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by Dena Weiss

I walk. I wake. I work, when I want to. I create uneven labyrinths of letters, I word. He worded and He created what He called earth, water, and swamp. I sink as I drown in that swamp, the same slick color as my patent green boots. I stomp on my existence.

My father called them Nazi boots. He wasn’t trying to be provocative; that’s how boots look to him. That’s how I look at a pile of shoes, a serial number, even a bar of soap. That’s how I look at an Aleph, the first of Hebrew letters, the sound that precedes speech; its arms grow rigid revealing the swastika tattooed upon my memory. When they teach us what it means to be a Jew, they coat the letters in honey, and coax us to lick it off. A sticky, suffocating sweetness clings to us as we learn to read and later still as we try to escape who we are, but can’t. My education is not tied to those books, but to my self, myself as I march up narrow staircases of apartments atop stores atop Brooklyn cellars, numbers on my grandmother’s arm as she washes the dishes and uses her own thumb as a pincushion. She can’t distinguish pain from life. She used to urge my aunts to keep on sewing. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” she said. Work frees. Iron gates and barbed wire. I stick myself with a safety pin and I bleed. My grandmother chuckles generously at my soft, suburban, spoiled hands. She would get me a Band-Aid but doesn’t know where she keeps them. The pressure stops the bleeding, and I get into my father’s car. Go home.

Sometimes I can’t tell whether persecution is an interruption of freedom, or if freedom is just how oppression looks from the perspective of the oppressor. The massah experiences subjugation as luxury. I scrub my own arms, trying to wash off the stain of white privilege, to find the Negro slave underneath. I breathe. I bathe. I believe.

Sometimes I wonder what I believe. I wonder if I’m that homeless guy that I saw clutching his Bible. Inheriting the earth. Do I truly believe that God rewards the faithful and punishes the blind? Does this anonymous man deserve only 17 cents in a cup, while I have merited my $38,564 a year? I drop him a dime as I worry about myself. I think that I believe the reverse. I believe that since I have survived I must legitimize my own survival by becoming one of the faithful, the charitable, even if it means that I too must clutch my bundle of prayers and close my eyes, tight. I feel the world creating around me, tightening around me, obligating around me, in a deafening hum. I no longer feel my own throat. I cannot hear my voice. I word, but I don’t speak. I shake with the responsibility.

I bear my gift awkwardly, like a camel with grapes. I am not well-suited to this burden. My hands are not yet calloused, and it makes me feel like an impostor, like the dusty wax grapes that my grandmother had on the coffee table beside her plastic-covered couch. We sit on that couch because there is nowhere else to sit. We linger on that couch because it clings to our legs, and it hurts too much to stand up from it. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, which somehow hurts more than the cut—after the scar has faded.

I hate myself every time I open the fridge and scream that there is no food. I hate myself every time I walk outside in my orange coat and say that I am freezing. I hate myself every time I hate myself. And then I hate myself some more. I shiver and my stomach grumbles, but I ignore it. I lace up my leather boots, and as I do I dwell in my own vanity. I am Cinderella with my closet full of glass slippers, Nikes, and Docs. I click my heels, suck in my stomach, and smile. I hate to be ungrateful.

My grandmother tells me never to wear silver, it’s cheap. Makes me look cheap, poorly raised. “You want they should think I can’t afford for you gold?” It is I who cannot afford it. I don’t deserve it, but I am not free to reject it. I am her survival.

I overhear a woman complaining that her mink is too heavy. I laugh for a moment until I realize that she is me. She is my soul externalized, what I would look like if I were turned inside out. I shiver again and hurry indoors.

I apologize for a lot of shit. I apologize when someone holds the elevator for me. I apologize when we don’t get off on the same floor. Or I apologize if we both are trying to get out of the door at the same time, and I step on his foot. But I don’t apologize to the homeless guy that I slid past righteously. I don’t like to think about how he is tread upon. He is the bottom rung of my capitalist ladder. The rung not paved with gold. Jacob, my father, dreamed of ladders, of God watching the angels ascend and descend. I paid more attention to his paper cup than I did to his sorrows. I paid him to get out of my conscience, to let me sleep. I dream in comfort. When awake I walk, feeling stalked by the homeless, because I too feel like I am never home. Home is something that you build, not something that you inherit.

Scripture

A fictional philosopher once posited that it is possible, in theory, for life and art to be reversed. I smile. I realize that they are interchangeable because, essentially, they are identical. They reflect one another. Judaism is a text religion. The Jew uses the text to instruct his life, then sees in those texts his sorrows. He becomes the text, and knows himself when he composes his own texts. The tradition states that the Bible, the book that describes Creation, was indeed the blueprint for the world’s construction. So which is the reflector and which is the reflected? Judaism is the language I use to interpret my life, and the language of my life speaks in, as it attacks, my Judaism.

