Preserve This Child
by
Robin Hirsch
"Martha wants to know what to wear."
"I don't know. Whatever you wear to a conventional bloodletting."
I am not uncivilized. My wife is a clinical psychologist. Our son was barely a week old. And here we were, new and excited parents, about to submit our beautiful, tender, sweet hearted boy, whose journey into the world had been hard enough, to the sharp and terrifying instruments of a certified Mohel.
A Mohel, in the Jewish religion, is a ritual circumciser. Traditionally, on the eighth day after the birth of a male child, after sunrise and before sundown, in a ceremony that goes back to Abraham, the boy's foreskin is cut off.
"This is the twentieth century," my mother-in-law protested. "They can do it in the hospital. It's barbaric. Why are you doing this?"
Why were we doing this? Neither of us is an observant Jew. We fast on Yom Kippur, we attend the occasional Seder, even more infrequently we hold one, but we don't keep kosher, we rarely worship, and we belong at the moment to no shul, mostly because two years ago we had the chutzpah–or perhaps the courage–to buy a crumbling, derelict brownstone in an iffy section of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and we have yet to find one here which answers to our peculiar, secular, vague, uneasy needs. And yet, one of the few things we had decided before the birth was that if we had a boy, we would have a bris--a ritual circumcision. Now, as the hour approached, a flood of feelings, questions, memories, apprehensions overtook me.
Had I had a bris? I didn't know. Certainly, I had been circumcised, but had there been a ceremony? My father is dead, my mother is elderly and no longer remembers.
I was born in London during the war. My parents were refugees from Germany. How anxious, I wonder, would they have been for so conspicuously foreign an occasion. The family doctor was German Jewish. Perhaps he had done it. On the other hand, given how conspicuously foreign my parents seemed to me growing up, and given also my father's bullheadedness, perhaps I had doch, as they would have infuriatingly put it, had a bris. And did I not have a godfather, that spectral figure on my childhood's horizon, and is not a godfather in childhood legend the one who holds your penis during the act?
If there had been a bris who would have been there? Certainly, no immediate family beyond my parents. All my grandparents were dead--both my grandfathers had died in Berlin, mercifully, long before Hitler; both my grandmothers had lived to die in concentration camps. My mother had a sister--but she had escaped with her two children to South America. My father had a brother--but he had fled with his wife to Amsterdam, where of course the Nazis followed; by the time I was born they had been moved into the Jewish quarter. One widowed cousin of my father's had also ended up in London. Perhaps she would have come. The rest of what had been two large, vibrant families were either dead, about to die, or scattered across the earth.
Bris or no bris, I think of my parents choosing to have children in a foreign country, in middle age, during the Blitz, and I think of it as a decision of extraordinary, almost palpable, courage. In the face of the destruction of their families it seems such a life-affirming act that if I dwell on it, I weep. But I weep also for another, more complicated, reason. For the inevitable failure. For parents old enough to be grandparents, for the enormous emotional and psychological gulf that separated them from us, for the hated foreign language which they were too old to shed, for the rigid nineteenth-century German precepts by which they sought to bring us up in postwar England.
And yet here am I, more than forty years later, and some of the contours of my life have a familiar shape. I live in a foreign country. What remains of my family is scattered. My mother, my sister, and my sister's two daughters live in London. My mother's sister, whom I met once in my life--twenty-three years ago at my sister's wedding--is dead. Her two children, my only cousins, survive. One, Ellinor, lives in Beer Sheva--we have seen each other half a dozen times over the years, each time in a different country. The other, Gert, lives in Buenos Aires. We have never met.
My father's brother lives in Amsterdam, childless at the age of eighty-six, having survived hiding, betrayal, Auschwitz, and the death, eighteen years ago, of his beloved wife after a series of strokes, the delayed and deadly aftereffects of her own imprisonment, starvation, and torture.
So, in terms of immediate family, there are eight of us in five different countries. Scattered about the globe, all these years later, we are shards from the explosion and there is very little holding us together.
And here am I in New York, six months older than my father was when I was born, and here, miraculously, is Alexander. And now, suddenly, however briefly, we are nine. And complicated, turmoil-ridden, tenuous though my family history has been, it is still, willy-nilly, a Jewish history and there is still a tattered fabric to sew him into.
And so I look for a Mohel. And in the process some of the loftier thoughts evaporate. And certain inescapable realities begin to present themselves.
How, for example, do you audition a Mohel? We had avoided finding out the sex of our prospective child so that when Alexander emerged, tiny, misshapen, and covered in blood, we weren't exactly ready to roll. On day two, bleary-eyed, exhausted, I called around, soliciting names. By day three, I had four possibilities. But day three was Friday and from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, these guys go into seclusion. So I had to move fast. I connected with two of them and the wife of a third.
