There were three main synagogues in our town, as I remember it. Each represented a different degree of religious observance, light, medium, or heavy: Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox. We were Conservative by my dad’s decree. We had a Seder meal at Passover. We went to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. We lit candles on the eight nights of Hanukkah. We even fasted on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. We went to Hebrew School, too, twice during the week, I think it was, and maybe a third time on Sundays. There we were supposed to learn Hebrew and the Bible and ultimately prepare for our bar mitzvahs.
My mom helped out with all this, of course. She prepared the meals, chauffeured us to temple, and so on. But she made it clear she was only doing her duty by my dad. She would tease him about it. She would say, “You know you’re just doing this to please your dead father.” My paternal grandfather died when I was very young. My clearest memory of him was of seeing him close to the end of his life. “Prepare yourself,” my father had told me and my older brother as we climbed the narrow stairs to his apartment. “He doesn’t look good.”
I remember a shockingly withered and gentle creature swamped by the wing chair from which he could no longer rise. In his youth, however, he was a stern and intimidating traditionalist apparently, a tough-guy pawnbroker who kept a kosher house and expected his two sons to do the same. My mother felt Dad maintained Jewish practices in our house only for fear of his memory.
My dad acknowledged—ruefully—that there was some truth to that. But our Hebrew rituals and schooling were important to him personally too. He saw the world as a gentile world forever hostile to its Jews. He didn’t want us to retreat an inch in the face of its bigotry. They’ll still kill you, even if you try to pretend to be one of them, so don’t humiliate yourself with cultural surrender. That was the general idea.
But also, and more reasonably, there was this. My father wanted us, his sons, to know our own people. He wanted us to take their history seriously. He didn’t want us to leave our heritage behind.
Which was fair enough, in theory. But in practice, there was a problem with it, a big problem with all of it—with the high holy days and the Hebrew School and the bar mitzvahs—one big problem that troubled my heart from an early age. My parents did not believe in God.
My mother, for her part, was a stone atheist, like her mother before her. I’ve never met anyone else as firm as she was in her disbelief. Oh, sometimes she would make some vague gesture toward the idea of a deity. She felt it was her duty as a mother, I think. She didn’t want to pull the metaphysical rug out from under her children’s feet too abruptly lest they bruise themselves plummeting into the existential abyss. She’d tell us things like: God is the people who love you. Or: There’s something out there; no one knows what for sure. But, of course, you can’t fool kids with that sort of mealy-mouthed malarkey. I knew where she stood. As I got older, I could even coax her true opinion out of her from time to time. If you ask me, it’s all a lot of hooey.
Of my father’s beliefs, I’m not quite as sure. He was close and canny about them, not just with us but with himself as well, I think; maybe even with God. It was not in his nature to openly defy a Gigantic Invisible Jew who could give you cancer just by thinking about it. But by the same token, he wasn’t simply going to kowtow to the Power. He felt the need to give the Lord a little zetz from time to time—a Yiddish smack—of sarcasm, disrespect, and disbelief. I think he prayed when things troubled him; it couldn’t hurt. The father he appeased with his observances was sometimes his own father and sometimes the Big Father in the Sky. He hedged his bets: he took Pascal’s Wager but held half of his cash in reserve in case the game turned out to be some kind of cheap hustle.
In any case, for child me, the larger point was this: God was not a living presence in my home. We did not say grace before meals. We did not kneel down by our beds at night. We were not told to pray in times of hardship. We were not referred to the will of God in matters of morality. Aside from collecting pennies for UNICEF on Halloween and occasionally putting quarters aside for the United Jewish Appeal, we did no volunteer work and had no charity life of any kind.
For me, this rendered our Jewish observances absurd. I was the boy, after all, who demanded that even his daydreams make some kind of sense. I became frustrated with a mystery story if even a single thread of the plot was left loose. And I had what I would call a very Jewish insistence on the rational basis for any supernatural belief. I could see that the magnificent four-thousand-year-old structure of Jewish theology and tradition was, at its core, a kind of language for communicating with the divine presence. Subtract the Almighty and what was the purpose of it? It was just an empty temple, its foundations resting on nothing, its spires pointing only toward the dark.
The absurdity of our godless Judaism affected all the family’s practices. My earliest memories of our Passover Seders are uproariously comical. The dinners would begin as carefully orchestrated and solemn religious rituals. Slowly at first, then very quickly, they would devolve into swing-from-the-rafters madcap circuses with my brothers and me clowning around like wild monkeys. A Seder really is a fine event. It’s a dignified but joyful remembrance of how God freed the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. The youngest son asks four prescribed questions of his father so the father can explain the majestic meaning of the feast. The participants drip wine on a plate while intoning the names of the ten plagues with which God crushed the resistance of Pharaoh: blood . . . frogs . . . lice . . . Everyone slouches on cushioned chairs to remind themselves that they are free men and women, no longer slaves. It’s lovely.
