Exit Laughing (19 page)

My grandfather, having been told that his tubercular wife would not survive another winter, had left Lithuania with its harsh winters and harsher pogroms for the safety and sun of Australia, but it turned out to be too late to save her. She died shortly after arriving in Sydney, leaving behind a bewildered
husband and four daughters stranded in an alien land. The sisters represented with almost mathematical precision—and in defiance of all fairy tales—descending degrees of beauty. That is, the eldest was the most gifted and beautiful, the youngest the least attractive and least talented, my mother being third in line.

All the daughters doted on their father, but my mother outdid them in her devotion to his every need and mood. I hadn’t heard of Freud, let alone read him, but I always suspected there was something troubling about my mother’s love for her father. It was as if she’d elected herself to be his surrogate wife. She used to tell the story of how, at the funeral of my grandmother, she had made him swear on his dead wife’s body that he would never remarry. This story was a source of great pride to her. It’s hard to imagine that Wolf Sniderman, this tall handsome man with his thick jet-black moustache and deep brown eyes, who was in the prime of his life, actually honored that awful promise. But he did.

The strongest images I have of my grandfather are on the occasion of the High Holidays when, with the rest of my family, I was forced to attend synagogue. I’d stare at him swaying back and forth, wrapped in a flowing blue-and-white
tallis
, looking like a vengeful ancient Hebrew prophet, and couldn’t imagine how such a remote figure was related to me. It was the same at Passover, when he sat enthroned, presiding over the festive table that had been laid with care and reverence by his four daughters. There were bitter herbs, the burnt egg, the honey and apple, and the richly embroidered three-layered
matzo cover that had been brought over from Lithuania along with the burnished gold candlesticks. A gleaming bowl with a fresh white monogrammed towel lay to one side of the throne, and an extra place was set for Elijah the Prophet, at whose place stood an elaborately chased silver goblet, also a relic from Lithuania.

I always dreaded Passover. As the youngest, I had to ask the Four Questions in Hebrew, and only if I recited them flawlessly would I earn a grandfatherly nod of approbation. But that wasn’t the end of my fears. At some point in the evening, he would begin his darkly dramatic chanting of the Ten Plagues. For each one, we had to spill drops of red wine from our glasses, splotching the whiteness of our dinner plates as if they were gouts of blood. “
Dom
 … 
Sfardayeh
 … 
Kinim
 … 
Arov
,” my grandfather would intone, until the last and most terrifying of all, the killing of the first-born
Makat b’choyroth
rolled off his patriarchal tongue like a stone.

Then arrived the moment I had been dreading the most—inviting the prophet Elijah to partake of our feast. To the adults, it may have been a symbolic act, but to me it was all too real. Somewhere out in that murky hallway which led to Grandpa’s flat lurked some bearded hook-nosed old Hebrew who was even more intimidating than my grandfather. I was certain he was ravenous and vengeful at being kept waiting. Under his striped desert robes was hidden a sharp-bladed scimitar which I knew he would use on me, the nearest and most helpless prey.

In fear and trembling, I would open the front door and call out the words my grandfather had taught me to say,
“Eliahu
Hanavi.”
No one answered, but I felt a hostile, alien presence in the shadows. My family, seated behind me, seemed millions of miles away.
“Eliahu,”
I whispered again, hoping he wouldn’t hear me and, if he did, that he wouldn’t accept the invitation. In all the years I had to do this, nobody ever answered, but I was always in a state of terror that someone with a heavily accented English like my grandfather’s would one day call back to me through the shadows.

When he wasn’t praying in the synagogue or presiding over the Passover table, Wolf Sniderman ran a small, dingy tailor shop in a rundown section of downtown Sydney. The Trouser King he called himself, and he had a huge sign outside his shop to back up his claim. He called me the Trouser Princess, and for years I really believed I was royalty. Somehow or other, the royal succession had skipped a generation, leaving my mother and aunts out of it altogether.

As a Trouser Princess, I was granted many privileges, my favorite being the privilege of looking at my grandfather’s gold fob watch, which he wore in his waistcoat pocket. “It’s a special watch,” he’d say in his thick Yiddish accent. “It wears out by looking at it. Only to a Trouser Princess do I show it, and even then only for a second or two.”

