A Rebel Poet Wrestles with His Rebel Kids

Poetry is so hard to understand. It’s like a dream, but not a full dream dream, more like a vivid half-waking experience with people who you aren’t sure if they’re real or not, standing in places that might never have existed.

Jake Marmer’s new collection of poems, The Neighbor Out of Sound (buy it direct) (or amazon), takes its title from a poem by Emily Dickinson, but its influence stretches out way farther in both directions, toward the more distant past and the more recent one: he combines jazz with Jewish teachings, improvisation with careful rhythm and breaks, the wisdom of thousands of years of chazal with his own frantic, limitless thoughts.

(And yes, I know it’s weird to call poems that are printed in a book “improvisations” — it sounds like a nice way of saying unedited. But there’s a spontaneity to these verses, a connected randomness like a really good middle-of-the-night dvar torah that comes at the end of a Shabbos tisch, where your brain connects one thing with another, geography homework with Elijah coming before the idol-worshiping priests, and everything seems to flow together in a way that makes utter sense of the universe.)

Geez, it’s hard to review poems, isn’t it?

It might be easier just to make you read them. Two poems, placed side by side in this book, “Root-Note Nigun” and “3 A.M. Nigun,” give two different takes on the Hasidic form of melody, a type of song that, traditionally, has no words. Here’s what I mean:

 

Root Nigun

this nigun is about a stick figure
a two-bone abstraction, solitary root
note, resounding its stripped chorus —

 

It keeps going, but then, a page later, we get this:

 

3 A.M. Nigun

two silences rise on each side of you
amplifying shadows of possession —

family of three — the dream of us
like the never-thickening liquid
all night poured in
and out of the bedroom’s cup

 

These poems are almost not poems. They’re half-poems, half jazz, the same way that Miles Davis will play a song that scales up and down in complicated patterns and then, somehow, it stumbles into a pop chorus that’s simple and catchy and gets stuck in your head all afternoon.

The poems wrestle with Judaism and G-d just as they wrestle with new fatherhood, career-hood, the unfamiliar weight of responsibility. It’s hard to go from being a snarky, provocative single person into an ostensibly responsible adult who’s not only responsible for teaching your children about traffic lights and potty training but also your own history, the old country of Ukraine, where Marmer grew up, and also the old country of New York, while living in a California paradise. He writes: “Almost three years old, on the toilet / he says: god / is everywhere / but you can’t see him, papa,” and then wryly notes: “The things we fought for / came back to bite us.” As his children discover themselves — playful, contrarian, mischievous — Marmer wrestles with his own self-discovery.

And yes, it’s funny, and yes, it’s cute, but Marmer doesn’t stay there. He takes us to the next level, a level of intimacy and truth. It’s messy, it’s gross, it’s inexact, and it takes us to a place of raw emotional honesty. In “Writing Prompt for a Young Parent,” he writes:

When your kids are sick, really sick, let them into your bed.
Let them cough and drool on your pillow.
In the morning, inhale the pillow’s worth of their sweet bad breath, and
their pain and terror intensified by sickness —
the terror you must have been the source of

Marmer straddles so many worlds in his verse, old and new, East Coast and West, jazz and Talmud, that it can sometimes feel dizzying to read them all at once. But you can’t stop. The greater effect of these pieces is a biography: not just Marmer’s story but that of his children, his parents and grandparents in Russia, his influences (from Mingus to Monk to Rebbe Meir and Sholem Aleichem) and his world. This book, this cross-section of his life, is a record of a transformation that is both singularly Marmer’s voice and an experience that touches us all.

 

Buy the book The Neighbor Out of Sound direct or on Amazon.

Sholom Brodt Was Not a Tzaddik

When wine goes in, the secrets come out. In A Shtikel Sholom, a new memoir of stories about his teacher and mine, Sholom Brodt, Barak Hullman writes about a drunken Simchas Torah they spent together.

“When you die,” Barak said to Rav Sholom, “everyone is going to say, ‘Oh, what a great tzaddik! Such a big rabbi!”

Sholom, who was, at these times and most others, playful and mischievous, turned hard and sober.

“G-d forbid,” he told Barak.

And Sholom, who was always thinking about G-d, who spent pretty much every moment I’d ever seen him doing things for other people, going out of his way to be kind to the students in his house and tolerant to the neighbors who swept in and ate his food and filled his rooms and stayed all hours of the day and night, maybe approached sainthood in a way that most of us wouldn’t dream of, or want to.

But he wasn’t like that. He wasn’t even a hidden tzaddik. He was a tzaddik in denial. He had such gorgeous, perfect faults. He was so good at being human.

“When you die,” Barak said that night, “I’m going to shout at the top of my lungs, ‘Sholom Brodt was not a tzaddik!’ That’s going to be my final gift to you.”

In the years after, Sholom would remind him of his promise. Years later, when Sholom did die, Barak said to his wife, “What am I going to do? I promised him.” You can’t, she said. People wouldn’t understand. And Barak said, “It’s a once in a lifetime deal. Do you think Sholom would want people calling him a tzaddik?”

