by W. E. Gutman
“Never,” I replied, breaking a leaden silence. “We are the Chosen People.” My father, who caught the bitter irony of my words, smiled and poured himself another jigger of brandy. My mother looked at me, a grown man, as she always had, like a hen admiring her newly hatched chick. It was a look that had caused me great embarrassment as a boy but in whose reassuring tenderness I now basked.
TWO
I slept a deep and dreamless sleep and awoke late, the lingering scent of yesterdays’ banquet still wafting in the air.
My parents and I had retreated to the den after dinner. We chatted long into the night, catching up on the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the ridiculous: politics; the economy; the staggering cost of war; family gossip; life then and now; my plans for the future.
I recounted how pre-election fever had been sweeping Yesod, how stupidity, chauvinism and intellectual torpor guided would-be voters, not acumen or sagacity, how yet another regional “conflict” was looming, this time too close for comfort and threatening to consume contiguous states. One by one, I remarked, major industrial nations, enfeebled by hyperinflation, soaring national debts, double-digit unemployment and social unrest, teetered on the brink of anarchy.
My parents, who had once shipped me halfway around the world so I could evade conscription and near-certain death in a bloody war, offered words of reassurance.
“Well, it’s all behind you now,” said my father. I could always count on him to look on the bright side, even in the gloomiest of times.
“Not to mention that Ein Sof is nothing like Yesod,” added my mother.
Both had sighed, a wistful look etched on their loving faces.
“So, are you here to stay?” asked my mother, a trace of good-natured sarcasm lifting one quizzical eyebrow.
“Time will tell, mama, time will tell.”
“Oh, leave him alone,” chided my father. “He just got here.”
“I’ve no plans to go anywhere for the moment,” I interjected quickly, mindful not to create a situation. I can’t swear I meant what I said.
*
The family compound was abuzz with activity. My mother was fixing breakfast. My father was scanning the Ein Sof Times. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin played softly in the background. Uncle Lazar, the one who had relieved his mouser, Fékété, of his duties after a dozen years of faithful service and built it a cozy retirement crate, fed a black and white kitten. I remember when the eccentric Lazar gave a speech, praising Fékété for his tireless loyalty to feline duty and introducing him to his understudy, Orozlán. Orozlán, it turned out, played with his quarries and the mouse population that year exploded out of control. Fékété had to be called out of retirement until a more industrious killer could be finally put to work.
Lazar’s wife, Helen, who had once offered me a child-sized shirt because her memory of me was that of a lad twenty years younger, boiled a bushel of apples in a big copper vat. Helen’s apple marmalade was legend. As was her crude sense of humor. A gifted blasphemer equipped with a rich lexicon of profanities, Helen thought nothing of lifting her skirts, showing her behind and spewing a barrage of obscenities at anyone who disagreed with her oracular opinions.
Sam, my father’s uncle, the one who denied visiting relatives so much as a glass of water but invited vagabonds to his dinner table, quarreled with his wife, the acrimonious Meema, over some minor peccadillo. The old couple, mismatched from the start, shared a lifetime of rancor and antagonism, Meema the casualty of latent schizophrenia, her husband Sam -- Schmiel to the family -- given to anti-social eccentricities that alienated all but the most tolerant kin. How the two managed to produce two sons was, for many years, the source of scabrous banter.
Those who did not know Meema admired what they perceived to be a kind of heroic stoicism in her rigidity. But her pinched lips, furtive glances and calculated irascibility betrayed meanness beyond pathology. My father, who would be neither fooled by the sham solemnity of her demeanor nor tolerant of her frequent outbursts, had once told me that “Meema” was a bitter, ill-tempered shrew even as a young woman.
“She alienated everyone she met and devoured her husband from the moment they tied the knot. No one could stand her. Efforts to dissuade Sam from marrying her fell on deaf ears. We’ve all been wondering what he could possibly have seen in this fire-breathing monster.”
My father would express the same qualms when I married my first wife.
