I'm Writing, Really Writing

 Norman Lebrecht had a deceptively wonderful article last week about how symphonies underdeliver. They are novels in sound, yet they do not provoke the complicated expressive journeys of novels. At first, I was enraged by it, then I realized that these were exactly my complaints about classical music. It's not really an issue of profundity, it's an issue of dogma. We do not have composers who express profound thoughts with the true freedom of novelists. Think of the religious tie ins in the most profound works of basically every composer until... Mozart? Think of the nationalism of Wagner. The dogmatism of Schoenberg. The near-impenetrable density of the Darmstadt school. These are all people capable of the profoundest masterpieces: what they lack is expressive freedom. Most composers seem unable to venture through the entire kingdom of music to feel as though there is complete freedom of thought, where high stands proudly next to low, sublime next to ridiculous, tragedy next to comedy, romance next to satire.

It's no secret on this page that I've had novelistic ambitions, but for years I despaired of finding novelists who inspired me as much as Mahler. Then I found the total, maximalist novels. Not necessarily the modernists, and rarely the postmodernists, but those novels which contain the universe. Novels denser than Tolstoy, not quite as dense as Joyce or Proust: Dostoevsky and Mann but really only those two at their best, and also underregarded names like Vasily Grossman, Robert Musil, Herrman Broch, Carlos Fuentes, John Dos Passos, Naguib Mahfouz, Jose Saramago, Jaroslav Hasek, Bohumil Hrabal, Joseph Roth, and many many more I'm sure I'll find along this journey. And then you go even further back to a freedom even past Shakespeare's once you discover Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, The Canturbury Tales, and perhaps my favorite of the older ones: The Decameron. I could try to describe the difference: but it comes down to literary places that surprise you. From sentence to sentence, you never know what you're going to get, and I find that utterly delightful. One day I hope for the confidence and competence to write about all these findings, because finding your way through these books is a deeply slow process, and in most of the cases, I still have not finished them. It's not like Mahler where you can wrap things up in 75 minutes (imagine, Mahler is comparatively shortwinded). In music, emotions lead to thought, in literature, thought leads to emotion.

In reading, as in music, I'm no American. I'm a Jew as always, but if I ever truly become a novelist, I'll never be a 'Jewish Melville or Faulkner', but I may be a mediocre Jewish Musil or Broch, a crude and disorganized assemblage of Thomas Mann at his most pedantic, a displaced central-eastern European writer for attention spans people don't have anymore, needing an attention span I'm not even sure I have as a reader.

But I think I'm funny, I think I have things to say, and for the first time in my life, I think I'm writing with a small spark of the freedom with which Mahler writes music.

--One could make a list of the exceptions. It's not long. The truly existential moderns like late Beethoven, Schumann in his piano music, Janacek in his second half, Schubert in his final two years, Mozart's best operas, the entire careers of Mahler, Shostakovich, Ives, Berlioz and Mussorgsky. Maybe a second line of 'almosts' it's not worth getting into...

Tales of Modern Collaboration: Beginning (reworked Dear Boychik and Bransk, 1899)

Dear Boychik, 

Nu? I guess I'm supposed to be writing this for you but I know it's really for your tateh who's just making me to write all this down even though he knows every bisl of it and like he always does he's forcing me to do his work for him, but still, it's for you more than anybody else because it's important that you know our meicehs and your tateh always gets the details wrong so I guess he's right that it's better that I tell you myself. Nobody gets the details right but me. Still, he should have paid better attention. 

He should have paid better attention when I spoke to him in Yiddish too, but like every other responsibility your farshtunkeneh tateh and his briders dodged, they refused to speak back to me in Yiddish so now they don't know bupkes and Yiddish is gonna die out with me. So I guess I can't write this in Yiddish because I'm gonna die soon and if I don't live long enough to teach you deh mameloshen, you wouldn't be able to read this at all. But gott in himmel you're gonna learn some Yiddish even if those goyisheh kinder of mine take you out every Sunday for a ham!

Right now, your Mameh is in the hospital geboring you, and for your tateh it's probably a very geboring process just like it was for me. I told him to bring a camera with him to the hospital so he can film your birth just like I filmed his. We didn't need the footage, but it gave me something to do while your Bubbie got all the attention and accolades, and if your Bubbie ever buys too much crap, I can always threaten to accidentally email the birth video to her friends. 

So what your tateh wants is for me to tell you the story of your mishpocheh. I don't think that's the real reason. I think the real reason is to give me something to do while he's raising the baby so that I don't tell him all the things they're doing wrong with you. You haven't even been geboren yet and I already know every mistake they're going to make. They're gonna hold you wrong, they're gonna hit you too lightly to burp you, they're gonna set the temperature in your room too warm, they're gonna mix the formula wrong and feed you at the wrong times, they're gonna buy the brand soap and oil, they're gonna buy you baby food rather than just put their food in a blender, they're gonna want to buy new cribs and carseats when we've got perfectly good ones in the garage from when your tateh and uncles were young, they're gonna buy new outfits and try to get out of dressing you with old baby clothes every day, and just so you know, all that money they spend is coming out of your inheritance, but I've promised your Bubbie that I would keep myself busy so that you stay the person they want to murder rather than me. 

I don't know when you would read this, maybe your tateh wants to give this to you as a Bar Mitzvah present, or maybe when you go off to college, or maybe when you get married, but I don't know how he would even keep track of it until then. I know your tateh, he's kind of lazy. He doesn't misplace things nearly as often as I do, but I'm eber buttel, I have a lokhen kop that's only getting larger. That's why I have a system to keep track of everything. The most important thing you can have as you get older is a system to remember where everything is. He doesn't have a system, so he's probably going to lose this a couple days after I give it to him. But if I go completely eber buttel before you're old enough to remember me, the most important advice I can give to you is "Have a place where you put everything important." When you're old enough, always remind your tateh to remind you to have a place where you put everything. Always have a backup: make a duplicate key for your house and leave it with your parents, make a duplicate for the car and put it in a magnet on the back bumper, have a basket at home where you always put your wallet and keys, always write reminders before you go to bed of everything you have to do tomorrow, always write down every password on a piece of paper and put it in the basket, and always, all the time, alle mol, take care of everything right away and never put anything off until the last minute: putting toys away, doing homework, filling applications, making a shopping list, cleaning the house and the yard and the car, getting the oil changed, and especially paying bills. Your uncle is particularly shreklekh at that. 

The system is everything: it's how you survive, it's how we survive, it's how your mishpoche, your nation, survived a million tzuris. The whole emuneh of the people you were born into is based on this system, and if the velt is about to be something we have to survive again, it's because people stopped following the system. Nothing else matters: faith, love, kindness, intelligence, those are all nice, but sometimes they go away and sometimes they come back. If you want to survive, if you want your kinder to survive, having the system in place to follow is the only thing that matters.

