JesusChristImaJew

(mostly fiction)

Why is this day like no other(s)? Because it is Passover, and because that afternoon I had just taken my first hit of LSD. I was sure enough about to get some Religion that day, but just exactly how it went down, I couldn’t believe and still cant to this very day. And you goddam betcha, there’s no “apostrophe” in “cant” for a reason. It’s an inside joke for Jews. That was the day I realized that I was A JEW.

Up until then, I had always been “Jewish.” It wasn’t any different than being Methodist or Episcopalian or Baptist or anything else. Your parents made you go to some building where everybody did hoo-lah hoo-lah god for a couple hours and went home. Dig it, my family still did Christmas. Oh, we called it Hanukah, what with the menorah and all, but we had a tree, and dig this… we had Santa Claus. Yep, we had Santa Claus, and just because my parents went to temple occasionally and made us go there to learn Hebrew, I figured it was just like the Catholic kids learning Latin, but everybody had Christmas… and everybody had Santa Claus. Some of the Jewish kids (who were in my Hebrew classes, otherwise I didn’t talk to them much) did NOT have Santa Claus or Christmas because it was “against tradition” and “goy,” but to hell with them. They even called me “Zakkie the Goy,” but like I said, to hell with them.

Now, let’s back to Santa Claus. I was about that age when you begin to figure out that Santa Claus is jive. Most white kids didn’t know “jive” back then but we wrapped it around some other word(s), like, “not real” or “abstract” or “symbolic” or “spiritual,” or in my own kid-at-the-time jargon, “fake.” My parents managed to dodge the question artfully for a long time, but I finally put the question to Momma directly. I can’t remember just how I phrased it, but it was airtight. No holes. I think I used the word “real.” Momma smiled.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think you guys buy the presents and put them under the tree and tell us Santa Claus brought it down the chimney.”

“Is that what you think?” She sweetened.

“I’m not telling you what I think. I’m asking you if it’s true.” Cripes, I must have been five or six years old. My dad was an Attorney. I redirected the question. “Do you and Dad buy the presents and put them under the tree and tell us Santa Claus brought them?” Momma’s sweetness was gone, and so was her smile. She looked at me directly, like an adult for the first time in my life. I had never seen that look before. It was enough. It was enough of an answer. When Momma looked at me like that for the rest of her life, it was always enough of an answer. I will miss that look for the rest of my days, and to this day when I think about Momma’s smile I start to cry, but if you be sayin’ anything about a Man or his Momma, you standin’ on shaky ground sukka.

It was at dinner time some time later when I posed the thesis to my parents after my little sisters had excused themselves and gone out of earshot. “If Santa Claus isn’t real, then God isn’t real.” Momma gave dad her same look that she gave me for the first time some time ago. Then I saw the same look on Pop’s face, only a little different. He turned that look on me, but it wasn’t the first time I had seen it on him. He put the look and his face close to mine. His eyes held great sincerity, but behind that I could see great fear. I could smell his cigarette breath. And I had always believed that the Old Man wasn’t scared of nothin’. He was a bombardier in World War Two. Momma’s smile had gone and Pop’s fear had arrived in and from my childhood. It was there that the Child, father to the Man entered the Spirit World and the Man was being born. We went to see the Rabbi. We talked about it a lot, which convinced me absolutely that I was correct. My parents and the Rabbi stuck to their guns, God is real and Santa Claus is not. Well, what if they’re both real in the same way? What if they’re both unreal in the same way?

Momma and Pop were absolutely not going to go there, and for my troubling impertinence my innocent little sisters and my guilty ass had to endure an even heavier dose of going to the building and doing hoo-lah hoo-lah god for extra hard time, and it worked on my sisters, at least for a while. So here it is Passover in 1968 and I’m at home with my parents and sisters and aunts and uncles and Momma’s giving me a yarmulke we keep in the closet but I don’t wear it because I need bobby pins. My aunts look like clowns and my uncles look like frightened horses and it’s all like a pagan bacchanal in the Roman Empire. Outside later, there was a big sign hanging in the heavens the size of Rhode Island that the entire planet could see that I hadn’t seen until now. It was in the shape of a pointing finger that stopped inches away from the top of me toiny heed.

