What Do You Do When You Discover You’re a Jew?

By Blechner

 

Dedicated to the work of Franz Kafka,
that flickering light showing others a way.

 

“…for human reality, to act is to be,
and to cease to act is to cease to be.”

Being and Nothingness 

 

“Why not relax? Why not let things find a level routine?
As long as no one is complaining, why is it not
sufficient just to let things amble along as they have been?”

Identity and Interpersonal Competence

 

What Do You Do When You Discover You’re a Jew?

Chapter One: Sammy Schor

Or you discover you’re a half-Jew? For one thing, I should be able to get a full-time job now with good benefits. Jews have connections, are hard-working, security conscious, and ambitious, the ones I know anyway, most of them, but not all it’s true, like other groups. Take my one-hundred-percent Jewish pal Sammy Schor, he doesn’t care about making money and he’s lazy, he says so in his own way, I’ve heard him many times complain.

“Ma, why can’t you leave me alone?”

“I am Sammy.”

“Well, leave me alone more.”

Sammy likes to do things, but in his own way. He likes to sleep, he’s one of the best sleepers I’ve ever met and he can do nine hours regularly. “I have a clean conscience,” he says. “And what’s with the rushing about sleep-deprived, phone slapped to your ear? Where’s everyone going?”

I told him, “To the bone yard.”

“Right, to the big dark empty nothing forever, and we’ll get there all of us soon enough whether we rise at five a.m. and commute closed-off like automatons or sleep till eight-thirty and sit an hour civilized with cereal and coffee to feel the morning like a turtle in the sun.”

Sammy’s mom, Mrs. Schor, would have none of this talk which is why she was divorced according to Sammy.

“You can’t be pushing people, Ma, folks have to find their own way,” he told her often with me sitting at their kitchen table gazing out the window wishing I was back in Alaska working in that lumber mill for good wages. The folks up there were all right back then in the seventies, fair minded and taciturn, even the millwrights who called me “Aunt Jemima” when I was out of earshot because I wrapped my long hair in a red and white bandanna. Those boys, most of them, showed up for work every day on time, did their jobs well and spoke their minds and didn’t care who liked it.

“Who’s pushing you, Sammy?”

“That feral cat and those two sparrows that live in the park, Ma, they’re pushing me really hard, the little beggars. My back hurts. And my knees. They may be small but they drive me pretty rough at feeding time if I’m late.”

“But isn’t the park pretty these days with the new plantings?” his mom said to bother him.

“Yes, Ma, it is,” Sammy said not taking the bait, “especially the African violets.”

Mrs. Schor shook her head pleasantly as if Sammy hadn’t said anything. “If you don’t push, Sammy, dear,” she said smiling a warning, “you’ll never get anywhere.”

“Where’s anywhere?”

“Why don’t you look in your ear.”.

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Use two mirrors and a flashlight.”

“Will that work?”

“It might. Why don’t you try it sometime?”

“OK, Ma, but you chased dad away with this go-get-it-now nonsense.”

“You call wanting to make something of yourself nonsense?”

“If you overdo it.”

“Who says I overdo it?”

“Dad did.”

“Oh, your father, that one.”

“What?”

“He had a wandering penis that had nothing to do with me.”

“A man doesn’t like being nagged.”

“The good ones do.”

“Ma, I’m telling you,” he warned but his mom wouldn’t hear it.

“Good men,” Mrs. Schor pressed gently but stressed good so hard it sounded like ‘gut’, “with strong characters know how to appreciate a woman’s encouragements, Sammy. To encourage someone is not the same as nagging.

“It’s close enough to be the same, Ma.”

“Nonsense.  A well-intentioned, even abrasive encouragement, which you call nagging, keeps a good man on the lookout for opportunities and makes him doubt himself.”

“Since when is doubting yourself a good thing, Ma?”

“Since the dawn of recorded history, Sammy.”

“That long ago, huh?”

