The Wandering Jew

•

I often wonder whether the Jewish mother really exists or is simply a creation in the mid of certain writers. For instance, there was no Mama Portnoy in my life. Instead I was born into a nest of patriarchs--a dark and broody place where it is, however, true that the women in it were frustrated and angry like my mother, permanent infants like her mother or in the single instance of my father's mother, worked themselves to death in ghetto rooms on the lower East Side.

Sometimes on Fridays in the midst of the Sabbath bustle I might hear the jingle of camel bells, a dainty mincing of their hooves or smell the heat of the sun on white, homemade linen drying on desert sand--for that was how deep the biblical presence went. In fact once when I was very young three of the grandfathers were alive at the same time.

First there was the great-grandfather on the maternal side--a little man, rosy-cheeked and senile like trolls who guard the bridge in Grimm's. He was over ninety years old then and lived with his widowed younger daughter. When we visited them it always seemed to be feeding time. There he would be, nodding, smiling, his head revolving, tucked up in a napkin around his neck while we stood back waving our fingers at him. And he, precocious baby, wagged back, food dribbling down his chin. It was hard to believe that in his prime, blessed with the same brilliant blue eyes that were now filled with a bottomless emptiness, he was the terror of the family. Photographs show him to be quite small beside his capaciously bosomed wife, her tall, orthodox wig swelling magnanimous proportions, while he bristled with a military moustache which was now yellow and sparse and had bits of his lunch sticking to it. As I remember her, his daughter, my tiny great-aunt was girlish, even infantile. All five daughters inherited genes that kept them looking young their whole life--having the father's clear skin, blue eyes that never faded and later the bird-like shaking head. But it was as though they had to give something up in return for this physical advantage--for they were all quite childish, settling down into a style of belligerent adolescence they never lost--even in advanced age. Like Kentucky mountain feuds, warfare blazed out regularly and there was always one set of my grandmother's sisters who were not talking to the others, even down to the third generation. I had cousins I was forbidden to speak to, and often crossed the street in order to avoid an unfortunate encounter. Today when we meet at a funeral or wedding we are still uncomfortable, like Capulets and Montagues running into each other at some unavoidable social occasion. But this old man, tyrant and father to a war-like brood, died early in my life, fading away like his portrait and the mystery of his power.

The next grandfather in the pantheon was my mother's father, the one who lived in the apartment above us--and for me the living God existed right here on earth in the rich presence of this man with his life-giving power of love--the turning of light to and from each one of us. Although eventually he became wealthy--making a legendary trip from push cart to real-estate baron, I imagine him first on a brewer's wagon, newly arrived from Galicia, sitting high on the buckboard with his blonde hair and blue eyes (a gift no doubt out of some Polish count whose blood strayed into the family many decades ago) ready to sweep my sixteen year-old grandmother who was dark and plump as a ripe peach into the seat beside him. Alas, it was also true that the twenty-three year-old brewer's lad was not only my grandmother's suitor but her uncle, her mother's brother, as well. This odd incestuousness, for I never learned what laws allowed it, burdened my grandparents' heirs with riddles and other hereditary weaknesses. Just as the Spanish royal family was marked by blood disease, so we were cursed with allergies. My mother and her brother had asthma and hay fever and I, remembering my mother as she was carried back to her room feet first, after swooning on the golf course of some resort, felt obliged to follow in those footsteps. To this day, I never see a country field in late spring without breaking into a cold sweat, gasping with every breath I take, my sister cannot put her hands in dishwater and my uncle had to take long sea voyages when he was a boy.

Nevertheless, when this grandfather died at the unexpectedly young age of sixty-four after a long battle with heart disease that today would be cured by a coronary by-pass or pacemaker--I could not cry--could not squeeze out even a single false tear while the funeral parlor shuddered with my sister's sobs and my grandmother's loud demands to be allowed into the coffin with her husband. My mother's face was swollen and red-eyed, my father's waxen with grief. Only I, a heartless, sixteen year-old girl was dry-eyed and, if the terrible truth were known, was glad that this grandfather had finally gone to his lawful home in the sky. Sharing life with the King of Kings had become too much of a strain--especially since his illness. Think of all the accoutrements of the sick room--the starched, forbidding nurses (as if there weren't enough prima donnas vying for his attention already); think of the smell and the instruments of death and most of all consider the great unblinking attention he received. It was an ongoing theatrical event that made all the concerns of my own life seem petty and meaningless just at the time I was filled with the tremendous self-concern of the adolescent. Furthermore, even before his sickness it had seemed to me he was taking up too much room. All that warm benevolence pouring out of this portly, balding man who, even though he was short, filled a room with his presence. Perhaps it was the way he carried his rich man's belly before him like a galleon, or the way light struck fire off his pince-nez or even the fury of his terrible temper. Yet, I told myself, there was something disgusting about this display of glamour. It was like too much chicken soup spilling over the pot as in the fairy tale--warm, golden--covering everything. But, as you might have guessed, none of the above was the real truth, only that I had long believed the beam of his attention was turned away from me--that it lit my sister's path instead--but that's another story and this one belongs to my father's father, Elias, the one mother called "the wandering Jew"--the one who was now the only grandfather.

