And then I fell off my chair onto the floor, holding my leg, moaning, “Mother, it hurts,” blood running from my nose. She picked me up, clutching me to her, and put me on the chair, blotted my nose with a tissue. Then we heard Simon yelling outside, and then his banging on the back door. Mother went and pulled him inside, his nose bleeding. “I fell outa the tree,” and, as she picked him up, she looked back at me; and I knew that she understood, and felt her fear and her sorrow as she realized that she and I were the same, that I would always feel the knife thrusts of other people’s pain, draw their agonies into myself, and, perhaps, be shattered by them.
(Remembering: Father and mother outside, after a summer storm, standing under the willow, father putting his arm around her, brushing her black hair back and kissing her gently on the forehead. Not for me, too much shared anguish with love for me. I am always alone, with my mountain, my forest, my lakes like puddles. The young couple’s boat is moored at the island.)
I hear them downstairs.
“Anna, the poor child, what can we do?”
“It is worse for her, Samuel,” sighing, the sadness reaching me and becoming a shroud, “it will be worse with her, I think, than it was for me.”
BERNARD MALAMUD
The Jewbird
Jewish fiction has always been at home with humor. Perhaps it is a natural propensity to exaggerate and twist reality—the kind of fancy that soars to the logical end of the ludicrous, that attacks and promotes itself under an umbrella of cynicism and resignation. Even the most realistically layered stories seem to be punctuated with those odd fancies and impossible details that contrast brightly with their sober themes.
While Pamela Sargent transmutes flying geese into rich Jews wintering in Miami Beach, “coating their feathers with Coppertone and ordering lemonades from the waitresses,” Bernard Malamud converts crows into Jewbirds that doven with passion, speak a passable Yiddish, prefer matjes herring to schmaltz, and must flee from the “Anti-Semeets.” He exaggerates, celebrates, underplays, shouts, whispers, teases, rejoices, and pulls mundane reality apart like Coney Island taffy. And the impossibly possible Jewbird named Schwartz complains, entertains, suffers, endures, and chokes until the reader stops laughing.
But who are the “Anti-Semeets”? Where are the “Anti-Semeets”? Out there, of course, but they’re in here, too, in the kosher homes with Friday night candles flickering in dining rooms, in the trades where Yiddish slang operates best, in small neighborhood synagogues, on the Long Island Expressway where the “Queen-Bride” of the Sabbath rides in Cadillacs, and in the media mirror of laughs and insecurities.
As Gabriel Pierson put it so welclass="underline" “A Jew fares as badly with his own Jewishness as the non-Jew: he is his own ‘anti-semit.’”
THE WINDOW WAS OPEN so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate. The bird wearily flapped through the open kitchen window of Harry Cohen’s top-floor apartment on First Avenue near the lower East River. On a rod on the wall hung an escaped canary cage, its door wide open, but this black-type long-beaked bird—its ruffled head and small dull eyes, crossed a little, making it look like a dissipated crow—landed if not smack on Cohen’s thick lamb chop, at least on the table close by. The frozen foods salesman was sitting at supper with his wife and young son on a hot August evening a year ago. Cohen, a heavy man with hairy chest and beefy shorts; Edie, in skinny yellow shorts and red halter; and their ten-year-old Morris (after her father)—Maurie, they called him, a nice kid though not overly bright—were all in the city after two weeks out, because Cohen’s mother was dying. They had been enjoying Kingston, New York, but drove back when Mama got sick in her flat in the Bronx.
“Right on the table,” said Cohen, putting down his beer glass and swatting at the bird. “Son of a bitch.”
“Harry, take care with your language,” Edie said, looking at Maurie, who watched every move.
The bird cawed hoarsely and with a flap of its bedraggled wings—feathers tufted this way and that—rose heavily to the top of the open kitchen door, where it perched staring down.
“Gevalt, a pogrom!”
“It’s a talking bird,” said Edie in astonishment.
“In Jewish,” said Maurie.
“Wise guy,” muttered Cohen. He gnawed on his chop, then put down the bone. “So if you can talk, say what’s your business. What do you want here?”
“If you can’t spare a lamb chop,” said the bird, “I’ll settle for a piece of herring with a crust of bread. You can’t live on your nerve forever.”
“This ain’t a restaurant,” Cohen replied. “All I’m asking is what brings you to this address?”
“The window was open,” the bird sighed; adding after a moment, “I’m running. I’m flying but I’m also running.”
“From whom?” asked Edie with interest.
“Anti-Semeets.”
“Anti-Semites?” they all said.
“That’s from who.”
“What kind of anti-Semites bother a bird?” Edie asked.
“Any kind,” said the bird, “also including eagles, vultures, and hawks. And once in a while some crows will take your eyes out.”
“But aren’t you a crow?”
“Me? I’m a Jewbird.”
Cohen laughed heartily. “What do you mean by that?”
The bird began dovening. He prayed without Book or tallith, but with passion. Edie bowed her head though not Cohen. And Maurie rocked back and forth with the prayer, looking up with one wide-open eye.
When the prayer was done Cohen remarked, “No hat, no phylacteries?”
“I’m an old radical.”
“You’re sure you’re not some kind of a ghost or dybbuk?”
“Not a dybbuk,” answered the .bird, “though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thanks God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful children.”
“Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.
“Why not?”
“What kind of birds?”
“Like me. Jewbirds.”
Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I’ve heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird.”
“We’re once removed.” The bird rested on one skinny leg, then on the other. “Please, could you spare maybe a piece of herring with a small crust of bread?”
Edie got up from the table.
“What are you doing?” Cohen asked her.
“I’ll clear the dishes.”
Cohen turned to the bird. “So what’s your name, if you don’t mind saying?”
“Call me Schwartz.”
“He might be an old Jew changed into a bird by somebody,” said Edie, removing a plate.
“Are you?” asked Harry, lighting a cigar.
“Who knows?” answered Schwartz. “Does God tell us everything?”
Maurie got up on his chair. “What kind of herring?” he asked the bird in excitement.
“Get down, Maurie, or you’ll fall,” ordered Cohen.
“If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz,” said Schwartz.
“All we have is marinated, with slices of onion—in a jar,” said Edie.
“If you’ll open for me the jar I’ll eat marinated. Do you have also, if you don’t mind, a piece of rye bread—the spitz?”