James Frey - The Final Testament of the Holy Bible

When I walked into the church, Jacob was waiting for me. He asked me why I was late and I said I was out spreading the word of God to sinners and trying to lead them to salvation. He asked how much I had taken in in donations, and I told him I didn’t get anything today. He stared at me for a long time and I got scared. He grabbed my arm and dragged me into the back of the church. I told him he was hurting me and he ignored me and kept pulling me. It hurt my arm and I was scared and I knew that he knew I was lying. He took me into his office and let go of my arm and pushed me into a chair and stared at me again and I was so scared and he looked so angry and he spoke to me.

Where were you?

I was out trying to get donations.

He slapped me.

Where were you?

I started crying.

I was out.

He yelled.

Where?

I was crying, and he yelled again.

Where?

In Manhattan.

Why?

I was so scared. I tried to wipe my face, and Jacob slapped me again.

WHY WERE YOU THERE?

And he slapped me again.

WHAT WERE YOU DOING?

And again. And again. And again.

And then he stopped and I was staring at the floor and I was crying and he grabbed my face and forced me to look at him and he was shaking he was so mad and he said it again.

Why were you there, and what were you doing?

And I didn’t want to say anything, because I was scared and I didn’t know what he would do when I told him, but I was more scared about what he would do if I didn’t.

I found Ben Zion.

I started crying again.

I found Ben Zion.

My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people’s lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough. They keep me going, the same way a glass of water, or an idea of a glass of water, might keep me going in marching across the desert, except that the desert never ends, it’s many million miles long, and it never will end.

I was born in Israel. My parents had both survived in the Holocaust of the Nazis, being in camps in Poland. My father was a Polish and went in Stutthof, and ended in Treblinka, and my mother, who was a Slovak, was first in Theresienstadt, and later in Birkenau. They met in Tel Aviv in 1949 and married almost immediately. At the time Jews of their ages were being encouraged to be married and starting families in order to further populate Israel. They didn’t love each other truly, but on some level they understood each of the other, understood in ways that other peoples couldn’t. Both of their families had been put to death by the Nazis during the war. Their entire families, parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, had all been murdered in the death camps. That was the basis for their marriage. Their feelings of the extermination of their families.

I lived in Israel until I was twelve years. We had moved to a small settlement near what today is being called Gush Katif, on the southern part of the Gaza Strip. It was attacked by the mujahedeen of Egypt and my parents were both killed. I was in the school when it was happening and found them on the floor of our kitchen with their throats gashed open. Their closest friends had left Israel for living in New York a year before and took me into their home. They were childless and happy to have me with them, and like my parents, they were both survivors. Also like my parents, their marriage was without love and strained, the main common element of them being they had both been in the camps. Also like my parents, they had survived but didn’t live through what had happened to them. They breathed and ate and spoke and went about their lives, but they didn’t live, didn’t truly be alive, because they couldn’t after what they had seen and experienced. Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

They did the best they could with me and I accepted them as being my parents. Like my birth parents, they were being very protective of me, did not trust non-Jews, and were fearful of all the world outside our neighborhood, which was entirely Jews. My adopted father worked as cook in a kosher restaurant, and my mother worked being a laundress. We went to synagogue every week, observed the Sabbath, ate kosher, and had a Shabbat dinner every Friday in the evening. We were happy, or as happy as we could be given the course our lives had all been taken, and we did not wish for anything more than what we had. In that way we were gifted. For if one knows nothing about what may be possible in the world, one will not yearn for it or be missing it.

When I finished yeshiva, I went to work with my stepmother being a laundress. I had hoped to be going to college and maybe becoming a doctor or a teacher, but we did not have the money for me doing that. When I was twenty, I started thinking about marriage and hoping for love. I got one of those when I met Isaac, who was to become my husband. He was working being a kosher butcher, and his family was said to be Davidic and had been in America since the early 1900s and owned their own family butcher shop. We met because the restaurant where my stepfather worked bought their meats from them and Isaac often was delivering it. My stepfather invited him to our home for Shabbat dinner and he came with his parents and we were sitting at the table across from each other. He was very handsome and very shy, with nice green eyes and blond hair, which are rarer among us, and I was very shy too. That first meeting we were hardly speaking and spending most of our time glancing at each other and hoping the other wouldn’t notice even though we did. That night when I went to bed I knew he would be my husband. For my stepfather it was a good marriage and would improve his standing at the restaurant, and for Isaac it would be prestigious to marry an Israeli-born daughter of survivors because there were very few of us then. I believed we would love each other.

Our wedding was a simple and beautiful one and our wedding night was more complicated for us. Neither had ever in our lives been alone with a member of the opposite sex before and we were both scared and being nervous. I was very excited and waited for Isaac but he wasn’t being ready and later he cried. We were both knowing we wanted children and it was expected for us. For six months Isaac was trying and not being comfortable about it and he was being more and more upset. One night he had too much to drink and we became truly man and wife and he cried again because of being happy. That night we were both very happy.

We tried for two years for me to be pregnant. Most of the time Isaac would be drinking but sometimes he would not be. We prayed and lived strictly according to our Jewish laws. When I became pregnant we were overjoyed, and our families too. We were finished choosing names for a boy or for a girl when I started bleeding. A few days later we put the names written on a piece of paper and we burned them and we never spoke of them again. For the worst things of our lives, it is sometimes the best way, to never speak of them again.

It happened three more times in our next four years, with two of the babies going to the full terms. We stopped trying to choose names or even being thinking of names, always feeling we should only give names to the living. In our seventh year of marriage I was pregnant again and it stayed and our son Jacob was born healthy and right. We thought he was a miracle baby, and he was looking just like his father, and we didn’t think we were going to be having any more children. Our families were tremendously pleased and we had two years of happiness, watching Jacob grow and learn, every day becoming more like his father. We never hoped for more childrens and we stopped trying to do it. One night we go to a wedding and Isaac has too much to drink and I have a little as well. The next morning we don’t remember everything of the night before but I know I am pregnant and I know it will be okay and I know the baby will be a boy and I know this with all of my heart without any doubts at all, the same as I know I am alive and I breathe and that God, in any of God’s forms, is all-powerful and all-knowing. There are no doubts in my heart.