Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (5 page)

I studied with Yitz Greenberg, a Jewish studies pioneer, in a course on Israel and the Superpowers, and enrolled in a seminar with Elie Wiesel, the dean of Holocaust literature.

Elie, as we called him, frail, refined, wore an air of somber courtesy. But underneath lay an invincible sadness that was like a reproach. Virtually everything he said accused the world and confirmed what my mother had tried to teach in her own crude way.

Another Holocaust was certain to come. Governments of any kind cannot be trusted. The world is and always will be against the Jews. The Holocaust was a civilizational crime, but in a very real sense, no one, yet, had truly paid for it. In fact, those most culpable were now prospering.

Once, Elie stood at the blackboard, elbow cradled in his hand, eyes wistful, and pronounced in that slow, sad, thoughtful way of his: “The Holocaust is not the end point. No. It is a new kind of beginning. For mankind, a singular sort of precedent. History has shown that once something unprecedented appears in this world,”—he scanned our transfixed eyes—“rather than go away, it sets the stage for future reenactments of the same, more genocides, but on an even larger and more criminal scale.”

Inflamed with anxious visions of impending Holocaust, I dreamed of armed resistance. Tried to think of ways to acquire guns. Even called Elie once, at his home. He listened, appalled, as I ranted and raged, drunk on Gallo port, about the need to rise
up. The Hit Man and the Angel warred in me. The Angel won. With virtually no resources, I launched a magazine called
Jewish Arts Quarterly
.

The first issue contained work by Wiesel as well as lesser-known scholars and poets. My way now seemed clear. I must become a Jewish writer. I launched myself on this course with prophetic gusto. After many months of determined effort, I decided to announce my career path to none other than the quintessential Jewish writer of all time: Isaac Bashevis Singer.

THE FUTURE NOBEL LAUREATE AND YIDDISH author, who situated many of his best short stories on Manhattan's Upper West Side, also made his home there. His phone number was listed. He was famous for permitting just about anyone to drop by.

It took me some time to screw up the courage to call. I did so in part because I was fast becoming aware that my plan to be a distinctly “Jewish writer” was considered to be something of a career hazard by not a few of my teachers, themselves Jews, who warned me on the sly to avoid the label “Jewish writer” by any and all means.

One I recall in particular, who advised me, face screwed up in distaste: “All the New York intellectuals are really Jewish writers, but none of them, not even Roth or Bellow, cop to it. Only Malamud—the third of that ‘Hart, Shaffner, and Marx' of literature—proclaims it, and he's the weakest of the three! There's Ozick, of course: she's very out about it. But on the whole, publishers don't really like the ‘Jewish shtick.' And the lit mags, well, they're all run
by Wasps like George Plimpton. Want to get ahead as a writer? Don't be too Jewish in your work.”

“What about I.B. Singer?” I said.

I remember the look I got. “Sing-er?” His voice dropped. “You want to end up like that?”

I kind of did.

After moving to the Upper West Side, I would often spot Singer, already old, dressed in a dignified blue suit, shuffling down the dingy Broadway sidewalks, careful of pigeons, fitting right in with the boulevard's rich stew of old Jews with numbered arms, young seedy hotshots loitering outside the Off-Track Betting Office, Puerto Ricans and blacks crowding the Chinese-Spanish restaurants, and aproned Italian hot dog vendors with cigars poking from their mugs. I wanted to be like him, a writer hidden among life's weeds, one who cared for ragged birds and conversed with everyday folks. I never dared approach Singer in the Four Brothers Restaurant, where he sometimes went to eat, or in Famous Dairy, his usual lunch spot. But I needed to speak with him, badly. I sensed that only he could help.

For all the well-meaning advice that I'd been handed, I was in fact now incurably cursed with Jewish Writeritis. In the wake of Wiesel's class, whenever I set pen to page, out popped some Jewish character anguishing over the Holocaust. I felt like a throwback to another age. It was the Seventies, but I wasn't hip: I was obsessed with Auschwitz. My fellow writers effulged in prose about smoking pot and free love, but I wrote about a lonely Jewish survivor who spoke to his parrot and a dreamy sculptor who perished in the gas chambers. To make matters worse, I had launched, with my own meager resources, the Jewish lit mag and it was how people most identified me. I had gone from a cool Kerouac type to a pathetic, outmoded Sholom Aleichem, on my way to committing professional suicide.

