End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  He reads the same chapter as always: a passage in which the ship’s captain realizes that sharks are following the boat, gorging themselves on the bodies the crew tosses overboard when the slaves-to-be, three hundred Africans shackled leg-to-leg in a hold intended to transport rum and molasses, die of starvation or dysentery. The words travel a well-trod path from page to brain to mouth, the usual memorized half sentences granting Tristan the usual chances to look up from the page, into the crowd. It’s all preamble. The moment he closes the book and asks if there are any questions is when the gig begins.

  In the foremost occupied row, an arm shoots up. Tristan pretends not to see it. If he’s learned anything, it’s that the first raised hand is always attached to a troublemaker or a crackpot, somebody eager to monopolize the spotlight with a caustic question or a lengthy rant containing no question at all. That goes double if the interlocutor is sitting in the extreme front or the far back. The arm sways and Tristan bides his time, locking his elbows and leaning on the lectern as if he’d like to push the thing into the ground. Just as his gambit begins to teeter on the brink of farce, another hand breaches the air.

  Tristan recovers his eyesight. “Yes?”

  A young man stands. In his hand, he holds a sheet of paper rolled into a telescope. He taps it against his thigh, looks to his left and right, then squares his shoulders to the stage.

  “Mr. Brodsky, are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?”

  The audience titters. The joker bows and takes his seat. Tristan glances over at Pendergast, who’s sitting in the wings on a folding metal chair. Peter waves a finger back and forth beneath his chin and mouths the words Not one of mine.

  Tristan pretends to mull the question over. “Hmm. That’s an interesting proposition, Senator. Will there be booze at this party?” He listens closely to the laugh that follows, hoping it is louder than the joker’s. It is. Round one, Brodsky. Before the sound dies down, two more hands go up—the front-row kid again, and then a woman farther back, with glasses and dark hair. Tristan lifts his chin toward her. “Yes. In the middle.”

  This one doesn’t stand. Instead, she slouches in her chair, one knee wedged against the back of the seat in front of her, and reads from a small notepad balanced on her thigh. Written questions always annoy Tristan. Too full of flourish, portent. He sips his water, rocks back on his heels.

  “Mr. Brodsky, in an essay published in the Partisan Review, Lionel Abel contests that modernist culture and radical politics can no longer be presumed central. The critic Harold Rosenberg responds that the historical crisis that spawned modernism is so constant that, and I quote, ‘there is no place for art to go but forward.’ My question, Mr. Brodsky, is this: what might come after modernist culture and radical politics, given both the subversion Mr. Abel suggests and the impact that the existentialism of Camus and Sartre is beginning to make?”

  Tristan clears his throat, feels his face hardening, tries to smile. “I couldn’t possibly care less. I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s a fascinating question, and it certainly sounds smart, but I can’t make heads or tails of it. I like that bit about art moving forward, or whatever you said. And I think The Stranger is a fine novel—made me want to run right out and kill myself, which is a real mark of excellence. I can also add that Harry Rosenberg, if you’re able to distract him from the topic of modern art, has some marvelous stories about getting drunk with Joe DiMaggio.”

  He senses a barometric shift, and pauses. There’s something unnerving in the tonal quality of the room’s silence, its sudden airlessness. Are they disgusted, shocked? Is it pity playing on their faces, his own obsolescence looming in the mirrors of their eyes? Is he giving them a fight, when it was an adventure they came for?

  “Where’s the joy?” he hears himself ask. “If literature is just a ring for ideologies to box in, why bother? Why not nail broadsheets to walls, or vandalize buildings with slogans? I don’t write because I believe in something; I write because I believe in writing. Novels are not illustrations of ideas. At least, mine aren’t. They’re novels because they can’t be any shorter. Does that make sense?”

  The dark-haired girl raises her hand again. “I have a follow-up question, Mr. Brodsky.”

  “Since I so eloquently answered your first.”

  The briefest flicker of a smile as she bends over her notepad, flips a page. “Irving Howe, reviewing Manacles in The Nation, wrote that ‘it is nearly inconceivable that in the immediate aftermath of the greatest tragedy in Jewish memory, a writer as gifted as Tristan Brodsky could strike a note so utterly wrong, so aggressively out of step with what the morality of these times demands.’”

