Goodnight and Sleep Tight

"A man makes a beast of himself to free himself from the pain of being a man" -- Dr. Samuel Johnson

They say that a true friend deserves much more than a last chance. My true friend deserved as many as he could gather, bull-rushing drunkenly through my life like a tornado as I had doubtlessly torn through the peaceful affairs of others. We had met when we were young--both young beneath our years--immature, partying, trading international addresses as simply as people swapped baseball cards, manifesting all our sundry ills in new climes, with new faces, and the same old outcomes.

We had been chased by a bull in the Galilee, dodged the Federales that time in Mexico, evaded capture at the border for carrying hashish in our shirt pockets, and eluded self-appraisals by living in that expatriate fuzziness of local customs, insisting on proper food and service and taking the piss out of foreigners who doubtlessly granted passage in exchange for precious Yankee dollars.

On the kibbutz, where we met, he was a godsend, a native speaker of my language in a ghetto of foreigners, aeriodite, articulate, with a grin that outlasted long, brutally hot days in the sun and nights of fear trying to sleep in the bomb shelter while rockets fell on the Lebanon border. By days, we swapped stories of home in gallant one-upmanship at a time when American or British nationalism didn't quite cut it abroad, shameless, arguing the differences between cookies and biscuits, trucks and lorries, fries and crisps. We were Banana Buddies, harvesting hundreds of pounds of fruit by day, pints of beer by night.

For fun, we stuffed women's underwear or raw St. Peter's fish in the backpacks of departing fellows, sure to be sniffed out by airport security as they left the country. Or we crept about with buckets filled with bone-chilling ice from the Galilee fish-packing plant, splashing hot co-workers in the blistering 100-degree sun.

And so, after visiting him in England and meeting his mum, I went sadly to Heathrow for my flight, stopping with him in the airport bar for a few goodbye pints and a stop in the bogs--as he called it--for a last toilet stop, whereupon he stepped nimbly behind me at the urinal and pissed up and down my legs, sending me off to my transatlantic flight with the steaming odor of a bar accident. All good fun for him. And so I vowed that was the end of it.

But a year or so later, he petitioned for a visit to Santa Cruz, where he showed up full of high alcoholic octane and vinegar, camping on the floor of our beach house, flirting with Maki and telling her how horribly possessive I was. All pardonable, I suppose, since I eventually drove her off with my overprotective, fearful obsessions; and so I chose to give him yet another chance and we drove to Mexico where we lit a joint on a sand dune a million miles from anywhere, but only a binocular's view away from black-uniformed Federales with automatic rifles.

We could "pay the ticket immediately" a Federale told me in Spanish, or go to the local hoosegow. I opted for the former and brokered a student price while my friend stood chagrined with his gap-toothed leer. All in good fun.

The next time I gave him a last chance was the year after I went into recovery in Washington State. I told him he could stay in my cabin, but there were rules against drink. He agreed to comply. We took the ferryboat to sightseeing in Seattle, where he insisted we enter a local pub for lunch. I said sure, but nothing for me, thanks. He ordered a platter onto which were arranged small glasses of beer representing each of the eight or ten varieties featured at the pub. He ordered a pint for me to "hold in your hand, mate" for the purposes of a reunion photo.

When I declined, he got stroppy, chugging down his own portions and mine as well. Then, fully steamed up for the tour, he insisted we charter a float plane for a ride over the Seattle skyline. The pilot took one look at him and shrugged his shoulders, but I talked him into going. My friend reeked of it and made horrific commentaries en-route to an abbreviated landing splash landing. So when we deplaned safely in Lake Union, I told him it was time for him to go, to find another place to roost.

He went off angrily and, weeks later, left a furious message on my answering machine, citing all my shortcomings and failures as a true friend. I chose to leave it alone.

A few years ago, he noticed my collection of short fiction for sale and sent an email to my publisher: did she know how to get hold of me? He had lost track, our being separated for reasons that eluded him.

I had heard once that drinkers bind together in a whirlwind, holding each other in orbit as links in a dangling mobile. When one link comes off the artifice, the mobile spins wickedly off balance in kinetic disarray. Drinkers will search with undying devotion to bring their wayward sober friend back into the gin.

