Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  “SO, see, I have an Esther in my family, too. The matriarch of my family. She dominated her sisters, in a grasping way, and then came to die of emphysema in my grandparents’ apartment in Florida. We went to see her in, this is in about 1993, I guess. Wheezing and pained, she said, ‘People tell me you are doing well, but I lie here in bed at night and worry, oh, I worry about you. How I worry. So now tell me, tell me, so your aunt won’t lie here as she is dying and worry … tell me … how much are you really making?’ ”

  “You can’t possibly tell that story,” Martha said. “It’s anti-Semitic.”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “Of course it’s true,” Martha said. “It’s just not appropriate.”

  I was trying out possible spiels on the more Jewish of our many Jewish friends. We have a certain number of friends who, though coming from backgrounds not unlike my own, have recommitted themselves to Jewishness in a serious way. While Yiddishkeit as a practice had nearly disappeared from New York, one of the things that were replacing it, paradoxically, was Judaism. A number of our friends are what I have come to think of as X-treme Jews, who study Cabala or glory in the details of the lives of Jewish gangsters, and even like to call themselves “Hebes,” in the manner of young black men calling each other “niggas.”

  I envied my friends the seeming clarity of their Jewishness, just as I envied, a little, the clarity of the family of observant Jews who live down the hall from us. On warm Friday evenings, one or two of the adolescent boys in that family will come knocking at our door, galumphing in heavy shoes and with pale faces, and, looking woeful, say, “Could you come and turn on the air-conditioner in our apartment? We can’t, ’cause we’re Jews.” I admired the simplicity of their self-definition: “We can’t, ’cause we’re Jews.” We are unashamed of our essence, even as it makes us sweat.

  But, whatever the appeal of that plain faith, I can’t say I was inclined to follow them. It seemed to me that my contemporaries, in contrast to the boys down the hall, had chosen Jewish—they were majoring in Jewish, just as my father had majored in English—when the force of the tradition was that it was not elective. I decided to sit down and read what I imagined was the bible on the subject, Alfred Kazin’s memoir New York Jew, a book that, over the years, I had neither read in nor read past but simply not read, thinking, unforgivably, that I already knew its contents. (The forties, boy! The fifties, joy! The sixties, oy!) In fact, it’s an unpredictable, rhapsodic, uncontentious book—but, for all the starkness of its title, its premise is that Jewishness is the board from which one springs, rather than the ground one must dig. To be a New York Jew is, for Kazin, like being a New York tree. It is what you are.

  Reading Kazin, I became a little impatient with my own apologetic attitude toward the poverty of my Jewishness. Wasn’t it the invigorating inheritance of the self-emancipation of my parents? My father had done the deracinating, to become a devotee of Pope and Swift, Molière and Shakespeare, and to reracinate was to be disloyal to him, to the act of emancipation from tribal reflexes that, with a considerable effort of will and imagination, he had pulled off. What is bracing about Kazin is not his Jewishness but that he makes no effort to pretend that he is something else. His liberation lay in not pretending to be Van Wyck Brooks; the liberation for us surely lies in not pretending to be Alfred Kazin.

  In the midst of these bitter-herb thoughts, Luke came in.

  “Here’s the new version,” he said. “Man says to a waiter, ‘What’s this fly doing in my soup?’ ‘Sh-h-h,’ the waiter says, ‘everyone will want one.’ ” It broke me up. Whether or not there are Jewish essences, there are surely some essentially Jewish jokes. That was one, and I was in the middle of another.

  I WAS about to call the Jewish Museum and give it all up, when a friend suggested that I speak to a rabbi. “Go see Rabbi Schorsch,” he said. “He’s the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He’s a terrific guy, and I’m sure he’d be glad to help you out with the spiel thing.” I vaguely remembered hearing Rabbi Ismar Schorsch on the radio once or twice, so I made an appointment—it felt like making a date with a dentist—and on the day I took the subway up to 125th Street.

  The rabbi’s secretary showed me into his office, and after a couple of minutes there was Rabbi Schorsch.

  “Rabbi,” I began, “I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways.” I don’t know; that’s how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn’t make head or tail of the Book of Esther.

  “It’s a spoof, a burlesque, really,” he almost mumbled.

  He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. “This is a Christian Bible,” he said, genuinely puzzled.

  He was the kind of hyper-alert elderly man who, instead of putting on weight around the middle, seems to have drawn all his energy upward into his eyes and ears, which gleam, outsized. “Yes. It’s a kind of comic chapter, not to be taken entirely seriously,” he went on, holding my King James Version in his hand as though it might be loaded. “It’s a light book with a serious message. You see, Scripture, the Bible, one of the remarkable things about it is that it contains a chapter about every form of human experience. There’s a book of laws and a book of love songs. A book of exile and a book of homecoming. A skeptical and despairing book in Job, and an optimistic and sheltering book in the Psalms. Esther is the comic book, it’s a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit.”

  You could see my whole skeleton underneath my jacket; my hair stood on end; I turned into a pile of black ash, smiling sickly as I slowly crumbled.

