I Pity the Poor Immigrant

by Zachary Lazar

  INTERVENTION

  By this time, the greater problem was Buddy Lansky’s paralysis, which had grown almost total. Buddy had to be fed by someone else, like a baby, and his father found this embarrassing. When there were family gatherings—Meyer’s own July Fourth birthday, Buddy’s fiftieth birthday in 1980, or a rare visit from Paul—Meyer told his crippled son to arrive early so the feeding could be dealt with before the other guests arrived….

  In an attempt to correct his physical decline, Buddy underwent an operation in the early 1980s to realign his neck and the top of his spinal cord. A metal ring was fixed, halolike, around his skull, and the halo was then attached to a back brace, temporarily immobilizing his head. The halo itself was secured to Buddy’s skull by metal screws that were wound tightly into the flesh. When Meyer went to visit his son in the hospital, he just could not look at the device.

  —Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and

  the Gangster Life

  HALO

  In the Bible, Absalom—more “highly praised for beauty” than any man in Israel—rises up against his father, David, who has grown decadent and corrupt. Absalom acquires a chariot with horses and fifty men to go running before him. His luxuriant hair, which he cuts only once a year, weighs “twenty shekels by the royal weight.” He positions himself as a sympathetic alternative to the king, a man of fairness and integrity, but he is also self-righteous and scheming, a demagogue who steals “the hearts of Israel.” Twenty thousand of his charmed followers die in the battle he wages against his father in the forest of Ephraim. As he flees David’s troops, Absalom’s mule passes beneath a terebinth tree, and his hair catches in the branches and “he dangled between heaven and earth while the mule which was beneath him passed on.” He hangs suspended there in agony from this halo, until David’s general, Joab, “took three sticks in his palm and he thrust them into Absalom’s heart.”

  Isaac Babel writes, Stop brawling at your writing-desk and stuttering in the presence of others. Imagine for a moment that you do your brawling on the squares and your stuttering on paper. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied with you. You are twenty-five years old. If heaven and earth had rings attached to them, you would seize hold of those rings and pull heaven down to earth.

  David calls to his son Absalom, My son! My son! Would that I had died in your stead!

  Part Four

  Facts on the Ground

  12

  Ghosts

  NEW YORK–JERUSALEM–TEL AVIV, 2011–12

  I have here the first letter Gila sent me back in 2010, before we met that one afternoon for lunch. The letter is still in its envelope, pressed between the pages of a book on Jewish mysticism by the rabbi Adin Steinsaltz. Steinsaltz writes:

  For everything man does has significance. An evil act will generally cause some disruption or negative reaction in the vast system of the Sefirot; and a good act, correct or raise things to a higher level. Each of the reactions extends out into all of the worlds and comes back into our own, back upon ourselves, in one form or another.

  I look back now over some of the sentences I wrote in 2009 in my piece about David Bellen’s murder, thinking of what Steinsaltz says about “reactions”:

  I had never cared much about Israel—my lack of interest was so long-standing that perhaps I should have wondered more about it. On a deeper level, I might have realized, I had never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew.

  Perhaps the reason I have never wanted to face too directly the idea of myself as a Jew is that all roads seem to lead to the Holocaust memorial, as if it is the Holocaust that makes one a Jew.

  I wrote these sentences almost unthinkingly, as much for the way they sounded as for what they meant. It is in this way that we end up in places we hadn’t meant to, the act of the sentences ramifying out and coming back to confront us, “in one form or another,” as Steinsaltz puts it, in my case in the form of Gila’s first letter. Out of that letter came our meeting. Out of that meeting came this book. This will interest you, Bellen’s editor, Galit Levy, had written me in her brief note accompanying his long, unpublished essay, “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” Hope you are well. When I read “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” for the first time, it reminded me of what Gila had described to me during our lunch with the word yored, “the sense of going down, of descending, of being corrupt.” I recognized this feeling in Bellen’s essay and I recognized it in myself. Hope you are well.

