All The Sad Young Literary Men Part 2

And lose. Though skilled in debate, he reserved too much respect for his antagonists' moral fervor, for their loud-mouthed certainty. He felt invariably like a journalist, making the precise, well-mannered objections that would set his opponent off on tirades of great pa.s.sion, and then into insults, interjections, apercus. Also, despite numerous prep sessions with Talia, Sam was a little shaky on the facts.

"What about 1948?" he said to his friend Aron, like Talia an Israeli emigre.

"There was some violence," Aron admitted, small-voiced and careful, a graduate student in his tenth year, a doubter of his own doubts. "In some of the villages there was violence, and where the Irgun was operating there were ma.s.sacres. In a few towns on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Yitzhak Rabin himself evacuated people. But the U.N. part.i.tion plan was completely ridiculous, and these people had sworn to destroy Israel.

"In any case," Aron went on, "now we are proposing to give it back. Barak offered ninety-four percent of the West Bank and three percent in other places. He offered to divide Jerusalem. They refused. They demanded a right of 'return' for four million residents-not to their future homeland, but to Israel. They began to fire Kalashnikovs and detonate grenades. Why?"

"Because they've been under military occupation for thirty years? They're angry?"

"OK, OK, I understand. Look. If we're talking about Galilee, even a bit of the Negev, I say fine, have a slice here, have one there. Arab population, Arab land, I think that's fair. But not Jerusalem. You cannot divide Jerusalem. You cannot give them the Temple Mount, you cannot give them the Western Wall of the Second Temple after the plundering and vandalism that took place under the Jordanians. Jews were not allowed to pray there until we conquered it by force of arms! So if we're talking about the territories, please, you think we want them? But if it's Jerusalem they're after, then I say we must meet force with force. If the Palestinians have embarked upon this war to see what they can get, they must emerge If the Palestinians have embarked upon this war to see what they can get, they must emerge from it knowing that they will get nothing. If they want Jerusalem, then I say fight. from it knowing that they will get nothing. If they want Jerusalem, then I say fight."

With the suggestion, not altogether subtle, not altogether m.u.f.fled, that Aron himself would fight. The same Aron who, rather than confront the student with whom he shared a library carrel for not arranging his books neatly, had requested a different carrel- this Aron would hire a taxi to the airport, board a plane, and emerge in Tel Aviv. What on earth could Sam say against that?

This was a week before he met Arielle for dinner at the Indian place in Inman Square, she having released herself from Calvary with a clean bill of health. "OK on the territories," he said when they also began to argue. "Let the Syrians place their guns on the Golan, let the Egyptians supply mortars to Gaza. But we can't give up Jerusalem."

"Not give up Jerusalem? To whom not give it up? To the people who live there? What on earth are you talking about?"

"Well, you know, the Old City. The Temple Mount."

"Al-Aqsa? Is that what you mean? You think that's just a cynical slogan, the 'al-Aqsa Intifada'? A brand name? Not as holy as our Wall is holy? You think they're not willing to die for their al-Aqsa? You better believe they are. And part of the reason for that, of course, is that they're desperate, that a brutal military occupation makes people f.u.c.king crazy."

She was furious with him, as if, here in the upstairs seating area of the Indian place in Inman, lawyers and students rus.h.i.+ng in and out with their six-dollar dinners, he had finally unmasked himself-as if, having known him so long, having even, perhaps, loved him so long, she had never suspected what a shallow, despicable creature he would at last turn out to be.

Before her eyes could adjust to this new Sam, he called out: "All right, East Jerusalem, they can have East Jerusalem! So long," he added, though not so quickly that his concession would lose its force, "as the Temple Mount remains under an international mandate. A shared zone."

"Well, obviously. Of course."

"OK." He smiled-a pained, humiliated smile, a grimace. He had never even been to Israel; all his hypothetical concessions came from him as easily as water sliding off a rock. It was the hundredth time in the past month that he had given up East Jerusalem.

Arielle tore off a chunk of naan. She looked good.

"Talia," he said as they were getting into bed at her place, shortly before the prime ministerial election, "I think Sharon is dangerous."

"Do you?" she shot back. "I also think he's dangerous, actually. Dangerous to those who would threaten the security of our people. That's right, our people. Or have you stopped being Jewish, the better to look down from above for your epic epic?"

