True Ancestor

Brother Jacques

Jacques and Annie talk to a class of high school students in Eugene, Oregon, 2000.

My cell phone rang Friday night as the One True Wife and I were going to bed. As is my custom on Friday night, I ignored it. It stopped ringing -- and then the land line rang. That's when your blood runs cold.

My sister Martha was on the phone: Jacques had died.

Jacques, as he freely admitted, was from another planet and another era. He was a giant Romanian, with the look of a Teutonic knight. He had hands the size of George Foreman's, and thunderous, gnarled feet. He had survived imprisonment and slave labor in the Soviet Gulag, from which he managed to escape in the dead of winter (and if you read his book on the experience, you marvel at the fact that he had feet at all). He had been a lumberjack, a short-order cook, a prize fighter, a U.S. soldier, the owner of a jazz bar, an actor, and God knows what else. He was a black belt in karate. He was an avid reader and chess player. He hated humanity but loved people. He loved my sister Annie. And he really loved cats.

He was my Annie's significant other for almost exactly 39 years, and her husband for about 15 of those. It was a relationship that was hard to understand until you spent a lot of time in their company. They bickered, argued, hurled accusations, fed each other, made each other double over with laughter; lavished love on their cats, worked out, read -- they did everything together. They were "Brains & Brawn" -- Annie and Jacques even wrote a thriller, featuring Annie as "Brains" and Jacques as "Brawn" -- but Annie developed brawn of her own over the years with Jacques; and his street smarts and powers of observation, and his hunger for music and his appreciation for language, betrayed a brain that, like his body, was incredibly strong despite and perhaps even because of the privations it suffered. 

Jacques became a towering presence in my life during my teen years, when he did his best to rip my friends and me from the grip of the cerebral insecurity and repressed sexuality that was, sadly, the hallmark of my high school experience. He simply couldn't understand what we agonized over. You liked a girl? So kiss her. She didn't want you to? Kiss her again. She smacks you? Laugh and move on. We thought so hard about so much that was of so little consequence to him. Our moral agonies were useless luxuries to him, and our appetites were busy trying to tell us the only thing worth listening to: follow your hunger.

The cover of the Japanese version of Jacques' book, with a picture of him as a teenager.

He sustained me physically through my angst-ridden 20s when I was living in New York and trying to figure out what to do with myself. Jacques practically force-fed me the gut-busting, mouth-watering meals he would cook up on the tiny gas stove in the 5th-floor walkup that he and Annie shared in Greenwich Village. The evenings in that garret were straight out of The Owl and the Pussycat (in which he had a memorable cameo), or Breakfast at Tiffany's: a cacaphony of cats, Erroll Garner, a Clint Eastwood or Martin Scorsese movie on TV, street noises, radiators or air conditioners (as the season dictated) -- and Jacques' bellowed orders, observations and exclamations (the most oft-repeated and memorable: "What the f*#k is the matter with you?!!") -- and the smacking of lips and sipping of sweetened coffee in the winter, or ice tea sipped from plastic pyrex measuring cups in the sweltering summer. There was one memorable evening spent slurping Szechuan noodles while watching a Nova episode in which a tiny camera was, shall we say, positioned to capture audio and video of the journey of a human sperm to the egg. At one point, the tail of the sperm thrashed in unison with the noodle I was inhaling. That almost killed my appetite, but not quite.

Jacques was determined to help me develop a bullshit detector. Most people, he was sure are lying, thieving, cheating, murderous bastards, and it was very important to understand what they were after. It was more important to understand what you were after. He felt I had talent and wasted it agonizing over it. He wanted to clear a path in front of me.

He could have: he had the largest hands of any human being I'd ever met. I made it a habit to shake hands with him, at least 10 times, each time I saw him. He would grimace and make his karate-master noise ("Eeeeeuuugggh!!") as he squeezed my hand, but clearly he wasn't even trying, while I squeezed with all my might and felt my bones turning to soup between his palm and the first knuckle of each digit. The next day my wrist would feel like it had been pinned under a truck all night. (Jacques showed me a photo of himself as a young fighter, in which he posed in a boxer's stance with the great Jack Dempsey: their fists were the same size.)

All these impressions don't add up to anything, I know. They recur to me now because their store has been capped. Jacques was partly gone before I knew him, but precisely because of that was more vividly here than anyone I've known -- possessed of fevered dreams and haunted by his enslavement, he was a bullshit-buzzsaw. He just couldn't take it -- didn't have time for it. He was also, perhaps, a little jealous of anyone who could indulge in the luxury of bullshit: they had time on their hands and food in their bellies, and they felt safe -- a feeling that had left him well before I was born.

Jacques was a dreamer, and he wanted his dream to be Annie's dream: he wanted the story of his life to be told in a movie. It may yet happen, but it didn't happen in his lifetime. It wasn't that he wanted fame and fortune -- not only that. I always felt that he wanted people to know how they were balanced on the knife's edge and thought they had all the room in the world. It was almost as if he experienced a demonic version of Harry Potter's Platform 9 3/4 -- he was swept onto a train and into slavery, and after that, part of him was exquisitely conscious of this different dimension of human evil and raw misery. He needed the people he loved not to get near that edge; too many had already gone over it.

I was lucky enough to visit Annie and Jacques less than a week before he died. He was much thinner, and greatly weakened by dementia, and only intermittently conscious, but when awake his eyes widened at the sight of me. He grasped and crushed my hand as always, and smiled his heart-breakingly beautiful  smile. When I told him I missed his cooking and would love some of his trademark grilled eggplant dip, he managed to say, "Soon." Annie played Erroll Garner for him and fed him ice cream. After polishing off most of a pint, he looked at her adoringly, kissed her, and said, "Me love you," which was how they always said it to each other, and how Annie and I say it to each other now, and how Jacques will go on, in every expression of love between us, for the rest of our lives.

