Through the Children's Gate (11 page)

In the midst of these bitter-herb thoughts, Luke came in.

“Here's the new version,” he said. “Man says to a waiter, ‘What's this fly doing in my soup?’ ‘Shhh,’ the waiter says, ‘everyone will want one.’ ” It broke me up. Whether or not there are Jewish essences, there are surely some essentially Jewish jokes. That was one, and I was in the middle of another.

I was about to call the Jewish Museum and give it all up when a friend suggested, “Go see Rabbi Schorsch. He's the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary. He's a terrific guy, and I'm sure he'd be glad to help you out with the spiel thing.” I vaguely remembered hearing Rabbi Ismar Schorsch on the radio once or twice, so I made an appointment—it felt like making a date with a dentist—and on the day I took the subway up to 125th Street.

The rabbi's secretary showed me into his office, and after a couple of minutes, there was Rabbi Schorsch.

“Rabbi,” I began, “I was not raised as an observant Jew, but I am nonetheless of a Jewish background, and I am naturally concerned to show some grasp of a tradition that, though familiar in spirit, is still alien to me in many ways.” I don't know; that's how I thought you ought to talk to a rabbi. Anyway, I eventually explained that I couldn't make head or tail of the Book of Esther.

“It's a spoof, a burlesque, really,” he almost mumbled. He picked up my Bible, riffled through it as though there were a kind of satisfaction just in touching the pages, and then frowned. “This is a Christian Bible,” he said, genuinely puzzled.

He was the kind of hyper-alert elderly man who, instead of putting on weight around the middle, seemed to have drawn all his energy upward into his eyes and ears, which gleamed, outsized. “Yes. It's a kind of comic chapter, not to be taken entirely seriously,” he went on, holding my King James Version in his hand as though it might be
loaded. “It's a light book with a serious message. You see, Scripture, the Bible, one of the remarkable things about it is that it contains a chapter about every form of human experience. There's a book of laws and a book of love songs. A book of exile and a book of homecoming. A skeptical and despairing book in Job, and an optimistic and sheltering book in the Psalms. Esther is the comic book, a book for court Jews, with a fairy-tale, burlesque spirit.”

You could see my whole skeleton underneath my jacket; my hair stood on end; I turned into a pile of black ash, smiling sickly as I slowly crumbled.

“It is?” I said.

“Yes. You see, Mordecai is a classic Jew of the Diaspora, not just exiled but entirely assimilated—a court Jew, really. It's a book for court Jews. Why doesn't he bow down to Haman? Well, it might be because of his Judaism. But I think we have to assume that he's jealous—he expects to be made first minister and then isn't. Have you noticed the most interesting thing about the book?” He looked at me keenly.

“I hadn't even noticed it was funny.”

“It's the only book in the Bible where God is never mentioned,” he said. “This is the book for the Jews of the city, the world. After all, we wonder—what does Esther eat? It sure isn't kosher. But she does good anyway. The worldliness and the absurdity are tied together—the writer obviously knows that the king is a bit of an idiot—but the point is that good can rise from it in any case. Esther acts righteously and saves her people, and we need not worry, too much, about what kind of Jew she was before or even after. She stays married to the Gentile king, remember. This is the godless, comic book of Jews in the city and how they struggle to do the righteous thing.”

I was stunned. This was, as they say, the story of my life. A funny book about court Jews … I had been assigned to burlesque it when the text was preburlesqued, as jeans might be preshrunk.

We talked for a while longer, about the background of Haman as a Jew hater, and of how the most startlingly contemporary thing in the book was the form of anti-Semitism; even twenty-five hundred years
ago in Persia, the complaint against the Jews was the same as it is now. In the end, the rabbi gave me a signed copy of the Bible, the Jewish Bible, the Tanach. (Signed by him, I mean.)

We got together a couple of times after that, and eventually I decided to try and go ahead with the Purimspiel. He said, “Why not? What have you got to lose?”

What have you got to lose? It was, I reflected, like the punch line of a Jewish joke.