Mohel Number 1--this was beginning to feel more and more like a TV show--lived in New Jersey, had trained in Israel, and was also a cantor. I had in fact seen him in action--an acquaintance whose son had been circumcised had the entire thing on video. He sang nicely, the baby didn't seem to cry unduly, the whole thing was over quickly, and the cameraperson had had the taste to fade out during the central act. But maybe the Mohel was just a little young . . .
Mohel Number 2 was an old timer, the most orthodox, and probably the most experienced. What was my Hebrew name? That was easy--David. And after whom is the child named? Well, his middle name, Max, was my grandfather's name and my father's middle name.
"And your father's Hebrew name was . . . ?"
I didn't know.
"Well, Max would have been either Moshe or Meir."
"O.K."
"And your wife's Hebrew name?"
"Darling, what is your Hebrew name?"
"Darling, I don't have a Hebrew name."
"I'm afraid she doesn't have a Hebrew name."
"She doesn't have a Hebrew name--is she Jewish?"
"Of course she's Jewish."
"Well, thank Goodness for that."
The wife of Mohel Number 3 was a businesswoman. "Mazeltov. The bris will be next Wednesday. Between sunrise and sundown. End of the day is no good, he is booked. Telephone--home and hospital." Two hours later the Rabbi--he is also a Rabbi--calls us at the hospital. I explain that I am as interested in the social and historical context of the ceremony as I am in the religious, that my son is the offspring of two families which have both suffered losses in the Holocaust, but that as far as orthodox religion goes, there isn't too much of that. I am being tactful--my wife's family is highly acculturated, in most quarters anti-religious, and in some quarters hysterically so.
Mohel Number 4 didn't get back to me until Saturday night, by which time I had pretty much made up my mind. And the winner is . . . Mohel Number 3 had done the deed on the son of a friend of a friend. The grandfather, a surgeon, was impressed with his work. He had been recommended by a distinguished liberal rabbi. Also, Mohel Number 3 was the fifth generation of Mohel in his family, he had written a scholarly book on circumcision, which he promised to send me, and above all, he had a voice which sounded real on the phone.
Reading the Mohel's book the night before, I learned a number of things. For example, that the ritual of circumcision, according to the Talmud, is one that the Jewish people have always observed with ecstatic joy--this was clearly one for my mother-in-law; that the removed foreskin was customarily buried in the desert--what would he do, bury it in our garden? and that, contrary to my childhood legend, it is not the godfather who holds the boy's penis during the bris, or even the boy, it is traditionally one of the grandfathers, and this--the office of Sandak--is a signal honor. When Leona's father arrives I will ask him to be the Sandak.
The ceremony was set for 1:30. I had called what little family there is, some friends, bought smoked salmon, champagne, one bottle of kosher wine, 30 3" gauze pads, Neosporin ointment, rubbing alcohol, flowers, candles. Behind closed doors, on a quiet city street, in the middle of an ordinary Wednesday, normal-looking men and women and even the occasional child would assemble and a man with, as the jacket of his book told me, one of the most comprehensive collections of circumcision instruments in the world, would, after a few Hebrew words, cut off my son's foreskin in our living-room. Why were we doing this?
"Why are you doing this?"
It's half an hour before the ceremony and the question comes from Ingrid, a writer, a Jew, who lives most of the time on an island off the coast of Maine. There is no challenge, no criticism, it is a simple open question. But I don't have a simple answer.
"I don't know exactly," I say, "It's a mystery. It has something to do with family, something to do with community. Somehow I felt it was important."
"Are you nervous?"
"Of course, I'm nervous."
When Alexander was born--at the moment he was born, after six hours of transitional labor and two and a half hours of pushing--I looked round the delivery room, into which Leona had been wheeled two hours earlier. When we had come in, it had been spotless, sterile, gleaming. This was, after all, LICH–the Long Island College Hospital, in the very respectable neighborhood of Cobble Hill, where, during the day, Leona worked as a consulting psychologist in the Pediatric Department. Now, with Alexander's painful arrival, it was covered in blood, instruments, rags. But mostly blood. Blood was everywhere--on the walls, on trolleys, on equipment, on the gowns of the doctor and nurse, on the bed, ankle-deep, it seemed, on the floor. In a petri dish, swimming in blood, lay the placenta. It was as though a terrorist had thrown a bomb. And in the midst of the wreckage, his head in a bandage, I held my new-born son and murmured, over and over again, as much for me as for him, "Everything's going to be alright. Everything's going to be alright."