But in my house we added a ritual in which my little brothers half swallowed the silver wine cups and then spat them across the table into each other’s foreheads. My older brother, meanwhile, kept up a withering sardonic commentary. And I put my face on the tablecloth and laughed till I wept. My mother would hide her smile at the antic chaos but my father, no. That was another part of our ritual: he would routinely storm out of the room in a fury over our disrespect.
It was shameful, I know. But it really was funny. And how else could it have been? Without God, none of it made any sense. Hebrew School? For me, who already hated ordinary school, an extra classroom hour every few days was suffocating torture. Who were these grave and self-important men who kept us from our games to teach us Hebrew and Torah? Why were they bothering us with such things? With their thick sepulchral accents and their harsh, punitive piety? With their bizarre language and their empty legends of an unknowable past? And Israel! They were forever yammering on about the nation of Israel! I remember when the Israelis, outnumbered and pressed against the sea, defeated the Arab nations in the Six-Day War. The Hebrew School front office piped the news reports into our classrooms over the loudspeakers. Our teachers wept at the miraculous victory. I found it ridiculous. I was American. What was Israel to me and who was I to Israel?
I was somehow managing to shuck and jive my way through ordinary school, but I didn’t have the energy or even the common courtesy to fake it here. I was sullen and unresponsive in religious classes. Sharp-tongued and disrespectful to the pompous and overbearing teachers. When we had tests on the Bible, I wrote flippant answers to questions about stories I’d never bothered to read.
How did Moses help Joshua defeat the Amalekites?
He brought the tanks.
Once, to my absolute horror, a session of Hebrew School conflicted with a game of the World Series in which the Yankees were playing. I put a transistor radio in my pants pocket and ran the earplug wire up through the sleeve of my sweater. All through the lesson on Exodus, I sat leaning my head on my hand, pressing the palmed earbud into my ear so I could listen to the game. My father used to say, “You can’t flunk out of being Jewish.” But man, I tried. I remember more than one report card when I received a P in every single subject. It stood for Poor, the lowest grade you could get.
By the time I began to prepare for my bar mitzvah, I was utterly alienated from the entire enterprise.
“I don’t believe in this,” I told my father. “I don’t want to do it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You have to.”
Three years later, fueled by seething adolescent rage, I would have defied him. When that time came, I did defy him, again and again. My fury and stubbornness drove him crazy, literally drove him to seek psychiatric help. But at twelve years old, I still thought I lived in the happiest of happy TV-type families. To defy my father in this most basic realm of his authority would have been to pull down the pillars of that illusion like Samson pulled down the pillars in the temple. I didn’t have the wherewithal. I complained and protested—often—but I did not resist. And my resentment of the whole process burned like acid in my blood.
Naturally, in a town like Great Neck, bar mitzvahs were a big deal. The thirteen-year-old boy, in his best Saturday suit, would stand with the rabbi and cantor at the front of the synagogue. The pews would be filled with friends and relations from all over. The boy would read out a Torah portion in Hebrew, not spoken but sung to a ritualized Eastern tune that he’d had to memorize line by line. Afterward, he would make a speech, written himself and vetted by the rabbi. “Today I am a man,” he would say, affirming that he had now accepted his place as a full-fledged member of the Jewish tribe. Increasingly, in those days, girls did this too: a bat mitzvah, it was called. I believe it was just then becoming the fashion.
In any case, boy or girl, the ceremony was generally followed by a massive and elaborate party, comparable in excess to a full-on white wedding reception. A hall was rented, some cavernous place with pink walls and enormous chandeliers and bubbling fountains. Or sometimes, in summer weather, a huge tent was set up in the backyard next to the pool. Indoors or out, a live band would play the new rock ’n’ roll music. There would be enough bad food to feed a small nation, oceans of terrible Jewish wine, sentimental congratulatory speeches, and lavish gifts of jewelry and cash. It was a garish business, as we upper-crust Klavans never failed to point out, but it was a happy one too. Most kids looked forward to their big day. My older brother had survived it without too much emotional agony—or so, at least, it seemed to me.
