Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

The second time I raised my voice at a human was also at Julia, many years later. I found it so much easier to give what wasn’t asked for or owed. Maybe I learned that from Argus — the only way to get him to drop a fetched ball was to appear indifferent. Maybe Argus learned that from me. Once Julia and I were living separate lives, it was not only possible to push my inner life through our still-shared conduit, I longed to. Because she appeared indifferent to it— appeared , or was .

Julia and I hadn’t spoken in a long time, but she was the person I wanted to talk to. I called, she answered, we shared, just like old times weren’t. I said, “I guess I wanted proof.” She said, “I’m the gentle soul you called, remember?” I said, “Remember how they say the world is uniquely open?” She asked, “What happened to you?” She wasn’t accusing or challenging me. She said it with the indifference necessary for me to give everything.

I’ve raised my voice at a human only twice in my entire life. Both times at the same human. Put differently: I’ve known only one human in my life. Put differently: I’ve allowed only one human to know me.

In a sadness beyond anger, pain, and fear, I screamed at Julia: “Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!”

HOW TO PLAY THE DEATH OF LANGUAGE

In the synagogue of my youth — which I left when I went to college and rejoined when Julia became pregnant with Sam — there was a memorial wall with tiny bulbs lit next to the names of those who had died in the given week of the year. As a boy, I rearranged the plastic letters that formed the names into whatever words I could. My father used to tell me that there were no bad words, only bad usage. And then, when I became a father, I told my boys the same thing.

There were more than fourteen hundred congregants of fighting age. Of the sixty-two who went to fight in Israel, twenty-four died. Two ten-watt, candelabra-base, flame-tip bulbs for each name. Only 480 watts of light. Fewer than in my living room chandelier. No one touched those names. But one day they will be rearranged into words. Or so is the hope.

It feels like it’s been centuries since I wandered that building. But I can remember the smells: the siddurim like withered flowers, the must of the basket of yarmulkes, the new-car smell of the ark. And I can remember the surfaces: where the broad strips of linen wallpaper met; the Braille-like plaques affixed to the armrests of every velvet chair, immortalizing the largesse of someone unlikely ever to sit there; the cold steel banister of the plush-carpeted stairs. I can remember the heat of those bulbs, and the roughness of the letters. As I sit at a desk filled with thousands of pages, continuing to comment on the commentary, I wonder how one should judge the usage of words made from the dead. And the living. From everyone living and dead.

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

There were several hundred men in the waiting area. Several hundred Jewish men. We were circumcised men, men who shared Jewish genetic markers, men who hummed the same ancient melodies. How many times, as a child, was I told that it didn’t matter whether or not I thought of myself as Jewish, the Germans thought of me as a Jew? In the holding area of that airport, perhaps for the first time in my life, I stopped wondering if I felt Jewish. Not because I had an answer, but because the question stopped mattering.

I saw a few people I knew: old friends, familiar faces from the synagogue, some public figures. I didn’t see Gabe Perelman or Larry Moverman, but Glenn Mechling was there. We nodded at each other across the enormous room. There was little interacting. Some sat in silence, or talked on their cell phones — presumably to their families. There were outbursts of singing: “Yerushalayim Shel Zachav” … “Hatikva” … It was emotional, but what was the it ? The camaraderie? The most extreme version of the recognition I felt with the deaf father at the convention? The shared devotion? The sudden awareness of history, how small and big it is, how impotent and omnipotent an individual is inside it? The fear?

I had written books and screenplays my entire adult life, but it was the first time I’d felt like a character inside one — that the scale of my tchotchke existence, the drama of living, finally befitted the privilege of being alive.

No, it was the second time. The first time was in the lion’s den.

Tamir was right: my problems were small. I’d spent so much of my finite time on earth thinking small thoughts, feeling small feelings, walking under doors into unoccupied rooms. How many hours did I spend online, rewatching inane videos, scrutinizing listings for houses I would never buy, clicking over to check for hasty e-mails from people I didn’t care about? How much of myself, how many words, feelings, and actions, had I forcefully contained? I’d angled myself away from myself, by a fraction of a degree, but after so many years, finding my way back to myself required a plane.

They were singing, and I knew the song, but not how to join them.

HOW TO PLAY THE ITCH OF HOPE

I always believed that all it would take to completely change my life would be a complete change of personhood.

HOW TO PLAY HOME

The completion of Tales from the Odyssey left Max bereft.

“Why?” he asked, spinning to face his pillow. “Why did it have to end?”

I rubbed his back, told him, “But you wouldn’t want Odysseus wandering forever, would you?”

“Well, then why did he have to leave home at all?”

The next morning, I took him to the farmer’s market with the hope of finding some consolation in baked goods. Every other Sunday, a mobile pet rescue stationed itself by the main entrance, and we’d often stop and admire the animals. Max was drawn that morning to a golden retriever named Stan. We’d never spoken about getting a dog, and I certainly hadn’t intended to get a dog, and I don’t even know if he wanted that particular dog, but I told him, “If you would like to take Stan home, we can.”

Everyone but me bounded into the house. Julia was furious, but didn’t show it until we were alone at the top of the stairs. She said, “ Again , you’ve put me in the position of either having to go along with a bad idea or be the bad guy.”

Downstairs, the boys were calling: “Stan! Here, Stan! Come on, now!”

I had asked the woman running the pet rescue how he got the name Stan — it struck me as an odd choice for a dog. She said the dogs were given retired names of Atlantic storms. With so many dogs moving through the facility, it made things easy simply to use a list.

“Sorry, a retired name of what?”

“You know how storms get names? There’s something like a hundred that are cycled through. But if a storm is especially costly or deadly, they retire the name — to be sensitive. There will never be another Sandy.”

Just as there will never be another Isaac.

We don’t know the name of my grandfather’s grandfather.

When my grandfather came to America, he changed his name from Blumenberg to Bloch.

My father was the first person in our family to have an “English name” and a “Hebrew name.”

When I became a writer, I experimented with different versions of my name: various uses of initials, the insertion of my middle name, pseudonyms.

The farther we got from Europe, the more identities we had to choose between.

“No One tried to kill me! No One blinded me!”

It was Max’s idea to rename Stan. I said it might confuse him. Max said, “But we need to make him ours.”

HOW TO PLAY NO ONE

We were given some simple forms to fill out, and an announcement was made that we were to pass, single file, in front of a middle-aged man in a white lab coat. He gave each person a quick visual inspection and pointed toward one of about a dozen long lines, which began to roughly correspond to age. The resonance with the selections upon entering the concentration camps was so explicit and undeniable, it was hard to imagine it wasn’t intentional.