You or Someone Like You (39 page)

When, I say, I realized to my utter astonishment that this question of who is and who is not a Jew was actually going to play a role of importance in my life, I did what I've usually done, which is lug books from the library—in this case the Los Angeles Public Library—to my garden. I wanted first to look up Hitler's Nuremberg Laws, which in Nazi Germany answered this exact question of who is a Jew. Now, who, I asked them, wrote in 1933 in Berlin, Germany (another three-by-five): “We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law:
the declaration of belonging to the German nation and the German race
.” (Italics in the original, I said.) “A State built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a German who declares his belonging to his own kind….”

Obviously, I said, the National Socialist era produced a volume of such quotes, from Hitler to Goebbles to Goering and so on. But this was said by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a famous Berlin rabbi. And the actual quote was this: “We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law:
the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and the Jewish race
.” (Italics in the original, I said.) “A State built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind….”

Israel, I said, is a racial security state with a hybrid democratic-theocratic government, overtly racialist citizenship laws, a particularist, exclusivist legal system of apartheid that distinguishes Jews from non-Jews in everything from immigration to public services, and a national philosophy of ethnicism. The United States is a universalist, inclusivist, constitutionally secular, antiracialist and antitheocratic multiethnic democracy, one that outlaws racialist citizenship and immigration policies, and has the most racially diverse population on earth. And the problem is that to Jews in the United States, the definition of Jewishness is the same as its definition in Israel, which is to say racial, which is to say that it is morally identical to the Nuremberg Laws of Hitler's Third Reich. The disconnect is intellectually worsened by the fact that Jewish American liberal thought (which largely defines American liberal thought, “liberal,” “progressive,” and “educated” being euphemisms for Jewish influence) has since 1945 been the denunciation of anything even remotely associated with Hitler and Nazi-like thinking. This ranges from the antiracist principles of the black civil-rights movement to antisexist feminism and throughout Jewish organizations like the ACLU. The irony is that there is one and only one exception to the antiracism of American Judaism: Judaism. Specifically the Jewish definition of Jewishness. Which is not only identical to the Nazi definition; much more importantly it agrees with the Nazis' basic philosophical premise that such a definition should—indeed must—exist.

(I finish that thought and clear my throat. There is nothing before me but a vast inchoate darkness. I know it is simply the brain racing to process thoughts, but it is a bit disconcerting.)

Exactly how the racialism of historically authentic Jewish thought can be logically reconciled with the antiracialism of liberal Jewish thought remains a topic little explored, but since it is relevant to me personally, as I imagine you are all quite aware, and given the literary topic tonight, I wanted to simply point something out. The Nazis believed in the moral superiority of their group, and in their racial
purity. If the Nazis were wrong about the Jews, then the Jews are wrong about the rest of us.

This goes equally, I say, for other versions of the Nazi idea. Such as the Jews are not superior, God simply holds the rest of us to a lower moral standard. My husband, Howard Rosenbaum, will get that reference when he hears it, I tell them. When, I say, Christian parents oppose their child's intermarriage to a Jew, they are bigots. When Jewish parents oppose their child's intermarriage to a Christian, they are something else. (My face is flushed. I am not so relaxed now. I do a quick mental inventory of my talk. Next is Mann, yes? Yes.)

Thomas Mann, I say, had an answer to why people hate and fear art. (Three-by-five. Keep the hands still, Anne.) “Art,” he said, “has a basically undependable, treacherous tendency; its joy in scandalous unreason, its tendency to beauty-creating ‘barbarism,' cannot be rooted out.” Actually my own answer would be just slightly different from Mann's. Art, as something that is only interesting to the degree to which it shows human beings not as we would have them be but as they are, leads us to throw over the control structures others build for their benefit. Literature shocks not because what it shows about us is inherently surprising. It does the exact opposite. It is shocking because it breaks down what we would be and shows us what we know we are. Dividers of each other into races and groups. Ethnicists. People who hate others via these concepts. And then why this is problematic. Because (this is the way I would rephrase Mann) art's treacherous tendency is to show that we all bleed, and in the long run you will not withstand art's construction of life, which is Shakespeare's construction of life, a construction that ultimately finds all human persons fundamentally human, regardless of religion or biology.

(Quick breath in and out. I register for some reason a caterer, a boy in black tie carrying a neat tray of clean wineglasses.) Obviously this is not the point this evening's organizers were counting on. Well—I should be more precise: This is exactly the point they were
counting on, but they were not counting on its being applied to
them
and the immoral ways in which they organize themselves. But then that too nicely supports this evening's point.

Harold Bloom says that he would locate the key to Shakespeare's centrality in the canon in one very specific aspect of one single character, Falstaff. “It is,” says Bloom, “Falstaff's capacity to overhear himself. And, thereby, the man's capacity to change. It is the most remarkable of all literary innovations.”

I agree. The capacity to change is, indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of literature, and one of the most remarkable, perennial capacities of human beings.

And, I add, if a person can change, he can also change back.

 

I am standing in an exquisite outdoor space. It is night. The ocean and the sky are now the same darkness. Stars above the wisteria. The little cascade of water into the black pool.

I unfold the photocopied page I made of the script I got from Howard's shelf. I clear my throat and read.

