Here I Am

ALSO BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

FICTION

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Everything Is Illuminated

NONFICTION

Eating Animals

HAMISH HAMILTON

an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China

Published in Hamish Hamilton hardcover by Penguin Canada, 2016

Simultaneously published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Safran Foer

An excerpt from
Here I Am
originally appeared, in slightly different form, in
The New Yorker
.

The president's speech, in the chapter “Nothing Is Not Political,” was adapted from a speech President Obama gave, in 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti. The poems quoted from in Part VII are Franz Wright's “Year One” and “Progress.” Radiolab, Invisibilia, 99% Invisible, and Dan Carlin's Hardcore History offered the inspiration for the podcasts Jacob listens to.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

www.​penguinrandomhouse.​ca

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Foer, Jonathan Safran, 1977-, author

Here I am / Jonathan Safran Foer.

ISBN 978-0-7352-3293-8 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-7352-3294-5 (electronic)

I. Title.

PS3606.O38H47 2016   813′.6   C2016-902468-7

Ebook ISBN 9780735232945

Book design by Jonathan D. Lippincott

Cover design by gray318

v4.1

a

When the destruction of Israel commenced, Isaac Bloch was weighing whether to kill himself or move to the Jewish Home. He had lived in an apartment with books touching the ceilings, and rugs thick enough to hide dice; then in a room and a half with dirt floors; on forest floors, under unconcerned stars; under the floorboards of a Christian who, half a world and three-quarters of a century away, would have a tree planted to commemorate his righteousness; in a hole for so many days his knees would never wholly unbend; among Gypsies and partisans and half-decent Poles; in transit, refugee, and displaced persons camps; on a boat with a bottle with a boat that an insomniac agnostic had miraculously constructed inside it; on the other side of an ocean he would never wholly cross; above half a dozen grocery stores he killed himself fixing up and selling for small profits; beside a woman who rechecked the locks until she broke them, and died of old age at forty-two without a syllable of praise in her throat but the cells of her murdered mother still dividing in her brain; and finally, for the last quarter century, in a snow-globe-quiet Silver Spring split-level: ten pounds of Roman Vishniac bleaching on the coffee table;
Enemies, A Love Story
demagnetizing in the world's last functional VCR; egg salad becoming bird flu in a refrigerator mummified with photographs of gorgeous, genius, tumorless great-grandchildren.

German horticulturalists had pruned Isaac's family tree all the way back to the Galician soil. But with luck and intuition and no help from above, he had transplanted its roots into the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., and lived to see it regrow limbs. And unless America turned on the
Jews—
until
, his son, Irv, would correct—the tree would continue to branch and sprout. Of course, Isaac would be back in a hole by then. He would never unbend his knees, but at his unknown age, with unknown indignities however near, it was time to unball his Jewish fists and concede the beginning of the end. The difference between conceding and accepting is depression.

Even putting aside the destruction of Israel, the timing was unfortunate: it was only weeks before his eldest great-grandson's bar mitzvah, which Isaac had been marking as his life's finish line ever since he crossed the previous finish line of his youngest great-grandson's birth. But one can't control when an old Jew's soul will vacate his body and his body will vacate the coveted one-bedroom for the next body on the waiting list. One can't rush or defer manhood, either. Then again, the purchase of a dozen nonrefundable airplane tickets, the booking of a block of the Washington Hilton, and the payment of twenty-three thousand dollars in deposits for a bar mitzvah that has been on the calendar since the last Winter Olympics are no guarantee that it's going to happen.

A group of boys lumbered down the halls of Adas Israel, laughing, punching, blood rushing from developing brains to developing genitals and back again in the zero-sum game of puberty.

“Seriously, though,” one said, the second
s
getting caught on his palate expander, “the only good thing about blowjobs are the wet handjobs you get with them.”

“Amen to that.”

“Otherwise you're just boning a glass of water with teeth.”

“Which is pointless,” said a redheaded boy who still got chills from so much as thinking about the epilogue of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
.

“Nihilistic.”

If God existed and judged, He would have forgiven these boys everything, knowing that they were compelled by forces outside of themselves inside of themselves, and that they, too, were made in His image.

Silence as they slowed to watch Margot Wasserman lapping water. It was said that her parents parked two cars outside their three-car garage because they had five cars. It was said that her Pomeranian still had its balls, and they were honeydews.