Everybody hates it when I get ongeblozen about this drek, especially your uncle, but soon I'll be dead, and they can do whatever they want. Everybody also says that I'm exaggerating when I say I'm gonna die soon, and I always have the suspicion it can't come soon enough for them, sometimes I wonder if it can't come soon enough for me either. That's why I've left instructions with my lawyer that on the night after you become a Bar Mitzvah, your first responsibility as a man is to put a pillow over my face as I'm sleeping - that is, if your Bubbie hasn't done that to me already, since I'm pretty sure that's been her plan since our first date fifty years ago. 

So the place to start is to tell you about the town you come from. Not Baltimore, where you're going to live, or Pikesville, where you should be living if your Tateh understood how much easier he would have it if he lived closer to us, but Bransk, the shtetl you come from, the place your great-grandparents were born, the town where two hundred fifty years of Charlaps lived before you. 

Your last name, Charlap, is an acronym standing for 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut Polin.' Which means one of three things. 

1. That we might be direct descendents of a Rabbi so important that he gets his own acronym, and all the best Rabbis get acronyms. 

2. One of your descendents was really smart for a Pollock - though your uncle tells me that slurs like Pollock are considered offensive now, but since this slur is about white people I think it's ok. 

3. One of your ancestors was a brilliant medieval Jewish merchant who realized that he could mark up his prices if he lied about his ancestry and exaggerated his Yikhes. 

As it happens, my cousin Yonatan recently emailed me and told me, with lots of exclamation points, that Charlap means 'Khiya, Rosh l'Galut l'Portugal,' not 'Polin', so apparently we're Portuguese and Sephardic Jews after all who came to Poland only after about two-hundred years in Salonica, which is a city in Greece, and Greece is just about the only major country where part of your family didn't live during my lifetime. But it would seem that most Jews arrived in Poland a little after 1500, just after they were expelled from Spain and Portugal, I don't think anybody knows how we ended up in Bransk, but some Jews left Salonica in the 1680s after a bunch of Jewish followers of a false messiah named Shabbetai Tzvi converted to Islam and moved to Salonica to establish their new community there - there goes the neighborhood....  

Bransk was a shtetl in Northeast Poland - 'shtetl' is a Yiddish word meaning "here we buy wholesale." There were about six-thousand inhabitants, half Jews, half Christians, mostly farmers, a town which never produced a single person of any note or distinction - here in America, we would call the inhabitants of a town like Bransk hicks. 

Jews aren't supposed to be hicks, though your cousin who hasn't had a job since he mooned his boss sure acts like one, but the truth is your whole family is Jewish hillbillies on every side, you, me, your tateh, your Bubbie, probably your mameh and her family too, though your Bubbie doesn't want me to ask your Sabba and Savta about their background because she thinks I'll start a fight about Trump. 

According to wikipedia, the key event in Bransk history seems to be in 1264, the same year as the Statute of Kalisz, which guaranteed Polish Jews protection against blood libels (if you don't know what a blood libel is, you'll learn soon enough), and forced baptisms (if you don't know what a baptism is, ask your cousin Shayt who married a shikseh). 1264 seems to be the year of the "famous" Battle of Bransk, which pitted the Yotvingians, a poorly armed tribe from whom the Lithuanians descend - more on them later too - against the mighty Krakovians, for whom the great city of Krakow was christened - a city later that was later the center of the Polish Renaissance, which is a bit like saying that Lakewood, New Jersey is where all the Jewish football players come from. But Krakow would find a lot of fame around the time your Tateh was born because it's the city that produced the first Polish Pope, who believe it or not, may have been involved with your family's history. 

It's tough to know what to say about our family before your elter Zaydie's parents were born. It's not like there are family stories handed down about your ancestor Yechiel who smoked opium in front of the Golden Calf, it's only right before my father was born that there's any historical documentation of our family at all. When your uncle Gideon was born, your elter-zaydie wanted us to name him after his own elter-zaydie, Velvl Daniil. I didn't even know he had a great-grandfather named Velvl Daniil. 

So by the time Joel was three and your father was seven, a West Highland Terrier started yelping outside our house for days. Day after day, the tiny bitch screaming outside my window every five seconds. I told your Bubbie not to give him any water and he would leave, but of course she gave him water when I wasn't watching. I told her not to feed him, but of course she gave him leftover dinner when I was in the bedroom. I absolutely, positively, would not let the dog in the house, but when I had almost ready to give him away, your uncle Abe started crying and screaming every day. I hate dogs so much, and I hated that hoont more than I hate Arafat, so eventually I had to keep him. By then, your elter-Zaydie couldn't even remember his own name, so instead of Gideon, we named the dog Velvl. 

But the family lore does not begin with Velvl Daniil, it begins with a dream from my own Zaydie, who I never met. He might have been a hundred-fifteen years old by the time I was born. 

Rebbe Yaakov Kharlap: he was a small town rabbi who wasn't even the Rabbi for his town. Just a kheder instructor, where he taught Jewish boys only a few years older than you how to write Hebrew letters, how to daven, how to read, how to memorize pages of Torah and Talmud - and if he was to his students anything like he was to my tateh, he probably used a ruler on them for every mistake they made. 

The story goes that when he was fifty years old and his wife Miriam was forty-five, an angel appeared to him in a dream. They'd been married for thirty years, but in all that time, they'd never conceived a single child. The angel in the dream told Rebbe Yaakov that his wife would bear him twelve sons, all of whom would survive into adulthood, and Reb Yaakov must name the twelve after the twelve sons of Israel. 

Well personally, I think the story is completely meshuggeh. If Reb Yaakov and Miriam were that old, and there's no way to really know, then there's certainly no way the kids were entirely theirs. I think all his children were probably just cheder orphans he adopted and Miriam took care of, and Reb Yaakov was meshuggeh, so he changed all their names to be named after the twelve tribes of Israel. 

But anyway, that's the story. And there were definitely eleven boys and a girl: Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naftali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulun, Dinah, and Yosef. And if there's still family resemblance between them all now? Well, it's the shtetl, we're all inbreds. 

Apparently Reb Yaakov had a rich twin brother, Ezra, who had a factory in Bialystok, the nearest city. Ezra sent Reb Yaakov money every week for his enormous family, but Ada was an 'enlightened' woman of the 'Haskalah' - never mind what the Haskalah means but depending on who you ask it's either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to us. Ada apparently couldn't stand Reb Yaakov, thinking he was just a nar from khandrikeville, and my father always referred to her 'die mechashayfeh' so I'm guessing the feeling was always mutual. 

