The Jewish Wars

The op-ed by Rachel Grossman was called “Why I Live at the JCC,” and Miriam, reading it to its end, felt the coffee she’d just imbibed rise in her throat, a bitter black bile. Miriam hated Rachel Grossman with a passion she otherwise reserved for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and hunters of big game. Her hatred went back, all the way back to Yaffe magazine, where Miriam (in those days sporting a long braid that swished against her back) was the fiction editor, and Rachel Grossman, fresh from Swarthmore, the latest hire. It was a small staff, just Miriam, two other associate editors, the art director, a couple of editorial assistants, and the editor in chief. Grossman was the newest editorial assistant, with responsibilities ranging from answering the phones to dealing with slush. No matter. She shortly made Miriam’s job all but impossible. In those days—ah, yesteryear!—magazines still ran fiction. More than thirty years later it still irks Miriam to remember how insistent the then-young-Grossman had been to show Miriam her own undergraduate work. When Miriam had relented, it had been as expected: the work was sophomoric, uncooked, juvenile. “Sorry,” she’d said. “It’s just not quite.” That had been putting it mildly. Two days later, Grossman’s manuscript came up again, this time via the editor in chief, who told her to publish it.

Thus, Grossman had triumphed—and established her modus operandi, her winning formula: the story (Miriam remembers it even now) featured a fat smart Jewish girl with an Ivy League degree working as a copy editor at a struggling Jewish woman’s magazine. On the first page, the narrator’s college boyfriend dumps her for a man, and then, to add insult to injury, spreads it around campus that it was his ex-girlfriend’s girth that had turned him off to women.

The story was called “Too Much to Love.”

A first novel called Way Too Much to Love followed. Eventually there were more of the same, with fat funny protagonists working in publishing or radio or journalism triumphing over a combination of skinny bitches and dull-witted men. Then there was a blog. And packed appearances at synagogue and Jewish Community Center book events. Mobs of Jewish women waiting to get their books signed. Orgiastic online pillow talk.

By then, of course, Miriam too had moved on—a doctorate in Semitic languages and literature, marriage and children, a house, a garden. And so what that Miriam’s own life had turned out just fine, that she’d established her own professional trajectory and managed to do so while raising children and staying married to the same man? That her days were filled with friends and books and music? That in middle age she’d established herself as a voice to be reckoned with, a cultural critic with a distinct and original sensibility? That she had her own small magazine? That she’d taken up the piano and now, at sixty, could play late-career Brahms with passion and artistry? That her garden, the literal one that she’d planted behind her house in unfashionable Poughkeepsie, bloomed with great thick bursts of color from March through October? That twice she’d beaten back cancer? That her husband of more than thirty years was still so handsome that women stared? That the two of them still enjoyed satisfying sex?

No! No! None of it mattered. Not with shit like this:

Not only does my local JCC provide refuge from the endless stream of perfect, size-six bodies that pervade the media, but it also allows me to get away from my work, that endless stream of words that flow through my imagination whether or not I’m actively writing. It’s not an easy life, being a writer. But what’s worse is being a writer of women’s lives, real women whose real lives populate not only my pages, but most of the world. And what do I get for it? Punishment!—or, rather, being relegated to the back alleys of literature, by which I mean heaped along with the bodice-rippers and romance writers as a writer of no more than what the literary establishment (established mainly by men, of course) calls “women’s fiction.” In other words, not-as-good-as, second-rate, formulaic. Because, as the current model of literary tastes stipulates, the lives of real women and their real bodies and real concerns, as imagined on the page, is automatically not real literature. At best, it’s entertainment. At worst, it’s garbage. So I go to the JCC, where I’m reminded of our common humanity.

Had the woman never heard of Jane Austen and George Eliot? Cynthia Ozick and Lillian Hellman and Hilma Wolitzer? Dara Horn? Glückel of Hameln? [see diacritical] Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Anne Roiphe, or Lynne Sharon Schwartz? Dora Shulner? Was she out of her tone-deaf and seemingly unlettered mind?