In the darkness, Sam clenched up.

"Because, you know, this is what I expect to hear from Arabs. It's not what I expect to hear, not what I ever expected to hear from one of my own people. Because they would kill you, you understand that? They would kill you without thinking twice about it, they would dip their hands in your Jewish blood and for them it would be a great o.r.g.a.s.mic pleasure. Do you understand that?"

"A Jew can kill a Jew."

"But he won't do it because the other is a Jew! Look. Sem. We offered them the West Bank. We offered them Jerusalem. Jerusalem! They refused. Now they'll get something else from us, you understand? They'll get the fist. And they will never have Jerusalem. And they will never have Jerusalem."

She turned over on her side and squeezed herself into a tiny ball.

"Whoever said anything"-Sam grumbled as he put on his clothes-"about Jerusalem?"

He made a great deal of noise leaving her apartment, but no one tried to stop him.

Frightened, angry, vengeful, the Israelis elected Sharon. Intifada II continued, however, and for all the Marx-quoting Sam liked to do, it was nothing like a farce. He soldiered on in the libraries and coffeehouses, beating forth ceaselessly, here and there, against the tide. After receiving, in the wake of many laudatory lunches, a small advance from a publisher to work on his epic, he quit his many jobs and made even less progress than before. One morning he spent two and a half hours searching for Talia's sungla.s.ses- they had been, it turned out, in her purse.

That day, sitting in cave-like Cafe 1369, hunched with the other patrons over his notebook, all of them in the darkness like a poor-postured group of shtetl scholars, Sam gave up hope. Israel was too complicated; life was too complicated. If he had once believed he could bring his women to the bargaining table, get them to listen to reason, sign on to some kind of accord, it was increasingly clear that nothing of the sort would occur. Talia was fiery, brilliant-and from another country. She wanted to make a Jewish home, that is to say a secular Jewish home, with Sam, here in Cambridge; she wanted to make Jewish children with Sam. Whereas Arielle wanted more and wanted less: she wanted a life of excitement, witticisms, put-downs, quasi-psychoa.n.a.lytic late-night discussions, then make-up s.e.x-and no children. Children would slow her down. Meanwhile, politically-politically Talia was moving right and Arielle was moving left and, if you added it up, they were all moving toward disaster. Al-naqba. Al-naqba. Sam straightened his back and looked around. Everyone in Cafe 1369 seemed to be writing poetry and having a lovely time. Even if in fact they worked on financial reports, initial public offerings, quarterly earnings statements, they enjoyed this, and what is more they had, unlike his medium black coffee, interesting drinks. Mocha chai lattes, caramel macchiatos, espresso con pannas. In any case, before launching his Zionist epic he would have to decide what he thought of the Holocaust. Sam straightened his back and looked around. Everyone in Cafe 1369 seemed to be writing poetry and having a lovely time. Even if in fact they worked on financial reports, initial public offerings, quarterly earnings statements, they enjoyed this, and what is more they had, unlike his medium black coffee, interesting drinks. Mocha chai lattes, caramel macchiatos, espresso con pannas. In any case, before launching his Zionist epic he would have to decide what he thought of the Holocaust.

What he thought? Well, it was a bad thing, naturally. A moral and spiritual catastrophe like nothing that had ever preceded it? Yup. A window into a realm so inhuman, with certain standard automated functions-trains, vans, showers, ovens-abused so hideously as to have brought the whole project of modernity into question? Certainly. An action so monstrous that, if it cannot be called religious, is nonetheless such in the precise degree to which the hand of G.o.d was absent? You bet your a.s.s! You bet your a.s.s!

He looked around the cafe-no one was staring at him. He had not uttered anything aloud.