Not at any price.

I love you dearly, old Banana Buddy. But goodnight, godspeed, and off I go. This is my stop.

The Plain of Jezreel

Leaving Nazareth, you reach the approach to Mount Tabor passing through the the Bedouin village of Shibli. According to Judges 4:13-16, the 1,350-foot peak was the site of the bitter battle between Sisera and Deborah and Barak. Long considered the site of Christ's Transfiguration, Tabor stands alone in the Plain of Jezreel like an upended teacup.

Atop the peak visitors find the Church of the Transfiguration, a Greek Orthodox church, and several small, hidden chapels. Today, you can hire a Mercedes taxi and cruise to the top, but when Dave Green and I visited in the spring of 1978, we chose to hike to the peak, from which you could see the Hill of Moreh, the city of Afula, Mt. Gilboa in the Jordan Valley and, across the way, the mountains of Gilead.

To walk meant that you followed the goat path through the cypress trees and pines, up the same hard scrabble ascended by 10th century BCE Israelites, the ten thousand men of Barak's army, Jesus himself, then legions of Romans, Crusaders, as well as countless Arab and Israeli warriors of the post-partition era.

Dave and I took our morning bus from Nazareth, leaving the crowded lanes of Arab women in their black abayas and niquabs, parading along with bright orange or green Tupperware nested on their heads, up the steep hills between modern and ancient buildings chock-to-jaw, and out to the Plain of Jezreel. From the Bedouin village, the approach is tricky. You have to ask directions as often as you spot a passerby. The trek is by no means strenuous, but on a hot day--of which there are legion--you need to stop and take refuge in the shade of olive trees or verdant rows of cypress. The route scales the hillside through rugged switchbacks that progress ever upwards to flat, bright terraces of grape vines, wildgrass, and sprays of blue lupines.

We carried only water bottles in our packs and donned our kibbutz sun hats along the trail. Dave hailed from Croydon, a London suburb, but had more recently shuttled British trucks through Africa to aid businesses in the apartheid South Africa. I frequently reminded him of his sins, and he made note of mine. It had become customary for Dave and I to argue the finer points of British colonialism as it stacked up against routine American aggression around the globe. He would play his trump card: that the British were the only invaders to burn our Capitol. And I would remind him that we saved their yellow hides to end World War II.

Dave had a happy grin with a gap between his upper teeth and his eyes flashed when you mentioned his proclivity toward bedding any woman with a pulse. He had gratefully accepted the nickname "Plunger" that the other Brits on Kibbutz Ginosar had bestowed upon him. I was called "The Young Gazelle", an ironic moniker since I was the slowest runner on the soccer pitch, laid low by a self-inflicted machete wound early one day as I attempted to chop down a banana tree.

The hike up Mount Tabor, then, was designed as a tonic, a way to put fresh life into the clicking joint of my knee. We had recently gone to the Dead Sea where the saltiest water in the world helped close the wound, for even a small insect bite in the Galilee turned into an angry infection if you left it alone. We were celebrating my good luck with the Dead See, combining a day off from labor in the Ginosar banana fields with off-the-path tourism and non-stop banter about the ills of Vietnam and India, respectively.

After the first half hour, though, I was bushed and aching. The sun burst through the clouds over the Plain of Jezreel and our blue work shirts were stained with sweat. Below you could see the winding roads toward the Galilee and, above, the terracotta towers of the Greek Orthodox church. Peacocks darted in and out of the hedgerows, filling the air with wicked shrieks.

King Sisera, Dave informed me after reading through his notes on the place, had nine hundred chariots in his forces, adorned with iron wheel-fittings. Nothing, he said, compared to his love chariot back in his hut on the kibbutz. He was wont to remind me of my poor record in getting laid. For those keeping score, it was something in the order of Dave: 28, Gabby: 0. You could count on Plunger to shift all topics to sex after he'd exhausted his prepared remarks on history. It made for a singular experience amidst far-flung settings like Bethlehem, Caesaria, Tel Aviv, Masada and, much later, South Croydon, California, Washington, and Mexico.

