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Well, now I’ll have an answer,” Irv said, with a self-satisfied nod that resembled davening or Parkinson’s. He and his forty-three-year-old son, Jacob, and eleven-year-old grandson, Max, were on their way to Washington National to pick up their Israeli cousins. (The Blochs would sooner have renounced air travel than refer to it as Reagan National.) NPR was on, and, to Irv’s extreme revulsion, they had just listened to a balanced segment on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Irv loathed NPR. It was not only the wretched politics but the flamboyantly precious, out-of-no-closet sissiness, the wide-eyed wonder coming from the you-wouldn’t-hit-a-guy-with-glasses voice. And all of them—men, women, young and old—seemed to share the same voice, passing it from one throat to another as necessary.“Answer to what?” Jacob asked, unable to swim past the bait.“When someone asks me what was the most factually erroneous, morally repugnant, and just plain boring radio segment I’ve ever heard.”Irv’s knee-jerk response triggered a reflex in Jacob’s brain’s knee, and within a few exchanges they were rhetorical Russian wedding dancers—arms crossed, kicking at everything but anything.“And anyway,” Jacob said, when he felt that they’d taken things far enough, “it was an opinion piece.”“Well, that stupid idiot’s opinion is wrong—”Without looking up from his father’s iPad, Max defended National Public Radio—or semantics, in any case—from the back seat: “Opinions can’t be wrong.”“So here’s why that idiot’s opinion is idiotic. . . .” Irv ticked off each “because” on the fingers of his left hand: “Because only an anti-Semite can be ‘provoked to anti-Semitism’—a hideous phrase; because the mere suggestion of a willingness to talk to these freaks would just be throwing Manischewitz on an oil fire; because their hospitals are filled with rockets aimed at our hospitals, which are filled with them; because, at the end of the day, we love Kung Pao chicken and they love death; because—and this really should have been my first point—the simple and undeniable fact is . . . we’re right! ”Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”But, instead of driving, Irv pressed his point: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued, “Europe . . . now, there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver, “I’m an asshole, asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob, “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they’ll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide that we’re noisy and pushy and way too smart for anybody else’s good?”“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on an image of a gored bullfighter.“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, pressing the accelerator while trying to catch his grandson’s eye in the rearview mirror, “you gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get ‘Hamlet.’ Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”“Jesus, Dad. Watch your lane!”“The Koran. Funny, right?”“Racist,” Max muttered.“Arabs aren’t a race, bubeleh. They’re an ethnicity.”“What’s a typewriter?”Irv turned back to Jacob. “The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that’s like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos.”“I like pandas,” Max said.“You don’t,” Irv corrected.“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”“It would eat your face.”“Awesome.”“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win by a hair a war for our survival and are a permanent pariah state. Why? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself, Why?”“Why what, exactly?”“The what doesn’t even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us: Because the world hates Jews.”“What are you saying?”“Nothing. I’m just saying.”Jacob was the only one who referred to the Israeli cousins as our Israeli cousins. To his wife, Julia, to Max, and to their older son, Sam, they were the Israeli cousins. Jacob felt no desire for ownership of them, and too much association made him itchy, but he felt that they were owed warmth commensurate with the thickness of blood. Or he felt that he should feel that. It would have been easier if they’d been easier.He’d known Tamir since they were children. Jacob’s grandfather Isaac and Tamir’s grandfather Benny were brothers in a Galician shtetl of such minuscule size and importance that the Germans didn’t get to it until their second pass through the Pale to wipe up Jewish crumbs. Isaac and Benny had avoided the fate of their five brothers by doing things that were often spoken around but never spoken of. After the war, Benny moved to Israel, where he had a son, Shlomo, who had Tamir. Isaac moved to America, where he had a son, Irv, who had Jacob.The brothers would visit each other every few years, as if the performance of familial intimacy would retroactively defeat the German people and save everyone. Isaac would lavish Benny and his family with expensive-looking tchotchkes, take them to the “best” second-tier restaurants, close his Jewish bodega for a week to show them the sights of Washington. And when they left he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how bigheaded and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli lunatics were Hebrews—people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings. Then he’d reiterate how important it was to maintain closeness.Jacob found the Israeli cousins—his Israeli cousins—curious, at once alien and familiar. He saw his family’s faces in their faces, but also something different, something that could equally well be described as ignorant or unself-conscious, phony or free. Perhaps it was existential constipation, but the Israelis didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. All Jacob’s family ever did was give shits. They were shit-givers.When Isaac shattered his hip and died, as all Jews who outlive cancer and Gentiles eventually do, Tamir surprised everyone by flying in for the funeral. He and Jacob stayed up late that night, drinking beers at Jacob’s kitchen table.