Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(68)

“And find a better word than simians.”

Irv turned to face his grandson while continuing to drive with his knees: “You gotta hear this. You put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and you get Hamlet. Two billion in front of two billion and you get—”

“Watch the road!”

“The Koran. Funny, right?”

“Racist,” Max muttered.

“Arabs aren’t a race, bubeleh. They’re an ethnicity.”

“What’s a typewriter?”

“Let me also say this,” Irv said, turning to Jacob and pointing his spare index finger while continuing to hold up the other six fingers. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but people with no homeland really shouldn’t. Because when those stones of theirs start breaking Chagall windows, don’t expect to see us on our knees with a dustpan. Just because we’re smarter than those lunatics doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on insanity. The Arabs have to understand that we’ve got some stones, too, but our slingshot’s in Dimona, and the finger on the button is connected to an arm with a string of numbers tattooed on it!”

“You’re finished?” Jacob asked.

“With what?”

“If I can host you back on the Blue Planet for just a second, I was thinking we should take Tamir around to see Isaac on the way back.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s obviously depressed about the move and—”

“If he were capable of depression, he would have killed himself seventy years ago.”

“Fucking shitcock!” Max said, shaking his iPad like an Etch A Sketch.

“He’s not depressed,” Irv said. “He’s old. Age presents like depression, but isn’t.”

“Sorry,” Jacob said, “I forgot: no one is depressed.”

“No, I’m sorry, I forgot: everyone is depressed.”

“I assume that’s a dig at my therapy?”

“What belt are you up to, anyway? Brown? Black? And you win when it’s around your neck?”

Jacob was weighing whether to give it back or let it go. Dr. Silvers would call that binary thinking, but Dr. Silvers’s reliance on the binary critique was, itself, binary. And this was too demanding a morning to become nuanced with his anvil of a father. So, as always, he let it go. Or rather, he absorbed it.

“It’s a tough change for him,” Jacob said. “It’s ultimate. I’m just saying we should be sensitive—”

“He’s a human callus.”

“He’s an internal bleeder.”

Max pointed to the light: “Green is for go.”

But instead of driving, Irv turned to press the point from which he’d strayed: “Here’s the deal: the world population of Jews falls within the margin of error of the Chinese census, and everyone hates us.” Ignoring the honking coming from behind him, he continued: “Europe…now, there’s a Jew-hating continent. The French, those spineless vaginas, would shed no tears of sadness over our disappearance.”

“What are you talking about? Remember what the French prime minister said after the attack on the kosher market? ‘Every Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone.’ Or something like that.”

“Bull-merde. You know he had a bottle of Chateau Sang de Juif 1942 airing out backstage to toast France’s missing piece. The English, the Spanish, the Italians. These people live to make us die.” He stuck his head out the window and hollered at the honking driver: “I’m an *, *! I’m not deaf!” And then back to Jacob: “Our only reliable friends in Europe are the Germans, and does anyone doubt that they’ll one day run out of guilt and lampshades? And does anyone really doubt that one day, when the conditions are right, America will decide we’re noisy, and smelly, and pushy, and way too smart for anybody else’s good?”

“I do,” Max said, opening up a pinch to zoom in on something.

“Hey, Maxy,” Irv said, trying to catch his eye in the rearview mirror, “you know why paleontologists look for bones and not anti-Semitism?”

“Because they’re paleontologists and not the ADL?” Jacob suggested.

“Because they like to dig. Get it?”

“No.”

“Even if everything you say is true,” Jacob said, “which it isn’t—”

“Resolutely is.”

“It isn’t—”

“Is.”

“But even if it were—”

“The world hates Jews. I know you think the prevalence of Jews in culture is some kind of counterargument, but that’s like saying the world loves pandas because crowds come to see them in zoos. The world hates pandas. Wants them dead. Even the cubs. And the world hates Jews. Always has. Always will. Yeah, there are more polite words to use, and political contexts to cite, but the hatred is always hatred and always because we’re Jewish.”

“I like pandas,” Max chimed in.

“You don’t,” Irv corrected.

“I would be psyched to have one as a pet.”

“It would eat your face, Maxy.”

“Awesome.”

“Or at least occupy our house and subject us to its sense of entitlement,” Jacob added.