634
PARTISAN REVIEW
about any new acquaintance.
My cousin still loved French wine and cheese. When I refused cognac
at dinner, he looked shocked. "Zut,
if
you don't want to drink it, I must give it
to you by injection."
He made me laugh and he also told me what he knew about how our
relatives died. Because I loved him and he was loving, this had meaning. It
was real because I found a survivor. I could grieve for the imagined deaths.
I met other survivors, the people who sold fruit in the market on the
corner, with their tattoos on their wrists. Because I saw the tattoos, it was
real. Despite my swagger of a young man who had merely found a pretty
girl, in due course I was being instructed by an infant in the unsimple and
unpredictable turmoils and stillnesses oflove. I was beginning to see what lay
around me. I felt the need of replenishment; I felt the replenishment my first
daughter gave me. Smelling clean and laughing after her bath, she made the
news of the world more than an entertainment, like a movie-we were in it
now together.
A stubbed toe-or a caressed arm-can easily obscure the rest of
history. Through the fog ofyouth, when a person feels his own hungers most
clearly, I began to notice that something unusual had happened.
My few lonely cousins, surviving and remembering, taught me what to
treasure, what was lost.
***
My life as aJew has been eccentric and not abnormal for the times. I
grew up in a non-Jewish town, a western suburb of Cleveland where there
were no Jews. The combination of the long streetcar ride into Cleveland and
a rabbi who stood his belly too close and hectored a boy who asked questions
made me defiant. Probably my questions were foolish and inciting. But I
sincerely wanted to know why the devil I was there. I preferred to play
baseball on Sunday mornings.
It
was said that the only separation between
the Euclid Avenue Temple and the Unitarian church across the street was
Euclid Avenue.
When bar mitzvah time came, I wasn't. I said no. Preoccupied with
becoming Americans in a difficult isolation, with making a living in a
depression, my parents didn't need more fights with a willful son. I'm still
astonished that I won (lost) this small family war.
Nevertheless, I was made to know I really was Jewish.
An
open
herring can, with a note attached to it, broke through the window when I lay
in bed with chicken pox. The herring smell reflected a touch of neighborly
