I had been on the Goldhandler merry-go-round for a month or so when Aunt Faiga produced a boy. Mom and Pop pleaded with me to come to the bris, the circumcision, at Zaideh’s Bronx flat, so I broached the subject at the Goldhandler dinner table. “But surely you don’t want to watch the savage mutilation of a helpless infant,” said Mrs. Goldhandler. Her figure was now fetchingly slim. She too had had a boy, Charles Darwin Goldhandler, whose foreskin was quite as intact as Sigmund’s and Karl’s and likely to remain so. “It’s so barbarous, so primitive.”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “this kid’s parents are very up-to-date. They’re both Communists.”
Mrs. Goldhandler frequently declared that she was a Communist, so I hoped this might mitigate my relatives’ backwardness.
“Parlor pinks,” she sniffed.
“Oh, no,” I persisted. “My Aunt Faiga was jailed for cold-cocking a cop in a Union Square riot. She’s the real thing.”
The moment had come to point with pride to this bit of family history. You never know.
Mrs. Goldhandler frowned at me, possibly because I said “cold-cock.” It was a curious convention that only the master could talk rough at the table. Nobody else ever said as much as “hell” or “damn”; not Mrs. Goldhandler, not her children, and not the staff. Up in the office we talked as we pleased, and Peter Quat pleased to talk most of the time like a bilked whore. Boyd and I were milder.
Goldhandler said, “Look, go ahead to the bris, Liebowitz. Just make sure they haven’t hired a nearsighted rabbi. He might cut off the rest of your cock. You might want it some day, though you wouldn’t understand why.”
Goldhandler knew that rabbis don’t perform circumcisions, that was just his joke. He spoke a flawless colorful Yiddish, in which he told paralyzingly funny dirty stories about rabbis, Jewish observances, and Bible figures, often with Talmudic nuances. His late father had contributed to a Yiddish socialist newspaper under the pen name Shloimkeh Apikayress, that is, Solly the Atheist. Pop had been much impressed to learn who Harry Goldhandler’s father had been.
“Solly the Atheist, eh? A very clever writer. So! No wonder Mr. Goldhandler is a success. The son of Solly the Atheist! Went a little bit too far, Solly, but the public licked their fingers.”
I knew it would upset Zaideh if I didn’t show up at the bris. On the other hand, it was happening on Sunday, and listening to Henny Holtz on Sunday night was a Goldhandler must. Afterward we would dissect the program, and you never heard so many synonyms for failure. It was an education of a sort, an alphabet of epithets with few gaps from A to Z. Every Henny Holtz program was one or more of the following:
an Abortion, a Bagel, a Bomb, a Botch, a Catastrophe, a Clunker, a Debacle, a Disaster, a Dog, an Emetic, an Enema, a Fiasco, a Fizzle, a Flop, a Hash, a Hodgepodge, a Jumble, a Lemon, a Louse, a Mess, a Nothing, a Pancake, a Stinker, a Turd, a Turkey, a Washout, a Zero, a Zilch
…or a Light Fart. This was Goldhandler’s own coinage, a light fart, and it was his favorite dismissive term. Whatever else a Holtz broadcast was, it was invariably a light fart.
Caught once again between the Inside and the Outside—as with exams on Shavuos, and the Varsity Show on Passover—I decided to go to the bris, leave at the knife slash, and speed back downtown. It did not work out that way. Our entire Mishpokha, and Boris’s too, jammed Zaideh’s flat to see a child of two Marxists enter the covenant of Abraham. “A generation goes, a generation comes,” Pop happily quoted in Hebrew from Ecclesiastes, as we pushed our way into this boil of our family and of Boris’s outnumbered but fleshy relatives, who took up about the same cubic volume as our crowd did. Zaideh’s flat reminded me of the famous Marx Brothers’ stateroom scene, except that people weren’t squirming and stepping on each other’s faces. It was all very merry and good-tempered. Once in, I had little chance of getting out fast. Zaideh made it impossible by awarding me the honor called kvatter. I protested that I had never carried a baby and might drop him, but I was laughed down. Actually there was no way that baby could have hit the floor. If I had let go of him, he would just have levitated on relatives until rescued.
