Second Hand Smoke - Softcover

Rosenbaum, Thane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312254180 ISBN 13: 9780312254186

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000

Synopsis

In the seamy atmosphere of Miami Beach's Collins Avenue, Mila Katz, a streaky card shark and confidante of mobsters, lives by the wits with which she has survived the Holocaust. Second Hand Smoke is the story of Mila's sons, Issac and Duncan, the one secretly abandoned in Poland, and the other, American-born, raised as an avenging Nazi hunter, poisoned with rage.

Told in bursts of fractured realism and dark comedy, Second Hand Smoke is a postmodern mystery of great lyrical power, deep insight, and emotional resonance.

About this title

About the Author

Thane Rosenbaum is the author of the acclaimed novel-in-stories Elijah Visible, which was awarded the Wallant Prize for best book of Jewish-American fiction. A law professor in human rights and a teacher of creative writing, he is also the literary editor of Tikkun and writes essays and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. He lives in New York with his daughter, Basia Tess.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Second Hand Smoke

By Thane Rosenbaum

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2000 Thane Rosenbaum
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312254186

Chapter One

It wasn't so much that as a family they were strange, or thatfrom the very beginning they had been estranged?althougheach in its own way was true. It was that they were damaged.Irreversibly ruined. The Katz family of Miami Beach came assembledthat way, without manuals or operating instructions or reassuring warranties.Everything was already broken. Nothing worked right; nothingever would. The damage is what defined them best.

    It was the way they functioned or, as psychologists now call it,dysfunctioned. A state of mind in civil war with itself. And there wereno defenses or cures for this condition. Whatever predator was outthere would have little difficulty tracking them down. That was theworld as they saw it. They were experts in survival, and yet at thesame time they were rank amateurs in recognizing the languid, solitary,untroubled moment.

    For them, the scarring ran deep and, in fact, had traded placeswith the surrounding skin. But the Katzes weren't visibly disfigured.There wasn't anything particularly hideous about them. A family portraithung in the living room of their apartment, taken in 1964 bythat German photographer used by everyone on Miami Beach's ArthurGodfrey Road. Framed and suspended on a stark white wall. Each daythe sun plunged through the window of their high-rise apartment andfaded the photograph, reducing the assorted hues to a blunt, burntyellow. The Katzes aged better than the images around them. Thethree of them posing: mother and son sitting beside one another,tight-lipped, stone-faced; the father standing behind, as though areferee in waiting. No smiles, but no apparent signs of deformity, either.The camouflage was both convincing and inviolable.

    The name Duncan, however, revealed the first sign of disguise.That was the name in 1953 that Mila and Yankee Katz had giventheir first and only child on the day of his bris.

    "What kind of a name is that for a Jewish boy?" an old man remarked,bits of whitefish precarious at the end of a long fork. Theold man speared the air, making his point, beating back any rebuttal.

    "Maybe they can't spell," a younger women, armed with a moreupstream appetizer?a carp or sable?whispered. "They are refugees,after all. Their English can't be so good. Maybe they wanted Davidbut got it wrong when they looked it up in the baby-naming book.It's an understandable mistake, no?"

    "What's the matter with you?" another old man joined in. He waswearing a pair of all-occasion green polyester slacks and a white shirtwith a golf emblem. An outfit equally suitable for both afternoon tee-offsand the severing of Jewish foreskin. He was late for a foursomeat Normandy Isle Golf Course, and had hoped that Duncan's rite ofpassage would have begun by now. Instead, the newborn was stillwaiting to have the work done on his genitals, while the golfer wasforcibly delayed from the tsuris with his own clubs. Agitated, he said,"Yankee graduated from Heidelberg. You mean to tell me a man ofsuch learning couldn't tell the difference between a David and a Duncan?Listen to me," he urged as the nibblers of nosh inched forward,"one thing is for sure: the boy's name isn't a mistake. These peopleare trying to tell us something."

    "They were both kings," a young college coed interjected. She wasslender with sleepy brown eyes. The daughter of a neighbor. Untilnow she had been sitting demurely on a soft, velvet, floral club chairin the Katz apartment, all the while wishing to be elsewhere, hermind not so much wandering as in a dull state of perpetual park.