But beyond that? Was the awful scale of the killing, and the ethnic ident.i.ty of its victims, part of the post-Holocaust world? Should it be remembered and invoked at all times, in all places- was it really paradigmatic in some profound way? A mile and a half from where Sam now sat they had constructed, in the center of historical Boston, a memorial to the millions dead. Of all the places to remember them; of all the Bostonian history to commemorate at that spot. It made no sense unless you thought it was some kind of justification. justification. For a hack like Uris (Sam had been reading up), the events of the forties flowed together like a Sabbath meal: the Holocaust was cause, Israel effect; a mortal danger existed in the Diaspora, as evidenced by Auschwitz; and the six million Jews stood on a scale-or was it, more physically plausible, just their ashes?-on which scale's other half were weighed the fact of Israel and All That It Had to Do. For a hack like Uris (Sam had been reading up), the events of the forties flowed together like a Sabbath meal: the Holocaust was cause, Israel effect; a mortal danger existed in the Diaspora, as evidenced by Auschwitz; and the six million Jews stood on a scale-or was it, more physically plausible, just their ashes?-on which scale's other half were weighed the fact of Israel and All That It Had to Do.

"f.u.c.k that!" Sam cried, and now people looked. He gave them all a shrug and bent again over his notebook. So Sam was not with the Urisites; the Holocaust happened under unique and terrible historical conditions, no longer ours. The Polish branch of the Mitnick family had been entirely wiped out in it-in the Bialystok ghetto, in the Warsaw ghetto, at Majdanek. But a lot of things had happened since then, But a lot of things had happened since then, including several generations of Mitnicks-including, even, Sam. including several generations of Mitnicks-including, even, Sam.

He would have to formulate this, somehow, without p.i.s.sing off the ADL. While trying to sell a Zionist epic, the last thing on earth you wanted was the ADL on your back.

Refreshed by his summation of the Holocaust, Sam decided to put the rest of his life in order. He felt the need to expand. Into Jordan, Lebanon, the Sinai. This body, this Boston, could not hold all of him, could not contain the bustling, bursting energies. He had two women, he loved them both, and he could not, would not, imagine it otherwise. He was just twenty-five years old; he had strength in him, and courage. At twenty-five Israel was invaded on the Day of Atonement, on Yom Kippur, from the east by Syria, from the west by Egypt. Caught off guard, it nonetheless repulsed the invaders and had crossed the Suez when the United Nations finally intervened. It was only at thirty-four that Israel invaded Lebanon, watched gloatingly as its nasty friends the Phalangists slaughtered the Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila, and ceased forever to be a light unto the nations, though hundreds of thousands flooded the streets, Israelis the only people on the planet to protest in such number the ma.s.sacre of their enemies.

So he would set in motion processes, gradual processes, of reconciliation. Tonight he would stay with dark-eyed Talia, tomorrow he would stay at home, and then the next night he would see Arielle. He called Arielle from the cafe to tell her about this.

"Why are you calling?" she wanted to know.

"I'd like to see you."

"OK," she said, as if it were a challenge. "Come over."

"No, not now. Friday."

"You said you wanted to see me."

"That's not what I meant."

"What did did you mean?" you mean?"

And he began to do the calculations, count the permutations. Her italics! Her sarcasm! But he could not tell her what he meant. What did he mean?

"Sam," she said, clearly exasperated. "We can't go on like this. We cannot! I will not play along anymore, I will not be the other woman in this."

"You make it sound so tawdry."

"It is is tawdry. It's unbelievably tawdry and conventional." tawdry. It's unbelievably tawdry and conventional."

"No," he said. "No." And he meant it. This was serious. If she hung up-if he lost this argument-that would be it. He would lose her, here on this telephone, in the back of Cafe 1369; he would be all alone.

"Look," he began again. "What you're saying is reasonable, I see the logic, but it's just not true. true. Look at Israel. I mean, we're supposed to be with one person, right, we're supposed to sit at home and believe in our tiny little life with that person, we're supposed to just stay within our boundaries. But look at Israel-it's the only country on earth whose borders are unrecognized by international law, whose borders are always changing." Look at Israel. I mean, we're supposed to be with one person, right, we're supposed to sit at home and believe in our tiny little life with that person, we're supposed to just stay within our boundaries. But look at Israel-it's the only country on earth whose borders are unrecognized by international law, whose borders are always changing."

"A lot of good it's done them."

"But at least they feel alive!"

There was a silence on the other end. The metaphor, like a cease-fire, had collapsed more quickly than he'd hoped.

"I'm telling Talia," she said finally.

"No," he laughed. "No, no. You can't do that."

"I'm going to do it. She's a right-wing loony but she deserves to know."

"No, but, you can't do that."

