TREYF (24 page)

A year after he died, we returned to the cemetery for the unveiling of my father's tombstone, which had been engraved with the Star of David on one side and his naval wings on the other. I
held Susan's hand and wept while we listened to the rabbi chant the ancient El Malei Rachamim. We gathered pebbles and rocks and set them on the top of the stone; we patted it. We said goodbye. And I crossed the line from tribal member to stranger; my earthly connection to my father was gone and, with it, my place in the family order.

When the unveiling was over, I stopped into the cemetery office to ask about the remaining Jarczower plots.

The office manager pecked at his computer keyboard; he pushed up his reading glasses and shook his head.

“No. Nothing left.”

The family plot was closed.

You only are free when you realize you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.

—Maya Angelou

T
he Connecticut home I share with Susan is neither suburban nor rural; drive three miles in one direction, and crumbling New England barns—some red, some silvered maple fashioned from planks milled in the eighteenth century—dot the rolling landscape, partitioned like a patchwork by old stone walls. Drive three miles in the other direction and prefabricated strip malls line the main road; Starbucks, Best Buy, Dunkin' Donuts, Domino's Pizza, and nail salons repeat in an endless loop. Where we live, the modern abuts the ancient, each a constant reminder of the other.

“Don't put your name on the mailbox,” my father said when I first left New York in 2001, to be with Susan a year after we met. Back then, she lived in a small Connecticut village of thirty-five hundred—it had gotten its first stoplight in 1996; they had a known black bear problem, a moose who strolled up her street from the thicket of woods below, and a neighbor who kept in his
front yard sixteen vehicles including a small yacht on which he would sit in a folding chair every Sunday morning to read the local paper. There was a Catholic church on one corner, two Congregational churches a mile in both directions from the house, and a stone Anglican church seven miles down the road.

I was the only Jew for miles.

“They don't care that I'm here, Dad,” I said when he voiced concern, and nobody did. I was sure of that.

“Do you?” he asked.

I didn't.

I had flunked out of Hebrew school on the first day, never set foot in a synagogue except for weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs, and was fed the promise of assimilation from everyone around me: from Gaga, who was so enraptured with Christmas that she hauled me to St. Patrick's Cathedral every holiday to stand in line for a glimpse of the Baby Jesus rendered in papier-mâché. From Aunt Sylvia, who turned away from a genetic memory of pogroms and annihilation and towards an upper-class American future of finery and wealth and safety. From my father, whose childhood connection to religion was sheathed in violence and chronic disappointment, who vehemently fed me treyf from the time I could eat solid food, because, he believed, I would ultimately become what I ate. All of them, without even knowing it, struggled to create a facade of perfection that would shield them—us—from the specter of our catastrophic history, and help us gain acceptance to a club to which we'd only been tentatively invited. All of us broke our culture's commandments and frayed the tether to convention, as a path towards transcendence.

In rural New England, a million miles away from New York, no one seemed to care who or what I was. Deep in the country, when the power goes out and you need to borrow a generator, or you have a snowplow and the person next door to you doesn't in the midst of a blizzard, very few people think about anything but just being a good neighbor. At least mine didn't.

•   •   •

I
moved to New England from East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York, where I lived just two blocks away from Central Synagogue, one of the oldest shuls in continuous operation in the city; built in a Moorish style that smacked, I thought, of an always-present connection to Spain, the Inquisition, and the Expulsion, the magnificent old temple loomed over Lexington Avenue, and every morning during the workweek, I was inexplicably drawn to the route that would take me past it, like metal to magnet, although I could have gone another way. One late Friday afternoon, shortly after Ben died suddenly of a massive stroke, I walked home from work by way of Central; Shabbos services were just about to start. I climbed the stairs, stepped inside, and was greeted by a warm-eyed slender man who introduced himself as Peter, the rabbi.

“Please stay if you'd like,” he said, putting on his tallis.

I sat down near the back and looked up at the stained glass and at the old tiles under my feet. It was an ordinary Friday night; no particular holiday. The shul was practically empty. The Shabbos candles were lit; the prayer was said.

Baruch atah, Adonai, Eloheinu, melech haolam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav, v'tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat.