--T.A.

Student-Speak Lexicon, Vol. 1

 

I'm trying to build my lexicon of contemporary student-speak. I really feel this should be an open-source work, so feel free to chime in. As you can see, it's still pretty thin (because I never talk to anybody), so please help me, and all those other students, navigate the jungle of contemporary discourse by contributing your knowledge.

It seems the percentage of people who never say exactly what they mean has remained steady, at about 99%, but figuring out what they are trying to say is harder than ever.

Here's what I know so far:

2010: "We should be Facebook friends" = 1980: "Let's do lunch."

2010: "I can't make it to class; can you e-mail me your notes?" = 1980: "Can I have your digits?"

"What classes are you taking?" = "How are you? (the non-sincere variety)"

"Do you like this class?" = "Who hates this class more: you or me?"

"I really like what you said in class the other day" = "Do you ever shut up?!"

"I don't feel well" = "I'm hung over."

"I find Nietzsche's criticism of Hegel's view of history so jejeune" = "I was not breast fed."

"U. Chicago is weird" = "U. Chicago is weird."

"Hyde Park sucks" = "I'm homesick."

That's about it for now . . . stay tuned . . . and please help grow the lexicon.

--T.A.

 

"Be more stupid and you will feel better."

 
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, 1632-1677

Paul Mendes-Flohr is providing a fascinating look at Jweish memory and Jewish history in his class on the topic. The reading begins (chronologically) with Spinoza, often referred to as "the first modern Jew," and continues through the 20th century, emphasizing the flourishing of Jewish historiography that began with Spinoza's Biblical criticism and flowered with Mendelssohn and the Berlin Haskalah. The idea of the class is to try to gain a better understanding and fuller appreciation of how Jewish memory and Jewish historiography have been shaped by Biblical and prophetic models of memory and progress; how those models contributed to Enlightenment thinking and then circled back to separate Jewish historical consciousness from Jewish religious memory.

Professor Mendes-Flohr has even brought in that great "Jewish" thinker Friederich Nietzsche, who, while often cited as inspiration for the rise of Fascism and Nazism, also warned of the weaknesses of the "monumental" view of history he espoused. In Professor Mendes-Flohr's words (from the lecture notes he freely shares), Nietzsche understood that this view of history could result in "a frenzy of fanaticism, and [encourage] visionary hotheads and plain scoundrels to destroy empires, assassinate princes, ignite wars and revolutions." In Nietzsche's own words (from his essay, On the Uses and Abuses of History), if monumental history -- built around exemplary historical figures and their heroic deeds -- is placed in the hands of "talented egoists and wild crowds of evil rascals, then empires are destroyed, leaders assassinated, wars and revolutions instigated."

Nietzsche, of course, was not Jewish, and is tarred with the brush of being the preferred philosopher of the Nazis. Here, however, is what he said about the Jews in Human, All Too Human:

As soon as it is no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an ingredient as any other national remnant. Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind.  In spite of that, I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more neutral, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek.

  

Friederich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

Nietzsche walked the line between brilliance and insanity until he fell off on the wrong side. But that's not my point. My point is that Jewish memory, as enshrined in the Bible and affirmed by the rabbis, kept Jewish memory apart from critical historical consciousness, even as Jews were kept apart from the broad stream of history. This had a remarkably profound and lasting effect on the way Jews remember things, and on what we consider progress to be. For millennia, Jewish memory was pegged to seminal events in Jewish history, and circumscribed the same mnemonic circle over and over again: every calamity was a reminder of the Temple's destruction, every victory was an Exodus.

Even now, today, we see ourselves -- don't we? -- as burdened by an enormous individual and collective responsibility to do well, get it right, be the rising tide that lifts all boats, and to remember and redress injustice. This kind of thinking isn't limited to Jews, but it is, to a very large extent, the result of Biblical imperative and rabbinic law, and the ways in which these informed Christian thought. As Enlightenment thinking pulled philosophy away from religion, "talented egoists" cherry-picked philosophy for ideas that could foment radical change and wholesale destruction.

Which isn't to say that talented egoists didn't or don't exist in the religious sphere. It's to say that our memory and history are inflected with -- messianic hopes! We remember our own and society's failures, and we work to try to help everything and everyone progress toward an Event or Goal that, in the back of our minds if nowhere else, is ultimately redemptive. As the historian Nathan Rotenstreivch said, Jewish history is "a synthesis between meaning and reality."

 
Nathan Rotenstreich, 1914 - 1993. This is the cover of the "Bibliography of the Writer Nathan Rotenstreich"

It's stimulating to read and think about history and memory -- especially when you're old enough to have a little of the former, and to start losing a little of the latter (thereby appreciating it all the more). But I wonder: what good does it do? At the end of the day, what have you got? Perhaps all this cerebrating and remembering overheated poor Nietzsche's brain. After all, he was reportedly counseled to chill out: "Be more stupid," his colleague Immermann told him, "and you will feel better."

I am fascinated to be discovering how deeply Jewish my thinking is, despite my deeply un-Jewish upbringing; amazed to understand how we are all -- even, perhaps especially the most strident atheists -- wired to think like good little messianists: there's an ultimate state at which things should arrive, and we must help get our world to that state.

"Be more stupid and you will feel better." These immortal words should be inscribed at the gates of every university and library, in order to scare away the meek, the dilettantish and the sensible.

But they haven't scared me yet.

--T.A.

My desk

is covered with books, papers, index cards. Texts in Hebrew and English lay in loose embrace; a stapler stands guard, squaring off against a calculator. A picture of my family stands on binder-clipped tip-toes. My old meditation bowl/bell sits at quiet attention.

 

I am happy here.

 

--T.A.