14. Jonathan


Prisoners of Zion: Gary and Jonathan face another day of Hebrew school.

BACK AT SSSQ, the bodies have been piling up for years. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka. We have special presentations in the gym, a protective fortress of prayer books around us, the American flag on one side of the stage, the Israeli flag on the other, and between them the slaughter of our innocents. As I watch the ovens open and the skeletons crumble, I become angry at the Germans and also at the Arabs, who are the same thing as the Nazis, Jew-killers, fucking murderers, they took our land or something, I hate them.

Then the other images that disturb us: Kids, white kids like us, are putting marijuana needles into their arms. They are smoking the heroin cigarettes. First Lady Nancy Reagan, standing next to the actor Clint Eastwood, a somber black background behind them, tells us, “The thrill can kill. Drug dealers need to know that we want them out of our schools, neighborhoods and our lives. Say no to drugs. And say yes to life.”

The children of the Solomon Schechter School of Queens are scared of Nazis and we are scared of drugs. If the Jewish Week had published an article revealing that Goebbels had been dealing dope to Hitler up at the Eagle’s Nest the world would finally click into place. But for now, the sad fact is that some of us will not go on to Jewish educations. We will go to public high schools where there will be gentiles, and gentiles love to “do” drugs. And how will we be able to resist the peer pressure when those thrilling drugs come our way? Clint Eastwood, sneering: “What would I do if someone offered me these drugs? I’d tell them to take a hike.”

I picture myself walking past the lockers of Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, the mild-mannered public school I’m zoned for. A kid walks up to me. He seems all-American, but there’s something not quite right in his eyes. “Hey, Gnu,” he says, “you want these drugs?”

And then I punch him in his face and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike, you Nazi PLO scum!” And there’s a Jewish girl they’re trying to stick with their needles, and I run over to her, fists swinging, and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike from her!” And she falls into my arms and I kiss her needle marks, and I say, “It’s going to be okay, Rivka. I love you. Maybe they didn’t give you the AIDS.”

The other holocaust we’re scared of is the nuclear one. The 1983 ABC-TV movie The Day After showed us what could happen to the good people of Kansas City, MO, and Lawrence, KS, if the Soviets were to vaporize them with thermonuclear devices. Then there is the BBC version, Threads, shown on PBS, which is widely acknowledged to be more realistic: babies and milk bottles are instantly turned to cinders, cats asphyxiate, survivors are left to eat raw radioactive sheep. (“Is it safe to eat?” “It’s got a thick coat, that should have protected it.”) I memorize the final moments before the bomb hits Yorkshire, an exchange between two ill-prepared bureaucrats, and I chant it to myself in the middle of the sclerotic hum that is Talmud class:

“Attack warning red!”

“Attack warning? Is it for real?”

“Attack warning is for bloody real!”

And then in the matter-of-fact tones of a BBC announcer: “The first dust settles on Sheffield. It’s an hour and twenty-five minutes after the attack. This level of attack has broken most of the windows in Britain. Many roofs are open to the sky. Some of the lethal dust gets in. In these early stages the symptoms of radiation sickness and the symptoms of panic are identical.”

Yes, they are quite identical. I am nearly shitting my pants. The problem with Threads, shot in the washed-out industrialized colors of its locale, is that it’s often hard to distinguish the city of Sheffield before the bomb hits from Sheffield after the devastation. The raw radioactive sheep actually looks like a step up from the shelled peas they’re serving at a family dinner in the opening shots; at least the mutton hasn’t been boiled to death.

The Day After, on the other hand, soft-pedals the devastation. The world falls apart far more brightly; how could it not with Steve Guttenberg (God, there he is again) playing one of the irradiated leads? But what I love about The Day After are the scenes of hardworking Missourians and Kansans reveling in their station-wagon lifestyles before the attack. Kids are riding their bikes through many-acred lawns, adults play horseshoes without worrying about mortgage payments, at the Kansas City Board of Trade soybean prices are up, and at Memorial General Hospital Dr. Jason Robards arranges for a patient to get his favorite flavor of ice cream. Vanilla. Whatever we’ve heard about the cost of living in Atlanta, Georgia, seems doubly true of this place. Here, my parents’ income if they don’t get a razvod—roughly $42,459.34 in 1983 dollars, give or take a cent — would make our family upper middle class. And then, fifty minutes into the film, when the enormous pines are uprooted by the nuclear blast, and the atomic flash reduces a wedding ceremony to so many skeletons, you really feel that these people have lost something special.