But I hated it, every minute of it. It galled me to my soul. I felt I was being bullied into a public act of hypocrisy. I was being forced to pretend to accept what I did not: Judaism without God, Judaism as a sop to my father’s dead father, Judaism as a fist shaken at a gentile world that was just as much my world as the gentiles’. This was the only Judaism I had experienced, and it was foreign and false to me. I wanted no part of it. The idea of lying about that in front of everyone I knew violated something very basic in me.
The preparation for the event was like Hebrew School only ten times worse. Extra classes at night. Extra homework to ignore. Extra humiliation to suffer when I showed up in the extra classes unprepared. Plus, on top of all that, a rabbi actually came to the house once or twice a week. A fat, sweaty, unpleasant man as I recall him. He would later go on to be convicted by a federal jury of being part of a loan-sharking operation in league with some New York mafiosi. I believe he did some serious time upstate.
The rabbi would sit shoulder to shoulder with me upstairs in my room at my desk, our heads bowed together over the open book of Torah. He would cue and harry me through the incomprehensible Hebrew I was supposed to be able to read by then but couldn’t. He would sing a line and then I’d sing it back to him and then he’d sing it again and I’d sing back and so on until I had the words and music more or less memorized. Then I was supposed to practice in my spare time. Then he would come back a few days later and we’d review what I’d learned and move on to the next part.
Except, as I need hardly say at this point, I never practiced, never. As the day drew near, I found I barely knew my part at all, just patches of it here and there, and I could sing only a vague meandering imitation of the tune. So, of course, when my bar mitzvah finally arrived, I stepped onto the chancery with the purest sense of dread. It was like one of those nightmares where you find yourself on a Broadway stage but can’t remember your lines. There I was in tie and jacket, standing in the temple before a congregation full of family and friends. My pulse was thundering. My spit had first turned sour then gone dry. I joined the rabbi in the sacred procedure of lifting the bejeweled Torah scrolls from their cabinet. We paraded them majestically before the pews. We laid them on the podium—the bimah—and rolled them open to the proper place. I took up the Torah pointer—the yad, it’s called—and placed it under those ancient and noble words that, after years of attending Hebrew School, I could read no better than if they were chicken tracks or a schizophrenic’s meaningless doodles. And I began to sing.
Well, the rabbi had come to the house often enough that I had some vague idea of where the words and music were located on the spectrum of available sounds. I found their general location as a man might stumble into the side of his own barn while wandering lost in the dark of night. Since the words meant nothing to me anyway, I only had to imitate the noise of them to get by. And for the most part I did, with the loan-sharking rabbi whispering helpful cues into my ear from time to time. There were a few portions that were lost to my memory completely, but I never faltered for all that. I had inherited a small measure of my father’s talent for realistic-sounding foreign-language gibberish. Faced with an absolute mental blank, I invented a bunch of Hebrew-like gobbledygook on the spot and pushed through, singing meaningless nonsense without a pause. I don’t know how many people noticed. The only person to mention it to me was a cousin of mine, a sophisticated lad a few years older than me. He sidled up to me after the ceremony as I was receiving the kisses and congratulations of my jubilant relatives. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone ad-lib the Torah before,” he murmured in my ear. I laughed wildly—with relief but also with a grifter’s pleasure at having pulled off a successful con.
I don’t remember the party afterward. This strikes me as odd. I was thirteen, after all. It was a big occasion. I should remember. But I don’t. I’ve blocked it out. My conflicting emotions must have overwhelmed me. On the surface, I surely felt happy enough. I’d gotten through the ceremony. There was a party in my honor. Food, music, dancing, gifts. But inwardly, I think I was half insane with rage and shame—more rage and shame than I could feel or know—at having been forced to violate my deepest sense of things.
I do remember this, though: Being a Klavan thing, the party was supposed to be more tasteful than the usual nouveau riche Great Neck affair. There was no rented hall, no pink walls, no chandeliers, no fountains. We did have a tent in the backyard, but it was just a small one over the badminton court, which was serving as a makeshift dance floor. There was no live band. My father was an expert with electronics and sound systems. He received most new records free from producers. He had made what today would be called “mixes,” tape cassettes with various songs on them. My friends and I ate food and danced to the taped music beneath the tent. For the time and place, it was meant to be very restrained and genteel.
But in one regard, there was no restraint at all: the presents. In that neighborhood, in those days, a bar mitzvah boy received a fortune in gifts. Cash and savings bonds. Gold watches and gold pen sets, not one but half a dozen of each, maybe more. Silver identity bracelets that were the current fad. Money clips and tie clips, chains and rings set with diamonds and other precious gems.
