The Disappearance Word from: Adam Shechter

You are a Jew because you are not a Jew at all. This ever-unwinding axiom is the delectable botulism of the Jewish literary experiment, the inherited permutation of the Mosaic desert in our days. As we have been instructed in the mitzvot of tearing one another to pieces in order to maintain a progressive and stable/adapting yet fragmenting collective ego, as these meta-familial teachings have stumbled down from that very large story that reads: We are no more! Still, we dutifully live this eradication and in pure joy record the altered-same event for the next generation, demonstrating how even you can be totally destroyed and remain legible in the Jewish canon.

A necessarily appropriate reduction of this paradoxical ecstatic nihilism is achieved by reaching out of such murky narcissistic declarations (with contorted skinny infant wrist only) and grabbing an actual book. Ilan Stavans The Disappearance reifies our everyday Judeo cataclysm in title and? But before going any farther with his so-called actual third objectness, lest the pleasure of my mutilated ego cease its conversation of orgasmic self-orchestration, I will personally tie into our textual fiction with a life experience. Though having no immediate social contact with Ilan Stavans beyond a 2AM interview watched on a nameless high numbered cable station, I will default abstractly to the apocalyptic theme at hand: No one likes to come in third place! But sometimes or really most often we must acquiesce and develop our critical gaze in the sizzling neurons of primal envy.

In the collections third and final story, Xerox Man, Stavans reports an immediate NYC subway encounter he had with Reuben Staflovitch the psychotic supermodel-esque son of a famous Hassidic Rabbi from Jerusalem, who stole and burned three hundred sacred Jewish texts from local academic libraries. Though before incinerating the irreplaceable artifact, the self-appointed cosmically clever Mr. Staflovitch would xerox the entirety, remove a single page and then add the photocopied manuscript to the illicit archival piles of his Upper West Side apartment. As I can no longer tolerate the absence of my life as primary subject of discussion, perhaps not that unlike Staflovitch, I will replace the requisite example of the actual sado-masochistic meeting between Stavans and Staflovitch with one from my own life. The yummy delicious tale of inter-Jewish destruction is as follows:

On a recent pleasingly chilly-clear afternoon, I was accosted by a gang of twelve-year-old orthodox Jewish kids. Lost and anxiously searching for a friends address on a nameless Brooklyn street, I soon noticed that I was flanked by two young yarmulke bearing boys, who were no less than mocking my determined gait. I sped up in an attempt to shake this social anomaly, yet the two Hebrew villains also increased their speed. Without consent, my heart initiated a bodily crisis alert and began to beat loud and hard. Soon, a wave of female giggles rippled up my back and neck, and cutting excited speech describing my dress swarmed my ears. Fortunately, a section of my intellectual faculty remained and calculated that my size was practically double that of my enemies, so I implemented an intuitive plan of attack and veered into the pathway of the boy on my right forcing him to retreat, along with his mindless partner. No sooner had a few seconds of my triumph elapsed, the boy on my right was back at it with his devilish mimesis, his cohort on my left again doing the same. In this moment of life changing decision-making, flight morphed into fight and I stopped abruptly. But then my heart stopped too as the two boys halted just a few steps ahead. What did the One From Above have me in for? My tongue swelled, my breathing fell erratic, my imagination blistered with unspeakable headlines from tomorrows Daily News. Coldly staring at the boy from the right, a tall olive skinned lad with crinkled broody eyes and mouth, I barked, Can I help you? With impervious adolescent defiance, he retorted, Can I help you? My teeth clenched, my eyes watered, I was dizzy with disbelief. No sooner than I could not think of a prized and winning rebuttal (the one I can never appropriately concoct except for in a day dream post-confrontation), there came clomping a horde of fifteen kids, mostly girls to join their two after-school compatriots. I was now surrounded by a pack of long-black-dressed giggling girls and frowning white-shirted boys, all eyes wildly floating about me in a googly sadistic gleeful jelly. I quietly gasped for air. Finally, one of the girls, and then a few others quickly echoing, inquired, Are you Rabbi Birnbaum?

Who was this Rabbi Birnbaum? Yiddishe sex symbol at the head of a hippest classroom in the yeshiva or a shlemeily scapegoat substitute teacher fun to stick pins in? I could not conclude.

Yes, I am Rabbi Birnbaum, I loudly announced.

I told you! I told you! The girls shrieked in masterful panic.

Gracefully peeling off my ski hat and dipping the top of my thirty-four-year-old head into their view, I mournfully corrected, No actually, I am not a Rabbi, you see? No yarmulke.

The kids went expectantly silent, though not budging from their predatorial semi-circle. I was not out of danger, but perhaps on my way. I had to act fast.

Not only am I not a Rabbi, I am a secular Jew, I calmly elaborated.

Whats a secular Jew? a short stocky boy asked immediately.

It means I eat pork! I exclaimed making my eyes really big and scary. Expecting the Jewish kids to scatter in terror as if I just held up a cross to vampires, their interest only intensified, the semi-circle closing in tighter around me. All the better for them to humiliate a pork eating Jew?

I eat pork too! the tall crinkle faced one rebuffed.

I couldnt believe it. He had just seized my most powerful and final weapon, surely knocking the very blood from his parents hearts at the same time. Is it illegal to talk about pig food products with under aged Jewish kids? I internally wondered. I feared for my future and theirs.

So you enjoy some good barbecued ribs? I eked out. Crinkle face didnt say anything. The obviousness of my come back stupidly reflecting on his dark angry eyes.

I am sure a great big ham makes a lovely shabbos dinner in your house? I shouted in desperation.

All the kids laughed in unison. Well that was enough fun for the moment. I had to get the hell out of there or perhaps a thirteenth tribe of Israel would be formed. I saw myself at their helm, roving down the back streets of Brooklyn, the whole gang gobbling down large globs of salty pig meat, in the same ritualistic fashion that the Yanomamo of Brazil do in order to prepare for battle. A new gang of Gypsy-Jews, with eccentric minhags of only being able to steal an old ladies purse in the presence of a minyan while davening mincha. The fantasy soon dissipated from my internal sight, as my real eyes saw the lot of them standing before me awaiting the next joke. But I was tapped out. Thinking we were now friends, I asked the group where the address I was looking for might be. I got twelve different answers with twenty hands pointing in forty different directions. Knowing that the address was most likely just a block behind, it was confirmed that this Hebrew pack was out to get me, and I glumly walked away feeling lucky to have survived.

I am aware that the above vignette was not crafted with the same historical elegance that Stavans employs when educating us about Maarten Soetendrop in the first and title story of The Disappearance, a Belgium actor who staged his own false kidnapping by non-existent Neo-Nazis or of my favorite sub-character in the collection (from the novella Morirse esta en Hebreo), Nicholas, a now Baal Teshuvah who is in exile from Mexico in Israel for a bank robbery committed pre-repentance. Having watched far too many hours of Sesame Street and not being culturally awarded Stavans Argentinian inflected serenity, I can only offer a skewed appraisal of his hyper-poetic journalistic tyranny, fun! I will say this, his stories teach an acceptance of the true pleasure found in the destruction of the contemporary Jew. And an acceptance with the specially flavored support of an author who is not afraid to personally converse in the real time of an actual story that is factual occurrence, fiction, and Torah sized myth. I should really tell you more about Stavans and what he actually wrote in The Disappearance, but then I would be remaining untrue to my innate dialogic violence, my need to destroy him and reiterate the biased primacy of my life as a destroyed Jew.