Great Kisser (28 page)

All that I—and Oscar—had missed.

The next day, at a roadside grocery, I saw him, the only other Jew in town. A young orthodox man with a white baseball hat plunked backward on his head to appear inconspicuous—no yarmulke to provoke the locals—but beneath, peeking out from his trousers, the fringes of prayer shawls he couldn't hide and probably didn't want to. How was I connected to him except for the feeling both of protectiveness and embarrassment at the sight of him that rose up in me?

On the last day in Stonington, I was standing at the phone booth near the statue of a stonecutter. An old-timer, very red and white face and white hair, sat in a car with an open window facing me. I heard laughter and looked around. He was grinning at me and laughing uproariously, out of his mind. This was derangement, but not the mental illness of someone who was crazy in life, but only on the subject of Jews. This was the old time stuff, Father Coughlin territory, when they could still get away with it, not the new-fangled, clever Pat Buchanan variety. But I knew this type, I had experienced it now and then through the years in white territory, even among the old time WASP's in my father's office. In the old days I would have felt shame and rage churning up in me, not now. I was intent on reserving a table at a restaurant. Although I froze inside.

But for a split second I knew he was tempted to run the car into me—could he get away with it?—my back was to him. I imagined his grinning face pressed to the window, his nose flattened out.

He started the car, backed up, and drove away.

When I returned to New York from Stonington, I learned that Oscar's mother was in the hospital. He could not see me. He spent weeks in the hospital by her bedside.

Because I had not known a mother who protected me and took care of me, I could not imagine how he felt at her death. He had preserved his sanity in Cologne, in Riga, then in the camps, in Hamburg, always talking to his mother at night. He'd had many chances to escape, but he would never leave her or his brother. I wanted him to explain to me what it meant to have a mother who loved him so much that he was willing to endure the camps and not abandon her. What had she given him that enabled him to come out and find a life and become a loving father and husband, to sacrifice his education for his brother's sake, to amass a fortune—when I had piddled away my days and avoided the mean streets, the critical tests, walked away from every rite of passage. I admired mafiosi, bakers, truckdrivers: anyone who'd struck out on their own, struggled, had families—went out on the highway. So what was I beside Oscar Schwartz?

I had a cat who would rush into the closet when there was thunder. My wife and I laughed at her. The next time it thundered, the cat was casually lounging outside the closet, showing no fear. But then I saw that one little paw was out of sight, secretly touching the inside of the closet for security.

“For every person who survived,” Oscar told me, “others paid the price. I am here because others are dead.”

After the war, Oscar's Uncle Michael could not accept the death of his wife Tova and daughter Marta. He kept questioning Oscar and his brother David: “When did you see my wife for the last time? Where? He would come up and ask insistently: ‘Did you see her die?'“ Oscar replied, “No, I wasn't there.”

Michael lived with Oscar's parents for a while after the war, but he kept taking off and going to Poland, Germany, Russia and Latvia in search of Juti and Tova. He was sometimes incoherent, and the authorities would jail him.

“We didn't want to lie to him and say yes, we saw her die.

“But if we had seen her die, we wouldn't have survived either. He would run after a woman on the street and start hollering, ‘Tova, Tova, Tova!' Then he would run up to her and say, ‘Aren't you Tova? Are you sure?' Sometimes he would read a story that someone, after five or ten years, found a wife or husband or relative. He would say to us, ‘You see, you see! They said she was dead.…'

“Later on they notified us he was killed by a car in Germany. He was buried in Frankfurt in a Jewish cemetery. I had him taken out about eight years ago and shipped to Israel. I bought a plot in Israel for my family. I buried my father there too. At least there's one place in the world, not scattered all over and you don't know where anyone is.”

When Oscar's mother died, he could not talk to me about it. Within two weeks, Oscar was diagnosed with throat cancer. After his surgery he lost most of his voice. When he spoke to me now over the phone, it was in a fierce and torturous whisper, and there still was no trust in it toward me.

Then Oscar dropped me. He said, “It's not the right thing. It's not good and proper. What can I tell you?”

His voice is here.

Although this is a story that has been told many times before, it is still hard to hear it. In writing it, I heard it for the first time. I heard Vilna, Dachau, Lodz, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen. I heard the Dreyfus case. I heard Lucy Dawidowicz, who came to me in loving friendship in what was to be the last year of her life, who gave her life to elucidating the war against the Jews. I heard Hannah Senesh and Anne Frank. I heard Abba Kovner and Abraham Sutzkever. I heard the journey of the St. Louis and the journey of the Exodus. I heard the shots fired at the Jews trying to reach safe shore.

I heard Oscar Schwartz.

About the Author

David Evanier is the author of seven books. His work includes novels, story collections, and biographies of entertainment legends. Evanier's work has been published in
Best American Short Stories
and has been honored with the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for short fiction. He is a former fiction editor of the
Paris Review
and a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, as well as a fellow of Yaddo and of the Wurlitzer Foundation. He has taught creative writing at UCLA and Douglas College. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a biography of Woody Allen.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“The Man Who Gave Up Women” and “Sabbath Candles on Brooklyn Bridge” originally appeared in
The Saint Ann's Review
. “Rabbits in the Fields of Strangers” originally appeared in
River Oak Review
. “The Great Kisser” (under the title, “Mother”) originally appeared in
Southwest Review
. “Danny and Me” originally appeared in
TriQuarterly
. Sections of “The Tapes” originally appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
and
Heeb Magazine
. With special thanks to The Writers Room and its director, Donna Brodie, and to Eva Fogelman and Jerome Chanes.

Copyright © 2007 by David Evanier

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

ISBN: 978-1-4976-4163-1

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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EBOOKS BY DAVID EVANIER

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