Oh, who is this sportsman, I ask you? This tough-talking soccer-baseball-Frisbee hero with the tons of friends, whose every response borders on the insouciant: Why I listen should? Left behind by a year, he’s still not mastering any English, that’s for sure. Putting together a report on his beloved Italy, he describes the Colosseum fairly concisely as Had roof not any more. Summoned down to the office of the principaclass="underline" “I do samsing bad?” “No, sweetheart,” the dear secretaries say, “no, asheine punim,” “nice face” in Yiddish. They present me with bags from places called Gimbels and Macy’s, filled with batches of their children’s old clothes, more T-shirt appearances by the man who turns into a bat and his masked young slave, the Boy Wonder. Upstairs, back in class, with the sacks of clothes at my feet, the kids whisper at me.
“Whatchoo got there?”
“Dzhas samsing.”
“More new T-shirts? Ooh, let’s see!” Laughter.
“Dzhas samsing for my mazer.”
Mrs. A — Z, not R: “Sheket! Sheket bevakasha!”
“Your mazer goes to Macy’s?”
“Dzhas samsing for my mazer zey geeff daun ze stairs.”
More laughter, except from the liberals’ son and one other source. The kid who is hated even more than I am.
His name is Jerry Himmelstein (no, it’s not). He was born in the U.S.A. to a set of American parents with all the rights and privileges entailed therein. And yet: He is the most hated boy in all of Schechter. I know that I must study him hard and avoid certain behaviors if I am to maintain my position as the second most hated.
It is Shabbat, one of the boys has been chosen to be the Abba (the Father, Hebrew), usually gentle Isaac or Yitzhak. (Every other boy here, myself included, is given the Hebrew name of Yitzhak; all we’re missing are the corresponding Abrahams, our fathers.) A girl, equally gentle Chava (Eve), is the Imma, or Mother. She is singing in a sweet preadolescent voice over the candles, “Baruch atah Adonai … Le’hadlik ner shel Shabbat.” We are all salivating over the braided challah bread and the sour-sweet Kedem “wine” and the promise of two Hershey’s chocolate candies to signal the end of the ritual. The Israeli kids in the back are inducting us into the world of adulthood. Zain, one of them says and grabs his crotch, then makes a challah shape with his hands. Kus, he says and sticks his fingers down an imaginary vagina (I know what that is! Oh, Emmanuelle!), then brings three or four fingers up to his nose and smells them. Mmmm … kussss. Even as Chava and Isaac are kosherizing the candles and the bread and the “wine” and the Hershey’s Kisses for Shabbat, we boys in the back are smelling our fingers with a far more religious expression, until Jerry Himmelstein breaks out in this explosion that he does, the one that sounds like: AGOOF!
“Sheket!” Mrs. A — Z yells. “SHEKET, YELADIM!!!” Quiet, children!
“It was Jerry! It was Jerry!” everyone tattles at once.
“Jerry, shtok et-hapeh!” Shut your mouth!
And everyone is laughing, even me, because that’s Jerry for you.
Agoof is Jerry Himmelstein’s rallying cry and identity statement; it is half spoken and half sneezed, and it means: (1) I think this is funny; (2) I’m confused; (3) I don’t know where I am; (4) I want to be one of you; (5) please stop hitting me; (6) I don’t know how to express this yet because I am eight years old, and my family is troubled, and the world in the way it is presently configured does not treat me as a human, does not afford me all the freedoms promised in the Declaration of Independence that hangs on the wall of class 2C, and I do not understand why it has to be that way.
Does agoof also mean “I have goofed”? Is it apologetic in nature? I will never know.
Jerry Himmelstein has both shirttails hanging out of the front of his pants like little dicks, while I normally only have one. “Jerry!” Mrs. A — Z will say, pointing at his shirttails. “Agoof!” Jerry Himmelstein’s shoes are untied like mine, but sometimes when he’s nervously swinging his little Jerry legs up and down in class, a shoe will fly up in the air and it will hit someone in the head who, if it’s a boy, will hit Jerry in the stomach by return mail. “Agoof!” Jerry’s brown hair descends down his head as if an Italian had emptied a kettle of his favorite food upon it, and his teeth are as yellow as egg yolks. His face darts back and forth looking for potential enemies. A web of spittle will attach to his face when he’s in full breakdown agoof mode. This will usually happen at a birthday party, let’s say his own. An SSSQ girl will tell him, in one way or another, that he’s not a person. Agoof! Then a boy will knock him down into the dirt or smush him with the leftovers of a magical Carvel Cookie Puss cake onto his pasta head. Agoof! Then it’s time to be picked for Wiffle ball, and I’ll be picked second to last and he will be picked last. Agoof! Then instead of hitting the Wiffle ball with the Wiffle bat he will clock himself with it, and then he’ll be lying down on the “plate” clutching at his own chin. Agooooooof! Then another girl, in OshKosh overalls or, later, in a Benetton sweater, will come over and, instead of administering help, inform him once more that he is not a person. And now all these agoofs have added up, as they must, and he sits there, hand to his jaw, hand to his stomach, hand to his face, hand to whatever part has been offended, and he’s wailing like something out of the Torah, like something before Abraham even, like when the earth was exploding into place in Genesis. Adonaaaaaaaaaai! Yaaaaaahweeeeeh! And the more he wails, the more we laugh, the girls and boys of SSSQ, because it’s pretty wonderful, his pain, pretty wonderful as far as these things go.
I take the role of Jerry Himmelstein’s second-in-command seriously. I must be humiliated and hit, too. It is understood that anyone can hit me. That’s what I’m there for, to absorb the sunlit, nascent-mustachioed hatred of the future homeowners of eastern Queens. In a school without excessive discipline, without excessive leadership, without excessive education, speed bumps must be provided so that the whole enterprise can run smoothly. The Stinky Russian Bear, the Red Gerbil, will rise to the occasion!
In the back of the school bus, my friend, another Yitzhak, is punching me in the stomach. Yitzi is only several steps up the totem above me: He’s not from Forest Hills or Ramat Aviv, in the fancy north of Tel Aviv; he’s from Soviet Georgia, and there’s only his mother to care for him, the father I don’t know where he went. I like Yitzi quite a lot, because he can hit me in my own language, and when I cry out Bol’no! (It hurts!), he’ll know what it means. He also must know about my brand-spanking-new circumcision, because he never hits below the belt. His apartment is across the street from my grandmother, who watches me after school, and we’ll go there to play a handheld electronic game called Donkey Kong after the school bus drops us off. He won’t really hit me after we’re out of sight of the other boys, so I think this is probably just a way to assert his place. In a combination of Russian and English we try to discuss ways to move ahead in the ranks of SSSQ, me the impressionable Boy Wonder to his Batman, while his mother serves us delicious Georgian-style dumplings heavy on the onion.