The long corner, p.2
The Long Corner, page 2
For my eleventh birthday, she gave me that copy of Cuba for Beginners. Ché, Fidel and Karl in cartoons.
“How are we Jews if we don’t believe in god?” I wanted to know.
“Soli, the Nazis didn’t care what you believed,” my father said.
“So that’s why I’m a Jew? Because the Nazis would have killed me?”
“That’s right, kid.”
“Not so fucking simple, Arthur,” my mother said. “There are other reasons.”
“Like what, Char?”
“It’s our heritage.”
“Are we a race?” I wanted to know.
“No,” my mother said. “Absolutely not.”
“Of course we’re a race,” my father said.
“So, I’m not white?” This was a relief. I was one of about twelve white kids at school and I’d have given anything in those days to be black.
“You’re definitely white,” my mother told me.
“You’re not white,” my father said.
“Really? Can I say that at school?”
“If you want to get your jaw broken, sure,” my mother told me and rolled her eyes at Arthur.
My father said, “You’re Jewish because your parents are Jewish, and theirs before, theirs before that and so on all the way back, all right? And because of that you’ve got a certain disposition, a certain mind. You see?”
“What kind of disposition?”
“Scrappy, funny, depressed, anxious, worried, nervous, tough, nuts, smart. That you even want to know what makes you a Jew makes you a Jew.”
“All Jews are like that?”
“No, Sol, don’t listen to your father.”
“All the Jews I ever met, yes,” my father said. “It comes from our history. We are what we are because of the way we’ve had to live. If you spend thousands of years being murdered and mistrusted, well you’re going to be different than people who spend thousands of years murdering and mistrusting. You see what I mean? Doesn’t have anything to do with whether you believe in God or if you pray or where you pray. When they come knocking, you think they ask if you pray? Fuck no. They have a list, Soli, and if you’re on it, you’re dead. Ask Baba if you don’t believe me. That’s a woman who knows what it means to be a Jew.”
“That’s enough, Art.” My mother couldn’t stand her mother and she couldn’t stand how much Arthur liked her.
“You ask why she calls herself a Jew, Soli. Next time Baba comes to visit, you ask her yourself. Your grandmother was raised to worship music and art and books. She never prayed in her life. What difference did that make?”
“Enough,” my mother said.
The only thing they ever agreed upon was the importance of self-reliance. Any problem I had, I was to handle it myself. A bad teacher, a fight, algebra, a bully, whatever. Even permission slips bothered them. “You’re twelve years old, make your own decisions,” my mother said and taught me to forge her signature. “If you don’t need anybody, kid, then you won’t need anybody,” my father told me.
On the other hand, after he disappeared, it turned out my mother did need somebody, and that was when Baba came to stay.
3
Baba was Karolina Klein, Charlotte’s mother, my grandmother, Lina, who, maybe because she was scrappy, smart, and a little nuts, or maybe because she was lucky, managed, in the winter of 1940 to slip out of Berlin.
In October of that same year, her parents and two sisters were arrested and soon after, in Łódź, loaded into a highly efficient vehicle designed to use its own exhaust to annihilate its passengers. Lina, on the other hand, had gone to see a boy she loved, “a pretty goy painter with emerald eyes,” when the Gestapo stopped by their apartment in Scheunenviertel. And because she was fortunate both in her timing and her beauty, her neighbor, Fritz Kurtz, hid her in his bedroom.
My grandmother used this word, hid, with a grin, raising those mean, black eyebrows, her only physical feature not soft, not light, not gentle, which made her startling, which offset what would otherwise have been an ordinary beauty. They served her as weapons of punctuation, accusation and comedy. When I was a child, I imagined all of her magic existed not in her bright eyes, which were the color of oiled pine, but there in her brows.
Fritz Kurtz hid her in his bed, until she escaped first his clutches and then the only city she’d ever known. From Germany she traveled to France, then to Spain, then to Portugal, eventually arriving alone on a crowded ship at New York harbor. It was the spring of 1941, a few days shy of her sixteenth birthday, and everyone she’d ever loved was dead or missing.
Fifty-eight years later, when I was myself nearly sixteen years old, she left New York for Los Angeles, where she did her best to take the place of my vanished father.
Thanks to Intersections, my mother had by then moved us from a grubby apartment in Playa del Rey, to a slightly bigger, slightly less grubby apartment in Santa Monica. Each of us had our own bedroom, but my grandmother and I shared a bathroom. She was restless, an insomniac, incapable of staying still, and in all hours of the night climbed into my bed, her voice still not yet entirely free of Berlin, offering aphorisms, advice and stories of her life.
When she’d first arrived in New York City, she bounced around the Lower East Side bereft, living with distant cousins, grandparents of old friends, people whose names had been written on scraps of cigarette packets and corners of ticket stubs. In the garment district she organized bins for a man she called “the king of fasteners, emperor of buttons, a dictatorial little fart.”
