The Instructions (20 page)

“the harlot who stands by the crossroads,” and was told by the people of Timneh that there was no such harlot. He went back to Judah and gave him the news. Judah decided it better to let the matter drop and let the harlot keep the collateral he’d given her, because the whole thing could become embarrassing—he didn’t want be known as a guy who had consorted with a harlot.

A few months later, news came that Tamar was pregnant, and Judah said she had to die for committing harlotry. He went into Timneh to burn her to death in public, and just before she was about to be burned, she whipped out the signet, the wrap, and the staff, and explained that she was pregnant by the man who’d given her the 185

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collateral, and asked that the man be identified. Judah understood that it was he who had made her pregnant, and he admitted it publicly, there on the spot, but he never consorted with Tamar again. Six months later, twins were born, Perez and Zerah.

That the messiah will be a direct descendent of King David—a direct descendent of Judah through Perez—is not up for debate; exactly how much of that information Tamar was aware of, however… is.

STORY OF STORIES

To strap down a chicken and pluck it while it’s living isn’t kosher, but that’s the only path to total baldness. The wispy little hairs in the feather-holes of kosher-slaughtered poultry remind my mom of eyelashes, which make her think of eyelids, and eyelids seem too thin to her to do their job.

When she was five, she saw a kosher chicken on my grandmother’s chopping block and ran to her room with her hands on her eyes.

This was the last day of the Six-Day War, and her dad was slaying enemies in the Golan. When he got home the next morning, my mom still hadn’t taken her hands down, and when he came into her bedroom, she would not hug him until he agreed to blindfold her.

He used his belt and she wore it on her face all day.

By dinner it was no longer cute, and my grandfather tossed falafels at her head. She said, “Stop it,” and he said, “Who are you speaking to, Tamar? What would you like that person to stop?”

She said, “Aba, stop throwing food at me,” and he said, “Take off the idiot blindfold,” and she said, “I need to protect my eyes.” He 186

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tossed more falafel at her head. “You need to protect your head,” he told her. She didn’t say anything to that, and he tossed falafel until there was no more falafel and he started tossing kibbeh.

The kibbeh was heavier, and it was not as funny as the falafel, but my mother was willful, and kibbeh—no matter how much heavier or less funny than falafel; no matter how hard anyone tossed it at her head—would not convince her to remove the belt from her eyes, and my grandmother knew that, and my grandmother yelled at my grandfather, and my mom started crying, and eye-shaped tearstains seaped through the fibers of my grandfather’s canvas belt.

“Your blindness is bad for us,” my grandfather told my mom.

“Hairy chicken is bad!” she shouted. “So stay away from hairy chicken,”

he said. “Buy me goggles,” she said. He said, “Goggles will make you look crazy. Are you crazy? Maybe you’re crazy, blindfolded and screaming about chicken.” My mother swiped fried grains from her hair and her forehead. My grandfather said, “You can’t protect yourself without sight.” “I can’t protect myself at all,” said my mother.

And my grandfather made her an offer: “If you stop your craziness,”

he said, “I will teach you how to kill with that belt.”

My mother consented, and was able to avoid raw kosher chicken until she was twenty-seven. My grandmother warned her away whenever chicken was on the chopping block, and my grandfather combat-trained her so well that when she left home for the IDF his special forces team made sure that none of her two years of compul-sory service were wasted off-mission, which meant no boot-camp, and so no kitchen-duty.

After she finished serving in Lebanon, she came to Chicago for school and gave up religion til I was born. All the chicken she 187

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cooked during college was traif, and all the chicken she cooked during graduate school was traif until she fell in love with my dad, who brought her to Shabbos at the house of his Lebuvitcher parents.

A couple years earlier, my dad had gone to Brooklyn to best-man the wedding of Yuval Forem. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson performed the ceremony. Traditionally, the bride and groom are the last to approach the chupa, but a lot of people believed Schneerson was the messiah, and a few still do, even though he’s dead now, so he’s who came out last. When the rebbe saw my father standing on the platform, he halted the ceremony and took him aside to whisper in his ear.