  She looks up, pushing her glasses against the bridge of her nose.

  “Right,” says Tristan. “I remember.”

  “Would you care to comment on the review?”

  Tristan sighs. “It hurt me deeply. But if Irving Howe—whose parents named him Irving Horenstein, incidentally, and who taught me the breaststroke at the City College pool in 1938, so I could pass the swim test and graduate on time—if Irving finds Manacles inconceivable, that’s Irving’s problem. He wasn’t very kind to Ralph Ellison’s book, either, so at least I’m in good company.”

  “How could you do it?” It’s the front-row kid—standing, shouting, arms raised to his shoulders. His accent is unmistakable. The Bronx is in the house. Out of the corner of his eye, Tristan sees Pendergast stand up, ready for action.

  “What gives you the right, Mr. Brodsky? Do you hate yourself so much? Do you—”

  “Stop right there.” Tristan gives his interrogator a straight arm, an open palm, feels his own heart rate spike and his adrenal glands kick into action. Finally, some outright antagonism. The borough of his birth delivers.

  “Let’s stick with that,” Tristan says, and the boy drops his hands to his hips. “I’ll answer that. The answer is no, I don’t hate myself. No more than I did when I wrote my first two novels anyway, the ones the Jewish reviewers fell all over themselves praising. And let me tell you something. Those books were full to the hilt with stereotypes, New York Jews acting just the way America expects.

  “Now I’ve abandoned the clichés, and the Jews have abandoned me. They want to recognize themselves, not face the truth. Manacles is not some fantasy I generated out of loathing. Jews were involved in the slave racket just like the rest of Europe—but I’m a pariah for writing about it? Bullshit. Excuse my French. This isn’t the time? Says who? My father was the only one of his six brothers to leave Poland. His whole family is gone. My mother’s, too—aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody slaughtered. But I’m a traitor when I suggest that Jews are not always the prey? That they, too, have been slave masters and killers?

  “Am I wrong? Nobody said I was wrong. Just that I’m self-hating—an adjective that rolls so easily into Jew that it seems built to modify it. But how can we understand evil if we can’t recognize it in ourselves? Why do the Jews applaud me when I’m exploiting and exposing their weaknesses—when my fiction is nothing more than a crude account of the experiences of a kid from the shtetl—then turn around and stone me when I train an eye on history’s greatest cruelty?

  “Can the Jews only recognize themselves in caricature? Why are we so comfortable reduced to vaudeville? You know who was filling up those theaters for the first quarter of this century, laughing their asses off at the scheming Jewish miser, the hook-nosed buffoon with the face full of putty and the too-small cap and the absurd Yiddish accent? Who do you think bought the sheet music to ‘Yonkle The Cow-Boy Jew’ and ‘When Mose With His Nose Leads The Band,’ and had family sing-alongs around the piano? Jews! Who else? The same people who wrote the jokes and played the parts. Jews laughing at Jews, so they could feel less like Jews! They should thank me—I made them feel like Nazis!”

  An hour later, Tristan pulls the car door shut, rolls his neck until it cracks, and palms his forehead. “Fuck.”

  Amalia starts the engine. “It can’t
always be like that.”

  “Yes. Yes it can.”

  She consults the slip of paper on which Peter’s wife, Judy, has drawn a map to the restaurant, then shifts into drive. “Admit it—part of you loves standing up there, battling it out. I get an ulcer just watching, but you, you’re like a—”

  Amalia glances over, and to her surprise finds her husband’s head thrown back, his jaw trembling.

  “Honey! What is it?”

  Tristan takes a deep breath, and when he exhales, it is slow, controlled. He pinches the bridge of his nose, leans toward her until his head rests awkwardly against her shoulder. “I’m just tired. I mean, what can I say, Amalia? I wasn’t at the death camps. I don’t even know anyone who died—not personally. I’m sure I’ll never write about it. It’s as abstract and incomprehensible to me as it is to any American.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  Tristan pulls himself upright. “Well, it’s no less abstract and incomprehensible to me than the Middle Passage. They’ll never forgive me for that. And you know what? I don’t want to make sense of it.”