No, she wasn’t. Clearly. She was, however, everything Miriam had spent her entire life fighting, from her teen years up through her current perch as part-time critic and full-time editor of Lost Languages.That practically no one read or subscribed to Lost Languages was beside the point. She’d kept the spark alive, the thrill of Yiddish, the loveliness of Ladino, the poetry of Aramaic and biblical Hebrew. A pox on Grossman, on her whining and all she stood for, her ignorance masked as cleverness, her victimhood posing as authenticity. A pox on all of them with their broad (and outdated) Jewish jokes that centered on Jewish guilt and Jewish mothers, their superficial cheer, their fatheaded self-regard, their conviction that Judaism was best expressed as American liberalism, and their blubber.

Not their blubber, though. Miriam was not fat phobic. Her own belly and thighs were not as taut as they once were. Her friends and loved ones came in all shapes and sizes. But she hated how the wretched Grossman has consistently made her body a weapon to be deployed in the service of self-pitying self-aggrandizement.

A plague on her! May she keel over from a heart attack brought on by her relentless whining! So she’s zaftig? Who cares?

It was winter—cold, dreary, gray. Lately she and her husband had been sniping about stupid things: whose turn it was to go to the grocery store, who did or did not say the last insulting or insensitive thing. One of their two dogs had an infection that wouldn’t clear up. She felt the icy hand of dread on her neck and hunkered down.

So it wasn’t until March, when a second Grossman op-ed appeared in the New York Times, this one parroting the erroneous contention that Passover wasn’t about Jewish liberation as seen in the story of Exodus but about universal liberation theory, topped by not one but two ancient Jewish jokes about eating matzo (“but I thought Moses said ‘Let my people go’”) that Miriam had had enough. Things had progressed far beyond dreck. Grossman garbled language, making a mockery of both Yiddish and American English. As for Judaism—for which she set herself up as spokeswoman!—what she was doing was embarrassing. Her Pesach prayer, shared with readers of the New York Times, was this: Out of Egypt at last, out of Egypt at last, Thank Yahweh Almighty we’re out of Egypt at last! Which, from a historical point of view made no sense, and in fact made a mockery of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s expulsion of the Jews, his seizing of all their assets, his secret police and midnight phone calls, and the resulting wave of Sephardic refugees longing for their lost Egyptian paradise.

She wrote the following:

To the Editor:

Regarding the recent opinion piece by Rachel Grossman (“A Matzo Ball Walks into a Bar,” March 20) I have one question: does the newspaper of record have no educated Jews on its staff? That’s a rhetorical question. My point is that Grossman’s humorous treatment is neither humorous nor accurate. In fact, all she does is reinforce and spread falsehoods about both the practice and the history of Judaism. And her jokes are older than the pyramids.

Miriam was no stranger to the letters column. Her last letter to the editor, in response to the newspaper’s men’s fashion magazine, claimed that after looking at the fashion spreads of anorexic male models, she had become homophobic. It—like this new one—was never published.

But the essay that Miriam wrote, “Whining All the Way to the Bank,” was published. It was published in Tablet, and it instantly ignited a war: feminists versus nonfeminists, stay-at-home mothers versus working mothers, religious versus nonreligious Jews, established critics versus bloggers, bloggers versus other bloggers. The only people who didn’t seem to notice, or care, were men. Unless they were Miriam’s husband, Eric, that is. Eric cared. Eric was furious.

“Are you trying to ruin your entire career?” Eric asked as the hate mail on either side flooded Miriam’s work inbox and rained down on her from sources beyond the internet that she could only attribute to the work of golems. He stood in the door, his silver hair abuzz with static, wearing corduroy pants and an ancient blue cashmere V-neck, shaking his head with the gloom of a movie prophet.

“No.”

“Then are you trying to ruin mine?”

“What? That doesn’t even make sense,” she said.

“Because I’m married to you. These things have a way of reverberating.”

“Oh,” she said, squelching the “buts,” which included but weren’t limited to the fact that she and Eric had different last names, that Eric was a tenured professor and therefore couldn’t lose his job, and that, in any case, his field wasn’t linguistics or criticism or literature of any kind but mathematics. Numbers. Pure logic. His classes were consistently well attended and his reputation among students high.

“Have you even considered the future of the magazine?”

She had. Lost Languages was her love child, something she stroked and fondled and nursed, keeping it alive year after year despite the naysayers and grumblers. It was in its pages, and in its pages alone, that the discerning and passionate lover of Yiddish and Ladino could still be smitten by the written word, intoxicated by the heft and headiness of language itself—and what those languages encoded, namely, Jewish civilization, the Jewish soul, the world irrevocably gone and, with its disappearance, irrevocably diminished. It was constantly under threat, by a shrinking audience, by cultural negligence, by the noise of the world. She ran the entire enterprise out of a barely two-room office that the college had provided in the Department of Jewish Studies.

