Israel on a Car Phone: Adventures in the New Babylon

By Warren Siegel

Israel Bodkin's journey began when he was a youngster and fled Lithuania just before the Nazis arrived. After fifty years in New York City he thinks he understands the boundaries of his life. But now his beloved wife is dead, and his family lives in Miami, a place Israel imagines as the New Babylon, a center of luxury, license, and wickedness. When his son insists he come to live with him, Israel reluctantly begins the next stage of his life's passage. He enters a world of bi-racial, tri-ethnic chaos he never bargained for. But all things are possible in the New Babylon. Israel discovers an unlikely new career as a radio talk show host and becomes a reluctant political activist. Interaction with a sometimes manic collection of new friends affirms what he already knows-that life is about making demands and fulfilling commitments. What you can't always predict are the consequences. Israel's story is as old as history and as new as today's headlines, and his adventures will move you to laughter and to tears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 5, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469714851

Warren Siegel

Warren Siegel practiced medicine in New York and Miami before moving to La Jolla, California where he now lives with his wife, a former actress.

Book preview

ISRAEL ON A CAR PHONE

Adventures in the New Babylon

Warren Siegel

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Israel on a Car Phone

Adventures in the New Babylon

All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Warren Siegel

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission in

writing from the publisher.

Writers Club Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons living or dead is

purely coincidental. In some instances reference is made to historical events and

personages to advance the plot.

ISBN: 0-595-22365-6

ISBN: 978-1-4697-1485-1 (eBook)

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

for Tobie

now and always

In the New Babylon all things are possible but not always desired

CHAPTER 1

Call me Israel. Wait, I know what you’re thinking. Not another endless book about obsession and large fish. No need to worry. This is not a story about a whale or any other kind of fish. Hey, all right, I know they’re mammals, bear with me. I’m not even talking whitefish about which I am somewhat compulsive. And there are no exotic harpooners in this tale. The only thing I ever harpooned was another potato latkes with a long fork and a boarding house reach at Passover dinner. This book is about me, Israel Bodkin, formerly a garment cutter in New York City, at one time an honorable if unexciting trade, now retired and on the brink of leaving my home. Please don’t let my name and my putative religion put you off. This is a tale with universal truths that has lessons for everyone in this polyglot America of ours. Like it used to say in the subway ads here in New York, you don’t have to be Jewish to like Levy’s rye bread.

New York City! What emotions these words conjure; resentment, jealousy, anger. The farther away from the city you get the stronger the thoughtless accusations of abusive power and undeserved privilege become. The deeper the resentment of the wealthy New York cabalistic power elite that supposedly runs the country. Don’t include me in your anger. I don’t even know Felix Royhatin, have never partied with Oscar de la Renta. You may not realize it but those of us who have lived here in New York for a long time have been forced by your resentment into an enclave of defensive provincialism. We have arrogated to ourselves a special bitter cynicism that does not travel well. That is why I am uneasy to be leaving the city after so many years. It has taken me a long time to learn what New York truly is; a great complex beleaguered, often wounded, sometimes diseased organism, struggling, as do all organisms, to survive. I have lived here long enough to have the siege mentality fit like an old pair of comfortable shoes. Now I am to be exiled to Florida, and I am concerned. More on that shortly.

I am seventy-nine. Wait, let me do the math for you. I was born in 1915 in Memel during the Great War, and I was four when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. That makes me eight when Hitler was drinking beer and shooting off his mouth and his revolver in that beer hall in Munich. As a youth I had the distinct impression that being a Jew in Lithuania was becoming less and less attractive. My father heard about Kristallnacht and somehow got the family aboard a rust bucket of dubious registry that left Memel on a damp oily night headed for Scandinavia and eventually Dundee. The family consisted of me, my father and mother, two sisters, one younger and one older than me, and one brother who was the oldest of the children. Austria and the Sudetenland had already been annexed and occupied, and Lithuania was next. Three weeks after Hitler flummoxed Chamberlain at Munich he ordered his military to prepare for the occupation of Memel, our dear home. I have this picture of our rust bucket of a boat slipping out to sea just in the nick of time as Hitler, seasick in the Baltic aboard the pocket battleship Deutschland, steamed into Memel, another provision of the Treaty of Versailles torn up. Of course this is conjecture, but it is a pleasing fanciful reminiscence.