So at the end of the funeral procession, after everyone spoke, when the assembled company was about to dissemble, Barak stepped to the front. He said what he needed to say, what he’d promised Rav Sholom all this time ago.

**

A Shtikel Sholom is friendly in the most intimate of ways. It doesn’t have deep secrets, but it has plenty of shallow secrets, the moments that you only share with the people who know you better than anyone else, better than you know yourself.

It’s the reason I felt repulsed when I first read it. Because I thought I knew Sholom like that, and I only knew the book’s author, Barak Hullman, in a cursory, across-the-shul, oh-he’s-the-guy-who-sings-a-little-too-glee-clubbish way. When my in-laws sent me a clipping of the Jerusalem Post advertisement for the book, I had to ask myself, who was writing it? Who has the chutzpah and the closeness to write 300 pages about the man who helped us survive our first year of marriage, who stayed at our Brooklyn home whenever he was called away from Jerusalem, who seemed to have something new to share, something meant only for me, every time I saw him or spoke to him?

That was one of Sholom’s gifts. I wasn’t his only confidant. I wasn’t even his only student, even though his yeshiva, Simchat Shlomo in Nachlaot, fluctuated between two and ten students during the year I was there. It’s bigger now, not that numbers matter, because Simchat Shlomo’s virtue, and Rav Sholom’s virtue, was not that he attracted masses of students — the yeshiva attracted the students who needed it to exist, a yeshiva of misfits and weirdos and doubters and true believers. While I was there, my chevrusas included a comic book artist, a self-proclaimed heathen, an Internet activist with the handle Orthodox Anarchist, and a banjo player.

The yeshiva was named after Shlomo Carlebach, but it took on Sholom’s personality. It may have been scant most days for morning prayers, but every week for shalosh seudos, the come-and-hear meal and meditation that closes out Shabbos, Sholom and Judy’s house was packed, and the walls swelled like the cosmic sukkah made of leviathan skin that will grow to house all the righteous at the end of days.

**

I don’t want to tell you about Sholom, I want to tell you about this book. And the book is such a treasure. Some chapters are only a paragraph long, some expand to a page or two. All of them are deft, funny, wise in unexpected ways.

Like the one where Barak complains about a crazy guy at shul who was praying maniacally, and Sholom says that we should all merit to pray like we’re crazy.

And the one where he ducked out of a rabbinical program just before the final test, telling Sholom, “I don’t want to be a rabbi,” and Sholom, thinking deeply, said, “Neither do I.”

And the one where, also on Simchas Torah, a stranger shows up in a black hat and a long kapota, dancing around the shul, and it’s revealed to be Sholom, who would never wear such things, but that night his hidden self has become revealed.

Reading these stories makes you profoundly sad. Not just a retroactive fear of missing out based in the past, where you wish you could just grab a time machine and wind up at a party you hadn’t known existed, but in terms of putting limits on the limitless. Sholom was infinite. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth next, or where he’d show up. When he died, he became finite. He would never be unexpected again. This book has an end.

**

On Shabbos I was getting water for our family’s lunch table and I reached for what we always call the Sholom pitcher. Once, while staying at our house, Sholom used a pitcher of water and accidentally cracked it. He got up early and went out to all the Jewish markets until he found a glass pitcher that matched its design almost exactly. It was no big deal! And we had other pitchers! And we barely even used pitchers! But he wanted to replace the pitcher he broke, and we didn’t even know until he replaced it. What could we say but thank you? So we did.

“Be transparent to your source,” Barak quotes Sholom saying in one of these stories. “When you give someone a glass of water, they should know it’s from G-d and not from you.” I poured water for him hundreds of times, Barak writes. Every time in my head, I’d repeat, be transparent to your source, be transparent to your source.

The philosopher Alain de Botton once attempted the impossible: to write an autobiography of his best friend. The effort was interesting, but it was so insular and overthought that it ended up revealing less about his subject and more about de Botton himself.

This book is a treasure, a gift. I almost wish that I didn’t know Sholom before so that I could have the experience of knowing his character through this beautifully incomplete portrait. I’m sure I will go back to this book again and again, get to know its hundred-plus anecdotes, each another piece of the gorgeously complicated puzzle that was Sholom Brodt, memorize these lines as well as I know some of my favorite books. But I did know Sholom, and he still holds an infinite piece of my heart, and I’ll never be able to see the borders and the limitlessness of the person I knew, who might not have been perfect in the classical sense, who would hate my saying this, but whose mistakes were the mistakes of a tzaddik.

Buy the book A Shtickel Sholom on the author’s website or on Amazon. 

Compliments

Taking compliments wherever we find them.

Writing about Dead People

I was out to breakfast with my brother-in-law, who told me he really liked my latest Hevria piece. I thanked him, then immediately regretted it, because how do you thank someone for memories that aren't yours? This is how it goes.

The Friend I Never Called

BY MATTHUE ROTH • JUNE 19, 2018 • ESSAY

I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.

Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights, which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.

So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.

Then, last night, this did.

I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:

I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.

She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.

Read the rest of my post here, or read the original article that inspired my piece.

