THE WRITING CLASS

There were three of us in the little cafe squeezed between a dime store and a launderette in Little Italy. We had the place to ourselves; it was too late for the night-time boozers who dropped in to hose down their stomachs irritated by the excessive intake of Manhattans and too early for the mid-day pastrami-on-rye guzzlers from nearby offices. If anybody wondered why a would-be writer, born, bred, and baptized in the Dublin Liberties, was more frequently than not seen in the company of two octogenarians born, bred, and bar-mitzvahed in pre-war Warsaw, he could easily see that the reason was an ancient Persian (or was it Chinese?) game called chess. In fact, the board had already been set in front of us, and we were about to toss a coin to decide who would go first.

Shlomo Fendelman, the younger of the two, separated the black pieces from the white ones, setting them on the board like two disciplined armies. Although I was quite fond of Shlomo, there was one thing that nearly made me weep with frustration, and it was his habit of slicing off the last syllable of my name.

“Derm,” he said now, with the immutable seriousness of a person suffering from an acute case of world hurt.

“You, the Irish, and us, the Jews, have much more in common than anybody in his right mind would expect. Do you get my drift, Derm?”

“It’s Dermot, Shlomo. Dermot Sweeney.”

“Never mind, Derm. What’s a name but a cluster of glottals and sonants? How’s that for my knowledge of phonetics, ha?” He chuckled, amused by his witticism.

“If you were, at least, someone famous, like our Singer or your crazy novel writer Jones, Joyce, or whassiname. But your problem is that you are not a finisher. In fact, you’re barely a starter. You might have great ideas, but all of them are half-baked. And you know why? Because instead of pounding away at your computer, you come to this lousy cafe and play chess with two old geezers. What can you learn from us?”

Shlomo was right. I was not a finisher. I’d started a novel about the second-generation Irish in New York, then went on to more marketable topics like micro-dope-dealing and teenage prostitution in Wichita. But all I had were two sketchy chapters and a drawerful of plots that needed work. Next week, of course. In the meantime, I spent most mornings drinking coffee and playing chess with two Polish Jews nearly double my age.

“That’s how I see it, Derm,” Shlomo concluded. 

“Take a typical Jew and compare him with a typical, run-of-the-mill Irishman. Both the Irish and the Jews have more similarities than differences—religion apart. Both you and us have seen all the chutzpah there is to be seen, and we take it in our stride. But there’s one thing we can’t do without, and that's suffering. There’s nothing sweeter and more tempting to a Jew than suffering, and from what I’ve seen of you, Derm, the same goes for the Irish. We bask in our otherness, you with your Emerald Isle, and we with our Promised Land. It is this resilience that binds us together, making suffering a bittersweet but integral part of our collective identities."

“Promised to whom?” Aaron, the other old geezer, muttered. He was pretty ugly, Aaron, with bushy eyebrows and a nose stuck to his face like God’s afterthought. Usually a talkative fellow who played well-calculated, aggressive chess, this time he nibbled on a stale bagel and was strangely subdued.

“There is a need for suffering in us, and I can tell you Aleichem was right when he said, ‘If no one squeezes us, we squeeze ourselves,’” Shlomo tapped the white bishop against the table.

“Isn’t it so, Aaron?”

Aaron only snorted contemptuously into the bagel.

“What I find even more extraordinary is our ability to survive. Take any Celt or any Jew, tie his hands and feet, and, in a Houdini-like stunt, he will get free. Bury him, and shovelful after shovelful, he’ll emerge. Burn him, and from the ashes he’ll be reborn like a Phoenix.”

I winced inwardly at the words. It had been difficult at first because, due to my instinctive fear of using words such as ‘camp’ and ‘chimney’ (words I had imagined brought painful memories to Jews), our conversation had been stilted. But Shlomo had put me on the right track.

“On the contrary, Derm.”

I felt like screaming: For feck’s sake, call me Dermot, Shlomo, Dermot!

“Speaking about the camps shows you haven’t forgotten. It’s respect—for us and the dead. Keep them memories alive.”

“Coffee!” he called now to a passing waiter with eyes as big and brown as pickled olives.

From the pocket of his checked trousers, Aaron took out a coin we used to flip to decide who was to start, looked at it for an instant, and then put it back in.

“What is it, Aaron? Scared we are going to check-mate you in the third move?” Shlomo teased.

Aaron sat with his long legs crossed at the ankles.

“Maybe later, Shlomo.”

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“It’s all the talk about suffering. Nobody chooses to suffer. Your Aleichem was an old clod. “If nobody squeezes us,” and so on. It’s just a lot of schmaltz.”

“Our Aleichem, Aaron, our.”

I watched them quietly. There was something they were not telling me, something that all the similarities between the Irish and the Jews (religion apart) could not explain. Aaron was upset, and it couldn’t have only been Aleichem’s century-old maxim.

I got up.

“You’d better carry on without me,” I said.

“Put your fanny back on that chair, Derm,” Shlomo ordered while his dry hand, with coils of veins like aluminum wire under the skin, patted his friend’s knee.

