Jew Boy , livre ebook

JEW
ALAN KAUFMAN
BOY
A Memoir
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
For Diane
C ONTENTS T ALES OF C HILDHOOD The Audition The Purple Jew Asthma The Death of JFK Dry Goods Scum Bar Mitzvah S CARS We’ll Give You Blood Eyes The River The Unholy Alliance The N-Word The Comb Virgins Football Head Mr. Greenhouse B OARDING THE F REIGHT The Loan Denver The Freight Train A MONG P OETS AND T HIEVES The Fishponds Call Up The Magician Raid The Time I Drew Angels The Things Carl Little Crow and I Did Together to Stay Sober in San Francisco On the Autobahn Epilogue: Dachau Who Are We?
T ALES OF C HILDHOOD
T HE A UDITION
IT WAS 11 P.M. My father had already left for his night shift post office job an hour ago. I had school tomorrow. I had gone to bed. But she woke me with her sobbing. I came out, rubbing a fist in my eye, asking, “Whatsamattah, Mommy? Why are you crying?”
I found her seated on the bed beside the open valise, face flushed a dark red, tears rolling down her cheeks, her hair all frazzled. “He was so young, so young, a young boy and they killed him.” “Mommy, do you mean Mario?” “Yes, Mario. Of course I mean Mario. You don’t understand anything. You don’t even know how sick I am, you and your brother and your stupid father. Gosh!” “Please, Mommy,” I said, picking with my fingers at my pajama leg. “Don’t cry. I’ll get us a beautiful mansion! You’ll see! Like Eddie Fisher.” I tried to put my arms around her but she shoved me away. “Oh, sure,” she said. The skepticism in her voice stung me to the quick. She made me feel like such a fool for believing in her dream of making me a singing star.
In fact, to me it was no dream, was already reality, and only a little more time was needed before we could start building the pool. I didn’t understand why the pool was so important, since she didn’t like the beach and I couldn’t swim. But it was going to be built. Soon I’d be in the movies like Shirley Temple, whom she idolized. In real life she and Shirley were about the same age during the war. Both had blonde hair and blue eyes. But while one tap-danced before cameras to the organ-grinder’s music, the other hid in a chicken coop gripped by a nauseating fear as SS men hunting for Jews prowled the vicinity. Mario was an Italian partisan tenor murdered by the Germans. He would sing “Santa Lucia” to her in their hideout, his favorite song. The partisans operated in the mountains of the north, where they waged a running battle with Heinrich Himmler’s Death’s Head division and where she, an escaped French Jew, slept on cases of dynamite. Once she saw an informer shot through the mouth and later, in passing the spot, scraped at the grass with her toe, exposing his hair: he had been buried standing up. For although this unit was Communist, they were also Catholics. Denied a horizontal burial, his soul would not reach heaven. Mario was killed as the result of this informer’s betrayal, first cruelly tortured, then paraded into the town square, covered in a red sheet to signify his Communism and publicly hung. My mother watched all this through a field telescope from the mountain hideout.
“Mario had such a beautiful voice! A future Eddie Fisher, so handsome!” “Did you love him?” I asked. “No! He was not a boyfriend!” she said indignantly. “No! Just a friend! Of course not!” But secretly I suspected that she did.
I sat on her bed, between us the open suitcase—the “valise” as she called it—filled with old, yellowing photographs. She plucked out the snapshot of the grinning young man with curly black hair, leaning casually against a tree. I had seen it a thousand times. “This is Mario,” she said, eyes shining. Is Mario the reason, I wondered, pained, why I am practicing day and night to master “Santa Lucia”? I had never thought of this before. In a trembling voice I asked, almost dreading to know: “Did Mario used to sing that song good?” She answered, “You never heard anyone sing it like him. You should only sing it so good. But, you never will.” Her unexpected scorn came like a surprising knife-thrust into my belly. My understanding of my life, her life, the whole point of life ran out of me unchecked, blood of my hope. How would I compensate for her robbed childhood? How would I fulfill my appointed destiny of redeemer? From the day of my birth I had been led to believe that I was the messianic promise, risen from the ashes of extermination. Hollywood was going to open the door to a new life for all of us. But now, in a moment, it slammed shut. I stood before it naked, ashamed, a little boy, fat, who was not talented enough to get an audition and so deserve his mother’s love.
