The Trojan Jew

By Wallace Markfield

This is a mildly poisonous satire from the grave – the intertwined stories of the launch of a Nazi project in WW2 Berlin and its conclusion half a century later in Manhattan.  Wallace Markfield published 4 full-length novels (3 satires + 1 thriller) in the 20th century.  His 5th was interrupted by his death in 2002.  It was nearly done, not that hard to finish, but thoroughly unmarketable in the context of 9/11.  Much has changed since then, so now that 5th novel can finally be released – The Trojan Jew.  Like To an Early Grave, it deals with death, features several bizarre Manhattan street scenes, and opens with an offense against feminism.  Like Teitelbaum's Window it tells the story of a boy growing up in the late 1930s, difference being that this one's father is a member of Hitler's inner circle.  Like You Could Live if They Let You, it includes an out-of-control comic named Jules.  Like his novella Multiple Orgasms, it revolves around a mildly frenetic high-maintenance yenta; or at least from her perspective it does.  Like Radical Surgery, it is a very high stakes intercontinental thriller.  Unlike any of them, it toggles back and forth between 2 separate stories in 2 separate times.  Like every one of them, it's littered with bizarre conversations, and the ending is a bit twisted.  The protagonist is equally saintly and demonic.  It's most accurately categorized as a SIAT (Satirical Information-Age Tragedy).  The target audience is amateur cynics, so if you can read it without taking offense, you're a pro.

    Everything we do has its context, as does everything we create.  Although far from perfect, our current era provides a better context for this novel's release than did the one that followed Wallace's death 22 years ago– could hardly be worse.

    His previous novel was a disappointment to many who had expected him to write yet another Jewish novel – apparently that's a real genre, or was back then – so in this one, he gave them what they had asked for, but not-exactly what they wanted.  As David Bowie said, never play to the gallery.

    Wallace wrote novels, but his day job was that of a speech writer at a big Jewish PR NGO.  At some point, it occurred to him that the director's incompetence presented as great a danger to Jews as had Hitler's policies – only half joking.  And then he thought, What if it were intentional?  Seriously, were, not was – proper grammar was second-nature to him, which served to heighten the comic effect whenever he deviated from it.  So he began to imagine the role of a covert Nazi at the head of such a non-profit.

    He spent over a decade working on this novel about a small foreign infiltration culminating in disaster for NYC, only to be upstaged by reality on 9/11/01.  That had happened before.  He spent the 1980s writing a novel about the breakup of the Soviet Union, completely unthinkable when he began it, yesterday's news by the time it hit the bookstores.

    In both instances, he had seen a full decade into the future, but thought it was only his imagination.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: non·standard thought
• Release date: Mar 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962461092

Book preview

the

Trojan

Jew

Wallace Markfield

Copyright © 2024 by Andrea Markfield

All rights reserved.

ISBN:  978-1-962461-09-2

Publisher:  non·standard thought

First edition:  April 2024

This is a work of fiction, interrupted by the author's

death and by the end of an era, a now-mythical

moment when the whole benighted world thought

that peace was normal and war was an aberration

fashionably breathing its last in tiny remote places

that few could even pronounce – the 1990s.

    Some of the characters are Nazi German

historical figures of the 1930s and 1940s, whose

words and deeds herein described are entirely

fictitious.  One of them actually outlived the author.

Others are American public figures whose words and

deeds herein described are again entirely fictitious.

All other characters and all events are pure fiction,

except for World War Two, which did actually occur,

although someday we may come to deny even that.

Wallace died

before he could finish

writing this novel.

He wrote all chapters

except the last one,

entitled Passover. 

See appended notes

for further details.

Mr. National Director

The Suffering Market

Monday morning, November 29, 1993

A little past four in the morning, when she had done her power walk through the seven-and-a-half rooms, not counting the foyer, long even for a Riverside Drive foyer, Leatrice returned to the foot of the bed and spoke the word Rudi feared most.  Cramps.

Anxiety, said Rudi.  And in his most nurturing, supportive voice, the voice he used with her every twenty-seventh day, he said, Which is normal.  Indeed, for a modern American Jewish woman of acute sensibility, anxiety is a necessity of life.

Absolutely.  All about us, in a global economy, resurgent anti-Semitism.  But also, to some extent ...  Leatrice's fingers spread down and out over the crotch of her nightgown.  Rage.  Repressed rage that a person who normally speaks her mind is mute and passive and a slave to her gynecologist.

