November 28, 1953 - My Bar Mitzvah

I still wear the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. SF in gold with a diamond. Some day it will go to my son. His initials are the same as mine. The diamond was one of three brought to this country by my maternal grandmother, Katie Rose Norinsky, when she emigrated from Russia to North Fork, West Virginia late in the nineteenth century. How she got there is another story, so why not tell it now? Or why not tell it again, as I'm sure I've told it before. Nu? Why not?

It all began when Tante Pesha and Misha Lazer got married in some backwater Lithuanian shtetl somewhere near Vitebsk. It was a marriage doomed from the git-go. Everybody said so, and everybody was right. Three months later Misha Lazer disappeared, took off without a clue except his absence. Pesha wailed and woed so much the family finally sent Shlomochaim, my grandfather, to track him down and bring him back. Which he did. In a whorehouse in Lublin. Truth. Somehow he managed to get him back to Pesha and the shtetl near Vitebsk. 

He was a great story teller, this Misha Lazer. He'd had adventures and loved to boast of them. Why he ever married was beyond any of us. Even Pesha. Why? One of his favorite stories was about the old rebbe who married a scrumptious young woman, years younger. Their wedding night, predictably, was a disaster, if you consider the disaster that nothing happened. And nothing happened night after night until the elder rebbe went to a modern younger one (but still a rebbe) for advice. His advice: hire a gorgeous hunk, a gentile, in particular, and have him watch while he waves a towel over you. Fireworks! So that night the elder rebbe and his scrumptious bride got to it with the gorgeous hunk watching and waving...still nothing. That towel flapped like a carwash and still nothing. Frustrated. Needing more advice, he goes back to the younger rebbe who tells him this time let the gorgeous hunk mount your wife and you stand there waving the towel. Such wisdom! That night the rebbe and his wife do as they have been advised. The gorgeous hunk mounts the scrumptious bride, and the old rebbe stands there waving a towel over them. Well, after a minute, the scrumptious bride begins to moan then moan some more then moan some more higher and higher more and more until she explodes with pleasure. The walls shake. The floorboards pop. The bed trembles. "You see, putz," says the old rebbe, as full of himself as a Passover goose, "Dot's de vay to vave a towel!"

As you may infer, Misha Lazer was not a man to sit still for long, and so it was that one day he was gone again. I'm going to make a long story short. They sent my grandfather, Shlomochaim, to bring him back. Which he did one more time, and then there was a third escape at which my grandfather drew the line. They must have entered the United States through Galveston, Texas because my grandfather found Misha Lazer in a whorehouse in Cinder Bottom, West Virginia. This time my grandfather sent for the family to come to the United States which eventually they did. Misha Lazer was fine with all this until he learned Pesha was on the next ship. Off he went, and, to this day, no one knows where because my grandfather refused to go after him.

And that's how they got to West Virginia, right there on the Kentucky border, territory of the Hatfields and the McCoys. They were tough Jews, all right. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield of that famous warring family. Those who knew her knew she lived up to her deliverer. 

Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2023

The trees are naked and vulnerable, not full and proud as they were only months ago. Summer trees make me think of British gunnery sergeants with their chests proudly puffed out. Winter trees make me think of that stone corpse writhing in agony in Pompeii, twisted limbs, trying uselessly to protect himself from the fiery ash falling from the sky. However, this, ironically, makes me think of the most beautiful thing I experienced while living in Italy. 

I had taken it into my mind that I wanted to write a screenplay. Yet, since it was the very early seventies, nobody knew much about such a thing although everybody had advice. After listening to a variety of opinions, I decided the best thing to do would be to go live some place where they didn't speak English. I spread a map of the world out on the floor and went through damn near every city in the known universe from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar before deciding on Florence. Why Florence? I had staged managed for Edward Albee just a few years prior at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, and so I knew enough Italian to ask for the men's room but not enough to entertain anything serious like, e.g,  criticism of my screenplay. Hey, it was 1972. You didn't know any more than I did. 

So - my ambition at full court press - I jumped on Icelandic Airlines, trained down from Luxembourg, got an apartment, and moved in with all my dreams intact. Once one got used to the constant aroma of horse manure, each step and every street was charming. It was as if I'd been painted into a work of art - Sunday In The Park With Stephen. I was there in the grand tradition of glorious ex-patriotism, subject to few rules but my own. 

Since I've been a gym rat all my life, I figured there had to be one in Florence, and there was, basically, right around the corner. Nothing fancy. More like a small garage. Ratty work out clothes. No cruising. Just a few guys pumping vintage iron and babbling incessantly. Point is: in order to get to the gym I had to pass by a building called the Academia. Who cares? Right? Well, folks, the Academia had one and only one inhabitant: Michelangelo's David. Nowadays people need to book tickets months maybe years in advance for the opportunity of spending maybe an hour with the David, yet I got to see him every day, casually, walking by, dodging inside, a minute or an hour, my choice, for a year. 

I became addicted to my visits with him, his warrior grace, the way he dominated the space around him. His beauty itself was lethal. I'd see that penetrating stare focus on a point in the distance, studying something crucial, the enemy, his height, his girth. I'd see the round stone in his free hand and wonder about its weight, wonder which river he got it from, wonder if he used special stones for special purposes or shaped his own, wondered which one would kill Goliath? What must he have been thinking? I'd do his monologue. "Goliath's helmet has a flaw above the brow, and, if I can penetrate that flaw, I've got him." His sling is over his shoulder. He seems calm and pensive. Is he calculating trajectory? Wind factor? Distance to target? His is not the face of an innocent.