Although my paternal grandparents were close to Yuval Forem, they had caught the flu together before his wedding, and were unable to fly to New York. The day after the wedding, Yuval and his bride Rochel moved across the world, to a young West Bank settlement without phone service, so the first my grandparents heard of the Rebbe’s weird behavior toward my father was in the postscript of a letter from Yuval that I keep in my DOCUMENTS lockbox. “P.S.

The vision or dream Rebbe Schneerson had about your Yehudah must have been of the very utmost importance to merit such a taking-aside-to-whisper,” wrote Yuval, “and so I didn’t worry the delay.

Still, I would be thrilled to know what was said between them.

Yehudah left the reception before I had the chance to ask.”

Within days of his return from Brooklyn, my father, who would not tell his parents or anyone else what the rebbe had said to him, dropped out of yeshiva to attend law school, and offered no one an explanation. So by the time they met my mom, my paternal grand-188

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parents had already been worried about my father’s future for two years. That is what my grandfather told me, right before he died.

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My grandfather died three days after my grandmother, when I was six and they were sixty-five. We were never close to my grandparents, even though they lived just six blocks away, and by the second evening of my grandma’s shiva, my grandpa knew he was dying.

How I know he knew was that he began our last conversation by saying, “It is nothing short of tragic, Gurion, that this is the only important conversation I will ever get to have with you. It is tragic that the only important conversation I will ever get to have with you will be about a rift. This rift, though, was about you, always about you, the most important person in the world, at least to me—the rift was about who you would become, and I need to know that you understand that, and I know that your father won’t explain it to you properly, if at all. My son is not the explaining type, and he won’t explain how important it is to his father that you continue to become the person I see you becoming, the scholar you are miraculously turning into despite your upbringing. In becoming who you are becoming, Gurion, you heal a rift by mocking it. You prove all the worries that your grandmother and I suffered to have been unnecessary. All we ever wanted was what every nice Jewish couple wants: for their children to raise Jewish children. By the time we met your mother, we had already been worried for a couple years about the path your father was embarking on. It was not we were racists,” he said, “not that. But what she did with that Shabbos
chicken, your mother…”

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He trailed off and backtracked then, explaining how they’d worried that by the time I’d be born, my dad, “who had not only traded, for that of Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo, the work of Rashi and Rambam the local rabbis all swore he was destined to elaborate, but had lately begun to obsessively clip the stragglers in his beard and—just a few days earlier—been witnessed leaning over the counter in a diner on Lawrence by our neighbor Zippy Kaplan who, yes, it’s true, she had glaucoma, Zippy, yet nonetheless she swore that the substance in the glass Yehuda sipped from looked milky beside his hamburger,” would become entirely secular, which would lead to secular children, and likely very few of them.

That my mother’s lost-tribesmanship might mean she wasn’t an Israelite, or that being dark-skinned would make her marriage to my father uncomfortable for certain Yeckies at shul,
never crossed my grandparents’ minds. The worry was that there would be no shul at all. My grandparents worried that, because my father was in love with a woman who wasn’t observant, let alone Lebuvitcher, he would leave behind his entire religion, just as he had left behind his career as a scholar. They were a little bit right and a little bit wrong, my grandparents.

My father was moving away from religion, and would continue to do so, but it had almost nothing to do with my mother. He told me himself that he’d made the decision to leave yeshiva even before Yuval’s wedding, that he’d begun longing to affect the world in a more direct way than he believed he was able to as a Torah scholar (a half-truth), and that that was why, a full six months before going to Brooklyn, he had secretly applied to law school. For a long time, that was all he told me. I learned the rest on my eighth Passover, 190

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mostly because Yuval Forem had too much wine.

Yuval’s parents’ house was a block west of ours, on California, and even though, like most others in the neighborhood, the elder Forems avoided us, Yuval—having brought his wife and six children from Israel for the holiday—wielded his authority and made sure we were invited. He and my father had been friends since grammar school, and roommates at yeshiva, so if Yuval hadn’t moved away, or if we had moved to Israel, we’d have done Passover with his family every year. That was how he started.

