by Steve Stern
The autopsy was performed by a doctor called in from Haifa for the purpose. He pronounced what most had already assumed: that the young mother had died from a combination of symptoms—insults, said the doctor, to both her nervous and circulatory systems—consistent with the virulent bite of the adder native to that region. It never occurred to anyone that the death might have been due to happenstance, the diagnosis having satisfied all concerned that the Arabs of the district, notorious for employing venomous serpents to get even, were responsible. Given the bad blood over boundary disputes between Tel Elohim and the village of Kafr Qusra, the wonder was that no such homicides had taken place before. The couple of partisans who’d survived the bank debacle, anxious for a chance to redeem themselves, recommended an immediate reprisal which they called upon the Baal Shatikah to lead. Vengeance, they maintained, was the best medicine; it was the only cure for such mortal grief, and also (they insinuated) for the restoration of one’s manly fortitude. But the Baal Shatikah was apparently not of their opinion. Declining both a memorial service and a plot in the newly inaugurated cemetery, Ruby buried Shprintze himself along with a storybook and the infant’s empty sling at the foot of an oleander she’d planted outside the hut. As an afterthought he perforated Abimelech’s heart with his icepick and dropped the dog into the grave beside the girl. Then the UN voted that a people should be allowed to become a nation, and the British began a pullout that left the Jews and Arabs (twins with different fathers) to settle things between themselves. Palestinians prepared to revolt while Arab armies started to mobilize on the borders of what would emerge as the state of Israel. But before the demons could come back to retrieve the boy (for he knew they would return for one of their own), Ruben Karp gathered up his son and took flight across the oceans to a ghetto in Memphis, Tennessee.
“WHEN IGOT THERE,” Ruby’s grandson Bernie read to his girlfriend, “I dumped the kid in the lap of his grandma in her ice cream parlor on North Main Street, and told her I was a murderer. She told me she was a whore. I told her I used to be a Jew.
“‘I said once the same thing to your papa,’ she replied, dandling the fretful pisher whom she’d pacified with a cinnamon stick on her knee, ‘and you know what he told me?’
“‘What?’ I asked.
“He said, ‘I used to be a hunchback.’”
c. 1950 – 2002.
When Julius (né Yudl) Karp was still a child, just beginning to outgrow the crankiness of his coddled infancy, his grandmother Yokey, known in the Pinch as “that ice cream person,” would recite to him his family’s history:
“Yosl King of Cholera from Boibicz, who married Chava Babtcheh, her that died from giving birth to Salo that they called him Frost-bissen”—pausing to catch her wheezy breath—“who married the sharp-tongued Basha Puah who begot in Lodz first the twins Yachneh and Yoyneh, who ran away to Palestine, then me,”—pause—“Jocheved, who begot in America with my poor husband Shmerl your father Ruben Karp, who was in the Yichud a holy terror before he got wed to his wife that was shlangbissen”—pause—“snakebit after already she begot you…”
A mannish creature with her cropped hair and coveralls, her chin whiskers and camelbacked spine, she informed little Julius of what he would have preferred not to know: that there was an umglik, a curse on the Family Karp that goaded them to extreme behavior. But as far back as he could remember, he’d determined that the curse would pass him over, maybe skip a generation, though God forbid it should be visited instead on his children. Not that he believed in curses. For even as a boy Julius Karp was on his way to becoming a forward-looking young man, and as such never saw much percentage in looking back. He grew to forget most of the names in his grandmother’s catalog, just as he tended to forget his grandmother herself though she’d practically raised him. Neither did Julius retain any vivid memories of the apartment that he and his widowed father had shared with the mildly demented Grandma Yokey on a leafy street in midtown Memphis.
He was not an endearing man, Julius’s father, no one would have called him that, but neither was he hard or cruel. Though his features were regular enough, if a bit chapfallen, his short frame solid and well knit, he made little impression on acquaintances and seemed devoid of any passion save his dedication to making a living. So conservative was he in his dress (everything steam-pressed and Sanforized) as to appear almost camouflaged, so self-effacing in his manner that he might have been about to disappear; and although Julius admired and even emulated his father’s industry, there were times when he thought there was something rather calculated about his ordinariness—as if in performing the routine functions of a common merchant he were practicing some dark ritual. After his checkered stint in the Holy Land, he’d returned to the States a widower to raise his son in a less embattled environment. For a time he scooped sundaes in his mother’s vest-pocket parlor, where Jocheved comported herself less like a soda jerk than a necromancer; but when that shop went the way of all the others on North Main Street, Ruben appealed to his uncle Marvin for a job. Though Marvin Karp had never approved of his nephew, the kid (now in his middle thirties) seemed chastened since his return from abroad, and as a favor to Ruben’s mother Marvin took him on in his home appliance emporium, the new embodiment of his old general merchandise relocated from North Main to a shopping plaza out east. The business had always fared well, but owing in part to Ruben’s knack with machinery, which helped secure its reputation for service and dependability, Karp’s Appliance began to outdistance the competition. For while he was never especially personable with the customers, Ruben made himself readily available for installations and spot repairs, and stayed abreast of the latest advances in compact freezers, convection ovens, and blenders. Later, as the aging Marvin began to wean himself from business with a view toward retirement, he allowed Ruben to buy into a partnership; then retiring in earnest, he sold his own share of the establishment to his nephew. Karp’s Appliance Showroom, while it wasn’t quite the institution it would become after Julius took over, prospered under Ruben’s management; it survived the general collapse of the city’s economy following its wholesale abandonment by the white population, whose flight to the hinterlands left the inner city nearly a waste.