  They sit quietly for a moment as Amalia pulls out onto Massachusetts Ave.

  “I saw you talking to that boy who yelled at you. What did he say?”

  Tristan snorts. “Asked me to sign his book.”

  “He didn’t. Manacles?”

  “God no. Angel.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Sure, kid, who do I make it out to?’ And then I wrote, ‘Dear Joshua, learn some fucking manners.’”

  “You did not.”

  They make a few quick turns, and then Amalia parks outside a large brick building, the words Abruzzi Brothers Family Style Italian stenciled on the window. “I met a fan,” she says. “A Radcliffe woman.”

  “At least I had one.”

  “No, Tristan, a fan of mine. She said she’d come hoping I’d be there. She was very sweet. Asked if I’d ever considered teaching.”

  “You’d be great. I’ve told you that.”

  “Maybe when Linda starts school I’ll look for something.” She opens the back door, unstraps the baby.

  Tristan takes Amalia’s hand as they walk toward the restaurant, up a slate path lined with parched, shriveling geraniums in pots.

  “Usually, someone asks me what it’s like to be married to another writer,” he tells her. “Whether we’re competitive, whether we read each other’s drafts, whether we talk about anything but writing.”

  “And what do you say?”

  He wraps an arm around her waist. “That I’m a lucky bastard, and my wife is brilliant. And extremely patient.”

  “And taught you to say ‘Where’s the joy?’ to people.”

  Tristan smirks. “Yes.”

  “Even if you don’t know what it means, because all you do is work.”

  “Yes.”

  She shifts Linda to her other arm and elbows him in the ribs. Tristan plays stoic, attempts a thousand-yard stare but gets only as far as the Abruzzi Brothers’ door, five feet away. He holds it open for his wife and child, follows them inside.

  The next morning, Tristan and Amalia entrust their daughter to the care of Peter and Judy’s baby-sitter, a grandmotherly type whose easy, take-charge manner with Linda makes Amalia feel superfluous and amateur. The two couples clamber aboard the Pendergasts’ station wagon and drive to their country club to play golf. Amalia grew up with the game; she taught it to Tristan after the move to Connecticut, overcoming his objections to learning a leisure-class pastime by promising him he’d excel at it—reasoning that anyone who can lay a broom handle to a pink rubber orb whipped at him from forty feet away can surely hit a helpless white ball off a tee.

  The day is warm and breezy, and Amalia breathes in the scent of her own sun-warmed skin, admires the rolling green landscape, does what she can to ignore the lingering aftertastes of last night’s garlic-drenched shrimp scampi and today’s early-morning conversation with her husband. Strips of sunlight started slanting through the blinds of the Pendergasts’ chaste little doily-filled guest room at dawn, waking them far in advance of Linda’s warbles, the waft of Judy’s weak coffee, the off-to-school prattle of Caroline, Marjorie, and Pete Junior. Tristan and Amalia lay in their matching twin beds, whispering across the shared night table, and he rubbed the hangover out of his eyes and asked her if he was a hypocrite for continuing to accept Peter’s patronage.

  If there is anything her husband hates, it is having his ambitions pitted against his conscience. Amalia told him not to worry, that his opinion of Pendergast’s writing was immaterial. Now—as Peter struts across the manicured lawns of his natural habitat, bragging that he is “ruffling the feathers of these blue-blooded Harvard bastards” by championing Negro and Jewish men of letters and proclaiming gleefully that the Boston Brahmins are shitting themselves to find one of their own shouldering open the doors of access—Amalia can see she failed to fully understand the question. By virtue of marrying her, Tristan is as wealthy as Peter, and by his own merits he’s already surpassed the older man as a writer. But there are rich Jews and then there are Brahmins, and as Amalia considers the graying, handsome patrician who is her husband’s benefactor, she begins to wonder if Peter’s goal in fighting for the social upliftment of a Jew like Tristan is to reinforce the differences between them.

  By the time the Brodskys and the Pendergasts tee up at the fifth hole, another foursome is already putting on the fourth. Peter and Judy take their swings, and as Tristan is sliding his driver from his bag, the other group pulls even.

