Recovery (23 page)

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Authors: John Berryman

BOOK: Recovery
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“I'm not a Jew,” I said to him. “What makes—”
“Listen, Pop,” he said to the man in the hat, “it's O.K. to shoot your mouth off but what the hell have you got to do with it? You aren't gonna do any fighting.”
“Listen,” I said.
“You sit on your big ass and talk about who's gonna fight who. Nobody's gonna fight anybody. If we feel hot, we ought to clean up some of the sons of bitches here before we go sticking our nuts anywhere to help England. We ought to clean up the sons of bitches in Wall Street and Washington before we take any ocean trips. You want to know something? You know why Germany's winning everything in this war? Because there ain't no Jews back home. There ain't no more Jews, first shouting war like this one here”—nodding at me
—“and then skinning off to the synagogue with the profits. Wake up, Pop! You must have been around in the last war, you ought to know better.”
I was too nervous to be angry or resentful. But I began to have a sense of oppression in breathing. I took the Irishman by the arm.
“Listen, I told you I'm not a Jew.”
“I don't give a damn what you are,” he turned his half-dark eyes to me, wrenching his arm loose. “You talk like a Jew.”
“What does that mean?” Some part of me wanted to laugh. “How does a Jew talk?”
“They talk like you, buddy.”
“That's a fine argument! But if I'm not a Jew, my talk only—”
“You probably are a Jew. You look like a Jew.”
“I
look
like a Jew? Listen,” I swung around with despair to a man standing next to me, “do I look like a Jew? It doesn't matter whether I do or not—a Jew is as good as anybody and better than this son of a bitch—” I was not exactly excited, I was trying to adapt my language as my need for the crowd, and my sudden respect for its judgment, possessed me —“but in fact I'm not Jewish and I don't look Jewish. Do I?”
The man looked at me quickly and said, half to me and half to the Irishman, “Hell, I don't know. Sure he does.”
A wave of disappointment and outrage swept me almost to tears, I felt like a man betrayed by his brother. The lamps seemed brighter and vaguer, the night large. Looking around I saw sitting on a bench near me a tall, heavy, serious-looking man of thirty, well dressed, whom I had noticed earlier, and appealed to him, “Tell me, do I look Jewish?”
But he only stared up and waved his head vaguely. I saw with horror that something was wrong with him.
“You look like a Jew. You talk like a Jew. You
are
a Jew,” I heard the Irishman say.
I heard murmuring among the men, but I could see nothing very clearly. It seemed very hot. I faced the Irishman again helplessly, holding my voice from rising.
“I'm
not
a Jew,” I told him. “I might be, but I'm not. You
have no bloody reason to think so, and you can't make me a Jew by simply repeating like an idiot that I am.”
“Don't deny it, son,” said the redfaced man, “stand up to him.”
“God damn it,” suddenly I was furious, whirling like a fool (was I afraid of the Irishman? had he conquered me?) on the redfaced man, “I'm
not
denying it! Or rather I am, but only because I'm not a Jew! I despise renegades, I hate Jews who turn on their people, if I were a Jew I would say so, I would be proud to be: what is the vicious opinion of a man like this to me if I were a Jew? But I'm not. Why the hell should I admit I am if I'm not?”
“Jesus, the Jew is excited,” said the Irishman.
“I have a right to be excited, you son of a bitch. Suppose I call you a Jew. Yes, you're a Jew. Does that mean anything?”
“Not a damn thing.” He spat over the rail past a man's head.
“Prove that you're not. I say you are.”
“Now listen, you Jew. I'm a Catholic.”
“So am I, or I was born one, I'm not one now. I was born a Catholic.” I was a little calmer but goaded, obsessed with the need to straighten this out. I felt that everything for everyone there depended on my proving him wrong. If
once
this evil for which we have not even a name could be exposed to the rest of the men as empty—if I could
prove
I was not a Jew —it would fall to the ground, neither would anyone else be a Jew to be accused. Then it could be trampled on. Fascist America was at stake. I listened, intensely anxious for our fate.
“Yeah?” said the Irishman. “Say the Apostles' Creed.”
Memory went swirling back, I could hear the little bell die as I hushed it and set it on the felt, Father Boniface looked at me tall from the top of the steps and smiled greeting me in the darkness before dawn as I came to serve, the men pressed around me under the lamps, and I could remember nothing but
visibilum omnium … et invisibilium
?
“I don't remember it.”
The Irishman laughed with his certainty.
The papers in my pocket, I thought them over hurriedly. In my wallet. What would they prove? Details of ritual, Church
history: anyone could learn them. My piece of Irish blood. Shame, shame: shame for my ruthless people. I will not be his blood. I wish I were a Jew, I would change my blood, to be able to say
Yes
and defy him.
“I'm not a Jew,” I felt a fool. “You only say so. You haven't any evidence in the world.”
He leaned forward from the rail, close to me. “Are you cut?”
Shock, fear ran through me before I could make any meaning out of his words. Then they ran faster, and I felt confused.
From that point, nothing is clear for me. I stayed a long time—it seemed impossible to leave, showing him victor to them—thinking of possible allies and new plans of proof, but without hope. I was tired to the marrow. The arguments rushed on, and I spoke often now but seldom was heeded except by an old fat woman, very short and dirty, who listened intently to everyone. Heavier and heavier appeared to me to press upon us in the fading night our general guilt.
 
In the days following, as my resentment died, I saw that I had not been a victim altogether unjustly. My persecutors were right: I was a Jew. The imaginary Jew I was was as real as the imaginary Jew hunted down, on other nights and days, in a real Jew. Every murderer strikes the mirror, the lash of the torturer falls on the mirror and cuts the real image, and the real and the imaginary blood flow down together.
Step One
“We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”
Step Two
“Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”
Step Three
“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”
Step Four
“Made a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves.”
Step Five
“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.”
Step Six
“Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”
Step Seven
“Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.”
Step Eight
“Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.”
Step Nine
“Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”
Step Ten
“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.”
Step Eleven
“Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
Step Twelve
“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
1
From the second (1972) edition, Berryman deleted six poems.
3
Three poems from
The Black Book
, a verse sequence about the Jews under Hitler, are preserved in Mr. Berryman's
Short Poems
,
here
.
Copyright © 1973 by the Estate of John Berryman
 
 
DESIGNED BY HERB JOHNSON
 
 
eISBN 9781466808058
First eBook Edition : February 2012
 
 
“The Imaginary Jew”
copyright 1945 by John Berryman,
copyright renewed 1973 by Kate Berryman
Foreword copyright © 1973 by Saul Bellow
All rights reserved
Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-84779
ISBN 0-374-24817-6
FIRST EDITION, 1973
Published simultaneously in Canada by Doubleday Canada Ltd., Toronto

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