Jonathan Foer - Here I Am

What was he left with? The knowledge that Germans were— are —evil, evil, evil, not only capable of ripping children from their mothers and then ripping their small bodies apart, but eager to; that had non-Germans not intervened, the Germans would have murdered every single Jewish man, woman, and child on the planet; and that of course his grandfather was absolutely right, even if he sounded insane, when he said a Jewish person should never buy a German product of any kind or size, never put money into a German pocket, never visit Germany, never not cringe at the sound of that vile language of savages, never have any more interaction than what simply could not be avoided with any German of any age. Inscribe that on the doorpost of your house and on your gate.

Or he was left with the knowledge that everything that has happened once can happen again, is likely to happen again, must happen again, will .

Or the knowledge that his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths.

Or no knowledge, but a feeling. What feeling? What was that feeling?

Sam didn’t mention to his parents what he’d seen. Didn’t seek explanation, or comfort. And he was given plenty of guidance — almost all of it unintentional and extremely subtle — never to ask about it, never even to acknowledge it. So it was never mentioned, always never talked about, the perpetual topic of nonconversation. Everywhere you looked, there it wasn’t.

His dad was obsessed with displays of optimism, and the imagined accumulation of property, and joke-making; his mom, with physical contact before saying goodbye, and fish oil, and outer garments, and “the right thing to do”; Max, with extreme empathy and self-imposed alienation; Benjy, with metaphysics and basic safety. And he, Sam, was always longing. What was that feeling? It had something to do with loneliness (his own and others’), something with suffering (his own and others’), something with shame (his own and others’), something with fear (his own and others’). But also something with stubborn belief, and stubborn dignity, and stubborn joy. And yet it wasn’t really any of those things, or the sum of them. It was the feeling of being Jewish. But what was that feeling?

Israel continued to describe the situation as manageable, but it also continued to close off its airspace, which left tens of thousands of Israelis stranded on vacation and prevented Jews who wanted to help from coming. Tamir tried hitching a ride on a Red Cross cargo plane, tried getting special clearance through the military attaché at the embassy, looked into chaperoning a shipment of construction equipment. But there was no way home. He might have been the only person grateful to be at the funeral — it gave him a few hours to rest in peace.

Sam wore his ill-fitting bar mitzvah suit to the cemetery. Wearing it was the only thing he hated more than the process of getting it: the torture chamber of mirrors, his mother’s unhelpful help, the functionally pedophiliac survivor tailor who not once, not twice, but three times groped at Sam’s crotch with his Parkinsonian fingers and said, “Plenty of room.”

Tamir and Barak wore slacks with short-sleeve button-up shirts — their uniform for every occasion, whether it was going to synagogue, the grocery store, a Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball game, or the funeral of the family patriarch. They viewed any kind of formality — in dress, in speech, in affect — as some kind of gross infringement on a God-given right to at all times be oneself. Jacob found it obnoxious, and enviable.

Jacob wore a black suit with a box of Altoids in the pocket: artifacts of a time when he cared enough about how his breath smelled to attempt to echo it off his palm for sniffs.

Julia wore a vintage A.P.C. dress she’d found on Etsy for the equivalent of nothing. It wasn’t exactly funeral attire, but she never had occasion to wear it, and she wanted to wear it, and since the neutering of the bar mitzvah, a funeral was as glamorous an occasion as she was going to get.

“You look beautiful, Julia,” she said to Jacob, hating herself for saying it.

“Very beautiful,” Jacob said, hating her for saying it, but also surprised that his assessment of her beauty continued to matter to her.

“The impact is lessened by it having been prompted.”

“It’s a funeral, Julia. And thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saying I look handsome.”

Irv wore the same suit he’d been wearing since the Six-Day War.

Isaac wore the shroud in which he had been married, the shroud he’d worn once a year on the Day of Atonement, the chest of which he’d beaten with his fist: For the sin which we have committed before You with an utterance on the lips … For the sin which we have committed before You openly or secretly … For the sin which we have committed before You by a confused heart … The shroud had no pockets, as the dead are required to be buried without any encumbrances.

A small — in number and physical stature — army from Adas Israel had passed through the grief like a breeze: they brought stools, covered the mirrors, took care of the platters, and sent Jacob an un-itemized bill that he was unable to question without requiring Jewish seppuku. There would be a small service, followed by burial at Judean Gardens, followed by a small kiddush at Irv and Deborah’s, followed by eternity.

* * *

All the local cousins were at the funeral, and a few older, zanier Jews came in from New York, Philly, and Chicago. Jacob had met these people throughout his life, but only at rites of passage — bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals. He didn’t know their names, but their faces evoked a kind of Pavlovian existentialism: if you’re here, if I see you, something significant must be happening.

Rabbi Auerbach, who’d known Isaac for several decades, had a stroke a month earlier and so left the officiating to his replacement: a young, disheveled, smart, or maybe dumb recent product of wherever rabbis are made. He wore unlaced sneakers, which felt, to Jacob, like a shabby tribute to someone who had probably eaten sneakers in the skyless forests of Poland. Then again, it might have been some kind of religious display of reverence, like sitting on stools or covering mirrors.

He approached Jacob and Irv before the service began.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, cupping his hands in front of him, as if they contained empathy, or wisdom, or emptiness.

“Yeah,” Irv said.

“There are a few ritualistic—”

“Save your words. We’re not a religious family.”

“It probably depends on what is meant by religious ,” the rabbi said.

“It probably doesn’t,” Jacob corrected him, either in his dad’s defense or in the absence of God’s.

“And our stance is a choice,” Irv said. “Not laziness, not assimilation, not inertia.”

“I respect that,” the rabbi said.

“We’re as good as any Jews.”

“I’m sure you’re better than most.”

Irv went right back at the rabbi: “What you do or don’t respect isn’t of great importance to me.”

“I respect that, too,” the rabbi said. “You’re a man of strongly held beliefs.”

Irv turned to Jacob: “This guy really can’t take an insult.”

“Come on,” Jacob said. “It’s time.”

The rabbi walked the two of them through a few of the small rituals that, while entirely voluntary, they would be expected to perform in order to ensure Isaac’s proper passage into whatever Jews believe in. After his initial reluctance, Irv seemed not only willing, but wanting, to cross his chets and dot his zayins — as if stating his resistance was resistance enough. He didn’t believe in God. He couldn’t, even if opening himself to that foolishness might have opened him to badly needed comfort. There had been a few moments — not of belief, but religiosity — every one of them involving Jacob. When Deborah went into labor, Irv prayed to no one that she and the baby would be safe. When Jacob was born, he prayed to no one that his son long outlive him, and acquire more knowledge and self-knowledge than him, and experience greater happiness. At Jacob’s bar mitzvah, Irv stood at the ark and said a prayer of gratitude to no one that trembled, then broke, then exploded into something so beautifully unrestrained and full-throated that he was left with no voice to deliver his speech at the party. When he and Deborah didn’t read the books they were staring at in the waiting room of George Washington Hospital, and Jacob almost pushed the doors off the hinges, his face covered in tears, his scrubs covered in blood, and did his best to form the words “You have a grandson,” Irv closed his eyes, but not to darkness, and said a prayer to no one without any content, only force. The sum of those no ones was the King of the Universe. He’d spent enough of his life wrestling foolishness. Now, at the cemetery, all the wrestling felt foolish.