A Paler Shade of Red Page 2

  LIFE: Nightmare of the wide-awake.

  LOYALTY: Virtue of those who have not yet been betrayed.

  NATIONALISM: Flag-draped racism and xenophobia.

  NEUTRALITY: Crime of indifference; aloofness further sullied by cowardice and opportunism.

  OPINION: Second-hand conviction often modified according to need.

  OPPORTUNITY: Prospect susceptible to disappointment.

  OPTIMISM: Baseless faith in intangible results.

  ORPHAN: Someone whose parents’ death prevents him from being ungrateful.

  PATIENCE: Waste of time.

  PATRIOTISM: (See NATIONALISM).

  PEACE: Brief intermission between wars.

  PESSIMIST: Someone who is never disappointed.

  PHILOSOPHY: Speculative art whose objective is to render all things simple complicated or incomprehensible.

  PLAN: Method that leads to unintended consequences.

  POLITENESS: Two-faced courtesy.

  PRAGMATISM: Selfishness disguised as realism.

  PUBLICITY: Mass-deception.

  RHINE: Eau de Cologne.

  SOLITUDE: In the best of company.

  SPECIALIST: Amateur who knows almost everything about very little and nothing about the rest.

  TRUTH: A lie we can believe in.

  USURY: Crime of interest.

  WISDOM: Form of intuition and circumspection that blossoms with age; the conscious but reluctant control of reckless instincts.

  NEVER FAR FROM THE TREE

  I descend from a long line of mavericks, thinkers, would-be prophets, and utopians, each the originator of essential truths that their descendants would dutifully record and trumpet with oracular verve. A ham at the age of three or four, I’d memorized several ancestral precepts. I recited them at will when we had company. My parents beamed with pride. When a child doesn’t quite understand adults, he apes them:

  The young want to add wings to the chariot of time; the old want to remove its wheels.

  One is more often unjust through carelessness than bad faith.

  Life is absurd; only death is logical.

  Happy is he who doesn’t take himself seriously.

  Politics is the art of exploiting events for the benefit of the dominant class while persuading the populace that they’re profiting from their leaders’ intrigues.

  When two people agree on anything, one of them is tired, in a hurry or confused.

  Coined by my father, two axioms would guide the rest of my days:

  You were given life; now fashion yourself.

  When you talk about nothing, you say too much.

  *

  I was eighteen when I landed in America, alone, with the fifty dollars my mother had sewn in the lining of my overcoat. The avatar of Babeuf, the 18th century French revolutionary agitator and journalist, would soon replace Sacha Guitry, the early 20th century playwright and ham actor of my childhood. The iron was hot; it was time to strike it.

  *

  My ancestors, natives of Spain, the Guzmán (a German surname they had the wisdom to modify once settled in Burgos), almost certainly also had the prudence to convert to Christianity -- a precaution they might not have taken a century earlier. Indeed, under the enlightened rule of King Alfonso X “the Learned,” Jews occupied positions of influence and privilege at the court. Alfonso surrounded himself with Jewish doctors, diplomats, scribes, astrologers, tax collectors and bankers. A major Jewish cultural and commercial center since the 11th century, Burgos had already suffered the defection of Solomon Halevy, later re-christened Paul of Burgos. In 1390, Halevy, the son of a rabbi, abjured Moses, kneeled before Christ, became bishop of Cartagena, then archbishop of Burgos, and spent the next forty-five years orchestrating savage pogroms against his fellow Jews. He dispossessed and exiled those he couldn’t convert by force. Others paid with their lives. According to historian Jeremy Cohen, the century marked a disastrous abandonment of Augustinian tolerance and the onset of modern anti-Semitism.

