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give Landsman the Bessarabian fish-eye. He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.
The handle was carved with a Sears hunting knife from a forty-ounce baseball bat. Interlocking black ravens and red sea monsters writhe along the shaft, grinning big-toothed grins. Their pigmentation used up fourteen Flair pens.
A Tlingit Mnemer (is that how you spell Thor’s hammer?)
The other yids echo the greeting, a bit unsure. Then they turn away and resume their back-and-forth over a fine point of pot koshering or VIN erasure.
So much of the narrative includes discombobulated bits like this - in this case, the ultra religious arguing about minutiae of the order vs. the banal but very serious criminality of these gangs
The Verbovers, with their Talmudic grasp of systems, their deep pockets, and the impenetrable face they present to the outer world have broken or rigged many mechanisms of control. But to have figured a way to gaff the entire INS like a Coke machine with a dollar on a string? “Nobody has that much weight,” Landsman says. “Not even the Verbover rebbe.”
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The air seems to shatter like a world of tiny windows with a tinkling sound. And Landsman feels something that makes him want to put a hand to the back of his neck. He is a dealer in entropy and a disbeliever by trade and inclination. To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery.
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Landsman has the feeling that something comes fluttering among them. Dipping down over the crowd of men, brushing them with its wing. Maybe it’s just the knowledge, leaping from man to man, of why these two homicide detectives must have come at this hour. Or maybe it’s the old power to conjure of a name in which their fondest hope once resided. Or maybe Landsman just needs a good night’s sleep in a hotel with no dead Jews in it.
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Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another. You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from
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He puts the papiros back into his mouth and looks at himself in the scratched rectangle of polished steel that’s mounted above the sink. What he sees there affords him no surprises or unknown depths.
They were twisted like a pair of chromosomes, of course they were, but where Landsman saw in that twisting together only a tangle, a chance snarling of lines, Bina saw the hand of the Maker of Knots. And for her faith, Landsman repaid her with his faith in Nothing itself.
Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve. Now the pious of the Sitka District have pinpointed the site of their collective unworthiness and gathered in the rain to lay it in the ground.
as Landsman understands it, the wings of an airplane are engaged in a constant battle with the air that envelops them, denting and baffling and warping it, bending and staving it off. Fighting it the way a salmon fights against the current of the river in which it’s going to die. Like a salmon—that aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home—Naomi used up her strength and energy in struggle.
It’s the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far off boyhood, say, or a motorcycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.
fata morgana
Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It’s the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque. The memory of that summer, for example, or the thought that he has long since exhausted the patience of a kid who once would have waited a thousand years to spend an hour with him shooting cans off a fence with an air rifle. The sight of the Longhouse breaks some small, as yet unbroken facet of Landsman’s heart. All of the things they made, during their minute in this corner of the map, dissolved in
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“And since when do you listen to doctors or Indians?” “Since never,” Landsman admits. “Self-medication is a Landsman tradition.” “So is being a Jew,” Landsman says. “Look where that’s got us.” “Strange times to be a Jew,” the old man agrees.
He turns from the bar and presents Landsman with a highball glass fitted with a lemon-slice yarmulke. Then he pours himself a generous shot of slivovitz and raises it to Landsman with an expression of humorous cruelty that Landsman knows well and in which he long since ceased to see any humor.
The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light.
Ok for all the clever phrases in this story, THAT is just a nonsense sentence.
Litvak opens the notepad to its first fresh page. Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself
Frum had served under Litvak at Matanzas and in the bloody debacle of Santiago. He was both faithful and without a shred of faith, a combination of traits prized by Litvak, who found himself obliged to contend on every side with the sometimes voluntary treachery of believers.
Dr. Roboy, in Litvak’s measured view, had a vice common to believers: He was all strategy and no tactics.
A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.
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Litvak knew that charisma was a real if indefinable quality, a chemical fire that certain half-fortunate men gave off. Like any fire or talent, it was amoral, unconnected to goodness or wickedness, power or usefulness or strength.
