http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM
Some context: In this passage I'm 6 years old and the "good times" I had with my father were drawing to a close. My parents were fighting more and more and very soon I would come to see my father as the bad guy. And my Jewish identity, at it's high point here, would gradually unravel. I would soon "become" German.
Copyright 2013 by Alan Wynzel
When it grew colder and snow was on the ground, my old man
gave me a bible. Inside he wrote:
November 1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy.
He called it the Old Testament.
He said it was the book of God from the time before Christ, from over
five thousand years ago.
My old man
read the Bible to me on Saturdays during the winter. He read to me in the morning, and sometimes
late in the afternoon, until my mother came home from work. He started reading Bible during Hanukkah,
when the light burned for eight days.
For Hanukkah he gave me chocolate dollars and a dreidle to spin.
When my old
man read me the Bible he expected me to repeat back to him what he said. He began with the story of God creating the
earth and the stars, the animals and people.
The first people, Adam, and Eve, from Adam’s rib. He made me repeat the story, and I couldn’t
get it right. I tried three times. He stomped his feet and yelled, No, no
dammit! Listen to me. God rested on the
seventh day, on the Sabbath!
It was the
same with Cain who slew Abel and Noah and all the animals on the Ark. I couldn’t tell the stories right the first
time and my old man got mad. I tried
hard to think and quietly listen to the stories. I couldn’t wait for Bible reading to be
finished. Sometimes we were still
reading when my mother came home and she would be mad at my old man for yelling
at me. Then Bible reading would be
over. But just my old man yelling was
better than both of them yelling. I
tried hard to learn the Bible stories so that when my mother came home there
would be no fighting that night. So that
instead we would get our Saturday take-out dinner.
Every
Saturday night we ordered supper, either Chinese food or deli sandwiches. If we got Chinese we always had Chicken Chow
Mein and eggrolls. Never anything
different. Even when we went to the
Chinese restaurant, once or twice a year, that’s what we ordered. My old man would always announce Jews don’t
eat pork and he refused to eat the egg rolls.
The Chinaman puts pork in them, he said.
My mother and I ate them.
If we got
our dinner from the deli we had corned beef and pastrami, rye bread, pickles,
mustard, coleslaw and potato salad. The
pastrami was for my old man. He ate it
on rye bread with mustard, and a pickle on the side. My mother wouldn’t eat it because she thought
it was too spicy and she wouldn’t let me have any because she worried it would
keep me up at night with a sick stomach from the spices and mustard. I wanted to tell her that the fear of their
fighting kept me awake most nights, waking me up like a bad dream that wouldn’t
go away, so let me have the pastrami.
But I knew that would cause trouble so I ate my corned beef without
mustard and only two bites of pickle, and kept quiet. I also had some coleslaw, not because I liked
it but because I wanted to be a merry old soul like old King Cole, who I knew
was Black like Nat King Cole. Nat King Cole
who was Black like my old man who looked Black, but instead was a Jew, and of
all the Jews in synagogue he was the darkest.
I wasn’t sure what being merry was, I supposed it meant happy because
that’s what Christmas was and everybody said Merry Christmas. It sounded happy, King Cole was merry and so
was Nat King Cole, Black like my old man, who liked the coleslaw. I ate some, hoping, but it never made me a
merry old soul.
November
1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy: I still called him my Daddy then. He wasn’t my old man yet. He was my Daddy and that year on Pine Street
was a year of walks uptown, naming the cars going by, and cheering the
Plymouths and the Dodges because they were the best. Walking, holding his hand, sitting in the
park with Uncle Sammy, watching the hippies under the willow play their guitars
and sing. Walking and holding his hand
in the cold and the heat. Wearing
mittens in the snow, feeling his strong, lean hand, like a coil of wire, grip
mine. Dragging me along when I was
slow. Yanking me back from the curb and
the dangerous street beyond.
My Daddy yelled at a lot of things
and a lot of people. But he didn’t yell
when I gave him a black eye. You put a
spot right there, he said. Your muscles,
like iron. Feel that, just like iron,
and he squeezed my clenched arm.
My Daddy was
dark and quick like a boxer. Like
Muhammed Ali. He got in a fight with a
man at work. Some guy in the garage
called me a dirty Kike! That’s a bad
name for a Jew. Don’t let anybody call
you that, boy. So I threw a garbage can
over his head and kicked him in the knees.
Sonofabitch won’t call anybody a Kike again.
This all
passed like Uncle Sammy. This came and
went like the Saturdays that summer, hot and drowsy, with blurry cars and
people passing on the street in the morning glare. Faded and muddled like the slow hazy days of
a heat wave. This all passed, but I
still feel it, clinging to the past’s horizon, a wavering desert mirage, heat
glare rising off the street as my old man tugged me home for lunch. In 1970, this is what I saw: Gigantic shiny cars with spoked wheels. Men with hats and men with crewcuts. Hippies and freaks in rags and beads, singing
songs of love in the park. Cops in blue
and black chasing them out of town. Films
of exploding jungles, screaming jet planes, and tired soldiers on the
television screen. Then November
1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy.
Hanukkah came and went, a winter freeze settled upon everything, folding
the dead grass inward, and that year on Pine Street was over. There would be other walks, other rides in
the Plymouth, more visits to Wayne and Bob and more auto races. But the war was spreading, and soon I would
have to choose sides. 1970 passed, along
with my fleeting innocence.
***
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