  Halevy had an able and zealous confederate, Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. Ferrer engineered the mass conversion of Jews, more often by questionable means. He made their lives so miserable that they surrendered their synagogues and “dedicated” them to the Church. One of his early converts was Solomon Halevy himself. Anti-Semitism spread in Spain under Ferrer who fomented violence in towns where Jews lived. He promulgated various anti-Jewish laws banning Jews from trading with Christians, prohibiting them from changing residence and, so they would stand out, from cutting their hair or trimming their beards. In 1391, he preached to mobs whose riots led to the transformation of the synagogue in Toledo into the Santa Maria la Blanca Church.

  The defection of the Guzmán, a widespread practice among Jewish subjects of their “very Catholic” majesties, Ferdinand and Isabel, and despite the minor rewards and privileges it brought, would elicit -- posterity would claim -- our most memorable epigram:

  Conversion is a despicable act of disloyalty only Jews are apt to commit.

  Despite its cynicism and distinctive Guzmán cachet, this imputation may be apocryphal but it lingered for many years in popular lore. The accusation is also specious: Moors fared no better during and after the “Reconquista” and most were coerced to forsake Allah the Compassionate and genuflect before his cantankerous and vengeful Judeo-Christian twin. Halevy’s more notorious copycats would include Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, the descendant of converted Jews. The apostasy of the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (né Aaron), the archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005], would lend a certain legitimacy to the incendiary saying my ancestors devised and circulated well into the 20th century. Unlike the others, Lustiger, a vocal opponent of anti-Semitism who considered himself a Jew until the end of his life, evoked hesitant sympathy: “Poor man, he’s misguided but not unlikable.”

  The Guzmán would expiate their impiety (and ditch the Castilian lisp) soon after their expulsion from Spain. They trekked to Worms, in Germany’s Palatinate, dropped the z from their Iberian surname and restored the virile t of their forebears. The men regrew their beards and side curls, changed from doublets and hose to kaftans and fur hats, and the women took ritual baths, groused and gossiped, this time in Yiddish or Ladino.

  Known in Medieval Hebrew as Vermayza, Worms was an important Jewish center whose origins go back to the 10th century. The first synagogue was erected in 1034. In 1096, 800 Jews were murdered by Crusaders and the local rabble. The Jewish Cemetery, dating back to the 11th century, is believed to be the oldest in Europe. The Rashi Synagogue, which dates back to 1175 and was lovingly rebuilt after its desecration on Kristallnacht in 1938, is the oldest in Germany. Worms today has a very small Jewish population and any semblance of an established Jewish community can only be found in the buildings of the Jewish Quarter which were renovated in the 1970s and 1980s and now serve as an outdoor museum.

  In 2010 the synagogue was fire-bombed. Eight corners of the edifice were set ablaze and a Molotov cocktail was tossed through a window for good measure.

  Some say that if you scratch your family tree you’ll find strands of Jewish DNA in the bark, the sap, the leaves, the fruits. And if you dare dig down to the roots, you might discover generations of scorned Maranos (Jewish converts to Christianity) or, earlier yet, reviled Khazars (converts to Judaism). We're very popular that way.

  *

  Soon enough, wanderlust still coursing through their veins, my clan pulled up stakes and set out for Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Romania where my parents were born. It’s in Romania, where I spent four years as a child that I discovered the mind-bending quirkiness of paradox. I would long revel in its incendiary potential.

  Cynicism is honesty with a grudge.

  A circle fancies itself sexier than a square; a trapezoid thinks it’s nimbler than a triangle.

  An upright mind, like vertical surfaces, gathers less dust.

  Common sense is more Cartesian than logic
-- and less corruptible.

  Memorizing incongruities and reciting them as Allied bombs rained on Bucharest and, later, as Fascist Romania turned overnight into a communist state would prove useful to the boy of seven I was at the time.

  *

  I often imagine my ancestors gathered around a large table festooned with plates of sliced stuffed derma and sizzling latkes, saucers brimming with gefilte fish, kishka and vine leaves filled with rice, large platters of fried mamaliga squares daubed with sour cream and sprinkled with goat cheese, and tureens overflowing with piping hot cholent, an indescribable but savory mishmash of potatoes, barley, beans, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fried onions. They are no doubt downing fermented cider, schnapps and plum brandy. At Purim, they scoff hammentashen, bite-size raspberry, apricot, and prune tartlets shaped like the ears of the dastardly Persian vizier Haman, the appendages by which, so legend says, he was hanged to avenge his genocidal plot against the Jews.