Whatever the fights were about, they clearly centered on money. Ezra sent his brother enough money that for shtetl dwellers living on a cheder stipend, they could live pretty well. Your greicer-onkle Jake still has the silver menorah Tateh buried before the war and dug up to take with him on the boat over here - and of course who should get that menorah after he died could have been a huge fight, so I let him take it. We showed him though, we found the same design menorah on ebay for a hundred twenty-five! 

But whether or not Reb Yaakov was ever worried about money, he was terribly worried about his career. He was apparently thirteen years old when Rebbe Chaim Schkop came to Bransk, and Rabbi Schkop was always dying, but he never died. Apparently he could never even stand up and just issued rulings from a bed installed in his Bet-Din (think People's Court for frummies). 

But on the very day Rebbe Schkop gave up the neshawmeh, in his eighties, just a year before my Tateh was born, Rebbe Yaakov fainted in his kheder. He'd been functioning for years as basically the town Rebbe, school melamed, din-torah and tateh tsu tsvelf kinder and was already in his seventies. 

The town makhers wrote immediately to the Mirrer Yeshiva about a miraculous emergency in which the Rebbe and his Yursh dropped dead in the same hour (give or take a few...). Reb Yaakov had come to within an hour and was back to work the next day. But just a few days before his initial installation, the Mirer Rosh Yeshiva wrote back that after much discussion, the Rabbis at Mir had ruled that this was a sign that Bransk would require a Rabbi destined for great things, and one of their grayster yunge khkhams was already on his way to become the new Bransker Rebbe. 

Nobody told Rebbe Yaakov until the day of his installment. They didn't want to make him faint again. But just as his kinder were packing the house to move into the Rebbe's heus and he came over a little early to figure out with the carpenter how to move Rebbe Schkop's bed out of the Bet Din, he saw a young boy he'd never seen before next to a young girl holding a baby. The carpenter called this young boy Rebbe Zilbershteyn. 

But if Rebbe Yaakov's career went nowhere, his family life was clearly overpopulated. Still, he needed one more son to complete the set: a Charlap who'd complete the vision of his dream that he would name Binyamin. That Binyamin was your Tateh's Zaydie, Benjamin Charlap. 

The day of your elter-Zaydie's birth was a pretty terrible one: Rosh Hashana 1899. It was the day, literally, the day, the entire Kharlap family left Bransk for good. Apparently they had to. 

So I want to recreate this day for you and set the scene. 

Let's just imagine your elter-elter Zaydie, Yaakov Kharlap, chanting the lesson of the day. We'll show you the first half in Aramaic, then the second half in Yiddish transliteration, and then for the purposes of this letter, I'll show it in English. As you read it in English try to hear in your ear whatever you might imagine as the sing-songy way the Orthodox have chanted Talmud since its composition.

מיתיבי כל עשרים וארבעה חדש דש מבפנים וזורה מבחוץ דברי ר' אליעזר א"ל הללו אינו אלא כמעשה ער ואונן כמעשה ער ואונן ולא כמעשה ער ואונן כמעשה ער ואונן דכתיב והיה אם בא

vi der nuhg fun er aun aunn, aun dakh nisht [dvka] vi der firung fun er aun aunn: 'khdrkh er aun aunn', varim es shteyt geshribn in khsubim, aun es iz geven, ven er iz areyn. tsu zayn bruders vayb, az er hot es aoysgegosn aoyf der erd; "du zalst nisht lakhn bite." aun 'la [bdiuk] khdrkh er aun aunn', veyl dart iz es geven an aumnatirlekher meshh, da vert es getun aoyf dem tbei.

(then in English)

An objection was raised: During all the twenty-four months {after a birth, when a mother is nursing} one may thresh within and winnow without; these are the words of Rov Eliezer. The others said to him: Such actions are only like the practice of Er and Onan! -Like the practice of Er and Onan, and yet not [exactly] like the practice of Er and Onan: ‘Like the practice of Er and Onan’, for it is written in Scripture, And it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilt it on the ground; (kids start laughing) "Don't laugh please." and ‘not [exactly] like the practice of Er and Onan’, for whereas there it was an unnatural act, here it is done in the natural way.

.......And so for today's dawf yeymi we get to Parashas Vayeshev... You must know the story by now... it's the story of Onan, Tamar, Yehudah, and Er. Tamar, the beautiful bride, that a series of husbands won't make her pregnant so she can keep her nice figure, so Onan and Er always spilled their seed on the ground during schtupzeit.

(one kid laughs)

Don't laugh...

So God punished Onan and Er by killing them. (slightly annoyed) And make no mistake Gimpeleh, that's evil and Hashem might decide to punish you for it if you spill your seed anywhere but your wives.

(more kids laugh)

Please don't laugh, this is important! The Torah teaches a valuable lesson here.... like it always does....

(kids calm down)

You don't have very long till your married, you all know what spilling your seed is, you just need not to do it until you're married and can make geschlect in your wives.

(a bunch of kids laugh)

(Rebbe Yaakov hits one of the kids with a switch)

NIBZEH L'AZAZEL KHALERIYA! LIGN IN DRERD UND BAKN BEYGL! HINDERT HAYSN ZOL ZU HABEN, IN YEDER HEYS A HUNDERD TSIMERN, IN YEDER TSIMER TZVANZIK BETN UN KADOKHES ZOL IM VARFN FIN EYN BET IN DER TSVEYTER!

(keeps hitting the kid)

Farshtunkener Jewish hillbillies!....

Worthless numbskulls!....

No better than wild animals are any of you!... Is Dreyfus going through all this so you mamzerim can dishonor his sacrifice?!

(Kid says distant from microphone): Rebbe Yaakov, Gimpeleh's finger looks crooked...

Zay shtil you naarisher pischer!... Alright! Put your hands on the table! Everybody put your hands on the table!

(Hits kids hands with switch between most sentences)

Laughing at the Torah! Laughing at women! Generation to generation of light-mindedness and ingratitude to your mothers! While you're busy not learning Torah they're making sure you don't starve and freeze! One day all of your wives'll be sick of your disrespect to women and demand all the things men have, and then where'll the world be?....

Feh! You're all just meat with eyes!...

How did I, how did my family, end up teaching generations of zhlubs like you?! We all needed you like a hole in the head! Fifty years teaching this stinking Kheyder, just like my Tateh un Zaydie un Elter Zaydie before me. It was the death of all of them. I'm the only one who lived past fifty and now I'm almost seventy and still stuck with you khamers!...

Teaching all your Tatehs and Zaydies who had cowsheads just like you! Waiting for Rebbe Schkop to retire so I might get a few years as town Rabbi and a decent pension pay for my eleven kinder instead of the bupkes your parents give me, and we said to him 'may you live to a hundred twenty' so many times, he lived to a hundred and would issue rulings from his bed! ...Ach...