    "Who?" the golfer wondered. "Yankee and Mila? Of what kingdom?Auschwitz?"

    "No, I mean Duncan and David," she spoke up proudly, offeringan insight that?for the moment, at least?justified her tuition at Miami-DadeCommunity College. "Maybe Mila and Yankee want to givetheir son a royal name. Maybe they have great things planned forhim."

    "Where? In Glasgow?" The man with the whitefish rejoined theconversation, having just returned with more provisions?potatosalad, some tongue, a smear of mustard on two slices of naked rye.

    This ancient ritual of Jewish tribal commitment had suddenly takenon less importance than the mystery behind the infant's name. Thegirl was right: Duncan was the name of a Scottish king, the recipientof a tragic Shakespearean end. With such a name, and finale, whatwere the parents hoping for?

    Despite their best efforts, Mila and Yankee hadn't really fooledanyone. They were trying to have it both ways, and their guests knewit. In giving birth to a son, they were holding up their end of thesacred covenant with God?laughably, the same god who was noweven harder to trust than before. Nonetheless, they showed their obedienceand good faith, the bris forever branding their child as a Jew.But in naming him Duncan, they were also not taking any chances,either. He had to have goy papers as well, something that would allowhim to blend in on the other side, to survive unharmed and completelyadaptable in the larger ghettos of the outside world.

    This strategic obsession with names was a fact of life for theKatzes. Everything was in the service of deception. Like secret agents,they preferred to have aliases, but they rotated them in case anyonecaught on. Names were easily disposable?interchangeable with numbers,in fact. Such were the lessons of the Nazis. Upon liberation,however, the refugees all learned that, unlike everything else abouttheir former lives, their names could be reclaimed?if they could beremembered, if they wanted to remember them.

    For some, the recovery of a name was not enough. Why have thatwhen all else was lost? For others, the memory of zebra costumes andbranded arms had forever soiled their attachment to anything thatwas once personal, precious, and intimate. Like the costumes and thearms, their pasts could never be washed cleaned. Perhaps it was betterto walk away from the camps, and the nauseating mess, with nothingat all.

    So some renounced their original names, changing them, clippingoff a syllable, or escaping entirely into a new language. In Israel theJews of the new Exodus became Hebrews all over again; in Americathey adopted the king's English, seasoned with shtetl spices thatrefused to be shaken loose in the New World. The Gentiles of America hadlong known that Jews could be named Brown or Smith or Wilk orHarris. Ploys to protect the innocent. Or maybe to conceal the guilty?

    Yankee had changed his name, too. No real mystery there. Theguests at Duncan's bris all imagined that his father had once beenknown as something else. He couldn't possibly have been born aYankee?not in Germany and not as a Jew. Sure, there were Jewsnamed Yankel, but they weren't German Jews. Too lowbrow for them;too peasant-sounding. But Yankee? Still didn't sound right. Somethingmust have gotten lost in translation.

    Arriving as a refugee in New York, Herschel Katz took on thename of a baseball team. He had never played the game in his life,and Mickey Mantle was more likely to conjure up an image of a mousethan a slugger. But he was looking to lose himself in something foreign?notjust in a country, but also the indelibility of its ways. TheYankees were good at world wars, and even better with the WorldSeries. As a former German intellectual, Herschel Katz strived forquality in all things, whenever possible. But what was perhaps mostimportant of all was that, as a Yankee, Herschel Katz would be virtuallyuntraceable and unknowable?even to himself.

    A few years before his arrival in New York, the Americans hadliberated him and his wretchedness from Bergen-Belsen; now heneeded to be free from Herschel as well. His entire family had beenslaughtered in the camps. Vanished faces and shrieking souls. A familytree chopped down, the handiwork of ax-wielding, maniacal Nazis.The world had mistaken a forest fire for a spectator sport while aholocaust consumed the best of European Jewry.

    Unlike her husband, however, the Mila of Warsaw was still Milain Miami. A name change alone would not have been enough, at leastnot in her case. Not sufficiently clever. More artful maneuvers wouldbecome necessary.

