“You must be kidding,” I exploded as my father informed me that custom calls for the latest arrival to assume the leadership of the clan.
“No. I’m afraid you’ll soon be asked to do your part,” my father said wryly.
“That’s crazy. I’ve only been here, what, not even a wink. What does an anarchist like me know about management, supervision, control? I’ve never had the slightest desire to lead, to guide, to enforce, no more than I’ve ever suffered being led, governed or controlled.”
“The post is largely titular, ceremonial.”
“I detest titles and the powers they confer. I can’t stand ceremony.”
“I know, but your powers would be limited to your own freedom of conscience. Majority consensus would still prevail in all matters of authority and protocol.”
“What you’re saying is that I’d be free to think but denied freedom of expression.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m not interested. I’ve never followed anything or anyone and I’m unfit to lead. Surely the clan can appoint a more suitable candidate. Trust me, I won’t be upset.”
“No. Tradition is clear. You’re our newest émigré. You must submit, with poise if not conviction. But look at it this way: Sooner or later, another expatriate will join us and you’ll be replaced.”
“But that could take eons.”
“It’s in the nature of eternity to suspend itself ever so briefly and to defer to happenstance. Someone could land on Ein Sof as early as tomorrow.”
“Or the next day or the day after that or in a month or a year or in ten,” I protested.
“Don’t worry. Providence is not that generous.”
*
The invitation to head the clan came from Yossi, my father’s younger brother, an otherwise kind man and astute businessman who had owned and operated a children’s shoe store back in Yesod. His son Amos, my handsome cousin, a talented cinematographer who had migrated to Ein Sof after losing a heroic battle against AIDS, had held the post, reluctantly, for almost a year.
“You’ll honor us greatly by taking on this provisional assignment,” said Yossi, speaking before a gathering of the clan in the large communal meeting room.
There they were, Lazar and his apprentice kitten, his wife Helen stirring the contents of a big copper pot with undiminished vigor, Yanosh deftly peeling his precious grapes, the towering Abraham engrossed in Scriptures, Fabian crying his eyes out, the peevish Meema and Schmiel, looking bored and cross, my maternal grandfather, fixated on the blemish marring his pistol, Néné Buby, grimacing and grunting with unremitting regularity, Lucy, farting and striking the floor with her cane, Amos, his angelic eyes lost in space where he could glimpse the gossamer likeness of his long-lost lover, and Néné Jan puffing away on his Turkish ovals and ready, should he get the chance, to declaim a few choice verses to a rapt Tante Yetta.
My parents, models of discretion, stood several paces behind the throng, cautious not to let their unease show through the perfunctory pleasure they felt compelled to display at that moment. I knew that look. I’d seen it in their eyes on countless occasions as I embarked on adventures that filled them with pride and disquiet.
“I’m flattered, Yossi, flattered and touched by the sentiment behind your appeal,” I said with sham gallantry. “I know how much this means to you all but I’m not your man. Find a more experienced proxy, someone more suited to the task, someone with the leadership qualities and zeal I lack.”
“It’s not that simple,” Yossi retorted, attempting an assuaging smile. Tradition....”
I resisted the temptation to cry out, “Fuck tradition.”
“Consider my past,” I pleaded instead. Rewind my life. Dissect my leanings and idiosyncrasies. Reread, out loud, the words I uttered, the tracts I published. Ponder the consternation they caused. Are you forgetting that I was a source of shame to many of you back in Yesod? Didn’t one of you suggest, as I reported on the gory deeds of Central American death squads, that I was meddling in other people’s affairs?”
Meema squirmed. She pinched her razor-thin lips and they disappeared in a grimace of contempt.
“Didn’t another among you call me an agent provocateur because I spoke out against military adventurism and torture?”
Yanosh fidgeted with his grapes.
“And didn’t you, Yossi, once complain to my father that my inquests into government corruption, the bestiality of man and the nauseating sanctimony of the Jerusalem rabbis amount to treason?”
Yossi blinked.
“And when I reached fifty -- not quite old enough to lay down my weapons -- didn’t my favorite uncle ask, ‘Aren’t you a bit too old to play paladins?’ Troubled by my forays into the belly of the beast where I hunted down vampires, hadn’t he added with a hint of irony in his voice, ‘don’t you think you should let younger men carry the torch for a change?’ And didn’t I reply that age alone couldn’t stop me from dissecting the horrors I witnessed, to expose pretense and duplicity and sleaze in high places?”