“He lived a good, long life,” Tamir said, and then took a good, long drink.“I suppose so, except for the good part,” Jacob said. “He spent his days clipping coupons for things he would never buy, while telling anyone who’d listen that no one listened to him.” A drink. “We once took the kids to a zoo in Berlin—”“You’ve been to Berlin?”“For work. It coincided with a school break.”“You’ve taken your children to Germany and not to Israel?”“As I was saying, we went to a zoo in the East, and it was pretty much the most depressing place I’ve ever been. There was a panther in a habitat the size of a parking space, with flora as convincing as a plastic Chinese-food display. He was walking figure eights, over and over, the exact same path. Every time he turned, he’d jerk his head back and squint. Every time. We were mesmerized. Max, who was maybe five, pressed his palms to the glass and asked, ‘When is Great-Grandpa’s birthday?’ What kind of five-year-old asks such a question at such a moment?”“The kind who worries that his great-grandfather is a depressed panther,” Tamir said.“Exactly. And he was right. The same routine, day after day after day: instant black coffee and black bread with canteloupe; read the Jewish Week with that enormous magnifying glass; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; push a walker on tennis balls to shul to have the same Sad Libs conversations with the same macular degenerates, substituting different names into the news about cancers and graduations; thaw a brick of chicken soup while flipping through the same photo albums; eat the soup while advancing through another paragraph of the Jewish Week; nap in front of one of the same five movies; walk across the street to confirm Mr. Kowalski’s continued existence; skip dinner; check the house to make sure all the lights are still off; go to bed at seven and have eleven hours of the same nightmares. Is that happiness?”“It’s a version.”“Not one that anyone would choose.”Jacob was ashamed both of the inadequate life he’d tolerated for his grandfather and of judging it inadequate.“I regret that we didn’t keep in better touch,” he said.“You and your grandfather?”“No. Us.” Jacob brought his beer to his lips and said, “Remember that night we snuck out of my parents’ house? Years and years ago?”“No.”“When we went to the National Zoo?”“The National Zoo?”“You really don’t remember? A few nights before my bar mitzvah?”“Of course I remember. And it was the night before your bar mitzvah. Not a few nights before.”“We were so dumb,” Jacob said, chuckling.“We still are.”“But we were also romantic.”“Romantic?”“About life. Remember what that was like? To believe that you could be in love with life itself?”Jacob first visited Israel when he was fourteen—an overdue present that he didn’t want for a bar mitzvah he didn’t want. The next generation of Israeli Blochs took the next generation of American Blochs to the Wailing Wall, into whose cracks Jacob inserted prayers for things he didn’t actually care about but knew that he ought to care about, like a cure for aids and an unbroken ozone layer. They floated in the Dead Sea together, among the ancient, elephantine Jews reading half-submerged newspapers bleeding Cyrillic. They climbed Masada early in the morning and pocketed rocks that might have been clenched in the fists of Jewish suicides. They watched the windmill break the sunset from the perch of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. They went to the small park named after Jacob’s great-grandfather Gershom Bloch. He had been a beloved rabbi, and his surviving disciples remained loyal to his memory, choosing never to have another rabbi, choosing their own demise.One morning, while Tamir’s father, Shlomo, was driving them to a hike along the sea, an air-raid siren started blaring. Jacob’s eyes opened to half-dollars and found Irv’s. Shlomo stopped the car. Right there, where it was, on the highway. “Did we break down?” Irv asked, as if the siren might have been indicating a cracked catalytic converter. Shlomo and Tamir got out of the car with the vacant determination of zombies. Everyone on the highway got out of cars and cargo trucks, off motorcycles. They stood, thousands of Jewish undead, perfectly silent. Jacob didn’t know if this was the end (a kind of proud greeting of nuclear winter), a drill, or some national custom. Like dupes in a grand social-psychology experiment, Jacob and his parents did as everyone else was doing, and stood by the car in silence. When the siren stopped, life reanimated. Everyone got back in the car and they were on their way.Irv was apparently too afraid of revealing ignorance to resolve his ignorance, so Jacob’s mother, Deborah, was left to ask what had just happened.“Yom HaShoah,” Shlomo said.“That’s the one for the trees?” Jacob asked.“For the Jews,” Shlomo said. “Who were chopped down.”“ ‘Shoah,’ ” Irv said to Jacob, as if he’d understood everything all along, “means ‘Holocaust.’ ”“But why does everyone stop and stand in silence?”Shlomo said, “Because it feels less wrong than anything else we might do.”“And what is everyone facing?” Jacob asked.Shlomo said, “Himself.”Jacob was both mesmerized and repulsed by the ritual. The Jewish-American response to the Holocaust was “Never forget,” because there was a possibility of forgetting. In Israel, they blared the air-raid siren for two minutes, because otherwise it would never stop blaring.What Jacob remembered most tenderly about the trip was the time they spent in Tamir’s home, a two-story Art Deco–ish construction perched on a Haifan hill. There were diagonally sliced cucumbers and cubes of cheese for breakfast and, two hours later, huge spreads of side dishes for lunch—half a dozen salads, dips. At home, the Americans made a point of trying not to turn on the TV. The Israelis made a point of trying not to turn it off.Tamir, who was a highly significant six months older than Jacob, was obsessed with computers and had a library of RGB porn before Jacob had word