TREYF (20 page)

Hoarse, I asked the cheese man for taleggio, my favorite soft, creamy northern Italian washed-rind cheese that emits such a stink that it could peel wallpaper; he shook his head no. An older, gray-haired lady wearing a jet-black cardigan, jet-black wool skirt, and suntan panty hose eyed me up and down with a grimace, like I'd just flown in from Mars.

“Don't go anywhere,” the cheese man ordered. “Just wait a minute.”

He disappeared into the back of the store and a few minutes later returned with a demitasse cup, which he passed to me over a massive wheel of provolone sitting on the counter.

“Drink it all at once—you'll feel better. Come back tomorrow. I close at six.”

A scrim had been lifted, and the sepia world I was living in was suddenly brilliant with color. Every day, I did my shopping on Avenue U, and every day, the little old Italian ladies in black grilled me about what I was making and how I was making it. Sometimes they nodded in approval and asked me where I lived, and whether I was single, because they had a nice grandson. Often, they corrected me. When I said I couldn't bake anything because the oven might explode, they shook fingers in my face and said,
“You don't need an oven.” I imagined Gaga, her mouth pulled into a thin line of anger and practicality.

At the pork store and the greengrocer, I bought anything I could cook on top of the stove: there were thick coils of fennel and garlic sausage that I simmered with red wine, grapes, and thyme, and then seared in a hot skillet; fava beans that I boiled and shelled and mashed into a topping for the semolina bread that I toasted in my grandmother's oil-slicked cast-iron frying pan, and then rubbed with garlic; I wilted the bitter puntarelle in a pot of salted boiling water, and tossed it with orecchiette cooked in the vegetable water, and folded giant spoonfuls of thick, fatty sheep's milk ricotta into the warm pasta. In the coming eighteen months, I left my cookware packed in boxes in the living room and raided my grandmother's dusty cupboards: her ancient aluminum pots clattered on the stovetop, their bottoms rounded and dimpled with age. I crushed garlic with my great-grandmother's Koch Messer, which I could barely lift; I steamed what needed steaming in a white enameled colander set over a small pot of boiling water; I wine-braised butterflied pigeon in my grandmother's old Teflon matzo brei fry pan covered with a warped cookie sheet; I dredged branzino in seasoned egg and flour and slid it into a hot, butter-coated oval metal casserole from the 1930s that had baked decades of kugels; I drank cheap red wine out of the tiny four-ounce milk glasses of my childhood Sunday lunches; I drizzled warm quartered figs with the dregs of my grandfather's Slivovitz that I found sitting in the depths of the hall closet, buried behind torn Klein's of Fourteenth Street shopping bags bursting with the fading letters
that my father had written to his parents from the Pacific during World War II when he was nineteen.

I cooked for myself every night and had my dinners alone at the kitchen table, surrounded by the ghosts of the people who had fed me brains and borscht, and who said,
You'll eat it,
even as my young throat tightened and the food of the past made me ill. Every night for eighteen months, I ate my dinner while sifting through piles of dog-eared photographs of long-forgotten cousins in Europe, of my acne-pocked teenage father who longed for his own father's affection, of my grandparents on the beach in Coney Island in 1917 right after they were married, of my great-grandmother in Novyy Yarchev right before the Nazis came.

602 was where I went to steady myself, to relearn who I was and exactly what I had become. When I moved out—when it was time to get back to my life—I took nothing with me: not the Koch Messer or the Slivovitz, the time-warped Bruegel or the juice glasses. I left with my cats and my clothes and my cookbooks—still sealed in their moving boxes from the day I arrived—and tucked the stash of my father's wartime letters into my knapsack. On my way out, I stopped into the kitchen and picked up my grandmother's old Tzedakah box, which I had been using as a paperweight against the breezes coming in off Coney Island; beneath it was the sheaf of wrinkled, handwritten kitchen notes that I'd scrawled, some on the backs of envelopes, while standing in the stores on Avenue U with the stern-faced Italian ladies. I stuffed the notes into my bag and left the Tzedakah box where I'd found it when I moved in, like a sentinel.

The old refrigerator heaved a death rattle when I reached behind the damp, cool coils and pulled the plug out of the wall.

I turned the lights off, stepped out into the hallway, and closed the door behind me; I reached up and touched the mezuzah, attached by my grandfather sixty years earlier, and said goodbye.

U
ntil he moved out, and for all the years of my childhood, my father kept his copy of
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
on the top shelf of the Danish modern étagère in our living room in The Marseilles, sandwiched between
Portnoy's Complaint
and an ebony bust of the Buddha. They sat there until I was fifteen, gathering dust, when my father left and took his books with him.

For years, my father would point up at them and I'd stare at the shelf with benign curiosity, and all he would say was “They're not for you.” It was a game we played, like cat and mouse; we both knew the rules, which we never spoke.

