Book I: A Journal of Mistaken Philosophies
It was some forty-five years ago, just as my parents disappeared, that the Scheinhorn family sent me a correspondence by mail, a postcard informing me of the family’s arrangement for me of the row house where I now live, inviting me to relocate here by a certain date, as the new owners of the home I was then inhabiting would be moving in shortly.
About a year ago, the family sent me a second postcard: “In celebration of your sixty-third birthday, the Scheinhorn family extends its far-reaching arms with hugs and kisses to wish you health and happiness. The family is proud of your real-estate investment choice at Graznaya Ulitsa 6, and wants to add it to our family owned buildings already managed under the trusted umbrella of Scheinhorn Properties. As a token of our love, we would like to offer you the generous advance sum of 413,890,000 Lei (EUR 10,000) for the purchase of your property, which we feel would be well managed by our professional real estate office. To demonstrate our goodwill, we additionally offer you 20% of all future income, whether we sell or lease the property. We hope you will consider the family solidarity that Scheinhorn Properties had perpetuated for over sixty years, before 1947 and for these years since the return of our properties. We all look forward to your swift reply.” Why would the Scheinhorn family be willing to invest ten thousand Euro in a property for which I paid two thousand? You can be sure it’s not because I made a good investment; it’s because I took my bad investment and put a worse thing it, leaving them with no option but to buy me out and close me down.
Just as where I saw an ambiguous practice of freedom and experimentation, the Scheinhorn family accused my of supporting hedonistic lechery, so it had happened even with my work, so that while Yana – my sweetest and most perfected goddaughter, my haunting ever-present absence – while she might have detected humor and playfulness in a certain phrase, the Scheinhorn family imposed a subversive interpretation and complained that my derelict theories aimed to dismantle the well-functioning social structures of our town, giving voice to the vagrants that hung around the industrial area of town, undermining the safety and righteousness of the people who worked there.
Never did I expect – I say this honestly – that Janos, my not-always-virtuous tenant, would edit some of my shorter articles, which I gave him just so that he would know where his payments of 30 Euro per week was going, into a pamphlet that he would distribute to the “vagrants” hanging in and around his industrial studio; and never did I imagine that these people, both those that took part in his photo shoots and those that were interested only in the shelter of the unlocked work-shacks, would find in my words a future for themselves, a hope, a voice that spoke directly to their experience, lowly as it may have been. The idea that a man sitting not uncomfortably in the same row-house for forty-five years had anything of interest to say to men and women, young and old, spending their days drinking in the forest of firs and nights drinking in the forest of factories, was more than bewildering – it was a fluke. There are moments when a certain group of people is ready for change, consciously or not, and it takes little more than a roughly relevant combination of words and positions to rouse them. The arguments happen to function as the ideological backboard of their actions. Please understand, I wasn’t unhappy with this unexpected notability – there was an audience for my work, and the farther away that audience was from the Scheinhorn family, the more I felt like I had succeeded in something. But it was difficult to take the credit for being the sole motivational force behind a select group of vagrants that started crossing the highway and moving into the more central areas of Berezino, until the pubs in the once-exclusive center were patronized by already-drunk forest dwellers as often as by the clean and ostensibly-sober townsfolk; and, though I would love nothing more, it would be gratuitous to claim that, after some townsfolk approached the vagrants and unkindly asked them to leave, they would have hastily retreated but for being able to quote some small passage from one of my pamphlets, saying, for example, “Do you know what Schneier Scheinhorn writes about impoliteness? He says that, since the word im-polite is the negation of polite, anyone capable of being impolite is capable of being polite. He also says that someone who is rude cannot be polite, since the two attitudes are in downright opposition to each other. Now, tell me, which are you, impolite or rude?”