I felt ill at ease. What had promised to be an entertaining, if not particularly intellectually stimulating, chess-cum-chat morning was turning into a cheap melodrama with rookie actors and an unwilling spectator.

“Your coffee,” the waiter said, balancing a tray on a boyish hip. He looked like a flamenco dancer—his movements were well-coordinated and graceful.

Shlomo threw a five-dollar bill on the table.

“Keep the change.”

“I’m sorry, Dermot."

Aaron never called me by anything but my full name.

“The weather’s getting me down.”

It was hot outside—the middle nineties, I’d say—and a dry summer breeze tumbled a whirlpool of dust and litter along the pavement.

Aaron lifted the cup, took a gingerly sip, and put it down again.

“I’m not in the best mood today,” he said, rising and extending his hand to me.

“I’d better get going. Shalom, Dermot.”

He left the cafe without a glance at Shlomo.

Fendelman slid his glasses off his nose, huffed at the lenses, and, using a corner of his shirt, polished them in long, leisurely strokes.

“What’s eating him?” I asked.

Shlomo finished the tedious ritual and inserted his specs a little crookedly back on his nose.

“Do you know the story of the dog and the sausage?” he asked.

“No.”

“What kind of writer are you, for heaven’s sake? Every child knows the story of the dog and the sausage! But never mind. It goes like this. There was this mutt chained to a tree. The chain was neither long nor short—just the right length to let the dog move around. One day, a passing beggar dropped a sausage in the yard. The dog could see it and smell it, but it couldn’t reach it. The chain was too short. It was not a clever dog; it thought yanking at the chain could get it closer to the sausage. It yanked and yanked, but neither the tree nor the sausage moved. It yanked so hard that his collarbone hurt, but still, it got him nowhere. It would have yanked his stupid head off if the same beggar hadn’t happened to pass again. He saw the sausage, picked it up, and ate it.”

In the kitchen, a tarantella was racing to a crescendo. With the corner of my eye, I saw the waiter tap his fingers on the counter as if it were a tambourine.

“Aaron was in Auschwitz, you know,” Shlomo said.

I did know. I had seen the faded blue number on his forearm.

"So what’s new?” I asked.

“Nothing. Just shut your gob and listen.”

The tarantella was over, and the waiter, clearly bored with the early-morning lull, was directing a Puccini overture with sugar tongs.

“In the camp, Aaron worked in a cobbler’s workshop. He’d been a cobbler before the war, and the camp needed trained professionals. His wife, Lena, had been a housewife. They did not need housewives in Auschwitz.”

He didn’t need to explain further.

“Aaron wanted to live, but don’t we all? And one way of making sure he survived was to work for the Reich. He worked hard, Aaron did, because he was a good cobbler. Until one day, he saw a shoe. He’d seen hundreds of shoes before—sandals, high heels, work boots, and galoshes. But this shoe was different—a red shoe with a big brass buckle. The sole was a bit thin; the person who’d worn it tended to put her weight on the heels. There was nothing special about the shoe, apart from one thing. It was Lena’s shoe. He’d mended it himself. And suddenly, Aaron did not want to live any longer. He felt he had no right to live. But people in the camp were told exactly when to die. Death was everywhere, of course, but it was like the sausage in my story—it dangled temptingly in front of their eyes, but they couldn’t reach it. In a way, it would have been easier to die. But they had no right to choose. Aaron was still useful, you see. He was ordered to live.”

Shlomo stared somewhere above my head at the broiling street. Sunshine poured in through the windows and, reflecting from the slightly convex glass, wove a dozen rainbows on the floor.

“But tell me, Shlomo, what does it have to do with now? It happened more than sixty years ago.”

“That’s exactly what I mean by the chutzpah of fate, you see,” he swallowed, making his Adam’s apple bob up and down like a walnut in a turkey’s neck.

“It’s the damn Sears,” he said.

“Sears?”

“After the war, Aaron remarried. Yesterday, he went to buy a present for Hannah, his granddaughter. She fancied one of them ‘hip’ shoes with platforms like the ones that actors used to wear in Greek tragedies. Fashions come and go, you know. And quite by chance, in the shop window, he saw a shoe—a replica of Lena’s red leather shoe. There it was—bang in the middle of New York.”

He dipped his parched lips into the cold coffee.

“What a shemozle, Derm,” he sighed.

For once, I didn’t feel like correcting him. Just this once, it didn’t matter. I thought I had seen and heard it all. Writers, especially unpublished ones, are vain creatures. There’s a potential Joyce or Singer in each of us, and a ‘Ulises’ or a ‘Shosha’ in the drawer full of ideas. But I realized now that there was still much to hear and see and that it was probably my conviction of omniscience that made my writing dry and flavorless and pushed me into the category of ‘unfinishers,’ as Shlomo would put it.

I was not fond of using worn-out, warmed-up clichés like ‘there’s more in heaven...’ and so on. But at that moment, looking at Shlomo’s ostrich head and listening to Madama Butterfly on the radio, I felt exactly like that. My road as a writer was just beginning, and there was a lot to learn. From two octogenarians born and bar-mitzvahed in pre-war Warsaw. From a red leather shoe with a brass buckle.