I
n the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, hundreds of people in dinner jackets and sequined dresses were wearing masks, although this made them look less festive than vaguely embarrassed, as though they were worried about being seen by their friends. I had forgotten the look and feel of a New York benefit: the ballroom made to look like a gym; the chicken stretched out, mortified, on its plate, with the Indisputably Classy Ingredient—the quince, or sun-dried tomato, or preserved lemon—laid on top of it; the fiftyish women, sexy and intimidating in sports clothes, wilting in their fancy gowns. The only difference was that at this benefit, there was a giant video-projection screen at either end of the hall and one above the podium, and the speakers—who included Rabbi Schorsch, saying the blessing—were projected on them. I gulped. I had thought it would be like a nightclub, where I could play with a microphone in the manner of Rodney Dangerfield. This was more like a political convention. I was an impostor, even though I had bits to do. I heard my grandfather's voice:
Feel stiff in the joints? Then stay out of the joints!

At last, just before dessert, I got up and went to the podium. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my own image on the giant screen.

What did I tell them? Well, I did the “New York as Persia, Donald, and Ivana” bit, and then I did a bit I'd made up that afternoon on Haman. That got a modest laugh, and, encouraged, I went on to do the “man goes to see a rabbi” bit. I said that, once I'd thought of transposing the story to New York, I had gotten stuck on Mordecai. Who could Mordecai be in the modern city? I had gone to see a rabbi, and the rabbi had told me that the Book of Esther was in part a spoof, a
burlesque: a comedy in which worldly people took risks and did unworldly things, and that Mordecai, if he was anyone, was us—the assimilated court and city Jews. And this was sort of amazing to me, since the idea that the man of the world might be the honest man was an idea that was central to the comic tradition I revered—Molière says it, for instance, just like that—but was not one that I had known had a place in the Jewish tradition. The Jewish tradition, I had always thought, proposed that the honest man was the man out of the world, the prophet crying in the wilderness. But I saw now that there was a connection between a certain kind of comedy, the comedy of assimilation, and a certain kind of courage, the courage to use your proximity to power, bought at the price of losing your “identity,” to save your kinsmen. The real moral center of the story, I saw now, lay in the tiny, heartbreaking, and in many ways comic moment when Esther—trayf-eating, dim-witted, overdressed, sexy Esther—appears before the king, who hasn't found her particularly sexy lately. I could see her in her Lacroix pouf dress, gulping for breath and showing up, so to speak, at Donald Trump's office in the middle of a busy day, saying that she had to speak to him. But she did, and the Jews were saved, for once.

It went over okay. I didn't kill them, but I didn't die, either. They were expecting something more consistently amusing, I suppose, but no one minds a little moral sententiousness in an after-dinner speaker. “Congratulations, that was unusual” or “You obviously spoke from the heart” or “I knew that when we asked you to do the Purimspiel, we would get something different!” or just “Thank you for your interesting remarks” was the general tone when I got back to the table. (I still meet people who were there. They give me exactly the look a father might have after seeing his daughter topless in a progressive-college production of
A Midsummer Nights Dream;
he respects the sincerity of the intention, but it was extremely embarrassing to be there nonetheless.) I had fund-raising-benefit dessert—something soft and white interspersed with something red and juicy—and went home. As a thank-you present, I was given a little silver grogger, a rattle, meant to be shaken when you heard the name “Haman.”

Though I am not strangely exhilarated by my experience as a
Purimspieler, I did find something significant in the Book of Esther, and I am certainly glad I did it. In one way, it was no different from any other exposure to an ancient, irrational belief-culture. I suppose I would have felt about the same if I had been a young Athenian who finally went to Delphi and heard the oracle: Even if it didn't change the future, it was nice to make the trip. But if there is something particularly Jewish about the experience, it may lie in the odd combination of a narrow gate and a large gathering; the most exclusive and tribal of faiths, Judaism is also the one that sustains the most encompassing of practices, from Moses to Henny Youngman, from Esther to Sammy Davis, Jr., and all of us Irvings. Whether it sustains this because, as the rabbi believes, it is in its nature narrow but infinitely various, or because, as I sometimes suspect, anything ancient and oppressed must be adaptable, still it is so. At least for a certain kind of court Jew, being Jewish remains not an exercise in reading in or reading past but just in reading on, in continuing to turn the pages. The pages have been weird and varied enough in the past to be weird and varied in the future, and there is no telling who will shine in them. The Jewish occasion lay in rising to the occasion. Even if it was too late to be an everyday, starting Jew, one could still be, so to speak, Jewish in the clutch.