  “It is?” I said.

  “Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated—a court Jew, really. It’s a book for court Jews. Why doesn’t he bow down to Haman? Well, it might be because of his Judaism. But I think we have to assume that he’s jealous—he expects to be made first minister and then isn’t. Have you noticed the most interesting thing about the book?” He looked at me keenly.

  “I hadn’t even noticed it was funny.”

  “It’s the only book in the Bible where God is never mentioned,” he said. “This is the book for the Jews of the city, the world. After all, we wonder—what does Esther eat? It sure isn’t kosher. But she does good anyway. The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together—the writer obviously knows that the King is a bit of an idiot—but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before, or even after. She stays married to the Gentile King, remember. This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city, and how they struggle to do the righteous thing.”

  I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews … I had been assigned to burlesque it, when the text was pre-burlesqued, as jeans might be pre-shrunk.

  We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew-hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred years ago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. In the end, he gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)

  We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, “Why not? What have you got to lose?”

  What have you got to lose? It was, I reflected, like the punch line of a Jewish joke.

  . . .

  IN the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing masks, although this made them look less festive than vaguely embarrassed, as though they were worried about being seen by their friends. I
had forgotten the look and feel of a New York benefit: the ballroom made to look like a gym, the chicken, stretched out, mortified, on its plate, with the Indisputably Classy Ingredient—the quince, or sun-dried tomato, or preserved lemon—laid on top of it. The fiftyish women, sexy and intimidating in sports clothes, look wilted in their fancy gowns. The only difference was that at this benefit there was a giant video-projection screen at either end of the hall and one above the podium, and the speakers—who included Rabbi Schorsch, saying the blessing—were projected on them. I gulped. I had thought it would be like a nightclub, where I could play with a microphone in the manner of Rodney Dangerfield, and this was more like a political convention. I was an impostor, even though I had bits to do. I heard my grandfather’s voice: Feel stiff in the joints? Then stay out of the joints!

  At last, just before dessert, I got up and went to the podium. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my own image on the giant screen.

  What did I tell them? Well, I did the New York as Persia, Donald, and Ivana bit and then I did a bit I’d made up that afternoon on Haman. That got a modest laugh, and, encouraged, I went on to do the man-goes-to-see-a-rabbi bit. I said that, once I had thought of transposing the story to New York, I had got stuck on Mordecai. Who could Mordecai be in the modern city? I had gone to see a rabbi, and the rabbi had told me that the Book of Esther was in part a spoof, a burlesque: a comedy in which worldly people took risks and did unworldly things, and that Mordecai, if he was anyone, was us—the assimilated court and city Jews. And this was sort of amazing to me, since the idea that the man of the world might be the honest man was an idea that was central to the comic tradition I revered—Molière says it, for instance, just like that—but was not one that I had known had a place in the Jewish tradition. The Jewish tradition, I had always thought, proposed that the honest man was the man out of the world, the prophet crying in the wilderness. But I saw now that there was a connection between a certain kind of comedy, the comedy of assimilation, and a certain kind of courage, the courage to use your proximity to power, bought at the price of losing your “identity,” to save your kinsmen. The real moral center of the story, I saw now, lay in the tiny, heartbreaking, and in many ways comic moment when Esther—trayf-eating, dim-witted, overdressed, sexy Esther—appears before the King, who hasn’t found her particularly sexy lately. I could see her in her Lacroix pouf dress, I said, gulping for breath and showing up, so to speak, at Donald Trump’s office in the middle of a busy day saying that she had to speak to him. But she did, and the Jews were saved, for once.

  It went over okay. I didn’t kill them, but I didn’t die, either. They were expecting something more consistently amusing, I suppose, but no one minds a little moral sententiousness in an after-dinner speaker. “Congratulations, that was unusual,” or “You obviously spoke from the heart,” or “I knew that when we asked you to do the Purimspiel we would get something different!,” or just “Thank you for your interesting remarks” was the general tone of the things that people said when I got back to the table. (I still meet people who were there. They give me exactly the look a father might have after seeing his daughter topless in a progressive college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; he respects the sincerity of the intention, but it was extremely embarrassing to be there, nonetheless.) I had dessert—fund-raising-benefit dessert, something soft and white interspersed with something red and juicy—and went home. As a thank-you present, I was given a little silver grogger, a rattle, meant to be shaken when you heard the name “Haman.”