But its funding was intact. The college merely provided her with office space. The money came from a single extremely wealthy Jewish philanthropist who lived in Washington, DC, by way of some shtetl in Poland. For some reason she had yet to understand, Bernie Baer—who’d made his fortune building strip malls—had a passion for the lost tongues of his youth. He was a grand old man, who even now, in his nineties, went to his old office, where he still kept a suite of rooms, every day, and walked to shul. Now and then she visited him, staying at his house in Washington, enjoying being served by the cook and sleeping on perfect sheets. She loved schmoozing with him: the state of things in Israel; how it was that Saul Bellow was such a dreadful schnook in real life but at the same time had produced such wonderous novels. And did you hear about the Peeping Tom rabbi at Kesher? A shanda, such a shanda!

Bernie was a lovely and gentle mensch, in some ways a second father to her. Her real father, may he rest in peace, had died of an aneurism when she was in graduate school but not before having abandoned his wife and child for the farthest reaches of Hasidism, where he found a second wife who bore him another six children. Miriam, the elder of the new batch by almost two decades, didn’t feel related to any of them. But she did feel related to Bernie. She loved him.

And Eric knew that. Which is why it was particularly irksome when he brought the old man up.

“Have you even thought about how this might affect Bernie?” he said.

“What are you talking about? Bernie’s an old man. He doesn’t do the internet. He doesn’t even know what the internet is. He doesn’t even use email.”

“But why would you risk upsetting him?”

“You’re speaking in riddles. Why would Bernie be upset about my pointing out the absolutely obvious about a third-rate hack who is an embarrassment to any Jew who actually knows something about Judaism?”

He didn’t answer.

Then he did.

“I’m concerned,” Eric said.

“So you’ve said.”

“Because this is what you do, Miriam,” Eric continued. “You get obsessed about something astonishingly trite, something so unimportant, so lacking in urgency, that it defies explanation, and then, without consulting me, or Bernie, or anyone, you take it into your head to right things by dropping a bomb, and once the bomb detonates and the body parts are strewn all over, you refuse to take responsibility, and I’m left to clean up the mess.”

“You’re a mathematician, Eric,” she said. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You put yourself in precarious situations. And then I have to defend you—even when I don’t want to.”

“I’m not asking you to defend me!”

“Just wait,” he said.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s just mean.”

“What if Bernie cuts your funding?” he said.

“Why would you say that?”

“His wife,” Eric said.

“His wife?”

“Julia.”

“I know who his wife is, Eric.”

Bernie’s first three wives had died—the first in the DP camps, the second of Alzheimer’s, the third of cancer—and now he was on his fourth, a widow in her early seventies who dyed her hair a dark brown and spoke with a weird, slightly British accent, mainly about all the important people she knew. Bernie was crazy about her. Mazel tov, a man who loved his wife.

“Naomi Grossman is her second cousin.”

“How would you even know this?”

“They’re first cousins once removed, actually,” Eric continued.

“Even if they are—what does that have to do with anything? And anyway, why would you know this?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Bernie’s ninetieth birthday party.”

“Of course I remember Bernie’s birthday party! I’m not senile!”

Bernie’s birthday party had been the blowout to end all blowouts, held at the National Art Gallery and lined with minor and less minor Washington celebrities. Miriam had been seated between a federal judge and a woman connected to the DNC. But before that, during the drinks-and-mingling part of the evening, she’d gotten herself stuck with Bernie’s wife as she told an endless, pointless story about her latest trip to wherever-she’d-been.

“Julia Baer told us how she and Rachel Grossman were related. You were there,honey.”

“I wasn’t there,” Miriam said. “She must have told you. Not me.”

“You were definitely there. We both were.”

Was she? And if so, had she blinked out? She must have. Then a visual of the moment came to her: she and Eric, side by side and nodding.

“Oh fuck,” she said.

“You didn’t hear a word she said, did you?”

“I try not to.”

“That’s the problem, Miriam,” Eric said. “You don’t listen. Not to other people. Not to me. Not to anyone. And this time—”

He shook his big head again, reminding her of the first pet she’d ever had, a Bernese mountain dog whose breath smelled like sour sponges. He too was named Bernie.