I loved her for her irreverence, her refusal to modify language or subject for younger company. It was her wildness, her toughness, a perspective and humor that only suffering and abject terror can provide. She had an earned, inimitable quality, a stillness in the eyes. Unlike so many people I knew, who had suffered one terrible trauma or another, she had never gone dead blank, never lost her humor.
She was immune to my procrastinations, booby-traps, tricks and entreaties. She said, “Shut up, Solomon,” and covered my mouth with her hand. “Against a survivor of the Holocaust, you cannot win. So, your father is gone. Poor you. The horrors of your homework? Your desire for ice cream? For sex? All meaningless. Now go to sleep.” She pressed her lips to my forehead. “I love you, little rabbit.”
I loved no one more. I have loved no one more.
After telling the emperor of buttons to go to hell, she took a job serving beer at Vasac Hall.
“Every Friday night after Shabbat services on Norfolk Street, I crossed Houston, walked up Avenue B to Tompkins Square Park, pushed my tits together and served beer and sausages to horny Poles ready for the weekend. You go out, Soli, into the night humming The Song of Solomon, what do you think is going to happen? Your mother won’t ever forgive me for the way I lived. Never. But, I say, fuck her,” she whispered, “I’d had enough of gloom and doom. I was after pleasure. I have always been. I will always be.”
I heard some version of this last bit countless times. She was always for pleasure, for experience, for throwing everything she had in with the untamed and good-hearted. She loved artists and would eventually make her life with them. “I was a satellite, a groupie, a hanger-on, a model, a lover, a muse.”
“Those are pretty words, Solomon,” my mother said, “which all mean whore.”
My grandmother laughed. “Charlotte confuses pleasure with sin.”
I said, “Do you like art, Mom?”
She took a deep breath. I thought she might throw her glass at the wall, but instead, in her calmest, most terrifying voice she said, “If you don’t work, if you have the time, it’s nice to go to a museum, but don’t ever believe, Sol, that your grandmother was any kind of artist.”
“Tell that to the painters I fucked.”
Lina Klein never lost those battles.
Later, after the yelling and the breaking of plates, my grandmother came to find me in my room.
“What artists do,” she whispered, “I mean the real ones, is really the only thing that matters. Turning nothing at all into something beautiful. It is the essence of all wonder. If you grow up and find that you have no talent, Soli, get as close as you can to those who do. It’s the next best thing. It might even be better.”
From the minute she showed up, this is how she spoke to me. She said she loved The Song of Solomon because there was no mention of God. It’s the most subversive text in the Torah, a little erotic poem some brilliant troublemaker slipped in among all the threats and fatherly disappointment. She went to Friday services because she loved that “dirty little song” and because she felt as if she were participating in a practical joke.
“Like a porno replacing a public safety film. The whole thing, Soli, is about sex, you know? The best kind of sex. Between unmarried people! Regular sex. Oral sex.” And, she leaned in, raising those eyebrows of hers, and whispered, “one of them has dark skin, the other light. His thing is sweet as fruit, hers a garden of pomegranates. Pomegranates that need to be eaten! Their lips are honey and milk! Never shy away from sex, Sol. No matter what your mother says. Any chance you get, any variety you find, the stranger the better. There are two paths to joy—art and fucking.”
And so, there we were in the summer of 1998, the three of us in a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment in Santa Monica, California. It was the summer of my father’s disappearance and the beginning of my mother’s slow, surprising transformation from Marxist-Leftist-Democrat to passionate Zionist and fervent supporter of the Israeli ultra-right.
“It’s your mother’s second adolescence,” my grandmother whispered to me after a particularly nasty fight. “Don’t worry. It’s all to spite me, but you just can’t out-Jew a Holocaust survivor.”
“Oh, it’s not like you survived the camps!” my mother said many times. But even this did not appear to disturb my unflappable grandmother.
Why did Charlotte hate her mother so much? Because Lina Klein knew my mother’s father for about as long as it took to make my mother. Because she was beautiful, and my mother was not. Because she was unbearably lucky (aside, of course, from the small detail of her family being murdered, etc.). Because she was blithe and brave, bright and bawdy. Because she rejected a tedious moralism that my mother could not live without.
“And when a girl’s mother is a bohemian free spirit, a hedonist, a little Lower East Side slut, King Solomon, well, then that girl grows up to have an asshole tight enough to crap diamonds. What can you do?” said Lina Klein to her sixteen-year-old grandson as they lay in bed together watching the dusty ceiling fan knock shadows around.
For three years, this was the woman with whom I shared a bathroom. The woman whose voice I heard both over the phone and in my mind as I lay awake those cold nights after my encounter with Plume, in the long, grim days leading up to the presidential inauguration, while Charity lay dead-still at my side dreaming of profits and purity.
In July of the first year of the new millennium the matriarchs Klein delivered me to LAX. My grandmother hugged me tight to her slight frame and said, “Solomon rabbit, you go enjoy yourself. Don’t take any of it seriously. Pleasure above all. You’ll never ever look back and wish you’d had less sex. More than anything, though, don’t become a prick at that fancy school.”
With this, she kissed me hard on the forehead, her favorite gesture of benediction, and climbed back into the passenger seat.