I felt that only Singer would understand, and so I called.

“Who is this?”

“Alan Kaufman,” I said.

“How can I help you, Mr. Kaufman?”

“Mr. Singer,” I began, heart racing, “I'm a college-aged writer, a novice. I publish a Jewish magazine. My mother was in the Holocaust.”

There was a tired pause. “Your mother, she was in the war?”

“Yes,” I said.

Another pause, this one kinder somehow. “I see. And so. I can help you with something?”

“Please, may I…come see you?”

He considered. Then: “So, come. The address you know?”

I read it off the telephone directory listing.

“Good. You'll be here soon?” He seemed almost concerned for me.

“Right now!”

“I'm the building on the left, off the courtyard. Goodbye.”

I ran the thirty blocks, and when I reached his amazing building on West 86th Street, a giant wedding cake of a thing with a doorman in a booth, I gasped, “Here for Singer!” and was waved right through. By the gloomy lobby lights I searched the mailboxes, and there, incredibly, affixed to the dented brass lid, was the name—IB SINGER—and his apartment number.

He met me dressed in the white shirt, black tie, trousers, unsteady on his feet. “Come in,” he said, and led the way into his bedroom, where an open valise lay on the bed. “Alma, my wife, is already down in Miami. I'm flying tonight to join her.”

“I shouldn't be a pest,” I said. “I can come another time.”

“At my age, there is no other time,” he said without a hint of jest. “Have a seat.”

I sat on the edge of the bed, as often in childhood I would perch on my mother's bed.

“And so, what is your trouble?” he asked. I hadn't said anything about trouble, yet he knew. And so I told him about my obsession with the Holocaust. That I felt alone, not only as a writer but even among American Jews; like a ghost, separate, inhabiting a kingdom of the dead unseen by the living, one made up of the murdered Jewish communities of Europe. I said that in my prose I wrote more for the dead than for the living. He listened intently, while slowly folding and packing shirts.

When I finished, he looked at me carefully and said: “You were born here, in America?”

“Yes, in New York. But how I ended up among the living, I don't know. I really shouldn't be alive.”

He nodded. “This is because your mother was a survivor. She felt guilty and you took this on yourself from her. You might be right. Perhaps you are a ghost. I, too, believe in spirits. This is something we both share. But you should also know that in Jewish lore, when a funeral meets a wedding in the road, the wedding has the right of way. Life comes first. So, you brought me something to see that you wrote? Most young writers do.”

Ashamed, I nodded and handed him a copy of my magazine containing what I considered my best work, a trilogy of short stories about Jewish American immigrants. After all, the only reason for a broke young student to publish a mag is to feature one's favorite author: oneself.

I CONTINUED TO WRITE AND ENTERED ONE OF THE immigrant stories for City College's prestigious Samuel Goodman Short Story Award. It won second prize: fifty bucks.

Emboldened by success, I audited a seminar with Anthony Burgess, author of
A Clockwork Orange,
who provoked my immediate outrage by publishing an essay in the Sunday
New York Times Magazine
in which he characterized his students, which included me, as a bunch of long-haired pot-smoking drunken bongo-playing ignoramuses.

It was true enough, but my ire was provoked; he was rumored to have been paid two hundred thousand dollars for his services. Incensed by his lack of gratitude, I stormed into his office one day.

“What the hell do you mean by this?” I demanded, tossing the magazine article onto his desk.

He glanced down, recognized the piece. “What I mean is the work pays well, and the
Times
pays well. I'm in need of bucks. About your edification, or that of your cronies, I couldn't care less.
I regard you all as utterly hopeless orangutans.”

He reached down, jerked open a heavy iron desk drawer, removed a bottle of gin with two tumblers, poured us each an ample helping, and offered up a toast, which I, standing there outraged, declined to join.

“Here's to bongo jungle. And your loss, by the way. This is better stuff than any of the crap you can afford.” He belted it back, wiped his mouth. “But here's the trick,” he said, gasping and pouring another while nudging my untouched tumbler closer to me. “If you stop protesting, start fugging writing, and if you stop worrying about what some old British arsehole thinks, you could someday afford to buy this kind of gin for yourself, and with money paid for by your own books instead of mine. Now, wouldn't that be nice?”