Cooking with the Anarchist Kosher Cookbook

Like the allusory joke of its title, Maxwell Bauman’s collection of short stories The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook has a very limited audience—a niche within a niche, that limited number of beautiful people who will have at least a passing familiarity with both The Anarchist Cookbook, the perpetually-Xeroxed manual of homemade explosive devices for domestic uprisings, and the sub-genre of cookbooks that do not merely contain kosher recipes, and certainly bear only the most passing resemblance to the miniature culinary museums-on-paper put out by Yotam Ottolenghi and his ilk, but echo more the haimishe delights and misspellings of Spice & Spirit and The Molly Goldberg Cookbook and The Famous Jewish Cookbook — that is, those garishly-printed 1970s volumes that regard jello as an all-purpose ingredient and expound on the myriad ways that tuna fish can be turned into salad.

In other words: Maxwell Bauman, don’t expect this book to become the next Da Vinci Code.

But a few weeks ago, the comedian Moshe Kasher posted a tweet that was just as niche: “Martin Buber’s personal pronouns are I/Thou,” summoning the intersection of those at the forefront of the evolution of nonbinary queer grammar and post-WWII Jewish theological philosophy, and I watched in pleased surprise as the numbers of hearts and retweets circulated higher and higher. Maybe there’s still few enough of us weird Jews to warrant a manifesto, but there’s also enough to cling to these tiny sporadic appearances in the overlap of people who are really into Judaism and really into oddness — enough, at least, to deserve a book like The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook, and to will Maxwell Bauman into existence.

I’m going to reprint the book’s table of contents here, partly just so you can appreciate it:

• When the Bush Burns
• The Messiah in New York
• You’ve Lost that L’chaim Feeling
• The Leviathan Blues
• The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook
• Baphomitzvah

Partly, it’s that his combination of deviously clever puns and intermixing lingos — Baphomitzvah, for example (and if you didn’t know), portmanteaus the demonic celestial Baphomet with the time-honored Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvahs, or, in the case of this story, a b’nai mitzvah. As we see the first sparkle of the demonic creature’s existence, the repeated snubbings and the heightening impending revenge of the titular bas mitzvah girl, we see both tropes of stories rearing their heads: the ugly-girl horror-story narrative, in which our likeable but socially-spurned antiheroine comes into contact with satanic powers, claims them for her own, then wreaks a mirrored havoc on the community and town who have wreaked a similar sort of havoc on her. To put this on top of the modern secular bar mitzvah narrative isn’t subversive, it just makes sense — but it works, and it works so joyously well.

That’s a lot of the joy of The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook. Substituting a golem for homemade molotov cocktails in the title story is a no-brainer, but the story’s power comes from the effortlessness of the twin narratives. Yes, Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman were Jewish and pillars of countercultural uprisings, but much of their personal journeys lay in ignoring or minimizing their background and/or affiliation. In the title story, he embraces it. The language of revolution is weaponized not by youngsters and upstarts and in spite of their Judaism, but by elderly rabbis and bubbes, and because of it — and by those youngsters and upstarts who claim that tradition.

The mixing occasionally has mixed results. I first encountered this book at an indie-books conference held in one of those sports arena-size conference halls with a million aisles and people swarming them like an ant farm. If you know anything about me, you can picture our first encounter: me catching sight of the cover typography, then actually reading the title, eyes popping out of head, body popping out of skin, &tc. To paraphrase Moshe Kasher’s tweet, I was pretty sure the audience for the title was me.

I read the first page of the first story, “When the Bush Burns,” and I was in weird Jewish heaven. Forgive me (and, by extension, Maxwell), but it’s raunchy.

I curled up and pulled the covers over my head, but the light was much stronger under the sheets. I opened my eyes to discover bright orange flames flickering out the edges of my panties.

“Good morning, Beth,” said the fire.

I screamed and kicked off the sheets.

“What’s wrong?” my husband called from the kitchen.

“My pussy’s on fire!”

“I’ll get you some cranberry juice,” he said.

It works on so many levels, right? Geez, I was into this. But the story devolves into — minor spoilers in this paragraph — the couple’s inability to conceive, and the work of a G-dly miracle/satanic imp/odd vaginal trickster to get her to hook up with the sketchy, overly willing rabbi of their synagogue. The story felt like it started promising Talmudic deconstruction and ended as a MAD magazine take on what a page of Talmud would look like, but without the sly evenhanded irony of a MAD article. At a few other places in the collection, Bauman makes a few errors/assumptions/missteps with regards to historical or cultural accuracy, especially when dipping into his Hasidic caricatures, which at other times in my life I’d get annoyed at or offended by — but this collection is meant to offend, good-naturedly, and for the annoyance part, I’ll just say that nothing’s too egregious, and probably could have used a little more research/asking questions, but it all really does seem to be coming from a good place.

And then there’s “The Leviathan Blues.” This story. I could write an entire other essay about this story, and how much I loved it, and how much it disturbed me — not about the character of G-d in the story, but about our entire notion of G-d as an almighty arbiter of our lives, as a storyteller in the most evil and poetic way, as Someone who’s looking out for everyone in the world, and because of this makes some decisions that are, at best, direly sad.