A man's character is his fate, said Rudi.  But a woman's gynecologist ...

Listen, said Leatrice, suddenly fierce, if I'm a cancerphobe and I run for internals and smears five times a year -

Entitled! cried Rudi.

I have that right.  Coming to me.

All at once her behind was close to his face and she was balancing herself breathlessly over the mattress and holding up the Interreligious Quarterly by its spine and shaking something out, and Rudi shut his eyes against the tiny black and chrome pocket calculator, and he called upon Vati [pronounced FAH-tee], asking that he send perpetual patience to shine upon him.  For he knew what to expect.

Earned the right.  Coming to me.  My due – Leatrice knelt beside him, weeping softly – because I am on every twenty-seventh day for thirty-two years reminded that my PhD in Aspects of Multicultural Diversity is no compensation for the – she squinted at the calculator – four hundred and forty periods I have not had.

Vati, Vati, thought Rudi, she turns me into a true Survivor.

She took his hand, put it against her heart, which was beating quickly and lightly.  When he moved it to tap her right nipple, she told him, "You could have had your pick of those yentas.  Those beautiful, baffled, nose-bobbed yentas.  Those 'What should I read first to prepare me for Hannah Arendt?' yentas.  Those renovate and redecorate yentas with uteruses and ovaries who would have increased and multiplied for you – you and the poor decimated Jewish people."

A powerful pressure started in the back of Rudi's neck.  I wanted a heart innocent of guile.  A heart whose mode was love.  A loving heart.  A loving heart, said Vati speaking within his head, and a barren womb.  And Leatrice, face drained of blood, was whining and lashing him with her hair; it took him some moments before he understood that he was twisting and pinching her right nipple.

Then he sat up very straight, and he waited until her chest and throat noises had subsided, and he told her what more or less he was compelled to tell her on every twenty-seventh day.  He said, We have seen, have we not, Leatrice, too many children of Survivors tortured by the search for an identity which is their own, an authentic self liberated from the oppression of their parents' memories.

You bathe them, you button them – Leatrice struggled for words – and then first you worry about an identity crisis.

He said, I am not and probably will never be out of sight of Buchenwald, where I reached the limits of human experience.  Can I, can you, Leatrice, be so certain, so complacent that a child of ours would not be pushed to the same ghastly extreme?  For no faith, not even our common faith in a democratic America, should be so ready, so facile and fluent and ultimately blind to the possibility that the American character structure is not yet proof against hatred.

The child is the meaning of this life, answered Leatrice, even if in a global economy with resurgent anti-Semitism the child has to carry a gun.

Then Rudi slid down, turned himself and Leatrice around so that he might fit his body against hers with something like fervor and exaltation, and he fell into the teasing tone he was more or less compelled to take with her on every twenty-seventh day.  He said, Leatrice, Leatrice, we would have had one child, one child only.  A son.

A son – she moved her head a few inches closer to his pillow – who by now could be on the staff of a nice Jewish senator or sitting on a daïs with Eli Wiesel or organizing a mission to Israel for black clergymen.

He said, "Leatrice, Leatrice, before he was trained to knife and fork and potty, you would have put him in the charge of some au pair girl.  Yes, before your stretch marks had quite gone you would be back at Columbia, steaming away on the tenure track."

Possibly.  Maybe.  I suppose.  Also – she backhanded the headboard – what bothers me is not so much that I might have succumbed to the pressures of career but that he would have been ruined for lack of sibling companionship.  Because – she made a weak watery sound – I am, we are of the American Jewish generation which has an average of one-point-seven children and whose mood of pessimism is such that it has failed to reproduce itself.

Pity, for shame, said Vati, speaking within his head.  Let us do what we can for this endangered species.  Rudi said, Leatrice, Leatrice, I see myself in perpetual contention with our son.  He visits me in dreams to lecture me on black rights and gay rights and Palestinian rights, to mock me with his snarling gutter-voice about loosening up on the Holocaust, letting go of the six-million, connecting once and for all to the beat of history.

And by the time the first light glinted through the Levellor blinds, Leatrice was weeping not for herself but for him.  And a little before she had shucked off her night gown and offered lips and eyes, breasts and pubic brush to him, she was saying, You know what?  You know where he'd most likely be, our son?  In California, where everybody from the Columbia Education Department has a child.  He'd be in California and he'd never write, he'd never call, he'd never-never call, he'd never write ...