“Even longer than that. Doubting yourself is called modesty and perseverance. Good men know nagging helps them, though they won’t admit that to their mothers. Not that any of us mothers ever expect thanks from our children, especially our sons, because to know how to encourage a man is a precious gift we Jewish women have carefully preserved, Sammy, and that is enough for us:  to know we have this gift and to cherish it. We have passed this gift on from mother to daughter for centuries as part of our special heritage, and now you know our secret too. It’s one of the secrets of our success as a people despite our small numbers. We push ourselves and our loved ones to death.”

“Aren’t such secrets revealed in the Kabbalah even to the uninitiated?”

“Sammy, dear,” Mrs. Schor said to him forever mild, “sarcasm is rarely attractive to your listener, even when used sparingly.”

“I’m serious, Ma. I read about that nagging secret in the Kabbalah, not in those exact words, but in ‘The Book of Zohar’,” catching my eye so I wouldn’t drift, “that nagging secret is one of the seven lesser mysteries of the Divine Healing. It’s often mistranslated as you say as ‘encouragement’ or ‘enthusiasm’ and even ‘sexual torment’ and ‘torture’.”

“The Divine Healing, is it, Sammy, in the Kabbalah? And those important writings in The Book of Zohar regarding women mistranslated as ‘torture’ and ‘sexual torment’?”

“Yes.”

“That’s your exegesis of a revered text?”

“Not just mine, Ma, there’s rabbinical corroboration because of the flawed translations.”

“Rabbinical corroboration, really?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Most recently at the University of Haifa.”

“Uh hum.”

“According to Gershom Scholem and depending on how carefully one fixes the historical references in the Zohar, the naggah healing or mishom-naggah healing is considered one of the final steps to female spiritual completion. That spiritual completion is placed above motherhood on the holiest path to the blessings that come with consummation with Ein Sof.”

“Above motherhood?”

“Yes.”

“That is significant then, isn’t it.”

“Immensely. But my reading is that nagging’s deepest mystery is bestowed only on the daughters of Sarah and Hagar and only on those females who can trace direct bloodlines through the mother to the prophets, Ma. That direct bloodline to the prophets is the most important distinction between the divinely gifted naggers who can nag effortlessly, and the merely skilled who have to work at it.”

Mrs. Schor covered her mouth to stifle a fake yawn. “That is a lot to think about, all that canonical research.”

“I’d say so, Ma.

“It tires me just thinking about all those readings the rabbis need to do to uncover the difference between encouragement and nagging.”

“It takes stamina. And some of these rabbis are frail and elderly but the research is still going on. I’m fascinated by the results so far. There’s still riches being discovered for the benefit of the faithful and the long-suffering, and for those Jews seeking lasting enlightenment in the folds of their ancient faith.”

“Do you have more to say about the Kabbalah?”

“Not right now.”

“Very well then, Sammy, I must say it again that sarcasm and mockery and women-bashing betray a severely unbalanced mind no matter how smooth the tongue and how shocking and impious the references. You can see the proof of that imbalance in that former president and the people around him. Are you trying to be like him? Adept at taking the cheapest shots and misleading all those unfortunate people desperately looking for someone they can trust to improve their lives and keep them safe? Is that what you aspire to be? An empty-headed mocker with a loose loud mouth, a thug and a vulgarian, a liar and a cheat who would have dragged this country into another unjustified war and killed people needlessly – killed especially our young and our rural poor – for his own selfish and misguided and ignorant ends, and for the ends of the louts and connivers who support him? Is that how you’ll end up? As a braggadocio with a smart mouth, one step above a criminal and thoroughly detested by so many conscientious and thoughtful and well-meaning people – the people who actually read books, and especially reputable history books at the University of Haifa and elsewhere?”

“No, Ma, not me.”

“Well?”

“OK, Ma, I’ll straighten out. I’ll get serious.”

“That’s right, ‘OK, Ma, I’ll straighten out, I’ll get serious,’” his mom said letting Sammy see her concern, which had no effect on Sammy, “that’s how it always is when I try to talk to you about your future, and nothing changes.”

“This time it will, Ma. This time there’ll be big changes. I want you to be proud of me so you can show me off to your friends. I want you to be able to say while I’m sweeping up out front and you’re having coffee here with Tante Netta and the others, ‘My boy Sammy, look what he’s done with himself, isn’t he a marvel with a broom?  And without a father to guide him for most of his life.’”

