And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but notenough. I was
in my bed, around my bed Americawas falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
— Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War“
You are in a CVS on an unseasonably warm day in January, having finished your syllabi for the spring term and what you thought would be this essay on space and the city, the idea of apartments and mass transit as shared spaces. Lately, you’ve been feeling a certain kind of way toward the people you love. A new kind of love whose binding and serrated edges leaves little space for you to live outside of. You couldn’t leave it you wanted to. It pre-dates love. It post-dates leaving. It leaves your heart full. It leaves it a wreck. Desperate, slow-breathed gasping. Not one-countried. Un-allegianced. Otherworldly worlded-warnings. At night an uncompromising hope fills it too: the first common threads of humanity as the future, as the last chance too late and not so distant. You shake it from your head. You find yourself shaking your head in the CVS where you wait in line, waiting to be called to the register, when hateful words from a woman behind you creep up and crescendo into tumult and razors.
Lost in your thoughts, lost in another world, it takes a while for you to understand what she is saying until you hear the word “Jew.” She’s saying something that runs your blood cold. That breaks sweat on your tepid skin. An instinct older than you wants you to raise your hands to your face as if to ward off a blow. You nearly drop the basket containing your purchases. You hear it again. You half-turn toward her when you catch sight of the man in front of you, the target to whom her words are directed. An elderly, tall man in all black, the tzitzit fringe of his tallit falling from his waist where he leans one hand on a cane. A black kippah, perfect and unmoving, encircles the back of his head as he nods at the cashier who is looking over a receipt. The cashier is nodding, and then calls for a manager. The store is very busy. The man has been overcharged. A simple mistake. One, though, that requires an override from a higher authority. This will take time. In a crowded, breakneck city like New York, you are accustomed to waiting. You are accustomed to the idea of arriving early, but are often late. A simple mistake.
Lateness and sharing of congested spaces go hand in hand within cities. Within Jerusalem, on last-buses-before-Shabbat eve to Mahane Yehuda market, you were shoulder to shoulder with other latecomers to buy the last of the rose-colored grapes, round loaves of bread, crumbling white cheese for a gathering you were already late to, before you even set out the door, before you even arose that morning or the one before, in which you’d just returned from visiting a girl in Tel Aviv, a girl you were in love with actually, a girl who’d been breaking your heart since you were in undergrad because you were always just a little too late when she was ready to open up, to share space in her small apartment she shared with two other roommates, a four-story walkup on Dizengoff beneath a coffee shop that never had any seats, you were always too late to grab one, and the sherut from Tel Aviv that brought you back to Jerusalem, the beat-up, rumbling white van you shared with seven other strangers, the driver always packing it to brim, you shared a seat with another young woman as small as you, a seat meant for two, sharing it for nearly two and half hours, having to stop at two roadblocks, the young soldiers peeking in through the heavy-curtained windows, until you scuttled into the heart of the City Center, heavy with construction on Yafo Road, the other woman’s head drooping on your shoulder, passed out despite the driver cursing the traffic, the honking, the quick and stunted acceleration of his foot on the pedal, the chatter of other passengers in Hebrew, English, Russian, each in solidarity with the driver, against the traffic, against an idea of people in a collective way, perpetuator unknown, unrealized, faceless, while the woman slept on your shoulder, and in retrospect, in reliving this moment within the clamor of an over-heated CVS in Queens, standing below a vent spewing out unnecessary heat for such an unseasonably warm day in January, you have withdrawn in your shared space, the seat that you and this woman were not asked to squeeze into but expected, how you were both too tired to complain and protest, she too with dark circles under her eyes and last-minute stages of dress— rumpled clothes, uncombed hair, bare faced— and you wondered too what she was escaping from, where was she going, as other passengers checked their phones and cited lateness, crying lateness, when sheruts themselves have no set timetable or schedule, only leaving when they are full, the driver saying when is when, when you hear that word again, breaking through the bumper-to-bumper would-be collisions in Jerusalem, that word “Jew.”
The woman behind you in this CVS in Queens is speaking louder now, almost in your ear, having found audacity in the stillness and congested space: “What is he trying to do, Jew them down?”
Suddenly you whirl around. You are turned around by that new love leaving little space for you to live outside. You are turned around by the forgotten familiarity of a phrase you’d heard in your AP high school economics class, when a local businessman visited and used this exact phrase. Your classmates looked at you, astonished, but said nothing. You felt your face ablaze with rage. This, after all, was an Advanced Placement class taught by your self-proclaimed liberal teacher. But he said nothing. You had to sit through the rest of the presentation. There was no Q&A, the teacher knowing what had happened, what was continuing to happen. After the bell, you arose and charged forward, your classmates still quite and lingering. To see what you would do. To see what you would say. Some looked at you with sorrowful gazes. Some smirking. You might have gone to a high school in San Antonio that had more than half a Mexican-American population, but it was the parents of these particular classmates that ran things, these parents who shortened your mother’s name to Espie from Esperanza. And these particular classmates were white like your teacher and the visiting businessman. They are deeply, deeply Christian— there was only one other Jewish student in the entire school of four thousand students. Almost all Young Republican. Most college bound to Texas universities with strong Christian ties. You felt your face turning even redder as you said to your teacher and the visiting businessman that what the phrase was not only racist in ideology, but deeply damaging for future generations, continuing stereotypes that would lead to a greater hatred toward Jewish people.