________________

Usually, when they had waited vainly for a cab and taken off in their preposterous heel-and-toe, arm-pumping gait for 79th and Broadway, the dog-trainers were out – murderous-looking Mexican bandit types who favored survivalist green – and Rudi would nearly always snicker.  For however carefully he tried, however he fought for mastery, it was involuntary.  The image overpowered him:  at the end of those eight, ten long leashes and choke collars he saw, instead of golden retrievers and airedales and Portuguese water spaniels, a variety of Jews.

But it was too early; it was seven-twenty, and the dog trainers would not be around for a good forty minutes.  Just as well.  For he was out of sorts, something troubled him, he was carrying about a mysterious weight.

"The Messiah will come three times before you'll see a cab on Riverside Drive," Leatrice was saying.

No, he did not feel especially unrested.  And, all things considered – Rudi gave a faint smile – it probably wasn't a case of post-coital melancholy.

And could it be otherwise?  Naturally it couldn't be otherwise.  The drizzle holds off and holds off till this minute.  Why?  So that I will arrive to preside over my first Budget and Personnel Committee meeting with damp sneakers.

Though her Channel-13 tote-bag kept slamming into his side, Rudi nevertheless decided to put forth some comfort, and he pursued a sudden insight.  You do not deceive me, Leatrice, hardly.  He wasn't quite sure what he would say next till he saw his first Puerto Rican on Amsterdam Avenue.  I believe you long to catch cold.  Yes, you refused to call Mercury Limo Service.  Indeed, the heart whose mode is love yearns for punishment.  But why, he wondered, do I feel like bursting into tears?  Punishment because you resent the down-sizing of your department ... the loss of those three Hispanics.

"This infertile academic yenta, she said with amusement and sorrow, is grateful to have been chosen by you.  Then raising both hands to the other side of Amsterdam Avenue, she said, The wanting to punish myself and catch cold ... that definitely has to be why I washed my hair and am walking with a wet head.  While Leatrice talked of what she must soon endure and accept, while she declared, I am ready to understand if not exactly to forgive the discharge of latent anti-Semitic attitudes from Maria Bustamonte who will most likely, oh definitely be dropped," Rudi was dealing with the source of his cold, crushing sorrow.

He tried first to link himself with the immediate.  He inhaled the sweet keen smell of pot.  He made way for a legless Oriental who pushed himself along on his sprawl-wheeled little platform with a pair of black steam irons and blew on a toy trumpet.  He listened intently to the quick-running chatter from wide-open brownstone windows, he set his teeth against the tumult of boom boxes, he kicked three syringes into the gutter, he winced at the urinous orange lighting favored by the Central American storekeepers, he estimated their annual rents, imagined their festering rage, imagined them moving crosstown by the hundreds, the thousands, to spreadeagle their Jewish landlords on subway gratings and underground steam pipes.

All at once his mind churned up last night's dream.  Vati's birthday.  And they had had words:  What do you want of me?  You know you are dead, you know your birthday is months away.

Meanwhile he patted down Leatrice's wet head with his Sulka scarf, meanwhile he reminded her, Maria Bustamonte deserves to be dropped.  She has twice failed her PhD language requirements.  She will anyway find something quickly and easily in one of the community colleges.

On Broadway Leatrice wiped her sneakers against the rubber runner in front of the Hot and Crusty Bakeshop, said, Still, said, Anyway, said, Look, the inner liberal ethos within my Jewish nature has mortal agony.

Vati had out his big watch, his onion.  And it came to Rudi that the big watch, the onion stood for time.  From this he passed on to The New York Times, to his op-ed piece on the Black-Jewish situation, and he felt a clutch of fear, felt that he had gone too far.  His opening:  The hand that fed you will survive your unloving bite.  And worse still the line:  American Jews will go on celebrating Brotherhood Week – without you, if need be.

At the hack stand near Zabar's he put Leatrice into a cab.  She kissed him, handed back his Sulka scarf, held the door open to say, You know what?  If he were not in California, if he were close by, our son would be most likely picketing the Education Department on behalf of Maria Bustamonte.