Uncle Johnny, my maternal uncle who, spellbound, had listened to my appeal now evaded my gaze. A well-to-do criminal lawyer who had specialized in defending men he knew deserved to be hanged from the highest tree, had once urged me to pursue a legal career. My fiery high school compositions, precocious gifts of effrontery and rhetorical acrobatics had so impressed him that he secretly lobbied my parents to send me to law school. But Uncle Johnny’s courtroom theatrics, the flourish of his body language, the ostentation of his blackjack arguments against often blameless plaintiffs, his very assertion that the worst scoundrel ever to walk the earth is entitled to due process had seemed incongruous at the time and given me all the ammunition I needed to dismiss his counsel and reject his profession. Years later he had amiably scolded me and claimed that mine was perhaps the only “important case” he’d ever lost.
I remember asking, “What sort of victory would you have wrested had I ignored my instincts, betrayed my conscience and yielded to pressure?” He smiled with avuncular pride and shook his head.
“Like I said. You’d have made one helluva trial lawyer.”
*
I shut my eyes for a moment, reliving the sterling epoch that had once been mine. I had created a persona from a large collection of fictional characters and re-invented myself over the years: Part activist, part rabble-rouser, a nonconformist filled with compassion for the voiceless and the persecuted, the orphan and the widow’s son, an anarchist revolted by bigotry and injustice, and, at the same time, a misanthrope overflowing with revulsion for the human race. It was a dichotomy I could neither explain nor reconcile. On one hand, I needed to find and expose the tiniest of stains in the purest driven snow. On the other, the pleasure I derived from such commerce far exceeded any possible urge to inform. I treated fact as a prop. It was the mood, the emotions, the color my stories conveyed, the anxiety or the outrage they were apt to elicit, that made me reach for a pen, not reverence for the Fourth Estate, nor a fondness for the reader whose fawning esteem or scathing attacks I ignored at first. My aim was to cause anxiety and discomfiture, to remind the forgetful and the smug that the Emperor is naked, to keep the son of a bitch stripped long enough for all to see him bare-assed and trembling, to sting and confound men blinded by their own self-induced myopia.
“How else do you awaken a dormant conscience...” I once fired back at an editor enraged by my denunciation of a cardinal who cavorted with barrel-chested colonels and generals and their buxom mistresses, yet turned his back on the gruesome human rights abuses that took place under his holy dominion, “... but by prying eyes open and dousing them with acid? If man does not peer into the heart of darkness,” I pleaded, “will God?” The editor tore up my essay. This would not be the last affirmation that “freedom of the press” extends up to but not beyond the editor’s desk and those who own the presses.
Hadn’t I asked in an editorial timed to appear on the Day of Atonement, “Who is this ‘maker’ who inflicts (or tolerates) atrocities for ‘the good that comes from them’? What cunning and irreducible absolute orchestrates without apparent aim or turns a blind eye to the paroxysms that convulse his realm? What ‘intelligent designer’ remains stone-silent while the sobs of his creation are never heard? What ‘ineffable’ entity is this, whose ear is inattentive and whose breast is unfaithful to the huddled masses that call on him and seek his succor? What cruel despot decrees that his subjects will speak and live by words not their own, that they will blindly obey the injunctions of his self-anointed envoys, tremble at their threats, mouth off supplications and jeremiads and recite guilt-ridden prayers of indebtedness and adoration, all repeated ad nauseum, day after day, to a God who never shows his face, never bares his heart, never sheds a tear, never says he's sorry, a God who grants life and, with it, the fear of death?”