When, after a few incurious years of college, Julius accepted his father’s invitation to come to work in the family business, it was clear from the start that the young man had a vocation. His outgoing personality was the antidote to Ruben’s retiring nature, and their clientele responded favorably to his enthusiasm just as they did to the ads and jingles he cooked up, the numerous inventory sales he engineered. He also led the initiative in opening a discount annex that turned out to be nearly as lucrative as the flagship store. At first Julius had looked forward to working alongside his father, anxious to prove his mettle, but Ruben, while commending his son for his go-ahead attitude, remained the same benign but distant presence he’d been throughout the boy’s life. Often the son felt ashamed of his father’s subservience, of how passively he suffered a customer’s unjust complaints, and wondered if his conduct might have less to do with decorum than faintness of heart. That assessment was further confounded by an incident that occurred during the lawless days following the murder of the man that the colored people regarded as a kind of black Moses, when there was rioting and looting all over town. Most of the mayhem was confined to the ghetto neighborhoods, but some of the looters ventured farther afield, if only to prove that nowhere was safe. This was the case on an afternoon when a car skidded into the lot of Karp’s Appliance, its doors slamming shut, and Julius saw his ordinarily neutral father become strangely alert. Then, without explanation, the father hustled his son behind a checkout counter and bade him hunker down beside him, as two men burst into the otherwise empty store.
“Ain’t nobody home,” exclaimed one, and the other, “‘Spose we got to wait on ourself.” There was the sound of metal smashing merchandise, and Julius, who couldn’t remember ever being in such close proximity to his father, sniffed a
bad odor he associated with fear. Presently a flat-nosed man holding a mini-fridge on top of which lay a crowbar, a plastic pick stuck in his woolly hair, peered over the counter. “What we got here?” The other, in dark glasses and cradling a shotgun, came round to see: “Look like a pair of fascist insect.” He stretched the pointy toe of his boot to prod a petrified Julius in the ribs, which was all it took to trigger an action that figured in no order of experience the youth had ever known. For his father was instantly upon the intruder, ignoring his weapon as he pummeled him to the ground, the rifle clattering across the floor as he fell. Then no sooner had he knocked down one than he lit into the other, who was pinned to the spot by the appliance he’d dropped on his foot. Having so savagely dispatched both vandals, Ruben Karp seemed not to know what to do with his leftover rage, and stood over them baying like a berserker, curling and uncurling his fingers as if strangling air, while the men dragged themselves bloodied and groaning from the store. After that the proprietor straightened the creases in his business suit and withdrew into a meekness that exceeded even his former demeanor. Julius, waiting to feel gratitude or awe, felt neither, but regarded his father from that moment with an increased wariness.
For all that, they were good years for Julius Karp, on the strength of which he married and started a family. Whey-faced and lethargic, his Yetta was perhaps not the most disarming girl, but aware that he was no prize himself (though his looks had improved since infancy from unpleasant to only slightly insipid), Julius was content to have found a bride who seemed to think that he would do as well as another. He was also pleased with his well-heeled in-laws, who had thrown in a suburban house to sweeten the deal. After the wedding there followed a prolonged honeymoon period during which husband and wife viewed history unfolding over their parallel TV trays. Together they witnessed a president resign in disgrace, though not before he had deputized the King (that is, Elvis) as an honorary member of the Secret Service. They watched the end of a war and the return home and subsequent death of Elvis Presley, prompting Julius to observe reverentially, “Our city is a place where Kings come to die.” The event made him feel, as he had in his youth, that Memphis was the center of the world. It was around that time that his Grandma Yokey also expired, though Julius was nearly too preoccupied to notice. The old lady had been mostly an embarrassment anyway, what with her androgynous appearance and her maundering about being a container for her dead husband’s soul. As far back as his childhood Julius was mortified to be seen with her in public, though daffyness aside she had managed his father’s accounts with skill. Then her senescence caught up with the papery skin and mole gray hair she’d had for decades, and diagnosed with advanced dementia she was confined until her unminded end to the B’nai B’rith Home near Overton Park.