Despite his title, my grandfather was a very bad tailor. Worse, despite his last name of Sniderman, which means “tailor” in Yiddish, he was no tailor at all. The slacks he’d make me out of thick, dark, itchy remnants would always have one leg shorter than the other, the clumsily sewn crotch biting into my cleft until I felt as if I were being sawn in half.

The wonder was that my grandfather’s shop flourished, but
it did, even though no Jew would be seen dead near the place. Only
shigotsim
flocked to the shop. “Id-yots,” my grandfather called them, spitting out the last syllable as if it were a piece of undigested food. And idiots they must have been to tolerate my grandfather’s insults and curses.

My mother often dropped me off at the store when she went shopping, and I’d cringe with shame when I heard a customer come into the shop for his first fitting. My grandfather, tape measure hanging around his neck like the professional he wasn’t, would trot out some dusty old bolt of material and drape it around the poor victim.

It was in vain for the customer to protest that it wasn’t even the color he’d initially selected, let alone the material. “Brown you want?” bellowed Grandpa. His voice rang with a fierce conviction. “Brown? With your coloring, your complexion? You want you should look like a mud pie? Like a lump of
sheis
?”

Shaking, I would cower under the wooden cutting table, waiting for the poor chump to crack my grandfather’s jaw open with one heave of his tough
goy
fist, but there would always be a subservient silence. I never managed to figure out why. Was it because of my grandfather’s towering presence? His bullying? His air of angry righteousness? Whatever the reason, when I mustered up enough courage to peek around the corner, there would be some shambling hulk, head hanging, feet shuffling, hands twisting in front of him.

While my grandfather’s insults rained down on their heads, his customers would shuffle out, holding a clumsily wrapped package containing some butchered lump of material for which they had handed out part of their hard-earned pay. Or
they would walk out with the suit on, hopping from leg to leg—I knew exactly how they felt—distorting their bodies to make up for the discrepancy in the arm length, the tightness across the shoulder, the crookedness of the seams, which even I could see were beginning to split open.

“Mr. Sniderman,” one of them might dare to say. “Wouldn’t you say there’s a little shortness in one arm?” And here the poor man would apologetically extend one raw wrist that protruded a good three inches from an ill-made cuff.

“Id-yot!” my grandfather would yell. “Pull it down! Pull it! Can I help it if you stood like a crippled crab at the fitting? What do you want from me—my life? That I should spit blood? You want you should come in here with your
pishach
money and expect from me Savile Row? Leave already! Go! And next time you should want a suit, don’t come to The Trouser King. Go instead to the pub, and drink your money away like the rest of your tribe!”

Why didn’t the man whip out a pistol from his pocket and shoot my grandfather between the eyes? “Bang! Take that, you filthy Yid!” Or grab his arm and twist it right out of its socket. No. Instead, he stammered, apologized, and shuffled out the door sideways. And sure enough, when next he wanted a suit, he’d be back at The Trouser King, his head bowed low to receive his ill-fitting jacket and his portion of insults. What spell, I wondered, did my grandfather cast over his servile population? My belief in his royalty deepened. He was indeed a king and I his princess.

Then a terrible thing happened. Grandpa’s brother, Louis Sniderman, opened a tailor shop less than two blocks from
his brother’s establishment. I guess he thought that sharing his brother’s surname also qualified him to be a tailor. Not only that, but he decided also to call himself The Trouser King and hung a big sign out front to prove it. It was just like the fairy tales—the true king was the victim of his wicked brother’s usurpation. But unlike the fairy tales, my grandfather didn’t take sword in hand and do battle for his kingdom. Instead, he had an even larger sign erected that read “The Original Trouser King.” Despite that, my belief in my imperial lineage began to wobble.

It finally shattered a year or two later when I was old enough to move around town by myself. I discovered that Sydney was infested with royalty. There was the Tie King, the Button King, the Umbrella King. My faith bit the dust. It became heartbreakingly clear to me that if my grandfather wasn’t the Trouser King, then I wasn’t the Trouser Princess. From that moment on, my grandfather ceased to hold much interest for me. And when, sensing this, he’d dangle his gold watch in front of my eyes, cajoling me to look at it as long as I wanted, I’d turn away in indifference.

