a powerful story Ken, but I suspect you will eventually be able to edit
it down a bit, speed up some of the lines? not sure exactly where
though: maybe it is the story that counts here, & the implied context
for this teller's telling it this way...
Doug
On 26-Sep-07, at 9:35 AM, Kenneth Wolman wrote:
> A very rough cut, starting with the probably inappropriate title,
> going through the Automatic Writing that happened afterwards.
>
> MY FATHER'S BIG FAT JEWISH FUNERAL
>
> Today when I tell people the story
> they do not believe me, so I let myself suppose
> uniqueness among the pedestrian and insane,
> that my family had the gilded qualities
> found in the wholly sociopathic who used
> religion, politics, any blunt instrument at hand
> as a weapon.
>
> The fact is that my father, pace (pace, mio Dio!) his
> protestations to the contrary, was a Jewboy,
> gift of Stanton Street and Brooklyn to the world
> of women and clothes he could afford
> only if he took them off frequently.
> Jew was my mother, and Jew was I, am I yet
> despite my best efforts to change the inscape.
>
> So when my father died while on the road to ruin
> his funeral was planned not by my sock-in-the-mouth
> puppet mother but by her brother-in-law
> the Reform dentist, first and only to that time
> who'd gone to college and therefore could pronounce
> on anything. In other words, a thoroughgoing prick.
>
> And so my father's body, after its one day transport
> back from the final beddown in Camden, Maine, reposed in
> Hirsch's Funeral Home on Jerome Avenue,
> the West Bronx, where Jewish funeral legalisms
> generally (but not always) are honored. And so
> my last memory of my father is of a man in
> an open casket wearing a tallis he probably
> could not have put on unless he were recumbent,
>
> an open casked the violated with The Finger everything
> in Jewish law or at least tradition,
> laid out with everything but a Missal and Rosary beads,
> 'til the the rabbi showed up and hit the roof, someone
> in the room with some integrity to the letter since
> the spirit hadn't bothered to show up,
> and he yelled to screw down that lid or else
> he would not do my father's funeral.
>
> And that I saw, that that I still recall, eleh ezkerah:
> my father at a rest I never saw in his lifetime,
> relaxed into the arms of what he'd courted
> from the first day he knew he could court anything.
> It eluded him in the battle already ended in France,
> it fled him in the fur markets, it laughed at him in two marriages,
> it mocked him through the worthlessness of the child
> (or is that children?) he fathered, but here, here,
> he was brought to ground, enveloped in silk and wood,
> kissed goodbye when he could have cared less.
>
> KTW/9-26-07
>
> --
> ------------------
> Kenneth Wolman rainermaria.typepad.com
>
> "I agree with the Chekhov character who, when in a crisis, he is
> reminded that 'this, too, shall pass,' responds 'Nothing
> passes.'"--Philip Roth
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
When you combine two unique voices
it creates a third, phantom voice.
Emmy Lou Harris
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