“Rabbi,” said Emmanuel, “You look frustrated. Are you silently pooh-poohing me?”
I said, I just don’t know what to say to you.
“Say that you’ll lead us.”
Lead you how? I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Somehow, though. Something needs to be done soon. There is too much strife in the Land of Israel. Everyone agrees.”
I said, There has always been strife in the Land of Israel.
“Exactly,” he said. “And always too much, and everyone has always agreed on that. It’s wisdom as old as history. Something needs to be done already.”
The train slowed and we swayed.
“Aren’t you getting off here?” Emmanuel said.
It was our stop, but Emmanuel could not be seen entering our neighborhood with me, so I told him to go ahead, that I would stay on til Loyola and walk from there.
“It makes me angry, Rabbi — at myself. I’m your student. Why should I have to worry I’ll be seen with you?”
Because you’re a good son, I told him.
“It feels like I’m a coward,” he said. “Either way, I’m the one who should walk the extra blocks — not you. And there’s no time to argue.”
Emmanuel was right.
When the doors slid open, I snatched the yarmulke from his head and flung it onto the platform.
He leapt out to get it, grabbed it and kissed it, and it was only after the train pulled away that I saw we’d created needless drama, that things had actually been simpler than they’d seemed. We could have both disembarked at our stop no problem if one of us had just hung back an extra minute while the other one entered the neighborhood.
I stepped off the train at the next stop, Loyola, and gulped down my last sip of coffee. The nearest garbage barrel was twenty feet away. By the time I got to it, the victory spike felt forced, like a knock on wood, and nothing seemed finished at all.
8 VANDAL
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
6:30–Bedtime
Patrick Drucker wanted to stand on the sidewalk in the Wilmette shopping district and speak through a megaphone while handing out pamphlets about conspiracies. The City of Wilmette didn’t want him to speak or hand out pamphlets, and after he refused a request to desist, the Wilmette police put him under arrest, and Drucker contacted the United Civil Liberties Advocates of America, at which point my father became his lawyer. Patrick Drucker vs the City of Wilmette had been getting publicity for weeks. Closing arguments had begun that morning. My dad was convinced he’d defeat Wilmette, and so was most of the rest of the Chicagoland area — my father always won — but the Israelites of West Rogers Park weren’t happy about that, they never were, and one of them, in protest, had spraypainted “Maccabees aren’t” above the welcome mat on the front stoop of our house. I couldn’t be sure how long the new bomb had been on the stoop — I hadn’t seen the stoop that morning (Tuesday) because I’d left out the back door like my parents, like usual — but I knew it hadn’t been there the afternoon before (Monday), and I had a hard time imagining someone vandalizing a stoop before midnight or after 5 AM, so I figured the vandal had come in the night.
Drucker’s pamphlets had titles like Aspects of Zionist Power in the United States and Zionists and the “Antisemitism” Cry. Those were the two that always got mentioned on the news, but there were five or six others, and one of them was called NBC, ABC, CBS, AIPAC. Whenever interviewed on television, Drucker would ask why it was that although the titles of his other pamphlets were regularly cited during newscasts, NBC, ABC, CBS, AIPAC was never mentioned. And then he would answer his first question with a second one; he would ask if the absence of the title’s mention might not be “very ironic proof” that “a small group of Zionists” was controlling all the major media outlets and “doing everything in their power to obscure the truth from the eyes of the viewing public.”
Drucker was always very careful to say “Zionists” and was not a stupid guy. When one of his interviewers responded to the media cover-up accusation by stating, “But Mr. Drucker, we’re an ABC affiliate. If this controlling group of alleged Zionists are doing what you claim they’re doing, how can you account for this broadcast?” Zucker responded like this: “You guys are out to make me look crazy, and since your so-called ‘producers’ and ‘editors’ are at the controls, you succeed to a degree. This is all pre-recorded and you do studio-tricks to my image. Anything from lowering the number of pixels per square inch in the area of my eyes so even the pupils look like an outdated video game, to simply shooting me from a slightly oblique angle which makes it appear that I am not, as they say, a ‘straightforward’ individual, not to mention sitting me on the right side of the table so I’m always leaning in what’s known as the ‘sinister’ direction to answer questions, and the way you raise the volume on my voice, and speed it up ever so slightly, and the way you ‘edit’ me, or should I say ‘censor’ me, the way you cut out portions of what I’m saying while I’m in mid-sentence… I come off like I’m disturbed, and if a disturbed man mentions my pamphlet NBC, ABC, CBS, AIPAC, the pamphlet is sure to be associated with a disturbed man, and such a man might as well be talking about a UFO sighting — you completely undercut my credibility. If one of your starry-eyed talking heads so much as even gave a list of the surnames of the men and women who run the networks, let alone the types of — if I may be permitted to scare-quote aloud—‘philanthropic’ Zionist organizations to which these men and women tithe, the implications would be examined at dinner tables all throughout Chicago, if not on a national level; but when a slightly diagonal Pat Drucker bends sinister to discuss these same executives, to alert the viewing public to the money-hungry, war-mongering Zionist cabal that’s controlling this very interview, well, it’s obvious he’s nuts, right? Cause just look at him, yeah? He’s a pixel-face!”
Drucker’s accusations about how the media undercut him were crazy in themselves, but at the same time, if you considered them for a second, you couldn’t avoid wondering if they could be true; and if it was possible that the only reason the accusations sounded crazy was because the TV networks were doing to his image what Drucker claimed they were doing, then it was also possible that all the other things Drucker had said weren’t as crazy as they might seem. His tactic made me think of that Lauryn Hill line that Flowers loved, “Even after all my logic and my theory, I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ig’nant niggas hear me.” Lauryn’s not only telling you about what she does, but in telling you what she does, she’s doing what she tells you she does. She makes truth by saying it. Drucker wasn’t making truth when he talked about the studio-tricks, but he was making tricks. It was pretty smart of him.
That does not mean that I liked Drucker. I didn’t like Drucker, and I didn’t like that he and others like him existed. I understood why someone had to defend Drucker’s right to speak against my people, and I even understood why it was a good thing that Drucker had the right to speak against my people, but I didn’t understand why the person who rose to his defense couldn’t be one of his people. I didn’t understand why it had to be one of my people. I didn’t understand why it had to be my father. And neither did the Israelites of West Rogers Park. And so I understood why some of them vandalized our house. If I had not been Gurion, I might have vandalized our house myself.