Book II: This Moment On
The following week was a cold one for sweaterless Sherman. With no job, he roved aimlessly within the confines of his neighborhood, which, during his absence of two months, had been extensively transformed. The metamorphosis was comprised not of new facades to old structures, not of architectural face-lifts to chafed and eroded shop-signs, but of a deviation in the nature of the establishments, in the neighborhood’s fundamental function. A year in the making, the approaching change, heretofore hidden behind construction fences and temporary false storefronts, had obstructed the day-to-day activities under the guise of later alleviating them, never hinting at their actual endangerment. Now exposed, the change became not only visible, but brandished its conquest of the neighborhood, its having undermined what the neighborhood had been through its veiled, inconspicuous growth.
It had been the case for many decades before that the Fairfax area sustained a working-class population, primarily Jews, with markets, book stores, import shops; large empty parking lots where young people, taught by their parents, could practice early phases of driving; synagogues and Hassidic schools; cafes, delis, pizza parlors, bakeries, bagel shops. American Hassidic Jews lived in a residential area not far from businesses run by secular Israeli Jews who were supported by elderly Russian Jews holed up in subsidized apartments and retirement homes up and down Fairfax. The neighborhood had never gone unengaged, never gone unpatronized, but the businesses and their clients had fallen into a routine, a familiar ritual where money no longer drove their interactions, and new, unexpected clients rarely seemed to find their way into the shops. Being located in the middle of the centerless city, the Fairfax area saw the cars of countless people – driving from Eastside to Westside, from Mid-Wilshire to the Laurel Canyon, from Beverly Hills to Silver Lake to Downtown – pass through on a daily basis; and yet, except when they were headed for historically popular spots, like Canter’s Deli, or Stephano’s Pizza, very few people made essential use of the neighborhood.
Not that the businesses voiced protests against this. Opened, maintained, and operated by immigrants and their children, the shops survived on their own terms, not making a killing and barely making a living, but able to combine the place where they had come from with the place they were now in, continuing their past lives at the same time as starting new ones – and allowing others in the neighborhood to do the same.
But to the building owners and investment speculators, each person who drove through the neighborhood without stopping was a squandered customer, because people spend money, even when they don’t have money to spend, and if they aren’t spending it at your place, you can be sure they’re spending it somewhere else. And to lure this money, there needed to be made to the neighborhood some auspicious, cataclysmic, rupturing metamorphoses. Expansive closed-off shopping complexes, separated from the street by the girth of the structure itself, had to be erected. Within the confines of these complex, open-air pedestrian walkways and courtyards – made to look ambiguously old-fashioned, modeled after some current conception of century-old civilized urbanism – had to be surrounded by familiar shopping cartels – not Bubele’s but Burberry’s, not Haim’s but Hermès. Parking structures had to be constructed, entangled systems of time-measurement had to be devised and instituted – you can park in this section for free for this long if you buy something in this section, and if you park there you can stay longer but you have to buy in that section, and make sure to get a little stamp that says in which section you bought something, so we know to which section you went, in fact, maybe you don’t have to bother going to the second section, it’s really not as interesting, and you’ll probably be happier spending in the first. The whole place had to be stuffed fat with a variety of modes of spending – food, clothes, entertainment, education, electronics – the entire spectrum of shopping-by-category encased in a single hermitage. The neighborhood had to be made difficult to get to, maneuver through, and get out of. Then people would come to spend. The way things had been was too easy. The neighborhood had gone unnoticed precisely because it was so available to everyone, because it offered no sense of exclusivity, no feeling of specialness. The neighborhood as it had been precluded the fantasy of being anything more than one’s own person; and, as people believed they deserved to feel special while spending money, making someone overly aware of being one in a multitude hadn’t sold enough.