“God
damn it
, I want to be that drinking fountain,” a boy with the Hebrew name Peretz-Yizchak said.

“I want to be the missing part of those crotchless undies.”

“I want to fill my dick with mercury.”

A pause.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You know,” Marty Cohen-Rosenbaum, né Chaim ben Kalman, said, “like…make my dick a thermometer.”

“By feeding it sushi?”

“Or just injecting it. Or whatever. Dude, you know what I mean.”

Four shakes, and their heads achieved an unintended synchronicity, like Ping-Pong spectators.

In a whisper: “
To put it in her butt
.”

The others were lucky to have twenty-first-century moms who knew that temperatures were taken digitally in the ear. And Chaim was lucky that the boys' attention was diverted before they had time to slap him with a nickname he would never shed.

Sam was sitting on the bench outside Rabbi Singer's office, head lowered, eyes on the upturned hands in his lap like a monk waiting to burn. The boys stopped, turning their self-hatred toward him.

“We heard what you wrote,” one said, thrusting a finger into Sam's chest. “You crossed a line.”

“Some fucked-up shit, bro.”

It was odd, because Sam's profligate sweat production usually didn't kick in until the threat had subsided.

“I didn't write it, and I'm not your”—air quotes—
“bro.”

He could have said that, but he didn't. He also could have explained why nothing was as it seemed. But he didn't. Instead, he just took it, as he always did in life on the crap side of the screen.

On the other side of the rabbi's door, on the other side of the rabbi's desk, sat Sam's parents, Jacob and Julia. They didn't want to be there. No one wanted to be there. The rabbi needed to embroider some thoughtful-sounding words about someone named Ralph Kremberg before they put him in the ground at two o'clock. Jacob would have preferred to be working on the bible for
Ever-Dying People
, or ransacking the house for his missing phone, or at least tapping the Internet's lever for some dopamine hits. And today was supposed to be Julia's day off—this was the opposite of off.

“Shouldn't Sam be in here?” Jacob asked.

“I think it's best if we have an adult conversation,” Rabbi Singer said.

“Sam's an adult.”

“Sam is
not
an adult,” Julia said.

“Because he's three verses shy of mastering the blessings after the blessings after his haftorah?”

Ignoring Jacob, Julia put her hand on the rabbi's desk and said, “It's clearly unacceptable to talk back to a teacher, and we want to find a way to make this right.”

“But at the same time,” Jacob said, “isn't suspension a bit draconian for what, in the scheme of things, is not really
that
big a deal?”

“Jacob…”

“What?”

In an effort to communicate with her husband but not the rabbi, Julia pressed two fingers to her brow and gently shook her head while flaring her nostrils. She looked more like a third-base coach than a wife, mother, and member of the community attempting to keep the ocean from her son's sand castle.

“Adas Israel is a progressive shul,” the rabbi said, eliciting an eye-roll from Jacob as reflexive as gagging. “We have a long and proud history of seeing beyond the cultural norms of any given moment, and finding the divine light, the Ohr Ein Sof, in every person. Using racial epithets here is a very big deal, indeed.”

“What?”
Julia asked, finding her posture.

“That can't be right,” Jacob said.

The rabbi sighed a rabbi's sigh and slid a piece of paper across his desk to Julia.

“He
said
these?” Julia asked.

“He wrote them.”

“Wrote
what
?” Jacob asked.

Shaking her head in disbelief, Julia quietly read the list: “Filthy Arab, chink, cunt, jap, faggot, spic, kike, n-word—”

“He wrote ‘n-word'?” Jacob asked. “Or the
actual
n-word?”

“The word itself,” the rabbi said.

Though his son's plight should have taken mental precedence, Jacob became distracted by the fact that this was the only word that could not bear vocalization.

“There must be a misunderstanding,” Julia said, finally handing the paper to Jacob. “Sam nurses animals back to—”

“
Cincinnati Bow Tie?
That's not a racial epithet. It's a sex act. I think. Maybe.”

“They're not all epithets,” the rabbi said.

“You know, I'm pretty sure ‘Filthy Arab' is a sex act, too.”

“I would have to take your word for it.”

“My point is, maybe we're completely misinterpreting this list.”

Ignoring her husband again, Julia said, “What has Sam said about this?”