A stout black bubble-eyed black woman tried to beat him to the cab behind.  Pulling the belt of her mannish trenchcoat he stopped her, said Mammy, I must ax you to wait your turn.

It happened that his driver was also black.  The man drove one-handed, never stopped scratching a scab high on the back of his neck, and he kept peeping at a newspaper during the long red lights crosstown.  When he was late accelerating on Lexington Avenue and caught another light, Rudi sent him a mental message:  The Führer was of the opinion that it was as meaningful to teach apes to read as blacks.

Therefore when they came to an abrupt pitching stop before the lovely blue and white canopy of the National Jewish Institute for Human Relations, Rudi rapped the plexiglass partition, and in his severest tone, Vati's lecture-hall tone, said, My friend, where did I ask to be let off?

Raising his closely printed Route Chart, jabbing a thick finger at the last scrawled entry, the driver answered, ... Fust Avenue, by the Northeast corner.

Indeed, said Rudi.  Excellent record-keeping.  He leaned back, crossed his legs.  But I have no wish, my friend, to be quite so far from the curb.  No less than a yard, wouldn't you say?  With a grind of gears, the driver shot into reverse.  Rudi paid the fare, asked for a printed receipt.  You will find an extra quarter, he said, before stepping out.  Take heart from it.  Let it remind you that Black and Jew will be once again joined in common cause, moving together toward the day of days when the advances in harmony and mutual understanding will be as breathtaking as the advances in modern technology.

A moment later, holding his damp Sulka scarf out to the flow of hot fan-driven air in the Institute lobby, Rudi's heartbeat increased, increased, and irregular black fragments bothered his vision.  He stood inert, beset by images of horned, cloven-back monsters who wanted his life,  and he felt alone,  and nothing looked as it should look,  and he waited for the cry of  Time, high time!,  he waited for the blow that would settle him.  But little by little, Rudi recovered his calm.

There had been a second dream last night, sadder even than the first.  Ancient enemies had chased him into the Institute, out through tunnels and ramps.  He had eluded them in the stifling, dust-eaten dark of a broken-down movie-house.  And there he had sat through endless showings of an old movie.  And though he fought to repress it, he recalled the name easily, easily:  The Most Dangerous Game.

Coming off the elevator, still dwelling on his op-ed piece, his two dreams, Rudi started to feel a little easier as soon as he heard the tick and whir of the Xarxa System from the Development Department on the floor above.  Koopersteen, the national chairman, had made a show of resisting the high monthly rent, but Rudi had convinced him that the System would bring in new contributors, new money.  This would come about, he argued grandly, eloquently, patronizingly, because through Xarxa they could dig out the name of any Jew of consequence, estimate his holdings, calculate his taste and temperament, nail down what most interested him and match this interest to some Institute project.  And he had curbed, but barely, barely, an impulse to add, how useful might the Xarxa System be under certain special situations, how much time it might save.

He was further cheered when he left the men's room and made his customary study of the immense mural on the Wall of Yesterday.  To be sure, a trick of light, but Hubert Humphrey looked as if he was wincing away from Martin Luther King, and the Israeli tank upon which Moshe Dayan stood was spewing flame straight at Anne Frank and Fiorello LaGuardia.  Now he passed the Alcove of Interreligious Understanding, and though Vati counseled, Patience, forbearance, Rudi turned, took in the four new public service ads, and sneered in a simpering falsetto at the crashing black headlines.  They read:

Take Your Best Shot

at Brotherhood

If You Must Use

an F-Word,

Try Fellowship

Let's Work

to Make Bias

a Collectible

No Taxes, No Rent

When You Move into

the Human Community

Now he passed the inward wall of the long corridor, and this was hung solid with colored photographs of Institute leaders pushing plaques and medallions and scrolls into the hands of Shamir and Yeltsin and Kohl and Mitterand and Major and Echeverría and the Pope, and on the waist-level molding was the gilt-lettered sign Going Places for Democracy, and Rudi murmured, How fine a thing to see Jews on the move.

Now came the banter and genial bickering of the support staff, and the mild doggy smell of their damp umbrellas and galoshes, and as they lined up to sign in at the time sheets they compared their morning subway sorrows – the spite of a change booth clerk, the seeing-eye dog who had taken sick and relieved himself on the shuttle, the crazy vagrant who stepped on shoes and tore newspapers in half, the arctic blasts of air-conditioning from Roosevelt Avenue to Times Square.