"I can't?" And she began to upbraid him. While he dutifully fed coins to the extortionary Ma.s.sachusetts pay phone, Arielle read, Lomaski-like, from the great chronology of his crimes. It must have been hanging, in large block letters, somewhere near her phone. What a woman! She wanted a final settlement, and if she did not have it she would drive him into the sea. It was land for peace-he gave up his moral land, his settlements on the territories of her conscience, allowed her the last word on everything, and she, in theory, would absolve and release and not tell Talia. He could promise her this. That was the thing to do; that was what men did. They promised and promised, and when it emerged that they'd been building settlements and buying arms all the while, they made incredulous faces and promised some more. That was what men did! But Sam could not. The moment demanded large mendacious strokes-but he was a peacenik, it turned out. The Israelis had an unpleasant word for that, probably.

He picked up the thread of the list: he had failed to e-mail congratulations on her graduation; drunk, he had tried to kiss her at a party though he knew she had a serious boyfriend; they were only up to 1997! She was reducing him to rubble, and he was letting her.

"Sam," she said, serious now in a way that boded ill. "I cannot have this in my life. I can't have this uncertainty. I mean, when will it end? Where?"

"Why?" Sam asked, knowing before he did so that it was the wrong line. Helpless Sam. "Why does it have to end?"

And so it was over, again. He lay in bed for three days, tasting the residue of her voice in his throat as if, through some transference of force, he had spoken with it himself. He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write. The Zionist epic belonged in the latter category, certainly, but it was creeping, dangerously creeping, toward the former. He had already spent the advance a hundred times. And he could see the future. In the future, Arielle got married. Talia got married. Neither of them married Sam, who was left alone, with slightly less hair on top than when this story began, sitting in a small academic office, sweaty and tea-stained, galloping his mare at the New York Times. New York Times.

When Israel declared statehood in 1948, precipitating thereby the first of five regional wars, Sam's grandmother sent a telegram from Moscow to the representative office of the Yishuv in Warsaw, the capital of her former country. Just months earlier the great Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels had been murdered by the NKVD, which ran a truck over him several times to make certain he was dead. "They killed him like a dog," Khrushchev would later say. The Mikhoels murder was Stalin's preface to a ma.s.s expulsion of the country's Jews into the deep Asian provinces (for their protection) , and people were beginning to lose their jobs. Nonetheless, Sara Mitnick's telegram read: CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR INDEPENDENCE. L'SHANA HABA'A B'YERUSHALAYIM ! L'SHANA HABA'A B'YERUSHALAYIM ! Next year in Jerusalem. She would later learn that she'd been the only private citizen in the Soviet Union to wire greetings. It took her many, many years to reach Jerusalem. Next year in Jerusalem. She would later learn that she'd been the only private citizen in the Soviet Union to wire greetings. It took her many, many years to reach Jerusalem.

When Israelis elected Ehud Barak on a platform of peace in 1999, Sam had sent an e-mail from work to his cousin Witold, who lived in Jerusalem and was the brother of his other cousin, Walech, who lived in New Jersey. Despite the fact that all outgoing e-mails were monitored by his employer with the use of keyword surveillance technology, Sam wrote: DEAR WITOLD! HAIL TO THE PEACE! CONGRATULATIONS CONGRATULATIONS CONGRATULATIONS. And added: L'SHANA L'SHANA HABA'A B'YERUSHALAYIM. HABA'A B'YERUSHALAYIM.

On the day the World Trade Center was destroyed, Sam watched a lot of television. When television went into a loop, he resorted to the Internet. Another of his cousins, a well-known journalist, filed four different articles with four different journals of opinion, each of them describing his walk down a different New York street. There was an unseemly outpouring of poetry; the radio quoted a few lines about New York by the fascist poet Ezra Pound-though not ones in which he called it, as he often did, "Jew York." Talia, when she wasn't crying, could hardly be kept from gloating. "Now they'll know what it's like to live the way we live," she said. "They'll know what the Arabs are about."

Sure enough, that evening at www.JerusalemPost.com came the headline: came the headline:

(17:55) Israel evacuates emba.s.sies, Palestinians celebrate.