“Don’t lecture me,” she said, thinking of the first Bernie, her big smelly dog and how she’d loved him.

Bernie didn’t cut off her funding though. He merely told her to stay the course. Still, all the savor had gone out of life. As if overnight, Eric had become an aggrieved old man, filled with recriminations, towering in his righteousness, cold in and out of bed, his thinning white hair an electric halo. Worse, he’d been right—Bernie’s wife was livid. Miriam knew because Bernie told her. Not in so many words: that wasn’t Bernie’s way. “Julia’s feathers are a bit ruffled, she’s very loyal to her family” is how he’d put it. Barbara, who’d been working as chief assistant and executive secretary and all-around confidante for Bernie through all four of his wives, had been more blunt: “She’s on the warpath,” she said. “Best keep your head down.”

“How bad is it?”

“If Bernie survived the Nazi occupation of Europe, he can probably survive Julia.”

But Miriam knew as well as anyone what it was like to live with an emotional terrorist: her late father (may he rest in peace) had been a master of the game, finding fault and picking fights, one day heaping abuse on Miriam’s mother for not being sufficiently kosher, the next day for using the wrong kosher butcher, the next for spending too much money. And from what Miriam had gleaned, Julia was a master of the form. The silent treatment or, conversely, the door slamming. The revenge trips she took, with one or another of her daughters, to France or Brazil. Once, when Miriam and Eric were staying with them in Georgetown, Miriam had watched while, over breakfast, Julia had pushed her chair back, thrown her napkin down, and stomped out of the house. “She gets like that,” Bernie had said. 

And this time she was to blame! Poor Bernie! It would almost have been better to have had her funding cut off than to know that she was the cause of Bernie Baer’s torment. And after all he’d done, not just for her but for any number of Jewish welfare organizations, hospitals, ancient tumbledown shuls in need of repair—he spread his largesse far and wide! And now all this home-brewed misery, and at his age! He deserved better. Then he fell.

Miriam learned of his fall the usual way, from the unflappable Barbara, who said: “Bernie took a tumble.”

“What do you mean he took a tumble? Is he all right?”

“He tripped on the sidewalk on the way to synagogue. Took it full in the face.”

“Good Lord!”

“Twenty-two stitches,” she said. “He seems fine though. I’m only letting you know because I figured that Bernie would want me to.”

“Would want?”

“He’s zonked out on painkillers. But don’t worry. He’s a tough old bird. He’ll outlast the sidewalk.”

She worried anyway, but at least the hubbub over Miriam’s own article had died down, leaving Miriam free to resume weeding the garden, playing her beloved Brahms, and keeping things going at Lost Languages, where for over a year she and her staff (of two) had been planning a special issue devoted to the work of Esther Kreitman, better known as a lesser talent and only sister of her two towering brothers, I. B. and I. J. Singer. Poor Esther, forever in her brothers’ shadows, and all three of them all but forgotten by the current crop of nonreading zombies, one of whom she’d almost run over earlier in the week, when, midtext, he’d stepped off the curb and into the intersection without so much as looking up. The world was going to hell.

But at least Bernie was out of the woods. Not that he’d ever been in the woods. It was more that at his age, things happen. Nothing happened though. Bernie continued giving large hunks of money away. Eric stopped grumbling. Miriam got the special issue out. Afterward, there’d been a brief Kreitman revival, her books—all used—selling rapidly from online vendors of otherwise unwanted books. Miriam felt for the long-forgotten author, she really did: she and Esther Kreitman, the second-stringers, the unsung Singers.

A year passed. That’s when it happened. Rachel Grossman published a new novel, this one called Meow. Miriam would barely have noticed, and in any case wouldn’t have taken note, had Barbara not called from Bernie’s office to tell her that Grossman’s new novel had a character in it who resembled Miriam.  

“No,” said Miriam.

“How much do you want to hear?”

“Better get it over with.”

Over the phone, Barbara read:

That day, as usual, I was late to pick up my daughter at school. Lily has just started her senior year at Melton High, here in Melton, New Jersey, and unlike the way I was at her age, she’s stunning. Also, supersmart and, surprisingly, given the way girls that age are, totally relaxed about it. Me, I’m more what you would call on the ample side, the kind who saleswomen immediately send to the plus section, if not outright suggesting that I might try the big girl store at the other end of the mall.

So sue me. I was late.