I don’t want to give too much of it away, but you know the story of the Leviathan, right? When G-d created the world, G-d made the Leviathan, a sea monster bigger than all other animals, and soon realized that they would fill up the sea and the Earth and there would be no room for other creatures. So G-d had to uncreate it. Anyway, this story takes that particular story and expands it, and it really does bear the fruit of a bit of research, or of digging into the several stories on this aggadic cryptozoid, but the story’s most successful technique, I think, is its simple way lingering on every moment, filling it with detail and thought.

It still has Bauman’s irreverence and his humor, it still has that cruelty and irony, but it fills the pages with the Leviathan’s pain and rage the way the Leviathan fills the sea. It’s graceful, it’s tragic, and it makes all of us who aren’t majestic, lonely sea monsters see a little more just how big, and how small, the world can be.

💪🤓 : Working Out, When You're a Nerd

I've been working out for a while now -- close to a year, maybe? -- which isn't so impressive in the greater scheme of things, or at least it isn't so impressive when you're a normal person, but considering I belong to the muscle-less minority and, for the first 30 or so years of my life, my greatest caloric expenditure was bobbing my head to They Might Be Giants songs, this is pretty notable. If I do say so myself.

Nerds Who Work Out

BY MATTHUE ROTH • JANUARY 16, 2018 • ESSAY

I started working out because I am cheap. There a zillion amazing things about working for Google, including free lunch (yes they order in kosher stuff for me) (but from a steakhouse, and I’m a vegetarian, so I eat a lot of pasta), but because I am a contractor — yes, even though I’ve worked here for 2 years — I don’t get basic things like healthcare.

So I feel this need to take advantage of every little bit of free stuff that does come my way.

At least, that’s what I told myself when I started. I really wasn’t prepared for this.

I wasn’t ready for working out to run my life.

<<read the rest>>

"Jackie, but Famous," and how you can read it right now

I'm really proud to have a new short story in Prime Number Magazine. Here's the beginning of it, and the rest is right after that little link on the bottom. It's kind of about the last real person still left in New York City.

Jackie, but Famous

Jackie had been running for the train, the 6:02 out of the city, convinced she was going to miss it, but also convinced that, with the correct combination of actions—magical gestures, glances at good luck omens like doves and not evil ones like pigeons, not stepping on any cracks in the pavement—she might still be able to make it. She wasn’t going to make it. The elevator took forever to come. The stoplights were against her. Traffic was still too heavy to safely run across. She walked fast, arms stiff, cutting through the air to her sides. She passed the length of one parked car, then another. The street was still too busy.

<< keep reading >>

Ok Google, say hello to Ellen

So in the gentile world there's this festival called Halloween, and it's based on a pagan festival but we've pretty much reduced it to creepy lights and candy corn.

But Ellen decided to do a special episode, and that Google Assistant thingy that I write had a little guest-starring spot.

The News Anchor Dreams (a short story)

My flash fiction piece "11-6" was just published by Heartwood Literary Magazine at the Low-Residency MFA at West Virginia Wesleyan College. I feel like I've written 4 or 5 pieces that all spin out of visiting the Big Bang Theory set, and you can't really tell it from the piece, but I think this is one of them. It's definitely about moving places with only a modicum of confidence (and slightly more divine faith, but not much) and having your life revolve around your job. 

Here's how it starts.

11-6

11-6

FICTION BY MATTHUE ROTH

The news anchor dreams there is a fire, a very bad fire. The only thing that can stop it is water. Everyone is waiting until the fire reaches the ocean. Until it does, the only thing to be done is to report on it. He reads a list of names, of people and businesses and towns affected by the fire. All the names are foreign. He does his best to pronounce each one correctly, short of putting on an accent, which doesn’t test well with the target demographics and makes him feel insincere.

He reads names. He tries to give gravity to each, knowing that among his audience are people with relatives there, people on vacation from there, people whom he is telling that their families are dead. He can’t linger long, though. There are more people waiting to hear the name of the next town to be incinerated, if it is theirs. He pauses before the next name. It is his own language, his own town—the place where he lives now. He lives two blocks away from the TV studio. He can make it to bed fast after the 11:00 news, and then he can be there bright and early for the morning news at six. It doesn’t feel like it’s burning. This must be some weird quirk of live TV, the way it’s filmed, like the five-second delay in case anybody curses.

But they are. They’re burning, and then everyone is dead.

[ read the rest ]

Famous Typewriters (and the Things They Made)

I flew into and out of San Francisco in a day a few weeks ago. Did I tell you about it? Maybe not, it was a bit of a secret.

By far, the weirdest/best thing I found was an exhibit of famous typewriters at San Francisco International Airport. In the middle of the jetlagged night, it felt like the most important thing I'd ever seen.

4. Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

I read The Glass Menagerie in seventh grade and adored it, although at the time I couldn't tell you why. Probably something to do with the mentally-fragile daughter, whose condition to me was scary and recognizable. When I moved to D.C., my friends Eric and Matthias used to take me to a bar called the Raven, the first time I had a regular bar, where, according to local legend, Tennessee Williams either hung out or wrote his first book. I started a lot of stories on bar napkins but never finished any.

3. Ernest Hemingway, A Movable Feast

I was always a little disgusted by Hemingway and a little scared of him, but Marty Beckerman's wonderful book The Heming Way did a bit to dispel it, and a bit to empower a looser, funnier sense of disgust.

2. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. In a purely metaphysical, inspiration-centric way, I identify completely with Rachel Bloom's song. I spent a while just staring at this typewriter in surprised silence (well, I was alone, so it wasn't that surprising that I was silent). Imagining his fingers on those very keys, the pure physicality of it all, the way that every time you hit a key the letter is permanently imprinted, no highlighting and deleting, no going back. Merely existing in the same place at that typewriter felt more dangerous than anything I've ever done. It was a dare never to use a computer again.

1. The Beatles, Introducing the Beatles

And the Beatles. I've never been crazy about the Beatles -- not that I don't like them! I really like them! -- I just, well, never thought they were the ultimate band or the only band that ever existed or anything like that. But also, I never thought about them writing songs. Or writing songs in an actual draft/reworking/another draft/final way. Would they write the words "I'd like to be your man," go back and forth about the word order, the rhythm, change "I'd like" to a declarative statement like "I want," and then Ringo tells you that you need a concrete image and you finally, finally type in the middle of the night, "I want to hold your hand"? Maybe that's not how it happened. But something happened. And the moments their keys struck paper, it turned into something.

A Guide to Additions and Emendations in the High Holiday Prayers

 

Over the 10-day period between the Day of Remembrance and the Day of Judgement, when our ephemeral lives and eternal souls swing in a delicate balance between life and death, there are certain things we can do to ask our Creator not to give us the soul-whupping we deserve. (Or maybe just the whooping I deserve. It is entirely possible that you, reader, are a better person than I am. Hell, I’d bet a few Eternity Points on it.)

So we take the most common prayer that we say all year, the Shemoneh Esrei (Literally “the 18,” the thing we recite three times each day, morning noon and night, even though it’s actually 19 prayers and not 18 — long story, I’ll tell you some other time) and we throw a bunch of new gloop into it. Some of it’s new lines, with new tunes, that comes in between the existing paragraphs. Other parts are remixes of the existing text. All of it catches us by surprise, throws us for a loop, makes us question our routines and our habits and what we think is normal….

Oh, let’s just jump into it and get started. Whether you’re ready or not.

You’ll deal.

1.

Zochreinu l’chaim
זָכְרֵנוּ לְחַיִּים

This is addressed to G-d; we are talking to G-d.Of course. G-d created the world, every time we open our mouths it’s going to G-d; G-d sees all; G-d knows all; one of the first stories in the Torah is Adam & Eve trying to keep a secret from G-d and, of course, failing. There is no question of whether or not G-d is listening; G-d can’t overhear anything because G-d hears everything, right from the assumption it’s being spoken aloud. Then: why pray? (Because sometimes we need to ignore everyone else and talk only to G-d.) But also: that means everything we say is a prayer.

melech chafetz b’chaim
 מֶלֶךְ חָפֵץ בַּחַיִּים 

So why the alternate form of address? The plural object, the command form? We are not asking G-d, we are telling G-d: Remember us! We created a new name for G-d for just this occasion. After the standard opening, the one we use every day, where we address G-d by a slew of titles and panegyrics and names and adjectives turned into names (G-d of Abraham, G-d of Isaac, G-d of Jacob; the Almighty; the Great; the Stringent; the Awesome), this one-line interjection takes the prayer and swings it for an unexpectedly sharp about-face: Remember us! and then Our King who desires life! As if G-d forgot G-d’s own name, G-d’s own role. We are being chutzpadik here, people. But not undeservedly so: This is our life. It is hanging in the balance. We need to demand it. A Chasidic tradition around the New Year: Everyone bakes honey cakes. When you go visit someone, you don’t ask for honey cake. That would be rude. You don’t sit around politely waiting for honey cake to be offered. That would be pretentious (if you expect it to be) or it would be thinking poorly of your hosts (if you assume they haven’t made any). You demand it: Gebt mir lekach! we are told to demand of them. Give us cake!

v’kosveinu l’sefer hachayim, l’maanecha melech chayim.
וְכָתְבֵנוּ בְּסֵפֶר הַחַיִּים. לְמַעַנְךָ אֱלהִ`ים חַיִּים

This is followed up right away by another demand: Write us in the book of life! I mean, while we’re being demanding, might as well not ask for just one slice but the full cake, right? But then the question really should be, why not ask for that straight up? If we want life, ask for life.

