:: DEBRA DI BLASI ::
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The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions- Excerpt From the story, "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung to the Accompaniment of Piano"
GENEALOGY: BAD TO THE BONE: PART 1 My maternal grandmother died believing she was half German, half Irish. She was not. Here's the story:Toward the end of the 19th Century my great-grandfather, who was a Jew and whose last name began with the letter G, emigrated from Germany to the United States. This was his second emigration. The first was during the European Revolution, as an infant carried by his parents. There had been "some sort of trouble" and the G family had escaped it by fleeing to America. (Something about Kaiser Wilhelm. Something about money and/or property. Something vague but unseemly, perhaps dangerous but not, perhaps, noble.) The trouble vanished, or was momentarily forgotten by the Kaiser, and the G family returned home only to flee again for similarly vague but [perhaps] ignoble reasons. The family settled somewhere in the area of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin-that region known for its vast Jewish-emigré population (ha ha ha!). There were six children in the G family: three girls and three boys, one of whom was my great-grandfather. Something happened to the parents; either they again returned to Germany to face whatever political music was playing (Wagner?) or they died or they simply could not afford to feed, clothe, and shelter a brood of six. Therefore, the girls were sent to live with a family by the name of Johns, and the boys were sent to live with a family by the name of Clark. The Clarks were Irish. My great-grandfather took not only their name but their heritage, and passed it on to (1) his daughter (my grandmother) whom he never told otherwise, and (2) his son (my great-uncle) whom he told shortly before his death, shamefaced, though it was never clear whether his shame arose from the 70-year charade or his Jewishness. Let me explain: My great-grandfather hated being a Jew. It shamed him. Whether it was the anti-Semitic climate in Germany or the anti-Semitic climate in Beaver Dam, or the anti-Semitic climate in his soul, my grandfather wanted so badly to fit into the world-a world that offered the possibility of rejection wherever he went-that he himself became anti-Semitic. He was a handsome man with olive skin and black hair and eyes, and a thick black mustache, and a streamlined soldierly physique. There was an exoticism about his appearance that couldn't be explained away (though he tried) by saying he was not only Irish but Black Irish: finer, rarer, worthier. He was worthy to Hattie, my great-grandmother: a tall big-boned German woman, her blue eyes drawn to his black eyes like day to night. She knew his true identity for he confessed it one night after they had kissed and kissed deeply, and she had hinted at their shared future by saying, "I vish to go on kissing you forever-if you know vhat I mean." Loved him especially for the burden of his self-hatred: the limping melancholia it lent him. AND YOUR ARYAN EYE, BRIGHT BLUE Ah, yes! I remember you years ago, when you were in the shape of a young man with Aryan looks of blue eyes & blond hair, and an Aryan last name (von Something-or-other), and an Aryan hatred for Jews and Gypsies and Blacks and Hispanics and Homosexuals and anyone everyone all who did not appear Aryan, as I did then in my German-skin phase, my eyes-Swiss-blue phase, my English-tongue-and-cheek phase. And I remember, I remember that last night you visited me before I fled to Europe, you were hung over and disgusted because you had fucked a Jewish woman ("But she had blonde hair!") and how you felt, you said, "unclean" and "damaged" and how those words toppled incongruously from your young ignorant lips, the way "genocide" and "supremacy" might spill from the lips of a three-year-old boy-for the implications of the words are as yet incomprehensible to him of the small dick the incomplete prick, and the words themselves only sounds his father makes when he's pissed and self-righteous and light-in-the-pocket after a long shitty day at the office. And I remember how I could not bring myself to declare, "My great-grandfather was a Jew," and how the shame of my reticence made me hate you that night so that when you said "I love you" and kissed me good-bye I shuddered, and when you'd gone I scrubbed my lips with a rag until they bled. I should have sent you the part-Jew-bloody rag with a note reading: "Fuck this, you fascist disease, you crime against humanity." Instead, when I ran into you ten years later I kissed you on the cheek and asked about your health and your new wife. Who was Irish. |