  Though I am not strangely exhilarated by my experience as a Purimspieler, I did find something significant in the Book of Esther, and I am certainly glad I did it. In one way, it was no different from any other exposure to an ancient, irrational belief-culture. I suppose I would have felt about the same if I had been a young Athenian who finally goes to Delphi and hears the oracle: Even if it didn’t change the future, it was nice to make the trip. But if there is something particularly Jewish about the experience, it may lie in the odd combination of a narrow gate and a large gathering; the most exclusive and tribal of faiths, Judaism is also the one that sustains the most encompassing of practices, from Moses to Henny Youngman, from Esther to Sammy Davis, Jr., and all us Irvings. Whether it sustains this because, as the rabbi believes, it is in its nature narrow but infinitely various, or because, as I sometimes suspect, anything ancient and oppressed must be adaptable, still it is so. At least for a certain kind of court Jew, being Jewish remains not an exercise in reading in or reading past but just in reading on, in continuing to turn the pages. The pages have been weird and varied enough in the past to be weird and varied in the future, and there is no telling who will shine in them. The Jewish occasion lay in rising to the occasion. Even if it was too late to be an everyday, starting Jew, one could still be, so to speak, Jewish in the clutch.

  We celebrated our own Seder this past spring, and are thinking of joining the synagogue we can see from our window, in part because we want to, in part because there is an excellent nursery school there for our daughter. That is the kind of things Jews do in Persia. I gave the silver grogger to the baby, who holds it at the window and shakes it in warning when she sees a dog. I believe that she now has the first things a Jewish girl in exile needs: a window to see from and a rattle to shake.

  2002

  DAVID SEDARIS

  IN THE WAITING ROOM

  SIX months after moving to Paris, I gave up on French school and decided to take the easy way out. All I ever said was “Could you repeat that?” And for what? I rarely understood things the second time around, and when I did it was usually something banal, the speaker wondering how I felt about toast, or telling me that the store would close in twenty minutes. All that work for something that didn’t really matter, and so I began saying “d’accord,” which translates to “I am in agreement,” and means, basically, “Okay.” The word was a key to a magic door, and every time I said it I felt the thrill of possibility.

  “D’accord,” I told the concierge, and the next thing I knew I was sewing the eye onto a stuffed animal belonging to her granddaughter. “D’accord,” I said to the dentist, and she sent me to a periodontist, who took some X-rays and called me into his conference room for a little talk. “D’accord,” I said, and a week later I returned to his office, where he sliced my gums from top to bottom and scraped great deposits of plaque from the roots of my teeth. If I’d had any idea that this was going to happen, I’d never have said d’accord to my French publisher, who’d scheduled me the following evening for a television appearance. It was a weekly cultural program, and very popular. I followed the pop star Robbie Williams, and, as the producer settled me into my chair, I ran my tongue over my stitches. It was like having a mouthful of spiders—spooky, but it gave me something to talk about on TV, and for that I was grateful.

  I said d’accord to a waiter, and received a pig’s nose standing erect on a bed of tender greens. I said it to a woman in a department store and walked away drenched in cologne. Every day was an adventure.

  When I got a kidney stone, I took the Métro to a hospital, and said d’accord to a cheerful red-headed nurse, who led me to a private room and hooked me up to a Demerol drip. That was undoubtedly the best that d’accord got me, and it was followed by the worst. After the stone had passed, I spoke to a doctor, who filled out an appointment card and told me to return the following Monday, when we would do whatever it was I’d just agreed to. “D’accord,” I said, and then I supersized it with “génial,” which means “great.”

  On the day of my appointment, I returned to the hospital, where I signed the register and was led by a slightly less cheerful nurse to a large dressing room. “Strip to your underwear,” she told me, and I said, “D’accord.” As the woman turned to leave, she said something else, and, looking back, I really should have asked her to repeat it, to draw a picture, if that’s what it took, because once you take your pants off d’accord isn’t really okay anymore. />
  There were three doors in the dressing room, and after removing my clothes I put my ear against each one, trying to determine which was the safest for someone in my condition. The first was loud, with lots of ringing telephones, so that was out. The second didn’t sound much different, and so I chose the third, and entered a brightly painted waiting room furnished with plastic chairs and a glass-topped table stacked high with magazines. A potted plant stood in the corner, and beside it was a second door, which was open and led into a hallway.

  I took a seat and had been there for a minute or so when a couple came in and filled two of the unoccupied chairs. The first thing I noticed was that they were fully dressed, and nicely, too—no sneakers or sweatsuits for them. The woman wore a nubby gray skirt that fell to her knees and matched the fabric of her husband’s sports coat. Their black hair, which was obviously dyed, formed another match, but looked better on her than it did on him—less vain, I supposed.

  “Bonjour,” I said, and it occurred to me that possibly the nurse had mentioned something about a robe, perhaps the one that had been hanging in the dressing room. I wanted more than anything to go back and get it, but, if I did, the couple would see my mistake. They’d think I was stupid, so to prove them wrong I decided to remain where I was and pretend that everything was normal. La la la.

  It’s funny the things that run through your mind when you’re sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers. Suicide comes up, but, just as you embrace it as a viable option, you remember that you don’t have the proper tools: no belt to wrap around your neck, no pen to drive through your nose or ear and up into your brain. I thought briefly of swallowing my watch, but there was no guarantee I’d choke on it. It’s embarrassing, but, given the way I normally eat, it would probably go down fairly easily, strap and all. A clock might be a challenge, but a Timex the size of a fifty-cent piece, no problem.