I'm trying to write a letter to you on your first yahrzeit. I'm depressed over you, over health reasons and a cancelled trip to New York. The day after I had to call off the trip I got sick again: a cold and a fever over the weekend. I can't stay at home when the kids come over because I don't want them to see me depressed, so I'm at Starbucks, the good one where the staff isn't always fighting. Instead there's a guy right next to me in his fifties who is shouting everything he has to say into the ears of his deaf Israeli mother, along with a not quiet Jamaican caregiver, whom I learned is the 'smartest 88 year old any of them know.' The guy is wearing water proof gym clothes and is in amazing shape: clearly he will be annoying other customers with his conversation for many years to come. I can't move because I have to charge my laptop. They just announced that another person is coming over to say hello. I almost don't want to leave just to see how obnoxious the next person is.
...Here she is. She has terrible plastic surgery and a shrill voice. There's an African-American gentleman across the Starbucks who is looking at them and looks even more annoyed than I am. ...He just left before he ordered anything.
Behold, the world you chose to raise us into. A world so unlike you and mom that I'm amazed you didn't shoot yourselves let alone me. Did our families really survive all that just to live in the materialistic, ostentatiously wealthy sort of lifestyle you hated even more than I do? The old lady apparently was a pianist: her family is clearly just loud yuppies with pronounced Baltimore accents who, if they have native intelligence, seem like they never had cause to develop it.
You always said you wanted to make a sequel to it's a wonderful life called 'It's a Miserable Life', there are days when I don't quite blame you.
Physical recovery from illness is 40% more likely when the attitude is positive, and I couldn't help but feeling your pessimism toward the end, perhaps even your nihilism. I could only hope it might have bought you another two ro three years, and whenever my time comes, I can only try as best I can to keep the good attitude toward it you always harangued me for not having.
The forties are different. For the first time, you hear about all sorts of people your age or ten years older dying, dropping dead, getting metastasized cancer, a person in my condition can't help wondering if that will be me before long enough. I'm doing my best to recover, but my best is clearly not good enough yet. I choose to believe things will get better, but some days the lack of evidence is crippling, overwhelming, like a brick wall of limitations.
...The guy just yelled at his mother's Jamaican caregiver about how she doesn't pick something up every six weeks for his mother in time, something about a hearing aid. Then he slammed down his cellphone. The sister is talking to him about a solution like he's a child. He's glaring at the caregiver like she's an enemy.
I shudder to think how often that guy was me and I know just how often it was you. It is bad enough when it happens to you, but when you watch what other people become in those moment you feel like a bit of a monster.
The old lady is sitting furthest away from me, but then I get a look at her, and oh my god, excepting the dyed thinning hair, she looks exactly like Bubbie. It's absolutely uncanny: right down to the same chin, the same bridges, the same facial expresion, the same cheekbones, the same eyes. The face is a little thinner, but it's a dead ringer...
They've finally left, one of them left one of their drinks on the table. Some pissed off guy around 70 in picks up the drink, throws it out as he's shaking his head, and vaguely slams it in the trash. He's now wiping down the tables. Not just the one he's about to sit at but the one next to him: thoroughly. Doubtless he's looking at my table and dying to ask me if he can wipe it down while his superego is yelling at him to yell at me for leaving my kind bar and straw wrappers on the table.
But after wiping down both tables for three minutes, he's finally sat down with what appears to be his wife. They sit next to each other at the booth while she sips a latte. I like these people more. She smiles at me as though she's sheepish for sitting intimately with her husband. She doesn't have plastic surgery, just a lot of makeup and huge sunglasses. I like these people: she's wearing a baseball cap that says 'book lover', he's wearing the kind of bucket hat Woody Allen always wears: the nerdiest of all hats. They're just sitting there very quietly, mumbling to each other with the long familiarity 50 years companionship brings. He sometimes puts his arm around her when he's not checking his phone. Sitting next to them is a pleasure.
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It's easy, talking to a ghost, almost easier than talking to you in real life. You finally can't interrupt me or weaponize what I tell you for your own edification, but it's so very different. The endless monologue that inserted itself into my head as many days of my life as you could dominate is no longer there. Supposedly it's my space now, and I intend to take advantage of it. But I worry, oh how I worry. I'm going to take a giant Eurotrip this autumn: not just because I want to treat myself to the trips I've denied myself for fifteen years, but because my body is so farblondget that even if I have many yeras left, I don't know if they will be particularly limber.
