You or Someone Like You

by Chandler Burr

  Sam pats his pocket to make sure the ticket and passport are there. He looks at his father. He says, “Why are you proud of me?” Howard—if he is conscious of the slightly peculiar tone in Sam’s voice, he does not show it—explains that mothers feel love for their sons, but fathers feel pride.

  A PRODUCER NAMED MARK SIEGAL takes me to lunch. He asks have I ever thought about producing. “I mean,” he says, “your literary judgment, combined with our expertise: an incredible combination.”

  I put down my fork. Mark. I was under the strict impression we were to talk about Joyce.

  He nods. “Exactly. Let’s talk about Joyce.”

  Not about turning him into a movie, I say.

  “Why not?”

  Oh! He’s so…What can one say? Not filmic. I start to give examples, bits and pieces of Joyce from here and there, which is how Joyce sticks to your mind, and he says, “There! You just made your first producing decision. No Joyce.”

  I attend to my tomatoes.

  “Look, all’s I’m saying,” he says, “is concept this as a natural extension of your talents. This is what you do.”

  This is not what I do.

  “But it should be what you do.” He talks about his new production company, West 85th Street Films. What they had in development.

  And then he mentions a figure. It is quite a figure. One has to wonder: How did he arrive at it? How many people had worked to come up with all these zeroes? He talks about books and stories. He talks about my name on the screen. Anne Rosenbaum. Except that it is Howard’s name, I say. (For some reason, the idea of seeing it as a credit makes me voice this. It seems important, suddenly.) My name, I say, is Hammersmith.

  “Oh,” says Mark. “But your name now.”

  Well, I say. My name—now—is Rosenbaum.

  “Well then,” he says, and smiles.

  It is just before I turn to walk to my car that I mention the screenplay. I’ve only skimmed it, once, I say, but it seemed very interesting.

  Mark says, I’ll send a messenger, and then, How do you spell this guy’s last name?

  Capital M, c, capital M a h o n. First name Paul.

  IN MY OFFICE AT HOME, I put down Paul’s screenplay and take off my reading glasses. I think it is very good, but I haven’t read a screenplay in years, so I go to Howard’s office and select a few from his shelves. I read them over. Yes, Paul’s is at least this good. I make a copy of the script and put it in an envelope and tell Justin that Mark Siegal of West 85th Street Films is sending a messenger.

  “Got it,” he says.

  One moment, I say, I’m going to write a note to go with it. I’m recommending this quite strongly. (I bend over my pen, avoid Justin’s intensely interested look.)

  That evening in the shower I find myself involuntarily thinking about Paul’s script again.

  Waking up I have what Howard would call a strong visual for the last scene. I give him the gist. I put a copy in your office, I say. Have you looked at it yet?

  “Not yet.”

  Howard, I think it’s actually quite good.

  “Listen,” he begins gently, “it’s not really something I’d take on.”

  I know, I say, cutting him off, I just want your opinion. I tell him briefly about sending it to Siegal, about West 85th Street Films, their interest in my (I have to make myself say it) producing for them. It’s just talk, I say.

  “Huh,” says Howard after a moment. His tone seems vague and ambivalent, but perhaps I’m imagining this?

  I just—well, I suppose I just want you to tell me I’m not crazy. For liking it.

  And (I add) if you were to like it, well, you might do something with it, right? You might talk to the writer…

  He has put his hand on mine. I’m receiving his “you are utterly transparent” smile. “OK.” He squeezes my hand, sits up in bed, and says “Bleh” very cheerfully to the beautiful morning.

  SAM HAS BEEN GONE TWO weeks, and at Arrivals, the flight from Tel Aviv having touched down almost half an hour early, Howard hugged and kissed his son. “Christ, I still can’t believe you’re as tall as I am.” Deposited the dusty backpack in the trunk and himself in the driver’s seat, glanced at Sam, who had already buckled his seat belt. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, Dad!”

  So Howard held on to the steering wheel for a moment. “Seriously,” said Howard gently. “Sam-o?”

  Seriously, he was fine, he said to the ozone.

  “Meet any girls?”

  No. And then the boy asked: Was Howard hungry? He, Sam, was totally starving, they never fed you enough, it was lunchtime, right? Could they eat?