Rosh Hashana is the Day of Remembrance. For better, for worse. It’s a day when the prayer service gets transmogrified from 2 hours into 5, a day when it’s nearly impossible not to have flashbacks to horrible, embarrassing and devastating moments over the past year where you did what you shouldn’t have, didn’t do what you should, often things that are not so horrid as stabbing a man in the bloody chest or making love to a wooden idol in public but instead baiting a friend into buying you a drink or yelling at your kids for stupid shit (and it is all stupid shit). That’s our burden. That’s our shit to remember. What we are saying to G-d is, we’ll remember that shit, you remember the other shit—the good shit, the perfect shit, the moments where all might not be right with the world but it’s good enough, where we were grateful and said thanks for an unexpected blessing or where we were about to explode and held ourselves back. Every woman I didn’t sleep with, and there are nearly 3.5 billion in the world, rather than the one I did. L’maanecha melech chayim. Dear G-d, always look on the bright side of life.

2.

Mi kamocha, av harachaman, zocher yetzirav l’chaim b’rachamim.
מִי כָמוךָ אַב הָרַחֲמִים. זוכֵר יְצוּרָיו לְחַיִּים בְּרַחֲמִים

The first two words are cribbed from an existing poem, one Moses and Miriam recited when they charged through the parted Red Sea: Who is like You? Because nothing is so Jewish as celebrating your redemption from slavery with a rhetorical question. It’s a nice rhetorical question, for the most part, not emphasizing G-d’s amazingness (since we mentioned that extensively right at the beginning) but G-d’s uniqueness. Also emphasizing our relationship to G-d. When you love someone more than anybody else, you can list of a Roget’s slew of adjectives (breathtaking, brilliant, blue-sky bootylicious) but all the best love songs are some variation on Ain’t nobody like my baby. And this is my favorite thing about religion — good religion, anyway, not the oppressive kind: everyone’s take on G-d is different because everyone’s relationship with G-d is different. Who is like You, G-d? Nobody, that’s who.

But there is some common ground, and some common through-line that connects us all or guides us in our own individual relationships, and that’s what prayer is. Av harachamon, Father, the one who has compassion for us. Rachaman officially means “compassion,” but it’s more like sympathy, seeing each of our problems and our cases on its own. And then it’s more like empathy, because G-d doesn’t just try to feel what we’re going through, G-d’s been through it too. The praying. The distractions. The memories. The original experiences of the memories we’re flashbacking to.

And then the final hammerswing of the conclusion: zocher yetzirav, remember Your creations. We belong to You. We are Your fault. Everything that’s good we do, we owe it to You; and every mistake we make is a result of Your Creation as well. It’s weird that it’s yetzirav, the third-person “G-d’s creations,” and not yetzircha, “Your creations,” and I’m not sure why. Maybe someone with better grammar than me can explain?

3.

Hamelech hakadosh
הַמֶּלֶךְ הַקָּדושׁ

Here we go. The catch. This one takes me by surprise every time I read it, the reason why the title of this is Additions and emendations and not just additions. While the first two special beseechings were new lines inserted into an existing text, this is a fake-out, the usual blessing ha-el hakadosh morphing into hamelech. El is one of G-d’s names, one that denotes stringency and anger, which we’re replacing with a more kind, gentle, and flattering name, King.

It’s weird — or, more accurately, an anthropological divergence — that, in Jewish theological literature, being a king is almost always a good thing, even though in the Bible the position of king was granted as a reticent condescension to the Israelites (not a good thing), and in post-Biblical times kings were often the ones who carried out pogroms, forced conversions, and the “Jew tax” (also not good things). But here, G-d being King is G-d being good to us. Ruling our lives and making our lives better.

4.

Hamelech hamishpat
הַמֶּלֶךְ הַמִשְׁפָּט

Just when you hit a rhythm of the regular prayers, the liturgical writers go ahead and screw with you. Hamelech is the third prayer. Then we get the usual prayers, the usual prayers, and smack in the middle — #11 — melech ohev tzedakah u’mishpat becomes…well, this. The usual blessing, Blessed are You, G-d, the king who loves tzedakah and justice, becomes just justice. (Mishpat is a more congenial, gracious, judge-everyone-favorably kind of justice, whereas the other {and more kabbalistic} word for justice, din, belies a harsh, this-is-the-way-it-is justice.) More, we don’t want G-d’s justice to be dependent on the amount of charity we give. We just want it to be given.

5.

V’kosuv l’chaim tovim kol benai verisecha
וּכְתב לְחַיִּים טובִים כָּל בְּנֵי בְרִיתֶךָ

Every time I say chaim I remember (memory again) we’re asking for life. And when we say l’chaim, we say it means “to life!” but that’s probably a bastardization of the text induced by Fiddler on the Roof. We don’t drink alone, we don’t say to life, we say to lives, everyone’s, kol benai verisecha. This one is short and direct and pleading: Give us life!

6.

