Daniel Torday - The Last Flight of Poxl West

I’d stayed on at my synagogue, Beth-El, to be confirmed in the years after my Bar Mitzvah. On Monday nights, I’d head out Route 9 to a Hebrew class Rabbi Ben offered for the handful of us who’d stuck with it. His class was relaxed, more catching up on our social lives and our spiritual lives than arduous Hebrew study. When I arrived one night soon after Poxl’s reading, Rabbi Ben interrogated me about him.

“So your uncle’s book got published,” Rabbi Ben said.

I’d just pulled up one of those desks that was attached to a plastic chair. Our classroom was in the basement of the shul. The heat of the building’s massive boiler pushed in on us. The room smelled of must, and of Ben’s patchouli oil.

“Way more than just published,” I said. “It got a glowing review in the Times this week. It made the bestseller list. It’s a great book. The Globe said it’s destined to be a classic.”

“Maybe you could get him to come talk to our class,” he said. “Like, in between our Hebrew lessons we could talk to him about writing, about making images and stuff. Oh, or man, we could get him to come along with a songwriter and a poet or something, and have them talk about craft.” Rabbi Ben was always trying to catch our ears by talking to us about what he thought we wanted to hear — it was all poets, and song lyrics, and if we’d let him, talk about Kabbalah, the study of Jewish mysticism. We wanted to learn Hebrew and flirt. What made him think we’d care about some esoteric sixteenth-century mystics was beyond me.

“I bet it’s really expensive to get him to give a talk now,” I said. I had no idea if that was true, but it sounded right.

“He’s your uncle, right?” Rachel Rothstein said. I’d had a crush on her since the third grade, and even though we were in school and went to shul together, I don’t think she’d ever acknowledged me before. Even the confidence I’d gained from that summer camp kiss hadn’t helped. My uncle’s memoir was paying off in ways I couldn’t have imagined. “You couldn’t get him to come?”

“I guess I could,” I said. “I mean, he’s not my real uncle.” Rachel Rothstein looked disappointed. I needed her not to be disappointed. “I mean, he’s more like a grandfather to me.”

Rabbi Ben looked at me. The other six kids in the class were looking at me now, too. I only looked back at Rachel Rothstein.

“I guess I could try,” I said. “If he’s in town for some other event or something.”

Everyone seemed happy with that. Even Rachel. We returned to our Hebrew text. The attention withdrew from me, and for the first time since I’d read his book, I was glad we weren’t talking about my uncle Poxl.

Time and again during the weeks that followed the publication of Skylock, my father would come back with a magazine or a newspaper that had reviewed Uncle Poxl’s book. This was more than a decade before the advent of the Internet. The only way to find out what was being said was to seek out those periodicals themselves. There was a cigar shop and newsstand in Jamaica Plain, near my father’s office, that carried every magazine you could think of. On a Saturday afternoon in late April my father told me there was a piece on the book in The Economist. We should go seek it out, he said.

I’d never even heard of The Economist before. Why, I asked, would a magazine about the economy run a story about my artist of an uncle?

“It’s the biggest magazine in England,” my father said. “It’s about everything happening in the world. And it will be a real feather in your uncle’s cap to have been mentioned there. Not just because so many people will read it but also, since he lived in London for so long, because it will be another kind of triumph.”

So that afternoon, one of the few Saturdays in that period my father didn’t have to head into his office to work, we left our house in Needham for the city. As we passed through the back roads of Wellesley, across the road that passed before the reservoir, I looked out my window to see a family of deer shocked by the whir of our Volvo engine, heads up, from their stolid meal. We made the long drive along Route 9 and into Boston. Puddles had begun to collect in the woods alongside that small highway, the last remnants of the snow that had covered the ground winter long. Bare trees popped buds like tiny green lightbulbs all up and down their branches.

This was the first time I’d made that trip on a weekend since my uncle Poxl’s book had come out — after months and years of riding into the city with him for our cultural outings, now I was returning to downtown Boston. Only this time my trip was to see Poxl through the scrim of space and time, through the window the magazine provided into his life. The only times I’d been with Poxl in the past weeks, it felt, was at night, when I was reading his memoir. It was as if the Uncle Poxl I knew now was a teenager, set adrift across the Continent with the onset of war.

We parked. Even though spring was upon us, the damp air brought a biting chill, somehow colder even than the frigid nor’easters we’d just endured. My father popped his coat collar against the cold. We arrived at the newsstand, and there, in the back of the magazine, was a review of Poxl’s memoir, complete with a photograph of his ruddy Ashkenazi face. Under the photographer’s flattering lights the garnet red of my uncle’s face seemed almost to glow, giving off a sense of import and beauty. He wore a Harris tweed jacket and a burgundy tie and looked every bit as hale as he had in the days before his Boston reading — it was as if that dandruffy grad student had never questioned him, as if no one had ever questioned Poxl West once in his whole Nazi-killing, war-enduring life.

The piece was not quite as glowing as the Times review, but it felt as if a consensus was building that Uncle Poxl’s memoir was an important one, no matter its flaws. At times the book wandered, the unnamed reviewer said (I didn’t understand then that all the articles in The Economist were unbylined, and the fact seemed all the more curious in the light of Poxl’s success and in the glow of having seen my own name in print). At many (many!) times it was a bit more sexually graphic than the reviewer might have liked. And while the details were revealing of a certain kind of war experience most readers hadn’t seen before, the reviewer felt its depiction of England was “too broad.” In the final paragraphs he went on to praise Poxl’s writing and to suggest that the book would likely be read in the years to come, but each henpecking at the book’s details ate at me. I could see only the criticisms.

I felt like reaching across the page and punching that unbylined reviewer in his mealy, unbylined mouth. My uncle Poxl’s memoir had hit the bestseller list just weeks after publication, and here was some anonymous reviewer trying to pick at it. I didn’t understand then that the book’s early success was part of what drew it attention, scrutiny.

Now the damp cold cut through my jacket when we exited the cigar shop. My father and I walked back to the car, traversed the city, and as we drove the roads of Jamaica Plain and into downtown Boston we crossed the same streets where my uncle Poxl had once taken me for our weekend outings.

“Wanna head over to Cabot’s for a sundae?” my father said. “I know you and Poxl used to go there after your days together.”

“It’s a little cold out for a sundae, don’t you think?” I blew into my hands.

“Well then, a grilled cheese,” my dad said. “We could get a grilled cheese. Or something.”

But I demurred. My father stood there in his lawyer’s jacket and with his lawyer’s stolid face. Every event that kept me too far from my uncle’s book in those days felt like a burden, a jilting — and after reading that review I just wanted to look at the book again, to remember its heft, its import. The ride back on Route 9 seemed to take twice as long as the ride out. This time no deer appeared beside the road. The trees looked like they’d never again wear leaves. My father and I barely talked.