The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [243]
There is no way to keep the place clean. Mrs. Goldstein, Joey's mother, is an industrious woman, and every morning and night she sweeps out the place, washes the counter, dusts the candy, and scrubs the floor, but the grime is too ancient, it has bedded into the deepest crevices of the store, the house next door, the street beyond, it has spread into the pores and cells of everything alive and unalive. The store cannot remain clean, and every week it is a little dirtier, a little more suppurated with the caries of the street.
The old man Moshe Sefardnick sits in the rear of the place on a camp stool. There is never any work for him to do and indeed he is too old for it, too bewildered. The old man has never been able to understand America. It is too large, too fast, the ordered suppressed castes of centuries wither here; people are always in flux. His neighbors become wealthier, move away from the East Side to Brooklyn, to the Bronx, to the upper West Side; some of them lose their little businesses, drift farther down the street to another hovel, or migrate to the country. He has been a peddler himself; in the spring before the first World War, he has carried his goods on his back, tramped the dirt roads through small New Jersey towns, selling scissors and thread and needles. But he has never understood it and now in his sixties he is prematurely senile, an old man relegated to the back of a tiny candy store, drifting in Talmudic halls of thought. (If a man hath a worm on his brain, it may be removed by laying a cabbage leaf near the orifice onto which the worm will crawl.)
His grandson, Joey, now seven, comes home from school weeping, a bruise on his face. Ma, they beat me up, they beat me up, they called me sheenie.
Who did, who was it?
It was the Italian kids, a whole gang, they beat me up.
The sounds move in the old man's mind, alter his thought stream. The Italians. He shrugs. An undependable people; in the Inquisition they let the Jews in at Genoa, but at Naples. . . Naples.
He shrugs, watches the mother wash the blood away, fit a patch of adhesive to the cut. Oh, mein Joey.
The old man laughs to himself, the delicate filtered laughter of a pessimist who is reassured that things have turned out badly. Nu, this America is not so different. The old man sees the goy faces staring at the victims.
Joey, he calls in a harsh cracked voice.
What is it, zaydee?
The goyim, what did they call you?
Sheenie.
The grandfather shrugs again. Another name. For a moment an ancient buried anger moves him. He stares at the unformed features of the boy, the bright blond hair. In America even the Juden look like goyim. Blond hair. The old man rouses himself to speech, talks in Yiddish. They beat you because you're a Jew, he says. Do you know what a Jew is?
Yes.
The grandfather feels a spasm of warmth for his grandchild. So handsome. So good. He is an old man and he will die soon, and the child is too young to understand him. There is so much wisdom he could give.
It's a difficult question, the meaning of a Jew. It's not a race, he says, it's not even a religion any more, maybe it will never be a nation. Dimly, he knows he has lost the child already, but he continues talking, musing aloud.
What is it, then? Yehudah Halevy said Israel is the heart of all nations. What attacks the body attacks the heart. And the heart is also the conscience, which suffers for the sins of the nations. He shrugs once more, does not differentiate between saying aloud what he thinks or merely moving his lips. It's an interesting problem, but personally