For its faults, The Day After is growing up in the early 1980s. This is our vocabulary. Pershing II. SAC Airborne Command. Launch on warning. “This is the Emergency Broadcast System.” “Sir, we need access to the keys and authentication documents.” “Confidence is high. I repeat, confidence is high.” “I want to confirm, is this an exercise? Roger. Copy. This is not an exercise.” “We have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. Multiple ICBMs. Over three hundred missiles inbound now.” “Message follows. Alpha. Seven. Eight. November. Foxtrot. One. Five. Two. Two.” “We have execution from the President.” “Stand by. Unlock code inserted.” “Honey, we’re going to have to get used to things being a lot different. What matters is, we’re alive. And we’re together.” “The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.” When I close my eyes I can almost feel the eerie still as Steve Guttenberg walks down a Kansas country road minutes before the Soviet missiles reach their targets. The children’s swings are empty. A crow buzzes over the state’s ample wheat.

My parents will buy a twenty-seven-inch salmon-colored Sony Trinitron, with a sleek remote control that would decimate the Zenith Space Command, just in time for Peter Jennings to tell us that the space shuttle Challenger has fallen into the ocean, but when The Day After comes out we have just a little nine-incher from a local dump, which we unveil for special occasions. So I start a subscription to TV Guide magazine to get a better grip on the important shows. I am not allowed to watch TV, but I am allowed the TV Guide, which we take to be America’s version of literature. The Day After, of course, is accompanied by many articles in the Guide, and I save that copy for many years to come, sometimes looking at the picture on the cover: a man shielding a boy from a mushroom cloud, the Lightman in my closet peering over my shoulder, so caught up in the horror he’s actually stroking my wounded ear. The boy will suffer flash blindness from the blast, and the thought of being alive in the post-nuclear-holocaust world without eyesight is devastating to me. The first order of business for when the Soviets attack — and I know those lying bastards, they will attack — is to get a good pair of sunglasses from the Stern’s department store in the Douglaston Mall.

“When the bombs fall, I will take my children outside so that we can die together instantly.” This is Mrs. A, a teacher of social studies and affiliated subjects. When she says that, I feel the true horror of nuclear war because Mrs. A is terribly attractive with her slim figure and bushel of kinky Ashkenazi hair, and her daughters, who attend SSSQ’s lower grades, are both similarly situated. All the cool kids and their mothers at SSSQ seem to know Mrs. A intimately, and she will often interrupt a monologue on the Suez Canal Crisis to say to her all-time favorite student, “Chava, remember when …”

Also, she is very keen to tell us that her daughter is an amazing ballerina and how she played Lincoln Center when she was eight months old or something of the sort. This love of child makes me tear up. My father once showed up to a parent-teacher conference where one of the teachers informed him that “Gary is very smart. We hear he reads Dostoyevsky in the original.”

Phh,” Papa said. “Only Chekhov.”

So, after The Day After I keep replaying the bit about Mrs. A taking her kids out to meet the mushroom cloud. How could the Soviets possibly kill Mrs. A and her ballerina daughter? What would Jewish television personality Abba Eban have to say about this? Before she made that announcement, I had not been entirely anti — nuclear war. My research indicated that two of the Soviet missiles would target JFK and LaGuardia airports in Queens. SSSQ is geographically equidistant from the two airports, and the school’s glass-heavy modernist structure would probably buckle and split into shards from the initial blasts, burning up the siddur prayer books like so many blue pancakes, and certainly the subsequent radiation exposure would kill everyone with the exception of the rotund, self-insulated Rabbi Sofer.

So far so good.