So I went to get the baby from Aunt Faiga, who sat with him in the kitchen. Very plump and womanly, little resembling the fire-brand in a Lenin cap who had cold-cocked a policeman, she handed over the infant with a worried maternal sigh. I worked my way with him through the kinfolk to Zaideh’s bedroom. The swaddled infant lay very calmly in Zaideh’s lap, blinking big blue eyes at the mohel, a bearded little man in a white medical smock, with a gauze mask over his mouth and nose.
And that was how I got my first look at a circumcision. I have since seen several, including my own two sons’. I do not recommend it as light entertainment. Nor am I about to regale the reader with a description. But maybe I should mention that the circumcision scene in Deflowering Sarah is one of Peter Quat’s crazier inventions. What happens is about as likely as that a surgeon would leave his umbrella in an appendix incision. I suppose the drunken circumciser with the shakes is sort of funny, also the mother who faints when she sees ketchup spilled all over the rug, but as to the Jewish content, it is just pure Quat. Peter has never seen a circumcision, any more than he has seen the dark side of the moon.
After much ado with surgical instruments and antiseptics, and a lot of Hebrew chanting, the mohel all at once just went and did it, whiz! There was very little blood. The boy—then and there given the inside name Yitzhak, outside name Ivan—uttered one sharp yip, subsiding at once when the mohel put a wine-dipped cloth to his lips. Boris carried him off, the family broke into a joyous tumult, and my plan to rush off was kaput. I had to sing and drink with the rest. Fortunately, in Zaideh’s book-crammed study, which was closed off from the party, a very ancient radio gathered dust. With some squeals and whistles, it still worked. I slipped in there to catch the Holtz show, while the relatives were falling to on the food.
How many hundreds of hours I had spent in this musty room, studying the Talmud with Zaideh! It occurred to me that Harry Goldhandler’s irreverent jokes, no doubt learned from Solly the Atheist, must be the bitter lore of old-country yeshiva boys chafing at their bonds: a mordant inside-out tradition, handed down in parallel to the Talmud. I was the only one in the penthouse who could laugh at those jokes. Boyd and Peter knew no Yiddish. Mrs. Goldhandler and her parents knew no Talmud. As for Sigmund and Karl, they would never have an inkling of what that luxuriant acid humor was all about. The parallel lines seemed to meet, and both traditions to come to an end, in the former Minsker Godol, the unbelieving joke-digger, Finkelstein.
On came the familiar brassy voice, full of overwrought pep:
Keep your Henny side up, up,
Here comes Henny to you.
If you’re feeling dismal and low
I’ve got lots of jokes on my show!
So keep your Henny side up, up,
Let the laughter come through.
Be like frisky colts
Laugh with Henny Holtz—
And keep your Henny side up!
Well, I must say, away from the Goldhandlers, the program sounded like any other Henny Holtz shows I had heard down the years, the same old frenetic foolery; not a lemon, a turd, a bust, a pancake, or a bomb, but the familiar mélange of songs and jokes. Eddie Conn was doing a perfectly good job. So I was thinking, when Cousin Harold came in with a plate of chicken salad.
Cousin Harold was now definitely applying to medical school in Switzerland. To increase his chances of admittance, he had changed his name. We still all called him Harold, but he was legally Mr. Harley Granville. Later on, by the by, since the fashionable thing for psychiatrists was to be Jewish, he changed it back. In fact, today Cousin Harold is Dr. Chaim Goodkind. Anyway, we were keeping up a desultory correspondence, and his letters, of course, were about his various fornications. My sex life being a zero, I wrote about my entry into show business via Harry Goldhandler.
Chicken salad on his lap, Harold, or Harley, ate in silence until the next commercial. Then he asked me in a confidential man-to-man tone, “Say, Dave, have you ever screwed a chorus girl?”
“No, Harold. In fact, I haven’t screwed anybody.”
“Dave, I’m surprised. Not yet? Don’t you know any girls?”
“I know lots of them.”
“Well, why don’t you screw them?”
“They won’t let me.”
“I never heard of anything so ridiculous. You just have to be firm, and screw them anyway.”
“Even if they say no?”
“Especially if they say no. They always mean yes.”
Henny Holtz came back on, and Cousin Harold went out, shaking his head. He had been wasting his good counsel on me since we were fifteen. Then Zaideh himself came in, all in a glow. Faiga’s first! A boy! And Marx or no Marx, brought into the Jewish fold according to law and rite! Holtz was joking with a girl singer, and the audience was in a roar.
“Nu! I thought you were sitting in here and learning.”