Book III: Reins on a Bucking Guilt
Trudging up the steep trench, from the train tracks through the damp dirt to the brown-green pasture above, not without a few minor slips that left streaks of mud above the soles of his shoes, Boris regained his balance and took survey of the scene: Down below him, people’s heads hanging out of the train cabin windows, a small group lining the valley of the trench, sitting on plastic bags they’d laid onto the damp grass, some smoking, others snacking; further out on the pasture several couples had taken the opportunity for a hand in hand walk through the countryside. Boris sauntered alongside the train towards the engine car, where he saw eight or ten people, some in jeans and t-shirts, some in slacks and rolled up sleeves, one wearing a frayed skirt – all pulling the dead brown cow, left across the tracks, up the incline by its legs. As he neared the locus of the crisis, Boris beheld the supposed defilement of the cow: Its skin had been cleaved at, yes, but in multitudinous lines and angles, so that if someone recognized in there a Swastika or a Cross or a Star of David, or any other political or religious emblem, they did so with purely personal and mysterious motives.
The train had been blocked for more than forty-five minutes, Boris still had three or four hours of traveling ahead of him – at this point, it was possible even that he had missed all his connections and would not reach his destination today at all – and the cow was still only halfway up the hill. The effort of pulling it up was so visibly fierce – for every intense heave and ho and pull that they managed, the cow moved an inch or two – that Boris wondered if it wouldn’t have taken less time simply to slice the thing up, light a bonfire, and congregate the entirety of the train’s hoi polloi for an impromptu barbecue. The skeleton and its innards could then be easily moved off the tracks, and the train, now full of sated passengers, could continue on its way. But who knew – maybe nobody except Boris was getting hungry.
Turning away from the hubbub, Boris spotted a lone, large, low-branched birch tree in the distance, and walked in its direction with the idea of climbing it, his mind disburdened from the crisis as the din he left behind no longer distracted him with its associations and preoccupations. The sky was still filled with a bevy of varying gray swaths, from dark streaks of almost black to patches of white turning blue, and a spotty bright light gave portions of the lackluster grass a refurbished aura, a persevering vitality that turned flat brown into saturated gold and dull olive into lush green, so that, in certain parts, the landscape was imbued with a deep assurance in some independent, tenacious, unshakable rightness.
Approaching the tree, Boris saw that its branches were higher than they’d looked from afar – his mood at that point not one that, in answer to a brash urge to sit on the tree, propelled him to actually set about climbing it – and instead he leaned up against it, resting his right arm up on the nearest knot, facing away from the event on the tracks, looking out at the undeveloped acreage, at what looked to the eye, despite his awareness of the world’s general overpopulation, like an overabundance of perfectly habitable space, a section of land within Germany’s borders that not even Germany had yet conquered. Hitler could have inhabited this land, Boris thought, having taken control of Germany after things hadn’t work out according to his hopes or intentions in Austria. Instead, before he’d even really surveyed and settled this place, unable to actually occupy the land he had somehow acquired, he set out for more, tried to conquer the rest of Europe. Of course! Any such person uncomfortable and dissatisfied with his own home, any such person unable to find prosperity or subsistence on his society’s preexisting terms, might have the brute reaction of moving and imposing his twisted personal vision of home – a home of his own invention – somewhere else, where people could not recognize the person’s private perversion. Where one’s essential aberrance was diffused by outward oddity, allowing one to sidestep the failure of distinguishing oneself within one’s own society by thriving in an alien society in which one’s distinction was tolerated as a part of, even attributed to, a less specific, innocuous preternaturalness. And maybe, had Hitler not succeeded in mobilizing this foreign country behind him – a country that historically had aimed for the kind of logic and efficiency that he did in fact provide – maybe he would have finally found himself at a pasture such as this one, his own train stranded by a slaughtered cow, and, tired of perpetual dislocation and alienation, settled for a territory he could see rather than an empire he could barely imagine.