I’m always running late—this is something Lily knows—but that’s only because I’m also running an entire company. We make specialty bras, for all occasions and all bodies, something that was necessitated by my own nonconforming, nonconformist, and, frankly, rather copious breasts. At first the company—UPLIFT—was more of an uplift for me, when my husband, and Lily’s father, abruptly announced that he was leaving me for a man. That hurt. Who knew that his leaving us like that would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me?

So just as I was pulling up in front of Melton High, maneuvering my Mercedes toward the regular spot where Lily waits for me, I was cut off by one of those enormous, gas-guzzling turbocharged four-wheelers, this one driven by a woman who appeared to be more skeleton than woman.

It was Myra Miller. My heart literally leapt into my throat when I recognized her—my former professor, back at Barnard, when I was a scholarship girl there and Myra (who was then “Professor Miller”) was working toward tenure—which she never got! From what I’d heard, my former professor had had the nerve to bring an action against the university before finally slinking off to whatever backwater college she finally ended up in. But none of that mattered now, as she pulled to the curb and my heart beat faster and faster.

Myra Miller stepped out of her car. And there before me, I saw her again, nearly the same: skinny, unsmiling, with perfectly coiffed shoulder-length hair, now gone a bright silver, and clothes that looked like they’d been ordered from an old Sears catalog.

 “Wow,” said Miriam when the reading was over. “I guess she doesn’t much like me. She doesn’t even like my hair.”

“Looks like it.”

“I like my hair, though.”

“I do too,” Barbara said. 

“And there’s more of this shit?”

“You can read it yourself, online.”

“Amazon,” Miriam said.

“Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Rachel Grossman dot com.”

Miriam didn’t go online for more, though she did wonder whether Bernie’s wife had had a hand in this latest public humiliation—if that’s what it was, given that one way to look at it was envy. For what, Miriam couldn’t say, as it was Grossman who was rich and famous. As for not-rich and not-famous Miriam, she comforted herself that, at last, the affair was over.

Meow wasn’t the end of it, though, and that’s because in addition to her annual production of a new novel, Grossman also maintained a blog. There, she freely and openly excoriated Miriam’s work at Lost Languages,calling it “a cemetery where old clichés go to die.” No matter that, by their very nature, clichés were old. That’s what made them clichés. God, she was dumb. How had the woman ever managed to get into, let alone graduate, from Swarthmore College? No matter. The blog attacks came with a predictable silver lining in the form of a slight uptick in Lost Languages readership. So Miriam ignored the posts, going about her business and checking in with Bernie, who, thank God, had made a full recovery.

“Sweetheart, I was just thinking about you,” is what he usually said when she called him on the phone. Either that or, “How’s my favorite beautiful girl?”

Sometimes she joked with Eric that Bernie was her real father, or at least that he should have been. More often, she thought that Bernie was perhaps the only other person on earth who understood what she understood: that language was sacred. All language was sacred. Not only was it what separated human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom, but it was the only way that mortals could seek God. Language was what had saved her life. As she’d gasped for breath and light, her heart beating ferociously within her, the chemotherapy toxins invading her body, it had been words, written in elegant biblical Hebrew and encased in holy flame, that had pointed the way: above her bed in the hospital, there they were, floating near the windows.

The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole man.

Most people hated the book of Qoheleth for its warnings about the vanity of human endeavors, but she’d always loved it because everything in it was true.

When the news filtered out that Grossman would be appearing at the Poughkeepsie Reform Temple, Marion predicted, nearly word for word, what Eric would say.

“I mean it,” he said. “You show your face, you so much as think about taking a drive nearby, and it’ll be over for you.” 

“Got it.”

“Self-mortification, burning yourself at the stake, go ahead, here’s the match, burn down everything you’ve worked for.”

“Heard you the first time.” It was November, cold and greasy with rain. She’d been upstairs working but had lost the thread.

“You need to promise me.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

But she had no intention of skipping the event, though not because she wanted to make trouble for either herself or Grossman. Rather, she simply wanted to see whether Grossman, in person, was as awful as Grossman in print. She knew that the novelist had a reputation for being warm and generous in person and hilariously funny on the stump.