There are people who tell you that you are a kind of person, I say. Not a person. A kind of person. And that all other people are another kind. Who take your desire for good and your talents and your spirit and twist and twist till you instinctively say, “He is one of mine. He is not. She is one of mine. She is not.” And then convince you that there is a god sick enough to want this. Or, if you've no use for the god, that there is reason to perpetuate this culture. That evil is good. That lies are truth. That a heart should close.

I stop. My vision has faded to black now. But in my sharp imagination, I'm in a large, dark vastness before a towering wall of dirty
white. He sits on the other side of this tall, ice-colored wall between us where they've put him. I see the ugly thing crouched on its haunches above his head, hanging to the top of the chair, whispering into his ear. It is the only thing he can hear.

I can see him. He leans toward me, and I love him so much, I love him so infinitely much, and I struggle in desperation to move myself to him, to touch him.

But then he leans back. No. He doesn't think so. I almost talked him into it.

I realize, I say to them, that in my beloved husband's new view of things I'm no longer a person in the strictest sense of the word.

And then I begin to sob.

 

No one moves as I turn and run. My heels sound rapidly on the beautiful slate stones. I run as fast as my sobbing will permit, but I am shuddering and sick with it. This is the path to the drive. I will somehow find the valet, he will give me the car keys.

 

NO ONE
calls throughout the evening.

 

The next morning, I explain briefly to Sam. He nods, asks a few questions. “OK,” he says.

Later that afternoon when he gets home he looks shaken, rather badly. But he also looks resolute. We talk for a bit, mostly me confirming or correcting what he's heard from people or gotten via text. I find I have to explain nothing, merely fill in details and counter misinformation. I talk about Howard.

There's a silent moment as Sam considers his father. Sam has something to say about this. He says: “‘Here—we—are,' said Rabbit very carefully, ‘all—of—us, and then we wake up and find a Strange Animal among us.'”

I laugh. Yes, I say, indeed. I feel a thousand things lifting from
me, spinning away. Such strange feelings we both have for Howard, Sam and I. An animal, I say, of whom we had never heard before.

(Sam had forgotten this. He agrees it fits.)

I say, I'm not letting go of him, Sam.

He nods. He thinks this is good. Who knows what will happen. Sam, too, is a fan of perspective. He returns to last night. “Why didn't you warn me?” He doesn't look so shaken anymore.

What makes you think I knew beforehand, I say. He knows I don't mean it on the more literal levels, but I mean it in some real way, and he accepts this as I've not experienced him before. He is more present to me and at once more distant than ever. Wonderful and sad.

So. He sits back. “Anyway, you went out with a hell of a bang.”

I smile. All ruined, I sigh. Oh, dear.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

I'm sorry, Sammy. I really am sorry.

“S'all right,” says Sam, and smiles. “Don't worry, Mom. Seriously.”

 

I call Ellie. “
Christ!
” she says. And then: “Has he called?”

No.

I hear her inhale. She lets it out. Do I want to come over? David is making dinner. I say maybe tomorrow. She mentions, wryly, that their guestroom has availability. Yes, I say, I'd heard that.

I call Stuart. He has heard via two colleagues. Accurate accounts, it turns out.

He says, gently, “I haven't spoken with him.”

I nod. OK.

“You couldn't've just called the guy?” and immediately, “Annie, I'm
joking
.”

Yes, well. (I smile, briefly.) There's silence on the phone for a moment. You know that he doesn't take my calls anymore, Stuart.

I can hear a horn from the street in Queens. “Listen,” he says.
“Anne. You need to believe me when I tell you this. He heard you. Every word.”

But you haven't spoken with him. How do you know?

“Every word,” says Stuart. “Trust me.”

 

I'M RETURNING TO MY UPSTAIRS
table where I am eating by myself. An agent just leaving comes too close; a greeting is unavoidable. And then she must turn to the woman she's lunched with, must introduce me. Anne Rosenbaum. The woman's smile hardens, white paper burning in seconds to dark ash. Ah, yes, says the woman. The very diplomatic Anne Rosenbaum.

Well, I say. I think about this matter of diplomacy. I suppose, I offer forthrightly, I'm not exactly Talleyrand. (Napoleon's deft foreign minister.)

No, she says immediately, maybe Ribbentrop, though.

The faint clink of dishes. It takes me an instant to process it; Ribbentrop, yes, Hitler's chief diplomat. Two busboys scurry around us. I smile. Nice, I reply, intellectual, even slightly arcane and yet extremely vicious at the same time. Though
subtly
so. Very nice. Two points.

 

I DON'T CHECK EMAIL. THE
faxes I glance at and throw away.

Then I decide to check email. There are a few cancellations from assistants for the book club tomorrow night. Some bitter tirades and several freezing-cold single lines. When I reach an email that consists of one word—“Nazi”—I delete the rest without looking at them and shut down the computer.

 

For my last book club, only two come. Both are Jewish, as it happens. One of them married an Italian Catholic and loves her deeply. The other was Orthodox and is now, as he puts it, “just a person.”
The weather is overcast. We don't read. It would be a farce. We drink lemonade and talk about how to transplant flowers. The key is water, I say.

The one with the Italian wife tells us how to make plants thrive indoors.

It bothers me that the clubs would end so abruptly. It bothers me because we had several good books coming up. Well—that is, of course, an absurd lie. What bothers me is how much I will miss them. I will miss the people, their words, the warmth of their presence, the way they crowded me. The arguments and the interaction. I can't think about it, but then I know I must think about it, their going away, leaving me behind.