  We would both always be yordim, Gila had told me, never olim. That was one of the things we had in common.

  What she and Lansky had in common.

  What she and I had in common.

  In writing this book, I have come to feel like a kind of immigrant in my own life, inhabiting a world of reflections and images of people I can’t fully know, some of whom are dead, and I see now that my life has been shaped by this network, in ways I didn’t always perceive.

  My father was the subject of, and not just a secondary figure in, a newspaper article in the summer of 2011:

  Lawrence Groff, 76, brother of well-known jewelers Jacob and Beryl Groff, was indicted in federal court yesterday on three counts of conspiracy to commit fraud for his role in an antiques scam that prosecutors say involved a chain of dealers in Britain and Switzerland. The indictment is the latest development in a scandal that has shaken confidence throughout the antiques world, which had already been hard hit by the economic downturn of recent years.

  According to prosecutors, Groff partnered with London dealer Dennis Lynne, a leading figure in the global antiques market, to sell items of purportedly eighteenth-century English furniture valued at $3 million to buyers in New York and elsewhere. The furniture, according to documents and photographs issued to the court by Lynne’s restorer, Martin Briggs, was in fact fabricated by Briggs himself in his Croyden workshop. Briggs claims he made the furniture out of old wardrobes and other items, which he then painstakingly refinished and appointed to look like rare and valuable antiques. In the court documents, Briggs includes invoices submitted to Lynne for about £100,000 (Briggs also asserts that he was never paid for his work). Months later, he learned that Lynne had sold the allegedly eighteenth-century furniture to a dealer in Switzerland for more than ten times that amount. Groff has been charged with arranging for the sale of these forgeries to longtime clients of his in New York and other parts of the U.S.

  “This is a business based almost entirely on trust,” said Candace Ross, an interior decorator in Darien, Connecticut. “Trust in a dealer’s integrity, his eye, his taste. So not only are we talking about a specific case here, we’re talking about the reputation of the antiques market in general.”

  Ross points out that it can be extremely difficult to ascertain the true value of an antique. Unlike works of fine art, for example, furniture does not usually accrue a paper trail of ownership, or a provenance. A skillful restorer can embellish a legitimately old piece, making it appear rarer and more valuable than it is. A shrewd dealer can then make exaggerated claims about a piece’s historical significance.

  “It’s not so much that Lawrence Groff didn’t know what he was doing,” said Christian Nabel, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It’s more that nobody in that business knows exactly what he’s doing. More precisely, people in that business don’t want to know exactly what they’re doing.”

  Groff was released on a $200,000 bond. If convicted, he faces up to ten years in prison.

  “I knew he was in financial trouble,” a friend of Groff’s said, “but I didn’t know it was serious. If the allegations turn out to be true, and I don’t know if they will, then the story will be one about panic, I think. Panic about protecting the kind of life he had built up over many years and was afraid of losing.

  “What is the line from Eliot?” the friend continued. “ ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender which an age of prudence can ne
ver retract’?”

  I went to see a friend of mine, Ellen Teague, a few days after this story ran. I don’t have a lot of people in my life, Gila had told me that day we’d met for lunch. It occurred to me that I didn’t have a lot of people in my life either, at least not people I could speak to about my father. Ellen and I have known each other more than twenty years—through her marriage, the birth of her daughter, her divorce, her various boyfriends. During all that time I’ve been trying to reconcile the way Ellen looks and thinks and speaks with the diminished way she seems to perceive herself. She’s a tall woman with a perfect face that she doesn’t experience as quite her own, as if the face is a mask. We sat in her office in Carroll Gardens, a room she shares with three other therapists, and drank wine in the late afternoon, chilled white wine on a hot day with the blinds half opened, the still light on the ficus tree and the lime-green sofa and chairs. My father had stopped talking to me a few weeks before this. I told Ellen that although I wasn’t surprised by my father’s silence, the reality of it now was more powerful than I’d expected. It felt like a verdict. What I meant by that was that it was as if my father was declaring that whatever in our relationship hadn’t been my fault before had now become entirely my fault. I felt this, even if I disputed its fairness. I had always been more accusatory than forgiving—I couldn’t blame him for this failing of mine. I understood that, even if I saw his silence as most likely a tacit admission of his own guilt, a product of his shame.