It is exactly a year after the breakdown of the Oslo Accords, just a little under a year after the beginning of the new Intifada. It is immediately a.s.sumed that some group with ties to the Palestinians-of blood, or politics, or sympathy-is involved. And the Palestinians go out into the streets, before the AP cameras, and cheer. Sam had to hand it to them-every time it appeared that the international community was beginning to lose patience with the interminable occupation of the West Bank, with the hopelessly stupid Israeli attempts at creating peace by waging war, with the tanks and the settlements and the prevarication, these folks went out into the streets and cheered the murder of people no less innocent than themselves. No, thought Sam, you really had to hand it to the Palestinians. In their ability to f.u.c.k up a late lead they were truly the equals of the Boston Red Sox.

Aron was on the phone. "How do you fight a country that isn't even a country?" he wondered of the Palestinians. "Maybe we should make them a country. That's what they want, right? Good, you're a country. Now we're going to bomb the s.h.i.+t out of you."

Next up was Sam's literary agent, who'd sold his epic for a modest sum. "Are you OK?" he began by asking. "Is it an OK time to call?"

"It's fine," said Sam. Already he could summon no enthusiasm for these national days of grief; if the business of America was business, it may as well be gotten on with.

"Then listen to this," his agent said, crinkling a copy of the liberal weekly New American New American in the background. " in the background. "We Americans no longer need any instructions in how it feels to be an Israeli. The murderers in the skies have taught us all too well. We are all Israelis now. We are all Israelis now! He might as well have said we are all We are all Israelis now! He might as well have said we are all Zionists Zionists now. This really ratchets up the stakes here, man. We suddenly have three hundred million more readers. Three hundred million!" now. This really ratchets up the stakes here, man. We suddenly have three hundred million more readers. Three hundred million!"

They hung up. The television trundled on. "America is changed forever," the newscasters kept saying, the experts interviewed repeating it as if that was the price, these days, for getting on TV. Sam did not want to laugh but, a little bit, he laughed. Nothing ever changes, he thought. No one ever changes. Things are destroyed and things are created: people can die, they can disappear from your life forever, so that a horrible gaseous hole seems to have been burned in the place where they once stood; and it is even possible that an epic, a Zionist epic, might be written, might be finished. But change? Change does not happen. And next year in Jerusalem, or next year in New York, will always be an infinite distance away.

This is what Sam thought.

And just then Arielle rang the doorbell. His Arielle! And with tears in her eyes, s.h.i.+ning, she hugged Sam, handsome Sam, and then Talia, lithe lovely Talia. And the three of them sat there, watching the television repeat itself-AMERICA UNDER ATTACK was the caption to the newscasts, and this caption was pierced by an eruption of bullets-their arms around one another until they grew tired, and then, sitting there, fell asleep. At some point Sam woke up and stumbled into the bedroom to sleep some more. He woke again later in the night, alone in the bed, hearing a familiar, sardonic voice on the television. "To pretend like we're surprised by this?" it said. "To pretend as if we haven't done worse? It's laughable. Three years ago we sent cruise missiles to destroy a medicine factory in the Sudan. The U.N. has been trying to investigate it, but the U.S. is intent on keeping-"

"Professor Lomaski, I'm afraid we're running out of time. Isn't it true that you once defended the murderous Khmer Rouge?"

"Are we really-"

"Thanks, Professor. That was Professor Lomaski, speaking to us from MIT, though frankly it could have been Mars for all I understood of what he said. You, Joe?"

"That's a fact, Jim. Didn't understand a word."

The TV was violently silenced. Dozing off again, Sam heard Talia and Arielle begin to argue the Zionist project, their voices rising and falling against his scattered bulk like the sirens out on Cambridge Street. Their meeting, their inevitable meeting, failed to stir him to fear. All they needed was to talk, to find common points of understanding, to rehea.r.s.e the obvious-and while they talked Sam would sleep, tired Sam, our friend Sam, Sam of the pa.s.sions, who only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace.

But he could not fall asleep.

Isaac Babel.

In the summer of 1996, after my soph.o.m.ore year of college, I found myself back in Maryland, with no money in my pocket and no job to speak of. Around early May of that year it had emerged that all my friends were going off to make connections and fetch coffee at NASA and the NASDAQ , and that I was too late. So I returned to my father's house and moped around and signed up, finally, at the student employment agency at Johns Hopkins, which sent students out on odd jobs-mostly, as it turned out, moving furniture.