processing. (In those days, Jacob concealed “The Art of Sensual Massage” inside “The Big Who of Baseball” at Barnes & Noble, searched lingerie catalogues for pubes with the dedication of a Talmudist searching for God’s will, and listened to the moans of the visually blocked but aurally spread-eagled Spice Channel. The greatest of lewd treats was the three minutes of preview that hotels used to offer for all movies: family, adult, adult. Even as a teen-ager, Jacob recognized the masturbatory tautology: if three minutes of the adult film convinced you that it was a worthy adult film, you would no longer have a need for it.) Tamir’s computer took half a day to download a titty fuck, but what else was time made for? Once, while they watched a pixellated woman jerkily open and close her legs—a “movie” composed of six stills—Tamir asked Jacob if he felt like beating off.Jacob gave an ironic, Tom Brokaw-voiced “No,” assuming that his cousin was joking.“Suit yourself,” Tamir said, and proceeded to suit himself, pumping a glob of shea-butter moisturizer into his palm.Jacob watched him remove his hard penis from his pants and begin to stroke it, transferring the cream to its length. After a minute or two of this, Tamir got up onto his knees, bringing the head of his penis within inches of the screen—close enough for static shock.“How does it feel?” Jacob asked, while simultaneously reprimanding himself for allowing such a creepy question to escape his mouth.And then, as if in response, Tamir grabbed a Kleenex from the box on his desk and moaned as he shot a load into it.Why had Jacob asked that? And why had Tamir come right then? Had Jacob’s question made him come? Had that been Jacob’s (entirely subconscious) intent?They masturbated side by side a dozen or so times. They certainly never touched each other, but Jacob did wonder if Tamir’s moans were always irrepressible—if there wasn’t something performative about them. They never spoke about these sessions afterward—not three minutes after, and not three decades—but they weren’t a source of shame for either of them. They were young enough, at the time, not to worry about meaning, and then old enough to revere what had been lost.Pornography was only one example of the chasm between their life experiences. Tamir walked himself to school before Jacob’s parents would leave him at a drop-off birthday party. Tamir cooked his own dinner, while an airplane full of dark-green vegetables searched for a landing strip in Jacob’s mouth. Tamir drank beer before Jacob, smoked pot before Jacob, got a blow job before Jacob, got arrested before Jacob (who would never be arrested). When Tamir was given an M16, Jacob was given a Eurail pass. Tamir tried without success to stay out of risky situations; Jacob tried without success to find his way into them. At nineteen, Tamir was in a half-buried outpost in southern Lebanon, behind four feet of concrete. Jacob was in a dorm in New Haven, whose bricks had been buried for two years before construction so that they would look older than they were. Tamir didn’t resent Jacob—he would have been Jacob, given the choice—but he had lost some of the lightness necessary to appreciate someone as light as his cousin. He’d fought for his homeland, while Jacob spent entire nights debating whether that ubiquitous New Yorker poster where New York is bigger than everything else would look better on this wall or that one.After his service, Tamir was finally free to live on his own terms. He became hugely ambitious, in the sense of wanting to make shitloads of money and buy loads of shit. He dropped out of Technion after a year and founded the first of a series of high-tech startups. Almost all of them were flops, but it doesn’t take many non-flops for you to make your first five million. Jacob was too jealous to allow Tamir the pleasure of explaining what his companies did, but it wasn’t hard to surmise that, like most Israeli high tech, they applied military technologies to civilian life.Tamir’s homes and cars and ego and girlfriends’ breasts got bigger every visit. Jacob put on a respectful face that revealed just the right amount of disapproval, but, in the end, all his emotional dog whistles were rendered pointless by Tamir’s emotional tone-deafness. Why couldn’t Jacob just be happy for his cousin’s happiness? Tamir was as good a person as just about anyone whose great success made his good-enough values increasingly difficult to act on. It’s confusing to have more than you need. Who could blame him?Jacob could. Jacob could because he had less than he needed—he was an honorable, ambitious, near-broke novelist who barely ever wrote. Nothing was getting bigger in his life—it was a constant struggle to maintain the sizes he’d established—and people without fancy material possessions have their fancy values to flaunt.Isaac had always favored Tamir. Jacob could never figure out why. Isaac seemed to have serious problems with all his post-bar-mitzvah relatives, very much including those who forced their children to Skype with him once a week, and took him to doctors, and drove him to distant supermarkets where one could buy six tins of baking powder for the price of five. Everyone ignored Isaac, but no one less than Jacob, and no one more than Tamir. Yet Isaac would have traded six Jacobs for five Tamirs.Maybe it was the distance that Isaac loved. Maybe the absence allowed for a mythology, while Jacob was cursed to be judged by the increments he fell short of perfect menschiness.Jacob tried to persuade Tamir to come and see Isaac before he moved to the Jewish Home. But Tamir denied the significance of the event. “I’ve moved six times in the last ten years,” he e-mailed, although like this, “iv mvd 6 tms n lst 10 yrs,” as if English were as vowel-less as Hebrew. Or as if there were no possible way for him to give less of a shit.“Sure,” Jacob wrote back, “but never to an assisted-living facility.”“I’ll come when he dies, O.K.?”Read the full story here: The New Yorker
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