“More of your diddling. What am I going to do with you, Sammy? You’re a grown man.”

“Strangle me in my sleep and throw me in the garbage.”

“I can’t do that,” Mrs. Schor said caressing his cheek, “You’re still my darling.”

Sammy was sympathetic when I told him I’d found out I was a half-Jew. He nodded resigned like he’d known all along.

“I always thought there was something off about you.”

“Come on.”

“I did.”

“Like what off?”

“Not here. Distant.”

“I’m not here? What’s not here about me?”

“Look,” Sammy said, “something off-to-the-side watchful is the way you come across like you’re over-listening, and you look sneaky.”

“Sneaky? Me?”

“Yeah. Evasive. Like you’re plotting your next move.”

“And that’s my Jewishness?”

“Half.”

“That’s my half-Jewishness? Because I’m a half-Jew I’m sneaky?”

“Pretty much. There could be some bleeding-in from the Italian-Catholic side. There’s some heavy baggage with that crowd too. Centuries. But both together?” He made a twisting conspiratorial sign with his pinky and didn’t finish the thought.

“So all these years you think I’m sneaky and you don’t tell me?”

“I didn’t have enough information to treat the subject productively.”

“And now you do.”

“Pretty much.”

“Give me an example.”

“Of you being sneaky?”

“Yeah.”

“OK, Sure.”

I waited.

“Well?”

“This is not the best example, maybe, but I think it will do.”

“Just spill it, Sammy. I’m dying to hear how I can improve myself in your eyes.”

“Hey.”

“Rip me apart, come on.”

“Not if you’re going to be like that.”

“Like what? A short-tempered Jew?”

“Half.”

“Right, half. A short-tempered half-Jew.”

“We’re just having a conversation.”

“I know we are.”

“So what’s with the defensiveness? It’s a conversation between friends.”

“Right, except one friend’s a sneak.”

“Looking sneaky is not the same as being a sneak.”

“Is that your Jewish wisdom?”

“I learn from everyone. I’m not prejudiced.”

“So?”

“It was that time when,” and Sammy told the story about me and my family  when my older brother was twelve and my mom said he was eleven so he could get in the movie theater for the kids price, which was half. But the ticket lady looked my older brother over suspiciously.

“He’s tall for his age,” my mother tried.

“Uh huh.”

“He always stands out but he’s eleven. He won’t be twelve for six months.”

The ticket lady wasn’t convinced so she sent for the manager, a slight stooped man with an uneven mustache who was having none of it.

“That kid’s not eleven,” he said after a quick look and no nonsense.

“He is,” my mother lied, “he’s just tall for his age so he looks older.”

“You have to pay him as an adult,” the manager said. “What are you trying to do here, Lady?”

My whole family was there in the lobby, my father, who I now know was descended from Russian Jews who changed his name because of the Nazi fear, and his four sons who had no clue they were half-Jews. If we boys thought anything we thought, “Our family’s just different. We’re socialists,” which meant, as far as anyone of us kids could tell, my parents didn’t like what our government was doing, it didn’t matter who the politician was or which party was in control, they didn’t like it. On the morning after elections, I dreaded bringing them the newspaper because I’d caught on to the atmosphere and I knew what to expect: outrage.

“So he won, after all,” my father fumed immediately, snapping the front page like it had bit him. “A landslide.”

And my mother was quick to scorn: “Of course he did. With all that money behind him.”

But it got worse.

“We should move,” my father would turn to, which scared the breath out of me whenever moving the family came up. But especially after the national elections my father would become more specific.

“We should move to a parliamentary democracy,” he said, “like Canada. That’s where progressive social change can take place in our lifetime.”

Fortunately my mother knew by now how to tame my father’s erratic tendencies that wanted to throw everything over in the household she’d painstakingly built up and begin again. Also, she was determined to protect their sons who she believed needed stability of place and were getting along well enough under a constitutional democracy. She knew my terror at being uprooted and hovered protectively to step in until the conversation shifted to something less disruptive of our home life.