I was good at this. I was a natural geometrist, calculating the angles of couches and desks and mattresses against doors, stairs, and cars. I was still lifting weights despite no longer playing football, and had enormous forearms and no neck. That summer I could bench-press 285 pounds.

My father was often away then, on business, or with his new girlfriend, or maybe, just, who knows where, and also my house was in a less-nice part of Clarksville than most of my friends' houses, and so it became the house that if anyone happened to be around, it's where they would go. Dave and Josh Quigley, my best friends from high school, came in and out, though they had jobs that summer. Amy Gould, my sort-of ex-girlfriend, would come by, and so would her friend Amanda. But above all that summer there was Ali Dehestani, a big Iranian boy who'd played offensive tackle on our high school team, and his tyrannically strict curfew, the enforcement of which was entrusted by his parents to their killer dog. If he came home past ten, said Ali, the dog would simply tear his throat out-which was odd, after all the dog must have known Ali. But we didn't ask. The point was that he was often at my house past curfew, so he was forced to stay at my house, on the couch in the living room, an infamous three-part couch that slid apart as you lay on it, so that sometimes, when I came downstairs in the morning after a night of drinking, Ali would be sleeping on the floor, the couch in a terrible state beside him.

On the other hand he would often drive me into Baltimore and drop me off, so I wouldn't have to deal with the meters and could concentrate on my work. Ali himself was working for his uncle's rug-cleaning company and apparently his uncle wasn't too particular about his hours.

That summer I relocated lawyers from Mount Vernon to Fells Point; hippies from pretty Charles Village to boring Towson; a professor's desk from the graduate poli sci department to the undergraduate poli sci department across the street. I abetted gentrification, such as it was; the invisible hand of the market, redistributing the choicest properties as they became more choice and pus.h.i.+ng those who couldn't hack it to the peripheries, was actually my hand, my two strong hands, carrying the antique armchairs of the upwardly mobile and the heavy fold-out couches of those who were falling behind. I moved a doctor couple to their new house in burgeoning-Clarksville! I moved a group of beautiful undergraduates, with long soft sleek hair, from an off-campus apartment on Calvert Street to one on St. Paul. We had some friends in common but somehow the conversation stalled; it was a hot day and I was sweating through my baseball hat and even through my weight belt, which I wore to protect my back while carrying people's stuff. At the end of such days I'd sneak into the Hopkins gym to work out and shower. Afterward I'd sit in the lobby and try to read the unread books that had piled up during the semester, as well as, more often, copies of the New American New American and and Debate. Debate. It was a nice time, though the work was hard and the money was bad, and I had no idea, really no idea, what would become of me in the years ahead. My college career had been, so far, disappointing; I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly; I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be, what particular fate I, in particular, was fated for. It was the last summer that I hung out with my high school friends, and it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way. It was a nice time, though the work was hard and the money was bad, and I had no idea, really no idea, what would become of me in the years ahead. My college career had been, so far, disappointing; I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly; I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be, what particular fate I, in particular, was fated for. It was the last summer that I hung out with my high school friends, and it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way.

Halfway through the summer the girl from the employment office called to offer me a different job. A group of high school kids in Glenwood was preparing for the August SAT and needed a tutor. I'd done well on the test itself, really very well, and tutoring paid much better than moving, and I'd be able to drive there and park. "You'd mostly just sit there while they took practice tests," the girl told me. "It's a nice gig."

I turned her down. Even then, I knew: better to carry couches, sweat through my s.h.i.+rt, be dropped off by a hungover, unshaved Ali Dehestani (who was losing his hair), better to remove the doors from their hinges and see people's squalid, empty lives-emptied out of their apartments by me-than dress in khakis and tuck in my s.h.i.+rt and hang out with a bunch of snots. Even then, I knew.

A week later I had my reward. The student employment office asked me to move Morris Binkel.