Wearing a pince-nez, a bushy mustache adorning his upper lip, my maternal grandfather, a noted poet, journalist, jurist and Teddy Roosevelt look-alike, cleaned his pistol, the very one he had used to kill the man who had challenged him to a duel. The duel, the culmination of months of invectives and counteroffensives dutifully reported in the press, earned my grandfather, who had never held a gun, let alone fired one, what many considered a slap on the wrist. Reluctantly prosecuted by a sympathetic magistrate -- his challenger was unpopular, a seasoned duelist and a marksman -- my grandfather was sentenced to six-months in jail. He spent less than thirty days in a comfortable room, next to the warden’s office where he continued to write, entertained family and friends, and ate catered gourmet meals. The remainder of his sentence was reduced to time served and he was released on good behavior. In his day, as in this, men of means and distinction, however reprehensible their crime, rarely faced long prison terms.
I wouldn’t have recognized Uncle Yanosh, one of my father’s cousins, had I not spotted him peeling grapes with a pocket knife and picking bread crumbs from the table cloth with a wet finger -- mannerisms that, I now remembered, I had watched, transfixed, the way one stares at a tic, a protruding nose hair or an unzipped fly. Yanosh’s features seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace, his upper lip curled menacingly, his nostrils flaring as if some foul odor inhabited his space, a scowl conveying both hostility and exasperation etched upon his face. Never far from his reach rose in a neat pile a stack of paper towels. Next to them was a tall glass of water which he fed with maniacal regularity from a carafe his wife was duty-bound to refill. An empty carafe elicited a litany of half-muttered expletives in her direction. Every ten minutes or so, he ripped a few sheets, crumpled them into a ball and dunked them in the glass. He then scrubbed the palm and back of his hands with a vehemence suggesting self-loathing. I called him Lady Macbeth. The skin on his hands had acquired the sickly whiteness and texture of boiled chicken. I imagined him as a boy, engaged in furious masturbation, and conjured scenes of maternal wrath for having “spilt his seed and polluted his hands in the presence of God.” The man had a wretched temper. He invited these unkind fantasies and I found myself disliking him more than the obsessive-compulsive disorder from which he suffered.
Seated across Yanosh, Aunt Mary, cradling two antique dolls in her arms, hummed a wistful lullaby, the same lullaby she had sung every night as she put her baby girls to sleep.
“Schloof, schloof, sheine meidele....”
Her husband (and first cousin) Louis, the elder of two sons Shmiel and Meema had managed to produce, tinkered with a Rube Goldberg-like contraption designed, he claimed, to “stretch time.” A veteran of New Guinea, the Philippines and Okinawa, Louis was intelligent but utterly lacking ambition. He had earned a living pressing ties in a sweatshop in New York’s garment district. He and Mary produced two daughters -- one who was eight, the other, still incubating in her mother’s belly when I first met them. Now in her fifties, my pretty, dreamy-eyed younger cousin had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was thirty or so. I called it “Meema’s revenge.”
Uncle Jan (everybody called him Néné Jan) smoked a Turkish cigarette from a short carved ivory holder, sending aromatic rings to the ceiling as he quoted from Baudelaire, Longfellow, Wilde and other poets. His wife, Tante Yetta, a once-pretty but vacuous woman who adored her husband, listened, her eyes closed, her mouth agape, in beatific amazement.
Abraham, staring in the void, his eyes still set heavenward in pious devotion, sought in mute prayer the a
tonement of sins that he knew could never be expunged. His son Fabian, reliving his life, wept in his hands as he had, years earlier on my father’s shoulder.
I looked at Fabian, replaying his now legendary history in my head. Thirty days after his mother’s death, having complied with tradition by engaging in histrionic displays of mourning, lamentations, breast-beatings and tearful one-way dialogues with God, his father Abraham remarried. His new spouse, a pretty, young woman he had 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 town. When he came home for brief visits he would be fed leftovers and forced to sleep in the attic in the stifling heat of summer and 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,” Fabian kept repeating as he wept,” my father Abraham gave in to his new wife’s frivolity and malice. He never intervened. I was not cast out into the desert, like Ishmael; I was dumped in a barren field where love and tenderness did not grow. I was not offered in sacrifice to God; I was immolated at the altar of indifference.”