    And so it wasn't simply a matter of assumed or contrived or whollyimprovised names. The Katzes had constructed an entire vocabularyaround the mixed message, the obscure reference. Suspicions lurkedeverywhere: concealed within the darkness of Miami's moonlit nights,floating like a bottle along its emerald bays, cast in the shadows ofits towering sun. Few anticipated such terror in the tropics. But theKatzes, of all people, were not blinded by the sun. They were notmere tourists in Miami, fleeing from hurricanes or coating themselvesto prevent sunburns. Their obsessions were real; their fears, althoughsomewhat twisted, were certainly not imagined. The family radarbleeped at frequencies that were out of range for most people. High-pitchedwarnings, like tocsins, that came often and hummed throughoutthe day; the sirens announcing the end of the world, heard onlyby those blessed with madness.

    Among strangers they spoke in an almost flawless code. And sincemost people were regarded as strangers, the code was commonlyslipped in between sentences like a necessary pause or a deliberatestutter. Mila and Yankee's English may have been mangled, but thecode spewed from their lips with the honeyed fluency of the familytongue.

    Often they alternated and recycled the code.

    "Keep them guessing," Mila always said.

    "About what?" Duncan often wondered. "What secrets do we havethat anyone would want to know? The sale items at Publix are alreadylisted in the Herald."

    Duncan carried around a crib sheet in order to keep the codestraight in his head. The flavor of the week in the Katz home hadnothing to do with ice cream.

    For years, the parents would discreetly say the word keller whenevera member of the family had, in his speech, strayed too far and revealedtoo much.

    "My mother can't pick us up at the park until after she goes to thestore and then gets my father at the bank," Duncan would tell a friendover the phone.

    "Keller," Mila, from the kitchen, would steer her son.

    "Oh, yeah ... no, I forgot, my father isn't at the bank. He's waitingat the corner by the drugstore."

    When Duncan hung up the phone, he cringed and then turnedaround slowly to hear Mila's decree.

    "Now we have to change the bank from Federal to Jefferson. Yousee, we can't depend on you for anything."

    Banking was a desperately private affair. But then again, whatwasn't? Dealings at the post office acquired an air of secrecy thatrivaled the Paris peace talks. A stock certificate was never put intostreet name, but rather in a safe-deposit box?or safer yet, in a shoebox under the bed. Safe was always a relative term. The receipt of areparations check was a bittersweet moment. The grocery bill wasnaturally confidential. The meter reader from Florida Power and Lightwas not allowed inside the apartment to do his job. Similarly, theKatzes refused home delivery of the Miami Herald. Everything was paidfor in cash. And only God knew what Yankee did for a living. Hisown son certainly didn't. One minute Mila would tell neighbors thather husband was a manufacturer, at other times an importer, sometimesa lawyer, once a builder.

    And who, or what, was keller, anyway? Yes, it was a mantra, invokedall throughout Duncan's childhood that became an exotic conversationkiller. But what else? Although curious, Duncan never botheredto ask, or maybe he was just afraid. In this classified, rarefied, survivalisthome, Duncan understood that even the derivations of certainwords were household secrets. He may have been born into the family,but he was never accepted into its inner circle. Maybe it was forhis own protection, his own good. Or, as Mila so often claimed,maybe they just didn't trust him. Perhaps it was simply that Mila andYankee kept some passwords just for themselves.

    Now back to the bris. And what a bris it was. While embracingGod's covenant with Abraham, Mila and Yankee were at the sametime also breaking promises, smashing tablets, stepping outside thefaith, scavenging around, and bringing back pagan souvenirs. The briswas unkosher in ways that violated not just the menu.

    There was a rabbi in the apartment, a modern, athletic-lookingclergyman who wore a fabulous tan but forgot to bring his yarmulke.And there was also a mohel?an expert in putting razor to penis?theone Jewish cosmetic surgeon who nobody brags about as being theideal son or son-in-law. But circumcision was merely a sideline for thismohel, who, when not slicing foreskin, was shaving points. Aroundtown he was known as Morty the Mohel, and this was no joke, becauseMorty was a well-known Miami bookie with his own table?andphone, no less?at the Jewish Nostra, a deli on Alton Road thatcatered to fringe mobsters and small-time Jewish hoods.