Meanwhile, Little Neck does not lie next to any obvious targets, the nearest one would be the Brookhaven National Laboratory in faraway Suffolk County, where my father will soon be toiling on a component of Ronald Reagan’s new “Star Wars” missile defense program, and the Deepdale Gardens cooperative is made out of millennial bricks that can withstand a heat blast up to 1,125 degrees Fahrenheit, by my sober calculations. All I need is to have my sunglasses handy and to shelter from the radiation for a few weeks. Then I will emerge into a world without Hebrew school. In this world, with my Russian accent scrubbed away, and with the superior mathematical skills I have picked up from my father’s Soviet textbooks, I will help start a new Republican civilization along with my new American best friend, Jonathan.

That is right. I have a best friend.

Mrs. A runs something called “Pilot Program,” which is for the smartest kids in SSSQ, a number that can fit around a small dining table. For an entire school period, we geniuses are separated from the usual debility of the rest of the school and are sent to a teachers’ lounge, where there is a refrigerator stocked with sad teacher sandwiches and a pall of cigarette smoke to make us feel quite adult. It is very hard to figure out what Mrs. A’s “Pilot Program” is about. It is safe to say that my father’s dream for a heavy workload in theoretical physics and higher mathematics will not come true. Activities include making caramel candies in the mold of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and discussing the TV special Something About Amelia, in which Ted Danson has sex with his own daughter. Mrs. A is a born conversationalist, and Pilot Program gives her a chance to free-associate while making baked goods. When someone mentions the Steven Spielberg movie Jaws, Mrs. A tells a fascinating story about an Israeli soldier caught in an explosion during the Yom Kippur War, who was left with nothing but three holes where his face should have been. We cautiously eat our E.T. caramels.

There are five boys who are marginalized at SSSQ. There is Jerry Himmelstein, whose victimization deserves its own after-school special and who will transfer out of our moronic inferno by grade 6. There’s Sammy (not his real name), a slim, sad, hyperactive boy who likes to jump on us while screaming “URSH! UUUUURSH!”—some deep-seated primal scream that can be translated into neither Hebrew nor English. There’s David the Mighty Khan Caesar, ruler of the Imperial Lands of David, the main enemy and sometimes ally of my mythical Holy Gnuish Empire. David’s a smart son of a rabbi who takes out a little spaceship in the middle of class and floats it before his freckled face while humming, “Noooooo … Mmm … Woooo …,” rather similar to the aviation pursuits I enjoy with my pen. There is me. And then there is Jonathan.

Jonathan’s personality has not been reduced to the level where he has to call himself Gary Gnu III or the Mighty Khan Caesar, but he is clearly not cut out for SSSQ either. He has kind and attractive parents, an adorable sister, the collie of my dreams; and this perfect-to-my-eyes family lives in a spacious, castle-like Tudor in Jamaica Estates, the kind of Tudor Dr. Jason Robards and his beautiful elderly wife enjoyed before it was vaporized in The Day After. Jonathan is short like me, and his good looks are partially hidden by a layer of baby fat. When an Israeli throws a dodgeball at him with all of his compressed Canaanite fury, Jonathan will get hit and fall to the ground clutching his elbow, just like me. Another strike against him is that his mom and dad are too shy to participate in the shtetl network of SSSQ parents, a network that’s mirrored in the friendships of the kids themselves. My own parents (“Ver is man toilet?”), of course, are completely unclubbable.

Finally, Jonathan is smart. Brilliant. And, as the old stereotype of Jews as the People of the Book dies a quiet daily death around us, Jonathan and I are also so very fucking bored. And now that my accent has faded and my English is strong and I can converse at a kilometer a minute, we become friends to the exclusion of everything else.

Saturday is his house; Sunday is mine. Or the other way around. The Jamaica Estates Tudor with its dedicated computer room or my Deepdale Gardens apartment with its treacherous red shag carpet. His Apple //e computer or my new Commodore 64 with Datasette drive (forty-three minutes to load a game). And when our playdates are over and we are shuttled back to our respective homes in Papa’s Tredia-S, or his dad’s AMC wagon, we rush to our push-button phones to call each other, work out further clues to Infocom Software’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Zork II, the nerdacious new “interactive fiction” computer games that don’t just take over our lives but are our lives, our brains buzzing with the idea that there are problems in the world that can actually be solved.