I closed my eyes and listened to the Aleinu, which I remembered from my Friday nights at camp in the 1970s, safe from the wildness at home in The Marseilles; I stood to recite the Mourner's Kaddish for Ben, transliterated in the siddur. Tears spontaneously poured down my cheeks and into the collar of my shirt; I tried to hide my face. An older man standing behind me put his hand on my shoulder and leaned down.

“It's okay,” he whispered. “We all weep—we're Jews.”

A year later, on Shabbos, a fire broke out in the sanctuary; I was passing the synagogue on my way home from work when billows of smoke blew through the roof. The rabbi who had been so kind to me flew across the street from the Hebrew school, wild-eyed, dodging oncoming taxis. A crowd gathered and watched as he put a handkerchief over his face, flung open the doors of the shul, ran in, and moments later, ran out, coughing, the Holocaust memorial Torah cradled in his arms. We stood on the north side of the street, our faces cocked to the sky, as the flames destroyed the building; I stepped back towards the school as the firemen began to arrive. Watching the synagogue burn felt ancient and tribal, and from another time and place; we could have been anywhere: Novyy Yarchev. Vilna. Vienna. Manhattan.

Someone shouted my name behind me; I turned around and my mother was there, having arbitrarily decided, a few months after her second husband died, to come to Central Synagogue
on that particular night, to say Kaddish for Ben. I stood in front of her and together we watched the flames in silence, her arm resting protectively across my chest, the tightest she's ever held me against her.

•   •   •

T
he Christmas after I brought the pig home, I submerged the shoulder in two gallons of spiced dork—duck and pork—fat for three days, confiting it in the traditional French style; while the snow fell, I roasted it outside, on the grill, until the skin popped and crisped and darkened to a pink-flecked umber, and the fat that had encased the meat sent billows of gamy smoke into the air. Dogs howled; neighbors and friends came over and pulled mindlessly at the pork with their forks, wrapping it up in warm flatbread, the crunch and the tender together, hot pig grease dripping off their chins. A month later, in the dead of winter, I marinate a butt in sour orange juice and achiote paste, wrap it in moistened banana leaves, and slow-roast it for hours in Lois's old Römertopf; we eat spicy cochinita pibil for days. I spend weeks perfecting a recipe for brasato di maiale al latte; I stand at our sink, Grandma Bertha's old, chicken fat–infused walnut cupboard hovering over me like a drone, while I massage this gorgeous hunk of heritage Tamworth pork—this animal who was grown for us by a stranger, with all the blitheness of a second grader growing an avocado plant—with raw milk. It teeters and wobbles in the sink, its straight grain of dark pink meat streaked with bright fat that my wife wants me to slice away so that she can render the lard. Somewhere, in a place I can't name, I reach my tipping point;
hot Levitical fury pants down the back of my neck; I close my eyes and hear strains of my grandfather davening all those years ago, at the tiny, stuffy shul in Coney Island, expunging the demons that he carried over from Novyy Yarchev, too mesmerized by prayer, too beguiled by ghosts, too in love with God to recognize his own son.

I weep silently over the sink; I am the real, modern American, the one who transcended my family's genetic code of violence and rage and disappointment, who broke every Talmudic law presented to us as though it was our job. I am no longer saddled with an impractical, demanding piety five thousand years old; I am the one who lives and eats—unfettered by my family history of death, longing, guilt, shame, and the relentless desire to belong—like a Gentile living in a Gentile world. Am I
not
who they struggled to be? Am I
not
who they wanted me to become?

Belonging everywhere, I now belong nowhere.

On this night, I stand in my Connecticut kitchen, in our house, with my Catholic wife in the next room, listening to my father's favorite Chopin
Étude
, our dogs asleep at her feet. I am safe—
finally
safe—even as I yearn for him, and for Gaga, and for Grandpa Henry, and for all who came before me.

To know who I am; to remember where I came
from.

My grateful thanks to Sharon Bowers, Jackie Cantor, Claire Zion, Denise Silvestro, Leslie Gelbman, Heather Connor, Craig Burke, Pam Barricklow, Laura Corless, Lauren Burnstein, Sarah Oberrender, Judith Lagerman, and Berkley Books. Heartfelt thanks to Libby Jordan, Kathy Daneman, and Sydny Miner for being extraordinary midwives.