B’sefer chaim, bracha v’shalom, u’parnasah tova, nizacher v’nikasev lefonecho, anachnu v’chol amcho bais yisroel, chaim tovim u’leshalom.
בְּסֵפֶר חַיִּים. בְּרָכָה וְשָׁלום. וּפַרְנָסָה טובָה. נִזָּכֵר וְנִכָּתֵב לְפָנֶיךָ. אֲנַחְנוּ וְכָל עַמְּךָ בֵּית יִשרָאֵל. לְחַיִּים טובִים וּלְשָׁלום

And then I think about what life really means, and why I want it so bad. I’ve done good things with my year. I’ve lived a complete year. One way or another, G-d has forgiven me for my transgressions of the past, or at least G-d’s forgiven me enough to get me to this point, one complete year and one more Rosh Hashanah under the belt. This is our last ask, the final insertation and the last mention before we shut the laptops of our prayers and let the screen go dark until the next prayer period, and so in one final flurry of typing we cram it all in. Blessings and peace. Good work and good money. Maybe these are the things that really count, the things we can’t do without or at least the things we don’t want to worry about, so we can worry about the stuff that’s more important.

But what is important? We keep saying life, life, life, and I, like Ayala, have had Tishreis where I couldn’t even convince myself with my praying. I’ve never not believed in G-d, which I know is weird, but I have gone through long dark periods where I don’t believe in myself. As much as this part is about the torrent of requests, maybe it’s also about listing how many things we need. Things both exact and nonspecific, things like money (that I don’t really want to think about but can’t do without) and things like blessings.

And who’s really in control of a blessing? Not the blessed but the blesser, and if I do believe G-d knows what’s good for me more than I know myself, then I can put that power in G-d’s hands, I can remember — memory once more — that it’s already up to G-d, that my Creator can give me the blessing to live or the blessing to die, the blessing to stick with my awesome but impermanent good job or the blessing to have no money and lots of time. The blessing to not know what’s coming before you. The blessing that every fate is both the best and worst of fates, and the blessing that, no matter how hard you pray, your fate is not altogether in your own hands.

Give us blessings. Give us peace. We start and end this part with peace — peace between us, for sure, but also peace inside us. And we sandwich it and surround it with requests for blessings. Remember it and write it before you, for me, for us, for all Jews, a good life, a peaceful life, because our life is in Your hands.

Amen.

 

Image by Erwin Gerodiaz.

When Old People Go Missing

My cousin is missing. He isn’t where I left him.

There’s a coffeehouse I visit as soon as I come to Australia. It’s easier to find my cousin that way than banking on him hearing his cell phone or being at home. He likes to stay active — he wakes up about 4:00 A.M., hits the streets for his morning stroll and first coffee, then spends most of the day at the coffeehouse, sitting at the tables, talking with his friends (mostly old men) and the strangers who say hi (mostly young women).

He’s easy to find there, until he isn’t.

Čapek is my grandfather’s first cousin. He was born around 1924 in Berehovo, a small village currently in the Ukraine, near the Hungarian border. In the years before he was born and over the course of his life there, until he turned 15 and was moved to a concentration camp, it belonged to the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and possibly Romania. Even today, the town’s few streets on Google Maps have alternating Cyrillic, Hungarian, and Czech names.

Then the Holocaust happened. The town got cleaned out. He spent most of the war in Buchenwald, a work camp — the entire rest of his family was killed; he was a teenage boy, he could help the Germans.

After the war, he was taken to Switzerland to get better. Fortunately, he had tuberculosis and had been malnourished enough so that he couldn’t eat solid food. The ex-prisoners who could were fed regular food, and their bodies couldn’t handle the overload. Most died. He spent four years in a hospital, then traveled to Paris, where many survivors ended up, trying to find each other and piece together what was left of their lives. He didn’t find anyone. From there, he boarded a boat to Australia.

My wife’s grandfather also spent much of the war in Buchenwald. He also ended up in Australia. My wife’s grandfather married the rabbi’s only daughter, had five children, a number of grandchildren, and counted close to a hundred descendants before his death last year. My cousin, one barracks over from him in the camp, never married. For 20 years he was a tram conductor. He collected fares, told jokes, let anyone pass who forgot their fares — or said they did — and just basically became friends with everyone he met.

He lives in a tiny apartment just above Acland St., which is the St. Mark’s Place/Melrose Blvd./South St./hip and trendy cafe-culture capital in Melbourne. I know his address, but there’s no point in me going there. “If I’m home, I’m asleep,” he once told me.

As usual, my first morning here I just show up at the coffeehouse — it’s right in an arcade, one of those European-style malls with stained-glass windows and wrought iron that you walk through and you think you’re in an old movie. The cafe has two heavy wooden tables right in the center of the arcade.

Most mornings he’s there with a kind German and a grouchy Hungarian, shooting the shit with each in their respective languages. Today he’s not.

This is not alone enough to sound a warning bell. But my mom has been calling his cell phone and getting no answer, which is also not alarming on its own, but (a) it’s been happening for weeks, and (b) my mom has been nonstop asking me about finding him, which is hitting my anxiety on the head a little too exactly.

His friends from the cafe are also not there. Neither, I soon discover, is the cafe itself. The inside awning is still there, but inside the place all the shelves are empty, the kitchen is in boxes, everything is dust and shadow.

