From synagogue to Pop’s home-staged feast set before most of Ira’s homely relatives — Zaida too, food and utensils kosher, of Mamie’s providing — seated on rented chairs, at rented tables, stretching from parents’ bedroom to front room, never-heated rooms in winter, where the frost seemed well-nigh impacted, in spite of reeking kerosene stove borrowed from Mrs. Shapiro for the occasion, and the fishtail gas burners flaring yellow overhead. The parental bedstead had been knocked down to make room for conviviality, and together with the mattress had been stowed in the rear of the long passageway. Nothing to be distressed by, nor even by Pop’s nervous and high-strung hosting, nor by Yiddish din within goyish hearing, nor even by the oration Pop chose for his son, and under threat of the usual dire consequences, compelled him to memorize and deliver, which Ira did, in English, standing surly and glum between rooms, back to one doorpost, staring at the other, thanked God and his parents for having brought him up a Jew. He could have smirked at all that in his amorphous, chaotic mind, and even grinned tolerantly at the memory in later years.
But the Bar Mitzvah brought the realization he was only a Jew because he had to be a Jew; he hated being a Jew; he didn’t want to be one, saw no virtue in being one, and realized he was caught, imprisoned in an identity from which there was no chance of his ever freeing himself. The kid who had once been like a drop of water in the pool of water that was the East Side, indistinguishable from the homogeneity about him, who had wept and wailed to be allowed to return and felt the tears of separation rise in his throat, during his brief return, wanted none of it now, chafed at his lot, fantasized obliteration of the imposition, feigned with burgeoning cynicism that he was not a good Jewish boy: “Thanks, Tanta Mamie” (who brought him his gray flannel shirt); “Thanks, Zaida and Baba” (who gave him a two-dollar bill); “Thanks, Tanta Ella” (who gave him a fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Max” (who gave him a retractable fountain pen); “Thanks, Uncle Nathan” (Zaida’s brother, the jeweler, who gave Ira a slender gold watch-chain — but nobody gave him a watch! If only his uncle Moe were there, and not in Germany far away.). Dissembling stood him in good stead, for behind his happy, staple smile he knew he was already concealing vice that would have horrified them. He loathed the ceremony; he loathed himself in it. Becoming a Jew, becoming a man, a member of the community was a sick mockery, became a sick memory.
— But that wasn’t it alone.
No, exactly. It was like a resonance, Ecclesias, if that’s the right word, a reinforcement within the psyche. As you can see: a self overt, a self covert, a self candid, a self stealthy. Nothing uncommon.
— No, but with you supremely exacerbated, into a veritable virtuosity.
I agree.
XVI
Though the intimations had been many before, Bar Mitzvah brought realization into sharp focus, not of the parting of his ways from Jewishness, but of never wanting to return. Vitiated for him, repugnant virtually all aspects of what he was to learn in time bore the name Diaspora. He knew it then only as Jewishness, detested it, was held to it, to the extent that he was held by a single bond: his attachment to Mom, his love for her, for the artless eloquence that imbued so much of her speech, for her martyrdom on his behalf, and for her nobility in spite of her sentimentality, humble nobility again and again shining through the rifts of its sentimental husk: “I didn’t know how noble you were, Leah,” Mom told Ira that Zaida said to her once — and removed his yarmulke and bowed: “Forgive me, Leah. I abused you when you were young.” (Almost too much to bear, the picture of that selfish, intolerant old Jew removing his yarmulke and doing obeisance to his daughter, his firstborn, plain and seemingly unfavored, as her Biblical namesake.)
Once more the school vacation had begun, once again it was summer, the early summer of 1919. Warm, but not so stifling as that August afternoon in 1914, when Zaida sent him downstairs, nickel in hand, to buy the Yiddish “Wuxtra.” It was more like the afternoon — and time of year — when Mamie and Mom and he and blonde little Stella waited in the newly furnished Harlem apartment for the immigrants to arrive. Another child had been added to the family since then: carrot-topped Pola, Mamie’s second daughter. . But now it was Moe that everyone waited for, the former immigrants too, all waited for Moe, safely back from France. Saul and Max had gone to the mustering-out center to escort their brother home. Everyone kept leaping to the front windows at the sound of an approaching motor car, kept looking to the west for a sign of the glorious appearance of the taxicab that would bear the one in whom all their hopes were centered: Moe, son and brother and uncle, home from the World War.
It was just at that moment when Mamie was admonishing her seven-year-old daughter, Stella, not to lean out so far, and Ira, stealing glances at his cousin’s plump legs, slumped further down in his chair so that he could see up further, and fantasizing with fierce intensity that Stella was older, when a car was heard slowing down, chugging to a stop with a squeal of tires against the curb. “He’s here!” Stella shrilled. “Uncle Moe is here! I saw him first!”
Crying “Moishe! Moe!” everyone rushed to the windows. Down below, doors were opened on both sides of the yellow-and-black-checkered cab before the house. Nimble Max stepped out on the street side as Saul stepped out on the sidewalk. And after him, Moe, burly and radiant in khaki. At the same time, across the street, from the candy store with the placard in the window printed freehand, WELCOME HOME MOE, out rushed Dave Eshkin, rolypoly, curly-haired proprietor, in his chocolate-flecked white apron: “Moe! Moe! Hallo, Moe!” he cried as he ran to greet Moe with outstretched arms. “The whole block is heppy you home! Gott sei dank, you home! Look, everybody, from the windows! He’s here!” Dave shouted upward at the increasing number of spectators leaning out of windows: “It’s Moe!” And was met by a medley of cries descending from all levels, “Mazel tov, Moe! Hooray, Moe!” Some came out of doorways to shake hands with him.
“Moe! Moishe! Uncle Moe!” Everyone in the front room who could crowd into a window or beside it, so many, Ira would think afterward with a shudder: What if the wall gave way with such a mass of relatives pressing against it. “Hallo, Soldier! Hooray, Moe! Here’s Moe!” reverberated from houses on both sides of the street, as some shouted from windows, others beckoned to those behind them to join in the triumphal chorus. Smiling with peculiar composure, Moe looked up, his blue eyes steady in the shadow under his campaign hat. Saul paid the taxi driver, Max lifted the duffel bag out of the cab. The three brothers entered the house, leaving behind cheering, waving spectators from sidewalk to roof.
Harry rushed down the stairs to meet them. Everyone else rushed to the door — neighboring doors opened; the sound of other doors opening on the floors below and above was heard, other tenants shouted their greetings. And there he came — up the stairs — a golden khaki apparition. “Moe! Moishe! Oy, mein kindt! Oy, baruch ha shem, blessed be the name of the Lord!” Everyone in the apartment surrounded him, clung to him, clamored with joy.
Moe entered, with jaw set in his bronzed-fair countenance, his lips thickened to pouting. Campaign ribbons were bunched on his chest. Gone was the quarter-moon under the three chevrons on his arm; in its place nestled a castle above an additional black loop. He no longer spoke in his former good-natured way, but with a dry, grating voice — and with scarcely an intonation. He sat down heavily on a chair.