    The Jewish Nostra brought a curious moose-lodge decor to MiamiBeach. It had maple-paneled walls and lopsided steel tables. A stuffedmarlin hung near the front entrance, its spear covering the door likea pistol. There was a gallery of black-and-white photos taken ofdrunken mobsters gone fishing. What caught the eye most in thesepictures was not the catch-of-the-day, but that the party boat had asmany machine guns as fishing rods on board. The lights at the Nostrawere always dimmed, and the room combined the unusual smell ofcigarettes and chicken-fat vapors scaling the walls in search of a diet.

    Although the nature of the business conducted at the Nostra?otherthan serving the obvious corned beef and a knish?was not inkeeping with any of God's commandments, these were, indeed, allmen of the tribe. Perhaps still lost, as well as being faithless andcorrupted, they were Jews nonetheless, convinced that the Diasporahad taken many different paths in exile, and this one was no lesshonorable simply because of a few sordid connections with familieswho confused kreplach with ravioli. A Jew in Washington, after all,had been behind Senator Joseph McCarthy's persecution of otherJews, and years later there would be a Jewish Secretary of State servinga disgraced president. How bad did the Nostra men actually look incomparison?

    Sometimes, when the lunch crowd was heavy at the Jewish Nostra,Morty the Mohel would be asked to help out behind the counter.

    "I only cut small pieces," he would remind the patrons, jokingly,"not enough for a sandwich, but at least when the brisket turns thirteen,he'll be able to have a bar mitzvah."

    Happily, the mohel would waddle behind the counter and strapan apron onto his waist. The phone at his reserved table invariablyrang throughout his shift. "He's cutting again," someone nearby wouldpick up and reply. "No, not pipiks, just regular meat. Call back. Yougot over an hour until post time."

    This was all happening in the days before Fidel Castro had expelledthe capitalists?and the mob?from Cuba, during the timewhen Miami was still the port of call for racketeers with business inHallandale and Havana. But on the day of Duncan's bris, the Nostrawas largely empty. Most of the food and the clientele had temporarilyrelocated a few blocks north. Minyans of mobsters gathered at theKatz apartment, savoring the smoked fish and succulent meats andcelebrating the birth of perhaps the only Jew in the room whose recordwas still clean. Sitting around the Katz living room, they poredover racetrack betting forms, waiting restlessly for the eight-day-oldDuncan to make an appearance.

    The moment finally arrived.

    "Hey everybody, here they come," the coed announced.

    "It's about time," the golfer added, edgily. Immediately he receiveda jarring elbow to his ribs from a Nostra regular who didn't much carefor golf, or whiny Jews.

    With Yankee holding Duncan in his arms, Mila and Yankee walkedfrom their bedroom through the hallway and then stood before theirguests. Yankee, his face soft, unlined, radiated a father's pride, and yethe appeared guarded and restrained. His eyes were a bloodshot blue,like a wounded sunset. He had brown hair that was thinning at thetop, and a round, bulging forehead. Fatherhood had visited him latein life. Already fifty, he was showing the wear and tear not so muchof age, but of circumstance and bad luck. Smiling and gesturing, eventhese faint motions seemed to be wearing him out.

    Mila was another matter, however. Her strength was apparent inall her movements, in everything she said and did. Although she wasshort, her back was always straight, which made her seem taller thanshe actually was. She walked with quick and determined paces, themovement in her arms abrupt and often dangerous. Her face wasrugged with a doubled-up chin and sagging jowls; her hands, largeand coarse. Unlike Yankee, she was a young parent, but she came tothe job with a much-abused body. Overweight, she smoked too much,and her nervous system functioned like randomly ignited firecrackers.But her deficiencies somehow came across as assets, which pleasedher and which she exploited to no end.

    Normally, the baby would have been brought into the room by agodmother, then handed off to a godfather, finally ending up in thelap of the sandek, the most coveted position at a bris?theperson entrusted with assisting the mohel. Such divisions of Jewish labor areusually parceled out according to some combination of age and kinshipand trust?in a word, to family.