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Looking at the green-brown muck all around, with its cows and its fences and its barns and its tree here and there, Boris had to admit he could certainly never give up his involvement in the world, as marginal as it was, for a life this irrelevant and removed. He was a social being despite his ever protest against it. So how could he expect Hitler, who saw himself as having considerably more influence and relevance to society than Boris, to give it all up for a plot of cow food? Boris, too, was passing through this pasture on the way to other lands, perhaps not looking to conquer a people and a state, but nonetheless with the intention of acquiring and owning a tiny portion of its cultural history. Well, but he was paying good money for his few film reels, and gaining possession of them by consent of their owner. Whereas Hitler, well, he wanted it all for free, and against everyone’s wishes. Stubborn brute. Cheap boor.
The blowing of the train’s horn called back all straying passengers – the sound was faint, proving the distance between Boris and the train to be farther than was apparent – and if he didn’t hustle back he might really be altogether abandoned at this pasture, a prospect that for him, perhaps like for Hitler, really was not so enticing.
Book IV: The Informed Peasant
Yana’s mother lived in Neve Ya’akov, a neighborhood so small and segregated from the rest of Jerusalem that it was mostly considered an outlying village, and, in fact, was known – if someone knew it – only for being remote and difficult to reach; and, what was more, completely not worth the distance and difficulty necessary to reach it. Its unofficial title was the Neighborhood of Gold Teeth, named after all the Bukharian and Russian immigrants who moved to Israel with little more than the yellow ore crowns covering the rotten roots of their oral orifice. Yana lived in this neighborhood not so much as a resident, nor a guest, but more as an entity perpetually passing through. The neighborhood infrequently acknowledged her presence, and she even less so asked anything of it. They tolerated each other the way the street-signs tolerated the cars that passed them.
Yana sat under the orange light of a streetlight on a short white-stone fence at the street-end of Neve Ya’akov’s “center”: an open-topped pavilion lined with several small convenience stores open till late in the evening, where one could buy cigarettes, beer, water, gum, pickles, a pastry, salted fish, cheese, milk, a bottle of wine; a shop which sold a mix of clothes, discontinued shoes, plastic goods from toys to kitchenware, all products with no clear origin in style or intention; a pharmacy which was open only the first half of each day; a small second-floor synagogue; a supermarket which closed early in the evening; a post-office which closed in the late afternoon; a new pizza parlor that stayed open late; and a restaurant and ceremony hall under construction, having taken over the space where the only local bank branch had been, and where now there was only a cash-machine. It was eleven-thirty at night, by now everything in the pavilion was closed, and the only preoccupying product she could get while she waited for Sherman to arrive was a pack of cigarettes, to be purchased from a vending machine next to the neighborhood’s gas station on the other side of Yana’s mother’s apartment building.
The gas station was connected to the parking lot flanking the broad side of Yana’s mother’s apartment building, which looked out in the direction of Jordan, whereas the pavilion was adjacent to the side facing the center of Jerusalem. Leaving behind the pavilion’s mishmash of teenage and elderly late-night loafers, Yana walked, unnoticed, anonymous, in the Jordanian direction, through one entrance of the apartment building and out the other, weaving past parked cars, passing by, but not getting too near to, the neighborhood police station, which stood next to the gas station and operated all day and night, but which was not a place for entertainment or diversion, at least not for anyone unwilling to break a law or pose a threat. There were usually two or three policewomen and policemen loitering around the station entrance in their loose dark blue trousers and looser light blue shirts, with braided black bands hanging over their shoulders to designate their rank and a gun or two hanging from their belt or shoulder to designate the extent of their force – leaning back on the metal barricades that set the police station apart from the parking lot and the gas station, they didn’t seem at first to be in the tensest of states, but beneath their nonchalance was a detectable potential for severe formality, for professional harshness.