I remember nothing of the actual voyage. I was sick with influenza, delirious with fever and have little recollection of our perilous flight. The journey has become part of the folklore and the oral tradition of our family and has changed many times in the telling. I do know that my younger sister died during the hazardous passage; there were whispers of rape and possible suicide. I also know that after we arrived in Scotland my mother only spoke to my father when absolutely necessary, and there was hardly any further physical contact between them. We eventually settled in a slum in White Chapel in London, and she left him soon thereafter. The family was wounded and confused. We split apart, and, after the war, when we decided to come to America, only my father and I made the journey. Once in New York he lived in solitude and died in 1951.

I married shortly after we came to New York. I married a young woman of surpassing beauty and kindness, possessed of a gentleness of spirit that defeated the bitterness I harbored in my soul at that time of my life. My wife came from a family of privilege and financial comfort, and they never had any understanding of our relationship. I was regarded with disdain, and she grew away from her family although they continued an arms length relationship that included them slipping her money since they assumed I was incapable of her support. We had a son. He is now forty-eight. When he was a toddler and he reached up for my hand there was the smell of freshly baked bread. I do not want to reflect on those years. They are too sweet in my thoughts to share with strangers. I was able to give my beloved wife and son a good life, and we were able to rejoice in our grandson. As for my beloved wife, last year at seventy-five she became sick for the first time in her life. It was a prolonged and brutal illness. Her family thought she was spoiled and ill prepared for this travail. They dreaded the time and anticipated the worst, expecting a drain on their patience and their pocket book. But I knew better. She began her final journey with little complaint and few recriminations. She endured her pain and physical deterioration with dignity for a year and died quietly, one could almost say elegantly. She confounded them. And now I am alone in the apartment in New York.

And that brings me to why I am about to leave New York. My son fears I am lonely and does not want me to live alone in an apartment filled with memories.

Mom died there. How can you want to stay?

He doesn’t understand that the memories, all the things she used, objects that her hands lingered on, her scent in the air, the sweat in the upholstery, even the recent stains in the carpet, are all that I have of her now. He is insistent, emotional, demanding. In his urgency to get me to Florida where he can keep an eye on me I sense a desperation in the recognition of his own mortality. He is an only child and has never known the loss of a close loved one before. He took his mother’s death very hard. Now he looks at me, and in my inevitable death he sees himself an orphan. He needn’t worry. I am remarkably healthy. Dr. Himmelfarb has reassured me that it will take a silver stake through my heart to kill me. I told Himmelfarb at my last visit that I would be leaving soon for Florida, and he congratulated me. His practice is too busy to worry about the loss of a patient. Himmelfarb has had a condo at a golf course community in Boca Raton for years and mixes easily with the assimilated Jews who come there like migratory birds each winter. Their wealth and secularism easily blur the distinction between them and the surrounding sea of goyim in which they seek to swim. But, after a hard day on the golf course, sitting in the grillroom in their Lily Pulitzer slacks, holding their Gibsons and gazing contentedly across the room, they see only other Jews. The objects of their mimicry belong to another club at which they are not welcome.

I chide Himmelfarb good naturedly about his assimilation for I am fond of him. Once, when I pricked him too sharply, he defended himself by saying that at least he had not changed his name, offering that act of courage as proof of his worth as a Jew.

The Florida I am headed for is far different from Himmelfarb’s verdant golf courses and upscale Gallerias. I am about to enter the bi-racial tri-ethnic maelstrom of Miami, and the good doctor blanches when he hears this.

"Why don’t you just move to Bed-Stuy?’ he asks sarcastically.