Watching him down the second drink, I had to admit: it would. Defeated, I hoisted my glass with a weak smile and savored its slow burning descent down my throat.

 

In 1977, two years out of college, I lived in a squalid boardinghouse room on the Upper West Side where I continued to slug whiskey and bang out short stories about the Holocaust and about Jewish immigrants, stories that only the rarest journal would lend space to.

One of these was
Shdemot
, magazine of the kibbutz movement, to which I sent a story about a Jewish sculptor who is betrayed by her Gentile lover and perishes at Auschwitz. The editor, David Twersky, fired off a letter of acceptance which arrived in an onionskin-thin envelope with Israeli postage bearing the image of Theodore Herzl.

I couldn't have been more thrilled. Included was a handwritten note from Twersky himself inviting me to “drop in at the Shdemot offices” should I ever find myself in Tel Aviv.

To me, who had no link to Israel or to anyone who did, it was
like receiving an invite from Ben-Gurion himself to hang out at the Knesset.

GROANING, STRETCHED ON MY SHOULDER, I surveyed the scene with fuzzy hungover eyes, blinking in the harsh sunlight at sun-browned feet, then up to knees, then the hem of a summer dress, a string-net shopping bag dangling from the wrinkled hand of an old woman wearing tortoiseshell sunglasses, a face framed by a cloud of white hair.

Came to my feet, swaying, asked the senior: “Where am I?”

She didn't say.

“Ma'am? Ma'am? If you don't mind: where am I?”

Astonished, with a thick accent, she replied: “What do you mean, where am I? You are in ISRAEL!”

Pale-faced, clammy with sweat, overdressed in a sweater and a tan knee-length thrift-shop camel-hair coat, clutching in one hand a leather suitcase and in the other a typewriter, I asked, baffled: “Where? Where in Israel?”

She gaped back, annoyed. “Tel Aviv! The city. In the center!”

We stood on a traffic island on one of the busiest thoroughfares
in Tel Aviv. I had no idea how I'd gotten here. The last I recalled, I was stumbling drunk through Piccadilly Circus in London; then remember vaguely passing somehow through customs at Ben-Gurion airport. After that, drew a blank. I concluded that how I got here didn't matter: I was here. Good enough! Now needed to situate myself. Twersky had suggested that I go to a kibbutz.

“Would you happen to know where I can find the offices of the kibbutz movement?”

“Which movement? Each is different.”

I remembered. “Ihud Hakibbutzim. Ten Dubnov Street.”

“Dubnov? Dubnov is near. Here is Dubnov.” She pointed. The loose underskin of her browned arm swung. “You see this big antenna? A couple buildings down is a white building, yes? That is your place. You are from America?”

“New York,” I answered, as though it were a separate nation.

“You don't look so good. Are you all right? Why are you sleeping here? You are poor? A poor American? I didn't know there is such a thing.”

“No,” I said, smiling. “Not poor. Drunk. A drunk New Yorker. There are plenty of us.”

Stiffly, she shrugged and crossed at the light to get away from my leering insolence.

Looked around. Saw a sign in Hebrew. Oh, my Lord, I thought. I'm really here.

As dubious a prospect as I may have seemed, I was assigned to a first-rate kibbutz and given a bus ticket to get there. The kibbutz, Mishmar Hasharon, or “Guardian of the Sharon Valley,” was a sprawling agricultural settlement in the central plain, orange grove country, near the coastal city of Netanya.

The proud land swept through my eyes like a vision. In January, the sun flashed out of somber rainy skies with blades of steely light
that clarified the sky into a pale-blue watercolor wash. And the hills sparkled with new green life. Everywhere people in sleeveless shirts and shorts sauntered along happily. Lining the roads were hitchhiking soldiers, and one could see in their faces that there was no meanness in them, that they were good men and women, serving the Jewish state with a sense of belief, of purpose. I was the stranger passing through, my cheek resting on my fist, leaning against a vibrating bus window, given up to an almost pleasant sense of unreality: In this realest of real places, I felt unreal.