Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

“You’re finished?” Jacob asked.

“With what?”

“If I can host you back on the Blue Planet for just a second, I was thinking we should take Tamir around to see Isaac on the way back.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s obviously depressed about the move and—”

“If he were capable of depression, he would have killed himself seventy years ago.”

“Fucking shitcock!” Max said, shaking his iPad like an Etch A Sketch.

“He’s not depressed ,” Irv said. “He’s old . Age presents like depression, but isn’t.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, “I forgot: no one is depressed.”

“No, I’m sorry, I forgot: everyone is depressed.”

“I assume that’s a dig at my therapy?”

“What belt are you up to, anyway? Brown? Black? And you win when it’s around your neck?”

Jacob was weighing whether to give it back or let it go. Dr. Silvers would call that binary thinking, but Dr. Silvers’s reliance on the binary critique was, itself, binary. And this was too demanding a morning to become nuanced with his anvil of a father. So, as always, he let it go. Or rather, he absorbed it.

“It’s a tough change for him,” Jacob said. “It’s ultimate. I’m just saying we should be sensitive—”

“He’s a human callus.”

“He’s an internal bleeder.”

Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”

But instead of driving, Irv turned to press the point from which he’d strayed: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued: “Europe … now, there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance.”

“What are you talking about? Remember what the French prime minister said after the attack on the kosher market? ‘Every Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone.’ Or something like that.”

“Bull- merde . You know he had a bottle of Château Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France’s missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I’m an asshole , asshole! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they’ll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide we’re noisy, and smelly, and pushy, and way too smart for anybody else’s good?”

“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on something.

“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, “you know why paleontologists look for bones and not anti-Semitism?”

“Because they’re paleontologists and not the ADL?” Jacob suggested.

“Because they like to dig. Get it?”

“No.”

“Even if everything you say is true,” Jacob said, “which it isn’t —”

“Resolutely is.”

“It isn’t— ”

“Is.”

“But even if it were —”

“The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that’s like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos. The world hates pandas. Wants them dead. Even the cubs. And the world hates Jews. Always has. Always will. Yeah, there are more polite words to use, and political contexts to cite, but the hatred is always hatred and always because we’re Jewish.”

“I like pandas,” Max chimed in.

“You don’t,” Irv corrected.

“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”

“It would eat your face, Maxy.”

“Awesome.”

“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.

“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win by a hair a war for our survival and are a permanent pariah state. Why? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself: Why? ”

His why wasn’t a question, not even a rhetorical one. It was a shove. A stiff arm in a time of forced hands. Everything had an aspect of coercion. Isaac didn’t want to move; they were forcing him to. The singular sense in which Sam wanted to become a man was sexual relations with a person who wasn’t himself, but they were forcing him to apologize for words he said he didn’t write, so that he could be forced to chant memorized words of unknown meaning before family he didn’t believe in, and friends he didn’t believe in, and God. Julia was being forced to shift her focus from ambitious buildings that would never be built to the bathroom and kitchen renovations of disappointed people with resources. And the phone incident was forcing an examination that the marriage might not survive — their relationship, like all relationships, dependent on willful blindness and forgetting. Even Irv’s descent into bigotry was guided by an invisible hand.

Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself. Nobody wants to be a Jewish man, or a dying man.

Jacob didn’t want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? Allow Sam to snip a ritualistic thread that reached back to kings and prophets, simply because Judaism as they practiced it was boring as hell and overflowed with hypocrisy? Maybe. In the rabbi’s office he’d felt ready to use the scissors.

Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel — the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping. Perhaps that would be a way to do it without doing it. Sam objected on the grounds of it being a terrible idea.

“Terrible why?” Jacob asked, knowing full well why.

“You really don’t see the irony?” Sam said. Jacob saw many ironies, and was curious to hear which one Sam was thinking of. “Israel was created as a place for Jews to escape persecution. We would be going to escape Judaism.” Nicely put.

So the bar mitzvah would be at the synagogue they paid twenty-five hundred dollars per visit to be members of, and officiated by the hip young rabbi who wasn’t, by any reasonable definition, hip, young, or a rabbi. The party would be at the Hilton where Reagan was this close to being put out of our misery, and where Julia and Sam were representing Micronesia. The band would be capable of playing both a good horah and good rock. Of course, such a band has never existed in the history of live music, but Jacob knew that at a certain point you just crunch the capsule you’ve been hiding in your cheek and hope not to feel too much. The theme — handled with delicacy and taste — would be Sam’s Family’s Diaspora. (This was Julia’s idea, and insofar as a bar mitzvah theme could ever be a good idea, it was sufficiently OK.) They would have tables representing each of the countries the family had been dispersed to — America, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada — and instead of seating cards, each guest would receive a “passport” to one of the nations. The tables would be designed to reflect regional culture and landmarks — this is where delicacy and taste were most severely challenged — and the centerpieces would include a family tree, and photographs of relatives currently living in those places. The buffet would feature stations of regionally specific foods: Brazilian feijoada, Spanish tapas, Israeli falafel, whatever they eat in Canada, and so on. The party favors would be snow globes of the various locales. There are more wars than snowfalls in Israel, but the Chinese are smart enough to know that Americans are dumb enough to buy anything. Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.