I have so much Scripture in my mind, novels and psalms, legal texts, homiletics, conversations and protests that though I’ve been typing all these years, I have never written a single phrase of my own. Do not think that I have plagiarized. I don’t believe in plagiarism. Not when your blood pumps the Book, your lungs breathe the Word, and your soul wraps itself in the light of those Letters. I am my own reflection.

Without me God does not exist. The Creator depends on the created, as the created do on Him. He needs to be called Creator. Again I smile, I like things even. I did not choose to be created, nor did I choose to survive, but God cannot reverse me without reversing Himself. Noah, I splash around in the flood we’ve made. I sometimes feel invisible when I am lonely. I think that God is invisible because He is the most Alone. I feel bad for God sometimes, and hope that He feels bad for me.

Why bother to create? Did God experience a cosmic existential loneliness? Did He feel for the angels who had no one to gossip about? Does the Omniscient have something to learn from watching me bumble about and mumble about my ignorance and guilt? I wonder why He’s chosen to be this all-knowing seer, instead of being seen. I know that I hate to be ignored, and wonder why God has created us to just while away our lives in endless blasphemy. I know that I’ve stated the answer, that God, like man, needs to create in order to exist. I chuckle at the reverse of metaphor, as I create God in the image of Man.

I also think about this deeply, seriously, as I draw on my sneakers. I pace around my room. I pace along the sidewalks. I pace around the city at breathtaking speed. I run so quickly that I appear still, and the world revolves me. Denacentric. And even here Buber chastises me, ”He who takes what is given him, and does not experience it as a gift, is not really receiving; and so the gift turns into theft.” I know when I lapse into self-righteousness and feel my ingratitude chasing me. I live with the fear that I am stealing my life, stealing my soul, taking a gift and spurning it. I watch myself strip it of its ribbons and its wrappings, and I leave it naked, stolen, underfed. A mass grave.

I try to appreciate. But then I run into the lady in the mink who tells me that if I cannot enjoy my luxury, it is a burden. What good is comfort if it makes you feel uncomfortable, undeserving? Is that not also a stripping of giftedness?  I pause. Meditate. Count to 22. Aleph, Bet. Aleph, Bet.

Survivor

My father tells me to get out of myself, that it doesn’t matter what I think, my actions make me who I am. Lo hamidrash ha’ikar, elah hama’aseh. My father quotes The Fathers. Which, of course, is not a quotation at all. My father is the same father who put his hand on mine and looked into my frantic, lonely eyes, and told me that I was wrong, that “it is always better to be the one who loves more. You always get more out of giving.” I realize that the two statements are connected. What my father has been explaining to me is that the actor is changed by his action in a way that the recipient is not. The recipient may think or feel grateful, and I may be jealous of him to no bounds, but he has not been truly affected by the gift. The giver has.

I deny the truth of what my father has told me, because I know that just as the Creator exists by virtue of the creation, the giver exists in the recipient. I wait quietly in the shadows, and the truth reveals itself.

Last year my father mailed me a book; it was entitled Yossl Rakover Talks to God. (I think Zvi Kolitz wrote it, but of course that hardly matters as I am the reader). In it Yossl addresses God from the depths of the Holocaust; he screams a tormented “thank you” to God for all of his suffering. He thanks God for making him a Jew at a time when being a Jew meant being de-legitimized, ghettoized, and gassed. Why? Because he saw a binary of evil, that there are only two, the perpetrator and the victim. He saw himself with two options, Nazi or Jew. Nazi or Jude.

My grandmother of the waxen grapes spits whenever she says the word Nazi and utters a Jewish curse whenever she sees or reads Hitler (may his name be erased). She says that they are animals. I think of a passage of the Talmud that says that had we not been given the Torah we could have emulated the morality of the animals. I wonder what we could learn from the Nazis. We would learn from the camel to be humble, from the cat to be modest, and from the Nazi? How to make evil into art. How to turn human beings into shoes. How to document it all meticulously.

I realize that according to my theory, I am a Nazi. If there were no Gypsies, no Queers, no Jews, no Handicapped, wouldn’t the Nazi himself be uncreated? Evil is parasitic; it ceases to exist without its impoverished host. I have been vilifying myself because I do not want to feel like the victim. I need to feel that my own wealth and my own hatred make me safe. I want to imprison that Nazihood in my fiction. But I am not the creator. I have not chosen my nation, and it is only my guilt itself that keeps me running, breathless.

I think that I’d side with Yossl. Never will I bleach my hair, my eyes, and my memory, even if it means that I could bleach my conscience. I would rather be in the chosen nation, than of the race that thinks it its destiny to choose. I will never be the Nazi in my inner self, even though I sometimes feel that I march in his shoes.

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