When Jonathan’s father drives me home I feel safer than ever. One day I want to have a son or daughter I can drive home in a sturdy car like this AMC wagon. My father has only recently taken to the road, and his car has been known to flip over a median and fall into a ditch, but Jonathan’s father is clearly to the wheel born. He asks me questions about school, and we laugh about some of the wackier aspects of SSSQ: Pilot Program and how easy the homework is, and whether Jonathan and I should go to Harvard or Yale when we grow up (Jonathan will eventually go to Yale, me not so much). When he delivers me to my own parents, their very expressions change; they become softer, as if the Americanness is transferrable somehow. In another decade I will find out that even as my parents are slowly clawing up the ladder, Jonathan’s father’s business — he owns a company that installs doors throughout the city — is in great difficulty, to the point that some of his SSSQ tuition is paid for in repair work. Later, cancer will take his life. The thought that this kind man, this perfect family, was going through something more painful than my own never occurs to me. On most days, I have my head so far up my family’s ass I can taste yesterday’s borscht. And that doesn’t leave much room for empathy for others, especially for Americans who the new Sony Trinitron says “have it all.” Sometimes, drunk off of three consecutive hours of Zork, I close the door to Jonathan’s cavernous bathroom, lie down on the soft mat riddled with collie hairs, and breathe in the floral air-freshener scent that even to this day I associate with home. What makes me want to cry is that Jamaica Estates is very close to JFK airport, and when the Soviets strike, my new family will be gone in a flash.

My father is also like a second father to Jonathan. Here is this strong man, manly to a fault, who takes us fishing on a pier off the wealthy suburb of Great Neck. The docks are clearly meant for Great Neck residents only, but my father has found a hole in a chain-link fence, and the three of us scamper through illegally to fish off the rich man’s pier. “Prokhod dlya oslov!” Papa proudly declares. “Gary, translate.”

“It’s the passage for donkeys,” I say to Jonathan.

Sometimes we invade the pier of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point and haul in a catch between the hulls of the military training ships. I love my father’s gentleness with Jonathan, though I am a little jealous, too. Proud that I have a father who can sneak into enemy territory and steal striped bass with just a few jerks of his fishing stick, but wishing that my father could be like that all the time — his English wrong but patient, tender, instructive. “Over zer is mostly flyook and zer is flaunder … Guys, don’t pull feesh so fast! Give him time to get on hook, okay?” Guys. We are guys together in front of my papa. It occurs to me that if we had spoken English instead of Russian at home, my father would have lost some of the natural cruelty that comes with our mother tongue. Eh, you, Snotty. Eh, you, weakling. Because all I want to do now is to speak to Papa and Mama in Jonathan’s English. Which also happens to be my own.

But it’s too late for that.

Sexuality is ripening around us in a way that makes us scared. I can never tell Jonathan about Natasha, my Russian summertime crush, because talk of girls will remind us of our dalit status and shatter the pixilated world we’ve created around ourselves. One beautiful fall day, the parents of one of the wealthiest SSSQ kids rent out the top of the World Trade Center for his Bar Mitzvah, complete with a harpsichordist strumming a classical version of “Hava Nagila” in the sky lobby, sevruga caviar by the spoonful, men in uniform bearing the boy’s name on their lapels at the toilet stations, and a series of buses to ferry us from Queens to the monstrous twin skyscrapers.

