Joshua Cohen - Witz

And their kinder, O their kinder the males of them, at least, how they trop their lessons home with them from cheder, from yeshiva, nusach for the nest, these boychicks smart and quick on their flocking ways, feathered in dark blurs of breeches and gartel: such promising issue of their womenfolk, hear yourselves be praised…O their women, these not much more than girls they are, here netted, wigged, and kerchiefed, wrangled into unbecoming floral prints, their enormous encampment tented of many formless, filthy skirts; perpetually knocked up, they’re trudging homeward, too, with new recipes in their heads, for all the new mouths in their stomachs: kinder, babies, new boys and girls of the covenant already, gestating girls pregnant themselves with already pregnant girls who in turn will sustain their pregnant issue unto the infinite eternal, one can only hope: women with pregnant guts, but also with pregnant paps, daughters eligible already secreted within each nippled sac, and suckling from within, waiting only to be born into the Law, into birthing themselves…dark forms rising like steam from the muck of the street, oily, pubic, as if smoke but thicker, a viciously rank viscous glopping, dim how they ooze themselves up from out of the churning melt, the burbling flow of downtrodden ice: they’re people, God they’re people, wiping from their eyes, noses, and mouths, their mouth massed, that metropolitan amnio ick; without umbilicus any of them as they’ve been born anew to nothing…now with two hands around each leg tugging once, twice, to free themselves from the secular mire, then looselimbed and with muddy vacant faces how they stagger themselves on ahead, deadeyed, they grom onward to swarm Him, on the way abducting from the surrounding freeze any icicles at hand, grabbing stones from the gutter, grubbingup left wood from scaffolds abandoned and hunks of asphalt the failure of public works with which to attack Him — a pogrom in progress, gevalt!

Hang down our neck of the shtetl weeping your putz off goddamn that ain’t recht…slumming down here with yr schmutz face and yr schlock grace who the futz u think u is —two menschs hanging on a corner, decently inconspicuous, passable, I’d say: they’re disguised appropriately, in yarmulkes to rekels and fingering a fidget at the hang of their false hair, that’s no crime, but they’re flashing photographs, too, which is lately if not yet verboten then frowned upon in this neighborhood, the side Upper West; our pogromists spit on them on their ways after greater quarry…women throw at them rocks of hardened potatoes from windows smoked open, the balconies of last century’s grand palaces, the highrises, coops and condos of the high sixties we’re talking. It seems to be a searchparty. He’ll take any kind of party today. Headed up by, I know it’s dark out but still it’s Hamm, it has to be, and Gelt with him, wagging his tush, scraping his knees on the blacktop ice; on the pavement overturned, ransacked, hoof and heeltossed, searching now underneath the idling carriages, every species of conveyance, the hitched yellow rides, a hacking flash of moon onduty…every cart made cab waiting to head anywhere with the meter fared out upon the drivers’ fingers, no — then lifts these udders hanging heavy with milk, brushes drecky tails out of the way, what’s he thinking I’d be hiding there, puckered deep in filth?

B bundles into a shadow, a way without lamplight newly signed as Aynredenish Alley, which is the ample, lined with stall fall of 72nd west of Broadway toward the river and waits, gasps, hands under His armpits to keep warmth in the freeze up from the Hudson’s slice; a woman approaches Him huddled against a mound of piled trash, panting a bubble to pop from His stubwound mouth as glass shatters crystalline and cool in the distance, too near…a plump girl too antshuldikt mir fat and old for the slight skirt and horsey haltertop she’s working in, propositioning Him with too much eyeliner, too, and tears, a psht she asks for tzedakah; you’re on the make, I’ll hide you, she’s saying, all I’m asking is a zuz or two for my trouble.

