The Meat which Clings to My Bones Word from: Adam Shechter

What is fattier than a pastrami sandwich from Mendys? What has higher salt content than the herring at your local shuls kiddush table? The hard reporting of The Jewish Herald constricts the arteries of the human heart with a grip tighter than any earthly Yiddishe gastrointestinal incantation.

Just hours ago, lazily drifting down Ocean Parkway into the thickening purple end of twilight, I spotted one of the innocent plastic bins displaying (and freely offering) the latest issue of The Jewish Herald, a crumpled and agonized male Jewish face consuming eighty percent of the periodicals surface. Simply stopping, acknowledging, allowing, looking, sent my blood pressure up a good ten points. Scrutinizing, reaching, touching, pinching between thumb and index finger the delicate and dry ethereal newspaper texture shot the count up at least another twenty, thirty points. A near death experience? Like any good Judaica addict, I opened (warily) the creaky plastic door, the insides barren with public hunger, not a single paper remaining. My cognitive ego functioning temporarily disabled, I thieved the display copy wedged into the scratched up window, leaving the bin desolate of Jewish presence. My guilt building, I glanced back at the civic grave marker, a handful of powdered white sugar indulgently tossed in with salt and fat, the flutter of heartbeat, the heartbeat soliciting nebulous punishment. The heart beat seeking rage, the thin lips of the heart shaping into a metaphysical cantorial circle to release an impossible frustration. I look at the covers headline:

More than 500 Mass Graves uncovered across Ukraine.

Vapors of schmaltzy salt rush into my nostrils, steaming my glasses.

The subtitle elucidation:

A Holocaust On Its Own. Parfeniy Bogopolsky reacts while recollecting Nazi atrocities in the Ukranian village of Gvozdavka-1.

This world believes that it is held up by proper nouns. I disagree. A cursory perusal of any world history book will show you that the names of people and places come and go just as quickly as the actual persons or places. It is in the bone and ligament between these pseudo-specific parts of speech where eternity lays. Abstraction is the meat of Gods body. And the meat of God right now is a journalistic phantom, one of my Grandmas Chicken Fricasees, an inky river of meatballs and chicken wings streaming down my throat, an ecstatically rich golden brown sauce. Her voice serving critical screeches, murderous yelps and the need to avenge through militant and sadistic sorrow.

I decided to end my evening walk, turned 180 degrees and picked up a faster pace, while recollecting my first exposure to The Jewish Herald. A saintly elf-like member (as holy as 1000 Jews returning to Israel) of a shul I attend used to drop off batches of thirty or forty issues, carried from deep within the asphalt folds of Flatbush. I was immediately taken by the shameless primal photographs adorning-imploding the cover. The liberal rational sounding tones of the articles inner fluids seamlessly directed through orthodox right wing pipes. Whenever the shipment mysteriously arrived, I would take the newspaper home and covet its hyperbolic stories of duress in the night table lamp comfort of my bed. The ever-surfacing wrongs committed against the Jews in the past imbibed in the softness of pillow, the wrongs transpiring at the very moment of my reading drunk in the safety of blankets, and the wrongs which will indubitably be committed, the most pressing wrongs, those crispy transparent apocalyptic goyishe machinations undigested. The pure grizzly burnt fat on the history bone, the ancestral chicken chunks fossilized in the heart, lyrical blackened poultry which cannot be chewed yet is still magically swallowed, pseudo-God-scaled Biblical revelation in the gray misty print. The end of the world begins with heartburn.

I used to pinch two copies, one for myself, and one for my expatriate Israeli father. On my way home from shul on Friday night I would stop off at his house after he was already asleep, and leave a copy on his worn television chair cushion. It would sit there, a stinking carcass, like a dead rodent gift left behind by a cat who loves its owner. I would walk home, savoring my fathers reading image, envisioning how the pro-Israel exile flavored words bathed his ego, reinforced his primitive wish for the state of Israel to exist, its absolute imperative, from a distance of 10,000 miles. Just like the cover story, the Jewish towns his father and mother came from in the Ukraine no longer exist. His grandfather shot dead and buried in a mass grave. His uncle Ben Zion, who was born the same year as him and given the same name, though in the Ukraine, did not see beyond the first year of life. He perished while hiding in the forest with his parents from the Nazis.

For this reason alone, my father was extremely lucky to be born in Israel (then Palestine). So that makes me lucky too. The Jewish Herald lays on my kitchen table unopened. Should I unbolt its pages and read? Should I eat the bloody meat of the Jewish peoples suffering? The same meat which clings to my skinny American bones and pleads for an easier flow of blood through its veins?