But on this day, the banter gave way to concern when my knee began to fail on the slopes of Mount Tabor. We were more than halfway to the peak when I gave serious thought to giving up. But Dave convinced me to try again for the next terrace, just beyond a line of junipers and through a stone Crusader gateway.

"Come on, mate, you can do it," he said, and we labored up the next cutback, through a tangle of hedges, and burst out, finally, on the wide terrace that overlooked the valley.

I bent over, trying to catch my breath, and Dave handed me a water bottle.

"Maybe we can just stay here a little while," I said. "Get our batteries charged."

But there would be none of it. For across the terrace, black and very large in the mid-day sun stood a bull, eying us suspiciously, steam rising from his thick hide as he took a single step, eying us all the while as he took another, and then he broke into a tidy little trot on his undersized legs down the terrace like a twinkle-toed nightmare deftly hopping the dirt moguls en route to throttling two international interlopers.

"It's up or down, mate," Dave said, tossing the bottle into his day pack. "One way or the other."

And off we ran, doubling back, my knee suddenly working perfectly, smoothly, painlessly through the contours of scrub and slippery mud-track as we descended like the mighty Canaanite troops of Hatzor, running like school kids, down to the hill country of Ephraim, past the sudden, unexpected parking lot of tour buses where Christian pilgrims embarked for their ride to the summit of Mount Tabor along a private road we had overlooked that rose effortlessly to the uppermost plateau where the Church of the Transfiguration stood against the cloudless sky, beyond the reach of bulls and sarcasm.

After the Galilee

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. ~ James Baldwin

Every morning we would rise in the dark and cold Galilee and walk to the tractor shed for coffee and cookies. We divvied ourselves into work teams, climbed into the kibbutz wagons, and Yossi or Bennie or another leader would hook up the Fordson tractors and drive us up to the banana fields. The sun would toss up a broad announcement of light behind the shadows of the Golan Heights, then burst up suddenly behind a wave of wind that swept across the sea and up the ridges where we bounced along the rutted lanes. Swallows exploded from the trees and sent up volleys of squawks and fluttering wings into the brightening sky. To the south, Mt. Arbel sliced through the morning fog like the ghost-prow of a ship.

At the first crossroads we stopped to wave at Reuven, who stood motionless in his own shadow, his eyes tucked under the wide brim of his blue cotton cap. The first day when we passed, David pointed to Reuven and whispered about the faded cobalt numbers that had been tattooed into his forearm at Auschwitz. His fingertips were stained dark orange from decades of holding cigarettes, his lips drawn into a thin line, a face devoid of palpable emotion. He had lost his wife and children in the camps.

When I inquired if he ever hopped in the wagon to help harvest the bananas for export to Europe, Yossi told me he wanted nothing to do with Europe. And besides, he was too spun out to work anymore. The Hebrew word for it was masugga. It was close to the Yiddish my mother used for the same expression, meshuga. I knew it well.

We merely drove past and let Reuven be, stopping on the way back to drive him to the kibbutz commons for lunch. It was as good as it was likely to ever be for him. And if he was out in the fields contributing to the effort--in his own way--it was honorable of the kibbutz to sustain his life with food, medicine, shelter, and love. But seeing him in that state did little to unravel the decades of hatred I had mustered for the Germans.

Every fall, the Jews of the San Fernando Valley gathered at Devonshire Downs for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Thousands of us would huddle in huge halls and tents at the fairgrounds while the Rabbi read the service and the Cantor blew the sacred ram's horn. I hated it because it typically fell on the same dates of the World Series, it took me out of class during those precious get-to-know-you days of the new fall semester in school and, worst of all, you had to fast from sunset to sunset. Everyone had headaches and was miserable with atonement.

During the service, the Rabbi typically moaned about intermarriage, how it was killing off the precious bloodline of the tribes of Israel and, of course, how the Arabs were bound to push all the Israelis into the Mediterranean Sea. This moment, coupled with years of hearing diatribes from family members against Germany, German cars, blond people, the Wagnerian operas I loved to play on the stereo, etc.--added to years of watching documentaries on the Holocaust, piles of shoes, of bones, of eyeglasses, of living skeleton survivors in rags--well, I was sure the enemies of Judaism had us right where they wanted us, all assembled under one roof in the San Fernando Valley where they could turn on the gas.