As Grossman strode onto the bimah, she cracked a joke about not being able to find a pair of Spanx strong enough to hold her stomach in and another about Botox. “My doctor promised to Botox my whole face, but as you can see, it was just lip service.” The crowd of women roared. Tears streaked their faces, smiles stretched their cheeks, they were laughing so hard. Miriam, dressed all in black, with a scarf arranged over her hair like a nineteen-sixties starlet, had gotten to the synagogue at the last minute and was relegated to standing at the very back of the room, where she hugged the shadows.

Grossman said: “What gets my goat, or maybe I should say my scapegoat, the most?” (Pause for laughter.) “Certain women—I won’t say who, but maybe if you follow me on social media you’ll get my drift—certain women who call themselves Jewish feminists who not only denigrate books written by and for and about Jewish women but also have the nerve to do so publicly and in a way that denigrates all women and all female enterprises and who do it at a time when we women need to stick together more than ever!” A pause. “Have any of you, by any chance, heard of Harvey Weinstein?” That did it. The crowd rose as one, fists pumping in the air as in approval.

“Too bad he had to be one of ours, though,” she said. “I mean, if it gets out that Jewish men can be as awful as men in general, shiksaswon’t want them anymore,and then we’ll be stuck with them all over again!” Hilarity, absolute hilarity. Then: “I’m getting forehead wrinkles just thinking about it. It’ll make headlines.”

Miriam hadn’t been inside the Reform synagogue in years, but now that she was, she remembered how much she’d hated the building, an enormous, cavernous structure with jaggedly designed stained glass windows that stretched high above the bimah and plush stadium seating in shades of mauve. But then again, she didn’t think much of the entire Reform movement. You weren’t supposed to think that—a Jew, after all, is a Jew—but she did. It wasn’t the style of praying that got to her, the lack of Hebrew, or the washing down of Judaism’s particular flavors. It was the sheer ignorance. Not that the Orthodox were that much better, but at least they knew their way around a prayer book, were on a first-name basis with the culture. Here you couldn’t even use the word shul—they didn’t know what it meant. The rabbi was a lesbian whose wife was Chinese. They conflated being politically liberal with being religious.

Not that Miriam’s own religiosity was so pure—not after the shock of her father’s increasingly hostile Orthodoxy was capped off by his abandonment of his wife and daughter and the way the suburban Conservative synagogue of her youth had taken pity on them. Such tohu v’ vohu it was, a mixed-up swirl of fact and emotion, shame and rage, and furious disdain for Judaism itself until at last she’d found a way back in through literature. So her faith came more by way of Der Nister and ibn Ezra than the Rambam. At least she knew the difference.

Grossman read:

I was aghast. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t put past Myra. After all, the two of us went back a long way. Even when I’d been a scholarship student at Barnard taking one of her classes, Myra had had it out for me, slamming my insights, ignoring my comments, and giving my midterm paper such a low grade that my scholarship had been in jeopardy. In the end, desperate, I’d taken the matter to the dean, who, reading the D paper for herself, changed my grade to an A minus, and, shaking her head, said, “Professor Miller reallymust not like you.” 

Et cetera.

For once, Eric had been right. She shouldn’t have come. Miriam was so overcome with her own absurdity that she nearly busted out laughing. Instead, she turned to leave but didn’t make it very far, riveted, as she was, by the wrap up.

“And finally, I want to thank the temple for making me feel so welcome. Speaking of temples, my body is a temple. Mostly ruins.” Pause for laughter. Then she told the joke about the Jew who, stranded on a desert island, builds three buildings: “He builds a house for himself and two temples. When he’s at last rescued, he tells his rescuer, ‘Why two temples? I’ll tell you why. Because this one back there? It’s where I pray. But this other pile? I wouldn’t set foot in it.’” You’d think they’d never heard that joke before for how raucous and appreciative their laughter seemed.

Finally, Grossman wrapped up for real, bowing and smiling and at last saying: “But your temple, your beautiful temple here in Poughkeepsie, is a temple I’d set foot in again and again.” In response, a hush descended on the entire assembled crowd, and Marion was seized by a demon, who said:

“There hasn’t been a temple in Jewish life since the Romans destroyed the one in Jerusalem in the year 3830, or, for those who don’t count in Hebrew time, 70 CE.”