Alright. May Rebbe Schkop's memory be a blessing... But then your parents, more naarishkeit! They get a new Rabbi! God forbid a Kharlap be a Rabbi for them for a few years before he plotzes into the ground too! Another generation of Kharlap rebbes passed over for a pischer straight from the Yeshiva barely older than you who doesn't know life from the lamed vav. Schmeggeges, all of you!

(one of the kids is crying from the beatings)

Oy, I'm so sorry Gimpeleh, I didn't mean all that. Kum tzu mir mein kint

(takes crying kid in his arms)

Ikh hob dich lieb

(kisses him).

You know I have love for all kinderlach, you know I have love for your parents who I taught when they was smaller than you. Tevyeleh I even taught your grandfathers, both of them! Du veyst, you kinder are my life, I just need you to learn so you can be a light to the goyim just like your parents have always been. I promise.

Let's all sing a song: let's sing Tumbalalaika.

(everybody sings a verse of Tumbalalaika)

You all sound beautiful tatelehs.

Listen kindz, I know this stuff is hard and boring, but you need to pay attention to it.

(pause)

He's up there, He's watching. He knows which of you are leyning good and which are leyning bad, but when you have trouble, you talk to Him, right during the Shomeh Esrei when we're all going Maaaanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehmanehoyriboimnosheloylamesistsoschverunsoshvachunoymein

tzurismeintatehisaschnorrermeinmamehisabalebusunmeinbriderisabeheymeunmeinbubbehisamekhasheyfehunikhveysvos

(the kids laugh hard),

just between you and me... and Him,... you don't have to do it.

What good is it to do the Shmoneh Esrai twice? Hashem didn't hear you the first time? Use that time to say to Hashem, geb a kook, I know I'm a bad leyner, but I'll try to be good. Just try harder to be good and he'll give you as many chances as you need till you become good because you are good. You're kinder and you're good, because all kinder are good, and you don't have time yet to become the rashas. You know he'll listen, and I know he'll listen....

I know I've told you this story but I know he'll listen. Hashem came to me in a dream. It's true! Your eltern probably say Oy, Reb Yaakov, he's so meshuggeh. That's what they say isn't it?

But today, I'm gonna tell it again, because I know you'll understand it, and today's the best day to tell it. An angel came to me in a dream just like he came to Awv Yaakov in ancient Israel, and he blessed me just like he blessed Yaakov. He told me, Reb Yaakov, I know you and your beautiful wife, and I know everybody thinks she's a mekhasheyfeh now, but she was beautiful before you all were born,...

(starts tearing up)

Reb Yaakov, I know you and your wife have tzuris having babies for 25 years, but you're going to have twelve babies, all of them sons, and they're all gonna grow up. You need to name them after the twelve sons of Jacob: Reuven, Shimun, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef and Binyamin.

And then, in four years, five sets of sons: Reuven and Shimun, then Levi and Yehuda, then Dan and Naphtali, then Gad and Asher, then three! Yissachar and Z'vulun and Yosif. And then, nothing, fourteen years, no more kinder. (chortles between a laugh and an oy) Eleven's enough. But then today, today, five minutes just before I got here, Reuven tells me mein weib's in labor, and I know we're gonna have twelfth son.

(class claps)

DON'T CLAP! (spits) Don't tempt the evil eye. After the birth you can sing me Mazel Tov and tonight you'll all come over with your parents and we'll do a l'Chaim and in a week we'll do the bris.

But here's the reason I'm telling you the story. My sons, Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef, and soon, one more... I raised them to be Yiddisher Kops. You know them! Reuven, Shimon, Levi, Yehuda, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Yissachar, Z'vulin, Yosef... every one of them is a Tzaddik. You know them! They all love God, and God loves them. They do the mitzvahs, they go to shul, they work so hard, they help their Mameh, they help your Mamehs, they help everybody in the Shtetl, and that's what Hashem gives you if you believe He will.

(Hard cut to Scene 2)

(4 of Reb Yaakov's sons smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetary)

Dan: (imitating his father) They do the mitzvahs, they go to shul, they work so hard, they help their Mameh, they help your Mamehs...

Naphtali: Oh we help their Mamehs... (they all laugh)

Yeah that hard cut to another scene just poured out of me like ruach, but we can't let ruach get too much the better of us, not just yet at least there's a lot to get through. First you have to know who Dreyfus is. You probably don't, but how would any Jew not know in 1899? And for five years, Reb Yaakov, the only mobile Jew in Bransk with enough money and literacy for a newspaper subscription, probably bludgeoned his kinder's oyers with every new detail of Dreyfus and his legal dybbuks. Every Shabbos, Reb Yaakov would probably bring new news of Dreyfus to the denizens of the Bransker shul, his former talmids every one, who never much considered why they so cared for the tzuris of a wealthy Jewish gentleman of the French military; whom even after five years of wrongful imprisonment would probably shpay on them in the street. They suddenly cared much more about Reb Yaakov's vissen and khokhma than they ever did when they were his students. So much so did they care that a guy named Reb Feivl would be on the doorstep of the kheder every morning to be the first to get new news, and by the afternoon Reb Leybl would be waiting at the Kheder door, thinking he rather would be the first with new news. But the very first to get new news was inevitably Reb Yaakov's kinder, every day with the breakfast their mother would quietly awaken at four-thirty every the morning to prepare so the kinder could eat at five thirty so they could milkh deh kauz und plau de felds before they go to shul for the Shacharis minyan, and then to cheder, and when they reached that certain age Jews tend to refer to as adulthood, tsu arbet.

 Apparently a couple of deh briders used to hang out in the cemetery, they were apparently the 'cool' shtetlers known as 'Deh Kharlap Khaleriyas'; they'd smoke cigarettes, they'd probably pish on the tombstone of the Rebbe, and I'm sure they'd brag about all deh sheyneh Branskeh maydlach they felt up in the barns. But apparently one day your uncle Asher, who was clearly a hot tempered type even then, got roughed up by a gang of Polish hoodlums. 

What was the fight about? I don't know, but don't automatically assume it was the Pollock's fault. Don't let anybody tell you Jews are smart, some Jews if they were twice as smart they'd be idiots. Well, this all was during the Dreyfus years, a story which nobody really cares about now except Jews and the truth is, maybe we shouldn't have cared about it even then. Being one of us is trouble enough, but we have this way of making trouble for ourselves whenever some shtik drek oysshteller thinks he can climb the goyisheh ladder and then has the kind of shlekhteh mazel every Yid has to expect when they think they can be a greyceh goy. 