I’m going to live with my son and daughter-in-law and my grandson.

Jesus, Israel, live in Boca. The family can drive up to see you whenever they want. Indulge yourself a little. You don’t need the problems of Miami.

But maybe that’s what I do need. Himmelfarb is fifty-five and has a mostly geriatric practice. He thinks he knows old people, assuming all they want are creature comforts, the warmth of the sun on old bones, easy to digest foods, regular bowel movements, and a nearby hospital. He thinks we all yearn for that great Boca Raton at the end of the rainbow. He sees too many AARP ads with those impossibly active tanned old folks playing tennis into their nineties. He assumes a reversion to simplicity of mind in old age, a loss of goals.

Lance, I say to him. Lance Himmelfarb, can you believe it? Maybe he has more courage than I give him credit for. Lance, when I’m settled in Miami I’ll come up to Boca and visit you. You’ll teach me golf.

My son, Howie, offered to come up to New York and help me pack up the apartment, indulging his conceit that I am suddenly too old and incompetent to manage my affairs. It was a half-hearted offer. He doesn’t like to spend time in the apartment he grew up in. When he and his family came to New York to visit they always stayed in a hotel even though we had room for them. They moved to Miami four years ago when my grandson, Richard, was nine. It was wrenching for all of us, but the job opportunity for Howie was irresistible. Sarah and I went to Miami several times a year to visit and to watch Richie grow up, but we could never really consider moving there too. But now, with Sarah gone, I feel like I have less substance; I’m like a reed in the wind, so I’ll let myself be blown to Miami. What could happen?

My grandson and I are very close, have been since he was an infant and some genetic marker told him I was to be his favorite in the family. My daughter-in-law, Joan, seems to resent the closeness. When Richie was six Joan gave me a present, a reproduction of Ghirlandio’s masterpiece The Old Man and his Grandson. I am told by an art historian friend at Cooper Union whose classes I sometimes attend that the Italian master was saying in the painting that the adoring look in the child’s eyes as he regards his deformed grandfather shows the purity of a child’s love regardless of the physical ugliness of its object. I showed the picture to Himmelfarb, and he identified the old man’s grotesque nose as a rhinophyma. I’m not sure what my daughter-in-law meant to convey by this gift. I choose not to think she is petty or jealous. She’s a wonderful mother, but she’s a shadow person. She lacks substance. Her life is so predictable it seems she’s already lived it.

My grandson, Richie, is the apple of my eye. I love and dote on him, but I never sentimentalize our relationship. I make demands. In some ways I am too quick to criticize since I expect so much from him. He is the hope of the family. Richie’s a good boy, but he is a bit of a nudge when it comes to some things. When he was ten he decided to become the official Bodkin family archivist, encouraged in the project by his Sunday school teacher.

Tell me about Europe, grandpa, he asks. Tell me about the war.

I resist. He’s reading about this in Sunday school.

Were you in the Warsaw ghetto? he asks hopefully.

In his excitement he’s forgotten that I was in London during the war. Did you know Ann Frank? he persists.

The kid’s a romantic. Yeah, I dated her before I met your grandmother. I’m in White Chapel cold, hungry and pissed off most of the time and looking for a way to get to America. I’m not looking for chicks, and I’m not keeping any diary.

Tell me about it, grandpa. What was it really like for a Jew in Europe during the war?

What do you want, Richie? You want to take me to school for show and tell? Read Malamud, I tell him. Read Primo Levi, read Elie Wiesel. It’s all there. You can appropriate that history. He’s a nice kid, but sometimes he’s a nudge. I have to be careful not to discourage him. I don’t want him to share American youth’s perception of history as a string of sanitized anecdotes waiting to be verified by a miniseries. It’s bad enough that we teach our kids history at theme parks.