And yet the thought of travelling is in itself scary: inability to eat anything, drink anything, what could happen to me on vacation? I plan on a relatively extensive visit with a friend in Berlin who always smoked a pack a day and drank wine with every meal, another trip to Venice with a couple friends who still do the same: just the second hand smoke will be brutal.
I also want to go to Europe because I'm not just worried about my own imminent decripitude.
I could be wrong about Europe: right now Northern Europe is a picture of health so far exceeding our own that there's not even a competition. But Europe has 'ever but slenderly known itself', and the fact remains, as you well knew, Europe cannot sustain itself without US help. They may think they can, but American assistance is all that comes between them and Russian interference, an interference the far right would welcome with open arms. They're doing great: they're doing gangbusters. There is no place to have ever been better to live in than the EU after 2000 until now, but the miracles you can work when you don't have to pay for your own defense beggar belief, but the US government roots for their failure, the Russian government roots for their failure, the Chinese government roots for their failure, and so does Israel. The only people left for reliable alliances are the Middle Powers: Canada, if it holds liberal, Australia, if liberal democracy holds, South Korea, if liberal democracy holds, India, if liberal democracy comes back, Brazil, whose liberal democracy keeps collapsing... The EU can barely get along with itself, does it really expect to get along with unreliable allies any better than it does the US?
If all that goes, so goes all the orchestras, all the theaters, all the galleries, all the free universities, and all the cheap health care if I get really sick over there.
And let's not forget, if our country's opinion of Jews is getting lower, it's pretty goddamn low. In a few years, somewhere that seems sympathetic may simply hear I'm Jewish and will trhwo me out. It's very difficult to have a good time in a place where you're not welcome. Regardless of health, I'll bet I have a better time there now than when I'm fifty.
This conflict isn't ending, it probably won't. There might be a temporary halt here and there if Netanyahu goes, (IF...), but the conflict has already been outsourced all over the globe. Every zionist is a villain, and every Jew is suspect of being a Zionist. Even the anti-Zionist Jews will find that out before too long.
Are half the people I know anti-semites? Well... probably not, but they hold antisemitic notions. I forgive them: they know not what they do; we all hold our prejudices we're quite aware of having, but it doesn't make life easy. I'm sure every minority friend of mine feels exactly the same way, but I'm not sure they're aware we do too.
You warned me this is what life outside the Jewish bubble's like, my mother warned me that this is ALL life outside the Jewish bubble's like, but people are so much more than their feeelings toward Jews, and part of being Jewish is bearing witness to what the world is: not just that small sliver pertaining to us, but the world entire, as it is, was and will be. If we are meant to be anything at all, we are witnesses, timekeepers, a continuity for the world that connects the now to the beginning of recorded time.
One of the highlights of the trip will be Berlin: the city of Hegel, Einstein, Fritz Lang, Frederick the Great and Furtwangler (oh god this is getting pretentious...), but most important of all, the Mendelssohns.
I think you weren't just fascinated by the Mendelssohns, you patterned yourself on them. When I was young and exhibited the musical talent whose promise I never delivered on, you compared yourself to Abraham Mendelssohn and me to Felix, and would repeat his line: "When I was young I was my father's son, and now I am my son's father."
Horseshit. If anybody was Moses Mendelssohn incarnate it was you. The Jew who associated, but determined not to assimilate with a will of iron. Felix was said to be woken up at 5 every morning to begin his education: an education you instilled into me mightily even as I was a colossal academic failure, but you learned your lesson from me and did not force the same bildung on J..... and E....
To you, Judaism and enlightenment were utterly coeval. There was no one without the other. That may be true, but the psychic toll it took on you was intense, and for me it was at times unbearable. I've never felt I fit in among other Jews, and I certainly don't fit in among gentiles. During those years I wanted desperately to break free and live my own life among progressive hipsters, I felt utterly out of place, really as out of place as I do among other Jews. Getting a Jewish education for your kids was so important that it didn't occur to you that I needed a progressive school if I was ever going to find my way through youth. When I was older it always seemed that every great opportunity for a vacation with friends happened on a holiday obligation for which my breaking it would be absolutely unthinkable. When I tried to question the 'religion' about which you would sometimes be withering, you would often get defensive. A number of times you warned me 'if you pick at the thread, the whole thing falls apart!' It's as though in your bones you knew it was bullshit, but you couldn't abide the knowledge of what that meant. I don't quite blame you, life without consolation is terrible. But that meant that in your Judaism, in your life practice, there was no real comfort, no real home. No wonder Moses's children all converted while the Ba'al Shem Tov's followers multiplied by the millions.
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