly sad. She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned her face into mine. I thought she was going to kiss me but her lips bypassed my cheek until I felt her mouth, hot against my ear. “Don’t tell anyone,” she whispered. “But I had an abortion last winter.”

An abortion! Can you even imagine the lubricious thrill of being the recipient of such a disclosure? I am here to tell you that you cannot because its pleasures were unquantifiable.
If she had an abortion, then that meant … she wasn’t a virgin!
I couldn’t choose a favorite posy from this bouquet of penny dreadfuls, it was almost too much. And still, all I really wanted to do was to put my own hands on Young Woman’s shoulders and look her in the face and snap her back to the reality of this artifice, back to this game. “Hey,” I would say to her, “I am
eleven!
”

That Young Woman should tell me her secret was momentous, to be sure, but only in degree, not kind. This was an absolute
jewel of adolescent
Go Ask Alice
reality; far and away the juiciest thing I’d ever been told up to that point (it was also just about the last time that I would characterize someone else’s secret as “juicy.” The word would eventually be stricken from my lexicon, about which more later), but by that age, I was already long established as the person to whom people poured out their hearts. I cannot remember a time when they didn’t. As faggy, loud, skittish, neurotic, caustic, and polymorphously, fun-ruiningly phobic as I was (and boy, was I ever), the most striking thing about me was my size. I was the very opposite of a threat. If others had reservations about trusting me, they seemed to dissipate as quickly as that fleeting moment where one hesitates before undressing in front of the dog. I was there, but not really. In Gypsy folklore, when one has a secret that can no longer be borne in silence one digs a hole in the ground and speaks those terrible truths into it. I was that hole. But a hole with a difference. A hole who could arrange his features and posture into an expression that was simultaneously neutral and curious, but not morbidly so. A hole who knew enough, once confided in, not to be a malicious blabbermouth.

I don’t know when I learned to do this, but I do know how. Psychiatry is the family profession. A certain kind of active listening and an understanding of the importance of confidentiality is just part of the fabric of many shrink households, just as Chinese immigrant homes might speak Chinese. It was understood that secrets exist for reasons. Reasons we sometimes would never know, but that still had to be honored, nonetheless. In some unspoken way, I had hung out my shingle from an early age and made it known that I was open for business. And I’ve been relatively lucky in the secrets that have been sent my way. Not because they are so juicy (again that awful word; I’ll get to it, I swear) but because they are so relatively tame, in the larger
scheme of things. I have never been told any tales of serious financial malfeasance. (No surprise there. I can imagine it would hardly be worth dealing with what would surely be idiotic but inevitable interruptions of “Wait, is ‘net’ the bigger number, or is that ‘gross’?”) No one has tearfully confessed to me an indiscretion involving, say, a blinding fugue state of racial hatred, a machete, and the innocent Tutsi children next door. There are perpetrators and victims aplenty in my closely guarded blotter, but no actual crimes committed, at least not in New York State. Most of what I hear about is infidelity. A lot of infidelity. So much infidelity it’s a wonder anyone manages to stay together.

But together we are, enmeshed in an ever-more refracting web. As my friend Rebecca says, “We’re all connected by paychecks and body fluids.” My childhood dream—that I would move to New York and have a creative life filled with many interesting friends who had terrible, terrible problems—came true. New York is for me, at this point, almost shtetl-like in its overlap. I sat at a dinner with a friend and her parents as it slowly dawned upon me that the patriarch was none other than the man who had been habitually sleeping with (and slowly breaking the heart of) a man I knew who had a thing for older married guys who liked to wrestle. Another time, I mentioned to someone that some other friends I knew had a similar artwork in their apartment only to realize that
this
copy had been a gift—a token of philandery—from one of them. On one of my birthdays, with no plans of my own, I hung up from a phone call with a friend I was comforting in order to answer my buzzer, to find the straying, soon-to-be-ex-husband weeping, coming up my stairs to give me the same news. Still another weeping husband—I had hopped on the train to the Upper West Side from Brooklyn one Sunday morning because it had sounded on the phone like he might kill himself—forgot about me and left me in the bedroom
while he called his wife, traveling on business, from the living room to confess all. He found me asleep on their bed four hours later. That was fun.

I’ve only ever gotten in trouble once, and then for a relatively minor infraction. I was silent about a friend’s impending divorce, and another friend was angry with me for not having shared the information. I suppose it would have cost me nothing to have told all I knew, but if you fancy yourself a practitioner of discretion, you might as well try being discreet, no? Moreover, when I was called to be given the news—news I already knew, news I had chosen not to share, news about someone’s very real pain—my friend’s voice was almost musical, swooping with the italics of schadenfreude. “Want to hear something
juicy?
”