Family Morfawitz (eBook)

I
The Family Morfawitz

Hersh has changed our family’s origin story into a series of bad jokes, anachronistic jabs so lewd they cannot be told outside the confines of a family home; after all, we are not alien to media scrutiny. Fortunately for him, our weekly Sabbath dinner provides an ample stage for his humor, and his failing memory means these recitals are something of a guarantee.

An element of clockwork is at play as the more closely allied members of our family gather each Friday in one of the ten family floors atop the Tower Morfawitz. Hersh insists that we are crammed, but that is far from the truth. Only when some of the more remote clan join us on High Holidays are we forced to make use of anything but the grand dining rooms themselves. On such occasions, makeshift tables are set up in the entry halls, ostensibly for the children to sit at, but—before the prayers are through—we have inevitably segregated along party lines. Like eats with like. Our walls are thick, and each time the service door swings open, a silence falls on either room.

In any case, Hersh’s insistence that some of the apartments are less comfortable than others is absurd, for we occupy the top ten floors, and the apartment layouts—with the exception of Zev and Hadassah’s penthouse—are exactly the same.

Zev is sick and ailing upstairs, and Hersh has slowly encroached on the coveted seat at the head of the table, just falling short of sitting in the stately, empty chair. If it were possible to make jokes about Hadassah, somebody might have suggested that Hersh was only trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and her seat at the opposite head. In private, I have often been asked how I can stand to sit so close to her throne and how I keep myself from freezing over. Hersh himself has inquired how it is that I spend so much time with our matriarch, whether I’m planning a coup, ha ha, and wonders that I don’t doze off at her constant retelling of our family’s recent past.

“I hope,” he tells me, “that you’re writing it down. She won’t be around forever . . .”

But it isn’t clear to me that he really believes that, or that anyone really expects the old woman to die. He says such things only in private. Even Hersh has his limits, broad as they are; granted, where these limits might be is not always so clear when his jokes of the Old World begin:

“Once upon a time, your great-grandfather Uri was driving his three daughters home from the market in a wagon, when they were set upon by a group of Cossacks. ‘Quickly,’ he says to them. ‘Hide everything you can. Take these precious jewels and hide them in your knishes, in your schmundies.’” (He has the habit of using multiple Yiddish words as a means of conveying his mastery of the old tongue’s vernacular; it does not go unnoticed that his vocabulary is limited to anatomy.) “They do as he says, and the Cossacks come and steal everything but the clothes off the family’s backs. Watching his wagons be driven away by his own donkeys is too much for Uri, and he collapses in the dirt. ‘Get up, Papa,’ say the girls. ‘It could be so much worse. We’ve still got the jewels . . . Come now, what’s wrong?’ To which Uri replies, ‘If only your mother was here, we could have saved the wagon, too!’”

His next routine features once again this infamously large wife of Uri’s. Gallina was her name, and she was, by all accounts, a physically tremendous woman. Her girth is the star of a few of his jokes:

“On the night that your ancestors left Russia, the Cossacks come to do their looting and their pillaging. They pull the family out into the yard by the hair on their heads, torch the house, and then take their turns raping the daughters. Finally, the lead pogrommer-in-charge, the big pischer, shoves his own unsullied but very attractive son into the mix and points at Gallina. But the beautiful blonde boy—bless him—refuses. ‘But it’s a pogrom,’ says his father. ‘A pogrom is a pogrom.’ The boy nods but defends: ‘I’m all for the pillaging and looting, Father,’ he says. ‘I like to burn down a synagogue as good as the next. And the young girls, I understand. Give me one of them. But is it really necessary to have the mothers, too? And in front of their husbands and children?’ By this point, the flames of the house have offered up sufficient light to illuminate the youth’s superlatively beautiful face, and Gallina stands up and cries out: ‘Hey—a pogrom is a pogrom!’”

The jokes go on in this manner, centered around a little village just beyond the border of Poland and in what was then the tsardom of Russia. His geography is correct—as are his names—but his humor, as Hadassah often warns me, has come at the expense of accuracy.

“You want accuracy,” she says, “you speak to my brother. If you can get his face free of the Manischewitz . . .”

Actually, his face is buried in port, but speak to her brother I do. Naphtali’s memory for events that precede him is flawless; his memory for things he has lived is quite poor. Though he had not yet been born on the night of that great fire, he can tell the story as if he were there at the pogrom, but he will only do so after many glasses. Port is all he drinks, more for the sugar than the alcohol; he is a diabetic and a lush, and both are killing him in tandem. Nevertheless, when the rest of the table has cleared out to hear Hersh try his hands at some new nocturne or other, I sneak Naphtali another glass. Once a week his tongue is loosened, and then history flows from his lips.

On the evening of the pogrom that drove the Morfawitz clan out of Russia for good, nobody was pulled out of the house, though the rape of the daughters did occur—of the sons, too, with the exception of the youngest, who was a dark and sullen youth called Chaim. Chaim sat with his mother and, under the vague threat of gunpoint, watched while the officers went through his siblings; there was never a spoken order to leave the boy alone, only a tacit agreement between the officers as if they were stepping around a curse. Chaim’s dark, unflinching eyes made them uncomfortable, and rather than confront this, they allowed themselves to shy away while at the same time remarking inwardly upon their charity for protecting the innocence of extreme youth. He was nine at the time, and his eyes only moved away from the barbarity of the officers to coldly survey his father, Uri, who sat in the corner crying through closed eyes; they only opened when the captain who was leading the pogrom—the “big pischer,” as Hersh would later distort him—came into the house and took Gallina by her giant arm.

“Uri!” she cried, more disgusted than afraid.

He finally spoke up. “You can’t have her.”

“Dear man,” said the captain, releasing Gallina and striking Uri hard across the face. “This cow? I don’t want her.”

“Oh.”

The men looked disappointed, and the captain quickly recovered his audience.

“Only,” he said, “I don’t want you to have her either. So I’ll make you a deal. Sound fair?”

“Yes,” said Uri. “Wait. What’s the deal?”

“Smart man. You there, boy. What’s your name?” For he had not yet had time to develop his company’s distaste for the boy.

“Chaim.”

“Chaim. You want your mother to live?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want your father to live?”

The boy hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He handed the boy a pistol. Some of the company looked anxious for a moment and then regained their calm. The officer smiled at them and they filled their little glasses with vodka from an open bottle on the kitchen table and laughed. The officer stomped over to where Uri sat, now looking at the pistol in his son’s hand, now looking at the officer, the satisfaction at having made a deal entirely gone from his face. It looked as if the man had never smiled.

“I don’t want your mother, boy. But I don’t want your father to have her either. You understand?”

The boy shook his head and the officer reached down and grabbed Uri by the testicles. Uri stood up from his chair.

“You understand,” the officer said again, his voice now loud and violent.

Chaim nodded. He walked forward.

“No,” said Uri. “Boy . . .”

But the officer now let go and turned to the boy’s mother. He took a knife from his belt and held it to her throat. “Step forward, boy,” he said. The boy stepped forward until he was nearly underneath his father’s groin. “You save them both or you lose them both. The choice is yours. Not choosing is choosing the latter. There will not be a second chance. I’m going to count down from three. You understand?”

The boy nodded his head. The officer dug the point of his knife into Gallina’s skin. It punctured lightly, drew blood. She did not wince, but looked intently at her son. The officer followed her gaze.

“Three,” called the officer. The boy shot. Uri’s legs shook and his...