Which phrase? The businessman asked calmly.
You know what you said, you replied, your voice still shaking.
As the grass is green, I don’t, he said, smiling.
It’s funny, how many years later, you still remember that exact phrase too. As the grass is green. You had a feeling he wanted you to say what he had said. He wanted to hear you, a Jew, say it. You refused. You reiterated that he knew what he said. Neither nodded, but they let you finish. The businessman’s face was a blank stone, his mouth a straight line slightly bending down at the corners. His eyes sometimes narrowed, just a bit. He looked at you closer. He wasn’t you hearing you— you felt this. You felt lost, and stopped speaking.
Then, your teacher padded your arm gently, and introduced you by name to the businessman. As if you had just walked up to them. As if you hadn’t said anything. He added that you were one of the more promising students who had been given a generous scholarship to a good university, the words given and generous emphasized, as if you hadn’t worked for it.
You opened your mouth again only to be cut off: “Leave it alone.”
This was not indicated. These three words were actually said by a teacher you once admired.
You turned to collect your things, and headed straight to the vice principal who cut you off midway and said you were just making trouble. Threated suspension without saying it outright, but rather said he had zero tolerance for insubordinate students, for challenges to his authority, for wasting his time. You whirled around so he couldn’t see your eyes well up.
Now you are whirling around again, a half-finished cyclone drive more by a new love that cannot keep your mouth shut. You face the woman who has brought damage to your shared space.
“Excuse you,” you say to the woman, “That’s very offensive.”
She is looking at you closely, and you are looking just as closely back. She is dressed in a suit, a simple but well-made grey blazer and long skirt, black heels, small pearl earrings. Her dark blonde hair perfectly coiffed high in a twist, her makeup muted except for the vibrant blush on her cheeks. She bears a briefcase, an iPhone and her purchase of a greeting card clamped down in her free hand. You wonder for a moment for whom she is purchasing a card, for what occasion, a celebration, a thank-you or perhaps a death in a family. This is a woman who still buys greeting cards in the age of Evite and email. You hold onto that card, somehow. You let it go just as instantly. Your eyes meet again. Her voice has not lost its volume.
“Why?” She snaps, nearly shouting. “Are you a Jew too?”
Suddenly you are afraid of what you might do. You feel the moment before you will snap. Other customers have gathered around, shaking their heads in disapproval and groaning. She knows she’s gone too far, but it’s your reaction that you feel she’s waiting for. For you to deliver the slap, the physical blow. That she might have a knife or some kind of weapon crosses your mind— how often has your mother told you one just never knows what damaging things strangers conceal within their clothes much less than their minds?
You know you are no hero. You are too human for that. You have had so many of these encounters, in other variations, and yet each time they still catch you off guard. How many fights did you get in when you were younger, fights with fists and nails scratching and tearing at your clothes, bullied and beat up for being Jewish and not living among your own, on that side of town where you belonged, while the Jewish families at your synagogue always kept a polite but closed conversation with your family, with your mother, or was it for being half-Mexican, for being small and scrawny, for having a brilliant father who worked at Walmart and sometimes has trouble speaking to people— or rather, making ridiculous small talk deemed necessary by polite society— so he’s judged quickly. You got in fights because you can’t keep your mouth shut. Even if you wanted to, you can’t. It’s all very messy, complicated, imperfect. You are still figuring it out. You always have some fight within you.
But it’s the man at the counter who changes the course of your actions. You know he turns around because the woman’s eyes dart from yours to what’s in front of you: his bent shape not at all surprised, a long, tall sigh escaping his body. His sighing, weary eyes, his exhausted eyes meeting yours. His eyes meet yours.
His eyes of your father looking into yours.
That which is yet unnameable to humankind passes between you.
And there is no more space for you to live outside of such binding empathy with those even strange you would protect.
This, you realize later, has less to do with you both being Jews as it does a shared deep desire to heed other worlded-warnings. That it is not only because you were Jews. That it was the hateful language she was using that targeted you as Jews. That you cannot, will not, have this hate be the binding that holds you together as Jews. As humanity.
You set off to find a manager, who is still absent from the register. The store is very busy. A few people follow you. Together you explain the incident to him, which you realize happened in a matter of minutes, which is why the manager has yet to reach the registers. You return to the place in line where she stood. She is gone. How easy for her, to leave like that.
How easy for her, to leave like that, you say later to your father, to which he says nothing at first and for a long while, your father your man for whom no silence is uncomfortable, your father who only when he is ready to speak says “Gam Zu L’tova.”
Gam Zu L’tova. A saying from the Talmud. This too is for the good.
“What is?” You ask.
“That you said something. That you went to find a manager.”
“I should have done more. She got to leave.”
“It’s hard to change people just as it’s hard to speak out.”
You are still upset, but leave it at that for now. In the background, you hear your niece asking for the phone, as your parents are visiting her and your brother. She has a question about grammar, about verbs in particular, about what was really constitutes “action” and what it really is “to be.”
*
Painting: Mordechai Ardon, “To the Morning Star” (1968)