• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 522 0

opulent bordello, which would also include a deli counter, a bar with a brass rail and spittoon, a cache of White Owl coronas, and a twenty-four-hour TV sports channel. But the God we Jews are stuck with is both cruel and vengeful. To my way of looking, Jehovah was also the first Jewish stand-up comic, Abraham his straight man. “Take now thy son,” the Lord said unto Abraham, “thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” And Abe, the first of too many Jewish grovellers, saddled his ass and did as he was told. He built an altar, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. “Hey, Daddy-o,” said a distressed Isaac, “behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” In response, Abe stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. At which point Jehovah, quaking with laughter, sent down an angel who said, “Hold it, Abe. Lay not thy hand upon thy son.” And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and beheld behind him a ram caught in a thicket by the horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son. But I doubt that things were ever the same again between Abe and Izzy.

I’m digressing. I know, I know. But this is my one and only story, and I’m going to tell it exactly how I please. And you are now into a short detour into that territory that Holden Caufield once deprecated as that Nicholas Nickleby16 sort of crap. Or was it Oliver Twist? No, Nickleby. I’m sure of it.

Once Clara asked me, “How come your family emigrated to Canada, of all places? I thought the Jews went to New York.”

I was born Canadian, I explained, because my grandfather, a ritual slaughterer, was short two sawbucks and a fin. It was 1902 when Moishe and Malka Panofsky, newly wed, went to be interviewed by Simcha Debrofsky of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society in Budapest. “We want the papers for New York,” said my grandfather.

“Siam isn’t good enough for you? India you don’t need? Sure, I understand. So here’s the phone and now I’ll ring Washington to tell the president, ‘You short of greenhorns there on Canal Street, Teddy? You need more who can’t speak a word of English? Well, good news. I’ve got a couple of shleppers here who are willing to settle in New York.’ If it’s the goldene medina you want, Panofsky, it costs fifty dollars American cash on the table.”

“Fifty dollars we haven’t got, Mr. Debrofsky.”

“No kidding? Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m running a special here today. For twenty-five dollars I can get you both into Canada.”

Mine was not the legendary Jewish mother, a striver, fawning on her only son, no sacrifice too great if it meant he would enjoy a better life. Back from school, whacking open the front door, I’d holler, “Maw, I’m home.”

“Sh,” she’d say, a finger held to her lips, as she sat by the radio listening to “Pepper Young,” “Ma Perkins,” or “One Man’s Family.” Only when there was a commercial break would she allow, “There’s peanut butter in the icebox. Help yourself.”

The other kids on the street envied me, because my mother didn’t care how I did at school, or what time I came home at night. She read Photoplay, Silver Screen, and other fanzines, worrying about what would become of Shirley Temple now that she was a teenager; whether Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart would come home safely from the war; and if Tyrone Power would ever find an enduring love. Other mothers on Jeanne Mance Street force-fed their sons Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters, hoping it would inspire them to study medicine. Or cheated on the grocery money, saving up to buy The Books of Knowledge, ideal for a head start in life. Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor, the siege of Stalingrad passed like distant clouds, but not Jack Benny’s feud with Fred Allen, which deeply troubled her. What we used to call the funnies were more real to her than I ever was. She wrote to Chester Gould, demanding