“It’s certainly something to think about,” my mother would say, not meaning a word of it. “Considering how things are going.”

“Exactly. Civil rights in the South, it’s a national disgrace,” and my mother waited patiently until my dad turned back to the paper and, sensing my relief, nodded to me it was safe to leave. That we’d gone through another disastrous election without the moving van pulling to the curb was all I needed to know.

I had good friends those years growing up, they were all Reformed Jews it was true because that was the neighborhood, but what did I know? I was just a kid. I liked them and they liked me. I didn’t want to move away from them. I went to their bar mitzvahs and felt like I had a skin disease putting on the yarmulke and showered with disapproving adult glances as I raced to the nearest seat followed by the whispered, “What’s he doing here?” and the murmured, “Never mind.” But the food was good and after a while the parents pitied me with kindly smiles that kept their distance, but I knew what they meant: “Poor thing, but what can any of us do? He’s doomed. It’s life.”

So with the slightly stooped theater manager standing up to my mother and my father off to the side with a tortured look on his face, that was my first good lesson in world affairs because this theater manager wasn’t one of us and he didn’t give two shits if we were all dressed Sunday-well and upper-middle-class and his jacket and slacks and shoes were cheap and fit him poorly, he didn’t care about any of it. He was paid to do a job and he was doing it.

But apparently he’d never met someone like my mother because there was no way she was paying a full-price ticket for her eldest son. She had too many mouths to feed and who knew when the next financial crisis would come, the way these capitalists were with their ferocious appetites for gain, and all our savings were suddenly wiped out as her parents’ had been and there was no work for the men and we had nothing as she had growing up Italian and despised, and we lost our home and had our furniture put on the sidewalk.

There it was in front of us: the poorhouse, right out of Dickens, and this grubby theater manager was the factory owner’s factotum who paid starvation wages to the young women from the countryside working his unsafe machines and who had to prostitute themselves with rich men in alleyways to make their rent, their fists clenched and praying they didn’t get pregnant or fall sick with the syphilis. So it wasn’t even a contest. And as the legitimate ticket-buyers milled about the lobby staring at us and my mother stood tall for economic justice and her sense of truth-in-business, the poor manager finally had to give up.

“Next time he pays full price,” he said trying to sound vindicated.

As if with my parents there ever was going to be a next time at that theater.

“Next time he’ll probably be twelve so of course we will.”

“Have it your way.”

I didn’t see what Sammy was getting at with this story and I told him so.

“Really? You don’t see the connection to your sneakiness?”

“Really. I don’t.”

“That’s because you’re concentrating on your mother. You do that a lot I’ve noticed. Might be worth a look into when you have a chance. This over-reference to the mom. Could be a deep-seated connection there to your lack of achievement.”

“It’s my mom’s story at the movies, Sammy.”

“Nah.”

“Nah? She’s lying in front of her sons and she kept up the lie and they knew it.”

“So?”

“That incident left a mark.”

“On you it did. I doubt your brothers even remember it.”

“So what if they don’t? What’s that to do with me?”

“Your brothers have a healthy sense of obliviousness, it gives them a big advantage in their dealings. Also, they have healthy memories: they won’t remember what’s unpleasant. You should consider following their example. Your life would be easier if you observed less and were a little more obtuse and conventional, especially in your relations with other people. I’m not talking about with me. I like that you’re a misfit.”

“It’s my mom’s story, Sammy, whether I’m fragile as a snowflake and my brothers are made of glass and limestone and deaf as skyscrapers.”

“It’s your dad’s story.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Sure. This big movie-theater story, you think that’s when your mom taught you how to sneak around the rules?”

“To lie my way out of a jam.”

“Close enough.”

“I’m saying it was a formative incident in my upbringing.”

“Maybe it was, so what? Some incidents have to be formative. But they don’t have to set a tone of your life and make you look sneaky.”

“And this one is, is what you’re saying.”

“Sure. Because you got to think about your dad here, this City-College high IQ Jewish guy, standing there awkward. His people are of the book, they have rules laid down they embed in their kids’ skulls that make other religions look like a game of pretend.”

“He’d given all that religious nonsense up I’m telling you.”