On the way home to Queens in the rented buses, two of the more advanced boys crowd around the girl who has developed the most breasts and jerk themselves off to her loud laughter. The news reaches our front row, and Jonathan and I are duly shocked. This never happens in our computer games. We have seen Brooke Shields in a swim-suit in People magazine, and we tried to put two Panasonic VHS recorders together to dub the R-rated version of the John Boorman film Excalibur, rife with both frontal and dorsal nudity (it never quite worked out for us). But the idea that two boys, one not even an Israeli, would take out their zains in the back of a plush rented bus and cream themselves over a girl is beyond our sense of reality. As I fold myself into my safe red Soviet comforter at bedtime, Papa sometimes makes an appearance in my bedroom with the encouraging words “Are you tugging yourself? Well, don’t tug too hard. It’ll fall off.” And then deep in the night Dr. Ruth Westheimer will whisper into my headphones the difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms, but these are just words for me to put away for another lifetime, maybe for after law school. Am I supposed to tug at myself like those boys? Will that make my parents and my teachers happy? It’s too much to think about. I’d rather just play Zork with my best friend, Jonathan.

ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire

Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.

ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.

Revision 88 / Serial number 840726

West of House

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here

>

In the dim light of Jonathan’s computer room his two five-and-one-quarter-inch Apple disk drives are twirling with anticipation. The > represents the so-called status line, upon which the player would give directions. For example:

>W

would mean the player wanted to go west. Or

>Open mailbox

would be another self-evident command. And so, without the intrusion of the graphics or sounds found in other video games, Jonathan and I journey into the Great Underground Empire, land of dungeons and treasure, trolls and grues and Elvish swords, and the dreaded Flood Control Dam #3. After hours of > we pause play and stagger onto the brightly lit world of Union Turnpike, to the Hapisgah (the Peak) kosher kebab restaurant, where Israeli waitresses ignore us as blithely as our own damsels at SSSQ while heaping up some of the juiciest kebabs in Queens for pocket change. These are the rhythms of my new Life with American Friend: Union Turnpike, kebab platter with hummus and Israeli salad, video rental store, Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part 1, Mark Russell’s safe political comedy on PBS (“Read my lips, no new taxes, read my lips, they’re going to raise the old ones!”), and the wielding of our collective Elvish sword of great antiquity against enemies great and small.

In school, we mostly wield our Elvish sword, too. We are inseparable. Of course, there’s my outsize Gary Gnu III personality, and sometimes I have to act out in public, have to make the class laugh. When I am cast as Julius Caesar in a school play I go around performing the Roman salute, which is, unfortunately, identical to the Nazi salute. “Heil Caesar!” I cry as I run around Hebrew school with my arm outstretched. Mrs. A looks at me with disgust. “That’s not funny,” she says. “You think everything is funny, but it’s not. Not everything is a joke.” And I feel like she’s punched right through my Gnu persona, this woman who I so wish would love me. I can barely breathe as I say, “It’s the Roman salute, Mrs. A. I lived in Italy once.” But Mrs. A has already brushed me aside and is talking once more of her daughter’s ballet excellence and how she and her favorite student’s family should get together soon in the “Berkshires,” whatever those are.

There is one history teacher Jonathan and I love, and his name is Mr. Korn. Mr. Korn has three disabilities: (1) he stutters terribly (“T-t-t-tea-p-p-pot D-d-d-dome S-s-s-scandal …”); (2) his teeth are yellow and pebbly; and (3) he owns a total of three plaid shirts, each nearly as Soviet as my own. Mr. Korn actually wants us to learn something other than the birth order of Jacob’s sons. His signature line, the one he doesn’t stutter through, is “Stop and think about it.” Which is a weighty thing to ask of a class of troglodytes screaming at fever pitch about their zains and their father’s import-export business. I behave like a jackass in Mr. Korn’s class, but I do stop and think about what he has to say. About the fact that America is not merely a place for the extraction of capital but a landmass built partly on the miseries of others, that my future doesn’t have to be a mere triumphalist immigrant march from the streets of Queens to the Best Little Tudor in Scarsdale.

To reward Mr. Korn for giving me an education, I torment him all the more. Robert is his name, so I scream out, “Hey, Bob!” whenever I burst into class. Or “Yessiree, Bobert!”

Last year I learned that Mr. Korn recently died of a terribly well-known disease, because, in local parlance, “He liked theater,” and that knowledge merely affirms everything I know about the way the universe is held in place, the way the scales tip away from the good and the weak and toward the angry and the strong. Stop and think about it.