  “Sure we can eat,” said Howard carefully.

  Two days later, Sam and I were driving to the studio for a screening he wanted to attend. Holding the wheel with both hands, Sam said to me, “Before you got married, did you ever talk to Dad about the Law of Return?”

  I’d been reading. I stopped. I looked up at the traffic on Ventura. Cursorily, I said.

  His eyes are fixed on the blue truck before him. He says nothing more.

  The pieces of the story arrive from various sources. I collect them, fit each in its place.

  He gets off the plane in Tel Aviv and heads immediately for Eilat, where he meets two American friends from L.A., Josh Weinberg and Ben Talat, at Josh’s parents’ vacation home. After three days of sun, he surprises everyone by announcing that he is leaving to wander the country. On the bus up to Jerusalem he happens to sit next to a girl with very curly black hair from La Jolla. The girl invites him to visit her moshav family on Moshav Amqa, up in Galilee, so he goes with her. It’s a conservative moshav, completely kosher, not like the kibbutzes Howard and I knew. He stays three nights, picking avocados, then thanks the family, clips the blue-and-white kippa they’ve given him in his hair, and leaves.

  Why the kippa? Well, it makes him feel different. He is now Sam Rosenbaum with a kippa on his head. He is tentatively trying out an identity. Israelis treat him, subtly, differently. Larry Talat got this intelligence from Ben, who’d got it post facto from Sam. His trajectory at this point seems random. He is in Haifa for a day, then moves down to Tel Aviv, then a lateral shift over to Jerusalem, where he checks into a cheap pension and disappears into the Jewish quarter. Gone to ground. He is off the radar.

  He resurfaces one evening before the Western Wall, which is filled with people and their tortured trembling. Two things happen there. The first is an altercation. Two Norwegian couples, like four gentle blond giraffes, arrive like any other tourists. Their presence at the Wall provokes a religious Jew, not a black-hat but a black velvet kippa, and he begins screaming at them hysterically: “Ani kadosh! Ani kadosh!” This is translated in real time for Sam by an older English man he happens to be standing next to; the Englishman—he is perhaps some sort of Oxbridge scholar—with distaste at the intolerant outburst, says to his wife, “It means, ‘I am holy, I am holy.’” Before several thousand people, the religious Jew mimes ostentatiously to the Norwegian Gentiles that their presence dirties the purity of this place. He motions to them with disgust, Go! Go! They lope away disconcertedly, murmuring in Norwegian.

  The second thing is that around ten minutes later he is approached by a young, shortish man of indeterminate age. Wispy beard, a little overweight, white-and-blue knit kippa. The young man asks him: Are you Jewish?

  Now, Samuel Rosenbaum is seventeen years old. And he says, “Yes, I’m Jewish.”

  And the man, in a thick Israeli accent, recites (it is a set text that he repeats hundreds of times a day, and he delivers it perfunctorily but with force), “In that case, would you like to learn about your heritage and your past? Would you like to understand who you really are?”

  And Samuel Rosenbaum says sure, he would like to understand who he really is. It is a crystalline evening under a blue sky, and they are before the Western Wall.

  The next morning
he climbs, in the predawn dark and shivering, into a white van and sees five other young men sitting there, looking at him. One from Sweden, one from Spain, one Italian, and one Portuguese. The fifth is from San Diego. Each had been at the Wall the previous evening, alone, and to the same two questions each had answered “Yes.”

  They are driven very, very fast, the way the religious drive, through Jerusalem and find themselves at a yeshiva. It is, behind its nondescript wall, large and white and clean and self-contained. Judith Weinberg puts together what she can extract from Josh and gives me her guess as to which yeshiva it is, along with a sympathetic look; “They’re pretty hard-core,” she says. They are taught some elemen tary prayers (Sam squints at the English translations of the Hebrew) and at 6:30 A.M. are given a kosher breakfast—it is explained that the breakfast is kosher, exactly how it is kosher, and why they as Jews should keep kosher. He is sent to classes. He tries. He is game. He feels, for example, a moment of true excitement when an intense, intellectual young man from South Africa with a knit kippa recounts to them his personal journey to observance. He tells them that his engineering training was remarkably easy to use in Israel when he made aliyah (it means “to go up” in Hebrew and denotes becoming an Israeli citizen; he makes sure they know this). There are jobs and a place for everyone.