So naturally, when I left Israel in the spring, when I took a ship across the Mediterranean and later boarded a bus across Europe, I would have nothing to do with Germany. When my fellow riders got off to tour the German cities along the way between Athens and Amsterdam, I stayed aboard, determined that none of my money would fall into German hands. A cavity search in the icy rain at a German border post (because of the terrorist Bader Meinhoff threat--not because there was a Jew on the bus) further set my heart and soul against them.

* * *

It took me many years to concede that I was not born with hatred, that I learned how to loathe others as a way to remain a victim in my own flesh. It was a way to take poison and forever wait for the other man to die.

In retrospect, I cannot accept my breakthrough as coincidence. The melting of the hardened heart may take a lifetime, but the suddenness of how my perspective was altered continues to astonish and remind me to search out where blindness blocks me from grace.

In early 1991 I was diagnosed with severe depression. That in and of itself was no surprise to me, given the suicides in my immediate family, or that I had spent years attempting to treat my full-body gloom with alcohol or drugs. The doctor sentenced me to cognitive therapy and a medication that felt initially like a lousy batch of LSD that some crazed hippie had concocted in his garage. It was humbling to be meshugga. I couldn't stand the counseling, which was cut-rate and run by an amateur at a county medical clinic. One time she asked me to "walk through the fire" with her support in going cold turkey off my medication, and I ended up in the hospital with toxic shock. She was fired and the facility is lucky I was too depressed to sue their hide.

That winter, I wrote a poem by the wood-burning stove in my cabin in the forest near Chimacum:

On the Promenade of the Seasonally Affected

The last Canadian goose six weeks into fall
rises off the putting green, all
business, and dives behind Mt. Townsend.
The November moon ends
all hope this year we shall not go down into winter.
We trudge through town
hands in our pockets, facing down the wind,
the raw-toothed leaves and sand.

Down in Chimacum the ensilage for cows
weeps methane. Crows pair up in rough-hewn boughs,
school girls rummage through strewn hay
gone to loam in shallow lanes.
Girls are much too new to feel the ache
of natural ruin and fall, arctic air
smokes from their lips, their hair
flared into the draining light of the season.

The rebellion of human chemistry betrays reason.
It’s early dark, dawn’s too late,
& in the collapse of the year We Affected contemplate
fatality, our blood thick beneath the ice
of dim temper, curt hearts out of practice.
A feather on the sidewalk, eiderdown,
and you weep for nothing. (The pulp mill lays down
heavy over the hills a wet black stench of paper.)

The doctor said if medicated you will need to taper
off the elixir and let the Visitor exit as he will.
How lucky to be common for just one season, spill
over into autumn, then skim the black ice of winter, into spring,
the summer light splintering in sheer white threads across the lawn.
Then you drift into fall, falling, nesting like a naturally grown
creature, family around you, friends, Christmas bright,
no sneering thief to filch you off to night.

Early in the new year, I moved to town to be closer to people. I found a lovely little place overlooking the countryside and the Straights of Juan De Fuca. You could see the masts and stacks of large steamers that sailed past town beyond the line of forested hills. Through friends, I discovered a group of depressed people who were looking for company. They sought a safe place to feel temporarily insane in a world with little tolerance for the meshugguna. We began meeting at my house every Thursday night.

There were six of us, and we all came from elsewhere. Claudia spoke with a heavy German accent, wore her hair pulled tightly into a braid, and her eyes flashed on you like a heat ray. I liked her, but felt the old interference rise up like a powerful wedge between us. Each week "We Affected" met to discuss our highs and lows, our walk among the "normal" people. (Normal, my friend Don says, is a setting on a clothes dryer). We'd end each session with prayers and hopes, holding hands, and we'd agree upon a project to complete during the upcoming week. In one case, we settled on creating art that reflected our experience.