When I was fourteen, my grandfather was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. My mother fell into a deep depression and ignored everything else in her life—her child, her husband, her home, her friends—everything except the progression of my grandfather’s disease. Despite his obviously rapid decline, she refused to accept the inevitable and stayed by his side day and night, insisting on feeding him the dishes he’d enjoyed all his life—gefilte fish, pickled herring, smoked roe, and, above all,
chicken soup with noodles. Although he had long ceased to be the distant all-powerful figure of my childhood, it troubled me to see him in such a diminished state, pale and shrunken, his once flourishing moustache straggly and unkempt.

“Dad,” my mother would plead when he tried to turn his mouth away from the offered dishes, “just one more mouthful. It’s good for you. Just another bite.”

Her three sisters, who took turns looking after their father, remonstrated with my mother to leave him in peace, but her insistence won out. She was a bully, my mother—not for nothing was she her father’s daughter—and everyone, including my father and myself, was secretly afraid of her.

I deeply resented having to visit my grandfather. The last place in the world I wanted to be was in that hot, stuffy bedroom that reeked of sickness and stale air, but there were times, particularly on the weekends, when I couldn’t avoid it.

One Saturday, a day when the mercury had climbed into the high nineties and I was looking forward to going to the beach with friends, my mother insisted I come with her. No amount of cajoling on my part would move her. Did she have a foreboding that this would be the last time either of us would see him alive?

Despite the sickening heat, my mother tried to persuade my frail and dying grandpa to eat up his steaming hot chicken soup. “Come on, Dad, it’s good for you. Just a couple of mouthfuls. It’ll make you feel better. One more spoonful, Dad. Just a little bit more.”

Grandpa clamped his mouth shut and shook his head weakly.

“Just a sip, Dad. Just one sip of nice nourishing broth. Just one mouthful of
lokshen
.”

My grandfather started to make ominous gurgling sounds and tried feebly to wave the soup away, but nothing could deflect his daughter from her self-appointed task.

I was sitting in a corner of the room reading
A New Girl at St. Chad’s
by Angela Brazil, whose books about English boarding school adventures I adored. (I had already devoured
Five Jolly Schoolgirls
and
A Harum-Scarum Schoolgirl
and desperately wished my parents would send me away to a school like St. Chad’s, where I could be jolly and harum-scarum and never have to cope with my family on a daily basis.) I was so immersed in the goings-on at St. Chad’s that hardly anything could have induced me to take my eyes from the page, but my grandfather’s obstinate refusal to give in to his daughter’s bullying made me look over at him with admiration.

Suddenly, with a surprising show of strength, he pushed my mother out of the way and sat bolt upright. Opening his mouth wide, he spewed out a spongy mass of raspberry-pink tissue. It fell right into the plate of hot steaming chicken soup. Plop!

His eyes widened in surprise, and the last thing he saw before he died were the broken pieces of noodles splattered over the white sheet. For one horrible moment, I thought my mother would try to stuff the contents of both pink tissue and soup back into Grandpa’s mouth, but then she dropped the bowl onto the floor and began to howl with disbelief and grief. I sat on my chair paralyzed with shock and stared at my grandfather’s dead eyes.

My first thought was that my grandfather’s watch had stopped dead in its tracks for good. My second thought was to wonder whether he knew that in the last moments of his life he had been part of a Jewish chicken soup joke.

As my mother continued to wail, I felt an insane bubble of laughter grow deep inside my gut. It grew larger and larger until it burst out of my mouth. I couldn’t control myself. I howled and I rocked. I wet my pants. Tears rolled down my cheeks. The more my mother shrieked, the more I laughed until I thought I was going to pass out or else die for lack of breath. (I later found out that some people have actually died of laughter—a Greek comedy writer, Philemon, found one of his jokes so funny he died of a paroxysm of laughter and, in more recent times, a Danish man, Ole Bentzen, couldn’t stop laughing while watching
A Fish Called Wanda
and died on the spot.)

Was my laughter caused by hysterics? By a deeply ingrained sense of the absurdity of life, which I seemed to have had since early childhood? It was probably a combination of the two, both of which had gotten me into deep trouble. All my life I’d been plagued by inappropriate laughter. One of the worst ordeals of my school days was Remembrance Day, when everybody had to close their eyes and think reverentially of the sacrifices made by “our boys.” The solemn drone of Kipling’s Recessional would fill me with a bleak foreboding: