Sophie's Choice - William Styron [23]
I have always been a discriminating but light eater, and never sit down to breakfast. Being also by habit a late riser, I await the joys of “brunch.” After the noise subsided above, I saw that it was past noon and at the same time realized that both the fornication and the fracas had in some urgent, vicarious way made me incredibly hungry, as if I had actually partaken in whatever had taken place up there. I was so hungry that I had begun to salivate, and felt a touch of vertigo. Except for Nescafé and beer, I had not yet stocked either my cupboard or my minuscule refrigerator, so I decided to go out to lunch. During an earlier stroll through the neighborhood there had been a kosher restaurant, Herzl’s, on Church Avenue which had caught my eye. I wanted to go there because I had never before tried authentic, that is to say echt, Jewish cuisine and also because—well, When in Flatbush... I said to myself. I shouldn’t have bothered, for of course, this being the Sabbath, the place was closed, and I settled on another, presumably non-Orthodox restaurant further down the avenue named Sammy’s, where I ordered chicken soup with matzoh balls, gefilte fish and chopped liver—these familiar to me as an offshoot of wide reading in Jewish lore—from a waiter so monumentally insolent that I thought he was putting on an act. (I hadn’t then known that surliness among Jewish waiters was almost a definitive trait.) I was not particularly bothered, however. The place was crowded with people, most of them elderly, spooning their borscht and munching at potato pirogen; and a great noise of Yiddish—a venerable roar—filled the dank and redolent air with unfathomable gutturals, as of many wattled old throats gargling on chicken fat.
I felt curiously happy, very much in my element. Enjoy, enjoy, Stingo, I said to myself. Like numerous Southerners of a certain background, learning and sensibility, I have from the very beginning responded warmly to Jews, my first love having been Miriam Bookbinder, the daughter of a local ship chandler, who even at the age of six wore in her lovely hooded eyes the vaguely disconsolate, largely inscrutable mystery of her race; and then later I experienced a grander empathy with Jewish folk which, I am persuaded, is chiefly available to those Southerners shattered for years and years by rock-hard encounter with the anguish of Abraham and Moses’ stupendous quest and the Psalmist’s troubled hosannas and the abyssal vision of Daniel and all the other revelations, bittersweet confections, tall tales and beguiling horrors of the Protestant/Jewish Bible. In addition, it is a platitude by now that the Jew has found considerable fellowship among white Southerners because Southerners have possessed another, darker sacrificial lamb. In any case, sitting there that lunchtime at Sammy’s I positively glowed in my new environment, as it dawned on me with no surprise at all that an unconscious urge to be among Jews was at least part of the reason for my migration to Brooklyn. Certainly I could not be more deep in the heart of Jewry had I just been set down in Tel Aviv. And leaving the restaurant, I even confessed to myself a liking for Manischewitz, which in fact was lousy as an accompaniment to gefilte fish but bore a syrupy resemblance to the sweet scuppernong wine I had known as a boy in Virginia.
As I wandered back to Yetta’s house I was a bit upset once more by the happening in the room above me. My concern was