But perhaps even she now saw how untenable this was, even for herself. Neither of us could afford not to dream. Reality stood all around us, an unbearable prison. The Bronx darkness of screaming sirens, the bickering voices of neighbors, the barking of stray dogs, all hung in the air, threatening, oppressive. Her voice intruded, tremulous with disgust at her own lies while forcing herself to repeat them, for she had seen the brink of truth but drawn back. “You could…do it…if you worked hard. But…you don’t want…to practice. You won’t listen to me.” “I’ll listen, I’ll listen,” I gasped, ever so grateful. “I’ll listen, Mommy, I swear on everything holy, I will, I will.” I felt so thankful to regain my appointed purpose, though now a pang of doubt stained my confidence. But I pushed on through. My psyche knew no other route. I began to cry, to plead, “Please, believe in me, oh, please, Mommy.” She gave me a look that I had never seen before, that I could not have known, was yet too young to identify as insanity. She said, in a voice full of betrayal, “He sang it so beautifully and they killed him. They murdered him. And you, you aggravate your poor mother who went through hell.” She began to wail: “I had such hopes for you. But you turned out to be like your father. Look at him! What have we got? Nothing!” “No, Mommy, no, please. Don’t say that! Don’t! Oh, God, please no…” My voice gagging, each word she uttered opening wider an abyss from which I somehow sensed there was no turning back. She raged: “You’ll end up like him! Breaking your back! For nothing, in the post office. The putz office! You’ll be a putz like your father! You’ll see!” “No, Mom!” I screamed. Whereupon she slapped me once hard across the face, and then once more. And stunned I stopped, body stiff, shoulders hunched, fists clenched, wide-open eyes shocked in surprise, and moaned in anguish. And she, in turn, began to pace back and forth, back and forth, ranting to herself in an eerie, bitter voice: “This is what I get for marrying your father. This is what I get. I should have listened to my parents. They told me, ‘Mashala, don’t marry him. He’s poor. You’ll end up with nothing. He’s coarse. A lowlife.’ And so what do I have now? My own son talks back to me!” While I howled in protest how sorry, oh, Mommy, how sorry I was to deaf ears, she disappeared and I heard her rummaging in the closet and then move to the kitchen where a drawer scraped open and utensils rattled heavily. But I dared not move, decided it was safer to remain in the living room with eyes squeezed tight so that her search would go unseen by me, as if somehow blindness would protect me. I knew that I was in serious trouble. I knew that what was about to ensue would entail more than the usual slap. Instinct told me to go find a corner, quick, hide in it, face to the wall. As if refusal to open my eyes, to countenance this event, could somehow prevent its occurrence.
I ran to the wall, hid my eyes in my arm, cried, “No, no, please, no,” with all the conviction inside me, softly, gently, an appeal to a kind universe. She grabbed my arm and pulled me to a chair that she had placed in the center of the room. Beside it on the floor lay a wire hanger and a rolling pin. My eyes jumped away from them. I dared not look. She sat in the chair, offered her hands to me: “Take them,” she ordered, “and sing ‘Santa Lucia.’” I noticed my brother, Howard, watching, terrified, from the bedroom. My eyes met his in mute appeal. But what could he do? His lips pressed tight with helplessness was the only support he could offer. I was alone. The utter aloneness of my predicament drove me to despair. I began to cry out of control. She picked up the rolling pin and brought it down on the arm that shot up reflexively from my side. The hard wood shivered through my elbow. I screamed and ran. She gave chase and managed to land another blow on my arm. She then dropped the rolling pin, ran to fetch the hanger. This she brought down whistling on me in a stinging rain of fire, again, again, again, again, again. The sound of my voice in my own ears surprised me, as though I heard its continuous, choked scream from a far distance. She dragged me by my hair to the chair, barked: “Sing!” and grabbed my hands. “Look into my eyes when you sing.”
“San-ta,” I began, barely able to mouth the word. She slapped me. “‘Santa Lucia.’ Sing it!” and she hummed the melody as though I didn’t know it. As if I hadn’t practiced singing it a thousand times. As if my whole life had not become predicated upon singing it as well as Eddie Fisher in order to build her a house with a big swimming pool. I had always thought that I could sing it well enough to conquer show business, but now I must sing it as well or better than Mario.
She struck me and I sang and each time she laced into me with blows it was to perfect my rendition of some phrase or stanza. I was literally being tuned like an instrument, but with pain, blows, lashes in order to sing as well as a ghost once had. And I don’t know if I sang as well but at one point I was singing while she calmly listened. She no longer insisted that I meet her eyes. Perhaps the sight of my face killed the illusion of my performance, as though by no stretch of the imagination, singing or not, could I resemble Mario. But perhaps w