Now gaunt, straight-backed Nettie Popkin, Communications, was grinning and flinging up her arms.  Good show!  Brave, courageous and bold! she exclaimed.  He flashed her a look of hauteur and boredom, walked on with utmost deliberateness, stopped before the copying machine.  She came close enough so that he could smell a mixed fragrance of fear and piney cologne from her armpits.  Your op-ed piece made me feel like the beam of nostalgic sixties liberalism was finally removed from my eye.

Though I wrote it with a heavy heart, said Rudi, I felt it was time to speak out ... to call a spade a spade.

Now he heard voices turned somewhat sharp and nasty, and presently Deena Minkoff, Accounting, fish-like teeth on edge, sped past him.  Then she turned, shrilled, "I'm right now too upset to lavish praise upon your lovely New York Times article."

Whereupon Jay Laventhal, Comptroller, bumbled out of his office, murmuring, Don't stage a major production.  To Rudi he said, From frustration only I fell upon Deena.  The same business with the non-repeat contributors.  Three mailings already, they don't make good on their pledges.  He lipped his Chaplin moustache.  How do you reach them?  I'm giving up trying to reach them.

When he was done moaning, Rudi said, To each one on the list send a small card with this message:  'Pay or die.'

Now at the coffee cart he was accosted by Oscar Susskind, Factfinding, whose shirt ballooned out as he spoke at Rudi through a dense hedge of reddish-brown beard.  "I'm folding down my Times, I see the Rudi Schoenbaum byline, then my first call.  Hear the start of my day.  From Suffolk County, unwashed bottom of Long Island.  A neo-Nazi bunch, the Truth-Blasters, is now going into synagogue and kosher-mart parking lots, wherever there might be Jewish-owned cars, and over the headlights they paste on stickers:  'The first Holocaust was a fake, the next one will be real.'"

Though Rudi wrinkled his forehead in confusion and anger and crushing desolation, though he croaked, Jewish cars ... the headlights as if straining to take it all in, Vati was speaking within his head, saying, Let those who walk in darkness now drive in darkness.

Now pigeon-breasted Felda Brumberg, Women's Division, nearly struck his eye with the tip of her umbrella, and her look of bewilderment was followed by a look of solicitude, and she helped him off with his Aquascutum, and she found the last wooden hanger in the closet for it, and when she saw him glance at her paperback she cocked her head, nearly touching her shoulder, said wistfully, miserably, I have to read what my women read.  My mind is melting from them.  Suddenly, with a resonance of horror, she raised her voice.  Decide, please on the speaker for our Five Towns dinner-dance.  Which one?  Henry Kissinger or Abba Eban?

Rudi kissed her tiny poppy-colored mouth, answered, The evil of two lessers, and he left her laughing and saying breathlessly, "That's what you wrote for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, I virtually plotzed upon reading it."

Then crying Sanctuary, sanctuary! Rudi sprang into his office, slid shut the double doors, and began his working day.

________________

Because this was one of the mornings when he believed his word processor had been programmed for cruel messages –

CREDIT  DENIED

The hands of the Social Workers and

Interfaith Counselors shall bind thee fast.

- he took up his Mont Blanc pen.

A few words, first, to Professor Brian G. Tabachkin.  How kind and thoughtful of you to send me your forthcoming, Last Stop, Buchenwald.  Compelling, vivid, yet beautifully restrained throughout, it will surely make a magnificent addition to the literature of the Holocaust.

To Bernice Flagler he wrote:  Bernice, what can I say of your Under the Gun, the History of a Hidden Child?  The nobility of the righteous Gentiles who sheltered you from Hitler's killing machine and your display of beautiful restraint throughout touched my heart, my being.  Do not be at all surprised, Bernice, if you find me quoting again and again that vivid, compelling last line:  One day, perhaps, the Star of David shall be joined in bonds of brotherhood to that star which once rose in the East.

To Rabbi Menachim L. Krindel he wrote:  I must tell you that I read At the Edge of Doom throughout a single tear-blinded night.  What a compelling, commanding evocation of your father, of his last hours before the SS gun butts rapped upon your door!  Indeed, I too was an only child, I too hear the voice of my father, anguished and exhorting, I too pledged that whatever the cost I would help facilitate an end to Jewish alienation and Diaspora.