  Jews celebrate victory or flight from persecution by eating. They mourn catastrophe and death and expiate sin with a fast. Our history is filled with feasts, abstinence and famine. Every calamity is seen as divine retribution, God’s payback for the debauchery and impiety of his people. No disaster, no torment, however inscrutable and cruel is deemed trivial because every event, every setback, every tragedy is the manifestation of Yahweh’s will. Upheavals and grief and misery are tolerated, if not subconsciously foretold, precisely because they herald purification and redemption and are encoded by God himself. God has decreed that Jews may not defy their own destiny by repudiating Moses’ legacy without unleashing upon themselves the fires of hell. This is why Jews, to this day, live in a state of controlled anxiety -- the Diaspora’s assimilated ones subliminally, the new Canaanites with a sense of urgency and fatalism.

  Some believe they can circumvent fate by calling it coincidence.

  “When will it ever end?” I can hear my great-great-grandfather Abraham asking rhetorically, readjusting his prayer shawl around his shoulders, his bright blue eyes fixed heavenward, his right fist hammering softly the left side of his chest, unaware that his grandson, his wife and several of their children would perish and become mere statistics in the nihilistic calculus of the Final Solution. No one has the heart to tell him. Or maybe he forgot. This form of self-induced amnesia spares men the trauma of storing up too much knowledge which, everyone knows, can render them mad. Everyone at the table looks quizzically at each other for a moment then continues to eat.

  “Never,” I reply, breaking several generations of leaden silence. “We’re the Chosen People.” My father, who catches the bitter irony of my words, smiles and pours himself another jigger of Tsuica. My mother looks at me, a grown man, as she always had, like a hen admiring her newly hatched chick. It’s a look that had caused me great embarrassment as a boy but whose reassuring tenderness I would miss when she died, still young, of pancreatic cancer.

  “Everything is convention,” she had sighed, “except pain.”

  *

  In “All Rivers Run to the Sea,” Elie Wiesel, a distant relative, wrote:

  “Why is it that my town [Sighet] still enchants me so? Is it because in my memory it is entangled with my childhood? In all my novels it serves as background and vantage point. In my fantasy I still see myself in it.”

  From all accounts, my father, also a native of Sighet, neither felt enchantment for his town, nor saw himself in it, in fantasy or otherwise. Sighet was the embodiment of a niggardly heredity, a childhood filled with misery and privation, an adolescence overflowing with unattainable dreams long surrendered by his own forefathers.

  A shattered dream is like a broken vase; you can cement the pieces but you can never hide the fracture lines.

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  My great-great-grandfather, Abraham Gutman, was also born in Sighet, a small town in northern Transylvania, not far from the Hungarian border. His grandfather may have migrated from Poland or the Ukraine. Abraham's son Fabian, my father’s grandfather, lost his mother when he was just a child. Thirty days after his wife's death, having complied with tradition by engaging in histrionic displays of mourning, lamentations, breast-beatings and tearful one-way dialogues with God, Abraham remarried. His new spouse, Rivka, a pretty, young orphan he’d been screwing when his wife wasn’t looking, produced three children. Fabian was just a teen when he was apprenticed to a soap and candle factory many kilometers from home. He carried bitter memories of his childhood well into adulthood and once told my father, tears streaming from his eyes, of the indignities he suffered at the hands of his father’s new wife. When he went home for brief visits he would be fed leftovers and forced to sleep in the attic in the stifling heat of summer or on bitter winter nights. His stepmother made him do degrading chores and took pleasure in humiliating him in front of her own children.