I’ve never worn much jewelry. I don’t like the feel of it against my skin. For decades, I never wore even a wedding band or a wristwatch. So a lot of these baubles weren’t actually useful to me. But I was absolutely dazzled by the worth of them. It was the first wealth that ever belonged entirely to me. Before that, I had once saved my allowance for months to put together forty dollars to buy a rare stamp. This, though, this was—who knows how much?—thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of precious metals, gems, and legal tender. Riches beyond my imagination, and it was all mine.
I collected the haul in an elegant leather box that was itself one of the gifts. I stored the box in a toy cabinet built into my bedroom wall. In the days and weeks that followed, I would take the box out of the cabinet sometimes. I would sit on my bed and hold the box on my legs and open the lid and gaze down at the contents. I would run my fingers over the chains and pens and watches. I would sort them in the box’s various compartments and try to guess at their value. It seemed a sparkling treasure to me, like the contents of Aladdin’s cave.
I don’t know how long my enchantment lasted. Six months maybe, maybe eight, summer into spring. But slowly over that time, a deep misgiving grew in me. I would open my treasure box and find my delight in my wealth had become intermingled with a sense of self-reproach. There was something wrong with this, wasn’t there? At first, I couldn’t admit to myself what it was. But then I could, and my guilt soured to anger. I would sit on the bed and stare down at the open box on my legs. I would stare down at the gold and the silver and the gems and the bonds. I would run my fingers over them and hear them clink and rattle. And I would think, Why did you do it? Why did you let them make you do it? Why did you say those things that you did not believe in front of everyone? Why did you sing those prayers you did not even understand?
I didn’t think this then but I think so now: if deep down I had not believed in God, it would not have troubled me as much as it did. If you had asked me the question at the time, I probably would have come out with some pseudo-sophisticated agnostic blather about the unknowability of the infinite. But I’d have been conning you—posing, parroting the adults. I believed, all right. It was in my nature to believe. I felt God there. Why else would I have been so distressed? If it had not mattered to me that I had lied in a temple, at an altar, with the Torah open under my hands—if it had not mattered, I mean, in some essential spiritual way—I think my guilt and shame would have been less intense. I think they would have faded away in time.
But they did not fade. As the months went on, they grew stronger. I grew angry at myself. I grew angry at my parents. I grew angry—not at Judaism specifically but at religion in general. I resented the whole machinery of godless ritual and mindless tradition. I resented its authority without integrity, big people wielding their power over small. With great pomp and sacred ceremony, they had made me declare what I did not believe was true—and then they had paid me for the lie with these trinkets! I felt that I had sold my soul.
Now, when I opened the leather box, when I looked down at the gold and silver and gems and US Bonds, it was a bitter, bitter thing. Even the pleasant chill of metal seemed to have faded from the stuff. It felt warm and clammy under my fingertips. I took the box out of its cabinet less and less often and finally not at all; I just left it in there. I pushed it to the back of its shelf, stacking old board games in front of it. Even so, even with the cabinet door shut, I felt its presence, a weight, a sorrow, an accusation.
Finally, one night, after I’d gone to bed, I forced myself to stay awake. I waited in the dark for more than an hour. My father had to go to work so early in the morning that he was often asleep by nine, by ten at the latest. By midnight, usually, the whole house was quiet. When I felt I’d waited long enough, I opened the toy cabinet—quietly, quietly. I slid the boxes of board games aside. I drew out the leather box full of jewels. Barefoot in my pajamas, I crept downstairs with the box tucked under my arm.
Just in back of the house, down a flight of three steps, there was a concrete platform. It was set beneath the kitchen window, beside the cellar door. Two garbage receptacles were built into the cement, side by side. When you wanted to open one, you would step on a foot pedal to lever up the iron lid. Then you could lower in the old grocery bags full of kitchen trash.
I remember—I can feel it as I write—the cold of the concrete on my bare feet as I hurried tiptoe down those steps. I can still feel the rough surface of the cement through the knees of my pajamas as I knelt on the platform beside the receptacle. I pressed on the foot pedal with one hand to lift the iron lid. I can still feel the cold of the iron against my palm. With the other hand, I stuffed the leather box into the sodden garbage bag. I remember—I can feel as I write—the damp coffee grounds and the brittle egg shells that rose around my forearm as I worked the box deep, deep into the trash. I wanted to make sure it would not be discovered before the garbage men came in the morning and took the bags away. When the leather treasure box was well hidden, I lowered the heavy lid carefully so it wouldn’t make a noise.
I crept back inside—crept quickly back upstairs, two stairs by two. I slipped back into my bedroom, closing the door behind me.