I’m on the plane to Florida wondering about the turn my life has taken. I’m wedged between two large young men wearing undershirts that proclaim their loyalty to sports teams. I decline the compartmentalized tin that contains something questionably organic that the stewardess insists is chicken Orientale and catch a nap. One of the few positive things about growing old is the new found ability to fall asleep almost anywhere. I’m jolted awake by the landing. Despite pleas from the loudspeaker everyone immediately stands and begins to clog the aisles like cholesterol in arteries. You can see where my mind is. We shuffle in place and lean forward as if body English could influence the forward progress of the plane. We are told once again to be seated until we have safely reached something called the jetway. Then they turn off the air conditioning. In two minutes it’s hot as the devil and the air is rank. Is this the punishment for standing up too soon? I look up and see the little blower nozzle overhead.

This is just for showers, right? I say with a wry smile to the man standing next to me. Either he doesn’t get my bitter joke or he’s too pissed off to comment. I read where a poll showed that twenty-five per cent of Americans aren’t sure the Holocaust happened.

I get off the plane and there is a different Richie than I remember from his last visit to New York. It’s only about six months, but he’s undergoing some kind of puberty acceleration. There seems to be hair in the vee of his polo shirt, a bulge in his pants. For a moment my thoughts flash to a supermarket tabloid I saw last week. Boy Becomes Old Man in One Year!! screamed the headline on the paper as a tease for a story about progeria, a mysterious ailment that turns youngsters into old people in a few years. Richie’s bear hug jolts the image from my brain and almost knocks me over.

Grandpa, you made it! Did he doubt my ability to navigate the complexities of modern air travel or Delta’s ability to get me here? You look great!

Let me look at you, Richie, I say, holding him by his broad shoulders at arms length and drinking him in. He’ll be a man before I know it. I’m glad I’ve come.

Hi, dad. My son, Howie, gives me a hug. The Bodkins like physical contact. I think his eyes are full, but I don’t stare.

Come here, Joan, we can all hug, I say to my daughter-in-law who is hanging back unsure, as if excluded from something male. And we all do hug like a team that’s just won the big one. I figure we must look like an ad for a soft drink. Out of the corner of my eye I see a stewardess beaming. I give her a wink.

I’m in a suit. I still regard air travel as something of a formal event. It’s obvious I’m alone in that perception. Most of my fellow travelers look like they’ve been working under a car. Howie asks for my jacket. I loosen my tie. Richie hefts my luggage with pride and possessiveness, and we head for the parking lot. The heat is a physical presence that hits me with a force that is palpable and causes me to lose a step.

The wagon’s air conditioned, dad. It’s right over there.

On the ride to the house everyone chatters. The flight, the weather in New York, sports—Miami is about to get a baseball team—, Richie’s school, Joan’s new job. Are we talking around something? Richie almost gives it voice. I’m glad you came, grandpa, he says instead of Are you glad you came, grandpa? I like his version better.

As soon as we arrive at Howie’s house my bags are summarily stowed and, after I am indulged in my desire for a wash-up and a change of clothes, we embark on a tour. We take Joan’s car, a sedan with a sunroof through which I am urged to observe the palm trees and the sky with its castles of clouds. I don’t know if you’ve spent any time in Florida, but they seem to have more than one sun there. No matter where you look, there it is. I look out the windows or the sunroof as requested, but the blazing sun, only partially tempered by the tinted glass, always seems to find me. It is intent on blinding me, and I look away with my eyes smarting. I never appreciated those dull pewter gray New York skies until now.

How about this light, dad? Howie asks rhetorically. Makes you wish you were a painter.

It’s so clear, Joan chimes in as if rehearsed. And you can smell the flowers, she adds opening the window for me to take a whiff. Then thankfully she submits to the stifling heat and rolls it quickly back up so the air conditioning can function.

All you can smell in New York is the exhaust from the buses, Richie adds. This is from someone whose olfactory world is bounded by Burger King and locker room sweat. He’s read the script, too. When Richie was in New York he loved the buses, exhaust and all. So I see I am to embrace Miami from the start, and I accept my role in the play, chiming in with appropriate agreement and even initiating a complimentary comment, remarking on a vibrantly flowering bougainvillea bush which I recognize as something my beloved wife had tried unsuccessfully to cultivate in our little garden in New York.