It wasn’t a demon who had seized her, though, but her own dead father. The more rigorously religious he’d become, the more he raged against Reform Judaism, which he’d called “Christianity without Christ” and whose architecture he’d called “vacuous.” And then he’d left them—all of them, not just his wife and daughter and dog, but his community, his neighbors, his shul. And yet—nu?—what of it? Jews had always been going at it, from the days of the Mishkan, from before the days of the Mishkan, and ever onwards—back and forth over the centuries and across continents and courtyards, like neurons in particle accelerator, words falling where they will across time and space, with no singular agreement, on anything, ever. No agreement on anything except the monstrosity of Hitler—that was the one thing Jews agreed on. Otherwise, it was all up for grabs.

Silence fell. And then an uproar as Miriam, glancing neither right nor left, exited the building.

On the day in early spring that Lost Languages was nominated for a National Magazine Award, Bernie died. It was, as usual, his secretary, Barbara, who got the word through, starting with, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” which was all she had to say, as Miriam, hearing the clutched grief in her voice, knew what was coming.

The cemetery was in the suburbs: from the airport, Miriam and Eric took an Uber, but the traffic on the Beltway was torturous, and by the time they arrived at the gravesite, the mourners, in black and gray, were already shoveling dirt on the dead man’s coffin. It was one thing that the family had decided to conduct the entire funeral at the cemetery, forgoing a synagogue service. It was heartbreaking, though, how small the turnout was, especially for a man who’d lived so large and given so generously.

Julia Baer, surrounded by her grown daughters, looked shriveled, as if overnight she’d swallowed a glue that pulled her flesh inward. The daughters looked tired. As Miriam approached, she wondered if, as a latecomer, it would or would not be appropriate for her to take her turn in line next to the pile of dirt, that she too might help cover the dead man with earth. But before she got a chance to find out, she was distracted by the sight of one of Julia Baer’s daughters separating herself out from the others to stare bleakly in her direction. As she got closer, Miriam saw that the woman staring at her wasn’t a daughter, but, in fact, Grossman. The first cousin once removed. A moment later, a clot of flaky red dirt, obviously lobbed with purpose, landed on Miriam’s shoulder. It wasn’t until she realized that Eric was wiping the trail of dirt off with the cotton handkerchief he always kept in his pocket that she understood exactly what had happened, and how, and why.

But she was wrong. It hadn’t been Grossman who had thrown the clod of dirt. It was Julia, who even as Miriam wiped new tears from her eyes, was striding toward her, livid, red in the face, her hands doing a wild dance near her face.

“Who told you to come?” she shrieked as all three of her daughters and her one first-cousin-once-removed tried to stop her. “What are you doing here? No one wants you!”

“Mamma, Mother, please,” one of the daughters implored.

But Julia Baer was stronger than she looked, and in her rage she was majestic, and in her majesty she stood within inches of Miriam, and lobbing a spray of spit toward her face, hissed: “You! It was always you! You, you, always you! And you stupid, miserly Jew, with your head in the clouds, you moron, you hur, you nekeyve! You didn’t even know! Oh, my poor Bernie, he didn’t even tell you, did he?”

“I don’t understand. He was a second father to me. What didn’t he tell me?”

“You really are stupid, aren’t you? It was always you, from the time he first met you it was you, but you were too young, and married—but that didn’t stop him, did it?”

“From what? I don’t understand!”

“From pining for you, you whore. From hoping. From dreaming. What a putz! His real name, it wasn’t even Bernie, it was Benesh.”

“So what?”

“So what? The art, the fancy parties, and the money—all that money he gave you. For your magazine.”

But this was wrong. It made no sense. And anyway, she did love him. She loved him still. She always would.

“He said the magazine made his heart happy.”

“He couldn’t have cared less about the magazine. When it came to business, he was a genius, a gold mine! But books, words, poetry? He was practically illiterate in five languages!”

“But the books, the articles—we’d argue over which of Saul Bellow’s novels was the best.”

At that, Julia Baer’s expression turned from rage to raw incomprehension.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?”

“The books. I read them aloud to him. Yiddish he could read OK. English gave him trouble.”

With Julia Baer’s face nearly pressed to hers, Miriam could see its thousands of wrinkles, its paperlike translucence, and hear, as if for the first time, that her strange, slightly British inflections were undergirded by the gutterals and glottals of Brooklyn or Queens.

“Makhasheyfe!” she said. “Dummkopf! Fey, fey, fey!”

Oh, how Miriam had loved him, this one human being who had really and truly wanted her to shine. Goodbye, sweet man, goodbye forever—and a pox on them! A pox on them all!