As my outbursts grow worse, Mr. Korn sends me to the principal of general studies (the non-Hebrew half of the curriculum), another relatively humane man, with the unfortunate name of Mr. Dicker, whom we will soon reward with a heart attack. “How do you think you can work on your behavior?” Mr. Dicker asks. I stretch out my arm. “Now that’s a Roman salute, not a Nazi salute, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’m Julius Caesar. Heil Caesar!”

Back in the classroom Mr. Korn is going over our nonsensical essays on the ups and further ups of American history. I lean over the desk and feel his cigarette breath clouding the Fruit-Roll-Ups-and-Carvel-Flying-Saucer-ice-cream scent of an SSSQ classroom. Children are screaming around us. Jonathan is deep in sketching out our next rampage through the Great Underground Empire of Zork. “Hey, Bob,” I say.

“Hey, G-g-gnu.”

“I really think we paid too much for the Louisiana Purchase. Fifteen million bucks for Arkansas?”

“I know, Gnu.” And we smile at each other, so many broken, stunted teeth between us.

By eighth grade, Jonathan and I give up on a Solomon Schechter education entirely. We create our own game called Snork II: A Snork Forever Voyaging. We sit next to each other in class, and we play it all day long using pen and paper instead of the computer screen, coming up for air only when Mr. Korn stutters into class to complain about the Tet Offensive. I am the writer, and Jonathan is the player. His absurdist quest involves the rescue of a shipment of SSSQ’s Spanish textbooks, the Español al Días, which have been mistakenly kidnapped by Soviet intelligence and buried deep in a toilet in Leningrad. Jonathan is the main adventurer, but at times he is also joined by Gnu, Sammy “the Ursher,” and the Mighty Khan Caesar, in other words, our whole sorry gang. The adventure begins in Queens, continues on to Honk [sic] Kong, then mainland China (“Welcome to Communist China, the home of the whopper!”), the Orient Express, Venice, Germany, Sverdlovsk (where Lenin, who somehow never died, has been reduced to a third-rank poultry interrogator), and on to Leningrad. A series of self-destructing recorded messages, à la Mission: Impossible, drives Jonathan forward as I supply the horribly misspelled narrative and he writes commands into the status line (>).

page 120

Embankment (Leningrad)

P.S. This message will self-destruct in thirty hours

> Drop recorder.

You wanna leave the recorder behind?

> Yes

Ya shure?

> Yes

Absoludly?

> Yes

Todally?

> Yes

I can’t hear ya!

> Yes

OK, you leave it behind it explodes 30 seconds later, and kills 60 people. Happy?

> Yes

I’m not

> Go to party.

Gnu takes you to Tipanovskaya Street … Coincidentally Gnu lived there. You see a party going on indoors, a guard is guarding the entrance.

And on like that for hundreds of densely scribbled pages, with one-liners in the mode of Mel Brooks or maybe the Marx Brothers. “You are enemies of the state. We’re not shure which state but probably a sparsely populated one like Wyoming.” Riffs on “condems,” “vibrators” and “other exotic devices,” and occasional hints of romance, influenced, I suppose, by our recent dorkish reading of A Tale of Two Cities: “She’s beautiful, petite, and Victorian, what more do you want?”

But there is something I want more than Dickens’s divine Lucie Manette, which is to take Jonathan on an adventure into my childhood, which is why A Snork Forever Voyaging can only go back to one place, back to Leningrad, back to Tipanov Street. At home, my parents and I are watching the reformist new Soviet leader Gorbachev on television with great suspicion. Is the smiling round-faced man with the giant wine splotch on his forehead really going to bring all that Soviet nonsense to an end? “Trust but verify,” as our hero Ronald Reagan likes to intone. And I rarely bring up Grandmother Galya, whom we’ve left behind, because I know that anything rodstvenniki-related can only bring trouble. I am forgetting what she looked like, I am forgetting the taste of the cheese sandwiches that paid for my first novel, and I am forgetting that I should love her even though she’s not here.