B ignores her, she snarls, and then He shoos her, not trusting ever and so she spits on Him, asks are you who I think you are, answers herself, you can’t be…He thinks that’s what though He can’t understand her, and so she reverts, we’re translating along the lines of, where’s His rachmones, and your yarmulke, you Unaffiliated schlump, why aren’t you indoors, spits again, don’t make me report you — better make yourself scarce…

It’s My Birthday, is what I chalk on my board then hand it to her and refusing, again she spits on my shoes, by what calendar, she wants to know, then wipes her mouth with my mother’s low hem…you believe the nerve of such people, this chutzpah I can’t quite pronounce? me standing alone and unwanted for life in this street newly named amid bags and crates of grandopening trash, bannered and bunted homilies of yesterday’s business become scraps to be thrown to the, not even the dogs anymore but their old owners, the people…Amsterdam’s strays ranging west from the Park and nearing, coming closer with prey’s every scent that makes it in on the wind, their ravenous howls only an appeasement of memory, hollow prayers, appetite’s psalms. As the mob passes Him by up Broadway, other young menschs flood in on Him with consummating fires burning in their eyes, new baums and bergs, fresh steins and sterns, not intent on a ravage of a physical nature but on a savagery subtler, namely conversion, which is worse as it’s mental and emotional and physical, too, generational, perpetrated not only on you but on your kinder to come, each to hand Him bound sheaves of mimeographed brochures, and more leaflets, fliers, pamphlets, Redemption for Dummies one’s called, Abridged Kashrut another, a sheet outlining the laws pertaining to pamphletmaking, to flieruse and marital duties, what so and so has had to say about ziz or zat regarding and what, I’m supposed to do what with them, besides take them cordially, accept their enthusiasm, fervor it’s wasteful, then stuff their words into my shoes to speak their succor to the hurt of my feet, suck a wart. They leave Him with handshakes and a complimentary yarmulke emblazoned with the info for a shtiblach He’s apparently promised to attend if not this Shabbos then the next (and, they’re almost forgetting themselves, have you lain yet today, tallis, tefillin), also with late warnings against a mob reportedly in the area, and after any Unaffiliated — grumbling, unhappy with any unapproved incursions into their territory the upper west-most, it’s all ours down to Riverside Drive. We’re peaceful around here, we don’t take kindly to how they do it Downtown.

B follows them out, dispersing north then east toward the University’s gates on a mission on paper for their next personed, impressionable save. As for Broadway again, it’s denatured, silently without search, disappeared. All too easy and suspect; He’s expecting an ambush, an Amalek lying in wait, what schlock tactics even a kock could imagine. And so He makes to bringup the rear of their converting pogrom, more evangelically pleasant, less baseballbats and kitchendrawers’ knives: B crossing cautiously to stand in street’s middle, atop the trafficisland by the old IRT subway entrance turned almshouse seething with those without house or home, but with God — mouth agape, receiving the snow on His stump as if manna.

As for the world, it feels as if it’s caving…what with His weight and that of His burden carrying it further, we’re talking Biblical strata, the depths of wells, graveward regression, this reversion of earth, down to the floor of the past, the ocean unswept by the breath: the roofs seem to be raised up to the heights, as if tugged to an invisible, inexistent rainbow by ravens, a few of them on each roof they’re clutching with claws, straining their wings to scar an incision on the face of the sky; higher, luxury apartment buildings turned to underheated tenements…boarderbordered, coldwatered, commonly lived, dumbwaitered, dumbbells uplifted, they inherit more and more floors, and grayer, floors already filled with people already observing, preparing, they’re always preparing for what — to prepare; gray candles newly lit in sills newly filthy, eight families ingathered from Siburbia too north to be the Bronx and with all their extensions to inlaws and who knows who else crammed into the cramp of a single apartment, one room, what is this insanity, is this how they prefer it, why not…newly hewn tenement rooms with a view (a word that’s been assimilated from the most assimilated of tongues, from Latin’s Tenare, to hold —which is to keepsafe…the within from the without, and, too, the without from the within, as we’re told; to erect: a fence around the Law, and an eruv around Upper Manhattan), to another world, a terra old but never forgotten, ancient, and yet perpetually reborn if in the process idealized, evoked, worked up from photographs, documentaries, unfaded, defaded, testimonies censured then banned only as they might expose the falsity of this, their next incarnation: as if the rituals have been encoded deep in their souls, in the muscles, glands, and organs once dormant now flexing and pumping awake; tables groan under the weight of baked braided breads, massively musty volumes are stacked thereupon, what’s the meaning of this, what son might you be, go ask the rabbi if that’ll make you happy, gesund.