Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(100)

“What duress?”

“The duress of being forced to have a bar mitzvah when you know I find all of this shit to be bullshit.”

Jacob tried to spare Julia from having to be the one, yet again, to object to bad language: “Shit to be bullshit, Sam?”

“Is that poor usage?”

“Impoverished. And try to believe me when I tell you I would have been every bit as happy not to pay the utterly mediocre Electric Brigade five thousand dollars to play bad covers of bad songs.”

“But the rite of passage is nonnegotiable,” Sam confirmed.

“Yes,” Jacob said, “that’s correct.”

“Because it was nonnegotiable for you, because it was nonnegotiable for—”

“Correct again. That’s what Jewish people do.”

“Not negotiate?”

“Have bar mitzvahs.”

“Ah…I’d completely misunderstood the whole thing. And now that I realize we have bar mitzvahs because we have bar mitzvahs, what I really feel moved to do is marry a Jewish woman and have Jewish children.”

“You need to slow down,” Julia said.

“And I definitely don’t want to be buried,” Sam said, the Ultimate now within sight. “Especially if Jewish law requires it.”

“So be cremated like me,” Max said.

“Or don’t die,” Benjy suggested.

Like a conductor zipping up a piece of music, Julia gave a quick and stern “Enough,” and that was it. What was so scary about her? What about that five-foot-four woman, who never inflicted physical or emotional violence, or even saw a punishment all the way through, terrified her husband and children to the point of unconditional surrender?

Jacob broke down the breakdown: “The thing we want to be sensitive to is the appearance of enjoying life too much in the face of Great-Grandpa’s death. Not to mention the earthquake. It would be in poor taste, and also just feel bad.”

“The appearance of enjoying life?” Sam asked.

“I’m just saying that some sensitivity is required.”

“Let me tell you the right way to think about it,” Tamir began.

“Maybe later,” Jacob said.

“So no band,” Sam said. “Is that enough to make sure we don’t appear to enjoy life?”

“In Israel we don’t even have bar mitzvah parties,” Tamir said.

“Mazel tov,” Jacob told him. And then, to Sam: “I might also skip the sign-in board.”

“Which I always wanted to skip,” Sam said.

“Which I spent three weeks making for you,” Julia said.

“You made it over the course of three weeks,” Jacob corrected.

“What?”

“You didn’t spend three weeks making it.”

“Why do you think that’s an important clarification?”

He all of a sudden didn’t, so he changed course: “I think we should also consider editing the centerpieces.”

“Why?” Julia asked, beginning to understand that he was taking things from her, not Sam.

“I’ve never understood the desire of American Jews to speak words you don’t understand,” Tamir said. “Finding meaning in the absence of meaning—I don’t get it.”

“They’re…festive,” Jacob said.

“They’re elegant.”

“Wait a minute,” Sam said, “what’s left?”

“What’s left?”

“Exactly,” Tamir said.

“What’s left,” Jacob said, resting his hand on Sam’s shoulder for the instant before Sam recoiled, “is you becoming a man.”

“What’s left,” Julia said, “is being with your family.”

“You are the luckiest people in the history of the world,” Tamir said.

“We’re trying,” Jacob said to Sam, who lowered his eyes and said, “This sucks.”

“It won’t,” Julia said. “We’ll make it really special.”

“I didn’t say it will suck. I said it sucks. Presently.”

“You’d rather be in a fridge like Great-Grandpa?” Jacob asked, as surprised as anyone by his words. How could he have thought them, much less vocalized them? Or these: “You’d rather be trapped under a building in Israel?”

“Those are my choices?” Sam asked.

“No, but they are your much-needed perspective. Look at that,” Jacob said, pointing to the muted TV, which showed images of massive earth-moving machines, tires with ladders built into them, pulling apart rubble.

Sam took this in, nodded, averted his eyes to a place yet farther from where they would have met his parents’.

“No flowers,” he said.

“No flowers?”

“Too beautiful.”

“I’m not sure beauty is the problem,” Julia said.

“The problem,” Tamir said, “is that—”

“It’s part of the problem,” Sam said, talking over Tamir, “so lose ’em.”

“Well, I don’t know about losing them,” Jacob said, “as they’ve already been paid for. But we can ask if it’s still possible to shift the design toward something more in keeping with—”