Maybe that’s why I’m taking Jonathan back to Leningrad. I am telling Jonathan something I can never say to the boys and girls of SSSQ. That I am not some kind of Gary Gnu antelope whatever-the-fuck who is there to act crazy for their amusement. That I am a Russian boy, of Jewish lineage, sure, but a Russian boy from Russia, with half his life spent in that country.

And Jonathan, because he is a true friend, will go there with me.

Coincidentally Gnu lived there.

My father stops hitting me. Perhaps it’s because I’m a little taller now, my jumble of sweaty dark black hair hanging just a few inches below his thick lips. Perhaps it’s American life, Jonathan’s family, slowly seeping into him. The last time he gives me “one across the neck,” I’ve allegedly been a grubiyan (a “boor”) to my grandma Polya. I suppose I have been rude to her, refusing to let her hold my hand as we cross the violent streets of Forest Hills (I am almost fifteen) and not being as appreciative of her eight-course meals now that each bite of a Klondike bar goes right to my tits. But also I can sense my grandmother’s decline. Every year her mental faculties are withering, and the American drugs aren’t helping. A series of strokes are about to commence, reducing her to a wheelchair, one side of her body inoperable. Even before that happens, I want to withdraw from her. I cannot allow the woman who loves me so much to die slowly before me. I have to look away.

And so my father gives me one across the neck. Fine. Good. I simmer quietly in my room. Every penny I earn doing chores has been spent decorating my bedroom to resemble the office of J. R. Ewing, the villain of the television show Dallas. Luckily, it already has the right wood paneling, and to further the vibe I’ve installed a desktop computer, a fancy-looking Panasonic telephone with an LCD, and a luxurious chair from the dump. All I need is the model golden oil derrick to make the look complete. But even without the derrick, whenever I feel blue I stride into my so-called office, grab the expensive phone, and, with what I think is a Texan accent, shout into the receiver, “Hi darlin’! You just hang tight, y’hear?”

After giving me one across the neck, my father comes into my bedroom, and I brace my neck for another one. “Let’s go for a walk,” my father says. He seems sad. I sigh and shuffle the pile of carefully typed stories I am about to submit for rejection to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

We walk through the blooming Deepdale Gardens, past all the places where my father has entertained me with his Planet of the Yids tales and where he has given me the podzhopniks, the little side kicks in the ass. But those kicks symbolize gaiety and our funny father-son bond. Today, Papa is serious, and my neck is tense. He is taking his time with what he wants to say, and usually words just roll off him in thick bursts of anger or glee or philosophy. We are passing the five skyscraper-high, insect-like air traffic antennas down the street from us with their fearsome signage: WARNING THIS FACILITY IS USED IN FAA TRAFFIC CONTROL. LOSS OF HUMAN LIFE MAY RESULT FROM SERVICE INTERRUPTION. ANY PERSON WHO INTERFERES WITH AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL … WILL BE PROSECUTED UNDER FEDERAL LAW.

I do not want to be prosecuted under federal or familial law. Or maybe I do. “Listen,” Papa says. “I shouldn’t have hit you. You were rude to your grandmother, but I shouldn’t have hit you. I behaved badly.”

I rub my neck and shrug. “It’s okay,” I say. But what I want to say is: Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to keep hitting me? Don’t you love me anymore? Or am I so bad that I am beyond the redemption of getting one across the neck?

You have not behaved badly, Papa. Only I can behave badly. I am the child. You are the father. How can you say such an awful thing?

We pass by the basketball court where I’ve hit so many backboards and missed so many hoops with my imprecise aim, my fingers, my arms, my lungs straining to make good for him. We talk about fishing, cars, the odds of my getting into Stuyvesant, the specialized science high school in Manhattan where the tuition is free. My father will yell at me again. And threaten me. And be disappointed in me. But without his hands upon me, the family romance is over. Just like my asthma is over. Now I am supposed to be the man. To learn to hit and earn and make others fear me. How many fingers am I holding up, Vinston?

