He’s not a bad boy, Yitzi (one day, he’ll grow up to be a wonderful man). He’s just trying to become American, trying to get ahead. To that end, he has an amazing leather jacket with zippers, not made of real Polish leather but out of something much cooler, James Dean, for all I know. Years later, in the back of a crowded minibus huffing its way onto Moscow Square in what is now St. Petersburg, I am reintroduced with major prejudice to that Yitzi smell, the combination of leather and onion and the back of a bus. I cry out, “Excuse me! Excuse me!” fighting my way out of the packed vehicle and into the broken sunlight. “But you’ve just paid,” the incredulous driver will say. “I forgot something,” I say to him. “I forgot something at home.” Which is the opposite of what I mean.
Tot kto ne byot, tot ne lyubit, my father likes to say.
He who doesn’t hit, doesn’t love.
Or is it: Byot, znachit lyubit? He hits, therefore he loves. Said “jokingly” of violent husbands in Russian marriages.
Essentially he’s got it down. If you want to make someone love you, a child, say, you should hit him well. If you’ve come home from your new engineering job at a national laboratory on Long Island, exhausted and angry, because you don’t speak the language well and the Jewish boss was gone and you had to deal with the evil German one and the stinking Chinese one, and the Portuguese and Greek engineers who are often your allies didn’t intervene in your favor, and your wife’s a suka with her fucking rodstvenniki in Leningrad, her dying mother, and her sisters to whom she’s just sent three hundred dollars and a parcel of clothes, the money you will need not to starve if the German boss finally fires you, and your child is underfoot crawling in the shag carpet with his stupid pen or his Eastern Air Lines plane, you should give him one across the neck.
The child is shuddering beneath your hand. “Ne bei menya!” Don’t hit me!
“You didn’t do the math, nasty swine (svoloch’ gadkaya).” You’ve assigned the child math problems out of a Soviet textbook that’s more age-appropriate than the bullshit they teach at his Hebrew school, pictures of 4 + 3–2 Great Danes and then how many doggies do you have? instead of
f”(x) = –4 * [cos(x)cos(x) — sin(x)(—sin(x))] / cos2(x).
And the bitch wife whom your wolfish relatives tell you you should really divorce pops out of the kitchen. “Tol’ko ne golovu!” Just don’t hit his head! He has to think with the head.
“Zakroi rot vonyuchii.” Shut your stinking mouth.
Really, suka, can’t you see that love is in the air?
And then off you go, a smack across the left of the head, now the right, now the left. And the child is holding tight to the dizzying smacks, because each one is saying You’re mine and You’ll always love me, each one is a connection to the child that can never be broken. And what else is registering in that head being whipsawed left to right, right to left? The thing Mrs. R is singing in Hebrew as she’s marching the kids down the corridor. Yamin, smol, smol, yamin, left, right, right, left, troo-loo-loo-loo.
My mother has it all wrong when it comes to love. She barely hits. She is the expert on the silent treatment. If I don’t eat the farmer’s cheese with canned peaches (eighty-nine cents: Grand Union), there will be no communication. Go find your love somewhere else. To this day, my mother will launch into a particular childhood aria of mine. Apparently during one especially long period of making me unexist, I started screaming to her, “If you won’t speak to me, luchshe ne zhit’!” It is better not to live! And then I cried for hours, oh how I cried.
Luchshe ne zhit’! my mother likes to replay dramatically at Thanksgiving dinners, her hands spread out like Hamlet giving a soliloquy, perhaps because, in addition to being funny in her mind, the two-day-long silent treatment did what it was supposed to do. It made the child want to commit suicide without her love. It is better not to live! she cries out over her juicy Thanksgiving turkey and her “French” dessert. But I disagree with the efficacy of this technique. Yes, I don’t want to live without her love and attention and fresh laundry for a while, but the sentiment passes quickly. Noninteraction does not have the same tried-and-true result as a pummeling. When you hit the child you’re making contact. You’re contacting the child’s skin, his tender flanks, his head (with which he will eventually have to make money, true), but you are also saying something comforting: I’m here.
I’m here hitting you. I will never leave you, don’t you worry, because I am the Lord, thy father. And just as I was pummeled, so I shall pummel you, and you shall pummel yours forever, ve imru Amen. Let us say Amen.
The danger is crying, of course, because crying is surrender. You have to get away from the blows and lie down someplace quiet and then cry. You have to think of what will happen next. Which is this: The pain will turn dull, then disappear, and when the weekend comes you will play a game called War at Sea with your father, rolling the dice to see if your British heavy cruiser can get out of the way of his German U-boat fast enough or if the entire course of World War II will have to be rewritten. There is no particular segue from the beating to the game, from the explosive weekday to the quiet sausage-and-kasha rhythms of the weekend. On Saturday, your father is calling you “little son” and “little one” and any UN observer sent to this armistice would take off his helmet, get back in his jeep, and make his way back to Geneva with a happy report.
But there’s something about the tissue of the ears. Maybe a medical doctor can comment here. When you’ve been hit across the ears by your father, there’s a stinging, a shameful stinging, that not only keeps your ears red seemingly for days but makes your eyes moisten, as if from allergies. And then, against your will, you will bring your hand up to your ear and sniffle. And then your father will say the one thing you don’t want to hear, although he’ll say it in a kind weekend way: “Eh, you. Snotty.”
A year or so into my thirties I was honored to meet the remarkable Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. Our little turboprop had made the flight between Prague and Vienna, between two literary festivals, the first time Appelfeld had touched down on German-speaking soil since he had survived the camps in his teens. Waiting for our luggage at VIE, the airport where my family had first encountered the West, the seventy-something Appelfeld told me of his brief time among the Red Army after his camp had been liberated. One of the giant Russian soldiers described to Appelfeld his treatment at the hands of his superiors: I byut i plakat’ ne dayut. They hit and they don’t let me cry after.
On the day of the beating, in my little corner I am careful with the crying, a sniffle here, a spring shower of tears there, because otherwise the asthma attack will come. But maybe I want it to come. And soon enough, my father and mother are hovering over me as if nothing had happened an hour before, and perhaps nothing has. Father bundles the red comforter around my snotty chest, and my mother readies the inhaler: “One, two, three, breathe in!”