*
Stirring from his prayers like a man awakening from a trance, Abraham looked around the large communal room as if in search of a caring pair of eyes into which he could peer, perhaps a silenced voice he could rouse without fear of rejection. Finding me, hesitating at first, he asked, unaware of the incongruity of his question:
“Tell me about the weather back in the old country. Are poppies in bloom? Have the cicadas begun to chirp? Is the air filled with the sweet smell of lavender? Are young maidens dancing at the fair? Are they wearing new ribbons in their hair?”
Everyone froze as if immobilized by some invisible force. All eyes turned on me.
“I’m so sorry, Abraham,” I replied, a vague feeling of pity tugging at my insides. “Powerful storms ripped across the Yesod valley shortly before I left, killing a woman and sparking tornado and flood warnings. Winds snapped off trees as if they were toothpicks. Twelve homes were badly damaged, and several roads became impassable. Mudslides added to the devastation. Something to do with ‘global warming,’ you know....”
Grief and disbelief smoldered in Abraham’s eyes.
“But....”
I should have lied. I should have told him what he desperately needed to hear. It would have been a mitzvah, a good deed. Me and my big mouth.
“Enough,” Meema screeched, pointing a menacing finger at me. “You’re not to address Abraham. You hear? No one talks to Abraham. Not a word!”
“Why not?” A hundred pairs of scowling eyes turned on me. My father placed his arm around my shoulder, led me away and whispered, “let it go for now. I’ll tell you later.”
Abraham scanned the room, bitterness etched upon his craggy face. He stiffened, adjusted his prayer shawl, screwed the skullcap on his head and reentered the sacred realm as Rachmaninoff’s Elégie played in the background. Abraham’s supplications turned to lament. His eyes flooded with tears.
I felt like screaming.
THREE
You must be wondering what Ein Sof is like. It’s too early to tell with any certainty. What I can say is that it’s a place like no other I’ve ever known -- strange and vaporous, distant, shrouded in a torpid and soothing insensitivity toward anything that is not Ein Sof. And yet, it’s also exasperatingly familiar, the embodiment of every cookie-cutter township I’d passed through on my way to ever-elusive Shangri-las.
This could be Anytown, Anywhere, the carbon copy of a thousand unremarkable clusters of human habitation thrown together pell-mell and without regard for growth and looming overpopulation. And like all booming outposts, it’s a community so self-absorbed, so utterly indifferent to the rhythms and convulsions that mark the world beyond its gates, that it proclaims itself the center of the universe. Outwardly bucolic and easy-going, inwardly fettered by all the habits and attitudes the transplants brought with them, it’s a realm given to ethnocentricity and religious tribalism. Its denizens are bonded -- or cleaved -- by common ancestry, language, culture and doctrine. Hardened by custom and repetitive ritual rather than encoded bigotry, their brand of elitism appears to be stripped of overt hostility. For the rest, it’s live and let live. Ask the Perpetuals (as Ein Sof’s citizens dub themselves with gargantuan snobbery) why they limit contact with those who are not of their own kind, and they’ll tell you that they’re protecting ancestral mores from outside influences. It’s a feeble argument endlessly repeated and vehemently defended. These are the same people who assert that they can find the answers to all questions by asking as few questions as possible and who, while preaching virtue, claim that virtue cannot be taught. Like humans everywhere, they cultivate specious or illogical arguments to justify their own values while rejecting the equally dogmatic values of their neighbors and compatriots.
Protagoras would have been proud.