    But Auschwitz had shattered such time-honored traditions. Sincethe oldest people in the ghettos and the camps were also the mostvulnerable?and generally the ones who died the soonest?there wasa severe shortage of grandparents after the war. Actually, there weren'tthat many available uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, or cousins, either.Black-sheep relatives, who in Europe would never have been consideredfor an honorarable position at a family affair, after the war, andby default, miraculously rose to the ranks of royalty.

    The Shoah had created an improvised adoption network. All sortsof people were recruited to function as family, to "stand in" atsimchas, to assume lifelong, ceremonial obligations for people who, inanother time, would have been no better than strangers.

    And this was true of the Katzes as well. In fact, for them thesituation was even more dire, because none of their relatives had survived.

    Which explains why Larry Breitbart, of all people, was at the Katzbris. The future Godfather was now about to be a godfather, and agodmother, and a sandek?all at the same time.

    Breitbart had once been a seltzer deliveryman. Every week he haddropped off crates of wooden boxes filled with green quart bottles.On one of his delivery rounds back in 1951, he had met Mila. Shewas an immigrant; he wasn't. He looked like a movie star; she didn't.She had survived the grandest experiment in simulated hell; he hadbeen providing Miami Beach with the main ingredient for an eggcream. Other than that, they had much in common.

    "Lady, I never met anybody like you," he once said.

    "I'll show you more," she replied. "I have many tricks to teach."

    Eventually she would convince Breitbart that his true calling wasnot in carbonated water, but in organized crime. He was charming,with an insincere smile and a face angled like a diamond. One of hiseyes was hazel, the other green; his nose was cut sharp and fine. Butwhat intrigued Mila about Larry Breitbart was an untapped shrewdnessthat found no outlet in his current line of work.

    "Look at you" she said. "What can you expect from a person whoworks all day with bubbles? How can you think?"

    It wasn't his fault, really. Not everyone had spent their formativeyears as a poster child for Charles Darwin. That was Mila's world.Breitbart had grown up on the streets of Brooklyn. He still loved thecorner drugstores with their shiny chrome soda fountains, peppermintfacades, and Frisbee bar stools. But he also recognized a burgeoningmarket with all those Jews retiring to Miami Beach and others spendingthe winters there. What were they all going to drink? To quenchthe tropical thirst of a New York Jew, you need seltzer. It was thatsimple. Vitamin C in those days was still an untested theory. So Breitbartdecided to move down to Florida, bringing the native drink ofNew York with him.

    A few months after he met Mila, blood became the only fluid thatmattered.

    She directed him to a man she had met at a poker game two yearsearlier: Meyer Lansky, the head of the syndicate in New York, NewJersey, and Florida. Lansky was colonizing South Florida as the newhome for organized crime. Like the retirees and the refugees, theMafia was moving to Miami as well. Lucky and Bugsy were dead.Dutch they took care of years earlier. Arnold Rothstein, may he restin peace, would have been proud of Meyer. A Jew was still in charge.

    For someone in such a violent business, Lansky was a small manwith delicate features. The public associated the mob with machineguns and brass knuckles. But that kind of work he delegated to thegorillas. Lansky was better with numbers than he was with murder.Even when it came to the syndicate, the Jewish brain supplied all thenecessary muscle.

    Lansky always respected a hustle, as long as it was an honest one.Mila Katz was always honest, and she nearly always collected. AndLansky had an eye for talent. He summoned her to play in othergames, unleashing her to turn the tables on players who had been alittle too lucky at one of his casinos.

    "You'll owe me for this," Mila reminded the Jewish don, fearlessly.

    "People don't usually threaten a man like me," Lansky replied.

    With Mila's help and advice, Breitbart, the former seltzerman,proved himself to be one of Lansky's chief Miami operatives. Soonhe was put in charge of one hotel in Havana, another in Hallandale,and given a piece of the parimutuel action in Florida.

    His task today was quite different, however. Now he was sittingnext to Morty the Mohel. There was a pillow on his lap, and Duncanrested comfortably on top. Breitbart was participating in his firstbris?other than his own?and it was on the occasion of the birth of hisfirst and only godson.