“What's in them?” I would answer, poking at him like a bear. All of his other stuff was within my reach: the Cheever, the Updike, the Vidal, the Mailer, the
Playboy
s, the
Reader's Digest
abridged editions.

“Never mind,” he'd say.

“But why can't I see them?” I'd ask.

“Forbidden,” he'd say.

“But why?” I'd whine.

“If I wanted you to reach them, they wouldn't be up there, would they?” he'd say.

I'd stand in the living room, my head tilted back far as though I was having a tooth drilled, and wonder why, exactly, they were off-limits.

When I was very young, the fact of the books didn't matter—I couldn't have read them anyway, so their being dangled in front of me like Tantalus's grapes was gratuitous and maybe a tiny bit cruel: tell a child that they can't have something—a snack, a toy, a book—and they are instantly drawn to it. By the time I was in grade school, I had heard enough dinner party stories about the Nazis and whole families hidden in attics being taken out and shot in the streets to believe that, as a Jewish girl, I could likely expect the same fate; I assumed that violence would be a part of my life simply because of who I was. I wouldn't have read the Third Reich book even if I had been able to reach it. I wouldn't have needed to; I knew the story by heart.

By the time I got to middle school—fending off Tor Hoffmann's humping and Buck's pawing at me in the front seat of his '62 Falcon and Lisa Epstein passing around her diaphragm on the school bus—I would have been repulsed by Portnoy, who fucked the family dinner two hours before everyone sat down to the table to eat it, but I wouldn't have been shocked.

I never got near my father's illicit reading material; he kept it away from me because of its atrocity on the one hand and its
masturbatory gravitas on the other. But he also wanted me to know it was there, and a part of life. But I didn't need to read them: I knew about Nazis from the stories he told me, and from Judith Garbfeld, who had killed her first soldier when she was seven. And I knew about the underside of sex—its shame, its perversion, its power to manipulate and control and terrify—because Buck, on our quiet Friday afternoon hikes while Gaga was home slicing the potatoes for our Shabbos supper—had shown it to me.

Still, I wanted to know what was in the books I couldn't reach not because I was interested in their contents. I wanted to know about them because I wanted to hear the words directly from my father, without suggestion or innuendo; I wanted to hear him tell me exactly what gives birth to brutality, and exactly where shame comes from. And I wanted to understand how perpetrators of cruelty live with themselves as the world spins around them. I wanted to know what he believed stopped them, who we had to talk to or pray to.

•   •   •

M
y father foisted his other favorite books on me when I was a child; there was Carl Sandburg's three-volume
Abraham Lincoln
when I was eight, John Updike's
Rabbit, Run
when I was ten, and his beloved Lion Feuchtwanger's Weimar-era novel,
Jew Süss
, when I was eleven. He marched into my bedroom carrying whatever it was that he wanted to share with me that week, and he'd leave it on my dresser or my bed, sometimes with a note written in the same tiny, tense script that had appeared in his letters home from the Navy. It said:

Read it and then we'll talk about it. Dad

“So what did you think?” he asked me one night after dinner, pointing to the Feuchtwanger sitting on my little white, pink-flowered children's desk. I'd mindlessly buried the book underneath a pile of David Cassidy fan magazines, hoping my father would somehow forget that he'd given it to me, which he did not.

“I mean, you read it, didn't you?”

“I'm not done with it yet,” I lied, my hands stuffed deep into the pockets of my Wranglers.

“So what part are you up to, exactly?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest. He bent his head down and glared at me over the top of his aviators, which was what he did when he wanted to extract an admission of guilt.

“I don't know,” I muttered.

“Ssssss,” he breathed through his teeth like a steam engine. He shook his head in disappointment, pulled the book out from beneath the magazines, and walked out of my room carrying it tucked underneath his arm.

He didn't speak to me for a week. At first I thought it was my imagination, and when he passed me in the hallway and I said,
Good morning, Dad,
and he turned his head away from me and kept going, I realized it wasn't.

“Why aren't you talking to me?” I asked him over dinner that night. There was plain broiled salmon steak, flaccid canned asparagus; no rice, no potatoes, no bread. My father drank his Dewar's, my mother her Soave, and I, Hawaiian Punch out of a
tiki mug that Gaga sent away for by mailing in ten Hawaiian Punch can labels.

No response; I asked again.

Our little black-and-white television blared
The Price Is Right
from where it sat at the end of the table next to my mother, who was picking at her food.

“You
know
why,” he answered, staring at the set. He sighed heavily, breathing hard with exasperation.

“I don't know why,” I said.

“I'm sure you'll figure it out,” he said, standing up and dumping his plate and glass in the sink. He slipped the leather collar onto our dog and walked out of the apartment, letting the door slam behind him.

“He's not talking to me?” I asked my mother.