Of course, boychik, Dreyfus wasn't any schtik drek. These na'ars had to know who Dreyfus was. There was no Jew who didn't know in 1899. It probably wasn't until 1896 that Reb Dreyfus would come onto the mental radar of a shlemazel like Reb Yaakov, when it became known that Dreyfus's exile to a prison island was a framing to cover for a mer vikhtik officer with much greater Yuchus: Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. Why did they put a Dreyfus away and not an Esterhazy? Because the Esterhazy's were the Hungary in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (I'm not gonna explain the Austro-Hungarian Empire to you, because even though your farshtunkiner teachers probably never told you about Dreyfus, I'm sure they never told you about Austria-Hungary, and there are some gaps in education for which there's no hope that your generation will ever fill), and however rich the Dreyfus family might have been, Dreyfus is just the name of another German town Jews were expelled from in the Middle Ages. You do the math boychik.

But it wasn't until 1897, when the Dreyfus Affair was reopened and Esterhazy was acquitted after a two day trial that all the Reb Yaakov's went meshuggeh. This Yid who barely knew he was a Yid was suddenly the grayseter Yid of us all. Their shtures got even worse when Esterhazy fled to England, and doubled even again when Dreyfus was re-tried and found guilty, and reached its hits grad as the mob outside the courthouse chanted 'Death to the Jews!'

You can even imagine the scenes the Dreyfus-khopteh caused in Bransk. You can imagine Rebbitzin Zilbershteyn's mother weeping loudly in the synagogue whenever she heard the name Dreyfus. Imagine how he probably got a special M'shebeirach every Shabbos from Khazzen Nudler, from which everybody in shul competes for who can shout 'AMEN' the loudest!

 But the reason we're starting here is because everybody in the family remembers it as the legendary day just before Rosh Hashana 1899 when everything was finally supposed to go right for the Kharlap family. Reb Yaakov made a huge speech to the kids that morning before arbet about how hard it's been for all the Jews before them for so many centuries. According to my uncle Z'vulun it was about the history of the Kharlaps, though your elteh-Zaydie Benyamin always told me Z'vulun was full of drek and they didn't speak to each other for almost twenty years about it. But according to Z'vulun the speech was about the whole history of the Kharlaps: Expulsion from Spain to Venice, where they were made to live in a ghetto, eventually making it up to Poland just in time for the Khmielnitsky massacres in 1648 that wiped out half the Jews in Eastern Europe, two-and-a-half centuries of mistreatment, discrimination and pogroms in Poland... but finally, 'it's different now', and no Kharlaps were ever born with the advantages you have. After this coming Shabbos, the shatkhan is coming with matches for all of you. Very soon you'll all be married and have kinder of your own, and it'll be a year of Simkheh. So the kinder went out to work. Apparently it was quite a day... 

So let's just imagine four of the brothers smoking cigarettes in the Jewish cemetery, kibbitzing next to the headstone of Rabbi Chaim Schkop, the deceased last year Bransker Rebbe who seemed to live forever. Which brothers are smoking? Maybe Dan, Naftali and Z'vulun. Meanwhile, Asher is

Dan: Don't fucking pish on the Rebbe!

Naftali: Don't curse in the cemetery! 

Z'vulun: Who's gonna hear us?

Naftali: You don't wanna tempt the evil eye. 

Z'vulun: What evil eye? You ever see it?

Dan: Mameh's in labor! Just don't do it today, wait to do drek like this tomorrow! 

Asher: What drek? 

Dan: Why do you always do things like a mamzer?

Asher: I've got the same Mameh as you Dan.

Dan: If Mameh saw your drek on the headstone of the Bransker Rebbe she'd give you a cherem.

Asher: I'm not shitting I'm pishing! 

Dan: (sighs) Alright take a shit in the fucking ocean. 

Asher: (proud) Ha! There's my tzaddik. You still haven't rolled me a papiros. 

Z'vulun: You still haven't told us what this schlock is with that kadokhes Dreyfus. 

Dan: You can read it for yourself!

Naftali: Z'vulun doesn't read. 

Z'vulun: Shtup ir, of course I read, I just don't like to. 

Naftali: He says the words look backwards. 

Asher: Wow, we're worried about tempting the evil eye but Z'vulun is the evil eye. 

Z'vulun: And you're gonna get it in your evil eye if Dan doesn't tell us what that newspaper says. 

Dan: It's just more drek about that nochschlepper Dreyfus. 

Z'vulun: What's happening to him?

Dan: Bupkes! Like always happens! He's sitting in jail, his rich brother's giving money for him...

Z'vulun: (interrupting) Are we sending him money?

Dan: What money?! 

Asher: We have money!

Naftali: We had money. Uncle Ezra sends less every year. You know this! 

Dan: It's that apikeyres wife of his. She always hated Tateh. 

Naftali: And Uncle Ezra always hated her!

Asher: He did?

Dan: You heard what Shimon said. Apparently he goes to bed with a different shiksa from the factory every night. 

Z'vulun: Well so what, wouldn't any of us do that if we could? 

Dan: Yehuda told me that when he went to help Uncle Ezra he saw kielbasa in the kitchen. 

Naphtali: (sigh/chortle, stunned) Well now that's shocking... Mein Gott, what the shtup....

Z'vulun: Did you really think Ezra was a Yiddisher kop?

Naftali: I thought he was like any of us, only rich. 

Asher: Well we did ok for a while there. 

Dan: Yeh, cuz we have a reicher for an uncle! 

Naftali: Doesn't Tateh have anything saved away?

Z'vulun: He had twelve children! 

Dan: Well, I guess we mazel'd out. Uncle Ezra cut the funds just as we got Bar Mitzvah'd and could go work. 

Naftali: Some work we're doin' here.

Z'vulun: This is arbeit! We're here trimming the grass in the cemetery. 

Naftali: This is bupkes! We should have been home two hours ago! 

Asher: What does it matter? Who's hiring right now? When you have eleven brothers there are only jobs for sev...

Z'vulun: (interrupting) Stop, who's this picture of? (holds up newspaper to Dan)

Dan: That? That's Dreyfus! 

Z'vulun: That meeskait is Dreyfus? 

Dan: Yeh, that's who Tateh's been talking about... every day since we were in Kheyder. 

Z'vulun: Look at the shmattehs on him! 

Asher: Yeah,... he looks like a shaygetz. 

Naftali: That guy's as Jewish as the shtupping Pope! 

Asher: Look at the stripes on his fucking hoot!

Naftali: And what the shtup is that mustache?

Asher: How can a Yid who dresses like that not be guilty?

Naftali: And what's with the fucking knepls on his shirt? 

Z'vulun: Dan, is there any way of telling from the picture what colors his uniform are?

Dan: Well, you're not gonna believe this but I once saw the French uniform on a stamp. It was red, white and blue. 

Z'vulun: Ret, veis, un bleu?! How the fuck do these zelners go into the field without other soldiers knowing where to shoot them a hectare away? 

Naphtali: A feinschmeker like this guy must go into a barber and say "Hey. Make my mustache look like the hair over my putz!'  

Asher: Seriously, why the fuck do all these alter kockers give a dreck about some French faygaleh?

(interrupts from 20 meters away) 

Jan Kowalski: And who's the faygaleh here

Filip Kowalski: Tak, we know what that word means!

Chapter 3:

(Three meters away, directly next to the Jewish cemetery's wooden fence; six Polish boys, three of them the Kowalski brothers, whose father Yakub Kowalski was known through Bransk, Bielsk, Wiesocki, and Ciecanowiech as 'der Yid merderer', facing them along with Franczisek Nowak, Filip Wiśniewski, and Aleksander Wojcik. The shortest of these chuligans fifteen centimeters hecher than the tallest Kharlap.)

Jan Kowalski: And who's the faygaleh here

Filip Kowalski: Tak, ve know what that word means!

(Franczisek grabs the paper)

Jan: Look at these dupeks! Laughing sie na cemetery!

Franczisek Kowalski: Smoking papieros too!

Jan: They probably think ze sa special cuz they can read!

Aleksander: Well even if they're smieching sie na cemetery they still look as stupid as every other Zhid.

(Jan Kowalski unzips his fly and starts to pisch on Rebbe Chaim Schkop's headstone) 

Dan: Oh don't...

Jan: Don't?...

(pause, only sound of pissing) 

Dan: Don't pisch...

Jan: Don't pisch? Like don't siki? You hear that bracia? I started siking seventeen seconds ago he wants me to stop! Give me that newspaper. 

(sound of pissing on a paper)

Jan: So what were you Zhids reading about?

Filip: They were probably learning more magic spells. 

Asher: Nie don't know any magic spells. 

Dan: Asher, don't. 

Jan: (imitating) Asher! Don't. Bracia, hold that one, make sure Z'vulun's watching so we can teach him a lesson. (they grab hold of Dan and he crumbles up the newspaper) Here, take a look at these letters up close. (shoves the newspaper into Dan's mouth) 

Asher: Take that newspaper out of my brother's mouth. 

Jan: Oh! You're brother! Well we hear all about your family Asher Kharlap. A rdzina where all eleven live to be adults? That's fucking black magia!

Aleksander: Tak! They're probably here so nobody can hear their plans to poison our blyading wells!

Asher: Well maybe if your kind cleaned their shtupping wells once in a while your kid siostra wouldn't get sick and die!

(seven seconds of silence)

Jan: What are you saying? That you fucking mordecas of Christ had the secret to not getting chory this whole time and you've been keeping it from us?

Asher: Go back to your shtupping Boyars and Priests! They knew it this whole time and kept it from you to keep you stupid!

Naftali: Asher! Zey shtil! 

Filip: Are you calling our Holy Fathers liars?

Asher: They're fucking thieves and rapists and murderers!

Naftali: Mir ale hobn tzu lozn! 

(Z'vulun and Naphtali run away, the Kowalski kids immediately lunge for Asher, Dan's paper falls out of his mouth and he falls down to catch his breath while Asher is beaten up.)

Asher: Dan, helf mikh! 

Jan: Tak Dan, help him! It's just you and him against six of us. Tell you what,... why don't you just leave this idiota for us and you can run away like a nice Jewish boy. 

Asher: Dan, helf mikh! 

Jan: Well Dan, are you going to help your bro....

(Gad runs away) 

Jan: All your zhid brothers have run away. 

Filip: Tak, that's what Jewish boys always do. They always run away. 

 According to Dan, the Pollocks left Asher for dead five minutes later.

This story is so over the top boychik that I can't imagine it's even partially true. Your greycer-oncle Asher was barely a hundred pounds and meshuggeh as meshuggeh gets (and in case you haven't realized by now, so is your entire mishpocha except obviously your Zaydie, though your Bubbie and uncles would dispute that). 

Tales of Biblical Subversion: Tale #5: Mensch

 (Samuel is thirteen years old, Yahweh appears to him in a dream) 

Yahweh: Shmueleh, I am the god of your fathers and forefathers, and I bid you awake. 

Samuel: I'm here but I am still asleep. 

Yahweh: No Samuel, I mean awake spiritually! 

Samuel: I'm awake spiritually! Hashem is here, Hashem is there, Hashem is everywhere!

Yahweh: OK, fine, you're spiritually awake. 

Samuel: I know. 

Yahweh: Since you're spiritually awake, I bid you go to Aeli. 

Samuel: I know Aeli. Nice guy. He lets me sweep the temple floors sometimes. 

Yahweh: I bid you assassinate him. 

Samuel: Kill him?

Yahweh: He had a chance to annihilate Philistine with the Ark of the Covenant, he chose not to use it. 

Samuel: But he was merciful. Isn't mercy an attribute of G-d?

Yahweh: Not this God, this God kills people. 

Samuel: I don't get it. 

Yahweh: Just kill him. 

Samuel: Why?

Yahweh: Listen you little shit, you do first, understand later. 

Samuel: Oh, yeah, they taught us that saying in school. 

Yahweh: What's so hard about understanding this?

Samuel: I'm sorry, Lord, but you haven't spoken to anybody since Moses, and now I'm supposed to be Bar Mitzvah'd next month and you're telling me to kill the officiant?

Yahweh: Are you serious? Don't question me! 

Samuel: I'm sorry, this is just a lot to take in. 

Yahweh: Kill Aeli at your Bar-Mitzvah. Go. 

(Samuel wakes up)

(Samuel goes into the kitchen, where his mother is drinking alone.)

Samuel: Mom, I had a weird dream. 

Chana: I had a weird dream too. 

Samuel: What was your dream?

Chana: That I had a better husband. 

Samuel: He's not so bad. 

Chana: He's run off with Penina again. 

Samuel: (under his breath) I can't imagine why. 

Chana: What?

Samuel: Nothing, sorry. I'm so sad to hear that Mom. 

Chana: She hasn't kept her figure. She's as stupid as Balaam's ass. Her whole life is spending time with her kids and she was such a cunt to me. 

Samuel: Y'know, maybe you wouldn't think about this if you found something to occupy your time. 

Chana: I have you! 

Samuel: (under his breath) You've got hooch. 

Chana: What?

Samuel: Nothing. 

Chana: Thank Hashem you have that after school job as a Temple janitor. He barely sends us money when he's with her. 

Samuel: Y'know you might be happier if you worked. 

Chana: I'm on disability! 

Samuel: Of course. Of course you are. I'm sorry. 