  “He’s not talking to anyone,” Ellen reminded me. “It’s not just you.”

  “He’s talking to my stepmother.”

  “They live together. She’s his wife.”

  “She’s the one who picks up the phone when I call. She tells me I shouldn’t take it personally. Just like you. That I should be patient. That it’s not a statement about me. But it certainly is a statement about me.”

  I realized that the more I talked, the less attached I felt to the words. All I felt was a vague airlessness, which itself was like a product of the room, its smell of carpet cleaner and the gray light leaking in through the blinds. I thought of Ellen’s patients, the stories she’d told me about them. They were all from my kind of background, I realized, girls from affluent families who’d experienced some emotional trauma or who’d simply experienced their affluent backgrounds as a kind of emotional trauma. They played out this trauma through the most direct means available to them, anorexia and bulimia, narrowing their days to a simple monotonous punishment of hunger and denial. Food, shit, vomit, blood—all of life’s other complexities fell away. Since Ellen herself has struggled with some of these same problems, her work has sometimes seemed to me to have a self-lacerating aspect to it, a dangerous aspect. She lives inside her emotions more than I do. I wouldn’t want to have Ellen’s emotional life, but I sometimes fear that I’ve gone too far in the other direction. I do my work because I find it interesting. I cook because I like to eat well. I clean my apartment, I exercise, I see friends, I have occasional men in my life. I have worked all this out to minimize turbulence, but I realize this is ultimately a defensive posture. A part of me thinks that life is meant to be sloppier.

  “You haven’t told me all that much,” Ellen said.

  “I don’t have anything else to say.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It feels true.”

  “Then you might want to think about why that is. Just saying.”

  “Is that your professional opinion?”

  “There are art supplies in the closet over there. For the people who don’t like to talk or don’t know how to talk. The ones who can only draw pictures. Paint. Make things out of clay. I bet you couldn’t draw a picture in front of me if I held a gun to your head.”

  “What is this?”

  “I’m just saying it would make sense if you needed some help right now.”

  “I don’t think I need ‘help.’ ”

  “Of course not. Everyone thinks that. My clients, for example. Of course eventually there’s not really any ‘them’ to talk to anymore. They’re just bodies. Emaciated bodies. That’s how committed they are to not talking.”

  What if everything you have to say is a cliché? Does it change the cliché to express it in other, more evocative language? Or does it make more sense to seek out experiences that don’t lead one to feel like a cliché?

  “I don’t think I’m like your patients,” I said to Ellen.

  “You mean you’re not a lot like them.”

  “I mean I’m more like the opposite of them.”

  “Maybe. Maybe so.”

  But she was right about one thing. It was true that I could hardly imagine anything that would have made me more uncomfortable than opening a pad of fancy drawing paper and trying to sketch out something about my feelings for my father in that office. I wouldn’t have known where to begin. If that doesn’t make me ridiculous, then I don’t know what does.

  I was planning to go back to Israel that fall. I wanted to try to find the apartment Gila had shown me in her photographs at lunch. I wanted to talk to David Bellen’s ex-wife, the one mentioned in his essay, a woman now named Rachel Kessler. I wanted to talk to Eliav, if he would still talk to me after what I’d written about him in my piece on his father’s murder. I wanted to see if I could make sense of all these disparate lives—certainly I wanted to stop thinking about my own. But it was hard to see it as a story. The story was too tangled, even as I felt myself getting more and more invested in it. If I went to Israel, I thought, it would be to simply satisfy a few of my own curiosities—there was no subject I could claim to be “investigating” for any possible piece. But then in November I got an e-mail from Oded Voss, whom I had not heard from in more than two years. He wrote to tell me that a week before, Eliav had been found dead of a heroin overdose in Tel Aviv. He was thirty-eight years old.