    Another regular from the Nostra, an Italian from New York whoworked with Larry Breitbart, was loitering around the room in acrouched position, holding an eight-millimeter movie camera againsthis face. Larry thought it would be nice if Mila and Yankee couldhave a film made of Duncan's bris?for posterity, for the family'sarchives. So he arranged for his friend, Carlo Costello, to bring hisequipment and make a short about a family that had already had itsfill of epics.

    Mila and Yankee, however, were a little uncomfortable with Larry'sidea. For one thing, they preferred the anonymity of an unrecordedlife. But they were also cynical about the idea of preserving anythingfor the future.

    "Tell your man to go home, Larry," Mila insisted, as Costello, hislegs indistinguishable from tripods, boom sticks, and dolly tracks,stumbled into the apartment.

    "Why? You'll be sorry one day when Duncan wants to see whathappened at his bris,? Breitbart warned.

    "And what if there is a fire?" she asked.

    "Where, here? Today? Now?" Larry wondered.

    "No, some other time."

    "I don't get what you mean."

    Blood rushed to Mila's face as though she was about to put out adifferent kind of fire. "If the film one day goes up in smoke, Duncanwill lose something he wanted to keep forever. Better that he not haveit at all."

    Mila and Yankee had no mementos of their former lives. No babypictures or family albums. Forget home movies; they didn't even havetheir prewar passports. When it came to the sentimental attachmentto things past, memory had to do all the work. But memories are sooften faulty, or selective, or savagely mischievous. The mind tends toforget exactly what would have been so nice to recall: the innocentdays of pre-atrocity, when anti-Semitism was more ideological thanlethal. Instead, the wrong set of memories kept coming back, a glorificationof the tragic and dreadful rest?the nightmares that wouldbecome permanent installations in the museum of the mind. Whichmaster does memory serve?

    From the very beginning, Mila rejected the possibility that Duncan'slife would be any different. Things that he wanted to keep hewould lose; the people around him would leave. He would be betrayed.Why should he have had it any better than them?

    But as to the home movie, eventually Mila and Yankee relented.Larry Breitbart had argued too passionately on behalf of a Carlo CostelloProduction.

    "This is a great moment for the family," he said.

    Mila wondered which family he was talking about.

    Yankee started to warm up to the idea of a film that captured theKatz experience in America?in Miami Beach, with a baby boy, anda possible new beginning.

    "Maybe not so bad," he concluded, "although maybe we shouldwear masks?"

    Mila continued to see the film as an abomination, a sure ticket todisaster down the road. But Yankee wanted the baby, and the bris.Mila would throw in the film as well.

    Given the green light, the Mafia cinematographer eagerly went towork. Carlo Costello was a professional killer who was bored withhis life in the rackets and dreamed of one day shooting a feature film.Until that moment arrived, he was grateful for any opportunity tomake movies. On this day, his artistic vision inspired him to superimposean art-house setting onto the Katz bris.

    "Okay everyone, I need to see more energy from my actors!" hesaid, rolling his eyes as he checked the lighting. "Try to find yourmotivations ..."

    He faded in and out among the guests, dollied, and panned theroom?freeze frames locking in on the crowded bookshelves and theRosenthal china. He created a dramatic tension between the rabbi andthe mohel that otherwise would not have been there. As he continued tomake a nuisance of himself, Costello shot one scene while lying on thefloor and filming upward through a glass coffee table. Finally, to everyone'srelief, it came time for the rabbi to take over the proceedings.

    "Now gather around everyone," the rabbi said. A crescent ofcreamy onion, separated from its friend, the herring, smiled coylyfrom the center of a soiled napkin, which the rabbi had placed ontop of his head in lieu of a skullcap. "I think we can begin now. Butbefore we do any cutting," he said, while a number of guests who,already knowing this rabbi, imagined that he was doing everythingall out of order and slapped their heads in unison, "I'd like to start byasking Mila and Yankee to tell us something about the boy's name.Where does it come from?"

    "Yeah, what about the name?" an older woman joined in.

    "It's been driving us crazy." The man with the whitefish?oncemore restocked?demanded an answer.

    "What does it mean?" the slender coed pleaded.