My profound thanks to my teachers, mentors, editors, and friends whose wisdom and guidance sustained me during an often treacherous writing process: Dani Shapiro, Charles D'Ambrosio, Bonnie Friedman, Linda Wells. Joe Yonan and
The Washington Post
; Kera Bolonik and
Dame Magazine
; Holly Hughes and
Best Food Writing
;
Tin House
, and Doreen Oliver, Allison Coffelt, Jessica Ripka, LeVan Hawkins, Christina Campbell, Carole Firstman, Lyz Lenz, Liz Prato, Angela Ajayi, Ysabel Gonzalez, Elisha Wagman, Lance Cleland, Cheston Knapp, Michelle Wildgen, and Rob Spillman; Vermont Studio Center; the TEDx University of Nevada team, including Bret Simmons and Alice Heiman; Nat Bernstein, Suzanne Swift, Joyce Lit, and the Jewish Book Council; Jeff Koehler; Diane and Greg Morgan; Jessica Fechtor; Dana Velden; Jacqueline Church and Caleb Ho; Tara Austen Weaver; Molly Wizenberg; Sarah Searle; Erin Scott; Rosa Jurjevics; Abe Opincar;
Renshin Bunce; Mary Jo Hobaica Brown; Joe Hobaica; Kathleen Hackett; Jaci Goodman and Amanda Burden; Tracey Ryder and Carole Topalian. For their English-to-Yiddish translation assistance, Eve Sicular and Yankl Salant.

To my beloved oldest friends from Forest Hills and beyond, who clarified and confirmed memories: Jeff Sternstein, Cha Tekeli, Steve Sloane, Toby Haber, Maki Hoashi, Sandye Okada, Deborah Alperin, Todd Schwartz, Ira Sebastian Elliott, Lauren Kornblum Clifford, Rachel Bouwman Ziegler; in Honesdale, Lynne and the late Sam Nordan, the late Charlotte and Sam Ettinger, Alyssa Ettinger, Laura Zimmerman, Mimi Jerome Krumholz, Pam Brawn, Neil Ross, Liz Queler, Dori Friedman Schwartz, Martine Mogal Ritter, Susie Lichtenberg Blumenfeld, Nancy Adler Steinberg, Amy Feigen Noren, Elise Azaria Lane, Joy Zaretsky Meisner, Nenad Popovic, Rob Lowenthal, Wendy Levine Slater, George Bodick.

To my friends at The Om Center, who threw me a lifeline and rescued my body and spirit when they flagged: Jessica Proulx, Rebecca Gleason, Laure Proulx, Lisa Fontan, Claudette Adams, Linda Dayton, Dianne Lafferty, Becky Litz, Spencer Fappiano.

To my family by blood, marriage, and heart: My beautiful mother, Rita Hammer, my late father, Cy Altman, and the late Clara Elice, without whom there would be no story; Lauren and Zach London; Nina and Bob Schwartz; Russ Schwartz and Dawn Kaczmar; Roni and Mike Fertig; Sherrill Kratenstein Cropper; Rick and Roberta London; Shirley Puchkoff and Irving Feller; Stephen and Vicki Puchkoff; Robert and Margaret Puchkoff; Jean-Marie Cannon; Thelma Gordon; Carol and Howard Wulfson; Mishka and Bill Jaeger; Deborah Rubin; Vanessa Feinman; Stanley Fieber;
Larry Fieber and JP Cronin; Laura Fieber and Dennis Minogue; Lenny Fieber and Kris Moran; Sarah Fieber and Atang Gilika; Jenny Fieber and Aleksey Novikov; Laura and David Falt; Betty and Hank Podolak; Dick and Barbara Hopkins; Bobby and Shawn Warden; Debbie and John Sindland; Beth and Kevin Dean; Ruth Ann Turner; Kathy Turner; Ann Cassella; Ed and Cara Cassella; Sarah and Mike Vedovelli; Bill McDermott; Danny and Kitty Latowicki; Neale and Joan Turner; Chris and Dawn Watson; Sherry Sawyer and Mark Briganti; Fran and Maureen Pennarola; Steve and Melissa Murphy; Stevie and Porter Boggess; Kurt and Kim Friese; Tara Barker and Josh Hixson; Deborah Madison and Patrick McFarlin; Lisa Feuer and Alyssa Awe.

Thank you.

E.M.A.

January 2016