Yana turned right into the gas station, its whiter light was given a blue tint in contrast with the orange of the street lamps; she dropped all the coins she had into the slot, and, after selecting a pack of Time cigarettes, she passed back by the pumps with their locked-up nozzles and, having as usual forgotten to bring matches, she finally approached the chatting police officers and asked for a light. Though those few words she uttered in her slightly Russian-tinged Hebrew – “Do you have a light?” – were instinctively and correctly said, they hung in the vacant night air with blunt distinction from the streaming native Hebrew she had interrupted. There was something in her voice – not the formulation of her words, not her “accent,” but her actual voice, the way she projected sound from her throat – which acknowledged with every word, “Yes, I’m not from here; if you want, you can pretend I’m not here at all.” Heeding that unsaid yet vocalized admission, a policewomen no older than Yana, who had been mid-sentence when Yana made her request, uninterestedly pulled out a lighter, brought the flame up to the cigarette hanging out of Yana’s mouth, and pulled it away, continuing the monologue about her brother’s idiot wife which the slightly older policewoman listened to with weary, encumbered absorption.
Rather than returning the way she’d come, through the apartment building, Yana walked back to the center along the main road, which made a loop down, up, and around the outlying hill. Apartment buildings, extending north and east from the pavilion, made up the totality of the neighborhood. A mix of new immigrants – Bukharians and Russians, along with Ethiopians, Georgians, and Moroccans – lived around the upper portion of the hill, close to the pavilion and just under a large army base that crowned the hilltop. On the slightly lower flank of the hill, above the white-rocked foothill that descended into an uninhabited valley and ascended toward Arab villages, was a dense conclave of Hassidim, who, besides having a few small congregations and study rooms established in rented, second-floor office spaces above the pavilion, worshiped in synagogues which could be found by walking in any direction.
Now, close to midnight, as Yana sat watching the bus stop across from the pavilion, looking for Sherman to get off one of the busses, she could see Hassidim sitting or standing throughout the crowded busses, some holding religious texts close in front of their face, some chatting, all waiting for the next one or two stops further down the hill, while smartly dressed teenagers and bag-toting elderly exited the bus and dispersed, some to the monolithic twenty-five-story apartment blocs behind them, some to the smaller three- and five-story apartment buildings along the neighborhood’s edge, and some to the pavilion itself, to sit and pass time.
A teenage boy with blond highlights separated from his pack and walked over to Yana, who was sitting at a remove from the sidewalk on a large white stone under a low tree; he asked her for a cigarette, and she pulled one out of the box and gave it to him. He asked her for a light, and remembering that she didn’t have one, she looked at her own cigarette and saw that if she intended to have another smoke she would be needing another one soon, too. She lit his cigarette with what was left of hers, and immediately lit another cigarette for herself, hoping that Sherman would arrive soon so that she wouldn’t have to chain smoke the whole pack.
Book V: The Habit of Reinvention
Schneier Scheinhorn wanted to become a white-stone Jerusalem building. How could he become such a thing? Could he simply splatter himself all over its facade of rocks, leave there the residue of his blood, innards, and splintered bones? Could he jump to his death onto a building?
And anyway, it wasn’t death he aspired to, it was for the sake of life that he wanted to jump – to jump to his life – jump in order to save himself from the anguish he knew was not a part of him, and yet was still there: the anguish that projected itself onto everything it possibly could, everything there was.
Splattering himself on a wall could help, after all, in another important way: it could help relieve some of the accumulated vodka he had started drinking unremittingly two years before, not long after his arrival in Israel – a reservoir of alcohol that had dispersed and settled throughout every nook of his body, the gazillions of molecules of hydroxyl compound that might evaporate at least in part once his lungs and liver and kidneys had a chance to air out, once his arteries had a chance to swing freely in the city’s cool evening breeze.
Having spent every single day of his sixty-three years in the Belarusian town of Berezino, Scheinhorn left immediately upon his release from the Berezino Province Jail Detainment Annex, into which he had been emplaced for nine months for abetting lewd conduct. His sudden emancipation was as mysterious as his original confinement had been unwarranted. To his credit, he attempted during those nine months to produce a not-too-long text, a journal centered around the events that had landed him there; but, upon reflection, he found that the work over-philosophized banal issues which he had at best an indirect relation to, and over which he could grant himself at most a dubious, unreliable authority.