  Three of them are silver-haired, the fourth younger and leaner, with the glint-eyed look of an ambitious son-in-law. Hanging from each of them, slung across the shoulders like a golf sweater, is an aura of fantastic privilege. Even before she hears their last names, Amalia knows she’s face-to-face with Brahmins among Brahmins, men whose forebears leapt off the Pilgrim ships and into the frigid knee-deep Atlantic, charged onto the New World’s salt-caked shore and claimed the continent. These are the men who own the companies that publish books, the men who decide whether newspapers will deign to review them and if colleges will hire the kinds of teachers inclined to assign them to their students.

  Pendergast makes introductions all around. Amalia listens for a bit of defiance in his pronunciation of the name Brodsky, a bit of pride. She looks for a twinge of surprise, ineptly concealed, darting across the faces of the men who shake Tristan’s hand. But men like these are not so obvious. Or perhaps they don’t give a shit, don’t take such things into consideration any more than the Captains of Industry with whom she spent half her adolescence bantering in her parents’ living room.

  These men, like those, are impeccably friendly, standing here with their hands pocketed and their spiked shoes gripping the soft manicured earth. They inquire as to Tristan’s line of work—not hers, naturally; she’s used to that—but in the most perfunctory manner, as if to say, Yes, yes, of course you must be very good at whatever you do, but what does it matter, really? After all, here we are on a Wednesday morning, golfing! It’s refreshing and familiar, this disregard of professions, makes Amalia simultaneously aware of how seldom work was mentioned in her parents’ circles and how ceaselessly she and Tristan and their friends go on about it.

  She looks over at her husband. He doesn’t get it; he’s waiting for a follow-up question that will not come: What do you write? Anything I might have read? It’s been a long time since he’s met people who are not impressed with him, or at least angry.

  Soon the chitchat lulls and it is Tristan’s turn to drive the ball. He walks three paces to his tee.

  “Looks like a real golfer,” the silver-haired gent closest to Amalia says. She’s just near enough to smell his aftershave. It’s subtle and spicy, clean, a perfect scent for a man his age. She wonders who bought it for him, his wife or his daughter. Tristan, in the entire time she’s known him, has never worn aftershave, cologne. She resolves to get him some, and just as quick
ly acknowledges that he would never use it.

  “Show us how it’s done, old man,” the Brahmin calls, and winks at Amalia. She winks back.

  Tristan smiles over his shoulder, balances himself, and swings. He misses the ball completely, uprooting a clod of perfect grass and spraying luscious nutrient-rich dirt into the wind. He hauls off again and sends the gleaming, dimpled thing bouncing along the fairway. It comes to rest seventy-something yards away, far short even of Judy’s shot.

  Tristan flips his club in the air, catches the neck in his fist, and turns to walk back toward them, face red with exasperation. Get me out of here, his eyes seem to say. Get me out of here. I don’t belong.

  Amalia knows she must do something, cover for him somehow. Before she can think, her comfort and discomfort have collaborated on a response.

  “My husband is usually an excellent driver,” she hears herself say. “You gentlemen must intimidate him.”

  They chuckle. The young one says something about golf being a hell of a frustrating game. Tristan cracks a fake smile, grinds his teeth as he jams the driver back into the bag. Amalia walks over, wraps her arms around his waist, gives a jokey little tug, and looks up into his eyes. He stares down at her with a coldness so cutting and so private that Amalia feels her whole body go numb.

  She stumbles through the rest of the morning, looking for an opportunity to apologize. He grants none, speaks to her only as much as necessary to maintain appearances. She tries to catch his eye, but when she finally does, Tristan gives her a look of such rage that she drops her gaze, cowed.

  His game rebounds on the next hole, as soon as the Brahmins are out of sight. Amalia’s falls apart so completely that she has to invent a stomachache to account for herself. The Pendergasts fuss over her, ask if she’d like some water, some shade, and their concern only makes Amalia feel her husband’s anger more acutely. By the time they’re back in Peter’s car, the ailment is no longer a fabrication. Dread blooms in her like some dark flower as Amalia stuffs their things into the suitcase, strips the sheets from the beds in which they slept, breast-feeds her daughter.