The children of the Solomon Schechter School of Queens have gathered at the Forest Hills Jewish Center to hear my best friend, Jonathan, still a sweet little boy in his purple nylon graduation robe, recite a prayer for peace and against nuclear annihilation. We will then sing the Israeli national anthem and graduate. My family is also about to graduate, from our garden apartment to a real house with a forty-by-sixty-foot backyard in a different, slightly more affluent, part of Little Neck.

A yearbook of essays and photographs has been prepared. On one page, two young Jewish girls have submitted essays entitled “DEATH,” “FEAR,” and “THE TERRIBLE PAIN” next to a drawing of the Grim Reaper. Male children are supposed to shroud their inner life with so much active horseshit, but these girls are honestly scared of death, scared of the void, scared of the terrible pain that precedes death for a good 80.3 years in the United States. Who would have known the general sadness and anxiety — beyond the sadness of adolescence, beyond the anxiety of being Jewish — have infected the tiny hallways and tidy Bionic Woman lunch boxes of Solomon Schechter?

On another page, there is a photograph of a smiling Israeli kid mock punching me in the face, his hand choking my neck, as I mock cringe in fear. Next to that is a photograph of bearded Mr. Korn in a yellow plaid doozy of a shirt about to hit me over the head with a rolled-up copy of the Times. The look on my face says: I love this man.

Twenty-five years later, Jonathan and I will become friends again, after drifting apart as good childhood friends with traumatic schooling often need to do. We will return to our alma mater, a diminished place where more than a third of the kids are now from the former Soviet Union, mostly Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan who have settled this stretch of Queens. Mrs. A is still there, looking remarkably young and vital. She remembers Jonathan and, in particular, his pretty mother, but not me. “You’re an author?” she asks me. “Do you do anything else?” She’ll send us on our way with the mission of spreading the good word about Solomon Schechter education. “Prove to them our graduates aren’t ax murderers!”

I attend the twenty-fifth SSSQ reunion at the Forest Hills Jewish Center. The scene has changed only slightly. There are a lot of bald machers and their gleaming wives, entire tables speaking in Hebrew, teachers shushing us, a “Chinese auction” of vaguely Chagallesque paintings, a hired comedian making jokes about Hispanics and Iranians. “We taught you Chumash,”* a new but familiar-sounding female authority figure is screaming at us, “but we didn’t teach you manners. Stop talking! I have a hostile audience here!”

And as I glance around at my former classmates, a thought occurs to me. This is a community. These people know one another, understand one another, came of age with one another. They were tied by kin and outlook, as were their parents. As were their parents before them. Moms making rugelach in advanced baking ovens, dads talking mileage on their new Lincolns, the drowsy, hypnotic hum of cantors and rabbis on Saturday mornings. What happened here, this was nobody’s fault. We Soviet Jews were simply invited to the wrong party. And then we were too frightened to leave. Because we didn’t know who we were. In this book, I’m trying to say who we were.

“Dear Gnu, You are a funny republican who will be a democrat in a few years. Fuck Reagan! Bring on Jesse [Jackson]! Enjoy the Chinese whiz kids. Love … Rachel W.”—from a classmate in the SSSQ autograph book, 1987

“Dear Gary, Just one question: Do you ever cry?”—another classmate

“P.S. For every fortune made — a crime has been committed.”—Mr. Korn.

Genug [“enough,” Yiddish], Gnu. Begin anew.”—a concerned art teacher

In our computer games, there’s a series of commands the player types on the status line when he finds himself in an entirely new environment.

>Look. Hear. Taste. Smell. Feel.

All my books are packed for our move to the new house with the backyard. The wood-paneled closet is empty. I open it with the same trepidation as always, but the Lightman is sitting in the corner, shaking, little pinpricks of light falling off his body. Now that my asthma is gone, I can breathe in fully as I watch him disappear. But this is no catharsis for me, I’m afraid. No metamorphosis. Even as my tormentor drowns in the darkness around him, my fists are clenched. “You motherfucker,” I say in my now-perfect English. You motherfucker.



* The Torah in printed form.

At Stuyvesant High School, where I will soon enroll.

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