“Sure he did. We all do once we figure out what’s going on, the smart ones anyway, otherwise you’re a sucker. But still, we’re going back a ways, he hadn’t done a thorough cleaning so he’s conflicted. What was he then, about forty?”

“About.”

“Sure. He’s just about to find out how the moneyed class screws you when you stumble unless you let them know fast, “Don’t you fuck with me, you money grubber. I’m a maniac. Your life won’t be safe. I’ll rip your heart out and eat it.”

Sammy’s theory here was that my dad should have spoken up and told my mom to cut the crap, that was his point, and seeing my Russian dad stand to the side like that while my Italian mom was doing the family’s dirty work, that was my formative experience: I learned how to sneak off and do nothing in serious conflicts that screamed for resolution from this time when my Russian-Jewish dad was silent.

And the serious conflict here, as Sammy saw it, was the family-versus-everyone-else. He did remark out of his basic fairness that when it came to family-firsters the Jews and the Italians were at the very top of that moron list: don’t fuck with the family, it’s sacred. Outside the family it’s fair game, inside it’s a lifetime of bottomless devotion, sacrifice, and secrets.

But my dad wasn’t a dope, Sammy knew that though they’d never met, and my dad didn’t hang out in bars after work with a lot of other monkeys searching each other for fleas, he was a guy who kept to himself and who looked at the world independently like a good leftist. Plus he had brains and was always reading books. That reading books was another sign, according to Sammy, that I should have picked up on.

“Oh yeah?”

“Sure. Reading books all the time, what’s that about?”

“It’s about improving your mind.”

“Sure,” Sammy scoffed, “go ahead, but if it’s such a good idea, why don’t more people do it?”

I had no answer.

“Well?”

“What can I tell you? They’d rather watch sports.”

“Sure the thick-headed Christians and the brain-washed Hebrews and Muslims and the empty-headed what-nots and beer-guzzling atheists they all like a hyped-up sports event they can watch sitting down eating something fatty  and talking loud, rah-har-har. But this over-reading and isolation thing, that’s fundamental Semitic culture and European. It’s Spinoza. You find someone reading all the time and keeping to themselves, chances are there’s Jewish blood in their background, like you. Maybe with rabbinical roots or even ties to The House of David.”

What Sammy explained was that weak Jews like my father needed a strong aggressive woman as his mom maintained to reassure them now and then that they had a female tigress behind them who was eternally vigilant and would turn ferocious when sensing the smallest threat. Where my Russian-intellectual dad saw conflicting explanations and insurmountable complications and froze silent, my Southern-Italian peasant mom saw one simple thing: an attack on the family’s money supply and she leapt into action showing her fangs. And that money-supply as Sammy saw it was tied to my dad as income-bringer.

“Well wasn’t he?”

“He made some good money, yeah, for a while.”

“But not gobs.”

“No, but we were all right.”

“Sure you were. Better than most.”

“That’s right, better than most.”

“Even at the worst times. Even when your mom had to start teaching.”

“Right. Even then.”

So what my mom was doing by trying to squeeze expenses was showing  my dad how much she appreciated his schlepping off to his job and keeping us all clothed and housed and fed and educated, because she knew he was sacrificing his time and doing things every day he didn’t want to do to support us. According to Sammy that’s what killed him so young: living for years a working-day lie for the sake of a good pay check.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Sammy said, “you got to cut out this sneaky  standing-off-to-the-side shit and shrinking into a corner at the first sound of a raised voice, or making yourself soft and huggable so the moneyed-class is convinced you’re harmless and you want to be like them. That kind of weakling behavior can lead to cancers. You want to be known as a good-natured, self-effacing coward who’s pleasant company for two glasses of wine and a salmon plate when someone else pays, or you want to be respected for who you are and what you believe in and proud to eat day-old bread? It’s your choice.”