  At noon they send him to lunch, where he is fed kosher sandwiches—they explain what makes them kosher and why it is important for Jews to keep kosher. He sits next to the boy from San Diego. They talk about California, what’re the best sandals, hybrids versus hydrogen, the pluses and minuses of the Arclight cinema. The boy mentions that he’s Russian Jewish. Sam says that Oh, yeah, he’s Russian Jewish, too, on his father’s side. And English and Scottish on his mother’s. The boy says, Yeah? Wow, because there aren’t that many Scottish Jews, and Sam explains that they’re not Jews, they’re Scottish. Anglican. It is a moment before he notices that the boy’s face has shut down. In fact it is drained of color. The boy gets up, leaves. Sam, chewing his kosher sandwich, looks around the lunchroom and wonders if the kid is OK.

  That is when two large Israeli men appear on either side of him. They motion, no words. Leave the sandwich. He puts it down. Follow them. Sam obeys. They enter the office of the yeshiva’s head rabbi, a somewhat portly, thirtysomething Australian Jew with a dark blond beard. The two large men take up positions on either side of the door. Sit. So, the rabbi asks Sam, where has he traveled? He’s a long-term backpacker? No, Sam says cautiously, this is just, you know, two weeks. Spring break. He glances behind him at the men.

  The next detail is given to me by Jennifer. She looks down at my driveway as she repeats what Sam told her. He had shown up unexpectedly the previous day just before her lunch break—she’d been delighted to see him—they had hung out on the studio lot in the shade of some trees. She starts by saying that he hadn’t formally sworn her to secrecy.

  I nod, acknowledging what this means. It’s OK, I tell her.

  Well, says the rabbi, looks at his watch for the fourth time, you really should get this book—he names it—fantastic, tells you where to find kosher food from the Ivory Coast to Thailand.

  Why? asks Sam, looking back from the men to the rabbi. Why get the book? (The menace in the room is both frightening him and making him combative.)

  The rabbi leans forward. So you can eat.

  Sam had said to Jennifer that, weirdly enough, that had been the biggest shock of all to that point. What had been? she asked Sam, confused. It controls everything, said Sam. Like, if you don’t have this book you can’t eat. Presumably you—what?—starve? With food all around? Food perfectly good for everyone else, says Sam.

  Jennifer mentions to me that she has already recounted this story to Howard. It seemed to her that Howard buckled slightly, but he’d had no reaction. And anyway they had a 2:00 P.M. in a few minutes. A potential new Pixar project.

  The rabbi looks at his watch for the fifth time, and as he glances up again, Sam can see that his demeanor has transformed. You deceived us, he says to Sam, you told us you were Jewish, and you are not. You have caused us to sin: The Talmud prohibits teaching Torah to non-Jews. You are a traitor and a thief, and you pollute our yeshiva. He goes on for a while. It is unclear if the two big men understand any of this. (Somewhere in the middle of this icy tirade, Sam recalls hearing that if your mother is not racially Jewish, you’re not racially Jewish. He remembers, as if for the first time, which is bizarre, the comments his grandmother made. He considers, as if for the first time, his mother’s unexplained disappearance from seders and his father’s determinedly cheerful silence and the fizzing, irritating interpersonal static like on a TV screen. Even as his mind is overloading, it’s assembling data, putting the pieces together backward.) You are trefe, says the rabbi. You are unclean. You are impure. You are not a Jew. (He seeks to be clear on this point.) Understand that you are not a Jew. (Sam looks at him.) Your father has been part of the destruction of the Jewish people. Get out of this yeshiva, get out of Jerusalem, get out of Israel, and never come back.

  Sam, moving now because he is propelled by the two large Israelis on either side of him toward the exit, turns for some reason to ask—again—about his father. Oh, says the rabbi, his Australian accent chipper now and seemingly unfazed by the shift in his position, your father should definitely make aliyah because there will always be another anti-Jewish genocide. He should be with his own people.

