Then followed for me a night of
fitful sleep. Yiddish, a language I
wished to ban from my consciousness, sluiced through my unconscious mind. Sonya, the wanton matron, and her dialogue of
profane theology, unspooled in my mind like a filthy thread, Got, Got, Got, merder, merder, merder, God, God, God, murder, murder, murder. She addressed me like a cruel step-mother in
a fairy tale, but in a bustier and corset.
Goldfarb appeared, looking younger and dressed like a dandy from the
last century. His hair was slicked back,
colored a vibrant copper, and parted down the middle. He wore a matched mustache and spats. My wife Sharon was dressed like a little girl
in a Hebrew school uniform, part hiking shorts, and part peasant blouse. He spoke Yiddish to her and fondled her precocious
body, calling her pet names and muttering endearments. She answered him in an argot of biblical
Hebrew, Medieval Aramaic, and whatever she said caused him to laugh manically.
“You
never had a father or mother,” Sharon
addressed me in Yiddish, looking away from the scene with Goldfarb, like an
actor addressing a camera. “So it left a
hole in your center. You chase after
shadows. Does that surprise you?”
Indeed.
This
biographical verity held its measure of mystery. The void which dream Sharon evoked was a cavern of echoes and
false lights. All through the universe
of my psyche, the reverberation of this Big Bang still evoked a measure of
awe, years after the event of initial abandonment had moved far from its
source, loosing vitality as it traveled, but having untoward, unexpected layers
of cause and effect.
When
I awoke, I found myself muttering Yiddish phrases at a feverish pitch. The words of my half-demented bubbe wafted through
the medium of my illness. Her words were
soothing but malodorous. She spoke the
language of beggars, thieves, Chasids, an insular tongue of the enclosed world,
the reeking armpit, but foremost that of the Golus, of Exile, of physical and metaphysical homelessness.
The very syntax and diction of Yiddish
bespoke of a people without a land. The
very formulations of the words, the harrowing twists of its verbal
dissimilitude, was simply a way to deflect or absorb the crippling loss of place.
And
old men like Goldfarb had taken their profound grief and translated it to the
basest of lust: that of possessing the
lover of another; that of co-mingling with the seed of another man, in the dark
recesses of a woman. And to what end? To exorcise some deep set need to obey. To rid the Jewish body of its guilt and
restraint. To do something you are not
supposed to do.
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