The following Thursday night we assembled again in my candle-lit living room. We concealed our projects in a paper bag or box until it was our turn top speak. We went around the room, laughing, applauding each others audacity. It wasn't much for art, but each piece took a chink from the wall. When it was Claudia's turn, she peeled back the brown butcher paper...

It was a bird cage from a pet store. Inside the cage sat a blond-haired doll with blue eyes, alone on the floor, painted tears streaming down her face. The door to the cage was fastened tight with a padlock. "She doesn't know," Claudia said softly, "where is the key."

We sat silently a while in the candlelight, sparing the empty platitudes and false starts at meaning. We held each other.

* * *

A few months later, our group disbanded. The meshugga were all doing well, moving out into the world again in widening orbits. It was spring and the Casablanca lilies rose in the bed beside my front door. Ants marched up and down the long, green stalks and the cherry blossoms broke into fragrant faces in the trees.

Claudia and her husband left town suddenly, quite without fanfare. But before she left, Claudia dropped by to give me a gift wrapped in plain brown paper. Inside the box I found the Native American tapestry she had made, a dream catcher of dazzling threads and beads with feathers streaming from the sides. It hangs on on my wall today, helping me remember precisely how we are freed.

Dreams and wings, dear Claudia. Ich liebe dich.

Moniker Business

My birth name is Gary, as only my family and friends from the past know. It was a common name among 1950s boys, just as Kyle or Evan are white-bread names today. There were always four or five Garys in my classes. There were lots of Garys moving into lookalike suburban homes of families escaping the cold, crowded boroughs of New York to warmer climes in Florida and Southern California.

In Jewish tradition, I was named to honor my maternal grandfather, Harry, a Russian man I never knew. My middle name, Marc, pays homage to my father's father, Max. I never knew Max, either. When the Rabbi gave me my Hebrew names--to reflect my place in the order of things--I was called Getzel Mendel ben Gedalya, the last name being that of my father's first Hebrew name. I am Getzel Mendel, son of Gedalya.

In Hebrew school, they called me Getzel the Pretzel (see french fry post below). In high school, some of the more witty fellahs called me Buster (as in Buster Hyman), or Gary Cherry. Is sarcasm the misshapen expression of love? (Rilke says, "The child bent becomes the bender, inflicts on others what he once went through.")

I came by the nickname Gabby after living the better part of a year in Israel. I worked on a kibbutz (a socialist labor colony) on the Sea of Galilee. At the time, you went to an office in Tel Aviv and selected the flavor of kibbutz where you hoped to volunteer. The offices organized the available colonies by religious and political orientation. You could choose an orthodox kibbutz with a right-wing, Zionist stance, a middle of the road kibbutz with a liberal stance--or any number of combinations. There was even a kibbutz comprised entirely of American emigres, but who wanted to go abroad only to live with the people you were trying to escape?

I had landed in Tel Aviv and spent December with my distant cousin Ronit (changed from Robin) who had settled in Israel years before. She had married an Israeli--a tough, no nonsense kind of fellow--and was completing an internship as a nurse in the downtown Tel Aviv hospital. Her roommate was a Moroccan Jew with black skin and kinky hair. When they completed their training, she was sent to the town of Kiryat Shmona on the Lebanese border. The town is the site of many a rocket attack and a horrific massacre led by the PLO. It was considered a "sponge town" in that it was to absorb the hatred and violence that rained down from the Lebanese mountains above while maintaining an Israeli presence. It seemed like blatant racism to me that Morrocans were assigned there, while my cousin and other Ashkenazim (European Jews) enjoyed cosmopolitan life in central Israel.

I had seen Kiryat Shmona on a bus trip north of the Galilee. The apartment houses had "safe rooms"--cinder block vaults where the families could run and lock the doors behind them should terrorists invade their building.

I was awestruck by the Galilee, with its dry brown hills and plush, irrigated fields beside the sparkling blue sea. Minarets in Tiberias and Safed were whited gems along the shore. After I had returned to Tel Aviv, Ronit said it was time to go; she advised me to check out the kibbutz office on Frishman Street.

