The
Lower Case Jew by Roger Kamenetz || Author's Links |
The Lower Case Jew --T.S. Eliot appears before the rabbinical court in Jewish heaven. The Prosecutor: T.S., I got to tell you the emes --Bleistein here, pardon the cigar-- remember me, palms turned out Chicago Semite Viennese? Like I'm some kind of ape? You didn't like my baggy pants- now I'm here to take your measure- To prosecute is drek, but I got assigned. You think God don't have a sense of humor? It's punishment for you, but also me. I have to read these stinking lines you wrote about the Jews. Exhibit A: The jew squats on the windowsill, the owner Spawned in some estaminet in Antwerp- Squats, what's the matter? Did you owe your landlord rent? And spawned-- like shrimp in a tank- or in some dank cabaret after hours two Jew toads humping on a table? And what about that lower case j ? You must have hated us to break the rules of grammar, most bank clerkly of Englishmen.. Still I got to admire your style, the classy way you built those lines. The sounds kick back and forth: "jew" and "spawned," "owner" and "Antwerp," "squats"! You've got a delicate ear. The w sounds kiss word to word before they stick in the craw. But the lower case "jew" that spawned them all, that I don't forgive. You were a poet, T.S. you shoulda known better, a guardian of the tongue. That lower case j was a country club sign: No dogs or Jews allowed-- to keep us out of the poem or make us stoop to enter: Now here comes Exhibit B: Rachel née Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws; Me I'm an ape, okay. Look what you did to poor Rachel. A raccoon you made her- that gorgeous girl with the dark eyes-- she's dead now fifty years... I remember you liked to watch her and the one in the Spanish cape. You peeked in through the barroom door in your bank clerk suit buttoned up tight clutching your umbrella handle. Premature dirty old man, did you dream Rabinovitch, a rabbi's daughter, would softly claw your grapes? If only you weren't so scared. If only you had known her. What a world of wonder she hid. You were drawn by what was under, and you were afraid too-- undersea, under skirts, the secret under-name, for the secret underneath where you thought you might drown: I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Pardon the dime store Freud from a Chicago Viennese, but about yourself you didn't feel so good so you took it out on me and Rachel and Sir Ferdinand Klein. Was he the only phoney-- you fake English from Saint Louie, Missouri? Because you were ashamed that you liked to sniff around dirty bars, back alleys, looking for rolled up condoms on the ground testimony of summer nights. Hey, everyone's got a hobby. Sweet and dirty, high and low, Shakespeare and Dante in your ear slime in your eye, a stink in your nose. You liked to mix it up. London and Jerusalem, you called them unreal cities. Maybe what made those cities unreal was you never saw the people in them, just toads, raccoons, apes- and rats. For rats you had a special feel. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank rats feet over broken glass, And here's Exhibit C: On the Rialto once, The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot. And that time in Venice a Jew got between you and a painting what did you see when you looked in his face? A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto, Protrusive eye? Protozoic slime? Canaletto? You should plant your head like a potato and grow your eyes under ground! Instead of rats, you could have had rachmonis, the love a mother feels in her belly, rachmonis, rachmonis- you could have felt for people like what you felt for rats. I rest my case. Defense: Sir Ferdinand, here for the defense. What Bleistein's done is most unfair. Excerpts, scraps, bits and pieces, not the whole art, not the song... Let's admit there's much that's ugly in the fragments he's presented. The world is also quite imperfect. Do we then condemn creators? Besides, what harm's done in the end? They're only words in a poem, and poetry makes nothing happen: a few bad moments for a Jew in English class; black people too and women have to take far worse. If we must comb each crumb of hate from every line of verse there would be little left to read. Without aversion there is no passion. Without abomination there is no law. Surely that's clear to a Jew. Judge, addressing Eliot: I wonder, do you think that so? Does language do no harm? Does music have no power? When Hitler wrote his crude poems on the walls of the heart, like you he made a metaphor. Jews were pests- and Zyklon B a pesticide. To bad men, bad poetry gives marching orders. Eliot: But what, as Bleistein said, rach... rach... Mercy, he meant. Surely you can't blame me for what the Nazis did? I wrote those lines before the war. It was a different time. My copyright expires soon, punishment enough. I'll be in public domain. Judge: to Eliot All the worse. You never once apologized, retracted, or removed those lines. You published them up to the end. Eliot: But I won a Nobel Prize. Surely-- Judge: -there are plenty of them in hell. Come, stand before the golden scale holding your book-Gerontion Sweeney Among the Nightingales and Bleistein with Cigar. Here in the light, one particle of hate weighs more than a lifetime of poems. Your defense is your indictment. Your judgment, your readership. You will be loved most passionately by those who cannot see themselves: phonies, snobs, deluded social climbers, pseudo-English fake professors in bow ties and tweed, anachronisms, wine snobs, false Christians who preach but cannot feel the pain of others: hypocrite readers, your sisters, your brothers. Now in the name... Bleistein: (interrupting) Excuse me your honor- we Jews have a sign when we want to speak- we interrupt. Judge: What is your objection? Bleistein: Condemned to his readers? That's too soft by half. What punishment is that? They'll love him to death. They'll excuse him in public and in private they'll laugh. Judge: What more do you suggest? Bleistein: If it please the court- purgatory. Judge: That's fine, but it's Catholic for Catholics and Jewish for Jews... he's neither. Bleistein: I propose you send him to Hyam Plutzick's grandson's bar mitzvah. For the Jews it will seem an afternoon. For him, a hundred years: He'll hora with Rachel née Rabinovitch and kazatzki with Allen Ginsberg who will give him wet sloppy kisses (it's okay, he's a little meshuganeh..) while his landlord, from that Antwerp night club leads the klezmer orchestra. Put him at table 16 with that comedian Myron Cohen. He'll torture him with jokes. A million setups in English, a million punch lines in Yiddish. Then when he's hungry--- for that delicate English palate, matzo ball soup with shmalz on top, gallon after gallon and a thousand miles of dishes shaking glaucous jelly each with a shtikel gefilte fish stamped with a capital J. Eliot (groaning): O, I am bound to a bagel of fire... Judge: Silence. As the accused seems unrepentant, we'll take Bleistein's suggestion to heart. (Turning to Eliot:) And now in the name of the letter J which every eye can see- J that stands for Jehovah Jesus but also for Jew that little j you left behind now stands for justice- too. Bleistein: (aside) Poets-- you should be careful the words you choose. Remember, there are no lower case Jews. |
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