Chana: Your Dad used to be so in love with me! He said I was worth ten children to him!

Samuel: I know. 

Chana: I can't help it, I know, it's cuz I'm a shikker. 

Samuel: I think it's shikkereh. 

Chana: No, it's shikker, no feminine form. 

Samuel: You need to get better. I think you should take a vacation. I brought you those pamphlets about going to Benyamin.

Chana: More time in Jaffa? It's just another beach with sand, at least here we can canoe. 

Samuel: You haven't been canoeing since I was seven!

Chana: I can do it there I can do it here. What was the dream?

Samuel: Never mind. I mostly forgot it already. Anyway, Aeli wants me to give a d'var torah. 

Chana: Oh, that's a real honor! My son, giving a drasha in the Temple! 

 --------------------

(Next to High Priest Aeli stands Samuel at his Bar Mitzvah with a knife concealed in his tunic. Samuel will soon give his davar torah)  

Aeli: Samuel, (to congregants) what can I say to you all about this mensch of a boychik? Straight A student, student government president, captain of the debate team, champion mathlete, key club volunteer... you play the harp beautifully. Last year you wow'd us all playing the lead in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat. (to Samuel) What's in your future?

Class Jock sitting in the back row: (to his followers) Another Indian burn... (popular kids snicker) 

Aeli: When our people arrived in Israel, their dream was for their descendants to achieve things exactly like you have. You are such a credit to Am Yisrael. I cannot imagine what your future holds, and I'm sure nobody here can wait to hear what you have to say about this week's Parsha. 

(Aeli leaves the bimah, Samuel stays on and takes a step to the center) 

Samuel: (obviously nervous but still smiling, looking straight down at piece of parchment, saying under-confidently) When Moses went to the mountaintop of Sinai, he received G-d's word, but the people down below had no regard for the Lord, and they worshipped a calf. (pause) And a calf is what people worship today (crowd seems uneasy). When Moses came down with the Ten Commandments, he saw people praying to an idol, and he slew three thousand Israelites. (Samuel gets nervouser) Moses loved Israel, and because he loved... Israel, he had to slay the people who deserted her (crowd gets nervouser too, Samuel turns to Aeli) When Aeli took back this Ark from the Philistines (gestures behind him to it) he had a chance to use it on the Philistines and annihilate them, and he chose not to (crowd murmurs. Samuel tries to steel himself and fails). The Lord spoke to me, just like he spoke to Moses, and he told me to kill Aeli (scandalized crowd mumbles at full boil, Samuel tries to pull out the knife, he keeps fiddling with it but can't get it out of his tunic). I don't want to do it, but Aeli has to die. 

(Aeli drops dead) 

Lady from the crowd exclaims: You killed him!

Another man from the crowd: No, you heard him, he said the Lord spoke to him. 

Another lady the crowd; He is the Lord's messenger. 

Other man from the crowd: He's a prophet! 

Other lady from crowd: He is the new Priest! 

Whole crowd at different times: HAIL SAMUEL! HAIL THE LEADER! HAIL THE PROPHET! 

(they carry Samuel on their shoulders through Jerusalem) 

fin

Evan Will Have Stories Out Tomorrow

He says to no one in particular. 

Tales of Classical Perversion: Vol II - Tale 6: An Interview with Judas of Galilee

Welcome to the Sepph Hippodrome Y, we begin this evening with an interview with the leader of the new rebellion: Judas of Galilee is here. He is one of our most distinguished rebels and public intellectuals. His pamphlet, Zealotry: The Fourth Way, has inspired killings all around the North, and he himself has ordered the deaths of all those in the Galilee who registered for the Roman census and sacked Roman Empire depositories of gold, orichalcum and silver in Scythopolis, Ceasaria Maritima, Gamia, Sepphoris and Caesaria Philippi. I am pleased to have him at this table. 

Judas of Galilee: Thank you Charlus. 

(A Roman centurion walks on the stage and stabs Judas of Galilee)

Fin. 

Tales of Prophetic Subversion: Tale #3: Zoned for Experimentation - Rough Draft

 High Priest and magistrate Aeli my colleague, partner, and hopeful collaborator in vision of a better Canaan, 

I write to you in peace under a flag of truce. Please first permit me to give you whatever small words I can express for your bereavement of Pinkhas and Khafni. There are no words that elucidate the grief of losing both your sons. May their memory be for a blessing. It is a grief many Philistines knew in our shared battle, a grief every parent in Israel/Phillistine fears on either side and now I fear for my own children and kin, and that is why I write you. 

Your god is clearly more powerful than our gods. We've long known that. We thought that by capturing the ark of your covenant we would be able to worship Yahweh properly and enlist him upon our side. While we're not willing to convert because we don't want to tempt the wrath of our gods either, there are a number right now who are sorely tempted. I know you would welcome them with open arms, but as they possess state secrets, we cannot allow them to leave, and in certain cases we had to imprison them, and to my regret, still may have to put them to death, but when I explain further, I'm sure you will understand the delicate nature of our situation.

I write you what follows in a position of maximum vulnerability. You could, in fact, kill us all with this knowledge. I therefore trust you will not do this, as I suspect, though I could be wrong, that it would be an offense to Yahweh. 

We thought by opening The Ark of the Covenant we were enlisting your god in our fight. We thought that by your defeat, we had proven that the Yahweh was in fact on our side.  

Yahweh is clearly still on your side, and the Ark wants to return to what is clearly its rightful owner. Over these seven months we've opened the Ark of the Covenant once a month, and during all seven experimental procedures, it caused an outpouring of angels and fire that caused the faces to melt of every staff member present, the fire then reached to the heavens and your god seemed to swallow it up in a cloud opening, which then closed upon receiving the entirety of the blaze. Some unsuspecting Israelites may have seen unusual activity of that nature every so often and reported it. If so, that was the reason. 

I was fortunately warned by priests that this was a possibility and therefore not to attend the openings, but every time, the priests, the soldiers, certain wealthy Philistines who donated to see the opening, were all fleshless bones before some dying priest seems to have managed to close the ark in spite of having been incinerated and boiled. Obviously this presents a problem because there is no guarantee that a priest will be able to close the ark before the fiery angels leave the premises zoned for experimentation and begin their evisceration process on our unsuspecting population. 

As this is a terrible national security threat to the Philistine population, I would like to return the ark to you with all due haste. Obviously, given the delicate nature of this exchange, you could probably use this knowledge to annihilate us all. I would very much like you to view this as a confidence building measure for any future negotiations for settlement between our valued peoples. 