    "Come on, I'd like to tee off before tomorrow," the golfer saidsheepishly, mindful of the gangster behind him.

    But the parents remained silent. At one point they looked at eachother for support, then returned their gaze to their guests.

    Moments later, Yankee blinked. "It's from the Bible," he said.

    "It is?" the coed asked. "How interesting ..."

    "No kidding," Larry Breitbart said, nervously taking his eyes offthe sleeping lump on his lap.

    "Which book?" the dubious golfer asked. "New or Old Testament?"

    "Yeah," the man with the whitefish joined in. "I don't rememberany characters named Duncan."

    "Rabbi, what do you think?" a flirting woman asked.

    "Well, it's hard to know ... ," he replied, hesitatingly, but nobodyin the room expected him to come up with the right answer anyway.

    Mila then blurted out, "He is named for my Uncle Keller in Poland.They killed him in the camps."

    The family cue. Yankee knew not to go any further; Mila wouldhandle things from here.

    "Wait a minute," the golfer began, skeptically. "You mean to tellme there were Jews named Duncan Keller in Poland?"

    "Yes, many," Mila replied curtly.

    Sufficiently stumped, all those in the room quieted down and preparedfor the main event: the sacrificial guillotine that celebrates Jewishlife and continuity.

    The rabbi mumbled briskly through some prayers that may haveactually been his grocery list for the day, took a long swig of winewithout saying the blessing, and then turned over the remaining portionof the festivities to Morty the Mohel.

    "Okay, what I do first is give the baby some wine like so," Mortyannounced as though he was Julia Child. He dipped his ringless pinkieinto a glass of wine, and just as he was about to insert it into Duncan'smouth, Mila shouted, "No!"

    Larry Breitbart, who was collecting perspiration all around his face,clutched the pillow and the baby, while Morty withdrew his hand."Mila, just a few drops of schnapps?as an anesthetic, to numb thepain," Morty reassured her. "I do it all the time. It's very common.The baby won't get drunk."

    "He won't need it," she announced. "And I want him to feel it."

    Yankee looked on helplessly. "Please, Mila," he said, "don't be foolish.Let Morty do his job."

    "No, without wine or no bris."

    Larry Breitbart glanced upward for direction. The rabbi had alreadywandered away from the fracas, having spotted a blond moll who hadbeen batting her eyes at him from the moment he arrived. Mortystroked his chin and pondered now doing this procedure in the absenceof a painkiller. He searched Yankee's face for advice, and receivednone. He glanced down at Breitbart, whose eyes were nowespecially large and whose hands were drenched from all the suspensein the room. Mila, by contrast, was calm and resolute; the trace of asmile seemed to cross her usual poker face. Meanwhile, Costello theSicilian captured all the tension and drama in these Jewish faces withthe cinematic eye of a Fellini.

    "Ah, what the heck," Morty concluded. "Let's just do it ..."

    The rabbi gave the order; the camera swerved into position. In thefinality of a split second, the mohel cut; the child never cried. Thefather flinched; the mother didn't. The gangster, Breitbart, fainted atthe first sight of blood. Mila reached out and rescued Duncan fromBreitbart's arms before the ill-chosen sandek collapsed to the floor,almost taking the baby with him.

    Mila held Duncan up in the air, at an angle, away from her body.Beads of blood dripped from his circumcised penis as if he were astone cherub in a Florentine fountain. Morty hadn't had a chance todress Duncan yet. And because Mila wasn't holding Duncan close,the wound was open, the mark of Duncan's manhood and the fleshbond with his God there for all to see.

    Suddenly, Mila turned her face away, too, recoiling as thoughsomething about Duncan?whether it be the blood, or his newbornsmell, or perhaps because the rest of the room smelled like lox?wasgiving off a terrible, odious stench. But it wasn't Duncan's circumcisionthat repelled her, but rather the birthmark of another child, fromanother time, that now made it necessary for her to look away fromher own son.

    "Out, damned spot! out, I say! ... what's done cannot beUndone...."

Continues...

Excerpted from Second Hand Smokeby Thane Rosenbaum Copyright © 2000 by Thane Rosenbaum. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312254180
• ISBN 13: 9780312254186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320