She looked up from her plate.

“He'll get over it,” she said, turning back to the television.

Over dinner, the situation had become clear: his disappointment became my abandonment, ignited by a minor transgression. It felt rational in my house, and a normal response to benign disobedience: the hoary threat of desertion for reasons that no one could identify was wielded like a scimitar.

Decades later, after he died, I found a long-overdue library book among my father's things, checked out years earlier with the obvious intention of never returning it.
Jew Süss
by Lion Feuchtwanger, the book that he so desperately wanted me to read when I was a child, was sitting in his office closet in the Long Island condo he shared with his longtime girlfriend, hidden on a
shelf beneath his royal blue velvet tallis bag. The story of an eighteenth-century wealthy Jewish businessman-turned-political advisor to the Duke of Wurttemberg, Süss is, in fact, the illegitimate son of a Gentile nobleman. Infamously adapted for the screen in 1940 by the Nazi propagandist machine,
Jew Süss
is a tale of deception and desire and what happens when the human ego runs amok; Süss, found guilty of treason, fraud, lecherous behavior, and deceit, becomes the victim of an angry, anti-Semitic lynch mob and is sentenced to death by hanging. He chooses not to save himself by revealing his noble Gentile origins and dies while reciting the Shema—
Hear oh Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One
—the most essential prayer in Judaism and the one I fell asleep whispering to myself every night after services at Camp Towanda, as I lay in my little metal cot in rural Pennsylvania, staring at the ceiling joists above me.

Süss had been a master manipulator, a schemer who sold his soul for the sake of power; he broke every commandment, every canon, every tenet, every law handed down to him from Hashem, Blessed Be He, but when it came time for him to meet his maker, the words that dripped from his lips were the most profound and important in the Talmud. Reciting the Shema is part of what makes even the most secular, rule-breaking Jew a Jew, who tethers the fiber of his very being, his
self
, his heart, to the matriarchs and the patriarchs, to five thousand years of Jewish history and halachic law. It makes him who and what he is. In Süss—Süss the fallen; Süss the condemned; Süss the martyred; Süss the secretly, the privately devout—my father saw himself.

My father believed that I would put down my
From the
Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
and my
Trumpet of the Swan
,
Tiger Beat
magazines, and my
Wrinkle in Time
; he imagined, somehow, that I would read and fathom this story of deception, of anti-Semitism, of false appearances and desire. He wanted me to believe what he believed: that redemption waited at the end of every Jewish life—even one that had gone completely off the rails.

•   •   •

I
never actually saw my father read his books—not the forbidden ones on the top shelf in the living room, not the
Reader's Digest
abridged editions on the lower shelves, and not even his beloved Feuchtwanger. He was a newspaper man—the
New York Times
and only the
New York Times
—with, he liked to say, “ink under his fingernails.” He picked up the paper every morning before seven and folded it into thirds; we would sit down at the breakfast counter together, to our soft-boiled eggs and diet white bread and rashers of fatty Oscar Mayer bacon while my mother was putting on her makeup, and he would immediately turn to the obituaries.

“I read them first,” he would say, “to make sure I'm still alive.”

If someone of interest showed up—a famous musician whose work he loved, one of his professors from City College, a shipmate from the Navy, a high school classmate, a colleague from his early days in advertising, a distant publisher cousin who'd been tossed out of the family for some long-forgotten infraction that nobody alive could remember—he clipped them out and stuck them in a file labeled DEAD. Some of the obituaries he
deemed important enough to individually seal in plastic ziplock sandwich bags. These were the longer ones—the ones that gave context to their subject's lives. If my father knew them personally, and he often did, he'd read the obituary aloud and then provide his own clarifying commentary:

“Morris Pushkin, dead.” (No baggie.) “Garment center. Was in my high school air raid group. Bloodied me in the locker room after I tripped him during gym class. A putz who almost got his entire platoon killed in France. Enlisted a putz and came back a putz, with a bullet in his ass and a Purple Heart.”

“Lloyd Shearer, dead.” (Baggie.) “Second cousin. Newspaperman. Changed his name, became an Episcopalian. No idea why. Hated the family and moved to Beverly Hills. Refused a visit from me. Died a schmuck. Rich and famous; still a schmuck.”

“Victor J. Schmittz, dead.” (No baggie.) “Roommate, pre-flight school, Del Monte, California. Went back in, Korea. Surgeon. Married three times.”

My father's dead file, with its ziplocked VIPs who numbered upwards of fifty by the time he moved out, lived in the top drawer of his desk, where, years earlier, I had unearthed Grandpa Philip's gold-embossed Mass card signed by Sister Redempta. My father was completely obsessed with the very end of life. He was gripped by the possibility of redemption itself, like his beloved Süss, and the act of dying with the promise of sanctity and salvation on one's lips.