Best regards with hope of peace and friendship, 

Akhshish, King of Ekron, Mayor of Gath, Honorary Citizen of Ashdod

Tales of Disrupted Creation: All Fours - Rough Draft

 So I started on my way to Haran, it was a shit journey. They say the Levanese coast is beautiful, I wouldn't know. I just wanted to get to Haran as quickly as humanly conceivable, and I could conceive of a lot of things happening on the way. One of them already did happen when that piece of shit Eliphaz came up to kill me. He was a smarkatiner yingle as a kid, he's an asshole now. 

I really did want him to kill me. I wanted to die, no question of that. I meant to die, I thought about doing it every day of that journey. The only thing that got me through was the idea of what might eat my corpse. It's not fair that Abraham and Sarah get a cave and a proper burial, and just in case there's ever a resurrection they can walk around with a whole body. Me? I would just get picked apart by some vulture in two or three days and my bones would scatter everywhere and if some kind of revelation's at hand I'm nothing but a drumstick. 

So, yeah, that dream... fuck if I know. Angels going up, angels going down, angels going all around... it's just a fucking ladder.  Everybody asks me what it means, I think it means I could have charged them a lot of money as a motivational speaker and people would have eaten that shit up, at least until they talked to me and realized I didn't have much motivation in me to begin with. 

It is fucking tough being the grandson of Abraham. Esau agrees. Our dad was fine, he clearly didn't get me but he tried hard enough, harder than I've tried with a few of mine, I could've done better to them, we all know that. You bask in the glow of Hashem long enough and eventually you think even your khara smells beautiful. Dad had the same problem, and Abraham? Well, God made him meshuggeh so was he ever gonna be a good dad?...

Mameh was, well she's just Bubbie, still sitting around the campfire, one hundred... what the fuck is it now, sixty-seven? sixty-eight? Always up in your business and mine. Nothing's ever good enough for her but she cares, and look, even if we've spent the last hundred twenty years bickering I owe her a lot. She let me live on the land for seventy-seven years before I got to Kharan and made my money, Before I was 'Israel Abramowitz' to the world I was just the 'idiot son Yaakov' who needed setting up in business. 

Oh god, what a n'dot it was getting to Lavan. Dealing with that ganav was bad enough, but the journey there was the worst part. If you think the trip to Egypt is bad, try getting to the Armenian highlands. You gotta go through the Surian coastal mountain range, climb one, then the next, then the next. They're beautiful: trees on all of them with lots of green valleys and farmland, but you don't give a shit when you're exhausted and mosquitoes are eating you up everywhere, the animals you kill all have fleas and you've got athlete's foot from getting sandals wet that were already falling apart. 

So I went to sleep early that night. I guess I had a sleep deficit, but it was at a very high altitude, I wasn't just tired, just feeling loopy all day. It was one of the few days on that trip I wasn't hella depressed, and I was making very good time. But my neck was bothering me like you wouldn't believe from field dressing all that Surian brush-tailed moose. It was just a miserable time generally but that was frankly one of the better days. Maybe we all should have settled in the mountains...

So I gather a bunch of rocks as an 'orthotic pillow' and I go to sleep. A bunch of rocks became one rock. I've never been a sleepwalker but I have my own theory what happened... but you'd think from the way the Children of Babel acted when I told them about it that Hashem himself was making a cameo. The next night, it did seem a bit like he was making a cameo. Not him, but everybody else: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Abdiel... all the el's... and they were just... doin' their thing, up and down. You'd think they'd have somewhere better to be, but no, they just hang out on a latter. Maybe it's an exercise thing...

But that wasn't the memorable moment, and here, Binyomin, I'm gonna tell you something I think nobody's ever known, unless the angels were still there, which I guess is always a slight possibility. Everybody thinks it was an angel. I never thought it was an angel, I pretended to agree with everybody, but here's the truth...

A few days later, another mountain, this time around the Armenian border, around sundown I spot a hermit in the mountains. He must have been about the same age I am now. Pure white beard and wither, and he was naked. You saw every bone on him, and he looked unmistakably like Zaydie, right down to where the skin cancers grew. But he had food, and he prepared it: deer, gazelle, and yeah, the usual goat. Don't tell anybody but I ate the deer... that's not the secret don't worry...

For a hermit, he was a surprisingly chatty guy, and for an old guy, surprisingly spry, but he seemed more than a little crazy. All those hermits are, what can you do, and with our august lineage we're not exactly in a position to judge... All the usual questions go back and forth about where we're from, and he claims he's from Levanon. I asked him what he's doing around here, and suddenly he goes very quiet. So I change the subject and we start talking about our old days tending sheep and the various techniques we got good at, but when he heard that I'm from the family of the one true god, dude had a freakout. Just pacing around the fire, practically running, and screaming to himself, not in Aramaic or Akkadian, in Hebrew! Talking about how Hashem has finally found him and is going to complete the sacrifice. 

Sacrifice? What sacrifice? Another sacrifice? Another HUMAN sacrifice? Everybody knows that elter-Zaydie went meshuggeh and tried to kill Zaydie and stopped at the last minute, and then he went to get a ram. 

Yeah your elter-Zaydie was meshuggeh and kind of a schmuck: as you know, this is often what fathers are. His mind was already slipping at that point, but it was right around then that he had the stroke and semi-vegetative for a couple years. So, what happens?  

I asked him, are you the son of Abraham? I'm nearly as freaked at this point as he is, but instead of saying yes or no he starts bleating like a ram. So then I have no idea why I'm asking this, but I ask, 'are you Isaac?' The bleating gets louder and he starts crawling on all fours. 

I have no idea what to do at this point, but by then I thought I'd lost the birthright and the blessing to Eliphaz, I'm as penniless and homeless as this guy and had no more chance of going home than he does. I was running from a father who never paid much attention to me and running to relatives my mom always said were dirtbags. 

What am I supposed to do in that moment? I am face to face with the man I think is Isaac which means my father is either not my father or not at least who he says he is. Something in me was breaking, and I asked him to bless me. He stopped bleating and said no. I said 'bless me' again. He said no. He suddenly stands up and says he has to leave. 

I'm not letting this guy leave. Not without either the truth or without a blessing. So I block him. He tries to run away, I run after him and catch him. We wrestle for... what? Forty minutes? An hour twenty? I was exhausted by minute 4, but this ancient apparent uncle of mine had the strength to wrestle the whole time. At one point I was sure he broke my leg but somehow I could keep going. 

Finally the sun was coming up, and I said 'we gotta stop this and I have to get on the road. It's been real.' So he stops and at this point he says that there's no point after all this for not blessing me. He told me since I'm from Israel, call myself Israel, the land will bless me and he misses it. 

I hope you miss us Binyomin. You've been a hostage now for 100 days, we think you're still alive but we have no way of knowing, and I'm going to keep writing you these letters until you come home. 

Love,

Abba