“Zaideh, excuse me, I have to listen to this.”
“What are they saying? What are they laughing at? Translate it for me,” said Zaideh.
It was a card from the files:
GIRL: Henny Holtz, I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth.
HENNY HOLTZ: Of course not. You’d be killed in the rush.
I translated. Zaideh wrinkled his broad peasant nose at me, with a wry sad smile. “That’s how you make your living? A Yisroelke thrown away.” He went out, shaking his head like Cousin Harold.
When I got back to the penthouse, they were still sitting around the radio in the living room. Goldhandler, who was lighting up a long Belinda, malevolently grinned. “Did you hear it?”
“I did.”
“What did you think?” Mrs. Goldhandler shot at me.
All eyes were on me: the Goldhandlers, the sons, the old parents, Boyd, Peter Quat, who was making a hideous face, and even the little daughter.
“A light fart,” I said.
“A light fart?” thundered Goldhandler. “It was the bagel of the ages! The entire nation rose up as one man, from coast to coast, and shit on their radios! Except the constipated ones, who puked.”
“It wasn’t very good,” I said. I went upstairs to dig jokes. We needed freshies.
***
We always needed freshies, to keep that money cascading in at two thousand a week. You may wonder how the son of Solly the Atheist had come to stake out this goofy Klondike. I did at first, too. Boyd gradually told me the main facts.
Harry Goldhandler’s college graduation picture, which hung in our office, showed a slim dark-haired intense Jewish youth, sporting a Phi Bete key. In a photo on the book jacket of his early short stories, published not long after he graduated, you saw the same Byronic young fellow. That our rotund, balding, cigar-chewing, ribald boss had metamorphosed from this young litterateur passed belief. Yet so it was, and this was the story.
Henny Holtz, a Lower East Side boy, was an admirer of Solly the Atheist. When he was starting in radio and needed a writer, Solly recommended his son, then living on poverty’s edge selling magazine stories. Harry Goldhandler got the job. To feed Holtz with surefire laughs he started to keep the joke files. When Holtz made a hit, other comedians came to Goldhandler for scripts. Eddie Conn, a veteran writer of vaudeville acts, joined him, and the big money began to roll in. They took on program after program, and hired full-time joke diggers. Boyd was the first. Thereafter, desperate work under multiple deadlines, snatched sleep and rich feeding at odd hours, continuous smoking of Havana cigars, and constant juggling and coddling of several comedians at once, had transmogrified the slim sensitive writer in a few years to the weary heavy gagman.
Henny Holtz had put his foot down, however, about their writing for a comic named Lou Blue, who blatantly imitated Holtz. To be sure, Holtz himself blatantly imitated Al Jolson, but that was another matter. Goldhandler defied Holtz and took the Lou Blue job. Blue’s sponsor was Ex-Lax, it was the first time a laxative was going on the air, and the money was enormous. Goldhandler figured that Holtz must be bluffing. Who else could write Holtz programs?
Next thing he knew, Eddie Conn failed to show up at the penthouse, and did not return any telephone calls. It was on the third day of Conn’s defection that Peter Quat had telephoned me. Of course Conn had gone to work for Henny Holtz. That Holtz was an ingrate, and Eddie Conn a Judas, were now articles of the Goldhandler loyalty oath. Peter Quat snickered at all that, and sympathized with Eddie Conn for quitting. Conn was now getting all the Holtz money, and no longer had to keep up the insane Goldhandler pace. More power to him!
Toward our boss, Peter Quat was altogether ambivalent. Goldhandler’s Rabelaisian roarings could convulse him, and the celebrities who visited the penthouse awed him. At parties Peter would fascinate our college friends with tales of the colorful joke czar, well salted with casually dropped star names. Peter had another social life in cafés and automats, where he would talk literature with other aspiring writers. Once or twice I went along. In such company Peter would sneer at gagwriting as mere thievery, and at Goldhandler as a sellout and a barbarous kike. In the office a favored contemptuous gesture of Peter’s was to shut joke-file drawers with his behind, and he liked to go around whistling “For I Am a Pirate King.”
Peter had his future all planned. He would allow himself one more year of this prostitution. If by then he had not sold any stories he would go back to a university, get a doctorate in English, and teach until he made it as a writer. Goldhandler saw through Peter Quat, of course. He put up with him because Peter did honest work, but he rode Peter hard about his pretensions. “Finkelstein here”—he would wave his cigar at Quat—“has a picture of William Faulkner’s ass in his room. Every time he walks past it, he kisses it like a mezuza.”