Insofar as I had a hero, Morris Binkel was my hero. Until that semester I'd been a reader exclusively of books, though I knew that some kind of action, some kind of movement, was going on in the intellectual magazines. But there were so many! Toward the end of my soph.o.m.ore year I'd begun to wander over to the periodicals section of Lamont Library to look. I made my way through the magazines blindly, knowing only their historic incarnations- Emerson and James had published in the Atlantic, Atlantic, Mark Twain in Mark Twain in Harper's, Harper's, Nabokov and Salinger and Cheever, of course, in the Nabokov and Salinger and Cheever, of course, in the New Yorker. New Yorker.

Most of these places had declined or changed-they were not for me, just then-but Morris Binkel's articles in the New American New American were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also their dupes. Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture-the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kowtowing to their elders' ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor. (None of them, I read between the furious lines of Binkel, could lift a couch in a Mount Vernon apartment and toss it in the back of a U-Haul truck.) No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame. were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also their dupes. Binkel called for a renewal of an adversary culture-the young writers of today, said Binkel, were social climbers, timid and weak; they stood around at parties in New York waiting to be noticed, waiting to be liked. He reserved his especial scorn for his own people, for young Jewish writers, who had once been the bravest and the most outrageous, and now were the most timid, the most polished, kowtowing to their elders' ideas of orthodoxy and demeanor. (None of them, I read between the furious lines of Binkel, could lift a couch in a Mount Vernon apartment and toss it in the back of a U-Haul truck.) No one spoke anymore from the heart, said Binkel, and it was a shame.

Well. Now. This This was it. Oh, it spoke to me. And it made me feel that should I ever meet Morris Binkel, he'd know right away how different I was. Every time I was faced with a decision, I had begun to think, quietly but nonetheless with some insistence, of what Binkel would say, whether he'd approve, whether he'd call me out. His byline that year said he was a visiting professor at Hopkins, and I sometimes wondered vaguely if I might run into him when I went home for the summer. Some of my professors at Harvard wrote for the was it. Oh, it spoke to me. And it made me feel that should I ever meet Morris Binkel, he'd know right away how different I was. Every time I was faced with a decision, I had begun to think, quietly but nonetheless with some insistence, of what Binkel would say, whether he'd approve, whether he'd call me out. His byline that year said he was a visiting professor at Hopkins, and I sometimes wondered vaguely if I might run into him when I went home for the summer. Some of my professors at Harvard wrote for the New American, New American, and I could probably have asked them for an introduction-but that wasn't the sort of thing I knew how to do as a young man, though I'd certainly read about it in books. and I could probably have asked them for an introduction-but that wasn't the sort of thing I knew how to do as a young man, though I'd certainly read about it in books.

So when the beefy man who met me at his apartment in Hampden Village, taller than me, with a wry smile on his face, introduced himself as Morris Binkel, I blurted, surprised at my vehemence: "I'm your biggest fan!"

"Then it's a pleasure to meet you," said Binkel, and, smiling, shook my hand.

He had a big pockmarked but lively, intelligent face, with small eyes, and he had big hands, and he wore a sport coat, like a grown-up. When he smiled I saw his small, poor teeth, but he was, any way you looked at it, an impressive figure, an imposing guy, and not the sort I'd been used to moving all summer. His apartment was filled with books. Binkel's books: I ran my eyes over them. They were all the books I'd been having trouble getting at the library, even Hilles Library, which usually had all the books-he had Foucault, Bourdieu, Gramsci; he had Jameson. I'd never seen such a thing, in someone's actual house. My parents had many, many books-the first argument I ever saw between them was over whether to take more books to America. My mother said yes, my father said no, they fought bitterly and she won. (The second big fight was about moving to Maryland; my father took that one.) They brought the complete works of Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Pushkin, Chekhov, Gorky, everyone. They even brought the world cla.s.sics in Russian translation-Balzac, Stendhal, Sir Walter Scott. These books were on shelves in the hallway, in my father's office, in my room, in the small upstairs hallway, in the bas.e.m.e.nt. But they were all in Russian, a language that I could read only very slowly. They were mostly in my way, those books.

Whereas Morris's books-not only were they in English, they weren't even originally in English. They'd been translated translated into it. Pink, green, black, red-they were beautiful books. into it. Pink, green, black, red-they were beautiful books.

Morris watched me study them. He asked me where I went to school, asked about my major, and when he learned I knew Russian, he grew excited.

"Keith?" he said.

"It's Kostya, actually. Konstantin. My parents thought it sounded too Russian."