Zachary Lazar - I Pity the Poor Immigrant

“I heard about it. I saw something on TV.”

“It’s good to enjoy yourself. To go out to dinner, see a game. I always encouraged you to have a good time, to have friends. I wanted you to have a good life, I’ve always wanted that more than anything else. But I can’t keep taking care of you like this. You’re too old for it.”

“Dad.”

“I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do. I can’t give you fifteen hundred. I don’t have it.”

“But I need it.”

“I know you need it. I know that, Buddy.”

HOME

The valet watched while Booker rolled him under the archway to the opened passenger door of Booker’s uncle’s car, the big sedan still running, the air-conditioning on high. When the chair came close enough, Buddy leaned his weight toward the opening and Booker wrestled first a leg, then a buttock, then the other leg, then Buddy’s trunk onto the seat, Buddy grunting, limp, the slick blazer tangled around his midsection. It was like the thorax of an overturned beetle, he thought, and he was starting to laugh when Booker closed the door. But the look Booker gave him through the window came not just from his eyes but from his whole body, lank beneath an unbuttoned shirt with a broad collar. It was a gaze of wholly uninterested, damp-eyed boredom.

UNVEILING

The last occasion on which any number of the Lansky family gathered together in relative harmony was in 1985, for the unveiling of the gravestone of the first Mrs. Meyer Lansky. Somehow Anne… had survived to the age of seventy-four, alone in her West End Avenue apartment with her fur coats, dead birds, and cockroaches. The furs holed and shabby, her hair straggling and unkempt, Anne Lansky had so lost contact with the world that she would leave the door of her efficiency unlocked, to be raided and vandalized by the drug addicts of the seedy neighborhood in which she spent her declining years.

— Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and

the Gangster Life

ERETZ YISRAEL

Teddy brought him an early dinner that he ate alone on a card table in his study, the blinds drawn, no light but the light of the TV. His breath was short, and after the visit with Buddy he needed to be alone before bed. Eggs, toast, the baseball game a tiring blur. Buddy with maybe a year with some motion in his fingers. Probably less. It was of course a judgment on himself. There was no other way to see it, even if you didn’t believe in those things, even if you weren’t a religious person.

In Tel Aviv, on Hanukkah, the children and their parents would parade at night with candles and flashlights, a blueness in the dark. There would be a smell of cooking oil, the frying of jelly-filled doughnuts, sufganiyot, people out walking, joking, singing, coarse, without self-consciousness. They were a people with their own food, their own dances, their own music, their own language, a people like any other people, at ease in their home. You didn’t realize how deformed you were until you saw all that and failed to become a part of it.

Prime Minister

Menachem Begin

Jerusalem, Israel.

Dear Sir:

I won’t go into too many overtures and will state my case as briefly as possible.

Mr. Begin, I have a very keen desire to live in Israel, but unfortunately I am verboten. To begin with, when I spent time in Israel, I fell more in love with the country than I was before. My one wish is to be able to spend the rest of my life — which, I presume, can’t be too long, as I am 75 yrs. old….

The carbon copies, the folded correspondence, hopes entertained, poorly articulated, doomed.

… how much harm can an elderly, sick man do to Israel…. I can enter, as I have, any other country without criticism, except the place of my heritage….

If they could see him in the apartment in Miami Beach — Teddy’s bed, his bed, the matching nightstands, the wax fruit, the kitchenette. A building of old Jews, waiting with the blinds drawn. After two months of silence, the ministry had responded with another form letter telling him no. He understood by then how much they needed him to be their monster, how secure it made them feel in their righteousness.

I can give you eight hundred a month, that’s what I can do.

ANNE

She came to him in a dream as he was sleeping. She perched on his bed and reached down and felt the side of his hip, the angle of the bone, the lip of fat where his waist met his belly. He knew who it was from the smell of her hair, rich with oil, an almost burnt smell. She lay on top of him in her homemade dress, lips pressed shut, breath coming in stabs through her nose.

ANCIENT OF DAYS

The first pass was with torches, the light rising purplish over the red clay ground, cook fires smoldering from the night before. The Israelites came on stolen horses, riding low and at a rearward slouch, braying and screaming, coming out of the hills with the flames in their wide-spread hands. The Philistine camp was tents and houses more like stables, made of stone and mud, crooked tree limbs holding up the thatched roofs. They used dry thatch screens to block the desert sunlight, and all you had to do was brush them once and the structure collapsed in flames.

The shrieking of women, children, goats, mules. The Philistines begging on their knees. The boys rode through them, trampling and then encircling the ruins so no one escaped. Some dismounted their horses and set about hacking at the villagers with their swords. Those still mounted rounded them up and then the boys on foot slashed backhanded, like harvesters, while the horses reared before them. The farm animals brayed behind the wattle and sticks of their corral. The sun burned more brightly. You could see the pale yellow grass growing up over the red clay. One of the boys could not stop hacking at the head of a corpse, the cheekbone shattered, dark blood running from the nose and eyes. He attacked it with a personal rage until someone finally pulled him away.

PSALM

David saw the green hillside, the distant sheep, the clouds low in the sky casting their giant, slow-moving shadows.

The Lord is my shepherd,

I shall not be in want

He makes me lie down in green pastures,

He leads me beside quiet waters,

He restores my soul.

He guides me in paths of righteousness

For His name’s sake.

Even though I walk

Through the valley of the shadow of death

I will fear no evil,

For You are with me;

Your rod and your staff,

They comfort me.

You prepare a table for me

In the presence of my enemies.

You anoint my head with oil;

My cup overflows.

Surely goodness and love will follow me

All the days of my life,

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord

Forever.

WISDOM

It’s 2005—a temporary cease-fire — the Intifada going into its fifth year. We meet at my ex-wife’s house in Jerusalem, lantana growing around the iron gates that lead inside. There is chicken shawarma , my son Eliav’s childhood favorite, but he doesn’t eat much. He’s clean and cleanly shaven, and dressed in new jeans and a T-shirt and a gray linen sport coat that is unstructured, as if made of paper. His close-cropped hair gives him a look of intelligent severity. He says it’s over for real this time, though as we know now it never really ends. Hamas will launch rockets out of Gaza. Soon, there will be another suicide bomber in Netanya. Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. We already know the cease-fire will not last long.