It said “A JEW,” and the big letter “A” is important, like Hester Prynne’s badge. Nigger, Jew, Hippie, Commie, it doesn’t matter. Somebody is going to see that giant pointing finger and take extreme exception to whatever it is they think that you are or what they want you to be. And they’re not going to call you “Zakkie the Goy” or even try to beat you up. They’re going to kill you. Every Jew knows about this, like every American knows about Thanksgiving and turkey, and I am both “Jewish” and “American.” It (“Shoah” and “Thanksgiving’) has about the same weight in our daily lives, and carries all the same bullshit baggage, mythology and fluff. It makes us think we’re “special,” that we’re victims and not perpetrators. That we have to get “revenge,” or at least “not let it happen again,” and that’s not exactly the truth.

Now I am at Birkenau. I am fifty six years old, and I’ve been dreading this trip all my life. It was the Jews who stuffed and unloaded the ovens, the Germans who actually dropped the Zyklon-B in the holes. And I am, by “ethnic background,” a both a German and a Jew. I have wrestled for over fifty years with God and Santa Claus like Jacob and the Angel. I took Catholic lessons in my youth, (ah…Bernadette… the sweet Irish Catholic girl whose steel-fisted father brooked no shenanigans with boys who wasn’t Catholic. Hell, I would have become a Whirling Dervish, even Irish, which Momma picked up when her Grandmother married a goy, so I could be both Irish and Catholic for Bernadette) so I know all about Jesus ( Und ist kein ander' Gott )and love him too. Part of the spirits that move unseen among us, He is, the character in the Text, the Word made flesh and dwel(ling)(t) among us. Faith and begorrah. I knew all that and a bag of communion wafers, what I didn’t know was why. So I went to Birkenau to ask the question, calling out God like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Oh She spoke to me, “…what hast thou done? Thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

“Quit with that bullshit,” I said. I know I did it. Why did you let me do it? Why did you not intervene? Why did you not answer the question or show a sign to stop me from doing this? Yes I know I did it… and I know that you know that I know that you know… and all like that. Stop treating me like a child. There was no answer. Hah. Just like the cops, when you need them… and all like that. So there it was, standing on the ash heap of a million human beings: God and Santa Claus. What bullshit. And later, as I walked toward the steps at the Universitat Munchen where Die Weiße Rose, a group of crazy college kids threw the flugblatters, or flyers, to protest the Nazis in 1942 and it cost them their lives. They (Die Weiße Rose) are Righteous Among Nations now, I said a kaddish for them and had to explain to the students why there were stones on the memorial. Jews, I explained, (and I could and did not say, “We Jews”) don’t leave flowers. Nobody heard the kaddish, it was silent in my mind.

The flugblatters are still there, ceramic replicas imbedded in the cobblestones. I saw them, and She spoke to me, “…why seek you the living among the dead?” I knew I was in deep trouble, and so I was. One does not call out the Ruler of the Universe, Adonai Eloheinu, at High Noon. She was later to send a thunderbolt into my heart and strike me half blind, I knew I would have to take a ass-whuppin, and I knew I had it coming, just like the very few ass whuppins I got from the Old Man. All that stuff was way in the future on that Passover Evening of 1968.

Back through the fog of time and the smell of sandalwood I carried the guitar to Bobenbarbs, where dwelt my two-headed friend. Now I am barely twenty years old. I didn’t want to talk about being A JEW, hell they knew that, they were just too discrete to tell me about the Rhode Island finger. I think they had taken some of the same acid, so I wasn’t going to let it follow me into their apartment, which was small enough without the Rhode Island Finger being wedged in there among the smoking hippies and the chocolate Easter Eggs… and the smell of Barb’s bread baking. Crap, my place smelled like a sweat sock and it was full of beer cans and bullshit from my friends sleeping on the floor. Bobenbarbs was like home without the clowns and frightened horses, but the circus was there, all right. Damn everything but the Circus. But that night I was A JEW, a hippie, a commie, a nigger… all rolled into one.

I had to go where there were other jews and hippies and commies and niggers but where Bobenbarb still held a tether to the world of White Folk, and all would be well this night here in Lexington, where the bullet-headed Sturmvolk clucked and cooed in the streets like Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds. It would be a little while yet before the trooper’s heel and the feel of steel. That night, I had no concept of such a thing. We were wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying Nation, a moving paper fantasy. We were listening to the new-told lie that was as old as old as the hills and twice as dusty. We were mixing metaphors and metaphysics and hash oil and snake oil and smoking, poking, broke and joking. Old Ricco-red might have been there too. “Eeen ze back door… who shood sneek boot Rocky Rococo,” heh, we snarked at that line for years, Ricco and me, and g_d, how I miss him, like Momma’s smile, like the Old Man’s bad jokes. Now it’s a dream that makes me sad, like ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat. Splat. I lost it all madly.

But in those days, our lives were just like that.