(Continued from the March issue. In the first part of this tale, I recounted some of my experiences on a summer 1988 group tour the Soviet Union, and the experience of one member of the group, Ari, a 14-year-old from the U.S. of Jewish descent, at Babii Yar, site of a mass grave for 200,000 Kievites — roughly one-quarter of them Jewish — slaughtered by the Nazis during their two-year occupation of the city. )
Later that day, a small group of us left the tour to stroll around Kiev. Among us were Jerry and his daughter Dina (a young potter from Boulder), both of whom had so far struck me as politically naive but otherwise decent, sensitive people; Will, a sweet, shy therapist from southern California; Viktor, a Soviet journalist, who was serving as our guide; Ari; and myself.
We were having a terrific time, but Viktor was being so much the host that it was becoming embarrassing. He wouldn’t let us pay for anything ourselves; records, scarves, knicknacks — we no sooner eyed something than he’d bought it and pressed it on us. Was he on some kind of expense account? We didn’t know, felt it would be rude to ask, but Ari and I were feeling uncomfortable, so we agreed to put an end to it as soon as we could, as tactfully as possible.
At one point, we stopped for espresso in a crowded little coffee shop lodged in a passageway underneath the main plaza. Viktor commandeered tables for us, then blustered his way to the front of the line to get us food and drink. When he finally returned, he distributed the refreshments, then sat down and began talking to Jerry and Will.
Ari, remembering our decision, half-rose from his seat, reaching for his wallet, and called over to Viktor, “How much was the coffee and ice cream?” Before Viktor could reply, Jerry grinned at Ari, gave him a knowing wink, and called back, “Always thinking about money — just like a Jew,” rubbing the fingers of his right hand together all the while.
His daughter paid no attention. I could not believe my ears. Our Soviet guide, a Muscovite, was astonished: “Do you say this in your country? Here we think it is an insult!” Our other companion, Will, said quietly, “It’s an insult in America too.”
Ari had turned away suddenly, as if he’d been slapped. I was still unable to believe I’d heard this. I put my hand on Ari’s back. He was shaking underneath his jacket. “Did I hear him say what I think I heard?” I asked. “Yes!” Ari answered. I could see his face reddening and swelling; I knew he was on the brink of tears. “Let’s go outside,” I suggested. He nodded hurriedly, and we left.
Outside the shop, I pulled him to me, cradling his head against my shoulder. He put his arms around me and burst into tears. “That sonofabitch,” he said over and over again, weeping against my chest.
I did not know what to say, so I stroked his head until he began to calm. “Ari, it’s a poison, and it’s in so many people who don’t even know it’s in them — it’s insidious and evil and everywhere. It’ll never occur to him that there’s any connection between his attitude and anything else, that it’s ghastly he could visit Babii Yar this morning and say what he just said this afternoon.” I knew this was no comfort even as I said it. I decided to tell him a story.
“When I was a boy your age, back in the late 1950s, my parents — God knows why — decided to buy a summer house on Main Street in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. You know where that is?” He nodded against my chest. “Martha’s Vineyard was still largely old-line New England WASP territory, and Edgartown was the waspiest of all. We went there each summer for years, but while I managed to make friends from other parts of the island I never found a friend in Edgartown. It took me several years to discover — accidentally, through inadvertent eavesdropping — that we were known in town as the Main Street Jews.”
Ari nodded again. He had stopped crying. But when he lifted his head I saw the look in his eyes. I know that look: you learn to recognize it in the visage of everyone from scapegoated minorities. I’ve a theory about the origin of the word peon — that it evolved because everyone needs someone to pee on. Ari had just learned that, for this forester who had otherwise been so friendly to him, he was a peon. His face, still soft with baby fat, was a shade harder than it had been five minutes earlier — a shade harder than it needed to be. He would, from then on, be a touch more suspicious of gentiles, a nuance more self-protective, would feel himself by some tiny but not meaningless increment set slightly apart from others, watchful, wary, unsafe in the world.
“Scratch a good American,” says my friend the Baltimore Oriole, “and you’ll find a good German.” I quoted the Oriole to Ari. He nodded, a sarcastic smile on his lips. “I can’t handle it when anyone says anything about my family or my religion,” he told me. “Anything else I can deal with.” We walked back to the ship together. En route, we stopped by the fountain in the plaza. Our forester wanted a videotape of all of us together, asked us to pose. Ari resolutely kept his back turned, talking to me. “I can’t,” he said, “I just can’t.” “You don’t have to explain yourself to me, Ari,” I responded.
As we neared the ship, the daughter said — apropos of what I can’t recall — “Most homeless people in America are homeless because they’re lazy.” I asked if she were joking; she assured me she wasn’t. She resides in Boulder, Colorado, cleans other people’s houses for a living, and works as a potter.
When we reached the ship, I took the forester aside, asking to have a few words with him. Instantly, before I said anything else, he apologized. I told him that the problem was not so much me as Ari — that he had wounded the boy deeply, and would do well to look inside himself to see where that remark had its source.
Jerry replied that he now saw that his words were insensitive, though it was an “innocent comment.” I corrected him: it might have been casual, even inadvertent, but it was not innocent — it was an anti-Semitic statement, and there was no other way to interpret it. He bristled, clearly unwilling to accept that description of his act. Then he said that Ari needed to learn to be less sensitive, since he’ll run into a lot of this kind of banter in the world.
I could cheerfully have strangled him, but this was a peace cruise. “Don’t you stand there and tell me, Jerry, that a fourteen-year-old boy should desensitize himself to anti-Semitism. He’ll learn about it, painfully, from the casual, unconscious bigotry of people like yourself, but I hope he never becomes inured to it, because there may again be times when his survival depends on that sensitivity.”
The forester, clearly uncomfortable with the conversation, cut it short with a promise to try to make amends to Ari. (He never did. Dina would subsequently tell me that the whole thing was an attention-getting device on Ari’s part — despite the responses of Will, Viktor and myself. Both of them were determined to blame the victim.) I went to my cabin to write the incident down.
A few minutes later, Ari came in complaining of a splitting headache, asking for a couple of Tylenol. I gave them to him, let him stretch out on my bed, then covered him with a blanket. He seemed embarrassed, insisted he didn’t want to disturb me while I was writing. I hushed him up, told him to close his eyes. In a minute he was asleep. I could hear him breathe each time my fingers paused on the keyboard. His face and hands twitched from time to time. He was so innocent still, though a bit less so than he’d been a few hours earlier.
“Scratch a good American,” says the Oriole,” “and you’ll find a good German.” Ari had just scratched a good American.
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