To Dr. Selig Postal he wrote:  Men into Stone is a superb analysis of those who ruled the concentration camp universe.  The commanding, compelling, scholarly analysis of this transformation, of how they shed the trappings of humanity must surely -

But then there was a knock, and the double doors opened a crack.  Annette Fensterbush, his secretary, stuck her gargoyle face through, crooned her morning croon of constipated ecstasy and gave notice, by a touch to the thick dull tissue of her ear, that there was a call he would do well to take.

It was Isadore Fudderman, Honorary Life Chairman, and without preliminaries the old Health and Beauty Aids entrepreneur started talking in a voice that might have issued from the diaphragm of a stone statue.  Rudi, Rudi, make a little guess as to our state of mind.

Happy, high-spirited and fully accepting of the human condition.

Don't be smooth to me.  I'm not exactly in a mental frame where I need you to be smooth like a Chinese hard-on.

Izzy, Izzy, Rudi pranced and swayed in his swivel chair, is this how you fall on me?  How are you talking?  That's how you talk to a Survivor?

Cocksucker bastard, this morning it positively won't work.  Put aside the Survivor stuff.  From me sympathy is a lost cause.  But Fudderman had begun laughing softly.

And so Rudi pressed on, saying, "Would you like me to fly out?  I can be in Palm Beach before the afternoon with a nice Isaac Gellis salami.  We'll talk Peretz and Sholom Aleichem and lap top computers to the rich widows at poolside.  Then we'll track down a Russian-style steam bath where they serve you salty herring on toothpicks and maybe – who knows? – an aliyah to Israel."

Rudi, Rudi, said Fudderman, his voice soaring, "I want you to know how I feel.  I feel like I'm having heart surgery without anesthetic and ... and while they are sawing my ribs I am screaming that I want to hear the word Jew.  Like this I am screaming – Rudi had to hold the receiver away from his ear – and, if not Jew, a few words I can speak without the feeling that there's mud in my mouth."

There was the clinking of ice cubes against glass, sounds of fizzing and carbonation, a lip-smacking Feh! from Fudderman, then the rattle of paper.  "Our Feh was addressed to not only the quality of what has happened to Dr. Brown's Celery Tonic but no less to my speech of acceptance of the Hubert H. Humphrey Democratic Vista Award at our Palm Beach dinner.  A speech which is not meat or dairy.  A speech which, if it was a teeny-trifle more non-sectarian, I could give to an Ethical Culture barbecue.  A speech which is so mainstream that when I hang up on you I'm putting in an order for two acres in downtown Topeka.  A speech which builds up my medical knowledge with non-stop referrals not to anti-Semitism but the virus of hate, the cancer of bigotry.  You know what I'm afraid of, Mr. National Director?  I'm afraid how one day -"

Izzy, Izzy, said Rudi, as if in utter misery, these are the days of hush, not outcry.

Yeah yeah, sure sure.  Choked up, Fudderman blew his nose, went on with trembly force.  "Hush, not outcry.  Shah, not gevald.  I thank our common Judeo-Christian God that He's sent me at least three diseases which will soon finish me.  You don't know, Mr. National Director, how I look forward to the Malach-hamoviss and my fifty-car funeral and the lovely ecumenical music they will play from an organ record in a non-denominational paper-yarmulke chapel -"

No, no, Izzy, Rudi murmured.  You have many more years of honor and achievement ahead.

"Palm Beach birds – what kind I can't say, what does a Jew know from birds? – will take pity and fly over my mausoleum.  They will keep me informed as to how the five children and nine grandchildren out of my three wives didn't help themselves by loss of their Jewish identity.  These Palm Beach birds will go, 'No help, Fudderman,' meaning a lost cause and a waste of time that my children and grandchildren didn't know the difference between Shabbos and Yom Kippur, that they were in the social justice mainstream bleeding from all pores for the blacks, the women, the Orientals, the gays, ..."  His voice faltered.

My present mood is a fuck-on-all-their-houses mood.  In particular, the blacks.  Paper rattled.  "Why shouldn't I put into my speech a teeny-trifle of what you say in the Times?  How the blacks begrudge us the Holocaust because it's cutting into their suffering market.  I could say 'Don't begrudge us our Holocaust and we won't begrudge how you're dooming our cities.'"