  “Like his Biblical namesake, my father Abraham,” Fabian claimed until the day he died of a heart attack in the arms of his mistress, “gave in to his wife’s frivolity and meanness. He never intervened. I was not cast out into the desert, like Ishmael; I was abandoned in a barren field of desolation where love and tenderness did not grow.”

  Calumny or cry from the heart? The truth would turn out to be more sinister.

  Memory may have holes, be short, sometimes even blocked. In the end it is always deformed.

  *

  Conscious of his heritage, painfully chained to his lot, my father would neither seek nor find comfort in the very device that gave Jews their identity, favored their survival -- religion. As a child he complied with its elaborate rituals and conformed to its stringent mandates, brutishly and without reaping the slightest spiritual gratification.

  "I waited for the high holy days, not as re-affirmations of the Jewish ideal but in anticipation of a better meal.”

  Like other Jewish children, he’d worn peyes and attended Cheder, the elementary Hebrew school where he was taught to read the Pentateuch and other sacred works -- a formality to which he submitted without eagerness or fervor out of filial piety, along with a hundred other daily conventions and obligations.

  “Impoverished parents show love by providing food and clothing. Caresses, kisses and embraces are in very short supply, dispensed on rare occasions and with extreme parsimony. Impoverished children redeem themselves by obeying their parents and submitting to their lot with cheerful self-effacement. Suffering dilutes a child’s capacity to love. I did what I was told to do. We all did. Conformity and measured indifference, I learned, will get a child through anything: boredom, endless chores, long hours of rote study, not enough sleep, even the nagging urge to turn tail and run as far as your legs will take you.”

  “Did you ever run away,” I asked.

  Absconding would have been out of character for my father, an inconceivable act of betrayal against his parents and siblings. They needed each other “the way parasites need their host.” Each fed on an enormous well of collective emotion when his or her own was depleted. It was his family’s sole defense against the vast and incomprehensible universe that stretched beyond the walls of their little town.

  “No,” he sighed. “But I thought about it with nagging frequency. I dreamed of places I’d only read about. Late at night, in the glow of a small kerosene lamp, I thumbed through picture books, fascinated, lusting for the wonders that unfolded with every page: Budapest, Vienna, Rome, Paris, New York. I longed to be delivered from the stifling sameness of my life. I would eventually earn my independence by getting an education. It was one hell of a long shortcut to nowhere.”

  “What do you mean by ‘nowhere’?”

  My father looked away.

  “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if you’d understand.”

  I understood perhaps better than he could ever imagine, with a keenness and sensitivity only heredity, empathy and similarity of circumstance can inspire. Like father, like son. I too had taken shortcuts. Some led straight to a precipice. Unlike my father, I’d defied
reason and sidestepped convention, veering away from a course I knew I was not qualified to navigate. Fearing failure, I’d circumvented well-trodden lanes and cut my own footpaths. (I often boasted that I thrived on adventure when, in fact, it was a fear of commitment or a lack of faith in the constancy of my own objectives that catapulted me from one castle-building venture to another). Insufficiently schooled, ill-suited for commerce, undisciplined and ferociously eclectic, I would drift into journalism less by conscious choice than a happy confluence of wishful thinking and naiveté, youthful immodesty and self-created opportunities. Necessity, in my case, was the mother of invention. I enjoyed writing -- no, I liked to test the limits of forbearance, to indict, to bait. I was seduced by controversy, polemics, and I would invent myself bit by bit: part-chronicler, part agitator. The pleasure I derived from telling inconvenient truths surpassed any possible urge to inform or enlighten. I treated facts as props, words as projectiles; I relied on the mood they’re apt to convey. I am and have always been a good visualizer and words evoke strong images. I used surreal colors. I savored the vibes they were meant to provoke. It was the disquiet or indignation that my essays might elicit that found me pen in hand. I cared little for the Fourth Estate or the public it serves. I had one objective: to cause unease and discomfiture, to unnerve, to remind the gullible and the smug that the emperor was still naked, and to parade the son of a bitch bare-assed and trembling in his imaginary brocades and gold-embroidered silk robes for all to see.