Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(69)
“The Germans murdered one and a half million Jewish children because they were Jewish children, and they got to host the Olympics thirty years later. And what a job they did with that! The Jews win by a hair a war for our survival and are a permanent pariah state. Why? Why, only a generation after our near-destruction, is the Jewish will to survive considered a will to conquer? Ask yourself: Why?”
His why wasn’t a question, not even a rhetorical one. It was a shove. A stiff arm in a time of forced hands. Everything had an aspect of coercion. Isaac didn’t want to move; they were forcing him to. The singular sense in which Sam wanted to become a man was sexual relations with a person who wasn’t himself, but they were forcing him to apologize for words he said he didn’t write, so that he could be forced to chant memorized words of unknown meaning before family he didn’t believe in, and friends he didn’t believe in, and God. Julia was being forced to shift her focus from ambitious buildings that would never be built to the bathroom and kitchen renovations of disappointed people with resources. And the phone incident was forcing an examination that the marriage might not survive—their relationship, like all relationships, dependent on willful blindness and forgetting. Even Irv’s descent into bigotry was guided by an invisible hand.
Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself. Nobody wants to be a Jewish man, or a dying man.
Jacob didn’t want to coerce or be coerced, but what was he supposed to do? Sit on his hands waiting for his grandfather to shatter his hip and die in a hospital room as every abandoned old person is destined to do? Allow Sam to snip a ritualistic thread that reached back to kings and prophets, simply because Judaism as they practiced it was boring as hell and overflowed with hypocrisy? Maybe. In the rabbi’s office he’d felt ready to use the scissors.
Jacob and Julia had batted about the notion of having the bar mitzvah in Israel—the Jewish coming-of-age version of eloping. Perhaps that would be a way to do it without doing it. Sam objected on the grounds of it being a terrible idea.
“Terrible why?” Jacob asked, knowing full well why.
“You really don’t see the irony?” Sam said. Jacob saw many ironies, and was curious to hear which one Sam was thinking of. “Israel was created as a place for Jews to escape persecution. We would be going to escape Judaism.” Nicely put.
So the bar mitzvah would be at the synagogue they paid twenty-five hundred dollars per visit to be members of, and officiated by the hip young rabbi who wasn’t, by any reasonable definition, hip, young, or a rabbi. The party would be at the Hilton where Reagan was this close to being put out of our misery, and where Julia and Sam were representing Micronesia. The band would be capable of playing both a good horah and good rock. Of course, such a band has never existed in the history of live music, but Jacob knew that at a certain point you just crunch the capsule you’ve been hiding in your cheek and hope not to feel too much. The theme—handled with delicacy and taste—would be Sam’s Family’s Diaspora. (This was Julia’s idea, and insofar as a bar mitzvah theme could ever be a good idea, it was sufficiently OK.) They would have tables representing each of the countries the family had been dispersed to—America, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada—and instead of seating cards, each guest would receive a “passport” to one of the nations. The tables would be designed to reflect regional culture and landmarks—this is where delicacy and taste were most severely challenged—and the centerpieces would include a family tree, and photographs of relatives currently living in those places. The buffet would feature stations of regionally specific foods: Brazilian feijoada, Spanish tapas, Israeli falafel, whatever they eat in Canada, and so on. The party favors would be snow globes of the various locales. There are more wars than snowfalls in Israel, but the Chinese are smart enough to know that Americans are dumb enough to buy anything. Especially Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.
“I asked you a question,” Irv said, bringing Jacob back to the argument that only Irv was having.
“Did you?”
“Yes: Why?”
“Why what?”
“The what doesn’t even matter. The answer is the same to every question about us: Because the world hates Jews.”
Jacob turned to face Max. “You realize that genetics aren’t destiny, right?”
“Whatever you say…”
“In much the same way that I escaped the baldness that ravaged your grandfather’s head, you have a fighting chance of dodging the insanity that transformed a passable human into the man who married my mother.”
Irv gave a deep, dramatic exhale, and then, with the full force of his faux sincerity: “Would it be all right if I offered an opinion?”
Both Jacob and Max laughed at that. Jacob liked that feeling, that spontaneous father-son camaraderie.
“Listen, don’t listen, it’s up to you. But I want to get this off my chest. I think you’re wasting your life.”
“Oh, that’s all?” Jacob said. “I was bracing for something big.”
“I think you are an immensely talented, deeply feeling, profoundly intelligent person.”
“The zayde doth protest too much, methinks.”
“And you have made some very bad choices.”