The rabbi picked at his beard, searching for words as a macaque searches for lice.

“He denied it. Vociferously. But the words weren't there before class, and he is the only person who sits at that desk.”

“He didn't do it,” Jacob said.

“It's his handwriting,” Julia said.

“All thirteen-year-old boys write the same.”

The rabbi said, “He wasn't able to offer another explanation for how it got there.”

“It's not his job to,” Jacob said. “And by the way, if Sam
were
to have written those words, why on earth would he have left them on the desk? The brazenness proves his innocence. Like in
Basic Instinct
.”

“But she did it in
Basic Instinct
,” Julia said.

“She did?”

“The ice pick.”

“I guess that's right. But that's a movie. Obviously some genuinely racist kid, with a grudge against Sam, planted it.”

Julia spoke directly to the rabbi: “We'll make sure Sam understands why what he wrote is so hurtful.”

“Julia,” Jacob said.

“Would an apology to the teacher be sufficient to get the bar mitzvah back on its tracks?”

“It's what I was going to suggest. But I'm afraid word of his words has spread around our community. So—”

Jacob expelled a puff of frustration—a gesture he'd either taught to Sam or learned from him. “And hurtful to
whom
, by the way? There's a world of difference between breaking someone's nose and shadow boxing.”

The rabbi studied Jacob. He asked, “Has Sam been having any difficulties at home?”

“He's been overwhelmed by homework,” Julia began.

“He
did not
do this.”

“And he's been training for his bar mitzvah, which is, at least in theory, another hour every night. And cello, and soccer. And his younger brother Max is going through some existential stuff, which has been challenging for everyone. And the youngest, Benjy—”

“It sounds like he's got a lot on his plate,” the rabbi said. “And I certainly sympathize with that. We ask a lot of our children. More than was ever asked of us. But I'm afraid racism has no place here.”

“Of course it doesn't,” Julia said.

“Hold on. Now you're calling Sam a
racist
?”

“I did not say that, Mr. Bloch.”

“You
did
. You
just did
. Julia—”

“I don't remember his exact words.”

“I said, ‘Racism has no place here.' ”

“Racism is what racists express.”

“Have you ever lied, Mr. Bloch?” Jacob reflexively searched his jacket pocket yet again for his phone. “I assume that, like everyone who has ever lived, you have told a lie. But that doesn't make you a liar.”

“You're calling me a liar?” Jacob asked, his fingers wrapped around nothing.

“You're boxing at shadows, Mr. Bloch.”

Jacob turned to Julia. “Yes, the n-word is clearly bad. Bad, bad, very bad. But it was one word among many.”

“You think the larger context of misogyny, homophobia, and perversion makes it
better
?”

“But he
didn't do it
.”

The rabbi shifted in his chair. “If I can speak frankly for a moment.” He paused, thumbing the inside of his nostril with plausible deniability. “It can't be easy for Sam—being Irving Bloch's grandson.”

Julia leaned back and thought about sand castles, and the Shinto shrine gate that washed up in Oregon two years after the tsunami.

Jacob turned to the rabbi. “Excuse me?”

“For a child's role model—”

“This should be good.”

The rabbi addressed Julia. “You must know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“We do
not
know what you mean.”

“Perhaps if it didn't seem, to Sam, that saying anything, no matter—”

“You've read volume two of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson?”

“I have not.”

“Well, if you were the worldly kind of rabbi, and
had
read that classic of the genre, you'd know that pages 432 to 435 are devoted to how Irving Bloch did more than anyone else in Washington, or
anywhere
, to ensure the passage of the Voting Rights Act. A kid could not
find
a better role model.”

“A kid shouldn't have to look,” Julia said, facing forward.

“Now…did my father blog something regrettable? Yes. He did. It was regrettable. He regrets it. An all-you-can-eat buffet of regret. But for you to suggest that his righteousness is anything but an inspiration to his grandchildren—”

“With all due respect, Mr. Bloch—”

Jacob turned to Julia: “Let's get out of here.”

“Let's actually get what Sam needs.”

“Sam doesn't need anything from this place. It was a mistake to force him to have a bar mitzvah.”

“What? Jacob, we didn't force him. We might have
nudged
him, but—”

“We nudged him to get circumcised. With the bar mitzvah, it was proper force.”