I found an opening at Ginosar, a large kibbutz north of Tiberias, set on the shore of the Galilee just steps from where Christ had lived. Busloads of Christians emptied out nearby and people were baptised. Ginosar had hundreds of families settled on it, had a diverse economy based on crops (cotton, bananas, grapefruit), fishing (harvesting tons of St. Peter's Fish from the Galilee), a dairy, an electronics assembly plant, and a tourist hotel. Its most famous resident, Yigal Allon, was a Zionist pioneer and former Prime Minister, settling there in the early 1940s. I loved the idea of being on the sea which stretched out from the safety of the shore to the looming Golan Heights. I paid the small fee for health insurance, signed a few forms, and went directly to the Eged station to catch a northbound bus for Tiberias. Soldiers stacked their rifles in the aisle as we passed through the coastal plains and the foothills east of Haifa.

The bus dropped me off on the highway, right at the kibbutz. The farm was surrounded by barbed wire and a guarded gate and, after seeing bombings in the city and taking cover in shelters during terrorist threats, I came to feel comfortable when I returned from traveling and that gate slammed down behind me.

When you first arrived at Ginosar, you were assigned to a hut on the shore of the sea, given a roommate, a work assignment, and ushered to the laundry room where you were issued work clothes, bedding, and towels. You could put your name on your clothes, if you liked the fit and wanted them returned after cleaning. But you had to write an your name on the laundry tag. The Sabra who worked the counter looked at my tag. "Gary?" she said, "What kind of name is that?" She was right. In Japan, my name, phonetically, meant "diarrhea". "Your name in Israel," the clerk said, "Will be Gabi." (She prouncounced it "gah-bee").

It was odd having friends (among Israelis and kibbutz volunteers) with names that suggested they had stepped from pages of the Old Testament. There was Solomon and Samson, and Ester and Ruth. You could pick a name that used your original initial, so I became Gabby. In this country, Gabby is a woman's name, and I constantly receive junk mail addressed to "Ms." Or, I am miscalled "Gabe", which is rankling.

In the third month of my stay on the kibbutz, I went to work after a sleepless night and buried a machete in my knee. I was in the field, chopping down banana trees. Once the fruit is harvested, you chop the tree down to a foot or less and it regrows, producing its precious fruit. The plant is like bamboo, largely a conduit for fresh water from the Galilee and, once chopped, it sends new shoots toward the sun. My knee, on the other hand, did no such thing.

The stoic kibbutz nurse tried to stem the bleeding and told me to put a bandage on it and get back to work. This is no nation for slackers and whiners. But I needed stitches, so she backtracked, handed me bus fare to an American hospital in Tiberias. That afternoon, I came home on crutches.

For several weeks I could barely walk at all. A friend returned from a day trip to Tel Aviv with an armload of classical literature. It seemed like the first time in my life that fiction made sense to me. I thrilled in Graham Green's novels and Doris Lessing's stories. I wept at Chekhov, of all things. The sentences in Hemingway's narratives of the two-hearted river wrapped themselves around me.

After I was able to walk again, the kibbutz assigned me to a seat in the electronics factory, where I pressed two red buttons simultaneously to spot-weld switches. The machine buttons were separated so as to require two hands to initiate the weld. Apparently workers fried their free hands using the previous model. It was a far cry from the banana fields and fresh air and mud fights with my fellows. But, more than anything else--more than the evening dance parties at the field-house, the sunny days bobbing in the fishing boats on that brilliant sea, or the endless dininghall arguments over world politics with my fellow volunteers--I thought of digging out another book from the collection my benefactor had brought back from Tel Aviv.

In the spring, I left on a ship bound for the Isle of Rhodes. Less than a year after that, I enrolled in the creative writing program at Santa Cruz. I kept my floppy green kibbutz hat (click picture for detail), which I wore until it deteriorated, my memories, the scar on my left knee, and my kibbutz name. It's my writer's name. It's the name on the label of my birthday suit. It's the name that fits the shape that will remain after all the stars have died.

Aside from the folks at the department of motor vehicles, the IRS, and members of my family, no one gets to call me Gary.

