Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(76)

i just pressed my phone to my heart i could hear it beating even though we’re not on the phone?

yes

you can touch my face if you want to i text like achilles but i’m a * in real life i’m a feminist in real life you know i meant that idiomatically yes, i know you are not a vagina then i really have you fooled i will never write lol i’m sorry i hurt you why did you do it?

because it was a cowardly way to hurt myself

what was so hard about it was that i always feel like i understand you but last night i didn’t

it scared me

do you accept my apology?

as franz rosenzweig famously responded when asked if he was religious…

“not yet”

impressive memory

not yet?

not yet

but you will

did you ever wonder why it even mattered if achilles was wounded in the heel because that was the only part of him that wasn’t immortal so? so he’d be an immortal with a limp i’m guessing you know why i do

i’d really, really, really like to know really, really, really, really, really until you broke the word “like”

into a million pieces into love

so tell me

it’s not just that his heel was the only mortal part of him ALL of his mortality was in his heel —like moving everyone in a skyscraper into the basement, and then it floods and people who work on different floors, and never otherwise would have met, talk, and decide to go out to dinner, and keep going out to dinner, and meet each other’s family, and celebrate holidays together, and get married, and have kids, who have kids, who have kids but they drowned

so?





MAYBE IT WAS THE DISTANCE


Jacob was the only one who referred to the Israeli cousins as our Israeli cousins. To everyone else in the house, they were the Israeli cousins. Jacob felt no desire for ownership of them, and too much association made him itchy, but he felt that they were owed familial warmth commensurate with the thickness of blood. Or he felt that he should feel that. It would have been easier if they’d been easier.

He’d known Tamir since they were children. Jacob’s grandfather and Tamir’s were brothers in a Galician shtetl of such minuscule size and importance that the German people didn’t get to it until their second pass through the Pale to wipe up Jewish crumbs. There had been seven brothers. Isaac and Benny avoided the fate of the other five by hiding together in a hole for more than two hundred days, and then living in forests. Every story Jacob overheard about this period—Benny could have killed a Nazi; Isaac could have saved a Jewish boy—suggested a dozen stories that he would never overhear.

The brothers spent a year in a displaced persons camp, where they met their wives, who were sisters. Each couple had a child, each a boy: Irv and Shlomo. Benny moved his family to Israel, and Isaac moved his to America. Isaac never understood Benny. Benny understood Isaac, but never forgave him.

Within two years, Isaac and his wife, Sarah, had opened a Jewish bodega in a schwartze neighborhood, learned enough English to begin working the system, and started saving. Irv learned the infield fly rule, learned the alphabetic/syllabic logic of D.C. street naming, learned to be ashamed of his house’s look and smell, and one morning his forty-two-year-old mother went downstairs to open the store, but instead collapsed and died. Died of what? Of a heart attack. Of a stroke. Of surviving. A silence so high and thick was built around her death that not only did no one know any significant details, no one even knew what others knew. Many decades later, at his father’s funeral, Irv would allow himself to wonder if his mother had killed herself.

Everything was something never to remember, or never to forget, and what America had done for them was retold and retold. As Jacob grew, his grandfather would regale him with stories of America’s glory: how the army had fed and clothed him after the war; how at Ellis Island they never asked him to change his name (it was his own choice); how one was limited only by one’s willingness to work; how he’d never experienced anything that carried even the faintest whiff of anti-Semitism—only indifference, which is greater than love, because it’s more reliable.

The brothers would visit each other every few years, as if the performance of familial intimacy would retroactively defeat the German people and save everyone. Isaac would lavish Benny and his family with expensive-looking tchotchkes, take them to the “best” second-tier restaurants, close the market for a week to show them the sights of Washington. And when they left, he’d spend twice as long as their visit bemoaning how big-headed and tiny-minded they were, how American Jews were Jews and these Israeli crackpots were Hebrews—people who, given their way, would sacrifice animals and serve kings. Then he’d reiterate how necessary it was to maintain closeness.

Jacob found the Israeli cousins—his Israeli cousins—curious, at once alien and familiar. He saw his family’s faces in their faces, but also something different, something that could equally well be described as ignorant or unself-conscious, phony or free—hundreds of thousands of years of evolution crammed into one generation. Perhaps it was existential constipation, but the Israelis didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. All Jacob’s family ever did was give shits. They were shit-givers.

Jacob first visited Israel when he was fourteen—an overdue present that he didn’t want for a bar mitzvah he didn’t went. The next generation of Blumenbergs took the next generation of Blochs to the Wailing Wall, into whose cracks Jacob inserted prayers for things he didn’t actually care about but knew he ought to, like a cure for AIDS and an unbroken ozone layer. They floated in the Dead Sea together, among the ancient, elephantine Jews reading half-submerged newspapers bleeding Cyrillic. They climbed Masada early in the morning and pocketed rocks that might have been held in the palms of Jewish suicides. They watched the windmill break the sunset from the perch of Mishkenot Sha’ananim. They went to the small park named after Jacob’s great-grandfather Gershom Blumenberg. He had been a beloved rabbi, and his surviving disciples remained loyal to his memory, choosing never to have another rabbi, choosing their own demise. It was 105 degrees. The marble bench was cool, but the metal plaque with his name was too hot to touch.