I paid dearly for indulging my vice. I was fired, lost friends and suffered the disaffection of family. I was shunned, isolated, censured, even threatened. But I never kicked the habit and remained habituated, less for the fleeting high it produced than out of respect for all the unpopular causes I’d championed, some out of conviction, a few out of spite for those who did not share my egalitarian views, most in tribute to George Orwell’s definition of freedom: “the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”
I’d also become fearful of losing the modest acclaim I had worked so hard to secure. Although it proved unlikely that my tracts could radically influence public opinion, I had by now a reputation to maintain and I could not afford to surrender the modest momentum I had gained. I was getting published. My byline, set in bold face, appeared under a cameo likeness of me. I had an audience and fresh enemies to rankle and strike back at. Safeguarding such ego-boosting assets would exact an effort all out of proportion with the ephemeral pleasure they produced. Instead of catering to my craft, I was now busy feeding an insatiable momentum of self-perpetuation-by-retaliation. No sooner had my broadsides created the desired effect -- shock, indignation or sheer horror at the medley of human miseries I chronicled -- than I’d fire off another salvo. Eventually, what had been a youthful fantasy, a Faustian pact, would shackle a once happy dilettante to a tiresome reflex. I kept going just to see how far it would get me. I never stopped.
In time, while I eagerly joined in the intellectual skirmishes of the day, my polemics evolved from tactical weapon into strategic objective: Excavate the truth, no matter what it takes to dredge from the mire where it hides or is often buried. I had become a saboteur and an apologist for the devil in whose company I learned at long last to shed what Maimonides called “senseless beliefs and degenerate customs” and to embrace the truth, lofty and hideous, enlightening and damning.
I was in my mid-fifties and involuntarily “retired” (anyone deemed “overqualified” understands the sting of forced joblessness) when I decided to turn an informal journal into a memoir, a life story replete with escapades, heartbreaks and disaster, in whose pages I could comment on the world as I saw it, immune from the editor’s blue pencil or the ever-present threat of censorship. Satirical, politically incorrect in the extreme, devoid of simplistic rationalizations, what I compiled in more than five years of writing and rewriting grew into an accolade to gonzo journalism, a tribute to my parents, a personal testament of self-scrutiny devoid of pedantry or false modesty, and an indictment of every stinking manifestation of man’s sadism, greed, gullibility and, most of all, stupidity, which I define as “the passion for fixed ideas.”
No, this was not a burst of male menopausal narcissism, exhibitionism, catharsis or the vainglorious hope of a literary ticket to posterity. I was driven by a compelling need to tell all, often with brutal bluntness and self deprecation, to relate a personal story that spans four continents and seven decades, and to do so in brushstrokes that deliver an unvarnished canvas of the people, places and events -- reality stripped naked -- that marked my life. I minced no words. I spared no sensibilities. I took no prisoners.
My greatest victory, I believe, had been one of self-conquest. I reached emotional and spiritual independence by shedding absurd beliefs, relying on my inner reserves of intellectual power, banning the past from memory, living in the present with an eye sharply peeled toward the future, and ignoring situations or events over which I had no control. This might not be a “Dale Carnegie” story of success or a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches saga. I amassed no fortune, didn't become an industry mogul, a tycoon. I moved no mountains, nor did I ever aspire to do so. If we measure success in terms of wealth and material assets, I'm a miserable failure. If it means satisfaction with one's own achievements, peace of mind, the ability to accept one's limitations and the chutzpah to believe in one's elusive potential, then I've reached the pinnacle of success, all that without benefit of motivational gurus who enrich themselves by exploiting the greed and credulity of their audiences. Last, I was a struggling agnostic for most of my life. I had since come out of the closet and breathed the oxygenated air of emancipation by proclaiming my Atheism.
*
I looked at Yossi and studied the eagerness in the eyes of those assembled around him. I saw not a glimmer of fondness for me, or joy or festive anticipation. Instead, what their expressions conveyed was the lurid zeal of fanatics bent on solemnizing, by their presence, the sacramental reenactment of their faith and most fervid convictions. It’s an expression I’d witnessed at ritual circumcisions, Bar-Mitzvahs, Eucharistic rites, baptisms, communions, prayer vigils, tribal scarifications, evangelical revivals and exorcisms, in the eyes of hopeless cripples in Lourdes, in the trancelike rocking of rapt Orthodox Jews praying at the Western Wall, in the serene stupor of Hindu mystics and in the awestruck faces of children being read a fairy tale. I sensed neither sympathy nor a grasp of the existential dilemma they were forcing me to face. The clan’s expectations were as unrealistic as they were unjust. How do you honor tradition by forcing it on someone who rejects it?
At an age when the weight of years softens even the strongest convictions and consigns lofty causes to low-priority status, I realized that I was still full of piss and vinegar, that little had calmed the storm within and that, if pushed against a wall, I was ready for a fight.