Only then did my mother get out to put her hands on my shoulders, look me straight in the eyes and say, “Sol, whatever you do, it’s got to be for more than yourself. You have to do something for others, for the world. You have to. As you know, I’d prefer you act for Israel, but whatever you choose to do, it’s got to be for more than money, for more than comfort, all right? That’s all I ask. To hell with comfort, that queen bitch. Change the world for the better a little bit, okay? And don’t go joining a goddamned ashram.”
They drove off then, my mother’s eyes on the road, Baba’s on me, both her arms extended out the window. “Pleasure, Solomon, pleasure!” she sang.
And with that, I flew east.
I expected my grandmother would soon leave Los Angeles to abandon my humorless mother and her awful new politics, to return to New York and her beloved apartment on the Lower East Side, which she’d purchased, pregnant, in 1951 with the “participation” of my grandfather, weeks before he faded into the crowd. Just another handsome hustler I’d never know.
If my grandmother is to be believed, regarding both the apartment and the man, she regretted nothing. “One of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life, Soli. If a beautiful man wants to provide you both unspeakable pleasure and three bedrooms three floors up on Orchard Street, with so much sunlight streaming in, what kind of jerk wouldn’t take it? What? I’d be better off married? Marriage is for deluded bores.”
“You notice, Sol,” my mother said, “she makes no mention of the child he gave her.”
“Nothing’s for free,” my grandmother said and grinned at me.
“You’re disgusting!” my mother screamed.
And so it went.
Each year I came home from college expecting peace, a slight thawing at least, but no. They were like an ill-paired couple who couldn’t muster enough energy for divorce. My grandmother stayed. My mother let her.
Even after September 11, when my mother really lost her mind, they remained housemates.
By the time I graduated from college, tensions between them were as high as they’d ever been. They flew back east to see me collect my diploma. All through those days, Charlotte made clear that it would no longer do for me to simply live a righteous, selfless life. Now I must devote it to the good of Israel. As the ancient “master plan” theories began to swirl and gather new force, joining together anti-Semites from all camps to make the same old simple argument (the Jews did it), my mother’s attitude was just as simple: the world at large could get fucked.
Lina Klein on the other hand, was uncharacteristically quiet. I thought, at long last she’d lost the energy to fight. And who could blame her? There’s nothing more boring than arguing with a zealot. Still, her silence worried me. I knew by then that the battles my grandmother waged against her daughter were only expressions of her war against orthodoxies of every stripe.
On the morning before they were to fly back, Baba took me to breakfast.
“Soon I’ll be eighty years old, Solomon.”
“So?”
“So that’s a very long time to hang around.”
“Do you feel okay?”
“Since when do you ask such questions?”
“I always ask you questions.”
“Not like this.”
“Like what?”
She pushed her plate away and drew my hand across the table so she could cover it with her fine, cool fingers.
“Soli, I have a little graduation present for you. I don’t know what you want to do now or where you want to do it, but what I do know is your mother doesn’t have any money and without your fancy scholarship you don’t have any money, so unless you’re going to go live on a kibbutz or join the IDF—are you going to join the IDF, Solomon?”
“No.”
“Kibbutz?”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” she said and slid two keys across the table. They were attached to a large opalescent button by a silver ring.
“What is this?”
“One makes you larger, the other makes you small.”
“Funny.”
“And the button is made of something fancy. I can’t remember what. I stole it from the emperor himself. Pearl? Abalone? Goyim bone?”
“You’re giving me your apartment?”
“What’s wrong with you? No, I’m not giving you my apartment. I’m offering to let you live in my apartment. Assuming you’d like to move to the city to pursue your dreams, whatever they may be.”
She knew exactly what they were. In many ways, she herself had formed those dreams with her heady stories of a lawless, bohemian New York City. For years, I had imagined a life like hers. Or, anyway, a life like that of her stories. By the time I came to be sitting across from Lina Klein holding those keys, my fantasy had been burnished by the work and lives of Joseph Mitchell, Frank O’Hara, James Baldwin, Alice Neel, and her various other heroes, many of whom she claimed to have known.
I was elated, but I also knew that the apartment was her single asset and for years she had used it to generate income to help pay the many debts my father had left us. Yet another compounded source of Charlotte’s rage. God damn Arthur for leaving her his burdens. God damn Lina for coming out so well after an utterly selfish life. God damn her for abetting my meaningless existence, for tempting me away from the Levant.
“Can you really afford this?”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain?”
“When am I not certain, Soli?”
“Don’t you need the money?”
“If I need the money, I’ll put you on the street.”
“Then thank you, I will move to New York.”
All that missing light returned to her eyes. I slid around to her side of the booth. She put her arm around me so that her hand was on the side of my head and pulled me to her.
“I love you.”
“And I you, Solomon rabbit.”
I began to cry, but she couldn’t see it.
“What will you do in that wonderful dream of a city?”
“I’d like to be a journalist.”
She squeezed me tighter. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good. What will you write?”
“Like Joseph Mitchell,” I told her.
“You remember how you discovered him?”
“No.”