We celebrated our own Seder this past spring and are thinking of joining the synagogue we can see from our window, in part because we want to, in part because there is an excellent nursery school there for our daughter. That is the kind of things Jews do in Persia. I gave the silver grogger to the baby, who holds it at the window and shakes it in warning when she sees a dog. I believe that she now has the first things a Jewish girl in exile needs: a window to see from and a rattle to shake.

N
ew York still looks best in fall. (“April in Paris” is a fiction, but “Autumn in New York,” by the same songwriter, is a glorious fact.) Thanksgiving—not just the holiday, I mean, but the sweep of days it superintends, the long autumn that begins in October and runs, festively, through the Jewish holidays, to Halloween and beyond, with Christmas peeking around the corner—has always been the best time of year in New York. Abroad, I often thought about the lines at Ottomanelli's in the Village the day before Thanksgiving, where everybody who ordered a turkey has his name misspelled in black marker on brown paper—and I thought about the absence of evident warmth combined with the come-one-come-all brown-paper democracy of the scene, the weary procedural dutifulness of the butchers—and I then felt a rush of something like patriotism. These months are nearly perfect in New York, the slow roll up to the great secular feast of shopping and feeling at Christmas. After that comes dread, the winter with shoes in the trees and unbiodegradable plastic bags blowing at your feet, the Lenny-Bruce-in-Times-Square sordidness of the place. To inventory the holidays, Jewish and Christian and creedless, each with its little burst of merchandise and ritual, is to expose the intermingling of the sacred and the secular. But that is our city, and it fits somehow. In London, where they invented the idea of Christmas as middle-class mass ritual, there is still some sense that the festival overflows from the spiritual side; Dickens makes his dutiful, sober asides to the religious holiday before he gets on with the games. In Paris, the old Catholic hardness one hears in French baroque Christmas music,
the premonition of tragedy that is so much a part of Christmas for the believer, still reigns. But in New York, heroic materialism is all the heroism we've got, and it goes on: Thanksgiving, secular and greedy, balloons pumped up with helium, leading to the coronation of the department-store Santa Claus.

The first few weeks back from France are precious, because naive vision is a capital sum, quickly depleted, and for a few months, New York—the Great Home, Our Place—can be seen again. On our first morning back, woken early by the jet lag, I took Luke for a long dawn walk down Fifth Avenue, past the University Club and St. Patrick's Cathedral and Saks.
This is all from another place,
I thought, shocked by the derivativeness of Fifth Avenue architecture. I felt, I
saw,
for the first time ever, the adolescent absurdity of so many Manhattan monuments—the sad, wilderness, opera-house-in-the-Arctic and Amazon pathos of copying old European styles in a New World city.
This isn't a true Gothic cathedral,
I thought, staring at St. Patrick's.
There are such things, I've seen them, and this is just a … copy, a raw inflated thing thrown up in emulation of a far-off and distant thing! That Renaissance palazzo on Fifty-fourth Street is no Renaissance palazzo—it's a cheap stage-set imitation!

This perception—of New York as a blown-up Inflato city, aspirational rather than achieved, gawkily imitating its models, the proper cities of Europe—which was once so obvious and embarrassing (to Henry James, much less to Tocqueville), has faded away now, and I no longer see it that way. For that single early morning, though, it seemed that the architecture of New York was not quite real, not organic, coming from elsewhere and imposed, a delirium of old styles and other people's European visions: the Gothic vision of sublime verticality, or, for that matter, the Bauhaus vision of the glass tower. For a moment New York seemed unnatural, the anti-matter city. “You're not real!” I wanted to cry out, to the city.
“Yes, we are,”
the buildings cried back blankly
. “It is the old thing that is the lie; the true thing is our re-creation of it.”
But the moment passed quickly, and now New York just looks like New York: old as time, worn as Rome, mysterious as life.

* * *

T
he children are flying above our heads, the neighbors are sighing below our feet, and between them we are trying to return to a life we thought we knew already. A full life is what we said we wanted when we left Paris, and full it is, in moments already too full. We fill our eyes and heads with things already seen and known, and try to see them and know them again.