Fries, No Flies

The Hebrew characters spell the word Chai (sometimes pronounced "hai"). It means life or refers to the living God--depending on how it's used or defined. A variant, l'chaim, is the common toast in Hebrew, meaning "to life". My last name, Hyman, is also a variant on the word, meaning that my last name refers to life and the God that lives inside me.

My last name was changed to Hyman when my forebears arrived from Romania at the turn of the 20th Century, having been hunted and killed by mobs and their villages burned to the ground. Grandpa Max came to America when he was still young, quite without the English language and familiarity with life on these shores. Along the way, he changed our name.

Jewish boys and girls attend Hebrew language and culture training for several years leading up to the Bar/Bas Mitzvah, a ritual that signifies adulthood in the tribe. You learn common prayer, special prayers selected by the calendar that match the season in which you turn 13 years old, our cultural history, and the language used to read and recite scripture.

My family initially sent me to a school that was not affiliated with a synagogue, but a bar mitzvah mill that churned out celebrants by the dozens. We met in a converted store filled with school desks and blackboards under the direction of a taskmistress whose name I have blocked from memory to protect myself from recurring trauma. I love a story from Donald Barthelme in which he calls the teacher "Miss Mandible", and it will suffice for this recollection. My Miss Mandible walked behind the desks--not unlike the demon nuns that have been described to me from recovering Catholics--making sure we kept our Sephardic noses to the grindstone.

I had trouble making out the consonants, although the vowels were simple. They appeared beneath each letter, or to the side, and were few in shape and number. But the consonants! Some were uttered from deep in the throat and when you pronouced them correctly, it sounded as if you were trying to clear a bolus of half-chewed beef from your windpipe. Several characters looked exactly the same to me, which is why I sunk into depths of multi-generational despair when I confused them in recitation beneath Miss Mandible's gaze. When I went to the synagogue, I always chanted the notes to the prayers, mumbling the actual language, which seemed impossibly out of reach.

What I truly loved, however, were the short historical films we watched on biblical heroes from the Old Testament. I particularly had a crush on Ruth, the Moabite woman who said, "Entreat me not to leave you, or to turn back from following you; For wherever you go, I will go." In the film she was utterly delicious, impeccably tanned, lean, and graceful in her white robe and sandals. From then on, I was to search the continents and islands of my travels to find a woman who would commit to everlasting fidelity.

Bethlehem, as it was presented in the film, was a small village with neatly arranged little adobe houses tucked among smooth pathways that ran between desert rocks and plants. In the close-ups you could see Ruth's skin--like spun chocolate--and pleasant eyes. This a was a Bethlehem quite without scorpions, flies, and pestilence--whether biblical or otherwise.

One afternoon--for we went to Hebrew school after regular school let out--my friend David and I made a discovery that was to influence our religious training forever. Just up the alley that ran behind the Hebrew school was a cafe that sold french fries by the bag. These were no diminutive fry bags issued by fast-food joints. These were Number 10 shopping bags, brown as Ruth's skin, and stuffed to the top with hot, oily, heavily salted fries. They made for fine eating and quelled the imperious, full-body shame that rose to the heart from scripture dyslexia.

How many times did we sit in the alley, ignoring the fear of flunking out of Hebrew school, wolfing down those delightful, crisp, heavenly fries that surely God had delivered unto us? I cannot say, except that as my bar mitzva date grew near, my father was disturbed by my apparent inability to read or speak the most rudimentary of expressions required for the ritual. A private tutor was arranged, thereby wiping out the savings my parents might have made by sending me to the cut-rate, bar mitzvah factory run by Miss Mandible.

The venerable David Starr made house calls, teaching me how to perform the entire ceremony phonetically. Ever-more chubby, now entered into a lifelong struggle with my overeating, I mastered the Torah melodies, which I sung in my cherubic, bell-clear soprano voice just months from changing forever--and everyone was proud of me.

Years later, I visited Bethlehem on a day trip from Jerusalem. There was no sign of Ruth in the crowds of Sabras who walked among the modern apartments and rumbling buses. Her descendants wore bright miniskirts, Western jeans and baseball caps, and several carried Uzi machine guns. These were tough women, who had no notion of taking an oath to follow me wherever I went.

And the biting flies, dear God, oh the flies!