Inappropriate for our Palm Dinner, Izzy.  Not with three black Congressmen and a Latino Undersecretary of Education on the daïs, each hungry for his photo-opportunity.

Uh, answered Fudderman.

And a videotaped message from the White House wishing you many more years of honor and achievement.

Maybe it's my sky-high cholesterol count – but I'm thinking lately along the lines of, 'Whoa, take it easy, American Jews.  Only yesterday they barely named a few streets after you, don't rush to ask for a planet.'

They owe us a planet or two, Izzy.

I'm happy they let us have Israel.

Indeed, as he should be, Rudi reflected.  Sets up a research center in Bar Ilan, squeezes the brains of the underpaid chemists for his latest line of health foods.  He said, Paid a heavy enough price for Israel, don't you think?

Rudi, Rudi, give close attention now.  And Fudderman screamed, Rhoda, wife number three, pick out your pair of twenty-five dollar pantyhose later and go pull open the terrace door.  There were slow footfalls.  There was a whispered exchange, a woman's laugh, breathless with humiliation.

Then Rudi heard trilling and twittering.  And in a lower tone Fudderman said, I want you to listen to the warning coming over from my Palm Beach birds.  The warning is, 'Fudderman, be happy and grateful you were allowed to push your youthful hand truck down Seventh Avenue once upon a time.  Fudderman, saw with the American grain and don't make so many waves in the American mainstream.  Fudderman, don't turn a few pleasant words from the White House into a thousand-year warranty on parts and labor for the American Jewish population.'  Also -  Fudderman paused.  - since we are delivering the speech with a few minimal teeny-trifle changes, since I am going along and playing the game of American Jewish power without confidence in our next-to-no strength, you will do me a favor, Mr. National Director.  Fudderman yawned, burped.  In case you come to Palm Beach, don't come with an Isaac Gellis salami.  What Fudderman hungers for, salami will not satisfy.  And he hung up.

Rudi went to a window, opened it to clear his head, dispel his rage.  Oh my Jews, my Jews, he whispered to First Avenue, to UN Plaza, to the pennants of all nations, it has always been thus with you.  How well you exploit the possibilities of capitalist enterprise!  But when will you understand that if money isn't everything, money is nevertheless all, all, all you will ever get.  Even Fudderman, scenting danger and disaster, wants more, though more of what, he can define no better than the rest of them.  What did Isaiah say ... ?  And Vati helped him out, answering, Thou couldst not race with footmen; how then wilt thou compete with chariots?

Meanwhile Rudi continued to stand at the window, and he studied the five, six, seven elegant, whale-backed pastel-colored chartered buses lining up at the UN Plaza curb, and as their doors folded open he took note of the passengers – the austere, thoughtful, immaculate Japanese, the strikingly muscled young back-packing Norsemen types in hiking shorts, the uniformed private school girls, faces aflame with curiosity and happiness.

But his concentration was broken by another bus.  An old-fashioned yellow-orange boxy thing.  Windows cracked, chrome pitted, the unwashed side rotten with mildew.  Under one of the cracked windows a faded black satin banner:  Yeshivah Ram-Tov of Kings Highway.  Then Rudi caught movement within the bus, winced at an unpleasant electronic buzzing.  A loudspeaker came on.  First a gruff male voice, then several sweet high boyish sopranos joined in a liturgy, a chant, a lamentation.  Five windows opened, five blue and white Israeli flags caught the stiff breeze, and just before the bus took off with a shimmer of black exhaust, Rudi heard, Holy Israel, holy land!  Jews hold it at God's command.

Rudi, watching the bus turn west on 47th Street, took heart at the thought that Shatterbeak, out of a Jew-hating Tarzan by way of Billy the Kid and Natty Bumpo, had to be close behind.  Now, at last, the bronze-haired steel-thewed mountain man whom he summoned most often on the point of sleep was done with his journey across native American grounds, was waiting before Yeshivah Ram-Bam-Tov of Kings Highway, strangling cord and long notched killdeer knife at the ready.

And soon Rudi had an impulse to make his secretary's life miserable.  He buzzed her on the intercom, and when she picked up he said, "I am disappointed in you, Ms. Fensterbush.  Two memos about your chinwhiskers and still no clipping or tweezing.  Time, also, to do something about our Brooklyn diphthongs.  It's Holocaust, not holy cause.  As to your claims of sexual harassment -"

But she was as usual pleased by the attention, and she answered as usual, Does that mean I don't get a merit increase?

