Харлан Эллисон - More Wandering Stars - An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

And every night there were phone calls from girls. Girls who had received impossible urges to call this number. “Are you Lance Goldfein? You’re not going to believe this, but I, er, uh, now don’t think I’m crazy, but I heard this voice when I was at my kid brother’s bar mitzvah last Saturday. This voice kept telling me what a swell fellah you are, and how we’d get along so well. My name is Shirley and I’m single and…”

They appeared at his door, they came up to him at work, they stopped by on their lunch hour, they accosted him in the street, they called and called and called.

And they were all like Mom. Thick ankles, glasses, sweet beyond belief, Escoffier chefs every one of them, with tales of potato latkes as light as a dryad’s breath. And he fled them, screaming.

But no matter where he hid, they found him.

He pleaded with his mother, but she was determined to find him a nice girl.

Not a woman, a girl. A nice girl. A nice Jewish girl. If there were easier ways of going crazy, Lance Goldfein could not conceive of them. At times he was really talking to himself.

He met Joanie in the Hughes Market. They bumped carts, he stepped backward into a display of Pringles, and she helped him clean up the mess. Her sense of humor was so black it lapsed over into the ultraviolet, and he loved her pixie haircut. He asked her for coffee. She accepted, and he silently prayed Mom would not interfere.

Two weeks later, in bed, with Mom nowhere in sight, he told her he loved her, they talked for a long time about her continuing her career in advocacy journalism with a small Los Angeles weekly, and decided they should get married.

Then he felt he should tell her about Mom.

“Yes, I know,” she said, when he was finished.

“You know?”

“Yes. Your mother asked me to look you up.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Amen,” she said.

“What?”

“Well, I met your mother and we had a nice chat. She seems like a lovely woman. A bit too possessive, perhaps, but basically she means well.”

“You met my mother…?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But… but… Joanie…”

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said, drawing him down to her small, but tidy, bosom. “I think we’ve seen the last of Mom. She won’t be coming back. Some do come back, some even get recorporeated, but your mother has gone to a lovely place where she won’t worry about you anymore.”

“But you’re so unlike the girls she tried to fix me up with.” And then he stopped, stunned. “Wait a minute… you met her? Then that means…”

“Yes, dear, that’s what it means. But don’t let it bother you. I’m perfectly human in every other way. And what’s best of all is I think we’ve outfoxed her.”

“We have?”

“I think so. Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I love you, too.”

“I never thought I’d fall in love with a Jewish girl my mother found for me, Joanie.”

“Uh, that’s what I mean about outfoxing her. I’m not Jewish.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she assumed.”

“But, Joanie…”

“You can call me Joan.”

But he never called her the Maid of Orléans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.

bummerkeh (bumå-er-keh) A female bum; generally, a “loose” lady.

“Eli Eli” (aå-lee aå-lee) Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. Title means “My God, my God.” Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in early 1900s. Al Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.

fressing (fresså-ing) To eat quickly, noisily; really stuffing one’s face; synonymous with eating mashed potatoes with both hands.

latkes (lotå-kess) Pancakes, usually potato pancakes but can also be made from matzoh meal. When made by my mother, not unlike millstones.

Litvak (litå-vahk) A Jew from Lithuania; variously erudite but pedantic, thin, dry, humorless, learned but skeptical, shrewd and clever; but used in this context as a derogatory by Lance’s mom, who was a Galitzianer , or Austro-Polish Jew; the antipathy between them is said to go back to Cain and Abel, one of whom was a Litvak, the other a Galitzianer… but that’s just foolish. I guess.

momser (muhmå-zer) An untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person; not a nice person.

nafkeh (nahf Å-keh) A nonprofessional prostitute; a bummerkeh (see above); not quite a hooker, but clearly not the sort of woman a mother would call “mine darling daughter-in-law.”

nuhdzing (noooood Å-jing) To pester, to nag, to bore, to drive someone up a wall. The core of the story: Practiced by mothers of all ethnic origins, be they Jewish, Italian, or WASP. To bore; to hassle; to be bugged into eating your asparagus, putting on your galoshes, getting up and taking her home, etc. Very painful.

pupik (pipå-ik or puhpå-ik) Navel. Belly button.

shiksa (shikÅ -suh) A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

shmootz (shmootz) Dirt.

shtumie (shtoomå-ee) Lesser insult-value than calling someone a schlemiel (shleh-meal å). A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a social misfit, a clumsy, gauche, butterfingered person; more offhand than schlemiel , less significant; the word you’d use when batting away someone like a gnat.

shtupping (shtooooopå-ing) Sexual intercourse.

tante (tahnå-tuh) Aunt.

yenta (yenå-tuh) A woman of low origins or vulgar manners; a shrew; a shallow, coarse termagant; tactless; a gossipy woman or scandal spreader; one unable to keep a secret or respect a confidence; much of the nuhdz in her. If it’s a man, it’s the same word, a blabbermouth.

One of the basic tenets of Judaism is that after various signs and portents the Messiah will come to redeem the people of Israel. In the next story by Gardner Dozois a momentous event is seen through the nervous eyes of Nicky the Horse, a panhandler who earns his meager living by spreading the word of the Lord. Although Nicky stretches out his hand to every likely passer-by and announces that the Last Days are indeed coming, he can’t quite believe that the Messiah could be Murray Kupferberg, a plumber from Pittsburgh.

The story reminds me of these lines from Isaiah:

NICKY THE HORSE was a thin, weaselly-looking man with long dirty black hair that hung down either side of his face in greasy ropes, like inkmarks against the pallor of his skin. He was clean-shaven and hollowcheeked, and had a thin but rubbery lower lip upon which his small yellowed teeth were forever biting, seizing the lip suddenly and worrying it, like a terrier seizing a rat. He wore a grimy purple sweater under a torn tan jacket enough sizes too small to look like something an organgrinder’s monkey might wear, one pocket torn nearly off and both elbows worn through. Thrift-store jeans and a ratty pair of sneakers he’d once found in a garbage can behind the YMCA completed his wardrobe. No underwear. A crucifix gleamed around his neck, stainless steel coated to look like silver. Track marks, fading now, ran down both his arms, across his stomach, down his thighs, but he’d been off the junk for months; he was down to an occasional Red Devil, supplemented by the nightly quart of cheap chianti he consumed as he lay in the dark on his bare mattress at the “Lordhouse,” a third-floor loft in a converted industrial warehouse squeezed between a package store and a Rite-Aid.