What did you expect?”
Uri answered, laying the pen on the blotter. “My generation had only three
places to go: Hitler’s oven,
Ben-Gurion’s Palestine,
or the Wonders of America. Most had no choice. I had one, so I was forced to pick. I made the wrong choice.
I
cleared a place to sleep on the couch and found the manuscript, Die Hausfruedn, The House Friend, neatly
arranged and fresh in appearance, as if that old letch had typed it just this
morning. Holding the manuscript in my
hand did little to alleviate my state.
I
knew what the “house friend” meant in the lascivious circles which Goldfarb
once orbited. The plot of The Hausfruend was the type of sexually
free thinking philosophy which some Yiddishists practiced between the
wars. For Yiddish speaking Jews such as
Goldfarb, political and social philosophy had failed. They were not Hebraists and had no interest
in pioneering the Land
of Israel. They were not farmers or laborers. They worked at newspapers, wrote plays, novels,
short stories and poems, and were slaves to a language which had the misfortune
not to be spoken in any parliament or police station, court of law, barrack or
scientific institute.
It was the
language of religious instruction, domestic life, and the bedroom. And it was the last from which Yiddhistists
like Goldfarb made their realm. Goldfarb
and those like him took two-thousand years of rabbinical purity and conjugal
injunction and threw them out the window, along with eating the flesh of
animals with cloven hooves who do not chew upon their cud.
They swapped marriage partners, a husband
took two wives or a wife took two husbands.
Or, in Goldfarb’s case, as was his particular literary fixation, a man
was invited into a marriage to be a “house friend” to his wife, a euphemism for
a second husband. The wanton Carnovksy
sister in his magnum opus had done just this: she had taken a husband under the
chuppa and another was contracted in a café.
No matter the
place, time, or setting, Goldfarb returned to this theme in his work, with the
regularity of a tide. Polyandry was
Goldfarb’s idée fixee between the
pages of his fiction. But what about
between the sheets? Goldfarb was an old
man, after all, and surely he could not marshal the forces even of secondary
husband?
Der Hausfreund had less restraint than
its previous incarnations. The
protagonist, simply called S., had less prowess in coupling with his wife than
the younger house friend, the writer Alter.
He watched his wife make love to the other man, furtively, from a crack
in the wall next to the bureau. The
narrator took a clinical, objective interest in his wife’s coordinated
infidelity. Then, as the story mounted
toward a climax, S. began to stroke Alter’s body as he made love to his wife. His wife coaxed him. She barked obscenities about God and the
Torah to heighten the level of depravity.
I
had met Mendele Goldbarb only this afternoon.
I had read The Carnovsky Sisters
several years ago, and that bulky work with many asides left little
impression. What he said in Carnovsky in nearly half a million words
he had accomplished in The House Friend in less than twenty-thousand. His characters were little more than
mouthpieces for his depraved philosophy of the pursuit of pleasure. Then the story ended abruptly. Alter, the young man, is making love to
Sonya, the matron. All the while the S.,
the husband, is entranced by the “jangling of bed-springs.” At the height of pleasure, Sonya, who keeps a
loaded pistol in her dresser drawer, shoots S. dead.
We have passed through the first gate of the
49 Gates of Defilement, Sonia explains to her lover, who is standing next
to her, both naked, above the hopeless corpse of S: willing cuckold, passive voyeur, latent
homosexual, he had to endure the final indignity of having his corpse defiled
as his wife copulated with Alter once again.
The story ends with a piece of obscene theology: The God of Israel
loves and kills, Sonya explain to Alter, our God is the greatest lover and killer.
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