  The two men march him out of the office. Sam sees now that the lunchroom has just emptied. It is the only passage to the street, so the business with the watch was timing, to avoid anyone’s coming in contact with him. (And he then realizes that the boy from La Jolla turned him in to the authorities. He marvels for a second at the swiftness of the boy’s instinctive reaction: Discover the impurity; eliminate the impurity.) They open the door and wait, wordless, for him to exit blinking into an empty inferno of sunlight. He takes a step into the street. Then the other foot. He hears the door slam behind him. He’s alone before a tall white wall. He’s squinting into this blinding vacuum, and he can’t see anything at all.

  At this point it becomes fuzzy. For an undetermined period he seems to lose a sense of where he is. The people have vanished from the city, and yet he hears voices. The street is packed dust, completely empty, although cars drive past. He must have picked a direction, walked, because after a while he is able to see figures moving about again. He is in a market somewhere. He spends an hour with two teenage girls he meets somehow. They are shopping for scarves, a sweet girl from New Zealand and a snarky one from New York. “Well,” snaps the New Yorker, manhandling the scarves, “we’ve got to choose, we can’t be total Japs about this.” Sam thinks this is sort of funny.

  He goes back to the pension, checks his El Al ticket. His flight leaves the next morning. It is late afternoon. He falls into a very deep sleep.

  AS I FILL HOWARD IN, he stares at nothing. We’re sitting in the garden. Sam is out somewhere. I think in passing that Howard looks older. It must be the light.

  I hesitate. Are you OK?

  He looks at his shoes, a strange look, as if mice were swarming around his feet.

  Howard, did you and I ever discuss Israel’s Law of Return?

  He says in a hard tone, “Why the fuck is Judy Weinberg gossiping about our son.”

  I’m rather astounded. I peer at him. Howard, she’s not “gossiping” about Sam. She’s letting me know what—

  “Never mind,” he says. This time, by contrast, his tone is defeated, wan.

  I wait for clarification. Howard has indicated to me, without giving details yet, that he’s already received some information from his own sources. Since Sam isn’t talking yet, I don’t have the whole story. If, I begin, we—

  “What the fuck did he think he was doing,” Howard asks my garden. It sounds like a plea. For an instant, I’m confused; I assume Howard means Sam. Then it occurs to me that he is being more precise: Howard means Sam’s answering, “Yes, I am Jewish.
”

  Not that I care about Sam’s being Jewish or not. Or what it might mean to whomever. I care about Sam, but I can attend to him later; in the immediate it is Howard’s tone of voice that concerns me, and whatever is behind it, and I start by putting my hand gently on his shoulder and saying, “Howard,” but he moves away from my hand, gets up suddenly and, very fast, walks away from me toward the house.

  When I come in—I have spent a few moments in vague nothing—I see Howard on the phone. He is talking to his brother. I can tell this instantly by his tone and his expression. He stops talking when he sees me, and we look at each other. Then he says, “Stu wants to say hi.”

  He holds out the phone.

  Hello, Stuart.

  “Anne.” Stuart talks a bit.

  You sound distracted, I say.

  “Nah,” says Stuart. “Nah.”

  So when are you coming out to see us?

  Afterward I ask Howard what he and Stuart had been talking about.

  “Just stuff,” says Howard, frowning at his hand.

  SAM EXPLAINED HIS CONCLUSION TO me (apropos of absolutely nothing; it’s nothing, nothing, nothing from them, Signal Unavailable, and then all of a sudden one evening they’re standing in the kitchen as you’re chopping ingredients for the salad, vehemently expressing their thoughts as you try to hide your surprise). The thing was, he said, if you really, you know, want to maintain this crap (he meant “if you want to perpetuate a tribe of people separate and distinct from all other people”), then you have to do this to other human beings. You, like, have to! (His voice was straining upward.) To look at all the people who aren’t in your club this way and stuff. This totally extreme in-group, out-group social organization, all the fucking ethnocentric differentiation and the primitive identity cueing, and the—the theological-slash-morality that, you know (he gesticulates, searching among things he has heard in classrooms for a verb), undergirds it all philosophically. And you shore it up with this insane crap about what dishes you have to eat off or whatever and pretend that the Thing that created the universe seriously cares about your dishes. But it’s all just about keeping your guys separate from everyone else’s guys, because your guys are more—he gestured vaguely at the window—valuable to God or whatever.