Like the great-grandfather, the patriarch, Elias survived until his late nineties except that he died with all his faculties intact. Legends of the passions of the other grandfathers faded in the face of this man's monumental rages and his sons and daughters shiver still with memories of the time chicken soup was flung flowing and swirling across snowy Sabbath linen simply because the broth had too much salt, or the way he beat the older boys for not bringing home all the money they earned selling papers or delivering for the tailor. Because he once was a cutter in a sweat shop, images of him working late at night in a dark room lit up my collection of family history handed down by aunts and uncles. My father who was most often, during his father's later years, his sole support, resented the old man so much that, if he could help it, he never spoke of him. The major cause of my father's indignation was my grandmother's death--for his mother died before she was sixty... "...all those stairs and all those children," my father would groan, blaming both the lower East Side and the birth of twelve children--four still-born--on the old man.

So this grandfather's rare visits to our house took place within an atmosphere of such nervous anxiety that even if no one had told me about his temperament, I would have guessed. For one thing, it was as though we were about to receive Elijah himself. The aspect of Elias that validated this fantasy was that he spoke no English and that just before his arrival we would somehow inevitably have been indulging in an all-American breakfast of bacon and eggs. In fact, that very activity was a sort of spell guaranteed to conjure him up. For this sudden arrival was heralded only by a brief ominous phone call from a brother or sister. "...Papa's here..." Suddenly, windows were flung open and tea towels flapped and ammonia poured to let out the forbidden smell of pork. Then there he was--another short man in the patriarchal collection, ram-rod straight and stubborn, with a neat Jewish version of the Van Dyke, red-veined eyes that teared and hands that shook. Kissing him was another ordeal--like embracing a large piece of brillo. Everything about him was coarse and wiry: beard and moustache, a very stiff and scratchy suit and, in addition, the smell of something dry and aging as though he had been left in the closet with mothballs in his pocket for too long. Still, except for the prickliness, nothing about him resembled the angry Moses dashing the tablets down Mt. Sinai--just the rheumy sentimentality of the very old as he called us by our names in Yiddish and devoured us with his eyes.

After a few moments, almost everyone would disappear. My mother to a bridge table at the club where she played tournament bridge as often as she could, my sister to the sidewalk outside where she practiced prodigious athletic feats, and I to my bedroom presumably to read but, instead, as soon as I dared would sneak out to spy and stare at the two men who were much too concerned with the unbridgeable gap between them to notice me. And as I heard the rise and fall of their voices, felt the tension in the room, saw the sharpening glances of eyes that were so alike, small, brown, and red-rimmed, I heard and saw the whole history of my father's nervous breakdowns, his paranoia--the compulsive character that caused him to constantly rearrange the underwear in his bureau drawer and count his sox.

My first memory of this grandfather was of the farm in Huntington, Long Island, where I visited him with my father when I was six years old. It was my first train ride and I still remember the Toonerville aspect of the Long Island Railroad as it was then. There were the two passenger cars, an unsteady track, the red caboose and the way the green plush seats smelled of coal dust and cigar smoke. It was wonderful to be alone with my father away from the excitements and rivalries of the larger family and all this was enhanced by the idea of traveling into what was then the depths of the rural countryside. Nor was I disappointed in the farm. To me it was like a picture out of Mother Goose. There were the chickens smelling and squawking and the little white farm house and later my uncle Manny killed one of the chickens--chopping its head off on a bloody stump and still it ran around even without its head, and because I was unaware this was a cliché I was awed by country life and the magic skill of Uncle Manny. Best of all, there were the two of them, my grandfather and a little old lady like a doll made from nuts or a withered apple standing under the grape arbor, and the grandfather beaming and pouring out the wine that he had made himself with his own grapes, which led to many family jokes about the Passover wine smelling like feet. Just as I did not know about the headless chicken, so I didn't know this was a counterfeit scene, fraudulent as a stage play. Within the year, my uncle had disappeared, deserting his wife and son, and now my father had to add them to his list of dependents even though he had lost all his own money in the crash two years before and was resentfully living on the benevolence of my mother's father, the real estate baron, who had hedged his bets and carried no mortgages and was sitting pretty in the midst of the debacle. As for the farm, it was gone as if it had never existed and the next time I saw the grandfather called the Wandering Jew he had begun his wanderings and that particular little old lady had disappeared as surely as if she had been sent from central casting.

