Philip Roth - The Prague Orgy

“They are strong on nothing,” says Eva. “It is that I am so weak. That I am stupid and cannot defend myself against all of these bullies! I cry, I shake, I cave in. I deserve what they do. In this world, still to carry on about a man! They should have cut my head off. That would have been justice!”

“And now,” says Sisovsky, “she is with another Jew. At her age. Now Eva is ruined completely.”

She erupts in Czech, he replies in English. “On Sunday,” he says to her, “what will you do at home? Have a drink, Eviczka. Have some whiskey. Try to enjoy life.”

Again, in Czech, she pleads with him, or berates him, or berates herself. In English, and again most gently, he says, “I understand. But Zuckerman is interested.”

“I am going!” she tells me — ”I must go!” and rushes from the living room.

“Welt, I stay…’’ he mutters and empties his glass. Before I can get up to show her out, the door to my apartment is opened and slammed shut.

“Since you are curious,” says Sisovsky, while I pour him another drink, “she said that she is going home and I said what will you do at home and she said, ‘I am sick of your mind and I am sick of my body and I am sick to death of these boring stories!’”

“She wants to hear a new story.”

“What she wants is to hear a new man. Today she is angry because she says I bring her here with me only to show her to you. What am I to do — leave her alone in our room to hang herself? On a Sunday? Wherever we go now in New York and there is a man, she accuses me of this. ‘What is the function of this man?’ she says. There are dramatic scenes where she calls me a pimp. I am the pimp because she wants to leave me and is afraid to leave me because in New York she is nobody and alone.”

“And she can’t go back to Prague?”

“It is better for her not to be Eva Kalinova here than not to be Eva Kalinova there. In Prague, Eva would go out of her mind when she saw who they had cast to play Madam Arkadina.”

“But here she’s out of her mind selling dresses.”

“No,” he says. “The problem is not dresses. It’s Sundays. Sunday is not the best day in the émigré’s week.”

“Why did they let the two of you go?”

“The latest thing is to let people go, people who want to leave the country. Those who don’t want to leave, they must keep silent. And those who don’t want to leave, and who don’t wish to keep silent, they finish up in jail.”

“I didn’t realize, Sisovsky, that on top of everything else you were Jewish.”

“I resemble my mother, who was not. My father was the Jew. Not only a Jew, but like you, a Jew writing about Jews; like you, Semite-obsessed all his life. He wrote hundreds of stories about Jews, only he did not publish one. My father was an introverted man. He taught mathematics in the high school in our provincial town. The writing was for himself. Do vou know Yiddish?”

“I am a Jew whose language is English.”

“My father’s stories were in Yiddish. To read the stories, I taught myself Yiddish. I cannot speak. I never had him to speak it to. He died in 1941. Before the Jews began even to be deported. a Nazi came to our house and shot him.”

“Why him?”

“Since Eva is no longer here, I can tell you. it’s another of my boring European stories. One of her favorites. In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night. My father was horribly shy of people, even of his students. But because he believed that my mother and my brother would be protected if he was courteous with the officer, he went whenever he was called. And they were protected. All the Jews in the town were huddled into the Jewish quarter. For the others things got a little worse every day. but not for my family. For more than a year nobody bothered them. My father could no longer teach at the high school, but he was now allowed to go around as a private tutor to earn some money. At night, after our dinner, he would leave the Jewish quarter and go to play chess with the Gestapo officer. Well, stationed in the town there was another Gestapo officer. He had a Jewish dentist whom he was protecting. The dentist was fixing all his teeth for him. His family too was left alone, and the dentist was allowed to continue with his practice. One Sunday, a Sunday probably much like today, the two Gestapo officers went out drinking together and they got drunk, much the way, thanks to your hospitality, we are getting nicely drunk here. They had an argument. They were good friends, so it must have been a terrible argument, because the one who played chess with my father was so angry that he walked over to the dentist’s house and got the dentist out of bed and shot him. This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father, and my brother also, who was eight. When he was taken before the German commandant, my father’s murderer explained, ‘He shot my Jew, so I shot his.’ ‘But why did you shoot the child?’ ‘That’s how God-damn angry I was, sir.’ They were reprimanded and told not to do it again. That was all. But even that reprimand was something. There was no law in those days against shooting Jews in their houses, or even on the street.”

“And your mother?”

“My mother hid on a farm. There I was born, two months later. Neither of us looks like my father. Neither did my brother, but his short life was just bad luck. We two survived.”

“And why did your father, with an Aryan wife, write stories in Yiddish? Why not in Czech? He must have spoken Czech to the students at the high school.”

“Czech was for Czechs to write. He married my mother, but he never thought he was a real Czech. A Jew who marries a Jew is able at home to forget he’s a Jew. A Jew who marries an Aryan like my mother has her face there always to remind him.”

“He didn’t ever write in German?”

“We were not Sudeten Germans, you see, and we were not Prague Jews. Of course German was less foreign to him than Czech, because of Yiddish. German he insisted on for my brother to be properly educated. He himself read Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, but his own father had been, not even a town Jew like him, he had been a Jew in the farmlands, a village shopkeeper. To the Czechs such Jews spoke Czech, but in the family they spoke only Yiddish. All of this is in my father’s stories: homelessness beyond homelessness. One story is called ‘Mother Tongue.’ Three pages only, about a little Jewish boy who speaks bookish German, Czech without the native flavor, and the Yiddish of people simpler than himself. Kafka’s homelessness, if I may say so, was nothing beside my father’s. Kafka had at least the nineteenth century in his blood — all those Prague Jews did. Kafka belonged to literature, if nothing else. My father belonged to nothing. If he had lived, I think that i would have developed a great antagonism to my father. I would have thought. ‘What is this man so lonely for? Why is he so sad and withdrawn? He should join the revolution — then he would not sit with his head in his hands, wondering where he belongs.’”

“Sons are famous the world over for generous thoughts about fathers.”

“When I came to New York and wrote my letter to you, I said to Eva, ‘1 am a relative of this great man.’ I was thinking of my father and his stories. Since we have come from Europe, I have already read fifty American novels about Jews. In Prague I knew nothing about this incredible phenomenon and how vast it was. Between the wars in Czechoslovakia my father was a freak. Even had he wished to publish his stories, where would they have appeared? Even if he had published all two hundred of them, no one would have paid attention — not to that subject. But in America my father would have been a celebrated writer. Had he emigrated before I was bom, had he come to New York City in his thirties, he would have been discovered by some helpful person and published in the best magazines. He would be something more now than just another murdered Jew. For years I never thought of my father, now every minute i wonder what he would make of the America I am seeing. I wonder what America would have made of him. He would be seventy-two. I am obsessed now with this great Jewish writer that might have been.”