Peter laughed off this kidding, but on one weak point he proved touchy. He would glower when I laughed at the boss’s Yiddish jokes. “What? What’s the point of that one?” he would exclaim. “I thought I was following it. What was the punch line?” He liked to use show-business Yiddishisms, but he usually got them wrong. I’ve mentioned that English has no sound like the Indian’s “ugh.” That guttural runs through Yiddish, and Peter couldn’t pronounce it. Take “tugh-ess,” meaning posterior, rump, or ass, as you please. It would come out “toke-us” as Peter said it, and he said it often. When Goldhandler thought Peter was being slow or dense, he would call him “Mister Tokus.”
Meaning no harm, I once mentioned as we were eating in a Chinese restaurant, about two in the morning, the great Yiddish writer in Peter’s family tree.
“You’re kidding!” Goldhandler exclaimed. “That’s impossible. Mendele Moykher S’forim?” He turned on Peter Quat. “Your grandfather? Liebowitz is full of shit, isn’t he?”
“What’s the difference?” Peter said.
“But is it true? You’re related to Mendele?”
“Oh, he was my great-granduncle or something. I don’t know. I don’t care.” It was a surly response, and Peter was making a dangerous face, his mouth all twisted up on one side.
“For Christ’s sake, Mister Tokus! You are related to Mendele Moykher S’forim, and you can’t even say a Yiddish word! What’s with you, anyway?”
“Nothing’s with me, and fuck Mandalay Mohair Serafin,” snarled Peter, looking Goldhandler straight in the eye, “and fuck you, too!” His face crazily distorted, he slammed his napkin on the table and stalked out of the restaurant.
Goldhandler was baffled. “What’s eating Finkelstein?” he asked me.
Peter showed up at work the next day as though nothing had happened. Nobody referred to Mendele Moykher S’forim again. Goldhandler joshed him no more in that vein, nor ever called him Mister Tokus after that. Peter went on using Yiddishisms and mispronouncing them.
***
I did not share Peter Quat’s disdain for our outlandish employment. To me it was rare fun in a dream world. George and Ira Gershwin came to the penthouse, for instance, to talk over an idea for a musical show. Goldhandler ordered a vast platter of delicatessen sent in from Lindy’s. The Gershwins smiled at us as we came trooping down the stairs behind Goldhandler. “The rebbe and his Hassidim,” George Gershwin said, and there we were, lunching with the great Gershwins! Goldhandler knew publishers and editors, for besides his own short stories he had ghostwritten Henny Holtz’s best-selling humorous books. He knew bankers, novelists, playwrights, and opera stars. They all came there just to listen to his rough fantastic humor. He never used old jokes in conversation. His talk was all original. He would stand in front of the mantelpiece and hold forth on the Broadway shows, or the new movies, or literature, or the radio business, or politics. The visitors would prod him with a question or two, and he would soar off in a brilliant tirade, jamming the huge cigar into his mouth while his listeners guffawed at his sallies.
Peter used to growl, “If only he’d get it down on paper!”
At Lindy’s, the all-night Broadway delicatessen restaurant, Goldhandler held court. We would march in at one and two in the morning to eat garlic steaks, or thick corned beef sandwiches, or heavy cream pies, whatever we desired. Goldhandler paid for everything. We ate and drank much more each week than our salaries would have bought. Show business is abuzz at that hour, and Goldhandler’s table was the center of attention as though he were the mayor of New York; possibly more so, because he was funny, and people always want a good laugh.
I know I loved the man, and I felt at home with the Goldhandlers. After all, the boss and I were both atheists who revelled in Yiddish. Mrs. Goldhandler was a sort of plutocratic Aunt Faiga. Her parents were like Boris’s relatives, totally Jewish and totally irreligious. Sigmund and Karl were freakish prodigies, zestful and funny like their father. Maybe the heart of the matter was that, unlike Peter Quat, I didn’t take myself seriously as a writer. I was quite willing to be an apprentice or a Hassid to this gagwriting Gargantua for a year or so. Deep down, I had a sense that it was all a fantastic interlude, before I returned to the law.
And anyway, at the time neither writing nor law were on my mind as much as something else, to use Mama’s words; and to use Goldhandler’s word, something mighty elemental.