In the meantime, left alone on Hawthorne Street (from which he’d refused all these years to move, despite deepening pockets and the decay of the neighborhood around him), Ruben Karp surprised his son by accepting his perfunctory offer to occupy the guest bungalow behind Julius’s home. His tastes being simple to the point of austerity, the old man, whose age like his mother’s had exceeded his years, resisted any attempts on the part of his son and daughter-in-law to decorate his quarters, preferring to leave them as ascetically spare as a monk’s cell. There was never any formal announcement of Ruben’s retirement, but one day he simply ceased to show up for work and thereafter devoted his time to no one knew what. So excited was the family in any case over their daughter’s first steps and the recent birth of a son that they practically forgot the old man’s existence. The smell that ultimately led them to his remains—the coroner’s report stated that the old man had effectively starved to death, though Julius never accepted the judgment; hadn’t he always seen to it that the guest house had a well-stocked refrigerator and fully functional kitchen?—took weeks to fumigate. Among his scant belongings they found, on the night-stand beside the bed, an old icepick tucked into a limp ledger whose pages were strewn with a script that resembled an augur’s tossed bones. There was a small shelf of disintegrating Yiddish books that Julius threw out and of course the grisly tenant of the Kelvinator freezer, which his father had transferred from the rear of Karp’s Showroom when he came to live in the little house behind the house on Canary Cove.
Of the latter Julius seldom spared a thought. After all he had a family to raise and his position in the community to consolidate, his televised ad campaigns to manage. It was a good life in which he laid claim to the full complement of middle-class chattels, and wasn’t there also some precept of the Jews that stated that a man was not a man without a wife and children? Though never observant, neither was Julius ashamed of his heritage. Regarding religious attendance as a more or less civic duty, he went to services with his family on the High Holidays. It was important to him that he not be perceived as in any way un-American, an unease that perhaps had its source in his having been born abroad. So while he purchased his annual share of Israel Bonds along with the other members of the Temple Brotherhood, he had no relation to the so-called Jewish homeland; his own place was here in the South, where he belonged to a number of fraternal organizations in whose fund-raising activities he participated with zeal. Much as he desired the renaissance of his ill-starred city, however, Julius thought it just as well that the great world not interfere overmuch in local affairs. That’s why he was relieved when the relic from the deep freeze—notwithstanding the perversity of its defrosting—had adapted to the climate of these interesting times, and that its (his) message, while retaining its spiritual essence, did not contradict the basic values of the marketplace.
Nor had it seemed to upset the status quo when that message was translated into a profitable enterprise from which Julius Karp, as the rabbi’s chief investor and financial consultant, had benefited as well. So much had he profited, in fact, that he’d begun to contemplate selling the Showroom in order to devote himself exclusively to the operations of the New House of Enlightenment. Lately, however, that venture had come under fire from the municipality. Hysterical rumors abounded and a stink had been raised in the editorial pages of The Commercial Appeal, whose bloodhounds demanded full disclosure of New House dealings—which, despite Sanford Grusom’s facility for cooking books, were perfectly aboveboard. Nevertheless, Julius had started to wonder if, in getting involved with the recycled old huckster, he was perhaps in over his head, though his share in the revenues from the New House was simply too great to walk away from. Then there were the fringe benefits, which were hard to define, not the least of them being the tonic, almost joyful attitude that Julius’s association with the rebbe had instilled in his wash-and-wear breast. To say nothing of the peace of mind that Mrs. Karp had found since coming under the rebbe’s influence, in particular his Zen Judaism seminars. Truly, their relationship with Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had opened a compelling new chapter in the annals of the Family Karp.
But now Sandy Grusom, Julius’s trusted accountant, who had taken such an active role in promoting the House of Enlightenment, was seated on the opposite side of his desk advising his boss that the time had come to cut their losses.
“What losses?” Julius wondered, because the proof of the New House’s bullish fortunes was winking at him in fiscal radiance from the computer screen. He swiveled the screen toward Grusom, a droopy-jowled fellow with a torso like an onion bulb, who swiveled it back without looking.
“The losses we’re about to suffer when the shit hits the fan.”
Julius knew his accountant for a cautious man who never spoke out of turn, but still in denial himself, he refused to believe that the rabbi’s marvelous mumbo jumbo had had its day.
A week later the appliance maven was sitting in his office, still turning over the situation in his mind, when there came a knock at the open door. Shoving his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose, he saw in the doorway a slender, high-cheeked girl with particolored bangs like the teeth of a rainbow comb. She was wearing a braided military tunic like someth
ing out of a comic opera, drawing a bead on him with her forefinger as she accused him of being Bernie Karp’s dad.
“Who wants to know?” he replied, wondering what this peculiar young person could have to do with him. Not by nature a suspicious type, however, he softened. “Okay, you got me dead to rights. What can I do for you?”