Regardless of their race or creed, Perpetuals put a premium on what they call unpretentious living -- plain attire, time-honored cuisine, modesty and temperate language. It would be useless heresy to suggest that what they consider simplicity, humility and temperance might appear to others as ostentation, duplicity and conceit. This perception, were they to acknowledge it, would be blunted by what they would argue is their austerity. Indeed, Perpetuals shun all but indispensable conveniences, among them the telephone. Their aversion for remote voice communications stems from their belief that this “infernal device,” as they describe it, interferes with their quasi-monastic lifestyle, which depends in large part on a conscious separation from worlds and idiosyncrasies that are not their own. The telephone, they insist, brings the “outside” into the home; it intrudes on the privacy and sanctity of the family and interferes with social interaction by eliminating face-to-face, intimate discourse. Naturally, almost everyone has a telephone, suitably hidden from view in some secret alcove and used only in unspecified “extreme emergencies.”
Perpetuals make no effort to convince their neighbors of their right not to be like them. If anything exists, they insist, it can be comprehended only by those who engender it. It’s one way of rationalizing an isolationist existence.
Life, as it were, revolves around the family compound, centering on shared activities reminiscent of the failed communal settlements of the 1960s. Those who don’t conform, can’t be convinced to change their ways or transgress against a member of the clan are snubbed. Like Abraham, they live in a twilight zone of abridged human contact and enforced silence. They can speak out; but no one answers. Ever.
Key concepts that form the core of Ein Sof’s collective ethos include the rejection of pride and arrogance; the cultivation of diffidence, serenity and poise, often interpreted as “submission” or “letting-be,” but perhaps better understood as a reluctance to be considered presumptuous, narcissistic, or overly assertive. Perpetuals greatly value harmony (even if it takes discord to restore it) and adhere to a strict hierarchy. Defiance of established rules, behavior or language perceived to threaten the idyllic uniformity to which Perpetuals aspire, and violation of the pecking order are sternly censured.
The thing Perpetuals fear most is the danger that non-conformists, dissidents and critics pose to the established order. It was not without some reticence and chagrin that my parents, aware if not always supportive of my once eccentric lifestyle and the great polemics my writings had stirred, felt compelled to drive this point home.
“Perpetuals,” my father explained, shrugging his shoulders, “place a high premium on maintaining the unity of the clan. Their ostensible eagerness to submit to codes that impede free will seems at odds with the blatant egoism, distrust and hostility so evident in their daily lives. You may want to take note of this dichotomy.”
“Nor do codes prevent selfishness and vanity from rearing their ugly heads, even in far-flung places like Ein Sof,” my mother added.
�
�Looks like the virtuous always take refuge in paradox,” I ventured.
My father laughed. My mother beamed at the son she had spawned.
Not surprisingly, members of the neighboring clans, all of whom also live in self-reliant autonomous enclaves and are bound by the same social strictures and domestic obligations, treat outsiders with distant civility. They acknowledge each other with frosty reserve; they rarely stop to converse. “Separate but equal” comes to mind.
Equality has never been a guarantor of justice.
*
It took me no time to realize that I was breathing the air of sorcery and fear. No, it wasn’t medieval witchery but the subtler Satanism of homogenized ideas. If legend and tradition and rigid convictions shape the Perpetuals’ thoughts, actions, notion of the cosmos, of God, of an afterlife, then they must also perforce be the cauldron in which simmer all their fears, prejudices and dormant hostilities.
While freedom of thought and speech are tolerated -- up to a point -- freedom of action through radical speech is not. You may utter what you honestly think is true, if you express yourself with a tact bordering on circumspection. Open dissent and rabble-rousing, especially the kind that ignite the imagination and stoke the intellect, are forbidden as they threaten the power base and tend to disrupt the structured unity of the governed. Freedom of conscience, in any literal sense is a luxury that the Perpetuals forfeited in favor of group cohesion and safe, soothing, intellectual inertia.
Their idea of the archetypal clan is that of a monolithic group of related individuals who submit to a system of commandments, decrees, unwritten rules and hazy taboos that generally inhibit the exercise of pure logic. They reject philosophy, which is guided by reason, in favor of faith, which is steered by prophecies, commands, injunctions and strict adherence to traditions lost in the fog of antiquity. It would be futile to suggest that, guided solely by tradition, men will inevitably be led astray. The mere concept of an ethos that rejects or bypasses tradition is unimaginable to them. Or so they claim.