  From an e-mail dated 12/22/2008, forwarded to me from David Bellen’s “Drafts” folder by his ex-wife, Rachel Kessler, on 12/2/2011, about three weeks before I was to interview her in Jerusalem. The e-mail was originally addressed to Bellen’s friend Adam Harris, an editor at an American magazine who had rejected Bellen’s essay “I Pity the Poor Immigrant”:

  Dear Adam,

  I understand your reluctance—the piece is far too long—but I wanted to thank you for your kind words anyway. What I did not include in the piece was yet a further confession. In the fall of 1972, I saw Lansky once in person. I had been sent to cover his trial, not even for a newspaper but for a small journal of literature and politics that ceased to exist before it could even run my story. My then-wife Rachel and I were living in a small one-bedroom flat in Tel Aviv, expecting our son Eliav, and we were gravely in need of money. I took the bus to Jerusalem with no set idea of what I wanted to ask Lansky if I even had the chance.

  It turned out of course that he was thronged. It was the day the supreme court handed down its decision denying him citizenship, and afterward I could only see him from a distance, speaking to some newsmen, looking down briefly at the lapel of his suit jacket. I remember that his clothes could not have been more impeccably clean. They shone against his matte skin, making him seem somehow less visible by comparison. I remember his words that day were oddly poetic. He compared his loss to the recent shock of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Germany. “Look what happened last week in Munich,” he said. “Young branches cut down. I’m an old man.”

  When I returned to our apartment in Tel Aviv that night, it was later than I’d planned and Rachel, pregnant and uncomfortable, was standing in her nightgown at the stove. I had spent the last few hours in the bar at the Dan Hotel, the hotel where Lansky had lived throughout much of his stay in Tel Aviv. It was a place I’d never liked, a place not for Israelis so much as foreigners, yet in my role as “journalist” I somehow felt the need to assert my right to sit there. I hadn’t counted on the impact of Lansky’s fame, its strange mutedness—I remembered looking at him and mar
veling and also wondering why I was marveling. I noticed that the sound of his voice, his physical proximity, had caused something profoundly untrustworthy to stir inside me. It was his very mildness that caused this.

  At the hotel, a waitress about my own age brought me coffee. When I remained there after the other customers had left, she came for the empty carafe and we ended up talking. She told me she was hoping some day to move to New York. I remember that—at the time, the very words “New York” suggested a place scarcely less romantic and unreal than the one conjured by the matchbooks from Billy Wilkerson’s Flamingo Club. I didn’t believe she’d ever see New York. I didn’t even believe I would. I didn’t have any money to take her somewhere when her shift ended—I thought the whole thing was over when I paid my bill. Young, stupid, “poetic”—I can look for words to explain what happened next, but explanations are beside the point. “Impatient” might be the right word. Preyed on by an impatience that made every appetite a panic, something crucial I feared missing out on.

  It was about nine months later, a few months after Eliav’s birth, that the waitress took me to an apartment in a part of the city that I seldom went to. We walked there all the way from the Dan Hotel. She led me into the foyer of a small gray building and we took the tiny elevator up to the third floor—no one around, no sounds of life, the apartment whose door she opened completely empty—no furniture, not even a single chair, just the bare, scuffed floors. I didn’t want to ask for explanations. I guessed that whatever explanation she might have given me would not have been the truth. She ran some water from the tap until it finally ran clear, then she filled a glass that had been left on the counter. The glass could have sat there for years. I watched her slender back beneath her blue dress as she drank. It would have been a few months before the Yom Kippur War, a war which had yet to start but that everybody knew was coming. Almost as much as I remember her, I remember the odd, spartan asylum of that empty apartment, the way we spread our coats like blankets on the floor and laughed a little as we knelt, kissing, then stopped laughing.