Morally loath to retreat to his row-house, unwilling any longer to bear Berezino’s degenerate core, Scheinhorn had looked to the Modern State of Israel for asylum, which, as a matter of course, it gave to him the same way it had given it to near one million other ex-Soviet Jews; a few provisions were promised him – the opportunity to buy household appliances without the usually heavy taxes, a meager monthly stipend, and free healthcare – but as he had neither a household nor the capital to buy appliances (which, in theory, he would then resell for a slight profit), all he was left with was $300 per month, and a hospital bed or a visit to a doctor, in case, God forbid, he ever needed either one.
Scheinhorn had been assigned to a small absorption center for older olim not far from the Russian Compound in Jerusalem’s center, and when his absorption program ended one cool autumn day he was released, hatted and sweatered in his dark gray slacks and with a small doctor’s bag, into the city, where he was supposed to establish for himself a mollifying routine. But using some self-acquired elementary accounting from his brief period as land-owner, Scheinhorn gathered that even renting the smallest furthest-away flat in Jerusalem would not leave him with enough money to cover what was necessary for basic sustenance; not to mention that discarding Jerusalem, into which he had spent such effort being absorbed, in exchange for some cheaper, smaller, or more welcoming community would have demonstrated yet another moral compromise: a rejection of the anonymity and inconsequence he had delivered himself into, a return to the insular, parochial concerns of cohabitants that would likely agree prejudicially on the very issues that required dialogue, debate, and disagreement.
Unable to find his way through this dilemma using logic, reason, or accounting, Scheinhorn bought himself a small bottle of vodka and, taking it to Independence Park, sat down on a bench set into an alcove under the shade of a willow, mulling over his whole predicament to the hankering beatings of a beginner’s darbouka class coming from a community center on the other side of the fence-wall behind him. In thinking about himself and the city, Scheinhorn found respite in Jerusalem’s contradictory qualities: the mayhem and unconcern of its markets and stands, the touristic and pious preoccupation of its center, the manifest and distancing austerity of its religious devotees, the enduring pining for peace and the unyielding imminent danger, the adamant phenomenon of its Jewish governmental body and the resentful persistence of its Palestinian presence. All these things together in one complicated, yet finite, yet mysterious, yet welcoming, yet severe, yet generous, yet limiting, yet inexhaustible place – which he couldn’t afford.
His attention having been fixed on these thoughts as they took shape, he had finished the entire bottle of vodka without really noticing. Then, overcome by a physical urge to disengage which simultaneously put his mental capacities out of commission, he laid down on the bench and, also without really noticing, fell asleep – a slumber during which his internal constitution was steadily both annihilated and reconstituted, mutated rather than ruined, resulting in a Scheinhorn that was still Scheinhorn but somehow no longer. And it wasn’t so much that he liked the new Scheinhorn than that he liked taking a break from the old one. So that not thinking but escape had solved his dilemma: from that afternoon on, there would be vodka and a bench.
And yet, despite having slept every afternoon for more than a year and a half either in Independence Park, at or around Zion Square, or in Saker Gardens, neighboring the Israeli Defense Force’s base in the city center and the Knesset, not far from the Israel Museum, Scheinhorn would have felt like a liar saying he had become Israeli. He could manage about five words in his sixth language – piled on top of Russian, Belarusian, French, and some Spanish and Italian – Hebrew, the language in which he intended to live out his advancing years, the language in which he was supposed to read the Torah, the language of his people, the reclaimed language, the re-organized language, the language of his Israel, the language of his missing Israeli ID card. Curiously enough, there was no Russian accent traceable in his Hebrew – perfect intonation with all nine words he could say – but what? Did that make him Israeli?
Of course.
Or. Not.
Could he become Israeli? Could he, at sixty-five, take the responsibility of Israel onto himself, all by himself?