I’d imagined a hundred times over the moment I came back, talking to the barista. I’ve met him over fifty times, talked to him whenever I visited my cousin, known him, weirdly, for over ten years, although the time we’ve spent actually speaking would probably only add up to a couple minutes. But when you’re close to an old person, at a certain point you begin to envision — to fantasize, almost — how you will find out they’re dead. Or, worse, that something terrible’s happened to them, that they aren’t in the peaceful dreamless sleep of death but are somewhere unknown suffering through something and if we only knew how to find them, if we only paid them more attention, we’d be able to help them.

This happened with my grandmother in her nursing home, where they took excellent care of her, and where my parents visited her every day. How we’re not a part of their lives always, how what we mean by “their lives” is such a fragile and unguaranteed thing.

I run down the street. I stop in every place on that street he went — the bank, the other coffee shop, the early-bird special lunch place, the bakery where he used to fry donuts in the morning, as a favor to the owners or as an actual job I was never able to figure out. He just loved hanging out there and they gave him something to do. I’ve been in the country less than 24 hours. Just an evening, a sleepless night, and now this early morning. Except for the eateries there’s nothing else open. I’ve been searching for him for an hour and it’s still only 8:00 in the morning. The world is whirling around me; I’ve crossed the same street a dozen times, I’m no longer being careful about the direction of the cars. I’m crying openly. An old woman asks me what’s wrong. I ask her if she knows Čapek. I describe him — short, hunched over, bald, mustache, a psoriatic scar on the top of his head (I feel guilty saying this to someone else, but it will help, I tell myself, it will help), likes to wear one of those dinky Outback hats like in Crocodile Dundee.

The old woman blinks at me. Crocodile Dundee? It was from the ’80s, I tell myself, that counts as old these days. She should know what I’m talking about.

There is a supermarket called Woolworths. My only association is the dinettes from the 1950s American South, the restaurant where they wouldn’t let black people eat with white people at the counter. They’ve never had that problem here; nobody knows a Woolworths is for anything except groceries. I’ve never seen Čapek in here, but figure it can’t hurt. And I hit pay dirt. One of the self-checkout supervisors remembers him. She says he was always the nicest person in the world, but a few times he’d thrown fits, yelled at people. She thinks he was having Alzheimer’s fits. She thinks they took him to a nursing home, but she doesn’t know for sure and she doesn’t know which one. She’s apologetic and a little accusatory. You didn’t know they took him? What kind of relationship do you have to him?

I’m his cousin, I say. But I don’t live anywhere near here.

I get back to my in-laws’, feeling more alienated than ever. The kids are up. I make sure they’re okay but I can’t play with them, I have something to do, and they’re confused — we’re on vacation, isn’t my work in another country? But I get to work.

The only thing I can think of doing is, I search for a list of elderly facilities in the area. I start calling them in Google Maps order, the closest first. It’s about to be a Jewish holiday tonight. I’m only there for a week. If I lose today, I’ve lost 3 out of my 7 days in the country.

I start calling down the list and find two things very quickly: That every nursing home uses an annoying voicemail system, and that none of them can tell me if he’s here because of patient privacy. But what, I ask, if he doesn’t know how to tell them that I’m a legitimate relative? What if he doesn’t recognize me anymore? I hang up from the fourth place, feeling every bit of the queasiness I managed to avoid on the plane seeping into me. The phone rings. It’s my father-in-law. He suggests I call the local Jewish bureau. They might not be quick, but they must have resources for situations like this. He’s the only adult who was awake during my search, and he has the kind of mind that’s perfect for this. He sees everything like a puzzle. Once you see problems like puzzles, you can solve them.

I call and tell the very kind receptionist what’s wrong and give her all my information. She says it’s no problem and she’ll be able to find him in a week, maybe two. I thank her and slip off the phone.

Then I call the fifth place. “Hi,” I say fast, “can you put me through to Čapek Roth’s room?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t think there’s anyone here by that name,” the man on the phone says. “Are you quite sure he’s here?”

No, but that doesn’t stop me. I try the fourth place again, then the third. Then the second.

And the receptionist who picks up this time tells me he’s just gone down for a nap.

The next morning is the first morning of the holiday. I wait outside the electric doors till someone walks through. I squeeze past them so I don’t use electricity, and then I get Čapek’s room number and take the stairs.

And there he is. Sitting upright in a bed, swathed by white paper-thin bedsheets, and, disconcertingly, without his mustache, which I don’t realize till he lowers his coffee from his mouth. Which somehow makes up for the lack of mustache, because coffee is the ultimate normalizer.

And there’s that moment where I’m not sure what is real and what isn’t, and if it’s really him because I can only see half his face with the coffee mug up, and scariest of all, whether he remembers me or not, but then he lowers the mug and says, as chill as if he’s back at the cafe and making jokes in German, “Matthue! How did you get here?” and just hearing the syllables of my name from his mouth, just having myself as the point of reference for him, means that even if everything isn’t okay, it’s still okay for now.

And I hug him, which I’ve never done before, and feels a little violating because he’s in bed and weaker than he used to be and he can’t really do anything about it, but also feels a little bit like what we need. And I laugh, and I say to him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” And then I tell him.

 

Photo: Lost Old Man by Alexander Kluge.