“Every year, Yehudah!” he continued. Yuval’s neck was so thick it could have been shoulders. His voice boomed through the mouth-hole in his wide, spongey beard, and the frayed lapels of his black robe-jacket seemed to ripple, the wales of cordurory bending and swelling. “Every year, your Gurion and my daughters would search out the afikomen together,” he said. “Every day they would play together. We’d spend Shabbos
together, build the suka together, have barbecues. You are a brother to me, and I love you and have missed you. And you, Tamar—you bring this brother of mine such joy. He used to be so spooky! With the studying… all the books…

you can’t possibly know how
weird
he was. He knew
everything
. He’d study and smoke and study and smoke, and only after ten o’clock at night would he ever relax a little…We’d go for a walk, usually for a soda over at…what was this place, Yehudah, this late-night deli where we’d go for the sodas? What was it called?”

My father, cross-hatching a half-eaten new-potato with his fork, said, “Asner’s.”

“Asner’s!” said Yuval. “Asner’s exactly! Every night, nearly—

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it’s ten, ten-thirty, your husband says to me, ‘Yuvy, I’m going blind here! Want a walk?’ and of course I would agree, and Asner’s we’d go to, and sometimes, if feeling particularly charitable, we’d invite Rolly Bar-Sheshet, and sometimes, if Rolly was feeling particularly less like a snivelling little shmendrick than usual, he’d come along with us—what ever happened to Rolly?”

My father made his lips fat and waved away the question with all his fingers.

I knew what happened to Rolly, though. Rolly Bar-Sheshet was the cantor at the Fairfield Street Synagogue, which is where I go because my parents won’t attend shul and it’s close enough to our house that I can walk there by myself. Rolly trilled a lot during the mourner’s Kadish, and I did not like it so much, but his son Amit was nice.

Still, I didn’t want Yuval to stop telling stories, so I stayed quiet.

“Rolly-olly, Rolly-polly,” said Yuval. “What I was saying is that after Asner’s, we’d walk some more, usually through the cem-etery, drinking our sodas, talking about everything boys will talk about. We’d talk about you, Tamar, what your name would be and what Yehudah hoped you’d be like when he met you, and you, too, Gurion—he knew his firstborn would be a son. Sometimes the time would slip away, and it would be midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning, and you know what we’d do then? If it was midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning?”

“Litberg’s!” shouted his eldest daughter. She’d heard it before.

“Litberg’s, my Sara! It’s true,” said Yuval. “We’d walk up Devon to Litberg’s bagel factory. All night long they were making bagels inside, taking them from ovens, dunking dough in vats. We’d wait near the backdoor, and this man—Morris Nussberg was his name, 192

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you see what I can remember?—Morris Nussberg would eventually come outside for a cigarette, a cardboard boat on his head to guard against the falling-out of hairs, and we’d offer him a light, and we’d chat a little about this or that, about bagels, making them, the necessity of the boiling process and so on. He’d tell us, ‘Buy stock in garlic. It’s the new poppyseed,’ or ‘Litberg’s nagging again about the egg bagels are too orange for the goyim—says to lower the yolk content or Lenders will bury us by ’87.’ Soon enough, this Morris Nussberg finishes smoking, takes his leave, and returns with what? The freshest bagels ever. For Yehuda and I. The freshest. Ever.

Delicious! And there we’d be, under the moonlight, thinking about you, and you, and you and you and you,” Yuval said, gesturing with two hands at all the children around the table, knocking over an empty glass, shrugging at it, leaving it, “and you and you. Except
you
, as I recall, were going to be called Dovid,” he said to me. Then, to my father: “Whatever happened to calling him Dovid?”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” said my father.

“This has always been your husband’s second-favorite answer,”

Yuval said to my mom, “tied with ‘It’s not something I’d like to talk about, Yuvy,’ both of which, as you probably know, run all too distant behind the number-one favorite answer: the half-bored/