Amazingly, almost everyone I called is here. We are maybe two dozen. I look around--writers, psychoanalysts, filmmakers, rock musicians, lawyers, business people, television producers--not exactly a crowd Abraham might have anticipated, not exactly a family. And yet doch a family -- a lateral family, a chosen family, the only kind of extended family a decimated family can have. And, mirabile dictu, there is even real family. In addition to Leona's relatives, there is one distant cousin of my father's, Herta, whom I discovered living in New York a dozen years ago. From Berlin in 1939, she had escaped to Shanghai. And from Shanghai after the war she had come to America. And here she is with her husband, Lacy, a Hungarian Jew who had spent the same ten-year-period in the Jewish quarter of Shanghai but whom she had not met until New York, and here they both are with their American daughter and their son-in-law and their two-year-old granddaughter, Kayla, the youngest of all present.
The Mohel arrives. We go upstairs. I have set out candles, the wine, the gauze, the alcohol, the ointment, on a table, and a chair for the Sandak. The Mohel takes off his jacket and puts on a white coat. He lays out his instruments. We discuss the matter of Alexander's Hebrew name. Alexander, it turns out--the Great, not the Little--was a benefactor and protector of the Jews and his name is thus acceptable as a Jewish name. Max we have decided will be Moshe. And, as a Jewish boy is named also after his father, he will in addition be ben (the son of) David.
Leona holds him, kisses him. I kiss him. She retreats with him to the landing. I stand with his godfather, his grandfather, and the Mohel, four Jewish males awaiting with varying degrees of anxiety the arrival of a fifth. His godmother brings in Alexander and presents him to his godfather. His godfather presents him to his grandfather, who sits in the chair opposite the Mohel. And the Mohel says, "Boruchhaba, Blessed be he who has come." And Alexander is placed on the table. I read from a poem written by an Irish friend who cannot be here. In the best Irish tradition it begins, "Shalom--Alexander Max . . . " and it continues,
Journey well, Alexander Max
And make with us this loose pact --
You will laugh a lot,
And always ask -- why.
The Mohel introduces himself, jokes about his instruments, places the ceremony in a brief historical context, recites the traditional blessings, and asks me for permission to carry out the act. I read from a prayer by Rabbi Chaim Yosef Dovid Azulai:
I am prepared to fulfill the divine commandment of Ritual Circumcision. Presently, my son will be brought into the Covenant of Abraham as it is written in the Torah: "At eight days shall every male be circumcised unto you for your generations . . . It shall be a token of the covenant between Me and you."
I appoint the Mohel, here present, to act in my behalf and perform this Ritual. I pray to God that our son will be a pride to his mother and myself, that we may raise him to be learned and righteous and that we may share with him in the fulfillment of his life.
And the Mohel begins. My father-in-law holds down his grandson, gazing intently as the Mohel clips back the foreskin and cuts. And cuts. And Alexander cries. And I stand beside his grandfather and I squint my eyes and reel back so his grandfather's head comes between me and my son. And I hear the sound of cutting. And I hear the sound of crying. And after an age the Mohel looks up and presents the bloody stump for my inspection. And he says, "A nice Jewish boy." And I smile wanly. And he soaks a piece of gauze in Schapiro's Naturally Sweet Concord Grape Wine from Rivington Street and Alexander bites on it like a sailor in the British Navy and he stops crying. And the Mohel recites the blessing, "Elohenuvelohayavosenu . . . Our God and God of our fathers, preserve this child for his father and mother, and may his name be called in Israel: Alexander Moshe ben David."
And the Mohel bandages the tiny wounded penis. And when he is done he produces a miniature red, white, and blue knitted yarmulke with the legend "I [ideogram of heart] NY" crocheted around the edge and he places it on Alexander's head and he holds him up and people laugh and there is applause.
And Alexander is returned to his mother.
And the Rabbi and I settle up.
And down in the kitchen Leona's mother, who has stoically resisted the temptation to come up, knows that the barbaric ritual has come to an end.
And Lacy, my father's distant cousin's husband, who finds himself here in Brooklyn via Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Shanghai, and the Upper West Side, breaks the challah and says the blessings over the bread and the wine.
And we open the champagne and we dig into the bagels and cream cheese and salmon and slowly the terror and the mystery recede and we are once again in a pleasant light-filled house in a no longer crumbling brownstone on Garfield Place in the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City, and the year is 1988 if you count from the birth of Jesus, or 5748 if you count, as the Jewish calendar counts, from the Creation. And no-one cries. And there is only the faintest memory of blood.
No comments:
Post a Comment