Although far from senile, he had developed a febrile restlessness and was no longer able to stay put. He lived, but not for long, at various rooming houses in Brighton Beach, Edgemere, the Catskills and Lakewood, New Jersey, run by elderly Jewish widows who would swear on a stack of Old Testaments that they were Kosher to a degree not known since Miriam, the sister of Moses.

And again, in my head, where as long as I live and am in full mind an indestructible photograph album is kept, I see him down the next few years on the arm of some little old lady with wizened cheeks and a babushka. They all resembled my grandmother, his dead spouse, in their clean wifeliness and grim determination to please him. But it was no use. They all turned out to be wanting in some major way mostly having to do with the laws of the Kashruth.

This is the way it would happen. We would take the long drive to Ellenville in the Catskills or to Lakewood, New Jersey. The two men sitting stiffly in the front seat, while I was in the back seat with my mother and sister. I would be hunched over, hugging my stomach, nauseous with guilt over undone homework, for I was a poor student with the kind of learning difficulties that now would earn me a guidance counselor, a tutor and a fancy excusing name for the condition. Still, if I wasn't carsick from tension by then, I would revel in the long ride and the further away from home we got, the less worried I became.

When we got to our destination we would get out of the car along with the old man and his suitcase, his bible, his stole, prayer shawl and the purple velvet bag which he had received at his Bar Mitzvah filled with his Tvillum and the "sign-post to be worn upon his forehead" he donned every morning to doven in his bare feet, bending and swaying in the corner of the room thanking God he was not a woman. Then he would go into the little white house off the highway where there were trees in the backyard and again some chickens and the little old lady, beaming and smiling. And we would leave, my father breathing sighs of relief. A month would go by, several perhaps, if my father was lucky, then the phone call late at night or deep into the torpor of a Sunday afternoon and the voice of my grandfather--high, thin, querulous. Sometimes it would be an uncle or aunt. "Papa says he can't stay there anymore." There was always a long list of grievances beginning with the traitorous breaking of laws five thousand years old--a heresy that only he, the indefatigable, would discover. Sometimes "she" would be accused of mixing milk and meat dishes or margarine made out of lard would have replaced butter. There would be another trip, this time the widow hovered in the background wringing her hands and crying.

"No!" she would sputter, "No! No! No! Not a crumb after Lilly Klein cleans for the Passover! Mouse shit, maybe--or even some motzah meal. But breadcrumbs--never!" But the inquisitor had spoken and was now seated in the front seat of the car, still ram-rod straight and unforgiving. And in later years when first my father then, after I was married, my husband would come home after a day away at work, walk in the front door nostrils quivering, sniffing the air like a bloodhound and discover a sour dishcloth or a spill of milk under the refrigerator that had turned and left an unmistakable odor, I would think that what I had learned in childhood from the tireless investigations of the old man was to be prepared for the unfathomable depths of male dissatisfaction. A mythic quality goes with the last of these episodes. The setting was an orchard in spring. This time we are in Lakewood, New Jersey. The two men stand under a blooming apple tree. Blossoms fall upon their shoulders but their voices are raised in argument. There was something so absurd about the two of them yelling at each other in Yiddish in that vernal setting that I was ashamed in the face of nature. But nothing could mitigate the violence of the two voices, not the soft pink flowers or the fragrance, or the tender green grass. They were so wrought up that the cords stood out in their necks, the old man's skinny and gnarled, my father's younger but already knobby as were the veins in his forehead that seemed to throb with the rhythm of the shouts. My mother and I were sitting in the car which was parked on the side of the road. Mother was making sarcastic remarks under her breath. "It's always something--he old goat--never satisfied." And she would run through the various places he had been taken to and then rescued from in that year alone. "First there was Mrs. Klein in the Catskills, then Lakewood...," her voice rose and fell in an aggrieved lament.

And I understood that the litany was a form of exorcism--her way of supporting my father. Finally my father came back wrung-out and pallid, the muscle in his cheek working and his nostrils pinched. As we drove away we could see the old man standing angry and proud under the trees like Geronimo or some other Indian Chief who has found out for the millionth time that white man speaks with forked tongue. The drive home was silent but somehow we knew that this time my father had refused to find my grandfather a new place only to have him leave it again.

The phone rang very early the next Sunday for I was still in bed. I ran out into the hall to answer it. It was my grandfather's landlady...her heavily accented voice loud and desperate. When my father came to the phone he was so upset he didn't notice me still there--listening.

"Come and get him," she screamed, "the dirty old pig!" There was some more screaming and indignation. Then my father's outraged voice-

"Are you trying to tell me he came to your bed last night? Lady, the man is ninety-five years old!"

"I mean what I say." If anything, the voice was a notch higher. "You think it was the Malkomovitz sitting on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night waking me up from a sound sleep. You're lucky I didn't call the police!"

And before the day was over he was again sitting in defiant dignity in the front seat of the car, his baggage in the trunk and as we drove off my father's silence was so deep it roared like the break-up of a mighty river in spring.