- timing the number and duration of your visits to the ladies' room does not yet constitute sexual harassment.

And soon she was in the office, laying a hand, a loving hand, on his arm, saying without a flicker of resentment, I would also have to discharge tension with your load on my shoulders, then, A second, just a second ...  When she returned she was bouncing a peeled, quartered navel orange on her palm.  For a nervous day, Mr. Schoenbaum, make time for a little citrus.  It's a Jaffa.  From Israel, she added.  While he sucked at one of the quarters she went 'round the table on her thick, blocky legs, observing him from all angles.  I see you get your tension where I always get it.  In the neck.  Right?  Like ... a Jewish tension.

Indeed, said Rudi.  An acquired Jewish characteristic.  From centuries of looking over our shoulders.

She smiled apprehensively.  What's going to be, Mr. Schoenbaum?  How do you foresee the Jewish future?

I am only an administrator, Annette.  A bureaucrat worn down by those who, as Mr. Fudderman believes, are neither meat nor dairy.  A speculator trading with bloody murder and brotherhood.  At times ... indeed, indeed, indeed ... an imaginary Jew.

Neither meat nor dairy, she affirmed, and went on to say, I am not a very religious person, but when I try to imagine myself as a non-Jew -  And just then his private phone rang.  She looked so piteously at him that he let her answer it.  Stern-faced, shoulders back, all business, she said, I understand ... I have it, Miss Shawcross, Miss Linda Shawcross.  Don't mind if I take it upon myself to ask for the sending over of as many reprint copies as you can spare ...  The sun was shining through broken clouds when, whistling between her teeth, softly clapping hands, she told him, "Only the Times, only to report that their phones and faxes are burning up about your piece."

It was written with a heavy heart, he said, in the hope that it would spur the black community to an understanding of what is truly liberal.

What then? she said.

He set off for the Tuesday staff meeting in the Arthur J. Goldberg Lounge.  Annette Fensterbush accompanied him as far as the ladies' room, and when she entered it he hastily dropped the three remaining quarters of the Jaffa navel orange into the trash bin near the copying machine.

Venetian Night

AUGUST 1937

On the pontoon bridge, crossing over from the Wannsee mainland between Berlin and Potsdam to Peacock Island, Rudi battled images of breasts and nipples and the big black things below.  Little dead Momma, he beseeched, supplant these images with images of how you have been by now unspeakably altered by maggots and slime.  Give me some sign that you were without the same or similar parts.  But dead Momma, sweet Momma failed him, and though he looked to the left, to the right, to the stars crowning the topmost turret of Frederick Wilhelm's castle, he nevertheless felt that cold, sweet, sickly scalding in the pit of his belly.

And so Rudi wrinkled his face and stuck out his tongue just a little at the many hundreds of upper school girls shining in white silk breeches and white blouses and white-leather slippers, and when they raised white wands simultaneously and simultaneously did a little twirling thing on their toes, he stood straight-legged and stared, seeking to implant the moment in his mind's eye.  But Vati had noticed, and Vati tweaked Rudi's ears and said in the laughing, loving voice which pleased Rudi most, Well, at eleven this lad must wait a bit.

In a voice like Vati's, Rudi answered, Three to five years, I should say.  But as to waiting – he held back till they had stepped off the pontoon bridge onto the dewy greensward and were alongside the tallest girls – it is they who must wait.

Vati looked at him with delight, with astonishment.  He smiled, almost bowed, said, More important than woman is our long hard work together.  Not easy, lad, to put an end to the idea of humanity.

Their eyes met.  Rudi said, De Gobineau, no? and Vati made a kissing noise and both were enclosed in absolute harmony.

Then Vati tweaked both his ears and with a great mock jutting of his blue-black beard said, Besides, when you go to woman, you must take – what was it he said?  Nietzsche?

A whip, take a whip!  And Rudi flicked the air twice, and twice again.

But presently Vati was telling him, It is time to enjoy your boyhood, your German boyhood.  For to the right, the pitchdark rotunda came suddenly alive with blasting blazing fireworks, and the last of these, a protracted starburst, spelled out in shivery gold and red:

WE WELCOME

THE CONVENTION

OF THE INTERNATIONAL

CHAMBER