I couldn’t argue with Sammy too long because he was smart and he was fearless. His dad had escaped the Nazis in Germany so he had first-hand knowledge of what it means when someone is trying to kill you. He’d learned about death squads at the dinner table before his dad took off and he supplemented that experience every chance he got. That was what Sammy did: he lived his life the way he wanted and paid attention to how people treated each other, that was his vocation. Sammy was a disciple of Abraham Maslow, a student of facial expression and spontaneity and self-realization, so he didn’t have time for something like a career, not that he ever wanted one. But he couldn’t tell his mother, “I’m too busy to work,” because work to Mrs. Schor meant at the very least you left home in the morning and you returned in the evening tired, and Sammy left their house as little as possible, and usually in the late afternoon for a long walk to the library once the bustle and the street noise had died down. So what Sammy was too busy with remained a mystery to his mom. If he ever told her he was reading the philosophers and Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets” these days and was fine doing odd jobs to make a little money for their household expenses, she’d have made him see a psychiatrist. So he just kept telling her he was close to making his next life-move and this time it would be real and lasting and income producing. He told me by way of explanation, “The first thing I’ll do when I become a hard-faced-cash fiend with money in the bank is buy some soft one-hundred-percent-cotton t-shirts that actually fit me and don’t shrink one whole size in the first wash. And then with my pockets full, it’ll be nothing from China or Vietnam cotton. I want Indian cotton.”

To Sammy, working-life in a post-industrial western democracy was in many cases one gigantic fraud foisted on the oblivious, the trusting, the under-educated, the unfortunate, the money-worshipers, the immigrants and the thing-wanters. According to Sammy, if someone worked a job in a wealthy society like ours they shouldn’t have to work long hours that exhausted them and they should be paid well, have health insurance, educational opportunities, and be able to look forward confidently to a one-hundred-percent secure retirement. His judgment was that simple, and too many people, far too many people, were working jobs, many of them thankless and mindless, many of them involving long crowded commutes, and weren’t paid enough or receiving enough benefits. Sammy wasn’t one to be asked what “enough” meant. He took that question as a personal insult.

“You want to know what ‘enough’ money means?” would be his acid response: “Ask the Walmart heirs. Or the Bush boys. Or your Congressperson. Or anyone at Bain Capital. They’ll tell you straight out: ‘Keep your taxes away from my unearned income, especially my dividends and capital gains and ground leases. It’s confiscatory. You’re robbing me. Get your taxes from the W-2ers.’ That’s what ‘enough money’ means to the moneyed-class: it’s never enough for too many of them. And those over-moneyed people are calling the political shots. All the important ones but especially on taxes. You ever look at the taxes added to your utility or cell phone bills? You ever try to figure those taxes out? How come selling stocks and property transfers isn’t taxed like that?”

Sammy’s points and his stories had an effect on me. One of his more convincing comparisons was from kindergarten which on the first day my mother had walked me there I cried the whole way.

“Man.”

“Well I did. I liked our home and I liked being around my mom.”

“Apparently.”

“But I went to that school all the same.”

“Sure you did but you didn’t have a choice.”

I got through the first kindergarten half-days all right but just when I’d settled in with the chocolate milk and my blanket, another boy called me a rubber-head. I didn’t know what a rubber-head was but I didn’t like his tone so I went to my dad for advice on how to deal with this prick. It was evening and my dad was reading a book in the living room as my mom prepared dinner so I told him what this kid had said to me and I wanted his opinion about what I should do about it. Right off, my dad didn’t take the incident seriously which was a very bad sign. This was a serious incident, something needed to be done, and I needed advice on what to do and how to do it. But my dad barely looked up from his book and told me to tell this fuck, “There’s no such thing as a rubber-head. Tell him we’re called human beings and let him think about that.”

“Exactly what I’m talking about,” said Sammy. “Exactly. You wanted to know how to respond to nasty and aggressive behavior and your high IQ dad tells you the best thing to do is to rise above it.”

