Bar Mitzvah Boy Blues

By DAVID MOGOLOV

Living in the Past
By Philip Schultz
89 pages. Harcourt.

Memoir is rarely so carefully plainspoken as the poems in Philip Schultz’s Living in the Past. In brief but sharply-detailed half-remembrances, Schultz tells of a willfully forgotten year in the life of a Jewish boy in a 1950s Rochester immigrant neighborhood called Cuba Place. He also proves that the confusion and contradictions of adolescence are far better conveyed in verse than in prose. Public embarrassments, familial shame, naïve excitement, and tortured hope hide between plainly stated fact and ingenious metaphor. Schultz restores to adolescent conflicts the significance and terror that sound silly when spelled out in memoir.

The 81 numbered poems themselves are engrossing both as stand-alone verses and as a collection. As portraits of moments, the poems themselves are complete. For example, read poem 15, in which the narrator accompanies his father, a snack-food vendor, to work on a typical Saturday. He follows “Father through factories, pool halls,/ tool & die shops, lathes echoing off cinder block as we lug/ dollies piled high with syrup, ice cream in hissing dry ice” through the day “until we get home in the dark, stinking/ of chocolate, coffee grounds, powdered sugar, soured mayonnaise, his hands red and swollen from slapping a million backs.” Throughout the day, his father plays the bigshot and everyone smiles at his approach. A breathless excitement runs the 15 lines of workaday minutia into a single unbroken sentence, an excitement no adult would ever feel for the lugging of snacks through factories, but which calls fully the thrill of a child at witnessing the command that a parent seems to have over the wider world.

But the real thrill of this collection isn’t in the individual verses—it’s the way that each informs the reader of the details missing from the others. They complete one another. Father, we know from poems throughout the book, is not a powerful man. He’s a dreamer and a business failure—the only income he ever brought in was from insurance fraud, and he “then bought an old Ford with the insurance/ and painted it yellow and called it The First Yellow Cab Co. of America/ after The First Church of Christ in the middle of Main Street.” The cab, a scheme his father was certain enough of that he unflinchingly crippled himself to get the insurance money, was no better than his other gambles. His father died in debt, minus a thumb.

Each of the narrator’s family members is suffering in a different solitude, but collectively their suffering is all of the same species. This is apparent when juxtaposed to the anguish of an equal influence on the boy in the year leading to his bar mitzvah: that of his piano teacher, Mr. Schwartzman, who “survived the Nazis but not Cuba Place.” Schwartzman speaks of Auschwitz, faith, Torah, Spinoza, and Martin Buber, but not of the piano. In exchange for lessons, the narrator translates Yiddish to English, to write unsent letters to his teacher’s children, all of whom died in the Holocaust. Schwartzman, along with the other displaced persons of Cuba Place, suffers an existence beyond the comprehension of the Schultzes and the Bernsteins and the Kriegers who consider themselves to be the permanent neighborhood, the one that isn’t the temporary one composed of transient Ukraines, Poles, and Russians. After the teacher’s suicide, the narrator finds “in Mr. Schwartzman’s German Bible” a poem in Yiddish, ominously titled “Gog and Magog”, which begins: “Is it better to suffer in the house of mourning or in the house of feasting?” The DPs of Cuba Place, it is clear, have brought the house of mourning into the house of feasting. But what the narrator alone seems to realize is that everybody is suffering here.

When the narrative jumps, in the last of four parts, 30 or 40 years to the narrator’s adulthood, that suffering has not abated because he spends so much of his time trying to make peace with the dead of Cuba Place. The turmoil of his childhood has also led to his spending decades in hesitation, “afraid of the next page.” He wonders “Did I begin my new life too late?”  He struggles with the balance between what he refers to as foreground and background of his family’s story. “According to the guidelines, the foreground provides/ perspective while the background is where we bury/ our illusions.” Because of his family’s ignorance of their background, he writes:

No one understood what we intended to mean. We simply
Stopped, the silence spilled over us like a sigh, the light
Faded, discord ended, the curtains closed and we were left
sitting at the table, in darkness, our mouths agape....

But his suffering is now balanced against a joy he feels for his family. After disappointing his five-year-old son (and himself), he carries him to bed: “But I am dizzy, as if from turning in the jungle night,/ my chest punctured and surging with the kind of/ remorse only great happiness brings.” One of the fruits of his childhood is a remembrance of the love that his father, who, when not obsessed with his own appearance and success, showered on him, which he in turn can share with his own children.

Discussion Question

In the last quarter of Living in the Past, Philip Schultz's narrator adopts the viewpoint, in some respects, of a Displaced Person. Is this feeling of displacement a particularly Jewish sentiment? >>