Mercifully it finally grows dark and, although I am assured that Miami after dark takes on a special magic, we skip the night tour and have dinner. An ethnically correct restaurant has been chosen for me, presumably by Joan, who remains convinced that elderly Jewish people from New York eat only the culinary delights of their eastern European forebears. We go to a delicatessen that is the apotheosis of the Jewish culino-cultural experience. The word glatt figures prominently on the menu. The place is filled with people whom central casting would have sent over for a re-make of Fiddler on the Roof. There is a jar of chicken fat on the table next to the sour pickle tureen. Personally I favor Italian food or a nice New York sirloin strip, but I go along with the charade dutifully eating my brisket and potato pancakes. I draw the line at the chicken fat. For a moment I catch Howie’s eye and see embarrassment there. It has been Joan’s idea that my life in New York shares more with a shtetl than with modern America, and he goes along to preserve harmony. His look lets me know we will not repeat this evening.

Now I’m not saying I have any objection to ethnic food. I enjoy the products of the Jewish kitchen as much as anyone. What I object to is the stereotyping. As far as religion goes I am comfortable with an agnosticism of convenience. I am a Jew by birth, upbringing and tradition, and my belief involves ethics and morality. I employ the stance of the reluctant agnostic to avoid the chores that the rubric of Judaism imposes; the celebration of the holidays, for example, or regulated temple attendance. Instead of Friday night I’d just like to drop in when I want. In some ways growing up in my household was not easy for Howie. My beloved wife was an unquestioning believer. She lit candles, attended temple on a regular basis, celebrated the holidays and, with firm good nature, insisted that Howie did as well. Howie, the good son, the only son, did as he was told, then looked at me and became confused. In college he lost a lot of his Jewish identity to the freedom of the sexual revolution of the sixties. Vietnam was of more immediate interest to him than was Israel. Fortunately he served there without physical or psychic injury. Then, as his life progressed and he married and had a child, he became more comfortable with his Jewish roots and proud of his heritage. Now Howie likes to identify with Israel, with its militancy and its guts. He celebrates the wars won. But, in recent years, with the Intifada and Israel’s reaction to it, with the question of the settlements and the rise of the right wing, he is less sure. He sees both Jewish and nonJewish feelings about Israel changing, and his zeal swings like a weather vane in the winds of public opinion.

I have never been a Zionist and have often been ambivalent about Israel. Howie and I had one of our few fights when I found amusing Meyer Lansky’s attempt to flee prosecution in the United States by claiming the dual citizenship accorded all Jews and seeking to enter Israel one step ahead of the F.B.I. You go to Israel to avoid persecution, not prosecution, I had said, starting the fight.

Frankly I’m uncomfortable with the anger of the God of the Old Testament. It seems to me that the degree of vengeance expressed by the Jewish God is sometimes inappropriate. Look at David and Bathsheba. The sword shall not leave the house of David! I mean for what, a little roll in the hay?

Anyway, the evening ends with everyone tired and ready to head home to bed. I am exhausted from the day of travel, and the family suffers the fatigue of tension. In bed much later I look at the clock and see it’s three am. I lie awake and listen to new sounds. I left the window open to hear the palm trees moving in the light wind off the ocean. The heat is oppressive. I close the window and substitute the drone of the air conditioner. It won’t keep me awake, nor will the unfamiliar bed or the unfamiliar geography of my new bedroom. I am an insomniac anyway. I do my best thinking between midnight and three when I have time to process and judge what I have heard during the day undisturbed by the need to make conversation. As I examine my thoughts I see that the short trip from New York to Miami, from my solitary life to one now to be spent in the bosom of my family, has already radically altered my previously fixed perspective. Despite my age and the loss of my beloved wife I had never before appreciated how the view ahead can become shortened. Less than twenty-four hours in Miami and I’m