When something similar had happened to Sammy, some bully had taken to pestering him, and Sammy had gone to his dad, Sammy got his dad’s full attention immediately. He listened to Sammy’s story, his jaw clenched like the tough Jew he was, asked a few pertinent questions a six-year-old could understand like, “Did you start something with this kid?” And when Sammy said, “No,” his dad followed with, “So he’s pushing you around? Looking for a fight?” and when Sammy said he was, his dad told him: “Hit him in the face.” When Sammy said he couldn’t because this kid was bigger than him, his dad said right away, “OK, here’s what you do: you get yourself a piece of broomstick about three-feet long and you smack him hard in the head with it, make sure you hit him in the head. If that doesn’t stop him picking on you, I’ll wring his dirty little neck.” When Sammy stood there uncertain about the stick, his dad reassured him with, “You smack him in the head. If there’s any crap from your school, I’ll handle it. This kid’s pushing you around, right?” And when Sammy repeated he was and he was afraid of him, his father told him again, “Smack him in the face with a broomstick. He deserves it. If your teacher was doing her job, this wouldn’t happen to you. So you got to fix it. Don’t be afraid. I’ll back you up.”

One other growing-up incident Sammy believed instructive happened around this time when we four boys were boisterous at the dinner table, which my father believed was a time for conversation and instruction. My dad saw us as adults like him only smaller and less educated and he wanted to teach us French with records and he wanted us to respond to questions like, “What was the chief event that gave rise to European feudalism, especially in France?” At the other end of the table, my mother sat silent and worried we were going to come out of this question damaged and she would have some work to do to get us back to being kids again, so my dad gave us three choices to help us along: one was the rise of the landed peasantry; the second was the centralization of power under a monarch established by divine right; and the third was the invention of the stirrup. We all made guesses and none of us chose the stirrup, which my dad said was the correct answer because it gave the horsemen an advantage in battle, and horsemen in those days were the weapons of mass destruction, only these weapons existed. You didn’t just hear some sloppy mix of rumor and lies at The United Nations General Assembly from the Secretary of State about secret horsemen with weapons of mass destruction coming to kill you, you saw them killing your neighbors and cutting their hands off.

Sammy grasped the problem immediately.

“You’re gonna come away from that kind of question believing your brain doesn’t work well. Either that, or when you’re asked a question in future, you’ll worry there’s a trick to it and whatever answer you come up with you’re gonna look foolish. How old were you?”

“Twelve. My older brother was fourteen and my younger ones ten and eight.”

“Sure. It’s the John-Stuart-Mill approach: learn Greek before you’re five. Trouble is by twenty you suffer a nervous collapse and are suicidal. Still, it’s too bad your dad died so young. If he’d lived to see you grown, you probably would have come to appreciate him more and told him to shove that stirrup story up his ass with an old hair brush.”

The one story Sammy didn’t like was when we boys had heard that a Cadillac was called a “Jew Canoe” and we took that to the dinner-table discussion with an excitement known only to us. That was our dinner conversation which we expected our parents to join in on. “What’s another name for a Cadillac?” was the question we posed to them and when they said they didn’t know, we fell over ourselves with the “ A Jew Canoe” answer.

Sammy’s response was, “Sure. It’s what I’m telling you. Your dad doesn’t respond to that outburst in some way?”

“Maybe he did. I don’t remember.”

“What? Something lame and liberal like, ‘That’s not a fair thing to say, children, Cadillac cars are owned by many different types of people’?”

“Probably.”

But the story that sealed my situation for Sammy was my dad telling us that his father had deserted his mom and his younger brother and him when he was a kid, and when he’d grown to college age he’d gone to see his father at his used-car dealership. His father had proudly shown him around the lot and when he came to a shiny red Cadillac he’d told my dad “I can make a lot of money on that one selling it to a N—–.” That was the end of their relationship for my dad. He never went to see his father again and for the rest of his life, he had nothing to do with him. Nothing, not even a word.

“Right,” Sammy said. “No wonder you’re a mess. You’re mostly concealment.”

“Like a lot of people.”

“But I’m not talking about a lot of people, I’m talking about you. You don’t get your identity sorted out you’re walking a dangerous line. Spontaneous self-expression is everything.”

“I know it is.”

“It’s called trusting yourself. What Emerson says.”

“I know,” I faltered.

“Well?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Sure. But don’t work on it too long. How old was your dad when he was hospitalized for that nervous breakdown?”

“Forty-seven.”

“You’re overdue. It’s time to get your shit together.”